Title The Apothecary's Tales: A Game of Language in a Language of Games Name Nigel John

171 Pages·2013·25.89 MB·English

Title The Apothecary’s Tales: A Game of Language
in a Language of Games

Name Nigel John Robinson

This is a digitised version of a dissertation submitted to the University of
Bedfordshire.
It is available to view only.
This item is subject to copyright.

A Game of Language Nigel Robinson 1~11~~II~~~II~II~~I~~~~~~~~~I~
3403595171
The Apothecary's Tales: A Game of

Language in a Language of Games

by

Nigel John Robinson

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire,
in partial fulfilment requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing)
August 2009
A Game of Language Nigel Robinson
2
I
Dedication
I must express my appreciation to the Arts & Humanities Research Council for declining to
fund my programme, which renewed my determination to complete it.
Even more sincerely, I would like to express my unreserved thanks to my supervisor at the
Univ. 8edfordshire, Keith Jebb, for his unfailing wit, insight, and patience with my humours,
which sustained my work (and humour) throughout four years. Sine qua nihil.
A Game of Language Nigel Robinson 3
Contents
Abstract 4
I. The Simulachron: an Unreliable World that
Dilemmatises the Past 5
II: Faking the Real: the Sleights of Literary
Chicanery 54
III: Nested Frames and Emblematic Resonance
in the Creation of Aesthetic Affects 91
IV: The Theatre of the Word: Metalepsis and
Narrative Frame Shifts 119
V: The 'Covered Subtilty' of I ntertexts and
Allusions 131
Definition of Terms 148
Bibliography 150
A Game of Language Nigel Robinson 4
Abstract
The thesis shows how the novel The Apothecary's Tales manipulates narrative frames to
create a 'simulachron', an unreliable virtual world, which problematises the reader's
conceptions of the past. The novel transgresses the generic rules of 'historical fiction' to
create a quality of 'historicity' located in the affect of alterity. This is argued to be a somatic
response to peril deferred. The novel seeks to evoke alterity by defamiliarising linguistic
norms. It does this principally through the use of 'diachronic polysemia' (lexical 'false friends')
and intertexts to syncopate the reader continually between the disparate sensibilities of the
ih
1 and 21 st centuries. These sensibilities are simulated in the novel by the imbedment of
sociolects and 'hypomemes', the tacit thoughtways supposed peculiar to a given milieu. To
self-authenticate its fictions, the novel employs the 'parafictive' devices of a testamentary
found artifact, an unreliable narrator and editor, plausible sociologuemes (social conventions)
and ideologuemes (ideologies that inform behaviour), along with a density of period minutiae
putatively grounded in the record. Any truth effects achieved are then ludically subverted by a
process of critique in which structural units of the novel systematically parody the other. The
novel is patterned in the structure of a nested diptych, of expositions contra posed in a mutual
commentary, which extends from the defining templates of plot and episode to the micro
levels of morphemes in polysemic wordplay. The tropes of nested framing and repetition of
form and syntagm are defined in the thesis, respectively, as encubi/atio and 'emblematic
resonance'. It is argued that these tropes, encoded in a fictive discourse that defies closure,
provide a simulation of hermetic form that -when mapped upon the aleatory life world - can
be productive of aesthetic affect. The agonistic elements of plot and incident in the novel are
figured within the tapas of theatre, foregrounded by the duplicitous self-fashioning of the
characters, and by the continual metaleptic shifts or 'frame syncopation' of narrative
viewpoint, both intra and extra-diegetic. Frame syncopation is used advisedly to dilemmatise
significations at both the structural and syntagmatic levels. The thesis contends that such
contrived collisions of narrative interpretation may be the dynamic of affectivity in all aesthetic
discourse.
A Game of Language Nigel Robinson 5
The Apothecary's Tales: A Game of Language in a
Language of Games
'[The purpose of this book] would be achieved if there were one person who read it with
understanding and to whom it gave pleasure '. Ludwig Wittgenstein 1•
CHAPTER I: The Simulachron: an Unreliable World that Dilemmatises
the Past
The thesis shows how the novel The Apothecary's Tales manipulates narrative frames
to problematise the reader's conceptions of the past by creating a 'simulachron', an
