(This Introduction was written for the purposes of scholarship and education, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing.)
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Incomplete Pictures aims to explore the relationship between literature and philosophy. The novel is experimental in nature, applying the themes of reincarnation and enlightenment and attempting to push language’s ability to mediate a state of consciousness to its limits. A key theme in the novel is the narrator’s struggle to find agency and a central identity. This is further problematised by the narrator’s apparent experiencing of memory from past lives. This lack of an essential identity and hope for a unified meaning opens up the imaginative space of the text.
I began this work as a way to give philosophy a practical application within the space of art, although I acknowledge that I am not the first to do so, with philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus creating some of their best works across a number of artistic mediums. I am indebted to the works of these philosophers, as well as to the works of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and Yukio Mishima. Without these sources of inspiration, the conception of this work would have been much more difficult.
Beckett’s sparse aesthetic – which inspired the often-overlooked works of Kavan and Quin – as well as the dark humour espoused throughout his works, have been a major inspiration to my own writing for some time. Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility,as well as his other novels such as Confessions of a Mask, have also informed my latest writing. Mishima’s ambitious tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, is a series of novels in which a character is reincarnated, reappearing in each subsequent novel under a different guise. Mishima uses Buddhist philosophy to critique the ongoing Westernisation of Japan, and exposes his protagonist to a hollowness that has begun to saturate his life:
Rather than pulling the rug out from under Honda’s feet, Mishima plucks the wool from his eyes, removing the veil of ignorance and forcing him to experience the void underlying everything. How persistent we suppose Honda’s Western rational sensibility to be (there are scattered hints of its gradual erosion) will also determine whether we imagine him living out his life as the sufferer of Sartrian anguish or the beneficiary of mystic enlightenment. (Wagenaar & Iwamoto 1975, p. 58)
This conflict of both personal and cultural identity drives much of Mishima’s work. However, throughout The Sea of Fertility, the question of identity becomes increasingly problematic, due to the use of reincarnation as both a philosophical and a literary device. It was not until after I had developed an interest in Buddhist philosophy and decided to utilise this philosophy as the theoretical basis of my novel that I discovered Mishima’s tetralogy. In addition to this, The Sea of Fertility inspired my notion of a serial novel being capable of existing also as a standalone work. Therefore, although part of a wider series, Incomplete Pictures can be read as a separate text to the rest of the trilogy to which it belongs.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks of the possibility of liberation after death, as well as the numerous pitfalls to avoid when in the bardo state. The bardo state is an intermediary state between death and reincarnated birth. In Incomplete Pictures, the bardo state is portrayed as a dreamscape, with different realms being depicted through multiple psychological states. One of the consequences of the many pitfalls of the bardo is the possibility of reincarnation and returning to the world as another being. The bardo state can therefore be applied to everyday life, since ‘the doctrine of reincarnation, the six kinds of existence, and the intermediate bardo state between them refer very much to this life, whether or not they apply after death’ (Fremantle 1975, p. xxiii). Following this theory of reincarnation, Incomplete Pictures is therefore an exploration of identity in the face of the possibility of becoming more than a single person over time. The composition of the self in much Buddhist philosophy is the amalgamation of the five aggregates: form; feelings; perceptions; dispositions; and awareness (Thakchoe 2019). Buddhist philosophy professor Sonam Thakchoe expands further:
The continuum of the five aggregates is designated as a conventionally real person, in that the continuum serves the pragmatic purpose of who we are as persons, explaining the principles of karmic responsibility and causation. (Thakchoe 2019, p. 821)
Since ‘rebirth does not entail annihilation of the aggregates’ (Thakchoe 2019, p. 820), it is therefore theoretically possible for reincarnation to occur. In Incomplete Pictures, the narrator’s ability to access memory from past lives leads him to the recognition that he could become any being at any point in time.
The narrative of Incomplete Pictures is a landscape that both frees and imprisons the narrator as he fights for agency through voice and expression. Conversely, he seeks silence and cessation, which gives rise to a seemingly inescapable contradiction. There are, therefore, multiple theoretical devices at play: On the one hand, there is a spiritual element in the search for knowledge and meaning; and on the other, there is a glaring technical limitation in language’s ability to access these philosophical areas, leading to language becoming exhausted. In his book on Buddhist philosophy, which attempts to mediate between Western and Eastern philosophical traditions, Jay Garfield outlines this problem:
Language hence misleads us into taking to be ultimately real that which is only conventionally real. And when we try to use language to talk explicitly about ultimate reality, things are even worse. For nothing exists ultimately, and so there are no referents for words in such a discourse. (Garfield 2015, p. 249 – 50)
The search for a renewal of epistemology cannot move away from language and from the voice that speaks; it continues on through futility but always with an absurd sense of hope, seeking to ‘postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator’ (Foucault 1979, p. 142). The importance of Beckett’s ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (Beckett 1958, p. 407) becomes apparent here.
In addition to philosophy, I have mentioned that the research for this novel has consisted chiefly of avant-garde experimental texts – texts that aspire to the pursuit of knowledge through creative practise. These include Quin’s entire oeuvre, Ice by Kavan as well as several of her collections of short stories, Beckett’s influential trilogy and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. In furthering this tradition of innovation and experimentation, Incomplete Pictures aims to create a textual experience that will lead to new insights in relation to being-in-the-world. The landscape of the novel is an extended dream in which the dreamer is never fully actualised. This ambiguity allows the text to take an open form of enquiry into the nature of reality with respect to textual representation.
The project itself is an attempt for the narrator to fill his own vacuous interior with a text that creates an illusion of identity. This idea stems back to Sartre and the human being as an ongoing project that has no fundamental essence, a position effected at the conclusion of his epistolary novel Nausea. Writing a novel is therefore a powerful and decisive way of undertaking the project of becoming a human being. In Incomplete Pictures, it is the narrator, rather than the author, who is the creator of the text. Michel Foucault contends the following:
In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears. (Foucault 1979, p.142)
The sense of absence the narrator experiences is not one of despair but rather the opening of possibility. This possibility relates closely to Buddhist theories of emptiness – an emptiness that allows for the possibility of fullness. The incomplete nature of the narrator’s interior and exterior world (of which there becomes little distinction) allows for the possibility of change and liberation from suffering.
As the bardo state dissipates and its formlessness gives way to form, our narrator finds himself in an increasingly strange and uncompromising world. This sense of the strange and absurd opens the text to philosophical questioning of its own inherent and fundamental assumptions.
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