The master and the bedpan: Henry James confronting trash in David Lodge’s author author (2004) and Joyce Carol Oates “The master at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 1914-1916” (2007)

This paper aims to discuss two recent biofictional narratives featuring Henry James as their protagonist – Lodge’s Author Author and Oates’s ‘The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, 1914-1916’ – in relation to the theme of trash. Lodge and Oates both draw on Jamesian criticism (Forster, Wells, Edel) and his comments on the French Naturalists to present James as a snobbish author repelled by the sight and smell of bodily fluids, gangrenous flesh, excrements and ‘perverse’ sexual practices, which he has always refused to write about. However, human life is not only made by ‘the elegant flowering [of] civilization’, but also by what James deemed as unspeakable: in Oates’s short-story the fictional James realizes it while ministering to maimed soldiers at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. ‘In all of the Master's prose, not one bedpan’, he sadly exclaims, acknowledging his refusal as an impairing inability. Thus, throughout the narration the Master is increasingly confined to silence while the third person narrator lingers on physiological acts and bodily trash. Similarly, in Lodge’s novel James is described as an old man farting, urinating and obliged to talk about them to his great discomfort. In both works there is ‘an infringement of the Jamesian propriety’ (see Hollinghurst) which interestingly unveils a task confronting the contemporary writer. These biofictional narratives are indeed a locus of anxiety and identification where discussing the challenges of writing. James’s questioning his own inabilities refracts Lodge and Oates’ urgency of finding a language that expresses all aspects of life, including trash.