Vital Signs: Towards affirmative fiction: gender, autofiction, fiction

Abstract

This thesis speculates on how the Deleuzian concept of ‘becoming-other’ required in fiction might enable fiction to be affirmative. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, steering between fiction, philosophy, criticism and autofiction. The first section is a critical exploration, where a nomadic lens inspired by the philosopher Rosi Braidotti is used to read the autofictional works of Chris Kraus, namely I Love Dick (1997), and Rachel Cusk, namely her Outline trilogy (2014’s Outline, 2016’s Transit and 2018’s Kudos). Working through the body, desire and feminism, the five chapters in this section consider whether autofiction is an adequate new representation of the times in which we live and sketch a framework for what I call ‘affirmative fiction’. In chapter one, I consider the history and development of the autofictional genre, demonstrating how gender is key to both the production and the consumption of autofiction. In chapter two, I situate Braidotti’s work between the vitalist neomaterialism of Deleuze and the corporeal feminism of Luce Irigaray. I show how Braidotti’s enfleshed materialism, which draws on sexual difference theory and the politics of location, produces a nomadic subject, one that is ethical, politically activated, accountable and affirmative. In chapter three, I read Kraus’s desire and body through the lens of the monster, demonstrating how the work remains caught in the binary logic of dialectical thinking, and thus in the negative. In chapter four, Cusk’s annihilated subject is examined in the light of collectivity and embodiment to demonstrate how this emergent subjectivity cannot move beyond the negativity of oppositional consciousness, nor can it truly think beyond the (human) self. Each chapter is introduced by my own venture into the autofictional form, intended to respond to and incorporate the theory that surrounds it. These interstices work through the questions raised by reading Kraus and Cusk alongside posthuman, nomadic philosophy, tracing the ways in which my work is connected to theirs and, ultimately, where it diverges: my belief in fiction’s ability to move beyond the negative, to enable a becoming-other. The second part of this thesis is an original novel written in tandem with the critical work. It opens as CCTV cameras track Ellen Malan’s progress down a Winnipeg street. She enters an underpass but does not exit on the other side of the darkness. A few minutes later, an ambulance speeds into frame. Her children, Noel and Louise, clash at her hospital bedside, just as they’ve done everywhere else. They aren’t prepared for what they’re about to learn about their mother. Neither do they know how to tell their father, who has just begun the train ride from Vancouver. He hasn’t liked to fly since the cancer spread to his bones. He suspects this will be the last time he makes the long journey cross-country. He is looking forward to seeing Ellen, their dogs. He doesn’t think his life can change again. A nomadic, posthuman approach is made explicit in the structure of the novel, which uses third-person focalisers as well as, amongst others, the points of view of the Canadian wilderness, the death processes taking place in a corpse, the proliferating cells in a cancer patient. It demonstrates a new approach to the enmeshing of creative practice and philosophy, an attempt to stretch the realist novel as a form in a posthuman direction, one that imagines not just what we are but what we want to be.

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