I’ve decide to write the next essay on The Devil’s Footprints, rather than Glister. The starting point is a quotation, ‘a willed blindness’ (p.208), and a recent essay of John’s called Walk the Tightrope. My initial conception is to divide the work into three parts which is something I’ve never really done in my writing, but I think it suits the project.

The first section will concentrate on a close reading of a passage from ‘Traffic from Paradise’, viewed through the lens of ‘Walk the Tightrope’ and looking at the way in which Michael Gardiner strips back the self. The epigraph will be ‘being present, being stripped of all pretence. Being myself at last, empty-handed, with nothing to defend’ (p.197). Building on this, the second section will focus on a close reading of ‘The Curlew Sandpiper’, addressing issues of connection and compassion – of how to reach out to the other, using the final few lines of the novel as a starting point:

I feel sorry for him, I suppose. I never speak to him, or give out any signal that I know who he is, but there are times when I want to take him out to the point and show him the birds. (p.224)

The third section will then be about the act of writing, both creative and critical (as well as questioning any such division), and, through the lens of ‘Walk the Tightrope’ and ‘Strong Words’, discussing the potential of writing to act as that bridge, and as a form of dwelling.

Back in A Preliminary Sketch (1) I briefly mentioned the possibility of a collaborative project that was at a conceptual stage. The first element of funding has come together and I’m going to be lucky enough to work with John Burnside, putting together a pilot and applying for further grants to fund a longer series. The project should have its own blog/website in the next month or so, so I’ll leave the details for that and provide a link when it goes live.

I’ve received feedback on the essay and it’s been very positive. Only significant criticism has been of the introduction, which confirms a suspicion I had that it might be more suited to a chapter. The feeling was that it was too concerned with the place of A Summer of Drowning in John’s fiction, rather than focusing specifically on the novel. Jake also felt that a more conventional academic opening would set up a better contrast with the more experimental ending. I’ve given that a try and it seems to be an improvement. Going to leave it for a few days and then come back to it fresh.

Finished re-reading Glister and am torn on which way to go. I’ll devote a specific post to that when I’ve thought about it some more.

Also been feeling that I need to do more on desire. The piece that comes to mind isn’t really either academic or creative so I’ll just have to see where it goes. Update on that to follow.

Just a quick update.

Finished the first draft of the essay on A Summer of Drowning last week and it came in just under the limit – at about 5800 words. As predicted, I had to leave out the discussion of Ryvold and Angelica, but I think the more experimental ending incorporates those perspectives on desire and prevents the work from becoming simply a binary analysis. I’ve been lucky enough to have had some offers to comment on the draft, so I’ll wait for some feedback before I begin polishing.

In the meantime, I’ve started work on the Glister piece. I’m lacking a preliminary title, but I think Eliot’s The Waste Land will prove a useful intertext. I’m tempted to divide the piece into sections – to mirror the structure of the novel and the poem – but that’s never really suited my writing so I’ll have to see how it goes.

Longer update when I have a more concrete outline of the next piece.

A quick progress update.

The essay, including experimental ending, is nearly at a complete first draft stage. The writing has been a really enjoyable process, very liberating to ‘open up’ again, whatever that means. The only sticking point has been the problem of length. It was close to 8000 words at one point – without any discussion of Angelika, Ryvold and Kyrre. This posed the problem of how to condense the length without compromising either the experimentation or the depth. The current solution is to focus exclusively upon Liv and Martin. While this creates a manageable scope (sort of), it runs the risk of turning the essay into something dialectical; type and antitype. The challenge in subsequent drafts is going to be making sure that doesn’t occur, that the essay retains its nuance, ambiguity and complexity without being overly long. I console myself with the thought that when the time comes to put the together the monograph on John’s work there will be plenty of room to incorporate discussions of Angelika, Ryvold, Kyrre and Maia within the experimental structure.

