The Waste Book: Detaching from the Structures of the Self
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The Waste Book: Detaching From the Structures of the Self Joseph PIERSON This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Kingston University for the award of PhD. Note to the examiners: Part One of The Waste Book (pp. 21-89 of this thesis) was submitted as part of an MA Dissertation and is not for assessment. It is included here for continuity. Kingston University School of Art Creative Writing Department Month and year of submission: May 2020 1 Abstract This thesis comprises a novel, The Waste Book (TWB), and an accompanying critical thesis, which identifies and interrogates the novel’s motivating philosophical ambitions. TWB follows Katherine Goss through her end-days drinking and into recovery. While in treatment, Katherine’s friends and carers encourage her to identify with a story of herself that will allow her to challenge her old behaviours and be a different person going forward. The thesis considers Katherine’s resistance to therapy as an instinctive detachment from the structures of the self and contextualises Katherine’s detachment from these structures within theory at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with an emphasis on work by Damasio (1995; 2000), Metzinger (2004; 2009; 2014) and Zahavi (2007; 2015). The structural nature of the self is further analysed within a network of literary influences that similarly attempt to attack, deconstruct and detach from the self concept, including novels by Dostoevsky and Lispector, with an emphasis on The Passion According to G.H. 1 I contrast the didactic efforts of these novels, and their protagonists’ fraught psychological struggles with the self, with the way Katherine persistently fixates upon the simple fact that she exists but sees no need to integrate this realisation into broader – narrative – structures. She thereby represents a sense of ‘narrative detachment’, a theory contextualised within narrative conceptions of the self, including frameworks outlined by Strawson (2004, 2007). The thesis further suggests TWB’s minimalist aesthetic exaggerates Katherine’s detachment from the self, while facilitating a commitment to an objective reality as it is, rather than as it is experienced by a subject; a distinction which positions TWB as ideologically opposed to a Modernist emphasis on subjective experience. This commitment is considered alongside Meillassoux’s ‘correlationsim’ (2012; 2014) and the Kantian Idealism to which it responds. Throughout, the critical thesis stresses the ambiguities at the heart of TWB and poses the question, is Katherine detached and therefore free, or simply aimless and lost? 1 Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., tans. by Idra Novey (London: Penguin, 2012) 2 Acknowledgements With thanks to my supervisors, James Miller and Marina Lambrou, for their patience, guidance, and support. 3 Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 i. Introduction 5 ii. Aims and Research Questions 12 iii. Chapter Overview 14 The Waste Book Part One 21 Part Two 89 Part Three 198 The Critical Thesis – The Waste Book: Detaching From the Structures of the Self 1. Structures of the self 1.1. The Waste Book and Minimalism 266 1.2 Introducing Dostoevsky and Lispector 277 1.3. Structures of the Self 281 1.4. Motivating Identity 291 2. The Story of the Self 2.1. Strawson’s ‘Four Types’ of Self 295 2.2. Katherine as a Response to Dostoevsky 302 2.3. Detaching from the Self Concept 312 3. Internalising the External 3.1. The Correlate 320 3.2. Preserving the Objective 329 3.3. Internalising the External 334 Conclusion i. Summary 343 ii. Concluding Comments on the Critical Thesis 346 iii. Concluding Comments on the Creative Project 347 iv. Reflective Postscript 349 Bibliography 351 4 i. Introduction This introduction offers a broad overview of the thesis’ major aims and outlines the essay’s methodology. It begins with a short summary of the creative project. The introduction is followed by a subsection, which further clarifies these aims and reformulates them as research questions. These sections serve to orientate the reader and explicitly signpost the thesis’s intentions. This is followed by a brief overview of each of the chapters. Clarice Lispector’s novel, The Passion According to G.H. (hereafter, The Passion), and my own novel, The Waste Book (hereafter, TWB) are cited with in-text brackets. All other sources are cited in footnotes. Unless indicated by the comment ‘emphasis added,’ any italicised references are italicised within the text cited. … TWB is divided into three parts, and the chapters move back and forth between two timelines. In the first, Katherine Goss has lost another pub job, dropped out of school, and is drinking heavily in a B&B room in east London. In the second timeline, set approximately one year later, Katherine gets sober in a detox centre, moves into a residential rehab in Kent, and starts piecing her life together. She gets a job in a gallery in central London