ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how three postmodern novels - Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, John Fowles's The Magus, and D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel - use aspects of theatrical representation. The whole aspect of postmodern performance as analogous to dramatic performance is, indeed, part of the postmodern debate. The three aspects of performance examines in relation to the novel. First: It uses both textual and textualized performance. Second: the self-consciousness of these novels, and their delight in flaunting their own artifice means that the very act of representation is in itself a performance of representation. Third: the self-consciousness of consciousness of the characters in these novels also indicates a concern with character formation. In Midnight's Children, Star Turn, Hawksmoor, and Chekhov's Journey, character (subject) formation is not, as the Realists would have it, unscripted. The Postmodern texts are interrogative in the sense Catherine Belsey explains in Critical Practice.
