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The Age of the Screen/ Subjectivity in Twenty First Century Literature

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The Age of the Screen/ Subjectivity in Twenty First Century Literature The Age of the Screen: Subjectivity in Twenty-First Century Literature Allan Rae Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy. Literature and Languages The University of Stirling September 2015 "2 Abstract The screen, as recent studies in a number of fields indicate, is a cultural object due for critical reappraisal. Work on the theoretical status of screen objects tends to focus upon the materialisation of surface; in other words, it attempts to rethink the relationship between the supposedly 'superficial' facade and the 'functional' object itself. I suggest that this work, while usefully chipping away at the dichotomy between the 'superficial' and the 'functional', can lead us to a more radical conclusion when read in the context of subjectivity. By rethinking the relationship between the surface and the obverse face of the screen as the terms of a dialectic, we can ‘read’ the screen as the vital component in a process which constitutes the Subject. In order to demonstrate this, I analyse productions of subjectivity in literary texts of the twenty-first century — in doing so, I assume the novel as nonpareil arena of the dramatisation of subjectivity — and I propose a reading of the work of Jacques Lacan as hitherto unacknowledged theorist par excellence of the form and function of the screen. Lacan describes, with the function of desire and the formation of the screen of fantasy, the primary position this ‘screen-form' inhabits in the constitution of the Subject. Lacan’s work forms a critical juncture through which we must proceed if we are to properly read and understand the chosen texts: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber; The Tain by China Miéville; Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. In each text, I analyse the particular materialisations of the screen and interrogate the constitution of the subject and the locus of desire. By analysing the vicissitudes of subjectivity in these texts, I make a claim for the study of the screen as constituting a central question in the field of contemporary literature.! "3 Contents Abstract 2 Contents 3 Acknowledgements & Declaration 4 1. Introduction: Step Away From the Limit! 5 2. Screen of Faith, Trace of Doubt: Materiality 38 and Gaze in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things 3. There Is No Oryx: Desire, Subject, and 74 Meaning in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake 4. Not a Mirror: The Return of Narcissism, and 127 What Happens When You Don’t See a Vampire, in China Miéville’s The Tain 5. Screening the Void of History: Abyssal 171 Experience and the Screen of Fantasy in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz I. 'Insistent' Trauma in the Archive 180 II. Nostalgic Gazes: Photographic and 195 Archival Screens in Austerlitz III. Searching For Screens: After Nature and Austerlitz 208 IV. The Abyss and Superposed Time 222 V. 'Subjective Destitution' and the 237 'Form-of-the-Building' 6. Conclusion: Desire of the Screen/ The Society 255 of Perverts Bibliography 267 ! "4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Adrian Hunter for his exceptional advice, enthusiasm, and indefatigable patience. My thanks also to Prof. Ruth Evans and Prof. David Richards, both of whom contributed invaluable guidance during the writing of this thesis. My gratitude to Tom, Jane, and Emily, each of whom I cannot thank enough. Words: 76,436 Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and that all critical and other sources (literary and electronic) have been specifically and properly acknowledged, as and when they occur in the body of my text. Signed: Date:! "5 Introduction: Step Away From the Limit! What lurks in the background is, of course, the pre-modern notion of "arriving at the end of the universe": in some well-known engravings, the surprised wanderers approach the screen/curtain of heaven, a flat surfaced with painted stars on it, pierce it and reach beyond [...]1 This work is concerned with screens. It focuses on many kinds of screen — computer monitors, mirrors, photographs, windows — and considers the manner in which they are represented in literature. At the theoretical level, it is concerned with thinking about the screen, with that particular form of object itself, the structural notion that makes a screen what it is — that which makes a screen what it is for the experiencing Subject, in other words, and how this relationship between the two is depicted in literary text. Before we step forward, however, we will step back. This backwards step allows us to broaden our field of view, to attempt to discern the frame which marks out the screen (through) which we behold. This strategy is not regressive: instead it is an attempt to define an alternative approach towards