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A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Critical Enchantments: Reading Fictionality in the Contemporary Novel Charlotte Terrell Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Sussex September 2018 Acknowledgements First thanks go to my supervisor Peter Boxall who was always generous with his energy for the project, and who demonstrated an astounding ability to conjure a Don Quixote reference to fit any situation. This project also benefited from early comments by Nicholas Royle, Sam Solomon and Pam Thurschwell, and thanks are due to Natalia Cecire who, in a conversation way back at the beginning of the PhD made a throwaway comment – “Toni Morrison, I mean, talk about enchantment” – which was a lightbulb moment not only for a chapter but also for the scope of the thesis more generally. I would not have got half as much out my time as a PhD student if it weren’t for the efforts of a number of professional staff: Amanda Britt, Steven Colburn, Clare Hunt, Shelley Jenkins, Laura Vellacott and Rob Witts go above and beyond to support their students; their help and advice has been indispensable. Friends at Sussex, the British Library and beyond have taught me about solidarity in the face of precarity. Eleanor Careless, Laura Fox Gill, Katie Kruger, Chris Law, Nicole Mennell, Kiron Ward and Natalie Wright – I cannot acknowledge you all enough. Thank you also to the SPT collective, and especially Sandra Kazlauskaite and Grace Tilly, who in the last six months injected so much fun and the sense of a new academic future into my life. I’ve been lucky enough to have a supportive and hilarious family who continue to believe that I should be good at scrabble or spelling because I ‘do English’. My grandmother Alison, my parents Fiona and Peter (also a sharp proofreader), as well as the whole sibling crew – Brinley, Hannah, Jonny and Josie – all deserve mutual thanks and responsibility for the anachronistic and heinous title ‘Dr Chaz’. My friends, doing incredible and underpaid work in the public sector, fighting the good fight, have been inspiring. Thank you to Jess, Lydia, and particularly to Fraser and Sophie who have been there every step of the way. There is no final gesture to ‘the other half’ at the end of this acknowledgements page. Instead, my final acknowledgement is to the inexpressibly humbling process of re- learning intimacy and relationships beyond romance. Romantic love is wonderful, but the last few years have been a lesson in the life that is borne out of other relationships; they have made writing and completing the PhD as a single woman more secure and supported than I had thought possible. ii Summary This thesis examines the resurgence of an enchanted idiom in the contemporary novel and shows how it frames questions about the type of enchantment that reading fiction can lay claim to, ranging from unresolved mysteries to authors who call themselves mediums. With reference to novels by J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison and Ali Smith, Critical Enchantments makes an intervention into the study of contemporary writing by reinstating the importance of the distinction between ‘the novel’ and ‘fiction’ at a time when the critical and political function of fictionality is deeply contested. In the introduction I delineate the logic that enchantment and fictionality share – their invitation to recognise artifice and yet maintain a readerly investment in the artwork. The project is then organised around three lines of enquiry. Chapter one surveys the recent re-enchantment of literary reading practices: through a discussion of the recent work of critics such as Rita Felski and Timothy Bewes (and their Ricourean, Lukácian forbears), I locate an idiom of mystery and magic that structures Smith’s experiments with the idea of too-close reading as surveillance. The second chapter appraises the construction of fictional ‘belief’ that figures centrally both in Coetzee’s late fiction and, with recourse to novel and narrative theories of fictionality (particularly Catherine Gallagher’s), illustrates how concerns about belief find articulation in Coetzee’s recurring figure of the secretarial reader. The final chapter reads Morrison’s fiction alongside the reflexive critical trends that have formed in response to her creative and critical corpus; reversing my previous focus on fictional readers, I demonstrate the enchanting effects that Morrison’s extra-fictional anticipation of being read has on her readers. Taken together, these scenes of critical enchantment tell a story about how the contemporary novel trades on the genre’s tradition of engaging with the mystifying effects of fiction on both readers and writers, and reveals how this mystification is indexical to a performance of authorship that anticipates critically adept readers. iii List of Figures Figure 1: Caravaggio, ‘Incredulity of Saint Thomas’, Oil on Canvas, c. 1601-2 119 iv Contents Declaration i Acknowledgements ii Summary iii List of Figures iv Introduction 1 i. What is critical about enchantment? 