The Text As Product 

 
      

The literary text is at once intertextual and unique. Ideas, words, thoughts of other authors, philosophers, theorists are channelled through a personal perspective that itself changes as new ideas are incorporated to create a specific view of the subject in process. Although this is an individual perspective it is not the single world view of the author, on the contrary it is a perspective of inclusion, reflecting the multiplicity of everything and the fluidity of being.

     If the point of the text is this perspective, do the story, the characters and plot really matter? In Hilary Mantel’s article, ‘Ghost Writing’ first published in The Guardian (17.11.2007), the unsayable is explored through the mythical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. If, as Mantel says, ‘Every book that is written is the ghost of possibilities that were in the artist’s head,’ then the characters are catalysts, causing us to reach for ‘the unsayable thing we are always trying to say’ (Mantel, 2007:8) and beneath the overt plot, every story is the same. Bringing this awareness out into the text, into the consciousness of the author and the reader is the real product, the purpose of the literary text. Such a text produces the author for the author and for the reader, also the reader for the reader. The author then is very much alive, if hiding in the text, constantly re-writing the self, making writing a narcissistic activity in an endless circle of drive and sublimation.

     The concrete work may seem a dead object, frozen in time, fixed forever on the page, but awareness of the unspeakable, flowing within it, exposes the partiality of language, of writing. What is written, the images used and the way they are presented is then important in the way the work engages the unconscious, the non-linguistic, and allows it to permeate the text. Formal devices are crucial. The polyphonic novel presents plurality, a clamour of discourses and registers that exposes the imposition of order on a non-ordered ‘real’. In the clash of these voices the characters are made to turn, showing different faces, ambiguity, plurality, alternative perspectives. Into this clamour drops silence, proposing the value of wordlessness, the non-linguistic. 

     It is my argument that this attention to the 'unsayable', the things that language leaves out, distinguishes the literary text from plot-driven descriptive writing. This is not to say that the literary novel should not contain plot and description, but that its function is to reach beyond these devices to engage the reader (and the writer) at a deeper, unconscious level with the objective, if any, of weakening the hold of reason, of the single dominant world view, on the conscious mind.

(Adapted extract from Addressing the Unspeakable: The Feral Child As Literary Device; A thesis submitted to Edge Hill University in fulfillment of the requirements for PhD in Creative Writing, February 2010)

Carol Fenlon, July 2010.

 

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