“A Convenient Ventriloquist’s Dummy”: The “Christopher Isherwood” Character in Christopher Isherwood

The “Christopher Isherwood” character first appears in Lions and Shadows (1938), Christopher Isherwood’s lightly fictionalised autobiography. Its foreword claims that “Isherwood” is merely a “guinea-pig” and asks us to read Lions and Shadows “as a novel” (xv). In the foreword to Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the author distances himself from his namesake once again: “‘Christopher Isherwood’ is a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy, nothing more” (np). This thesis examines Christopher Isherwood’s relationship with the “Christopher Isherwood” character in five texts: Lions and Shadows, Goodbye to Berlin, Prater Violet (1945), Down There on a Visit (1962), and Christopher and His Kind (1976). In doing so, I attempt to answer the question, ‘what happens when Christopher Isherwood gives his name to the narrator of his fiction?’  The second paragraph of Goodbye to Berlin begins, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” (1). The critical consensus is that this paragraph is indicative of a namesake narrator who acts as a detached observer, withholding judgment, existing only as a vessel through which the story can be told. I maintain, however, that as Isherwood and “Isherwood” have the same name, we are compelled to compare and contrast the two. Isherwood’s biographer, Peter Parker, claims that “Isherwood liked to imagine himself his own creation” (np). Through his construction of “Isherwood,” Isherwood creates a self – one that does not pre-exist his texts.  Isherwood’s novels anticipate a new kind of autobiographical writing, transparent and aware in their fictionality, four decades before it is formally recognised as a genre; while contemporary writers all over the world are now publishing autofiction more than ever before, there was a writer, alone the English island in the 1930s who preceded them all. His name, and his character, is Christopher Isherwood.