‘Kardinia’: a novel and exegesis Catherine Harris Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy College of Arts, Victoria University Melbourne, Australia August 2015 Abstract This doctoral thesis is concerned with two interrelated components exploring literary form and style as they relate to the reading and writing of unsympathetic characters. Section one (30%), the analytical written component, examines these themes in light of three novels that have influenced my creative work: The member of the wedding (Carson McCullers), After leaving Mr. Mackenzie (Jean Rhys) and The driver’s seat (Muriel Spark). These novels have all been criticised for formal considerations, often attributed to socio-cultural qualities such as the authors’ gender, ethnicity, and/or personal histories, that inhibit readers’ engagement with the narrative. Rather than looking to reconcile these elements, this exegesis aims to find a theoretical bridge that enables a complementary analysis of the texts without resorting to essentialism. Douglas’s notion of dirt as “matter out of place” and Kristeva’s use of abjection present as useful analytical terms, but key components of their frameworks limit their applicability across place and time. Duschinsky’s “purity discourses” remedies these limitations, incorporating dirt and abjection into a flexible, non- essentialist, ideologically contingent theoretical mechanism. This mechanism is overlaid across Douglas’s three-part description of the process of dirt (from ‘safe’ non-differentiation, to differentiated and ‘dangerous’, to a return to indiscriminate formlessness) allowing a three-part analysis of the novels, whose narrative arcs conform to this same pattern. Section two (70%), ‘Kardinia’ (the creative component), a novel about a young man caught between two worlds, mirrors the three-part structure of the novels from the exegesis (from ‘safe’ dirt, Harry becomes differentiated and ‘dangerous’, before returning to indiscriminate formlessness), intentionally manipulating reader engagement and sympathies, taking a character with an abject status and resolving his trajectory in a story of unexpected salvation and hope. Each of these four novels demands an engagement with the “in-between, the ambiguous and the composite” (Kristeva 1982, p. 4). This engagement challenges the hegemony of a narrative form reliant on easy relateability and comfortable resolutions, thereby contributing to the diversification of our expectations of the role and structure of fiction. 1 Acknowledgments Thank you to my supervisors, Ian Syson and Barbara Brook, for their thoughtful guidance and encouragement. 3 Table of contents Abstract 1 Declaration 2 Acknowledgements 3 Table of contents 4 SECTION ONE: ANALYTICAL WRITTEN COMPONENT A note on the text 5 Introduction 7 Contextualising the discussion: a review of the literature 8 Skirting the issue of comfort and likeability 14 Chapter One: “Caught all by ourself”: abjection, dirt and other yucky stuff 20 Structural inflexibility: limitations of Douglas and Kristeva 22 Knowing your place: the limitations of purity 24 Economies of discourses 27 The process of dirt/ying and purity discourses in The member of the wedding, 29 After leaving Mr. Mackenzie and The driver’s seat Chapter Two: Purity discourses in After leaving Mr. Mackenzie, The member 31 of the wedding, and The driver’s seat. I. Dirt (non-differentiated, safe) 31 II. Differentiated ‘dangerous’ dirt 41 III. Return to indiscriminate formlessness 59 Conclusion 67 References 72 SECTION TWO: CREATIVE COMPONENT ‘Kardinia’: a novel 86 4 A note on the text All references to Carson McCullers are from The member of the wedding, all references to Jean Rhys are from After leaving Mr. Mackenzie, all references to Muriel Spark are from The driver’s seat, all references to Mary Douglas are from Purity and danger and all references to Julia Kristeva are from Powers of horror, unless the text indicates otherwise. 