unreliable virtual world. The novel transgresses the generic rules of 'historical fiction' to
create a quality of 'historicity' located in the affect of alterity. This is argued to be a
somatic response to peril deferred. The novel seeks to evoke alterity by defamiliarising
linguistic norms. It does this principally through the use of 'diachronic polysemia' (lexical
'false friends') and intertexts to syncopate the reader continually between the disparate
sensibilities of the 1t h and 21 st centuries. These sensibilities are simulated in the novel
by the imbedment of sociolects and 'hypomemes', the tacit thoughtways supposed
peculiar to a given milieu.
The creative work (or novel) The Apothecary's Tales which is the practice aspect of my
project is a sequel to my two previous novels: Gardening Secrets That Time Forgot (Village
GUild, 2004), and Cabbages & Queens (completed in part submission for my Masters by
Research in Creative Writing, Univ. Luton, 2005). Each traced in a humorous fashion and in
the simulation of a diary the fortunes of a 'fictional farming family, the Yeoman dynasty, living
in Ivinghoe village in central England in, respectively, the 15th and 16th centuries. The present
work continues the series with the chronicles of Hippocrates (Hippo) Yeoman, an aged
apothecary, astrologer and 'cunning man', putatively writing in the late Jacobean era 1623-25.
The chronicles, which include those of Hippo's servant Mercer, are introduced by a fictive
modern editor John Yeoman XVIII who, as the prior novels explain, ostensibly found five
centuries of his family's diaries cached in a root cellar.
a
If the novel had any purpose other than ludos it would be to show, as a roman these, and
principally through the manipulation of narrative frames, the linguistic means by which the
present fashions the past and the past fakes the present. This dissertation (or thesis), which
is also a form of Judos, will expand inter alia upon the ways by which fiction can engender
I Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921, opening paragraph. As Wittgenstein
had presumably read his book with understanding, and gained pleasure from it, his purpose had been
achieved -like mine -upon the moment of the work's completion.
A Game of Language Nigel Robinson 6
identity and identity can manufacture perception. It will also set out, as a purpose secondary
to that of doctoral submission, a pragmatic toolkit of operations applicable by creative writers
who deal with the historical past and will illustrate these operations by reference to the novel.
The thesis will therefore address theory only when it is felt to facilitate practice.
It might well be asked why, given the manifold choices of genre available in a PhD
programme in Creative Writing, an author should wish to write a work of historical fiction. In
my own case, it is an experiment in mythopoeia, or auto-fabulation, the creation of a mind­
world - attractively immune to time -to live in and call a home, by a neotenous old man who
has chosen to ignore the lesson of Ozymandias2. As the past, whether recent or historic, must
be located in the mind-world of the presene, my selection of a setting in the historic rather
than contemporary past was predetermined by expedience. I had previously done some
research in the period for two prior historically-themed novels, and I felt comfortable in the
Jacobethan. Moreover, the stimulation of research and of revising the outcomes of it (the act
of composition itself, as many authors will attest, gave me no pleasure whatsoever) provoked
a process of shameless self-gratification: the reason (I contend) that all authors write, even
those who claim unpersuasively that ulterior constraints gave them no option4.
The Apothecary's Tales are a fabulation of who I am. The foundation of Yeoman's hall is
located topographically within my own house, arguably 1i h century, just one mile from the
historic houses of Ivinghoe (verifiably 16th century) which my novel faithfully replicates and in
which many of the episodes are located5. Just as I have whimsically re-visioned myself in the
novel as the last of the Yeoman dynasty, the modern editor who rehabilitates (and cannot
resist rewriting) the tales of his forebears, so my two focalisers Hippo and Mercer hyperbolise
themselves, and with no less licence, in their respective journals. Hippo elevates 'the house of
Yeoman' which 'shall end upon my death' (55) to the grandeur of a regal fiefdom; later, he
boasts 'Verily, am I Yeoman of Yeoman, seigneur of my manor that were my father's, and his
