Faking it further

[摘要] BIOGRAPHY? Gothic melodrama? Metafiction? Nowhere does Andrew Motion's The Invention of Dr Cake disclose its genre. What is clear, however, is that his latest, slim book is written in the same spirit as his partly fabricated biography of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, one of the most quicksilver characters in the circle around John Keats. But whereas Wainewright the Poisoner1 capitalised on the currency of biography itself, the obeisance it pays to document and fact, The Invention of Dr Cake fakes it further: it is an elaborate and speculative game in the subjunctive mode. What if the consumptive John Keats hadn't died young in Rome; what if his first poems hadn't been savaged in Blackwood's Magazine; what if he had returned to England and assumed a new identity; what if he had returned to his calling and become a provincial medical practitioner like George Eliot's Lydgate? Motion (who has also written a thoroughly orthodox biography of Keats) writes in the conviction that biography tells us everything except what is really important to know about a life.

[学科分类] 卫生学