Minding the Gaps: A novel, Cagnaccio and critical commentary exploring the potential spaces of fiction and their influence on reader experience.

Abstract

This thesis is divided into two elements: a novel, Cagnaccio, and a critical commentary that investigates the potential spaces in the reader’s relationship to a text that a novelist may utilise to influence the reader experience. Cagnaccio is a novel set in the late seventeenth century Italian Papal State that follows a troupe of Commedia dell’arte players and explores the nature and roles of the spectator and participant. An experimental novel, its structure mediates between playscript and novel conventions, demonstrating the nature of the reader relationship, by using a layered, metaleptic approach to the levels of narrative experience.
The critical commentary seeks to briefly discuss the critical context that influenced the decisions that resulted in the adoption of the novel’s innovative structure and layout. It considers the implications of the reader relationship to the act of reading, including the dynamics of immersion and reflection, the role and behaviour of the reader, the proximity of space and temporal setting, and the transferability of a novel’s themes into the reader’s actual world, drawing on Winnicott’s theories of potential space and the importance of playing as a catalyst not only for personal change but as a locus of cultural experience.
The commentary compares and contrasts the reader perspective with that of a theatrical spectator, drawing inferences from the spectator-to-participant continuum not just in the theatre but also in their correspondences to the reading act. By considering the nature of performance and identity, on- and offstage, it investigates commonalities between the doubleness of the actor, the reader, and the spectator. The commentary highlights the theatrical devices that helped shape the novel’s final form and goes on to reflect on the novel’s implications for future participatory fiction.

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ORCID for Andrew David Cliff: orcid.org/0000-0001-7913-0235

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