3 ii. We have never been disenchanted; or, enchantment, disenchantment, re- enchantment 9 iii. Authors or writers?: reflexivity and the literary institution 18 iv. Reading fictionality: intentions, aims and effects 24 1. ‘Seeing and seeing again’: from suspicion to enchantment in Ali 29 Smith i. Enchantment without illusion 33 ii. Dissimulation or revelation: reading in the twenty-first century 40 iii. Reading as decoding in There but for the 49 iv. Cheap artifice, anagrams and too-close reading 56 v. Open and unopen books: fiction and the secret 66 vi. The enchanted line: Smith’s re-enchantment 74 2. ‘I write what I hear’: J. M. Coetzee’s secretaries and the question of 78 fictional belief i. Bridging problems 80 ii. The near-death of the author 85 iii. Eighteenth-century fictionality and Coetzee’s serial fictions 91 iv. Secretaries I: dictation and dialogism 101 v. Being spoken to: the fiction of a fiction 110 vi. Secretaries II: between wisdom and ignorance, blessing and belief 115 3. Reading with Toni Morrison 124 i. “Reading” in Morrison 127 ii. Morrison’s paratexts: teacher, editor, critic 132 iii. Critical demeanors, critical novels 145 iv. ‘closed up and wide open’: A Mercy’s talking room 156 v. ‘write in the spaces’: intuition in Love 164 vi. Morrison’s literary re-enchantment 172 Conclusion. 176 i. Citing, exposing, doxing 177 Bibliography 182 v Introduction [R]e-enchantments continually return because they are the means by which we conceive and reconceive of the aesthetic and of fiction.1 -- Nicholas Paige, ‘Permanent Re-Enchantments’ In 2014 the BBC aired a documentary film as part of its ‘Storyville’ series. Originally titled An Honest Liar, it had been repackaged for the BBC as Exposed: Magicians, Psychics and Frauds.2 It was a documentary about the life of James Randi, a Houdini-esque stage magician who, in his fifties, changed the focus of his career and began devoting his knowledge of trickery to debunk people who claimed ‘real’ magical and psychic powers. Throughout the 1970s, Randi set out on a campaign to discredit the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller who was then gaining popularity. Randi would shadow Geller’s television appearances, performing the exact same spoon bending trick as Geller and assist producers in setting up the room’s conditions so that Geller would be unable to make his other psychic powers ‘work’ that evening. Randi’s problem with this type of performance was that it profited from a lie; Randi, so he said, was honest about his own lies – magicians are truthful in their tricks because they tell you that they are performing a trick but Uri Geller was being dishonest, he was telling you that the tricks he performed were rooted in genuine psychic and supernatural powers. What became increasingly apparent, and analytically interesting, was that in spite of Randi’s ongoing interventions, audiences did not seem too bothered if Geller was faking it or not. Debunking the illusion and exposing the technique did not have the expected effect of altogether debunking interest in Geller, and it did not have the effect of shunning him from public life for his fraudulence either. Even if many stopped believing, there was always someone who continued to believe. Randi was also responsible, in the early 1980s, for foiling university researchers’ investigations into parapsychology. He trained two teenage boys in sleight of hand and stagemanship and 1 Nicholas Paige, ‘Permanent Re-Enchantments: On Some Literary Uses of the Supernatural from Early Empiricism to Modern Aesthetics’, in The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, ed. by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 159–80 (p. 179). 2 Exposed: Magicians, Psychics and Frauds, dir. by Tyler Meamsom and Justin Weinstein (BBC, 2014). 1 foxed the supposedly rigorous tests formulated by the scientists.3 The lesson to these researchers and others was that even when we think we are being objective, scrutinising and critically attuned, we remain vulnerable to the authority of knowledge-bolstered artfulness. Randi’s pursuit of truth and his failure to stand in the way of belief – for all its shortcomings4 – articulates a dissonance that this thesis examines in the context of the contemporary novel.