The Terrorism Novel in a Surrealist Mode
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Northumbria Research Link Citation: Schoneboom, John Raymond (2018) The terrorism novel in a surrealist mode. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University. This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/42790/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html THE TERRORISM NOVEL IN A SURREALIST MODE J R SCHONEBOOM PhD 2018 ` THE TERRORISM NOVEL IN A SURREALIST MODE JOHN RAYMOND SCHONEBOOM A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Research undertaKen in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences Department of Humanities, English and Creative Writing April 2018 Abstract The Terrorism Novel in a Surrealist Mode is a practice-led research project comprising a novel (The Science of a Single Cabbage) and an accompanying reflective commentary. The research question to which my novel responds is: Can a surrealist writing mode help expand the terrain of the literary terrorism novel? I distinguish my surrealist “mode” from historical surrealism by identifying the movement as an unfinished project survived by a certain state of mind, while acknowledging the intellectual debt by noting five central preoccupations that are common to surrealism and my project: 1) the interplay of dream-life and conscious experience; 2) playful black humour; 3) anti-fascism; 4) engagement with spectacular crime; and 5) exploitation of paranoia as both a subject and a tool for querying reality as a social and psychological construct. My thesis argues that a surrealist mode can expose and unsettle the implicit givens of what can be termed a terrorism/national security ontology, thereby contesting the assumptions that circumscribe the permissible in our age. By employing this literary mode, The Science of a Single Cabbage contributes to a disruption of terrorism narrative through a destabilising interrogation of the boundaries between the real and the unreal. TABLE OF CONTENTS PART 1: THE SCIENCE OF A SINGLE CABBAGE 1 PART 2: THE TERRORISM NOVEL IN A SURREALIST MODE 253 INTRODUCTION 257 SYNOPSIS 265 CHAPTER 1: REALITY AND SURREALITY 267 1.1 PERCEPTION AND BIAS 268 1.2 CAPITALIST REALISM AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE 271 CHAPTER 2: A SURREALIST MODE OF WRITING 277 2.1 DREAMS 286 2.1.1 Dreams and Surrealism 286 2.1.2 Dreams in a Surrealist Literary Mode 288 2.2 BLACK HUMOUR 303 2.2.1 BlacK Humour and Surrealism 303 2.2.2 BlacK Humour in a Surrealist Literary Mode 306 CHAPTER 3: THE TERRORISM NOVEL 314 3.1 ANTI-FASCISM 322 3.1.1 Anti-Fascism and Surrealism 322 3.1.2 Anti-Fascism in a Surrealist Literary Mode 326 3.2 CRIME 330 3.2.1 Crime and Surrealism 330 3.2.2 Crime in a Surrealist Mode 339 3.3 PARANOIA 346 3.3.1 Paranoia and Surrealism 346 3.3.2 Paranoia in a Surrealist Literary Mode 349 CONCLUSION 364 REFERENCES 368 Acknowledgements My undertaking of this endeavour would have been highly improbable without the support of the Research Studentship generously offered by Northumbria University and the Creative Writing department. I am profoundly grateful to my advisors, Andrew Crumey and Michael Green, for their thoughtful feedback and uncompromising criticism. As primary advisor, Andrew was particularly closely involved with the creative process and often seemed to understand my writing style better than I did, which was indispensable to me in finding the right register for the novel. I am indebted to Michael for waving all the right red flags whenever my commentary ventured too far away from its mission into foreign disciplinary territory. They both kept me from disappearing into my own tangents. I would like to thank committee members Mark Blythe and Tony Williams, as well as former member Laura Fish, for their observations, questions, and challenges – and not least for their encouragement. Each of them consistently made me view my own work from perspectives I had not yet considered, certainly enriching the process as well as, hopefully, the end result. I would also like to thank Steve Chambers for canny advice on how stories work, the handling of peculiar characters, and the useful alchemy of turning outrage into laughs. I must include as well Jonathan Lethem for his generosity in taking the time for a private conversation via Skype in the summer of 2015, which reinforced my belief in the utility of a surrealist literary mode in honouring the full richness of the real. This section would not be complete without acknowledging the more personal contributions of my family: my parents, for probably the usual reasons but also for being so different from each other that I eventually absorbed the idea that Part 1: The Science of a Single Cabbage contesting narratives and considering contrasting viewpoints are projects that can be undertaken with love and respect; my children, Oscar and Maisie, for their invaluable assistance in maintaining in our home the high standard of ambient silliness that is so conducive to writing absurdly; and most of all to my wife Abby, because she’ll never say she likes something when it isn’t good enough, but when it is, she’ll get properly excited. Also – and she may not realise this – I have known for some time that she is in fact the mysterious Coffee Lady who brings a hot, enabling cup of NYC Mud to me in bed every morning. vii Declaration I declare that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for any other award and that it is all my own work. I also confirm that this work fully acknowledges opinions, ideas, and contributions from the work of others. Any ethical clearance for the research presented in this commentary has been approved. Approval has been sought and was granted by the University Ethics Committee on July 16, 2015. I declare that the word count of the novel is 72,351, and that of the accompanying commentary is 32,369, exclusive of references, for a thesis total of 104,720 words. Name: John Schoneboom Signature: Date: April 12, 2018 Part 1: The Science of a Single Cabbage The Novel Chapter One Squish. Bodhamari Arbop stepped on another slug on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. A slug: the kind you’re supposed to find outside, eating cabbage, not on a kitchen floor, in a flat, in a city. But here they were. Regularly. Fact of life. Should be an improbable thing, Arbop thought as he surveyed the damage, a slug in a kitchen. It seemed improbable each time, with every new squish. The persistence of the improbable as routine was exactly what made it so maddening. Obviously he kept an eye out for them so as to avoid just this sort of situation. Arbop habitually employed a special radar-toed skim-step on his dark sojourns in the wee hours. His eyesight was not the keenest but he could often sense the presence of a small moist intruder and negotiate around or lightly over it. Ideally he would only notice it a little. Then he could pretend he hadn’t seen it at all, which could justify in all somnolence the act of doing nothing about it. Otherwise, if he noticed it too much, he’d have to remove it. Removing a slug from an urban kitchen was not only a distasteful job, it also woke a fellow up when he’s trying to stay sleepy. By the time you’d located the stiff paper to slide under the creature, gotten him on there, gone out into the back yard, and sailed him over the fence, your delirious ties to the kingdom of Hypnos would have largely been severed. Nor is that the end of it. If you’ve squished one, there’s your foot to tend to. Arbop duly performed the slug-ejection ritual and began the personal cleaning process. It is much harder than it ought to be to get slug slime off of a foot. Slug slime vanishes off the floor with the airiest brush of the flimsiest tissue. Yet a Part 1: The Science of a Single Cabbage foot needs to be scrubbed assiduously with soap and water for a surprising length of time. This is less of a mystery than it might first appear. On the floor what you see is merely the shimmering gossamer trail gently laid down in a slug’s wake by beautiful faerie historians with tiny buckets and ladles, lovingly recording the movements of the Pulmonata. It bears only an incidental relationship, if any, to what comes out when you crush one. They are two entirely different kinds of slime. Arbop went back to bed and finally fell asleep about twenty minutes before it was time to get up, and then it was time to go to work.