Prose Rhythm and the Thickening of Time, and, The Apologetic

Darling, Brett (2026) Prose Rhythm and the Thickening of Time, and, The Apologetic. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

PDF Restricted to Repository staff only until 28 February 2029. Request a copy

Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between rhythm and creative writing. Specifically, I conceive rhythm not as unifying meter but as the unfolding of a non-fixed subjectivity. It examines the implications of this for narrative perspective in a work of fiction, and in doing so explores, through the mode of humour, concepts of self-narrativization, agency, guilt and shame.

Through a novel, I investigate the idea of a rhythmically deferred subject, by constructing a narrative I that remains perpetually unfixed. The resulting fiction shows a character who, against hope, attempts to place himself in time in relation to a past, which, perpetually disrupts his position in the present, while undermining any future grounded in hope.

The critical component of the thesis proposes first that rhythm be thought of not as an element of style, but as the temporal structuring of subjectivity; and second, that time itself is rhythmically arranged. In making these claims, I draw on Henri Meschonnic, Émile Benveniste and David Nowell Smith, to consider the implications of a non-unifying theory of rhythm for narrative subjectivity. Through analyses of Julio Cortázar, Witold Gombrowicz, and Hilda Hilst, I explore how pronoun experimentation and temporal oscillation produce a narrative position that remains unfixed yet paradoxically evokes intimacy, immediacy and presence. Finally, I conduct an analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, in order to trace a poetics by which prose can articulate time’s own rhythmic depth.

The creative project tells the story of a man estranged from the retelling of his life, following the release of his ex-wife’s autobiographical novel, and a subsequent film adaptation being made by StudioCanal. The novel opens in France during the film’s production, on which the narrator has been dubiously employed as a script advisor to his own role, a part which only that morning has been cut. Along with his double, Vincent, the actor playing his own role, the crew set out on a search for Juliette Binoche, the principal player, who has gone missing in the woods. In a comic case of mistaken identity with the now defunct method actor taking his place in the woods, the narrator struggles to make sense of his life in New York and the set of events which led him into a position of unreliability even in the narration of his own life.

When the conceptual and emotional justification for his retreat collapses, the novel returns to New York, where the writer walks a final few, bittersweet, hopeful steps toward a reckoning with his past, in search of a future the reader already knows will elude him. And yet in this final walk, the past offers a glimpse of redemption that questions both the linearity of time, and any claim to ultimate authority when it comes to the narration of a life.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	11 Jun 2026 13:30
Last Modified:	11 Jun 2026 13:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/103375
DOI:

Actions (login required)

View Item