THE LAST TESTAMENT OF OSCAR WILDE: THE GAME WITH IDENTITY – AN INTRICATE GEOGRAPHY OF THE MIND
THE LAST TESTAMENT OF OSCAR WILDE: THE GAME WITH IDENTITY – AN INTRICATE GEOGRAPHY OF THE MIND

Summary/Abstract: Starting from Mark Currie’s definition of the “culture of schizophrenia” (Currie 102-105), wherein I may include the novels of Peter Ackroyd, and from Brian McHale’s concept of “transworld identity” (McHale 58), I am going to enlarge upon the concept of identity and the postmodernist game with identity in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. I will focus on the way Ackroyd plays with historical knowledge in order to make us question what we think we know about both Wilde, and, by implication, about any historical figure. Ackroyd’s reader encounters a particular interpretation of the facts and comes to realize that neither the present nor the past have a stable identity. One’s identity becomes one’s narrative. To narrate one’s own or another’s identity is the same as to narrate a piece of history, by imposing the structural principles of the narrative on historical experience. With Peter Ackroyd, there is always an implied author who plays with the past and the present, with literary genres, styles and voices, assuming different personae in order to call attention to ever new possibilities of interpreting the past. My article also focuses on the dialogic game with voices, a dialogue between complementary world views and ideologies in a novel based on intertextuality. I will demonstrate that identity is displaced from itself through Ackroyd’s attempts at writing the self, everything resulting in a geography of the mind that is open to interpretation and revaluation.

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