BRIDGING ASPECTS OF RHYTHM AND PROSE FICTION AND DEMI-GODS Eliza Robertson A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2017 © Eliza Robertson 2017 All Rights Reserved 2 Abstract My novel, Demi-Gods, begins when nine-year-old Willa meets Patrick, eleven, in 1950. Patrick is visiting their Salt Spring Island beach house from San Diego. On the first morning, Willa follows him to the beach, where he coaxes her into a dilapidated rowboat. Their cruise ends when she is stung by a jellyfish and Patrick convinces her to urinate on herself. This transaction, in which Patrick asserts authority over her body and she complies, cinches a knot of power between them. As the years proceed, this bond thickens. It’s not until later that she realizes their relationship is essentially self-effacing. Willa has never felt exalted under anyone else’s gaze, and Patrick has never felt as powerful. The knot of power has altered them both. Rather than explore my creative practice thematically, I have found it more fruitful to unpack a concept central to the novel’s form and formation: rhythm. My thesis seeks to understand that centrality—how rhythm initiates and sustains my writing and fiction more broadly. Before Plato emphasized the link between rhuthmos (ρυθμός) and metron (μέτρον), rhythm signified a fluid or flowing form. The first chapter contrasts two traditional metaphors for rhythm, rheos vs. cadentibus guttis. By tracing the etymology of rhuthmos, I find these metaphors are not mutually exclusive. In the second chapter, I question the metaphors we use to identify “presence” in prose fiction. I draw upon Derrida’s deconstruction of the presence-absence hierarchy and pitch rhythm as an alternative metaphor to “voice.” The final chapter draws parallels between my study of rhythm and Henri Bergson’s theory of duration, with a focus on the grammatical verbal. Here, I apply the concepts I have been discussing to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. In its entirety, my thesis contemplates the ways in which rhythm bridges the experience of the reader with the experience of the writer, and how rhythm calls to me personally. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 5 Bridging Aspects of Rhythm and Prose 6 Introduction 7 Chapter 1: “Two Metaphors for Rhythm” 21 Chapter 2: “Rhythm as a Metaphor for Presence” 35 Chapter 3: “Rhythm, Durée and the Grammatical Verbal” 55 Conclusion 74 Demi-Gods 84 Bibliography 280 4 Acknowledgments I would like to thank, first of all, my supervisors: Ms. Jean McNeil and Dr. Stephen Benson. Jean is one of the most insightful fiction readers I’ve worked with. She’s seen many gestations of Demi-Gods, some of them unrecognizable, and her guidance has helped me find the story’s shape. The critical component of my thesis wouldn’t exist without Stephen’s acumen and encouragement. The directions he pointed me in helped solidify the ideas I was listing toward, yet didn’t have the language to articulate. Conversations with Stephen and Jean have been, quite simply, the highlights of my PhD. I gratefully acknowledge the funding received towards my PhD from the University of East Anglia and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Jean McNeil introduced me to Elaine Martel, a California native and sailor, who read the relevant sections of my novel and pointed out my landlubber mistakes and inconsistencies. I can’t thank Elaine enough for her time and generosity. I also owe a huge thank you to the staff at the San Diego History Centre, who helped me plumb their archives so I could invoke the mood of that city and time. Thank you to my agent, Karolina Sutton, and my editors Nicole Winstanley, Callie Garnett and Alexa von Hirschberg for bringing Demi-Gods into the world with Hamish Hamilton Canada and Bloomsbury later this year. Thank you Nathan Hamilton, a wonderful editor in his own right, who listened to my excitement and exasperation and helped this story find its shape. Thank you, most of all, to Mom and Jesse, the most supportive family I could ask for. 5 BRIDGING ASPECTS OF RHYTHM AND PROSE FICTION 6 Introduction In London, on June 10, 2000, the city opened a steel suspension bridge. The bridge linked St. Paul’s Cathedral on the North side of the river with the Tate Modern gallery on the South. Over one thousand people gathered on the bridge’s South end to celebrate its completion. White and cream banners lined the handrails; a band played. When it was time, the band led the crowd across. As more people filed onto the bridge, the deck began to sway—imperceptibly at first, then uncomfortably. Some stopped to grasp the handrails. Most shuffled forward like a flock of sheep with banana peels strapped to their hooves. It turned