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Denarrative Desire in the Contemporary British Novel

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Denarrative Desire in the Contemporary British Novel The Unseen World: Denarrative Desire in the Contemporary British Novel By Sarah Anne Miki Chihaya A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee In Charge: Professor Carla Namwali Serpell, Chair Professor Anne-Lise François Professor Barbara Spackman Professor Ian Duncan Fall 2013 The Unseen World: Denarrative Desire in the Contemporary British Novel © 2013 by Sarah Anne Miki Chihaya Abstract The Unseen World: Denarrative Desire in the Contemporary British Novel by Sarah Anne Miki Chihaya Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor C. Namwali Serpell, Chair This dissertation proposes a new theoretical account of the contemporary British novel’s vexed relationship to history. This project examines novels that attempt to rewrite narratives of violence and imperialism through what I see as failed magic tricks: fantastical reinventions of earlier literary or historical texts that ultimately prove untenable. This impulse resists the demystifying attitude of the postmodern novel, exemplified in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), where the ever-present figure of the novelist makes analytical intrusions into the Victorian plot. Instead, the novels that I examine— including works by Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift, A.S. Byatt, and David Mitchell—beguile readers into a temporary state of willful desire for historical recuperation. However, these would-be narrative enchantments threaten violence and pose dark ethical quandaries for both author and reader. This threat of complicity emerges in Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985), through the reader’s uneasy sympathy for the novel’s twinned anti-heroes, a murderer and a detective separated by two hundred years, yet illogically involved in the same crimes. In what I call the necropolitan chronotope of Ackroyd’s London, distinctions between these temporally distant characters deteriorate, as do those between life and death, good and evil. Past and present coalesce into a nightmarish void of time, in which attempts at narrative or historical resolution inevitably backfire: events can be neither changed nor undone because they are in a state of perpetual manifestation. I contend that these recent texts express a compulsive denarrative desire to undo or unknow pre-existing narratives, a wish that can never be responsibly fulfilled. This drive is fetishistic; the authors I consider recognize the impossibility of historical revision but enact it nonetheless, through formal experiments that critics often inadequately categorize as belated versions of postmodern irony or playfulness. These over-familiar terms fail to account for the serious claims that these novels make about the uncomfortable inextricability of the past and the present. For example, in Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell constructs densely interlocking layers of pastiche and a unique nested structure that moves first forwards, then backwards in time. Mitchell hews close to metanarratives of modernization and literary history, only to confound both. By considering texts like Cloud Atlas that hover outside the postmodern in the nebulous area of the “post-postmodern,” my project traces an alternative lineage of the contemporary novel. Alongside these theoretical questions about history, narrative form, and periodization, my dissertation interrogates the contentious status of the British novel in relation to broader European, Anglophone, and “world” literary landscapes. 1 Table of Contents Introduction: The Land of Begin Again…………………………………………………… ii Chapter 1: Necropolitan Time…………………………………………………………….. 1 Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor Peter Carey, Jack Maggs Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe Chapter 2: Fairy Tale Ecology……………………………………………………………. 34 Graham Swift, Waterland Chapter 3: Practical Alchemy…………………………………………………………….. 56 A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book Chapter 4: Mapping the Clouds………………………………………………………….. 97 David Mitchell, Ghostwritten Cloud Atlas The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………. 126 i Introduction: The Land of Begin Again Turning Back the Pages: Denarrative Desire The end of a novel is always a death; as we leave its world, we mourn its passing, as well as our own. When Walter Benjamin tells us that “death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell,” it is not only the lurking shadow of the character’s death, or the storyteller’s death, but the reader’s as well that lends this resonant gravity (Benjamin 94). Yet this death, though ineluctable, is also what we fear; as the pages dwindle and the end (or The End) approaches, one might wish the book could reach further, sprout new pages, extend its own “shivering life” and thus ours (Benjamin 101). The irresistible deathliness of “The End” is elegantly formulated by Peter Brooks’ explanation of “narrative desire”: “If the motor of narrative is desire, totalizing, building ever-larger units of meaning, the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end” (Brooks 52). Yet when we come to the desired last words – final, fixed, deathly – they are never so meaningful as we had hoped, and after them, we find only blankness: the white of the empty page, the darkness of grieving contemplation. This project began with a simple speculation: if narrative desire is our end-seeking death drive, then what are we to make of the feeling of loss and abandonment that we find in the blank abyss that follows, the vacant non-afterlife of a desired next page that never comes? One answer immediately presents itself: we turn back to the source of the story: we return to Page 1. The dissatisfaction of reading is incurable, but one might try and assuage it by rereading – finding, once we’ve fulfilled our drive to get to the end of a story, that it provokes a perverse, equal and opposite desire to go back to the beginning. In keeping with the contrarian nature of this impulse, I began to think of this Newtonian narrative backlash as denarrative desire: namely, the inexorable yearning to turn the pages back and read them, or, more dramatically, to write them again. Yet the problem of rewriting is the writer’s (and reader’s) recognition of the impossibility of unwriting. For rewriting implies rereading, and any act of retelling or reshaping cannot actually erase the original text that lurks beneath and within a new incarnation. How can any author, attempting a rewriting, avoid the classic metafictional trap of Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, believing that he instills new meaning into Cervantes’ Quixote by writing it over again, word for word? Denarrative desire turns the pages back, inserting new pages to render other narrative possibilities visible (while covering up the ones that we are unhappy with). But writing over is not the same as erasing; generating more narrative never actually undoes that first reading. Despite the urgent want to re-view – to see something else from a different angle - you can’t unsee something, just as you can’t unwrite what is written, or make someone unread what they have already read. The originary death still lurks in the text, regardless of how it is reread or reconfigured; in Brooks’ words, “Once there is text, expression, writing, one becomes subject to the processes of desiring and dying” (Brooks 53). The concept of denarrative desire draws equally on Brooks’ readerly formulation, and on Brian Richardson’s innovative, writerly exploration of “extreme forms of narration” in Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006). In his chapter ii on “Three Extreme Forms of Narration and a Note on Postmodern Unreliability,” Richardson defines “denarration” as “a kind of narrative negation in which a narrator denies significant aspects of his or her narrative that had earlier been presented as given” (Richardson 87). That is, the narrator takes back what has already been narrated – as Richardson explains, “the simplest example of this might be something like, “Yesterday it was raining. Yesterday it was not raining’” (Richardson 87). This concept has its origins in Gerald Prince’s idea of the “disnarrated” event, a term describing a “non-event” that is speculatively narrated but does not actually occur. In Richardson’s more “extreme” version, the narrative negation blatantly undoes what it has already done. Ultimately, as Richardson comments, “the narrative world may start to fissure; instead of observing a fluctuating narrator alter descriptions of a stable world, we will see the world being created and re- created anew” (Richarson 89). Such is the overarching, much longed for, never achieved goal of any denarrative project. Denarrative desire is the unfulfillable yearning to enact this move on a large scale: rather than the yearning to reach the end that Brooks’ term foregrounds, denarrative desire longs to loop back and overwrite an entire story with a known end, to “re- create” the world “anew,” all the while recognizing the futility of this act. Thus, denarrative desire is the expression of the perverse drive to somehow unknow or undo narratives, whether fictional, world historical, or literary historical, that readers are already familiar with, to go back to the same first page and read a different book. The texts I examine self- consciously play upon the state of frustrated suspension that this unattainable desire
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