On an unrelated note, I’m also in the final stages of putting together an outline of my monograph (PhD thesis) on Don DeLillo entitled ‘[T]he Language of self’: Strategies of Subjectivity in the Novels of Don DeLillo – thanks to Jake for some helpful feedback. Though I wont claim I’m enjoying writing the outline, reading through the PhD again for the first time since the viva I was glad to find I still loved the work. Was a nice feeling after hearing horror stories of disenchantment and revulsion. It should be finished by next week so I’ll post it in its entirety (it’s currently sitting at about four pages).

Here’s the final version of the research proposal. Thanks to Fiona for her feedback:

‘I’m not crazy – I know enough, after all, not to talk about these things to the living’1: Portrayals of Apophenia and Addiction in John Burnside’s Later Prose.

Since the publication of A Lie About My Father (2006), John Burnside’s fictional and non-fictional prose has increasingly explored the boundaries of mental illness and addiction. Characterising both his work and subjectivity as apophenic in nature, the second volume of his memoir, Waking up in Toytown (2010), addressed the shaping effect of this diagnosis – a concern which also mediates and informs his three contemporaneous novels: The Devil’s Footprints (2007), Glister (2008), and A Summer of Drowning (2011).

In its exploration of these liminal states, Burnside’s prose provides a subjective and affective counterpoint to conventional medical discourse surrounding such conditions, challenging the privilege which underlies and enforces the boundary between sanity and illness. While, as Foucault notes, structures of power such as medicine and psychology encourage a turn towards discourse, such an imperative speaks within strictly policed bounds of sense and non-sense, of what is factual and non-factual; an act of translation echoed and subverted in the title quotation of this research proposal and in Burnside’s work in general.

My project thus proposes to combine an analysis of material obtained from Burnside’s archive – housed in the nearby St Andrews University library – with detailed close readings of his prose texts, and two as yet unpublished interviews, to explore how his writing challenges, re-inscribes and re-defines the boundaries of medical discourse.

The initial research outcomes of this analysis will consist of two article-length interviews discussing these themes in Burnside’s work, and a series of three journal articles addressing The Devil’s Footprints, Glister and A Summer of Drowning. This will form the basis of a subsequent, monograph-length study of how such concerns have shaped the possibilities of John Burnside’s later prose.

As promised here’s a little more detail about the project. In the next post I”ll discuss the methodology a bit more and possibly outline the proposed structure. The following is the first draft of the research proposal (I’ll post the final draft when it’s done):

‘I’m not crazy – I know enough, after all, not to talk about these things to the living’¹: Apophenia and Addiction in the Later Prose of John Burnside.

Since the publication of A Lie About My Father (2006), John Burnside’s prose has increasingly explored the boundaries of mental illness and addiction. Characterising both his work and subjectivity as apophenic in nature, John Burnside’s second memoir, Waking up in Toytown (2010), addressed the shaping effect of this diagnosis – a concern which mediates and informs his three contemporaneous novels: The Devil’s Footprints (2007), Glister (2008), and A Summer of Drowning (2011).

Preoccupied by such phenomena, Burnside’s prose poses an invaluable subjective and affective counterpoint to conventional medical discourse, providing a valuable literary challenge to the privilege which underlines and enforces the liminal points and boundaries between sanity and illness. While as Foucault notes, structures of power such as medicine and psychology encourage a turn towards discourse, such an imperative is only to speak within strictly policed bounds of sense and non-sense; of what is factual and non-factual – a prejudice echoed and subverted in the title quotation of this research proposal and in Burnside’s work in general. An analysis of his prose thus offers a means of challenging, re-inscribing and re-defining these boundaries – an act of what Derrida terms as limitrophy. Utilising material obtained from John Burnside’s archive – housed in the nearby St Andrews University library – to supplement detailed close readings, and two as yet unpublished interviews, this research project will undertake such an act of limitrophy, charting and exploring Burnside’s portrayal of apophenia and addiction.