5 Her Kind By Anne Sexton I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind. 6 Introduction “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble” – Claire Messud, Publisher’s Weekly, April 29, 2013 ‘Kardinia’, a novel set in contemporary Melbourne (Section Two of this thesis), explores the circularity of identity, the ways the past feeds into the present, which in turn becomes another person’s past. Juxtaposing the beauty of the Australian landscape with the violence of macho football culture, the story investigates the role and meaning of responsibility in a subculture more concerned with brutality than with love. These themes are advanced through the eyes of Harry, whose personal values put him at odds with his peers. Told from a range of perspectives, shifts in time, tense and character, the structure and literary style of ‘Kardinia’ interferes with readers’ engagement with the narrative, ultimately implicating the reader in Harry’s ‘outsider’ status. It is this emphasis on structure and style that is explored in this exegesis, which focuses on three texts that have influenced and inspired ‘Kardinia’ – The member of the wedding by Carson McCullers (first published in 1946), After leaving Mr. Mackenzie by Jean Rhys (first published in 1931) and The driver’s seat by Muriel Spark (first published in 1970). These novels have all been criticised for formal considerations, often attributed to socio-cultural qualities such as the authors’ gender, ethnicity, and/or personal histories, that inhibit readers’ engagement with the narrative. Rather than looking to reconcile these elements, this exegesis aims to find a theoretical platform that enables a complementary analysis of the texts, a way of tackling these questions about style and narrative structure without reverting to essentialism. Spark’s The driver’s seat opens with the following exchange: ‘And the material doesn’t stain’, the salesgirl says. ‘Doesn’t stain?’ ‘It’s the new fabric,’ the salesgirl says. ‘Specially treated. Won’t mark. If you spill like a bit of ice-cream or a drop of coffee, like, down the front of this dress it won’t hold the stain.’ [Then t]he “customer, a young woman, is suddenly tearing at the fastener at the neck, pulling at the zip of the dress ... saying, ‘Get this thing off me. Off me, at once.’ This motif of stain – of dirt, defilement, of something fundamentally not right, not clean – is a prominent concern also in The member of the wedding and in After 7 leaving Mr. Mackenzie, whose main characters struggle to deal with their dirt, their “matter out of place” (Douglas, p. 52), in their bid to reconcile their positions in society. Frankie or F. Jasmine or Frances Addams (as the character variously calls herself), McCullers’ young protagonist, lunges at the ceremony of her brother’s wedding to put her world right, Julia Martin from After leaving Mr. Mackenzie tests the water with her family in England before returning to Paris to tidy up her life, while Lise from The driver’s seat looks to the certainties and securities of death as a solution to her mess. If distaste and defilement are common denominators of these books, then Douglas’s theory about dirt and purity (as detailed in Purity and danger) and Kristeva’s theory of abjection (see Powers of horror) emerge as obvious contenders for a theoretical bridge between these texts. However, neither Douglas nor Kristeva can fully account for shifts in the meaning of dirt and abjection across place and time. Duschinsky seeks to address this problem by reconceiving of dirt and abjection in terms of “purity discourses” (Duschinsky 2011b, p. 323), an adaptation of Douglas and Kristeva that allows for the variable nature and application of these concepts. This is explored in Chapter One of this exegesis. Contextualising the discussion: a review of the literature Carson McCullers (1917-1967) is an American author whose work is generally located within the oeuvre of Southern Gothic, with writers such as Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty. Some of the critics and scholars who have defined this position include: Evans (1964), Free, Gilbert & Gubar, Hart, Hassan, Logan, Westling, and Young. Focussing on misfits and outsiders, McCullers’ writing has been embraced by theorists, such as Adams (1999), Bell (2011), Carr (1976), Fiedler (2003 [1960]), Free (2008), Hart (1957), Kenschaft (1996), Logan (1996) and Rubin (1977 [1996]), who point to this emphasis as sublimation of struggles with her own body (she had many health problems) and with her sexual identity (McCullers never openly identified as a lesbian but many claim that she was). In The Member of the wedding, during a game where Frankie is pretending to be God, she determines “that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, whichever way they felt like and wanted” (1946 [1972], p. 116). Lines such as these have been tendered by critics and scholars such as Burns, 1964, p. 127, 8 Fiedler, 2003, p. 333-334, Hassan, 1959, p. 314 and Phillips, 1964, p. 70, as evidence of McCullers’ ‘queer’ identity. For example, Adams (1999) says: Although it would be difficult to argue that Member of the wedding is a novel about homosexuality, the repeated use of the queer functions as an open secret.