School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Start date: 2018 × Subject: poetry × Author: Eaves, William Alden ×

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    Three books: voice, literature, and mind
    Eaves, William Alden ( 2019)
    THREE BOOKS: Voice, Literature, and Mind (2013–2018) The Absent Therapist / The Inevitable Gift Shop / Murmur The Absent Therapist is a kaleidophone of voices – internal monologues, meditations, expostulations – that stir, argue, wander and pronounce. They may be thought of as sketches of the mind in flight – a vocal fugue that both suggests longer stories (how much more remains to be said) and bears glancing witness to the irretrievable or unknowable (how much has been lost). A companion “memoir by other means”, The Inevitable Gift Shop examines provisionality, detachment and obliquity in literary criticism and the composition of the self. It draws on philosophical and artistic models of brevity (on Auden’s notational essays and Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example) to renew an engagement with sensibility – the “faculty for feeling” – and with problems of voice, mind, belief and consistency as they arise in writing. A third, closely-related section, Murmur, is a discursive novel. It draws on aspects of the later life and work of the logician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing, sentenced to a regime of organotherapy (chemical castration) in 1952 for Gross Indecency with another man. Turing told his Jungian analyst that he’d been dreaming vividly throughout the organotherapy, and the novel presents these dreams as versified hallucinations, framed by letters to the woman (Joan Clarke) he nearly married during the Second World War. Turing and his avatars appears as Alec Pryor. His fiancée becomes June Wilson. In correspondence, Pryor and June use their experience as cryptanalysts to investigate the possibilities of AI: the stumbling blocks are point-of-view, consciousness, and the reality of pain. Murmur constitutes an extension of philosophical material explored in The Inevitable Gift Shop.