The Enigma of Development: Building a Reflexive Point of View
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The Enigma of Development: Building a Reflexive Point of View Across Remote Contexts James Macfarlane Thesis submitted towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at the University of Newcastle January 2016 Supervisors: Dr Andrew Crumey and Dr James Procter i I would like to thank my supervisors Dr Andrew Crumey and Dr James Procter for their guidance during the writing of this thesis. Further, I would like to express my appreciation for the work undertaken by my examiners Dr Will Buckingham and Professor Bill Herbert in following my research to its conclusion. Finally I dedicate this thesis to my wife Michelle and those from whom I have most come to appreciate the value of knowledge: my sons Ruairidh, Gregor and Alasdair. ii Abstract This thesis singles out point of view (POV) as the governing technical choice in creative writing. As such it integrates creative practice with an essay on the theoretical basis for a POV across remote contexts. The methodology follows Mikhail Bakhtin’s call for a new story telling position through an enquiry into Western literary history, Classical Chinese novels and Gao Xingjian’s partitioning of POV by narrative angle. Part One Chapter one establishes the importance of POV to motives in my own creative work and sets out the case for Bakhtin over normative theorists, calling for a reconfiguration of POV to withstand contextual aberrations arising from cultural or historical differences, or from the boundaries of what Bakhtin refers to as Small Time presentism. Further, it argues against Tzvetan Todorov’s generic view of the novel as a property of discourse, an ahistorical constant, by considering Bakhtin’s meta-historic survey of Western literature with periods of intensified novelistic discourse in given contexts. Chapter two considers POV in the separate context of Chinese literature focussing on the historiographic POV taken in Classical Chinese novels, namely The Four Great Works. Comparisons are drawn between these and Western short story cycles noting forms given in Andrew Plaks’ Chinese Narrative (1977) and aesthetics in François Cheng’s Chinese Poetic Writing (1982). Critical contemporary concerns arising between Classical and Modern Chinese are addressed with reference to essays by Xi Chuan, Yang Liang and Henry Zhao. Chapter three begins with reflexivity as an inherent property of what Bakhtin identifies as discrete double voicing and draws parallels with the bi-polar unity of Daoism and its Chan iii (Zen) hybrid, consulting Victor Sōgen Hori’s studies of capping phrases and contemporary techniques in the fiction, drama and essays of Gao Xingjian. Part Two Creative enquiry takes the form of a novel, Interesting Times, (working title: The Enigma of Development), in which a first person protagonist’s narrative alternates with third person short stories embedded in a historical schema. The novel depicts economic development through the construction of a power station, following a schema of short story settings in one location from pre-industrial salt making to sophisticated intellectual piracy, indentured peasant labour to chaotic collateral debt finance. These short stories alternate with chapters from the linking protagonist whose narrative encircles the whole from the rural location of his family’s ancient English heritage. With the cognitive ground of one POV set against that of the other, the resulting novel is intended to create an interpretive domain for the reflex between the two, in this case a cyclical relationship between exploiter and exploited, interchangeable as subjects and objects. iv Contents Part One Page Chapter one: Normative POV and its (Western) historical context. 1 Chapter two: Chinese Narrative POV. 33 Chapter three: Reflexive POV and the Fiction of Gao Xingjian. 66 Conclusion 110 Bibliography 117 Part Two Interesting Times 141:372 v PART ONE vi If there were no “that” There would be no “this” If there were no “this” There would be nothing for all these winds to play on Zhuang Zou vii CHAPTER ONE – Point of View across Remote Contexts My research interest in fiction stems from a contemporary world distinguished by globalised capitalism, that is, a world in which characters from a multitude of diverse cultural settings communicate with a frequency that is historically unprecedented and subject to homogenising cultural influence. In this world my creative conscience, the point of view1 of my ‘self’, is inseparable from the question of who speaks for ‘the other’. Though my writing is drawn to this question I recognise that at least some of this impulse is an ontological response, a matter of philosophy that leads away from creative writing if not actually inhibiting it. With this in mind, this section of the thesis seeks a methodology for the POV in a novel reflecting the increasing complexity of international literary contexts and in particular for the novel Interesting Times. Interesting Times is set in a third world peasant economy subject to historically unprecedented economic growth after Deng Xiaoping proclaimed, ‘It is a glorious thing to be rich.’ The novel is conceived as a recurrent cycle of short stories set in respective phases of economic development. In each story one protagonist’s gain becomes another's exploitation. With this in mind, throughout the writing of Interesting Times I have used a working title, The Enigma of Development. In this chapter we will address POV through Bakhtin’s works on novelistic discourse, justifying these as better aligned to our purpose than, for example, Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse or Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction. At this point it may be helpful to present the options of narrative POV in terms of their respective strengths and weaknesses. Third person narratives are presented exclusively from the POV of ‘he’ or ‘she’, 1 Hereafter abbreviated to POV. 1 notwithstanding degrees of subjectivity from ‘strongly internal’ where the author claims to interpret a third party’s internal thoughts to ‘wholly external’ where the author adheres rigorously to the ‘show, don't tell’ maxim. Second person narratives addressing the reader as ‘you’ have an effect of immediacy that, while powerful in the short story, is less readily sustained over the length of a novel. First person narratives presented exclusively from the POV of the ‘I’ narrator incorporate varying degrees of intimacy or distance. The ‘I’ narration POV has the advantage of immediately establishing the focus of the story with the opportunity for philosophical reflection and a chance to influence reader empathy. These advantages are outweighed by the fact that a first person narrator must not only be present in each scene, but their perceptions derive from a local setting that may have either little relevance to a wider outside world or, by asserting a wider knowledge than the reader, may come to feel like being addressed by a megalomaniac. Irrespective of any partitioning in terms of these pronouns (or their respective plurals) the choice of viewpoint for a particular narrative is constrained by perceptions available to the narrator or central character, if any, through their overall position in the narrative which in turn determines the form of a novel. Bakhtin does not uphold a formal principle for the novel by itself but demonstrates that the form is a mutually determined development around the protagonist: ‘the principle for formulating the hero figure is related to the particular type of plot, to the particular conception of the world, and to a particular composition of a given novel.’2 Irrespective of protagonist, in Forms of Time and of Chronotope in the Novel Bakhtin offers a comprehensive catalogue literary forms by the definitive term, chronotope: 2 Bakhtin, M.M., ‘The Bildungsroman’and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)’ In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern W. McGee, (Austin: University of Texas 1986 10th Edn 2006) p10 2 We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expresses in literature.3 In his catalogue of literary forms by chronotope Bakhtin devotes a separate section to certain liminal figures, namely the rogue, clown and fool, and their position relative to a central narrative.4 These figures personify a narrator’s POV, developing as mise en scène episodes in themselves to create ‘their own special little world, their own chronotope.’5 By introducing these figures the author overcomes a dimensional problem through their capacity for overhearing, spying or eavesdropping where previously the position of the author in relation to the material was one of prosaic everyday reality that Bakhtin compares to that of publishing a laundry list, ‘a manuscript by “nobody-knows-who, written for nobody-knows- who and who-found-it-and-where nobody knows”.6 Instead the author’s optimal storytelling position is realised through the agencies of rogue, clown and fool where an author would otherwise be intrusive: The novelist stands in need of some essential formal and generic mask that could serve to define the position from which he views life, as well as the position from which he makes that life public.7 3 Bakhtin, M.M. ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’ In The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas 1981 16th Edn 2006) p84 4 Bakhtin, M.M. ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’ In The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas 1981 16th Edn 2006) p158,159 5 Bakhtin, M.M. ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’ In The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas 1981 16th Edn 2006) p159 6 Ibid, p161 7 Ibid, p161 3 In his catalogue of literary chronotopes Bakhtin devotes a separate section to these otherwise flat characters, stressing their metaphorical significance: Their very appearance, everything they do and say, cannot be understood in a direct and unmediated way but must be grasped metaphorically...