The initial research outcomes of this analysis will be two article-length interviews discussing these themes in Burnside’s later work, and a series of three journal articles addressing The Devil’s Footprints, Glister and A Summer of Drowning. This will form the basis of a subsequent, monograph-length study of how such concerns have shaped the possibilities of John Burnside’s prose.

Following on, loosely, from Havoc and Desire: A Problem of Method (1), I thought I’d outline the larger work which I’m proposing to begin. While there is a collaborative project which I’m hoping will start in the next few months – funding and assorted other nonsense pending (more if and when it becomes a little more concrete) – I’ll also be working on an individual piece.

Over the last few months I’ve felt the distinct sense of absence that comes from not having a commitment to a ‘lengthy’ work. Post-PhD, there was definitely a feeling of ‘what next?’, and that wasn’t really something I liked. While I got the opportunity to go back to other forms of writing that had largely been on hold during the thesis (something which I hope to continue now that balance is more than a distant theoretical possibility), I missed that sense of focus and challenge which that kind of work offers. While I’ve worked on plenty of disparate pieces since finishing The Language of Self, there is something about the gravitational pull and focus of a monograph-length work which is impossible to replace – hence the preliminary sketch.

The idea which has slowly coalesced is to undertake a book-length study of John’s work. While I love his early novels, Dumbhouse in particular, I think there is something about the last three – The Devil’s Footprints, Glister, A Summer of Drowning – which marks a change of focus and method. Each, in its own way, explores related themes in a related manner (though with very different results), and in this sense it feels the perfect subject for a longer work which traces and theorises that commonality and difference.

In the next post I’ll sketch a little more detail.

For a first proper blog post I thought I’d begin by discussing what I’m currently working on. Having read John’s new novel, A Summer of Drowning, an article-length piece came to mind, focusing, as its starting point, upon a quotation taken from the work’s concluding paragraph:

I am getting used to the fact that, in my house, there are shadows in the folds of every blanket and imperceptible tremors in every glass of water or bowl of cream set out on a table – and, some days, there are tiny, almost infinitesimal loopholes of havoc in the fabric of the given world that could spill loose and catch me out wherever I am. (p.328)

On a first reading, the strongest sense which I came away with was the connection between this havoc in the fabric of the given world and the pervasiveness of desire as a destabilising force within the novel as a whole. After generating the title, ‘Desire as “havoc in the fabric of the given world”: Subjectivity, Text and Dwelling in John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning’, I sketched out a rough structure and set down a draft of the first few thousands words. I soon began to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the work, however. There was something dissatisfying, not just about the writing, but about the piece itself on a conceptual level:

1.  A problem of tone: An ‘academic’ register felt alien to the work, particularly when discussing the writing of somebody I knew personally and had worked with. In retrospect, I think one of the reasons that I was so averse to meeting Don DeLillo during the writing of the thesis was probably the result of a wish to avoid the personalisation that would lead to the same problem of tone (which raises its own set of questions, but that’s probably best left for another time).
2. A problem of Method: If the ostensible object of the work was havoc and desire in A Summer of Drowning, then a conventionally academic form of exegesis also posed a number of methodological problems. By its very nature, such writing, particularly with the heavily philosophical/theoretical quality that I bring to it, will tend to emphasise the structural and the logical in its given object. Such an analysis accordingly shapes the possibility of the form which the essay can take. When the object of inquiry is the collapse of such logical relations, however, there would appear to be an inherent conflict between what is to be read and the form which such a reading can take. The challenge would then appear to be how to fashion a tone and a structure which does not obscure its object, but which instead, channelling Heidegger, brings it into proximity.

Upon further reflection I came to the conclusion that perhaps the two concerns were not only related, but essentially the same. Just as John had attempted to find a language and a structure which could evoke that havoc, yet still remain within a rational, coherent framework of a ‘conventional’ text which did not use typographical devices to represent such a collapse (compare his novel to The Trick is to Keep Breathing), so too this was the challenge faced by any inquiry of his text.