A Work in Progress
Mar24

A Work in Progress

by Martin Wallace identity, n. Pronunciation:  Brit. /ʌɪˈdɛntᵻti/ , U.S. /aɪˈdɛn(t)ədi/ a. The quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute or essential sameness; oneness.             – Oxford English Dictionary Identity is the story we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. Life experiences, often disparate, sometimes even contradictory, can hereby become trammelled within the rigours of narrative discipline. Ironically, it is through such elisions and emphases, such concealments and exposures, that our apparently coherent and consistent selves are instituted. The stability of our first-person pronominal referent, I, suggests an absolute and essential sameness, a subjective uniformity over time. Of course, in reality, such a resolute sameness is incompatible with anything other than entirely static environmental, physiological and psychological conditions. Memoir is the literary enactment of such identity formation, forcing into narrative clarity even the foggiest of understandings and recollections. As Mary Evans has put it, the generic form of auto/biography provides ‘a chance to stabilise the uncertainties of existence’. Such writing, and the stable subjectivity to which it lends material reality, is antithetical to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose formulation of duration figures time as cognitive development necessarily propelled by continuous qualitative alteration. For Bergson, ‘there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change at every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow’. Consciousness, then, is the freedom to change one’s mind. In his autobiographical stage play, Cocktail Sticks (2012), Alan Bennett observes that ‘you don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there’. Atypically for the genre, Bennett has used memoir not to project a coherent and consistent identity, but as an active process of self-exploration akin to Bergsonian duration. A case in point is one of his best-known works, The Lady in the Van. In fact, it is not one work but several; or perhaps one work in progress, having undergone several thematic and formal transformations since its first appearance in the London Review of Books in October 1989, shortly after the death of its protagonist, Miss Mary Shepherd. The tale of Miss Shepherd, her various vans, and their fifteen-year residence in Bennett’s front garden, the original LRB article is formed of past-tense reflections interspersed with present-tense diary entries. The resulting frequent shifts in tense bring into question the implied spontaneity and observational authenticity of the diary entries, hereby exposed as retrospective reconstructions. Indeed, Bennett has explained that all his published diaries undergo such revisions: ‘immediacy in my case doesn’t make for vivid reporting, which...

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Infinite Reading Group
Mar17

Infinite Reading Group

PhD students and lecturers at the Centre for Contemporary Literature have been running the Infinite Reading Group. Thus far the group has been entirely dedicated to the fiction of David Foster Wallace, but its organizers do intend eventually to work on lengthy and demanding texts by other contemporary authors. In 2015, the group will be focusing on Wallace's unfinished, posthumously-published novel The Pale King (2011). The first meeting is on Wednesday 11th March from 6-8pm in room 112, at Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square.  The group will start with sections 1-9.  The group has adapted the Pale Summer timetable for eight monthly meetings.  Full schedule below:       1.    Sections 1-9     2.    Sections 10-21      3.    Section 22     4.    Sections 23-26     5.    Sections 27-34     6.    Sections 35-45     7.    Sections 46-47     8.    Sections 48-50 plus the four previously unpublished scenes (pp. 551-573, paperback)   The group's organizers have previously held the successful conference at Birkbeck: Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace.   Featured image by N D Strupler under a CC BY...

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