Writing the Aesopic Body: fables from the Anthropause

Norton, Nick (2024) Writing the Aesopic Body: fables from the Anthropause. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This practice-based research project proposes the Aesopic Body as a twenty-first century expression of fable-function: using bricolage, autoethnography and a study of Aby Warburg’s ‘Mnemosyne’ project, I examine how fable-function assists a creative writing practice’s response to precarious contemporary conditions.1 I use ‘Aesopic Body’ to indicate how the function of the fable, as encountered in the Aesopic canon, may be considered in long-form fiction (Perry, 1952). This Aesopic Body evolves into an embodied metaphor representing a malleable use of fable-like effect – that is, a questioning of power relationships. At the same time, fable-function in an Aesopic Body is a manner of foregrounding how the craft of fiction can carry a sense of rupture, with gestures, landscapes, or patterns of correspondence becoming an additional level of tale-telling. The research is interdisciplinary in scope, reflecting the investigations that contextualise and feed creative writing as I explore how an Aesopic Body provides narrative strategies. This is the critical frame for the novel Laughter at the Edge of Tears which began within the Anthropause, a traumatic hiatus in twenty-first century baseline activity caused by a world pandemic. 2 The critical frame for a creative writing practice is extended via this societal trauma. Within large-scale relational uncertainty my research scrutinises how fable-function will assist narrative and creative writing in a shifting and imperilled environment.