Fictive Institutions: Contemporary British Literature and the Arbiters of Value

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of East Anglia digital repository Samantha Purvis Fictive Institutions: Contemporary British Literature and the Arbiters of Value PhD – Literature University of East Anglia Literature, Drama and Creative Writing April 2020 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived therefrom must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 1 ABSTRACT My thesis assesses the relationship between contemporary British literature and institutions. Literary culture is currently rife with anxieties that some institutions, such as prizes, exert too much influence over authors, while others, such as literary criticism, are losing their cultural power. As authors are increasingly caught up in complex, ambivalent relationships with institutions, I examine how recent British novels, short stories and ‘creative-critical’ texts thematise these engagements. My thesis mobilises Derrida’s term ‘fictive institution’, which marks the fact that institutions are self-authorising; they are grounded in fictitious or invented origins. Institutions, then, share with literary texts a certain fictionality. My project considers how Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing, Gordon Burn, Alan Hollinghurst, and— most prominently—Ali Smith, have used the instituting or inventive power of fiction to reflect on the fictionality of institutions. Each chapter assesses how a different institution—academic criticism, public criticism, the book award and publishing— reproduces aesthetic discourses and values which my corpus of literary texts shows to be grounded in an institutional fiction. In making this argument, my thesis marries three disparate strands of contemporary criticism: literary sociology, aesthetic theory and deconstruction. This approach repositions Derrida—a figure maligned by postcritique and the aesthetic turn—as an important and surprisingly timely thinker of the literary. Situating my readings in terms of a resurgent critical discourse on the value of the novel, my project traces how a wide range of twenty-first-century writing mounts a defence of literature by asserting fiction’s power to ‘speak back’ to institutions. While contemporary culture seems to suffer more and more from what David Shields calls ‘reality hunger’, and the rise of autofiction seems to augur the outmodedness of fiction, this thesis ultimately suggests that it is precisely as a fictional medium that literature retains its cultural power. 2 CONTENTS Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ 4 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 5 Chapter One: Literary Criticism ......................................................................................... 35 Chapter Two: Public Criticism ............................................................................................ 84 Chapter Three: Prizes ......................................................................................................... 131 Chapter Four: Publishing ................................................................................................... 179 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 228 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 234 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my parents, whose unwavering belief in me and enthusiastic support for my career have always buoyed me up. Daisy Henwood is the friend and peer who was closest to this project on a day-to-day basis. Thank you for the library stairwell chats, for easing me through my various crises, for cheering me on, for editing and proofreading, and for helping me to figure out the title when I couldn’t think straight anymore—all while doing your own PhD. Melissa Taylor showed endless reserves of patience and kindness, and her sense of humour often dissolved my work-related doldrums. Thanks also to my friends Lewis Buxton, Jake Barrett-Mills, Meg Pay, Sammi Gale, Rachel Ainsworth, Giulia Nazzaro, Ben Carpenter, and Anna-Grace Scullion. I had many stimulating conversations with the psychoanalysis and Sainsbury Centre reading groups, and would especially like to thank Al Bell, Ros Brown and Charlotte Hallahan for their insights and reading recommendations. Karen Schaller has been a source of inspiration and support for many years and provided invaluable feedback at my upgrade panel. Special thanks to Philip Langeskov, another teacher who is very dear to me, for his kindness, flawless critical instincts, publishing intel and dedication to this project. Finally, thank you to that most singular and beloved of teachers, Clare Connors. 4 INTRODUCTION This thesis is about institutions, so it seems appropriate to point out at the very beginning that the word institution—as well as referring to social forms and organisations—means ‘the act of […] establishing’ or ‘foundation’.1 Ali Smith’s novels have a very particular way of marking their beginnings, with her first lines often foregrounding the strangeness inhering in the act of instating a fictional narrative. Hotel World, for example, opens with the ghostly ‘[w]oooooooo- | hooooooo’ of chambermaid Sarah Wilby falling to her death down the shaft of a dumbwaiter.2 The apparition of this spectral, nonlinguistic voice at the novel’s opening moment recalls Maurice Blanchot’s description of literary voice speaking from a ‘place without a place’ in the text.3 This phrase most clearly designates the space from which ‘the 1 ‘Institution, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2019 <www.oed.com/view/Entry/97110> [accessed 31 January 2020]. 2 Ali Smith, Hotel World (London: Penguin, 2002). 3 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 385. 5 narrative voice, a neutral voice […] speaks’, but it also points to a more general truth about fiction.4 The third-person omniscient point of view has no grounding in the world of the story, but is a strange, self-generating fiction. It is therefore a particularly clear example of the fact that all narratives institute themselves. Staging the entrance of a sourceless voice as the act which inaugurates its narrative, Hotel World shows an acute awareness of the self-instituting nature of fiction. This thesis argues that Smith and a number of other contemporary novelists deploy the fictional status of their texts to turn this thinking of institution back on the actual institutions that arbitrate literary value. Twenty-first-century British fiction, I argue, often thematises the fabulous nature of institutional discourses about literature. My argument centres on Smith’s oeuvre because of its particular insistence on questions of institution. The Accidental’s introductory line concerns both beginnings and fictions: Amber recounts that ‘[m]y mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema’, with the reference to the big screen foreshadowing the lurid origin stories Amber will tell about herself throughout the novel.5 There but for the opens by asking the reader to call up the text’s opening image with the power of their imagination, foregrounding the work of inventing a fiction: ‘The fact is, imagine a man sitting on an exercise bike in a spare room.’6 Franchesco del Cossa’s narrative in How to Be Both begins with their surprise at returning to life and voice: ‘[h]o’.7 Autumn’s first line parodies the opening of A Tale of Two Cities: ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.’8 Winter kicks off with: ‘God was dead: to begin with.’9 Smith’s novels take care about how they begin themselves; they don’t just start any which way, but mark their own coming into being: the work, will or imagination it takes to institute a fiction. In this sense, Smith’s opening lines reflect Jacques Derrida’s proposition that fiction institutes or invents, and conversely institutions establish themselves through 4 Ibid. 5 Ali Smith, The Accidental (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 1. 6 Ali Smith, There but for the (London: Penguin, 2012), np. 7 Ali Smith, How to Be Both (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014), p. 3. 8 Ali Smith, Autumn (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016), p. 3. 9 Ali Smith, Winter (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017), p. 3. 6 a practical fiction. A fiction isn’t grounded in fact or objective reality, but has to create itself. The same can be said of an institution, which has to install or inaugurate itself. This is what Smith’s opening sentences dramatise as they bring their narratives to life: there always has to be a first moment, even as this inauguration marks its own fictiveness. What Derrida calls a ‘fictive institution’ has an origin that never properly existed, that was always a fiction.10 This is true of concepts, beliefs, discourses, and values—all of which have to be founded, begun, inaugurated. As such, institutions often carry traces of the paradoxes,

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