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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W
Fall 2023
Phillip Lewis Phillip Lewis Intertextuality
on the Intertextuality of Intertextuality Intertextuality The TheBarrowfields Barrowfields introduced by GEORGE HOVIS
COURTESY OF PHILLIP LEWIS
In the 2023 print issue of NCLR, I talked with Phillip Lewis about the influence of Thomas Wolfe on Lewis’s debut novel, The Barrowfields, which has met with widespread critical acclaim and has been translated into five languages. One of the great pleasures of The Barrowfields is its characters’ unabashed immersion in a world of arts and letters. The narrator is constantly making reference to writers: Thomas Wolfe, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, to name a few of the most important echoes in the text. Henry Aster, Sr., is an obsessive book collector. Henry, Jr., is evidently well read himself, as evidenced by the gorgeously lyrical narration of his tale. The whole family is constantly reading, and Henry, Sr., and Jr. are frequently playing Chopin and Mozart and Beethoven and Liszt on the piano. Henry, Jr., reads and tells stories to his younger sister. The names of characters even feel metafictional at times: Henry’s girlfriend has “the curious name of Story.” 1 (154). Henry’s sister’s legal name is Threnody. The name of his hometown is Old Buckram. As in Wolfe’s body of work, Lewis’s novel concerns itself with familial dysfunction and with the the artist’s race against time. For most of the interview, we talked of these Wolfean themes and of other literary influences – notably Poe and Hemingway. Lewis delved deep into a consideration of the other literary works with which The Barrowfields enters into dialogue. That lengthy response is featured here. This interview was conducted by email in May, 2022, and is presented here fully intact and with minimal editing beyond inserting citations for quoted matter.
I did not have any particular goals in mind; in fact, I thought that if I did it properly, most of it would go by unnoticed, at least on an initial read. Chiefly, I thought of the character and place names that are imbued with extrinsic meaning and the other metafictional devices as literary easter eggs: that is, little bits of treasure for the close reader who cares to delve a little deeper and find meaning in other layers of the story. They are scattered throughout the text. Some
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1
Phillip Lewis, The Barrowfields (Random House: Hogarth, 2017) 154; subsequently cited parenthetically.