Abstract:
In the most fundamental of Freud's discoveries, it has been argued, there exists a large part of
the psyche which is not under the direct conscious control of the individual. In referring to
this as 'the unconscious', Freud generated a paradox: how can we know of the existence of
the unknowable? (Fowler 1981: 193). This un/knowable unconscious underpins the fugal
narrative in its many variations. Varied perhaps, but structural similarities also unite
narratives such as these. 'Underworld narratives' rely on a fugal descent into the underworld,
including the underworld of the unconscious, which forms the structure of these narratives in
terms of both their ongoing framework and signified content, The underworld into which the
protagonist descends may be of a personal, social or cultural nature, or any combination of
these. This paper examines two novels which emphatically represent this type of narrative
structure. Most saliently, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, first published in 1911, and also
Susanna Moore's contemporary novel, In the Cut (1995), which offers a similar theme of
fatality and surrender. Both of these novels have as their main character an author whose self repression
leads to a fugal, self-destructive projection of their desire onto a' perfect' object
for the narrator's unconscious purposes. This paper is based on research for my recently
completed PhD thesis, 'The Writer's Fugue: authorship, subjectivity. and the self', which
applies the multivalent concept of 'fugue' to the creative writing process. As Deleuze argued
in his work on Proust, a work of art is analogous to a machine, because it is essentially
productive of certain truths (Deleuze 2000: 146). Mann's and Moore's murderous fugal
narratives explore analogous truths about the psychological state of writing and 'being' a
writer, both of which involve a necessary level of repression which can be represented
analogously as a form of death.
