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This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Signed Declaration This thesis has been composed by the student, and the work is entirely their own. The work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Signed, Katie Craig 1 Sweetness And Light Katie Craig PHD in Creative Writing, The University of Edinburgh 2 To Mairi and Iain Craig, my parents, for their assistance, in the last year of my PHD especially. John Bunyan famously said that you have not lived “until you have done something for someone who cannot repay you” and if Bunyan was right, then my parents have most certainly lived- literal repayment is surely not an option in the near future. Most heartfelt gratitude for both the financial and emotional support you have given me - in this endeavour and in life more generally. I love you both very much. 3 Contents Abstracts Page 5 Novel: Sweetness & Light Page 7 Word Count: 79,448 Critical piece: Making Light Of The Holocaust: Modelling Calvino’s Page 345 concept of lightness as an appropriate literary response to the Shoah, in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. Word Count: 20,357 Works Cited Page 425 4 Abstracts 1. Sweetness and Light. A novel. Judi lives in a nice, clean house with her seventeen year old stepson, who won’t talk to her in anything but monosyllables. His father, Nelson, and she are struggling to relate to each other, since they fell out over Judi’s continued desire to have a baby, despite many miscarriages. She’s forty-one. Her relationship has lost its spark, she doesn’t know how to talk to the man that she lives with anymore. To make matters worse, he is her boss too. Judi needs answers, what she discovers instead is The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s internationally bestselling guide to shaping the world around you with the power of your mind. Judi soon discovers she’s pretty good at it. Uncanny things start to happen. A wine-do with literary pretentions leads to an unexpectedly spiritual interlude, during which Judi is led, by a cosmic vision, to discover the sinister happenings at her work place. Hope, a schizophrenic woman in their care, has been raped, and is pregnant. Worse, Judi has strong reason to suspect that her abuser is the man she has shared her life with. With The Secret as her moral compass, Judi decides to kidnap Hope and raise the baby as her own. The relationship on the brink, becomes a game of brinkmanship. As Judi struggles to build a dream-life from the wreckage of the old, the burden of past makes its weight felt. A novel of secrets, and The Secret. An exploration of cosmic ordering, and its consequences. 5 2:Making Light Of The Holocaust: Modelling Calvino’s concept of lightness as an appropriate literary response to the Shoah in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. In Six Memos For The New Millenium, Italo Calvio proposes that lightness is a literary value which can act against cultural and creative paralysis. Given the ongoing cultural obligation to bear witness to the events of The Holocaust, might lightness be a necessary approach to post-holocaust literature? Calvino’s concept of lightness is deconstructed and examined in relation to the Memorial to The Murdered Jews Of Europe. The understandable critical hesitancy surrounding a light approach to the atrocities is examined, with special reference to Benigni’s La vita è bella Finally, taking Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces as an exemplar of the lightness Calvino advocated at work in the field of holocaust literature, the case is made for the appropriateness, and potential necessity, of this approach in works that address The Holocaust, in the specific context of Michaels’ work and more generally. 6 Sweetness and Light 7 1 The jolt, when he freezes to determine whether she’s woken, is what wakes her. Some men do this “behind your back” but Nelson does it right up against hers, so that mornings, these last weeks, she’s bed-ridden by proxy, pinned to lavender-scented Egyptian cotton by sheer awkwardness. She snorts snore-like, permission to resume the rhythmic pitch of his body against hers. Judi pushes down a wee flare of anger, and they lie together. How did this become normal? Just turn around, she thinks, but doesn’t, again. Back to back, book-ends with nothing between them, it’s hardly the tangle of heat that marked their beginning. Nelson has taken to staying late recently, the home office won’t do, home isn’t where he wants to be. Judi goes to bed alone, after nearly two decades. He creeps into bed late, back out early for his run. “You need more sleep.” “Margaret Thatcher only had four hours a night.” “Well then, Godsake come back to bed, before it’s too late.” You can’t nag someone back into your arms. He has his reasons, they both do. They used to have sex, they used to have each other, but now they have their reasons. In January, Jason, Judi’s stepson brought home a weather clock he’d made in Tech, a little Judi for sunshine, a little Nelson for rain, the figurines popped out according to the weather. Judi was glad she was sunshine. 8 “Affy clever. How does it work?” Judi peered into the wee house the figurines shared, but never cohabited. “Cat gut. Humidity” shrugged Jason. It didn’t sound like an explanation. It sounded like the beginning of a terrible poem. They hung it in the living-room. Judi wonders if her husband is cheating on her but with who? When? How? They work together. They live together. There’s no time. So unfounded, so unfair, so she kept it to herself. Would she blame him, really, if he were? Judi would swap herself for someone else, sometimes, if she could. The repetitive nudge of Nelson’s elbow these last mornings is a comforting addition. He’s back, or the back of him’s back at least. He rocks against her, surf lapping shore. It’s a shame, all the things in the way of their sex. She likes, has always liked, to lay her hands on the candle-pale, sun starved parts of him that are uniquely hers: the ghost-outline of his running shorts, moon-white chest. She places her hand, for a second, against the rasp of blonde stubble on his still unshaven cheek. How can she sit next to him in their own bed and miss him? Nelson takes her chin between his fingers, firmly, like before, and for a second she thinks he’s heard. “Better get going.” “Right-o. Your run won’t run itself.” They smile, sheepishly acknowledging the lack of further things to say. Easier if language went. To say her whole self just with her eyes. That’s what she’d like, if he could really look and see it. To explain, to speak at all, that wouldn’t be the thing she wanted. She waves him off and wills her eyes to say what she can’t: Kiss me. Properly. Often. Again. 9 The February morning is deceptively sunny; it will pinch their noses red. Her best friend Marina’s neon push-bike is still chained to their gate, bringing down the tone of Lanark Street in a way Judi finds most agreeable. So good to have folk come round unexpected, especially ones that bring homemade booze and juicy details about their personal lives. Sad not to be one of the popper- rounders more often, but it’s something to do with children. Everyone has kids now, everyone but Marina, and doors feel more firmly closed. “Come, anytime” and “see you soon” are just noises people make as they leave. The thought clutters her brain. She decides to clean something. Mornings are the best time to eradicate mess. The living-room cupboard spills messy, dusty, mementos. Photographs of people from college whose surnames she can’t remember, of babies that might have belonged to anybody. Judi sneaks up on the top shelf with a yawning black bag and begins her attack. She considers a stack of dusty paintings, the carefully rounded black felt- tip lettering on their sugar-paper frames: “Daddy, Judi and Me. Jason Urquhart, aged 7.” His skies are all a blue line at the top of the page, the ground beneath a solid scrawl of green. In between, nothing. It takes years of schooling and parental goading to convince a wee one that the ground meets the sky. Every wean going, without conferring on the matter, sees that it doesn’t. We unlearn what was apparent: things do not cohere. She sweeps the whole lot into a black bag and runs straight out in her nightie to the wheelie bin.

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