Hearing Voices: The Extended Mind in Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
Yuexi Liu
Modernist Cultures May 1, 2020 DOI: 10.3366/mod.2020.0289 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold advances 'exterior modernism' by externalizing interiority through dissociation, with Pinfold's auditory hallucinations figured as an extended mind operating like a radio. The author contends that the breakdown of communication causes these hallucinations and that the suppressed trauma behind them is the Second World War, while writing itself is presented as a dissociative activity linking madness and creativity. |
Abstract
Waugh's last comic novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) takes ‘exterior modernism’ to a new height, no longer avoiding interiority – as in his interwar fiction – but exteriorising the interior through dissociation. ‘The Box’, to which the writer-protagonist attributes the source of the tormenting voices, may well be his own mind, an extended – albeit unhealthy – mind that works as a radio: he transmits his thoughts and then receives them as external signals in order to communicate with them. Pinfold's auditory hallucinations are caused by the breakdown of communication. Interestingly, writing is also a dissociative activity. Concerned with the writer's block, the novel reflects on the creative process and illuminates the relationship between madness and creativity. If dissociation, or the splitting of the mind, is a defence against trauma, the traumatic experience Pinfold attempts to suppress is the Second World War. The unusual state of mind accentuates the contingency of Waugh's radio writing; his preferred medium is cinema.