the method in which we figure the screen as an object, by tracking the subjective relationship with the screen in a manner which does not restate the classical notion in which the veil of heaven is pierced by the inquisitive traveller, to paraphrase #i$ek. Perhaps the contemporary version of this act would be in beholding and manipulating the screen of "1 Slavoj #i$ek, 'The Matrix, or, Malebranche in Hollywood’, Philosophy Today, 42:4 (1999), 11-26 (12). "6 an electronic device, a translucent surface of glass or composite materials. But, thinking of this translucent material of which certain screens are composed: is this material composition not the first hint of the manner in which screens continue to mislead us? Not because the apparent translucency of this clear screen suddenly exposes to the viewer a revelation (which was hidden beyond the veil of heaven for the surprised wanderers), but because it tricks us into thinking that our attention, in studying the screen, must be directed towards it, must be focused upon the information disclosed by it as such. If #i$ek defines a pre-modern relationship of subject and screen in the engravings of the wanderers at the very curtain of heaven, then the recent example which he appends to his analysis demonstrates the manner in which the modern representation of the screen has clung onto this particular notion of 'peeling back the curtain'. In the final scene of Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), following the revelation that Truman's life is the product of a staged spectacle in which he has been unwittingly engaged since birth, the eponymous star 'steps up the stairs to the wall on which the "blue sky" horizon is painted, and opens up there the door' ('The Matrix, or, Malebranche in Hollywood' 13). This basic action of folding back a screen to reveal a passage towards sublime experience is produced all the more readily as a popular fiction because of the rise of cinema. As Martin Loiperdinger says, discussing apocryphal accounts of the audience's fear of the onrushing locomotive they witnessed on the screen at the first showing of Lumière's L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895), 'the fear and panic of the audience facing Lumière’s locomotive is retold in the form of an anecdote, [but] its status reaches much higher: reiterated over and over again, it figures as the founding myth of the medium, "7 testifying to the power of film over its spectators'.2 In spite of the fact that critics have exploded this founding myth and demonstrated that audiences were sufficiently aware of the artificiality of the images on the screen, it nevertheless remains true that early cinema repeatedly re-stages this fearful interaction between viewer and screen. Robert W. Paul's The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901) depicts a hapless country-dweller reacting with shock and panic at the image of the oncoming steam train which is projected upon the screen facing him, and in Edwin S. Porter's Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902) the eponymous rube, confronted with series of projected images (which includes the earlier Edison Manufacturing Company film The Black Diamond Express (1896), another ‘locomotive picture’), tears down the cinema screen in an attempt to halt the action unfolding within and behind. He succeeds, by discovering the reality beyond the diegesis of the film, by stepping forward beyond the veil. There, he finds the projectionist, with whom Uncle Josh proceeds to fist-fight as revenge for falling victim to the optical illusion. The initially bewildering experience of a trompe l'oeil, and the ultimate unveiling which accompanies the disclosure of the truth behind the screen of trickery, is the operation which links the actions of the irate Uncle Josh with those of the surprised wanderers at the curtain of heaven. In other words, one's first response, traditionally, is not to step back from the screen; instead, one finds a way through it. The suspicion which characterises the present work is that this 'traditional response' is encoded within the very form of the screen itself. The very same object can both obscure space from subjective view and disclose objective, visual information. In either guise, the object presents a portal; it "2 Martin Loiperdinger, 'Lumiere's Arrival of the Train: Cinema's Founding Myth', trans. Bernd Elzerm, The Moving Image, 4:1 (Spring 2004), 89-118 (92). "8 reveals the possibility of something beyond the phenomenal experience of the subject, either by negating space or representing it, and therefore awaits this moment of puncture by the subject. The Subject enters view here, and does so in a manner that we will claim to be entirely typical: with a screen. It will be argued here that the only way to properly approach the question of the screen is with the question of the subject, and that claim is made on the basis of an analysis of the work of Jacques Lacan.
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