Clockwork Man: a novel and exegesis

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Humanities, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

The thesis consists of a novel and an accompanying critical work. The novel, entitled Clockwork Man, tells the story of three people whose bodies have been transformed either by remedial or cosmetic medical procedures. Leon, an Australian man, has a hole though [ie through] his chest inside which sits a mechanical heart. Kathryn, an Irish woman, has a body covered in black wool, an unexpected side effect of gene therapy for Huntington’s disease. Greek Christos is a performance artist who has had carbon fibre and metal composite wings implanted onto his back. The wings can be moved by muscles in his body but they are for performance only (he cannot fly). The three people are brought together as an uncanny performance group by an American entrepreneur and become a global sensation. Their resulting fame and wealth, together with their physical transformations, attract fans and enemies who desire or despise or fear them, and sometimes do all three at once. What makes them objects of fascination also places them in danger. The accompanying work, Rendering: the autobiography of a novel, is an attempt to perform the uncanny in a text exploring aspects of my research for the novel and the rendering of the uncanny in all writing and reading. Rendering brings the doubling of writer and reader into the multiplicities of textual readings, with commentary by and dialogue with Freud and Cixous from their papers ‘The Uncanny’ and ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche.’ Rendering travels the writing and reading of becoming an avatar in Second Life, performance art that manipulates and mutates the body, and the uncanny life within death within life of automata and human cells.