A Novel Consciousness
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1 Student Number: 100543055 Penny Rudge A Novel Consciousness A Practical Exploration of Fiction’s Capacity to Represent Deafblindness Supervisors: Robert Hampson & Andrew Motion Submitted as part of the requirements for the award of the PhD in Creative Writing and Practice-based Research at Royal Holloway, University of London 2 3 Abstract Dual sensory impairment or ‘deafblindness’ imposes a special quality of engagement between the self and the social world. Yet novels, which specialise in the exploration of human subjectivity, have failed spectacularly to capture this. This thesis analyses the gap in representation and investigates narrative techniques that offer the potential to better represent the particularity of the experience. To achieve this, it takes a multidisciplinary approach that brings together research into literature, disability, consciousness, psychology and linguistics in order to construct a revised understanding of sensory loss and its place within the diversity of human experience. The first chapter shows that Western literature has an overwhelming propensity to use motifs of deafness and bllndness for metaphorical effect. Further, through a politicised disability studies analysis, this chapter identifies mechanisms by which such an onslaught of fictional depictions does not merely reflect but actively shapes unhelpful attitudes towards deaf and blind people in life. As a result, a new attitudinal model of classification is proposed, whereby disability tropes are framed according to their determining (and explicitly prejudicial) sociocultural attitudes rather than by the resulting constructs of symbolised defect. The second chapter builds on this analysis in order to suggest a way forward. It examines innovative techniques of rendering consciousness that were pioneered by Henry James and Virginia Woolf and considers how these might be adapted to a deafblind context. In the process, it draws upon a related enquiry, laid out in the appendix, into why consciousness has the potential to be structurally different for a deafblind person. The third chapter then assesses the thesis-writer’s own creative engagement with representing deafblindness. It reports on a process of experimentation with the narrative methods outlined in Chapter 2 and discusses the adaptations and reformulations that ensued. Finally, an extract from the resulting work, a novel titled Kindness is a Language, completes the thesis. 4 Preface I dedicate this thesis to my family with my love and appreciation. Many people have contributed to this work in different ways. My sincere thanks go to my distinguished supervisors Professor Robert Hampson and Sir Andrew Motion for giving me the flexibility and freedom to explore the directions in which my work led, and for their patience and constant encouragement during the lengthier-than-expected process. I owe grateful thanks also to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose funding made this work possible. Thank you to Dimitrios Kalpouzos for proof reading the final draft with cheerful efficiency: all remaning errors are mine. Thank you to my husband Nathan for believing that this project was worthwhile and for not complaining (much) about years of having to sleep next to a glowing computer screen. Thank you to my parents for their never-failing practical help and to my brother Peter for being there when called upon. Thank you to my children Alfred, Arthur and Millie and my guide dog Edie, whose arrivals along the way made sure the challenge never got stale. Thank you to the friends who have not forgotten who I am in all this time, with particular thanks to Emma Longstaff for being a sounding board at crucial moments and to Katie Planche for quite literally always going the extra mile so that we can meet. 5 Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................... 7 Chapter 1. How has fiction dealt with sensory impairment? ............................... 16 1.1 Overview of chapter ................................................................................... 16 1.2 Panara’s classification of deaf characters in drama and fiction ................. 19 1.2.1 The deaf as melodramatic plot devices for humour, mystery, or intrigue ...................................................................................................................... 19 1.2.2 The deaf as freaks, grotesques and distortions of reality ..................... 20 1.2.3 The deaf accepted with humanitarian spirit and sentiment .................. 20 1.2.4 The deaf tormented by isolation ........................................................... 21 1.2.5 Deafness as blissful solitude ................................................................ 22 1.2.6 Deafness as evidence of man’s inhumanity to man ............................. 23 1.2.7 Summing up Panara’s classification..................................................... 23 1.3 Jernigan’s typology of blindness in literature ............................................. 24 1.3.1 Blindness as miracle or divine compensation ...................................... 25 1.3.2 Blindness as total tragedy .................................................................... 26 1.3.3 Blindness as foolishness or helplessness ............................................ 27 1.3.4 Blindness as unrelieved wickedness and evil ...................................... 28 1.3.5 Blindness as perfect virtue ................................................................... 28 1.3.6 Blindness as punishment for sin........................................................... 29 1.3.7 Blindness as purification....................................................................... 30 1.3.8 Blindness as abnormality or dehumanisation ....................................... 30 1.3.9 Blindness as symbol or parable ........................................................... 30 1.4 The political perspective: theory as a call to action .................................... 32 1.4.1 Training the disability studies lens: bringing Mitchell and Snyder’s ‘narrative prosthesis’ and Quayson’s ‘aesthetic nervousness’ into focus ...... 34 1.4.2 The blind seer: a disability studies interrogation of Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight .................................................................................... 44 1.4.3 The deepening well of loneliness: Davis’s ‘deafened moment’ and Derrida’s ‘non-presence’ ............................................................................... 52 1.4.4 The embodied metaphor: finding an attitudinal response to metaphors of ‘blindness’ and ‘deafness’ ......................................................................... 64 1.5 Concatenating the categories: a synthesised and hierarchised scheme ... 77 1.5.1 Framing the synthesis .......................................................................... 78 1.5.2 Concatenating the categories .............................................................. 82 1.5.3 Swamping personal meaning ............................................................... 83 1.5.4 Objectifying by moral judgment ............................................................ 93 1.5.5 Denying agency and respect .............................................................. 103 1.5.6 Distorting into mirrored normalcy ....................................................... 108 1.5.7 Summarising the synthesis ................................................................ 119 1.6 Absorbing the metaphor: sensory loss in memoir .................................... 122 1.7 Sensory loss as phenomenological exploration in fiction ......................... 128 1.7.1 The descriptive approach: David Lodge, Deaf Sentence and Frances Itani, Deafening ........................................................................................... 128 1.7.2 The intuitive approach: James Joyce, ‘Lestrygonians’, Part II, Chapter 8, and ‘Proteus’, Part 1, Chapter 3, of Ulysses ........................................... 134 1.7.3 The oblique approach: Henry Green, Caught and Blindness ............. 144 1.8 Future representations: overcoming the barriers to representing sensory loss ................................................................................................................ 152 Chapter 2. Which narrative techniques can better convey deafblindness? ...... 158 2.1 Overview of chapter ................................................................................. 158 2.2 Whose point of view? Henry James and the subjective narrator ............. 159 2.3 Highlighting a hidden consciousness: Jamesian obscurity ...................... 168 6 2.4 Burrowing through consciousness: Woolfian disclosure .......................... 171 2.4.1 Using sentence structure to express the ‘flow of thought’ .................. 171 2.4.2 Acknowledging the impossibility of a unified ‘self’ .............................. 175 2.5 Enlisting the reader .................................................................................. 179 2.5.1 Jamesian word play ........................................................................... 179 2.5.2 Woolfian tonal cues ............................................................................ 181 2.6 Summarising the argument: a preparation for practical engagement ...... 185 Chapter 3. What lessons apply to my own writing practice? ............................ 186 3.1 Overview of chapter ................................................................................