Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City

188 Pages·2022·2.015 MB·English

by  Matthew Francis

Depersonalization and Creative Writing
Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City explores the common
psychological symptom of depersonalization, its influence on literature and
the insights it can provide into the writing process.
Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel
detached from their own selves and the world. Often associated with psy-
chological disorders, it can also affect healthy people at times of stress.
Beginning with a first-hand account of the experience, the book goes on to
argue that many well-known literary texts, including Camus’s The Outsider
and Sartre’s Nausea, evoke a similar psychological state. It shows how a
concept of depersonalized writing can be found in the work of literary theo-
rists from widely different traditions, including T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes
and Viktor Shklovsky. Finally, it maintains that creative writers can make
use of the lessons learned from a study of depersonalization to arrive at a
deeper understanding of writing.
Given this knowledge, the controversial writing teacher’s maxim show,
don’t tell, so often misapplied or misunderstood, can be repurposed as a
practical instruction for taking students’ writing to a new level of sophisti-
cation and wisdom.
Matthew Francis is Professor of Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University,
UK. He has published six poetry collections with Faber & Faber, most
recently Wing (2020). He is also the author of two novels, WHOM
(Bloomsbury, 1989) and The Book of the Needle (Cinnamon Press, 2014),
and a collection of short stories, Singing a Man to Death (Cinnamon Press,
2012). He has edited the poems of W.S. Graham for Faber and published a
study of Graham, Where the People Are (Salt Publishing, 2005).
Routledge Studies in Creative Writing
Series Editors: Graeme Harper (Oakland University, USA) and
Dianne Donnelly (University of South Florida, USA)
Strategies of Silence
Reflections on the Practice and Pedagogy of Creative Writing
Edited by Moy McCrory and Simon Heywood
Theories and Strategies for Teaching Creative Writing Online
Edited by Tamara Girardi and Abigail G. Scheg
Creative Writing Scholars on the Publishing Trade
Practice, Praxis, Print
Edited by Sam Meekings and Marshall Moore
The Rise of Creative Writing in Asia
Edited by Darryl Whetter
Depersonalization and Creative Writing
Unreal City
By Matthew Francis
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
com/Routledge-Studies-in-Creative-Writing/book-series/RSCW/
Depersonalization
and Creative Writing
Unreal City
Matthew Francis
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Matthew Francis
The right of Matthew Francis to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-53068-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-53069-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-08033-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003080336
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
In memory of Dr Anthony Ryle (1927–2016)
Contents
Preface ix
PART I
Autobiographical 1
1 Land Without Feelings: A Depersonalization Memoir 3
PART II
Psychological 27
2 Like Looking in Fairyland: The History and Pathology
of Depersonalization 29
3 The Sound a Noise Makes when it Ceases:
The Literature of Depersonalization 48
4 Making the Stone Stony: Depersonalization in
Literary Theory 76
PART III
Practical 99
5 A Moonlit Interval: Showing and Telling in Fiction 101
6 The Odour of a Rose: Showing and Telling in Poetry 122
viii Contents
7 Crossing the Threshold: Quests, Epiphanies, Liminality 145
Bibliography 166
Index 173
Preface
A book about a rare psychiatric disorder might be supposed to be intended
for a small audience of specialists. This, however, is not that book. True,
depersonalization is obscure, so much so that it is, as I note in these pages,
still little known even by medical professionals, but that does not make it
rare: the obscurity of this quite common symptom arises from the fact that
the change in consciousness is not readily detectable by outside observers
and exceptionally difficult for the sufferer to describe. Nor is it necessarily
a disorder. Many people who have never suffered from psychological illness
have experienced a transient sense of remoteness and unreality, perhaps
when involved in an accident, or at a time of great stress, or after taking a
recreational drug such as marijuana. Perhaps you have stared into a mirror
for so long that the person staring back at you suddenly seemed to be some-
one else; if so, you have a faint impression of what depersonalization feels
like.
My interest in depersonalization derives from my own experience of it as
an unhappy twenty-something postgraduate student in 1980s Brighton. It
was a crucial episode in my life, and one which seemed, in my case, to be
bound up with the beginnings of my career as a writer, as if the process of
becoming ill then being cured had unlocked my creativity. But it has taken
twenty years of teaching and thinking about writing technique to convince
me that that is no coincidence; what I learned from my illness, I now believe,
was a different way of thinking, which I explain in the following pages. No
one, of course, wants to be ill, but I argue here that you do not have to suf-
fer the illness in order to learn the lessons it taught me: one of the advan-
tages of studying is that you can learn from the experiences of your teachers
instead of having to have them yourself. This book, then, is aimed not at
specialists, nor, primarily, at those who have symptoms, but at anyone who
wants to be a better writer or to teach writing to others. It puts forward the
proposition that there is a fundamental connection between depersonaliza-
tion and writing itself, or at least the writing of fiction and poetry (which is
what I both practise and teach) in the modern Western world.
What I am proposing here is nothing less than a theory of creative writ-
ing, which is something we in the academic world badly need (Boulter,
2004; Light, 1996). The subject is widely taught, but there is still no real