Light the Towel: Narrative and the Negotiated Unconscious

A novelist writing a fractured, multi-voice narrative describes feeling estranged from the work yet strangely familiar with it, as the stories resisted linear coherence. The paper examines this experience through the lens of altered states of consciousness, particularly hypnagogia—the state between wakefulness and sleep—drawing on Andreas Mavromatis's work to explain how the unconscious shapes authorial intention and narrative material without full conscious control.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract This investigation is a practice-based inquiry. It takes place in the context of writing and editing a novel manuscript: The earth does not get fat (Prendergast 2012). The unpublished novel manuscript is a fractured narrative, a tale told in multiple first-person voices. One of the problems the writer encountered, as the novel developed, was a problem from the perspective of logic and continuity: the stories did not fit together in a linear way. As a result, the writer felt estranged from the writing and, at the same time, strangely familiar with it. Despite having produced the narrative, the writer felt that it was ‘other’. This paper summarises the writer's methodology; it explains the writer's attachment to this fractured style of telling. This fractured style is assessed within the context of the mind's ability to produce its effects without full consciousness. The analysis of authorial intention therefore focuses upon the influence of altered states of consciousness upon narrative material. In particular, the writer uses Andreas Mavromatis’ (1987) work on hypnagogia: described as ‘the unique state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep’ to describe the experience of the operation of the unconscious in authorial intention.