PhD ThesisThis thesis singles out point of view (POV) as the governing technical choice in creative
writing. As such it integrates creative practice with an essay on the theoretical basis for a
POV across remote contexts. The methodology follows Mikhail Bakhtin’s call for a new
story telling position through an enquiry into Western literary history, Classical Chinese
novels and Gao Xingjian’s partitioning of POV by narrative angle.
Part One
Chapter one establishes the importance of POV to motives in my own creative work and sets
out the case for Bakhtin over normative theorists, calling for a reconfiguration of POV to
withstand contextual aberrations arising from cultural or historical differences, or from the
boundaries of what Bakhtin refers to as Small Time presentism. Further, it argues against
Tzvetan Todorov’s generic view of the novel as a property of discourse, an ahistorical
constant, by considering Bakhtin’s meta-historic survey of Western literature with periods of
intensified novelistic discourse in given contexts.
Chapter two considers POV in the separate context of Chinese literature focussing on the
historiographic POV taken in Classical Chinese novels, namely The Four Great Works.
Comparisons are drawn between these and Western short story cycles noting forms given in
Andrew Plaks’ Chinese Narrative (1977) and aesthetics in François Cheng’s Chinese Poetic
Writing (1982). Critical contemporary concerns arising between Classical and Modern
Chinese are addressed with reference to essays by Xi Chuan, Yang Liang and Henry Zhao.
Chapter three begins with reflexivity as an inherent property of what Bakhtin identifies as
discrete double voicing and draws parallels with the bi-polar unity of Daoism and its Chan
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(Zen) hybrid, consulting Victor Sōgen Hori’s studies of capping phrases and contemporary
techniques in the fiction, drama and essays of Gao Xingjian.
Part Two
Creative enquiry takes the form of a novel, Interesting Times, (working title: The Enigma of
Development), in which a first person protagonist’s narrative alternates with third person
short stories embedded in a historical schema. The novel depicts economic development
through the construction of a power station, following a schema of short story settings in one
location from pre-industrial salt making to sophisticated intellectual piracy, indentured
peasant labour to chaotic collateral debt finance. These short stories alternate with chapters
from the linking protagonist whose narrative encircles the whole from the rural location of his
family’s ancient English heritage. With the cognitive ground of one POV set against that of
the other, the resulting novel is intended to create an interpretive domain for the reflex
between the two, in this case a cyclical relationship between exploiter and exploited,
interchangeable as subjects and objects