'Designing Its Own Shadow' – Reading Ann Quin Nonia Williams Korteling
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'Designing its own shadow' – Reading Ann Quin Nonia Williams Korteling PhD University of East Anglia, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. May, 2013. Word count: 85, 016. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 'Designing its own shadow' – Reading Ann Quin Ann Quin (1936-1973) is a little known and little read British writer, and this thesis is the first comprehensive response to her oeuvre. It is driven by the questions: What is it like to read Quin's writing? Why should we read it? How might reading it help us reconsider the purpose and effect of experimentation in 1960s and ‘70s British fiction? In response, the thesis provides extended and in depth readings of Quin’s books, short pieces, manuscripts and letters to demonstrate how these by turns overtly experimental, allusive, chaotic and frustrating texts are also carefully crafted, replete with clues and motifs, and in conversation with their time and place. Aware of the need to somewhat ‘introduce’ the writer, my readings draw out and consider locations of resonance and discord between her writing, life and cultural contexts. In addition, engagement with specific sources – from George Eliot to Beckett, Woolf to Sartre, Jane Harrison to William Burroughs, Dostoevsky to Alain Renais – reveals how Quin’s writing responds to, interrogates, encompasses and transcends these. Where relevant, the thesis is also informed and extended by a more theoretical approach. Indeed, my distinctive methodological approach reveals the points at which life, writing, historical context and theory are productively interwoven. Throughout, I argue that while the writing seems anachronistic by being immersed in earlier literature, it is precisely this immersion which energises its resistant rebellion to and ironic interrogation of the dominant ideologies and literary practices of its time. In this, Quin’s is writing both of the shadows and designing its own. 2 Table of contents Timeline .............................................................................................................. 4 Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. 5 Preface: Why Quin? .......................................................................................... 6 Introduction: Designing shadows ................................................................. 10 Reading Quin ................................................................................................ 19 Illumination 1 ................................................................................................... 31 Berg , 1964: To be is to be perceived ............................................................. 33 To kill his father ............................................................................................. 38 Came to a seaside town ................................................................................ 45 Who changed his name ................................................................................. 56 Intending to kill .............................................................................................. 64 Illumination 2 ................................................................................................... 74 Three, 1966 : Role play in the shadow of death ............................................ 76 Elongated shadows of Marienbad ................................................................. 83 Ménage à trois ............................................................................................... 93 To jeopardise a bourgeois stronghold ......................................................... 104 The death drive ........................................................................................... 111 Illumination 3 ................................................................................................. 118 Passages , 1969: The transgressive resistant paradox .............................. 121 The line of words ......................................................................................... 126 A woman’s eye ............................................................................................ 134 Myth in the Margins ..................................................................................... 145 Jew on the page .......................................................................................... 157 Illumination 4 ................................................................................................. 168 Tripticks, 1972 : Seeking the centre ............................................................. 171 The silent scream ........................................................................................ 179 A stream of verbal images ........................................................................... 185 The words of others I saw ........................................................................... 196 Trips and Psalms ......................................................................................... 207 Illumination 5 ................................................................................................. 217 The Unmapped Country , 1973: Too close reading and writing ................. 220 (Un)writing about and out of madness ......................................................... 228 Signs of madness everywhere .................................................................... 240 Furor scribendi – the madness of realism ................................................... 252 Illumination 6 ................................................................................................. 261 Afterword: Tracing flows and causing them to circulate .......................... 263 Appendices ..................................................................................................... 269 Bibliography .................................................................................................. 276 3 Timeline 1936 Ann Marie Quin born in Brighton on 17 th March, to Montague Nicholas Quin and Anne Ward (formerly Reid). 1945 - 1953 Attends a Roman Catholic convent school in Brighton. 1955 - 1961 Writes A Slice of Moon and Oscar – neither is ever published. 1964 Berg published by John Calder. Quin awarded D.H. Lawrence Scholarship from the University of New Mexico and Harkness Fellowship. 1965 - 1967 Living and travelling in America on Harkness Fellowship. 1966 Three published by Marion Boyars. ‘Leaving School’ published in the London Magazine . ‘Every Cripple Has His Own Way Of Walking’ published in Nova . 1968 ‘Never Trust A Man Who Bathes With His Finger Nails’ published in Mexico by El Corno Emplumado . ‘Tripticks’ published in Ambit . ‘Living in the Present’, co-written with Robert Sward, published in Ambit. Writes ‘Eyes that Watch behind the Wind’, which is published posthumously. 1969 Passages published by Calder and Boyars. ‘Motherlogue’ published in Transatlantic Review . Writes ‘Ghostworm’, which is published posthumously. 1970 Hospitalised after increasingly severe psychotic episodes, first in Stockholm, then London. 1972 Tripticks published by Calder and Boyars. Begins studying at Hillcroft College. 1973 Continues at Hillcroft College. Begins to write The Unmapped Country . Writes ‘Matters of the Heart’. Writes television plays. Walks out to sea at Shoreham and drowns. Is pronounced dead on arrival at Southlands Hospital on 27 th August. 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors – Lyndsey Stonebridge, Kate Campbell and Karen Schaller – for their feedback and encouragement; for believing I could do it and for making me carry on through the difficulty. A wider and invaluable source of support has come from members of the very lovely PGR community at UEA; especially, Barbara Cooke, Erin Soros, Diane Freeborn, Kate Jones and Lydia Fellgett. I am immensely grateful for the insights into Quin’s life and person given to me by Carol Burns, Alan Burns and John Carter, among many others, who generously shared their memories with me. But most of all, without the support and demands of my family – Brian, Rosa, Mum and Dad – to keep me sane, it would have been impossible. 5 Preface: Why Quin? In 1973, her contemporary B. S. Johnson named Quin as one of a small group ‘writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter’. 1 These writers were in antithesis to popular fiction, he said, because they refused the ‘stultifyingly philistine […] general book culture of this country’ and sought refuge in the imaginary of the continental avant garde. 2 Whatever one makes of his bombastic tone in this piece, the sentiment is persuasive: Johnson wanted to rescue British fiction from stultification, and to foster a literary culture where experiment and risk were better allowed to flourish. And, while there has been some renewed interest in others of these writers, including Johnson himself – with, for example, Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson (2004) – many of them, Quin included, remain largely overlooked and under-read. Despite some more recent appraisal – for instance, Giles Gordon’s ‘Ann Quin’ in Context 8 , Philip Stevick’s ‘Voices