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Odd, Unnatural Activities: the Writing of a Philosophical Novel © This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. ODD, UNNATURAL ACTIVITIES: THE WRITING OF A PHILOSOPHICAL NOVEL SAMANTHA HARVEY A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Bath Spa University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Humanities and Cultural Industries November 2011 Abstract The purpose of this study is to find which practical aspects of craft are open to the realist novelist when writing philosophical fiction. Plato began a long tradition of intelligent thought on the subject, but even amongst novelists the discussion does not often sit at the practitioner's level, and does not address the how-to questions that arise when an author tries to write philosophical content into a fictional narrative. In Section I, this study defines 'philosophical content' to characterise not only a body of enquiries that belong to western philosophical discourse, but also the mode these enquiries take, which, it is contended, is that of directness and discursiveness. The study then explores how such content can enter a novel's narrative in a way that is not unduly compromising to either the philosophy or the novel. The author's own novel, All Is Song — which is the creative counterpart to this study -provides the portal for this exploration. Sections II, V and VII revisit the philosophical content of a particular scene in the novel to see how it evolves with each rewrite and to trace the decision-making involved in the management of that content. Section III deals with an objection to the study's definition of philosophy and a 'philosophical novel', after which the remaining sections, IV, VI and VIII look respectively at the problems abstract ideas pose to literary realism, some responses to those problems as they pertain to the author's novel writing, and the degree to which All Is Song could be considered successful in fulfilling both its philosophical and literary aims. Through this analysis and reflection, the study finds that while dialogue, in the Socratic tradition, is and remains one key way of realising discursive philosophy within a narrative, a far wider and deeper structuralising of that content is needed to make the contending ideas lived and felt. It holds that once such structuralisation has taken place, a novel is not bound to the full execution of a discursive argument of the sort that exists in Platonic dialogues, say, and can express and sort philosophical ideas using an array of literary tools. The Conclusion (Section IX) suggests that this in part signals a move towards a less Platonic, more phenomenological sense of the way in which ideas can be given reality, and thus given form in the realism of the novel. The study does not conclude, however, that all discursive content should thus be 'dissolved' into extra-philosophical situations and events, but that the latter should act always to structuralise, exemplify, amplify and animate an idea or principle, and to give it as full a literary life as possible. Contents Introduction........................................................................................................................... 5 I. Brief definitions.......................................................................................................... 13 i. A novel............................................................................................................... 13 ii. Philosophy......................................................................................................... 13 iii. Philosophical novels.......................................................................................... 15 iv. Philosophical content........................................................................................ 19 v. Success.............................................................................................................. 21 II. All Is Song - a scene (i).............................................................................................. 24 III. An objection................................................................................................................ 31 i. The discursive mode.......................................................................................... 32 ii. A taste of the recent debate............................................................................... 33 IV. Philosophy as abstract ideas....................................................................................... 38 i. The real and the abstract................................................................................... 38 ii. Realising abstract ideas..................................................................................... 42 iii. 'Breaking into the dream'.................................................................................. 47 iv. Philosophical ideas in particular....................................................................... 50 V. All Is Song - a scene (2)............................................................................................. 56 VI. Structuralising the philosophy................................................................................... 64 i. Parables............................................................................................................. 64 ii. Being (and not being) didactic.......................................................................... 66 iii. Embodiment...................................................................................................... 69 iv. Continental philosophy and the literary mode................................................. 74 VII. All Is Song -a scene (3)............................................................................................. 79 VIII. Success and failure ..................................................................................................... 85 I.. Conclusion..................................................................................................................94 Appendices......................................................................................................................... 103 Appendix i: 'Euthyphro' scene....................................................................................... 103 Appendix 2: 'Bellevue' scene.......................................................................................... 133 Bibliography....................................................................................................................... 143 Please note that the Appendices have been removed from this digitized thesis due to potential copyright issues. Introduction Famously, according to Plato, there is an 'ancient quarrel' between the philosophers and the poets. By the 'philosophers' he did not mean generally those who think or who entertain large questions, but, more strongly and specifically, those who engage in the formal practice of reasoned thought and argument, with the ambition of arriving at a position of greater clarity about the nature of the thing or concept in question. By 'poets' he meant those who use words to create fictions and illusions, who evoke the real world with representative images of it; 'novelists' were not a known entity in Plato's time, but we can reasonably assume he would have included those also in this definition. It is precisely because Plato regarded philosophy as a formal, truth-seeking discipline that he perceived there to be a quarrel at hand. This quarrel was given unequivocal expression in the Republic when he banished the poets from his ideal state, and it expresses an old and deep-set fractiousness between what we might call the mind and the heart. For Plato, the mind that philosophises concerns itself with fixed forms and concepts that reach for what is real, and aims to get there by the process of reasoned investigation, to 'behold the things in themselves' as he says, rather than the way they appear to the senses. To behold, that is, the things that 'can only be seen with the eye of the mind'.1 And then, into this purity of vision steps the poet who aims not at all at what is real but at the counterfeit representations of it, the simulacra, the sensual, emotional and non- rational. The poet, he believes, is concerned with appearances rather than essences and with the vicarious and the removed. 1 Plato, Republic (Penguin, 2007) p.263. The 'ancient quarrel' is talked about at Republic 607'a. 5 Plato's banishment of the poets is extreme; he holds that the poet's aims are not only unlike those of the philosopher's, but are also a menace to the philosophical cause, which is a menace to anybody who wants to live a life of self knowledge - that is, a good life. For Plato, no true philosophy can be done in the poet's obscuring presence. As the philosopher Stephen Mulhall says, 'Against this background, merely banishing the poet might seem like an excessively charitable response.'2 I might as well say from the outset that I find Plato's position hard to swallow if for no other reason than that banishment of the so-called problem seems a very unphilosophical way of resolving it. But this thesis isn't meant as a critique of Plato; whether or not I agree with the full flourishing of his views as they appear in the Republic, I find it impossible not to accept the basic contention that exists between philosophy and literature, where the two are distinctive forms, distinctive
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