The Queen’s play (novel) + texts & myths: a postscript to The Queen’s play & more (exegesis)

Abstract

This thesis is composed of two parts: creative and exegetical. The first part, my novel, The Queen's Play, tells the story of the origin of chess, linking it to the Indian epic, Ramayana, and in the process offers an alternative telling of the epic events. Although myths abound as to the invention of chess in the East, it is unclear whether it originated in India, China or Persia. References to a chess-like game in the Ramayana and the lore surrounding it refer as far back as the fifth century BCE. Using the game’s development as a narrative strategy in a time period which is immeasurably remote, this project probes perennial literary questions. The novel adopts the modernist technique of temporal and spatial disruptions in narration, even as the narrative at times seems to mimic the movement of certain chess pieces. The second part, the exegesis, is an exploration of my writing practice in the light of theories and disciplines including Narratology, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Psychology, and Mythology; and writers/thinkers including Marcel Proust, J.L. Borges, James Joyce, Stendhal, John Hawkes, Gérard Genette, Mikhail Bakhtin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georg Lukács, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Joseph Frank, and C.G. Jung. It investigates, inter alia, how reading practices inform those of writing; how certain kinds of narratives (in this case, ‘free-indirect style’) come to be constructed; how qualities such as lightness, speed, and multiplicity are harmonized to create the unique atmosphere of a novel; how the disruptions of spatial and temporal forms in the modern novel inform my own practice and patterns of structuring material and help find the most suitable voice for the story; and, finally, why such disruptions are particularly important in a novel that branches out of the epic.