out the engineers had accounted for the crowd’s vertical, not lateral vibrations.1 The pedestrians’ tendency to fall in step with their neighbours caused the bridge to sway. Though the movement started inconspicuously, the crowd adjusted their steps to the bridge’s motion so they could balance better. As the pedestrians synchronized their gaits to each other’s, and to the bridge’s, vibration, the bridge’s vibration increased. What strikes me about this incident is our readiness to walk in time. The Millennium Bridge example contains a question that underlies the study of rhythm and literature: does rhythm precede the writing of a text (did the bridge’s sway cause pedestrians to alter their gaits), or does it emerge from the process of writing itself (did the synchronized footfalls cause the bridge to sway)? Is it possible that rhythm can both precede and emerge from the text? Similarly: what differentiates rhythm in the product (ergon) of a text—rhythms we may point to as critics, such as meter or rhetorical devices—from rhythm experienced in the process (energeia) of writing or reading? All these rhythms I have named—rhythm that precedes writing, rhythm that emerges from writing or reading, the rhythmic material in a text—are they aspects of one concept, like different faces on a prism, nuanced only by our descriptive and linguistic limitations? Or indeed, do they point to different phenomena altogether? These are the questions I will ask and seek to understand. 1 David E Newland, “Vibration of the London Millennium Footbridge,” Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, accessed January 7 2014, http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~den/ICSV9_06.htm. 7 It is thematically gratifying to start with the Millennium Bridge example because it introduces the body—groups of bodies who are moved by rhythm before they have a chance to think. The idea for this project emerged from a dance workshop I took in Sweden in 2012, where we were guided to internalize the rhythm of a song before we expressed the movement physically. Rhythm and the body is a relationship I will return to over the course of this thesis. As I will discuss in Chapter 1, it was while describing the movement of a body dancing that Plato first applied the notion of metron (μέτρον), or measure, to rhuthmos (ρυθμός). In Chapter 2, I will look at the hierarchy of presence over absence, speech over writing, and spirit over body in Saussurian linguistics. Bodies appear here in the very metaphors we use: we refer to a body of work, for instance, the body of a text or essay. In Chapter 3, I will discuss rhythm as a means to link bodies—the body of a reader with the body of a writer through the body of the text. It may be a feature of my style as a writer, or a feature of the subject material, but metaphors have proven central to my conceptualizing of rhythm. The first chapter, for instance, is framed around two metaphors, which are often pitched as mutually incompatible: rhythm as rheos, continuous flow vs. rhythm as cadentibus guttis, or falling drops. As mentioned, I will dig into the etymology of rhuthmos (ρυθμός) and suggest that these two metaphors are not necessarily opposed. In Chapter 2, I will conduct the reverse exercise: rather than examine metaphors for rhythm, I will pitch rhythm as a metaphor for presence in literary fiction. Derrida’s deconstruction of the presence-absence hierarchy proves useful here, and I will offer the verb “presenting” as a way to articulate presence in literary fiction that does not pitch presence over absence, but still articulates the value of “vital” characters and prose. In the third and final chapter, I will turn to Bergson’s concept of duration—the discussion of which bears linguistic similarities to my discussion of rhythm— and I will describe the grammatical verbal as a linguistic metaphor for rhythm, as well as an example of rhythm as it functions in text material. To return to my initial metaphor of Millennium Bridge, it is worth pointing out the bridge implicit in the word metaphor itself. Metaphor comes from the Greek μεταφέρω (metaphorō), “to transfer.” If we break the word down, we have μετά 8 (meta), which means “after, with, across,” and φέρω (pherō), “to bear,” or “to carry.” Metaphors are bridges. They carry meaning across. A final reason Millennium Bridge provides a useful starting place is it introduces the concept of “sway.” As a fiction writer, the work I am most proud of emerges from, or contemporaneously with, what I will describe inadequately for now as a “sway”—not a character or plot idea. I did not begin Demi-Gods with its narrative content. Indeed—the trajectory of the novel did not take shape until the third draft.