Citation: Shaw, Sarah (2014) Seventeen: Ethics and Aesthetics

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Northumbria Research Link Citation: Shaw, Sarah (2014) Seventeen: Ethics and Aesthetics. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University. This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/23587/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html Seventeen: Ethics and Aesthetics Sarah Shaw PhD 2013 1 2 Seventeen: Ethics and Aesthetics Sarah Shaw A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Research undertaken in Creative Writing in the School of Arts and Social Sciences October 2013 3 4 Seventeen: Ethics and Aesthetics My practice-led research in Creative Writing consists of composing a novel closely focalised through three members of a dual-heritage family in Suffolk in 2004 after the teenage daughter is diagnosed with leukaemia. ‘Seventeen: Ethics and Aesthetics’ explores the question: what are the tensions between truth, kindness and the form and poetics of the novel? My critical reflection considers techniques used to convince the reader, and my attempts to represent unconscious psychic processes of the novel’s protagonists in relation to trauma fiction. The aim of the research programme has been to discover the appropriate form for a novel in which characters are paramount. My research methodology has consisted of revising repeated drafts in order to imagine and articulate the points of view of the novel’s protagonists: Rosie, a mixed-race teenager who has a vivid sense of the ridiculous, who wants to separate herself from her family and mix with her friends; Jay, her White mother, who works in anti-racist education and has ambitions as a photographer, together with a tendency to embrace New Age ideas; and Mel, Rosie’s stepfather, who runs an independent cinema, who never intended to be anyone’s father but finds himself caught up in loving Rosie. The novel is about the language and voices used, and about how the relationships between the characters change as a result of Rosie’s illness and impending death. Writing a commentary has informed the discipline of editing and revision. My completed critical reflection recounts decisions made on ethical or aesthetic grounds, while attempting to relate the research to cultural preoccupations in the study and composition of novels. The originality of this contribution to knowledge consists of fiction that focalises three original characters. A claim to originality may also be made in relation to my work on metaphor, metonymy and the unconscious. 5 6 Contents: Acknowledgements 9 Author’s declaration 11 Seventeen 13 Introduction to Critical Reflection 243 Writing a Realist Novel in the Twenty-First Century 257 ‘Seventeen’ and the Ethics and Aesthetics of Trauma Fiction 284 Conclusion 320 Appendices 322 References 331 7 8 Acknowledgements Thanks are due to the School of Arts and Social Sciences (SASS) for a partial studentship that enabled me to undertake this research. I would like to thank my principal supervisor, Professor Michael Green, in particular for allowing me the freedom to blunder and flow through my first draft, for his insights concerning voice and syntax and for his acute readings of the commentary. Thanks are also due to Dr Andrew Crumey for close readings and challenging criticisms of some draft chapters of the novel, and to Dr Julie Scanlon for suggestions on how to improve the commentary. Thanks to Dave Gregory, Jane Gower, Jon Codd, Mary Anne Woolf and Rowan Bowman for reading a draft and making comments, and to Nicola Balfour for reading several drafts and offering suggestions. Thanks also to participants in the departmental Creative Writing Workshop, who responded to a draft of the first chapter in 2011 and a draft of the tenth chapter in 2013. Thanks to delegates to the Time and Space in Contemporary Women’s Writing Conference (University of Hull, 8-9 September 2011) for their responses to a paper on the politics of metaphor; to delegates at the SASS Postgraduate Research Conference 2012 (Northumbria University, 6 September) for responses to a paper on ethics and aesthetics in ‘Seventeen’; and to delegates at the Great Writing Conference 2013 (Imperial College, London, 29-30 June) for responses to a paper on metaphor, metonymy and the unconscious. Thanks to Dave Gregory at Ipswich Film Theatre and to staff at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, in particular Jonny Tull, for helping me find out about programming films and the switch from celluloid to digital. Thanks to Russell Clarke and the Ipswich Caribbean Experience project, stored at Suffolk Records Office, for help understanding the experiences of African-Caribbean- English families in Suffolk; particular thanks to Mrs Challenger, whose testimony I have adapted in Rosie’s narration on p194, below. Thanks are due to Sarah Smith, Lead Paediatric Oncology Nurse Specialist at Ipswich Hospital, for answering my questions about leukaemia, graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and monosomy 7 (and for checking her answers with Dr Myles Bradbury, Consultant Haematologist at Addenbrooke’s 9 Hospital, Cambridge); to Janet Hayden, Myeloid Clinical Nurse Specialist at King’s College Hospital, London, for answering my questions about chemotherapy and leukaemia research; and to Dr Emma Morris, Reader in Immunology and Immunotherapy at University College, London, for answering my questions about bone marrow transplantation and leukaemia research. Any inconsistencies and errors with regard to GVHD, HLA antigens or blood functions are due to my own incomprehension, or that of my characters. This research project was prompted not only by questions about voice and poetics, but also by the death of my daughter, Naomi Shaw, from leukaemia. I would like to thank medical and support staff at University College London Hospital, King’s College Hospital and Ipswich Hospital for their kindness and expertise. I particularly want to acknowledge the high standards of nursing care in the paediatric wards where we spent time: thanks to Alex, Becky, Beverly, Bryony, Denise, Fiona, Gino, Hazel, Helen, Jan, Janice, Joy, Julie, Lee, Lesley, Libby, Lindsey, Michelle, Natalie, Sarah, Sue, Theresa, Vicky and Yvonne, among others. Special thanks and love always to Mary Sokanovic and Sarah Smith. A poem by Naomi Shaw appears as Rosie’s on p156. I have adapted a piece she wrote for English to form the setting for her hypnotherapy exercise on p68. This work is dedicated to Naomi: love you to the end of time and back. 10 Declaration I declare that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for any other award and that it is all my own work. I also confirm that this work fully acknowledges opinions, ideas and contributions from the work of others. Name: Sarah Shaw Signature: Date: 11 12 SEVENTEEN 13 14 Zero Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Before I was born, in a galaxy not far from ours, on the other side of a supernova, a god was making me out of sand at the edge of an ocean. She was young, inexperienced and a bit drunk, which meant that her hand slipped and she didn’t get me quite right. But everything was already in motion so I shot out of the exploding star and floated like a seed on my parachute of light across this galaxy, through a huge cloud of icy comets into our solar system and down past Pluto, Uranus and Jupiter (Neptune, Saturn and Mars being at the opposite curve of their orbits at the time). Down into Earth’s atmosphere, towards the island shaped like a man wearing an oversized hat while riding a pig, and into the man’s shoulder and my mother’s belly in Middlesbrough, which is where we lived when I was born. Which is why children write their names and addresses like we do, for example Rose Star Ord, 46 Brook Road, Ipswich, Suffolk, England, United Kingdom, Europe, The World, The Solar System, The Milky Way, The Universe. Because our journey through emptiness and starlight has rubbed off on us. Where did the me enter in? Out of the dark into the dark where my mother’s egg, fertilised by my biological father, drifted along the fallopian tube. My cells multiplied for six days until in the womb the embryo that would become me attached itself to the snug lining in the safe golden waters. I swam and danced and grew there without any difference between myself and my mother. I swung from my cord like a trapeze artist in the dark and the scent of blood and the waters of Zion. 15 The darkroom is sweltering because Jay fixed cardboard over the window to reinforce the blackout curtains. She leaves the door open and turns on the bath tap to rinse her prints. The developer and fix she tips down the toilet, she opens the bathroom window to dispel the stink.

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