Katherine, and, Watering the Void: The mystical writing practice of Fleur Jaeggy

Peters, Virginia (2025) Katherine, and, Watering the Void: The mystical writing practice of Fleur Jaeggy. Masters thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Katherine is a 34,000-word abridged extract from a work of true-fiction titled The Mystery of Us. I use the term true-fiction to describe a work that is grounded in real experiences, emotions and events; it is a paradoxical, hybrid term that has enabled the author of this work to break from old ways of thinking around autobiographical writing. (I use the term interchangeably with autofiction). The author-protagonist in Katherine, a surrogate for myself, is questioning her obsession with a dead woman murdered near her home some twenty years before. Having run a private investigation, published a true crime novel, and defended the book in a defamation case without knowing what was driving her, returning to the story years later the author remains blind to her own motives. Now, as the facts of the woman’s unsolved murder fade in significance, in this new work the author realises that the real mystery is not who committed the woman’s murder, but why she ever brought a murder victim into her family home in the first place. Was it a case of chance or destiny? She senses it was the latter. The dead woman stayed twenty-years. Now she’s gone – but where? More importantly, why did she even come in the first place? These are the questions that concern the strand that follows and the greater encompassing work.

The companion essay to this submission explores the mystical writing practice of the Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy and her highly original work Sweet Days of Discipline. ‘Before writing, Jaeggy enters her own vuoto, the Italian for “empty space,” “vacuum,” “nothingness,” “hole.” Intimations in Jaeggy’s interviews, and appearing across her work, suggest her practice of entering a ‘void’ is a ritualistic attempt to be in concert with the divine (or what Jaeggy’s narrator calls ‘the absolute’). In secular terms, the divine is perhaps a word for escaping the facticity and self-consciousness of the self. To be free of the burden of names, facts, the self, to reach beyond to the ineffable, an author perhaps has no choice but to engage in the art of paradox – linguistic experimentation and ‘onomastic correspondence’ with an invented self – which some say are elements typical of autofictional writing.

The essay is about a particular creative approach. It is not concerned with genre, that is what box this work fits into on completion, but the unconstrained void – a void into which one goes to uncover material hidden from the logical, rational mind. After writing a pragmatic book using the left hemisphere of the brain, what happens when you allow your same protagonist to roam freely through the labyrinth of the nocturnal mind via the brain’s right hemisphere? Who is this other that you encounter within? If the product of a dream, how is it this imagined ‘other’ seems to know more about the author and her world than the rational, logical self, who for years slaved to understand the connections between herself and the dead girl - and failed?

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	06 Nov 2025 10:55
Last Modified:	06 Nov 2025 10:55
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100914
DOI:

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