and has some success with a novel she has been writing. The earlier timeline shows her trying, unsuccessfully, to get sober, before she and her friend, Joe, visit a drug dealer, attack him, steal his money, and scatter. Katherine ends up back where she started, a B&B in east London, and as the implications of this attack – she is arrested and bailed pending trial – interrupt the story of her slow recovery, Katherine’s lack of attachment to her past seems to present her recovery in a decidedly precarious light. Katherine resists the therapeutic emphasis on confronting the story of her past that she can be a different person going 5 forward, though she examples, throughout both timelines, an unusual level of psychological and emotional contentment. The novel’s final part brings the earlier timeline up to date with the latter, while the latter timeline ends with her mother’s death and leaves the sustainability of her recovery an open question. The thesis identifies two overarching philosophical ambitions motivating the creative project. The first, to present a protagonist who detaches from the structures of the self; the second, to employ a spare, minimalist prose to describe reality as it is, ‘free from subjective intrusion, without the didactic hectoring of popular writing.’2 It is the purpose of this thesis to exemplify, analyse, and contextualise those ambitions, before assessing the novel’s success or otherwise in its attempt to achieve them. TWB is characterised perhaps most markedly by its lack of philosophical or analytical commentary on the part of its third-person narrator or through access to Katherine’s thought processes. Chapter one considers this decision to avoid overt theorising from within the text and considers the novel’s minimalist stylistic strategy as a deliberate reflection of Katherine’s detachment. A focus on this stylistic reductionism positions the novel’s aesthetic in a literary context. While acknowledging the broadness of the term, the essay defines TWB’s minimalism as ‘an impulse towards economy of style,’3 and suggests that this strategy of stylistic reduction facilitates an eschewal of interiority, while the unadorned prose aims to present reality as it is to itself, rather than as it is experienced by a subject, a distinction which positions TWB as ideologically opposed to a Modernist emphasis on subjective experience. The essay considers this stylistic strategy with reference to a range of broadly ‘minimalist’ literatures, including the Dirty Realism of certain contemporary American fictions and, in 2 John Biguenet, ‘Notes of a Disaffected Reader: The Origins of Minimalism’ in, Mississippi Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 / 2 (1985) pp. 40-45 p. 40 Hereafter, Biguenet 3 Warren Motte, Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) p. 1 Hereafter, Motte 6 chapter three, the ‘objective’ prose of Robbe-Grillet. The thesis introduces Lispector’s The Passion and a series of Dostoevsky novels as TWB’s major literary influences, making clear that TWB’s characteristic stylistic economy is radically different to the experimentation of Lispector and the wrought, pacing, polyphonic nature of Dostoevsky’s fictions, but that these writers are partly motivated by a philosophical commitment to attacking and deconstructing the notion of a coherent self. TWB’s dominant influences, then, are philosophical rather than stylistic. Each of the essay’s major chapters turn to these influences in order to clarify and interrogate TWB’s philosophical ambitions. The lack of anguish Katherine demonstrates while presenting a detachment from the self contrasts sharply with the fraught psychological struggles that dominate the Lispector and Dostoevsky novels under discussion. Katherine begins from a place of detachment that those other protagonists never manage to attain. TWB was highly influenced by those texts, but it does not repeat their experiments; instead, it aims to start where they leave off. While Lispector and Dostoevsky present and interrogate the philosophical problems inherent in any attempt to detach from the self, TWB uses its minimalist aesthetic to demonstrate Katherine’s detachment, rather than arguing for it from within the text. As a result of this decision to eschew commentary within the novel, the chapters that follow are tasked with interrogating the novel’s central aims with an academic rigour that is obviously absent from the novel itself, thereby clarifying TWB’s philosophical intentions in a clear critical context. The thesis thereby affords both myself and my reader a clearer understanding of the philosophical implications inherent in those ideas motivating my creative work, implications that the novel itself rarely addresses. In this way, the thesis serves a double function. It provides a philosophical and analytical context to elucidate TWB’s motivations, while it simultaneously clarifies those motivations to myself, motivations which were oblique and intuitive while I was drafting the novel, but which clarified as the thesis 7 took shape.