forefathers' afore him, and before Agincourt, freeborn and an Englishman' (236). In a
2 'In the Phaedrus, Socrates concludes that "anyone who leaves behind him a written manual ... on the
supposition that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly
simple-minded"'(Goody 1963: 328). Socrates's simple-mindedness is attested by the observation that
the Phaedrus itself went on to enjoy more than two millennia of pem1anence .
.1 Collingwood contends: 'history is not contained in books or documents; it lives only, as a present
interest and pursuit, in the mind of the historian' (Collingwood 1946: 202). As Ackroyd opines in his
historical novel The House ofDr Dee: '[t]here is no such thing as history ... History only exists in the
present' (Ackroyd 1993: 264). Of course, such an axiom -that the past 'lives' only in and for
contemporary agendas -leads logically to revisionist history, a trope licensed only for novelists and
New Historicists whose rhetorical agendas are encoded with their own caveats (see Chapter III).
4 In the words of novelist Stephen King: 'Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids
through college, but those things were on the side -I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the
thing' (King 2000: 200).
5 It is a Baudrillardesque irony that the empirical Ivinghoe inspired Scott to name his prototypical
historical novel Ivanhoe (1819) from 'an old rhyme of the Black Prince' (Wilson 1986, 1819: xiv), and
that Ivanhoe int1uenced my writing of The Apothecwy 's Tales as a burlesque of the generic historical
novel.
A Game of Language Nigel Robinson
7
foreghosting of his revelation as Hippo's half-brother, sometimes hinted at but not confirmed
until the last chapter, Mercer mourns 'I followed after what little might yet remain, myself
apart, of the Yeoman dynasty' (138). The self-theatricalisation of two historically
unremarkable members of the yeoman class, numbering as many as 70,000 in the early 1 ih
century (Campbell 1942: 219), not only reflects the compulsion of many socially insecure
Jacobethan men to exalt (or, if necessary, invent) the dignity of their lineage6, it is also of
course congruent with the timeless instinct of the inherently insecure ego to justify its
existence to itself. Greenblatt, in his speculations on Renaissance self-fashioning, 'maintains
or implies that even the most substantial selves are egos built on fiction' (Martin 1997: 1317).
Narrative fiction is one means by which the writer/reader can, if only for the audience of
himself, glorify his public identity by giving his private identity a stage for its self­
transformation. In so doing, he also notionally protects his transformed self by relocating it in
a fabulative realm immune to death. As I shall detail later, all of the principal characters in my
novel initially present a public self, fashioned for their gain or mere survival, which belies their
essential self ie. the face they present privately to themselves. And by the time of their return
in the last episode, itself figured ironically as a masque, all have dropped their masks.
'A great mask allows one to own as one's own face another mask' (Martin 1997: 1317{ To
don a mask, even invisible, is to instigate one's own game or to accept the game rules of
another in a mode of play defined, in my case, putatively by the conventions of the novel
genre. (That these rules turn out to be deceptive is one of my covert games, that which I play
upon the reader.) However, while the reader must assume the mask of my focaliser of the
moment - the single eye/'l' in the narrative - the author (at least in a work like mine which
foregrounds playas a theme and relentlessly works every trope of play) is free to inhabit his
work wearing any mask whatsoever, overt, cryptic, or anonymous that he wishes. Umberto
Eco describes his impish delight in hiding his authorial self in The Name of the Rose behind
four masks in successively nested frames of perspective: 'I wrote the introduction
immediately, setting my narrative on a fourth level of encasement, inside three other
narratives: I am saying what Vallet said that Mabillon said that Adso said ...', '[t]his enunciative
duplicity fascinated and excited me very much' (Eco 1983b: 2, 33). In my own novel, the
supposedly 'real' and ultimate author who is now writing this thesis8 wears, throughout a
There is an interesting precedent for the Jacobethan anxiety about the fragility of the family in
6
medieval genealogies which 'locate the founding of the line in a mythical ancestor of primitive times,
