The Great Chain of Unbeing
- Submitting institution
-
University of Northumbria at Newcastle
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 22099951
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Dedalus Books
- ISBN
- 9781910213773
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This full-length, sole-authored book includes material produced over a span of about twenty years. This material was then reworked through an extensive and intensive process of new writing and revision over a period of roughly twelve months. Content research included cosmology, Beethoven, prosthetics, Adorno, radio communications. Theoretical sources included Bakhtin, Badiou, Leibniz. Location research included Moscow, Greek islands, Scottish Highlands. Practical research included sight deprivation. The theme of linked story collection was creatively explored in depth, through multiple rearrangement and redrafting, creating a novel hybrid form which one reviewer suggested might be called Kurzgeschichtenverkettung.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Great Chain of Unbeing aims to interrogate and disrupt the terrain between short-story sequence and novel. This intermediate form has been widely explored, typically with stable location or prevailing theme as unifying principle. I chose instead to ask how structural coherence could be established while maintaining maximum tonal/stylistic variety between sections. Novels typically depict some causally-linked chain of events intended to be read from start to finish, while a story collection invites partial or non-sequential reading. I was conscious that my “chain” had also to be “unchained”. Taking the contrast of symphonic movements as creative model, the result was a book that is novelistic in the sense of Bakhtin, consciously aligned with his notion of Menippean satire.
The title alludes to the classical “Great Chain of Being”, as interpreted by Arthur Lovejoy. “Being”, in that context, is ontological (the hierarchy of living creatures), yet could also be interpreted existentially. I problematise this duality, negatively and paradoxically, as “unbeing”. Opposed to the Great Chain of Being’s Leibnizian plenitude is Badiou’s insistence (in Being and Event) on wholeness as necessarily inconsistent. Inconsistency therefore became integral to my method, with recurrences serving to contradict as much as unify, and sections thrown into mutual dialogue.
The reader is guided by paratext: a table of contents indicates the first and last stories to be the “Unbeginning” and “Unending”. A person mentioned in the first story is protagonist of the second, which is comic in tone. A “chain” is thus established – though not sustained throughout. The linking procedure of the initial sections gives way to story-groupings that allow for, even encourage, detachment and isolated reading.
Dissemination included an Edinburgh Book Festival appearance, Radio 4 broadcast and Saltire Fiction Award shortlisting.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -