Introduction

As a writer of novels, memoirs and essays, Rachel Cusk has engaged with a variety of literary forms over the course of a career that has had its share of controversy as well as kudos. From Saving Agnes (1993), winner of the Whitbread Prize for first novel, to Second Place (2021), longlisted for the Booker Prize, via the somewhat mixed reactions to, and controversy surrounding, her memoirs of motherhood, and of separation and divorce, in A Life’s Work (2001) and Aftermath (2012), followed by the almost universal acclaim afforded the ‘Outline’ trilogy (2014–2018), Cusk has never rested on her laurels but has always challenged herself as a writer by pushing the boundaries and conventions of genre in relation to reader expectations and critiquing gender norms in terms of what it is possible and/or deemed desirable for a female writer to say, and in what form. While, in many ways, her interests have been consonant with Knausgaard’s concerns insofar as she became wary of ‘the artificiality of the novelistic “occasion” ‘ (Booker Prize 2021 website) and has infused her fiction with episodes from real life, there are also differences between both writers, which will be explored in this chapter, in terms of their trajectory and the locus of their interest.

Moreover, in the broader context of the themes and focus of Radical Realism, the chapter will connect Cusk’s trajectory with current trends among writers ‘trying to expand the possibilities of the novel’, whether this be by ‘incorporating the techniques of memoir and essay, of hewing closer to the author’s subjective experience’ or by ‘effacing the difference between fiction and their own personal nonfictions’ (Blair 2015). It will frame what is often seen as the ‘sharp break from the conventional style of Cusk’s previous work’ (Blair 2015) in relation to broader literary and cultural developments, including contemporary interrogation of the fact-fiction borderlands, and to the work of other writers, including that of Knausgaard, whose work Cusk has reviewed positively in the past and with some of whose concerns her work dovetails in terms of a rejection of plot and fabrication at the expense of an interrogation of the real and of what constitutes reality.

Why Has the Dissective Tendency Been So Persistent in the West?

In Lecture 2, I proposed living cosmos panpsychism as a holistic alternative to the dissective outlook of modern science with its dissociating implications for our relationship with nature. But in fact, holistic versions of panpsychism have figured significantly in the Western tradition; Spinoza is a prominent case in point. Yet such theories have always remained outriders to the main intellectual traditions, both in philosophy itself and in the cultural mainstream. In the modern period – by which I mean from the time of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century – the West has, as we have seen, adhered very strongly to its dissective presupposition, a presupposition that rules out the possibility of intrinsic normativity, or Law, in nature. In consequence, our attitude of dominate-and-control with respect to the natural world has only continued to gain strength.

So perhaps merely coming up with a theory that conforms to holism and thereby seeks to supersede our old dissective or atomizing habits of thinking will not enable us to check this stubborn tendency. It might in addition be necessary to scrutinize why these dissective or atomizing habits of thought have become so entrenched. Is there something not just in what we think but about the way we think that disposes us to see the world in these divide-and-rule terms?

I shall suggest that there is and that to understand this disposition we need to dig down beneath the explicit content of theories and examine the underlying thought processes that are involved in the mental production of theory itself. We need, in other words, to examine the phenomenology of theorizing – to ask ourselves what it feel like, subjectively, when we are theorizing. When the phenomenology of theorizing is examined in this way, we shall discover that the theoretical mode of cognition, which had its origins in the philosophy of ancient Greece, in fact enacts an inner disjunction between subject and object that then endlessly plays itself out as a divisive tendency in the theories it spawns, a tendency that ultimately cancels out the possibility of a holistic worldview.

Contextual Introduction

Artistic activities provide the possibility for self-expression, to help reinforce one’s sense of competence and enhance a general feeling of content in life (Eisenhauer 2007). That is also the case with those affected by profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (henceforth PIMD) to whom such activities are extremely enjoyable (Levy and Young 2020). However, their opportunities for recreational activities are limited by different social and cultural ideologies based on ableism, such as assumptions that physical strength is always essential to have capabilities for hobbies. Opportunities for meaningful recreational activities are much fewer for young people beset by PIMD, than for their non-disabled peers or for those with better functional abilities (Eriksson and Saukkonen 2021).

The aim of this chapter is to look at the role of artistic elements and sensory experiences in those physical activities that are currently provided for young people faced with PIMD. The study is a part of a three-year academic research project (2019–2022) dealing with opportunities of young people affected by PIMD to physical activities in their daily lives. It has been found out in the research that opportunities for these young people for recreational activities are often dependent on institutional practices of residential and disability services. For example, the practice of professional physiotherapy provides a possibility for physical exercise, while physical activities are enabled in sports events arranged in housing units (Eriksson and Saukkonen 2021).

Educational institutions, such as vocational schools, provided physical education according to the curriculum. Careful attention was paid to equal opportunities of children and young disabled people despite the level of their development. Various physical activities, such as adaptive sports were also provided for young PIMD afflicted people according to their interests and individual abilities. In edcational institutions they were also open to new, artistic types of sports activities, such as those undertaken in circus acts and other performative arts: an openness that enables schools to combine physical activities with drama education. As the role of arts has been often forgotten in the discussion on sports and physical activities of young people facing PIMD, this chapter provides an insight into the reality of their lives when such practices of physical recreation – in which artistic expression and multiple sensory experiences are crucial – are applied.

The origins of this book are hybrid in that they reside both in my professional and personal history. As an academic of some thirty years standing, my interest in the development of the novel form has not waned, even if it has taken shape in different contexts. From a PhD thesis in 1989 on conceptions of realism in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French and English novels via two monographs on aspects of contemporary narrative in 2011 and 2016, it seems in some ways that I have come full circle in rethinking relationships between and among social context, writerly aims at a particular historical juncture, and readerly and critical responses to a body of literature selected as much for the questions posed and reactions elicited as for the tentative answers given. Yet there are notable differences between then (1989) and now (2022), not least my current focus on very recent literature and on emerging trends, rather than on an established set of canonical works and their critical contexts.

There are both positive and negative aspects to this change of emphasis: firstly, my background in Comparative Literature and prior engagement with literature in France and England from 1840–1940 means that I am not coming to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literature as a novice but with some knowledge of preceding texts and contexts; it has also permitted some critical reading in French as well as English. Arguably, the downside is that in focussing on recent contexts and trends, there is a risk that what is emergent and exciting in the present moment is already old news by the time my monograph reaches its audience and/or that writerly and readerly concerns have moved on. Yet, as I hope will become apparent, some of the key notions and terms in the book would seem, if anything, to be generating increasing interest. Indeed, in the time it has taken to write this book, there have been a number of publications focussed on autofiction and the autofictional, most recently an edited volume by Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor entitled The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms (2022) published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Regardless of their race and social-political orientation, African scholars, journalists, and other writers of African experience tend to portray the people of this region as a single entity, homogenized by cultural practices, social formation, and political development. In this light, many in the West—usually the half-informed population— think of Africa as a country. Yet, Africa is a continent located in the middle of world civilizations with multiple cultures and traditions, practices, and people, as well as tongues and governments cutting across fifty-five recognized modern sovereign states with different geographical features.

By implication, the complexity of understanding “Africa” lies in divergent, exciting features. Whereas the above points to multiple space factors in this complex web, another vital point is the time consideration. When we discuss African cultures and civilizations, from which epoch of their consistent evolution are we concerned? This takes us back to the matter of space. Africa is vastly divided between two regions: the Maghreb and sub- Saharan. As early as circa AD 622, Islam had been a dominant force in the Maghreb region of Africa, perforating the social fabrics and steering the political wheel of the civilizations founded in that area. It was not until around the twelfth century that Islam and its cultural assets infiltrated the sub-Saharan part of Africa, having a significant effect on the people’s culture and organization.

Compared to the Maghreb region, Islam had a less, if not substantial, effect on sub-Saharan Africa. Islam did not thoroughly spread across the states of the area until the twentieth century. In fact, in many of these modern states in Central and Southern Africa, the proportion of the Muslim population is smaller. In addition, those in the northern part of the continent (the Maghreb), for several reasons like color, cultural mores, and geopolitical advantage, consider themselves more Arab than African. The region’s government could even choose to identify with Africa on one occasion and Arab on another. Then comes the Europeans with a taxonomy of modernity embedded in religion and religious practices, and considering that religion is a culture, the foregoing becomes clearer.

Taking its place in the heart of Africans, Christianity began to shape and guide the evolution of many of the states in the continent from the nineteenth century.

Introduction: Vallejo’s Universalist Poetics and the Question of Indigenismo

As we saw in the previous chapter, José Carlos Mariátegui lauds César Vallejo’s first two poetic collections for having forged a new lyrical style within an emerging intellectual avant-garde, capturing with unprecedented authenticity the rural Indigenous sentiment and spirit. Such was the nascent role of indigenismo during the “cosmopolitan period” of Peruvian history, defined by its experimental tendencies, which broke with the dependency on Spanish and colonial aesthetic forms. Following Antenor Orrego’s verdict, Mariátegui affirmed Vallejo’s “poetic liberty” and “the triumph of the vernacular in writing” against the ornamental excesses of colonial literature, in which the voice of the rural Indian was first rendered legible.

For Mariátegui, Vallejo’s works attest to the emergence of a “genuine Americanism,” pointing to the Indigenous literature to come, beyond the representations of the rural Indian provided by the urban mestizo:

In this chapter, I will focus predominantly on the dreadful aurality and carnivalesque approach in Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), a film that is exemplary of the Grand-Guignolesque in the early talkie period. My focus is to discuss the place of the uncanny voice, especially the “stubborn” scream, in 1930s cinema as part of a genealogical intervention into Grand-Guignol cinema. The Grand-Guignol theatre was a place that staged its plays without music (excluding the diegetic) or an orchestra pit, and where the spoken word was instead central. As an arena of embodied knowing and corporeal speech acts, the carnival environment of Florey’s film suggests something of the heterogeneity taken up within Grand-Guignol cinema. Loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic detective story of the same title (1841), Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue opens with scenes of carnival attractions, as the grotesque body of “Erik the ape” is put on display by Bela Lugosi’s Dr. Mirakle. The audience reception of the grotesque body of Erik the ape at the carnival resonates affectively with the circulating “stub-born” scream of first-time actress Arlene Francis, who plays an anonymous sex worker in the film who is later abducted and killed. Grotesque aurality serves as a springboard for considering the lowly, the bawdy and the corporeally excessive. Considerations of early sound films in the horror genre have overlooked the stubborn screams of Francis to focus instead on the spectacle of films like King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933). Released the year after the Rue Morgue, Kong gave the genre its first recognisable “scream queen” in Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow. But just as the racialised grotesque body of Murders in the Rue Morgue’s Erik the ape prefigures the spectacular body of Kong, so too does Francis’s scream prefigure Wray’s. This study of Grand-Guignol maps such anxieties through the materiality of the scream in early 1930s horror cinema, which produced affective intensities across the bodies of viewers.

According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is categorised by a celebration of the grotesque and excessive body, especially the open orifices and protrusions of the “lower stratum” (1984: 325). Agnès Pierron argues that the carnivalesque is one of the major themes of the Grand-Guignol in which symbolic inversions take centre stage (1995: XIX).

What Might a Holistic Account of Reality Look Like?

Let us return then to the issue of worldview – of what is wrong with the Western worldview – again in light of our new hypothesis that the universe is not so much built up out of basic constituents – as classical physics supposed – but is primordially an indivisible whole. Let us see where this new metaphysical presupposition leads us in terms of understanding our place in the world.

When we contemplate the universe not as a contingent composite of components but as a seamless whole we may be tempted to ask, why is this universe, which stretches away from us in every direction in such breath-taking inter-galactic splendour, a universe, a unity: why does it cohere in the way that it apparently does? In asking this question we are however implicitly reverting to our default assumption that reality is compound, that it consists, as the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume put it, of logically ‘distinct existences’, where it is this assumption that raises the question, why do these distinct existences hang together. If we set aside this assumption and assume instead that reality is not composed of distinct existences that are somehow held together by the (always contingent) laws of physics but that it is already a single indivisible unity, then different aspects of the universe may come to the fore as salient.

What we are likely to be struck by, when looking through this lens of unity, is not so much the various bodies that present – the stars, planets, rocks, grains of sand, cells, and so forth – as what lies between these bodies. In other words, we are likely to be struck by the fact that this universe is spatial, that all observable bodies are held, so to speak, in space, and that space itself is an indivisible continuum. Matter, by contrast, seems plainly divisible: we can cut it, and cut it again, all the way down to the level of subatomic particles. But we cannot cut space. We can differentiate different regions of space by reference to the bodies that appear to occupy them, but we cannot separate one ‘part’ of space from another, since this is an operation which itself could only take place in space.

Background

When discussing disability, poverty (as depicted in Part Two) and neglect it is important to note that most people acquire their impairments (to varying degrees and in different forms) through poverty, pollution, violence, accident, war and ageing. Tragically, the World Health Organisation in its World Report on Disability (2011) pointed out that the biggest cause of impairment/disability was poverty. And poverty, when it is analysed in depth, is usually the result of government failure, ineptitude, immorality and/or criminality. It is also essential to acknowledge that contemporary understandings and attitudes towards disability have been shaped by the onset of capitalism (which is inherently criminogenic) and its associated ideologies of individualism, liberal utilitarianism, industrialisation (specifically waged labour) and the medicalisation of social life. As a result, the injustice of ‘disableism’ (in all its discriminatory forms) is endemic to most, if not all, ‘developed’ contemporary societies. And to compound issues, disabled people are the excessive victims of poverty, immoral crimes and criminality as a direct consequence of this prevailing discrimination.

Without a shadow of doubt, the on-going passive or deliberate neglect of governments across the globe to fully address the social determinants and inequities of health and disablement has led to a growth in the number of disabled people in most countries. Moreover, corporate-governmental immorality/criminality is especially evident when governments and self-interested politicians blame disablement, the cost of disability and social support networks for the innumerable economic crises that have ‘dogged’ societies since the mid-nineteenth century. Disturbingly, all these economic crises have been politically portrayed as the fault of welfare policies for the unemployed, the poor and disabled people who have supposedly imposed unreasonable and unaffordable costs on society, despite not being the only recipients of welfare or even being the biggest ‘drain’ on government finances.

Ultimately, the overarching consequence of this ‘blaming’ has been a consistent failure to enact meaningful policies which produce and maintain a fully accessible infrastructure relating to public buildings, housing and support systems that will accommodate all sections of society, including people with impairments, those suffering from long-term ill-health and, of course, elderly people.

Travel Ban

Family Separation

Pandemic

Theorizing the unsettled relationship between truth and democracy and the special power of the press means explaining what constitutes an act of journalism. Actor-Network theory is not focused on what an act of journalism is, nor on who acts of journalism are for, but on contacts between actants that do journalism and on seeking out transformative mediators. Cultural sociology defines acts of journalism as performances that shape collective representations, contribute to a stable civic sphere and are not reducible to economic or political structures. Critical sociology seeks to address enduring forms of domination at both the level of the act and from the vantage of a totality of social relations. At a pragmatic level an act of journalism is not a simple conversation between the journalist and actual readers, but a more implicit exchange that takes place in the anticipation of an audience’s imagined interest in the subject.

IN THE SIMPLEST TERMS, A TRADITIONAL Chinese worldview contrasted a civil, agrarian interior with a barbaric, steppe/nomadic outside. Whatever the category, various binary oppositions—cooked versus raw foods, silken garments as opposed to coarse felt—functioned to construct the civility and refinement of the center in opposition to the progressive wildness and savagery of the periphery. In one of the earliest texts, The Book of History, there is a description of concentric circles radiating outward from the innermost nucleus of the “Imperial Domain” to the benighted far-off reaches, peopled with banished criminals and barbarians. The notion of the Four Barbarians (Siyi 四夷) representing the cardinal directions also originates in the Book of History. It is explicitly articulated in the Record of Rites (Li ji 禮記), where these so-called savages from different quadrants are labeled: “The Yi of the east, the Di of the north, the Rong of the west, and the Man of the south.” In theory, these barbarians paid tribute to the Chinese court and saw themselves as political and cultural inferiors. Robert Marks has remarked on the “heroic tinge” of the Chinese-Confucian narrative arc of history and literature in which the Chinese, as the “font of culture,” “spread the benefits of their high civilization to less advanced peoples, bringing them within the fold.” More often than not, stories about cultural Others in Zhang Zhuo’s Court and Country fit this paradigm.

To complicate matters of ethnicity, the imperial Li clan, the Tang rulers, were not Han Chinese; their lineage—though they claimed to belong to the aristocratic Longxi Lis and descend from the Daoist sage Laozi—can be traced to the Türkic Xianbei, a people connected to the steppe. This background created tensions between them and the “few dozen old Han clans” rooted in northern China who had for centuries “dominated high society and formed a quasi-aristocracy.” Though the ruling family had “barbarian” blood, it “made enormous efforts to present itself as a bona fide Han [Chinese] house.”

The early Tang featured a hybrid culture, blending Chinese and Central Asian elements. To cite one example, “barbarian dress” (hufu 胡服)—caftans, wide-brimmed veiled hats, shoes with upturned toes—and dances held an exotic appeal.

Fascination, Grapes of Death, and Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom

In this chapter I will examine films that deal with sensorial taste and its intersection with cinematic “bad taste,” chief among them Jean Rollin’s Fascination (1979). This continues the overall project’s impetus to engage with Grand-Guignol cinema via the senses. Thus far I have dealt with concepts ranging from a Bakhtinian semiotics of utterance and carnival, the anthropophagic eating of discourse and the shocking sight of corpses in the Benjaminean ruins of modernity. Here I will enlist the transgressive potlatch theory of Georges Bataille as it embodies the excess of threshold experiences in unproductive consumption under capitalism. Bataille is very prominent in this chapter, in part because he proved very influential within Rollin’s oeuvre. This chapter will demonstrate Bataille’s intellectual and artistic influence on Rollin’s films, particularly around excess as a concept. My corporeal examination of Grand-Guignol cinema takes me, in this chapter, to consider predominantly the sense of taste, and its inter-relatedness to the sense of smell. I will continue my examination of odour in the Conclusion, as smell continues to be an under-examined sense in film studies (Marks, 2000). Rollin is often wrongly singled out as the one and only horror auteur in the development of the French fantastic in cinema, which is a short-sighted view of its development (Allmer, Brick and Huxley, 2012: 91). However, many of his films are classified in liminal ways and have deep resonances with the threshold experiences of the Grand-Guignol, especially as they mingle the erotic with horror.

Agnès Pierron has argued that “the Grand-Guignol is fascinated by thresh-olds, in-between places, instances where an individual is between life and death, states of consciousness and unconsciousness, normality and madness. The guillotine is [its] privileged instrument…” (1995: XLVIII). There are no guillotines in the cinema of Rollin—the scythe is his tool of choice—yet his depiction of a secret blood circle in Fascination does refer to the headless figure of the Acéphelic Man that Bataille presented in the mid-1930s. In this, Bataille, too, conjured a secret circle of devotees who sought to put into practice the transgressive notions of his theorising.

A Frame of Reference

Politics is part of the air that we all live and breathe. It is about what we are allowed and not allowed to do. It is about friends and enemies. It permeates every pore of our bodies and makes assessments and judgements about our worth in society. It is about reward, freedom, punishment or confinement, marginalisation, (institutional) discrimination and criminalisation. But most of all it is about how we understand, embrace or oppose it. Policy typifies all of this and can be seen to be stereotypically judgemental about the most ‘visible’ recipients of welfare benefits. This is particularly true of the UK welfare system. And there lies the hypocrisy of powerful elites.

As Richard Titmuss pointed out in his Essays on the Welfare State (1958), the Social Divisions of Welfare meant that we are all recipients of welfare. Welfare, for Titmuss, is manifest in three different forms (four when you include the unpaid caring role of women conducted outside of the paid labour market). ‘Occupational Welfare’, he argued, conveys rewards for those who supposedly pay deference to social norms and behaviour. It does so, through the non-taxable or tax-privileged perks derived from advantageous employment in the labour market (i.e. through ‘golden handshakes’, employer pension contributions and fringe benefits such as meal vouchers and/or private healthcare schemes).

Likewise, ‘Fiscal Welfare’ rewards individuals by granting tax allowances on non-State pensions (estimated to cost the UK government, for instance, £14.3 billion in 2005/6) and mortgage relief for ‘responsible’ home-owners. Yet, unlike ‘Occupational Welfare’ and ‘Fiscal Welfare’ – which are rewards derived from the government curtailing its tax revenue and leaving more money for the so-called industrious or wealthy to keep – ‘Social Welfare’ involves a direct payment to these recipients of welfare. ‘Social Welfare’, therefore, concerns the visible, publicly provided funds and services such as social security benefits, local authority housing, healthcare and personal social services.

But all of this has echoes beyond the United Kingdom. Australia and the United States, to name but two, conceive of welfare in similar ways. For example, tied into the notion of benefit payments, as opposed to tax allowances, is the ‘Murrayesque’ concept of ‘workfare’ and the stigmatisation that claiming benefit payments entail.