in a process not unlike the episcopal practice of inventing apostolic origins for the See' (Spiegel 1983:
50)
7 In his observations upon Bakhtinian carnival, Hayman remarks: '[t]he mask ... releases [the actor]
from social controls. sets him apart from his fellows and places him in a timeless zone. Behind the
mask ... there is no face' (Hayman 1983: 110). In my novel, the game player par excellence,
Buckingham, 'wore a mask before a mask before a mask that signified, in its artful purpose, only the
wearing of a mask' (360). .
H Hippo mischieviously questions the notion of who (ultimately) is the 'real' man: 'I am fashi~ned by
my thoughts and, as Heraclitus tells us, a man cannot step twice into the same thought, for al~ IS.flux ..
So I am not the man I was this moment past' (41). In addressing a similar question of authonalldentlty,
A Game of Language Nigel Robinson 8
similar matrix of contra posed or nested frames, variously the mask of the modern editor, of
the two focalisers Hippo and Mercer, of the near-omnisicent taverner Filsmiro (Fr. 'Fils'lson +
'miro'/robin: Robinson) - who is both 'a lexicon of Ivinghoe' (60) and Chaucer's Host Harry
Bailey in The Canterbury Tales, and of the immortal Fr Bacon who might (or might not), in a
final metaleptic shift, emerge as the empirical author andlor critic9• The author might also be
said to be present hermetically in the ubiquitous hare [hair] (messenger of
Mercury/HermeslThoth and the god of authors) and, metonymically, in such symbols of choric
irony as the brain of Hamlet (the presiding genius of the tavern), the leering pig's head above
the Dorton gate, and the satyr's grin atop the arch at Theobalds. I will address the issues of
frame manipulation and emblematic resonance, central to my work, in greater detail in
Chapters III and IV. Here, I wish only to draw attention to them as tropes of facetiae, the
grossest symptoms of my ludic pathology.
The novel as a play-world, ruled by mischief
My novel is play - in truth more jocus than ludos - but play, of course, need not be frivolous. It
is a structure of performance art hospitable to any genre of drama, fictive or otherwise. 'Latin
has really only one word to cover the whole field of play: ludus, from ludere, of which lusus is
a direct derivative ... Ludus covers children's games, recreation, contests, liturgical and
theatrical representations, and games of chance ... The compounds al/udo, colludo, iIIudo all
point in the direction of the unreal, the illusory' (Huizinga 1949, 1998: 36). Man may be -like
many other species that we suppose intelligent -an Aristotelian animal ridens, but laughter is
not the obligatory function of ludos. For example, David Lodge suggests that play has been
evolution's training ground to promote the survival of the wittiest ("wit' being defined here in a
sense common in the Jacobethan: 'imaginative intelligence'). 'The ability to imagine what
another person - an enemy, for instance -might be thinking in a given situation, by running
hypothetical scenarios on the brain's hardware, was a crucial survival sklll for primitive man
and might explain the storytelling instinct that seems to be a part of all human cultures'
(Lodge 2002: 41). Play can be regarded as the first activity of the cosmos, the wilful dance of
the logos. 'In the dawn of European philosophy Heraclitus says: "The course of the world is a
playing child moving figures on a board -the child as absolute ruler of the universe'" (Fink
1968: 29)10. In her commentary on Bakhtin, Kristeva identifies the laughter of play with the
Korzybski might have argued that the Robinson I who wrote the first syllable of my novel could not be
the Robinson" who wrote the second syllable, except by an accident ofcommon habitation and a name.
To suppose any identity between the concatenations of Robinsonsn who might be identified as the
authors of 'my' novel and the Robinsonn+1 who is currently penni11g this (ie. that) syllable, is­
Korzybski fervently argued -the short road to the mental ward. General Semantics, however, offers no
answer to the dilemma of which Robinso11 should present himself at the viva. (Korzybski 1933: xxx).
9 He advises, sylleptically: 'Whither the cabbage'. Hippo protests, indignant at his would-be
copyediting: 'Wither the cabbage?' (309). Hippo has previously identified 'cabbage' with words: 'all
words are cabbage' (146).
to Paula Findlen similarly refers us to Erasmus's In Praise ofFolly (1549) where play is conceived as
divine: 'Games were not merely child's play but an important feature of the Renaissance tradition of