Gut Feelings: Ann Quin and Instinct

Positioning the gut as the centre of feeling – a processing organ, but also an “organ of mind” that “ruminates, deliberates, comprehends” (Wilson 2015, 5) – this paper examines Ann Quin’s experimental fiction for its gut natures. Disregarding the demands of what might be considered “sensible” writing, Quin’s experiments in language display a tacit knowledge of embodied space, where often the processes involved in the passage towards sensemaking are prioritised over “making sense.” From this angle, what is “felt” in the text – where there is an apparent absence of ration or logic – becomes a conduit for a radical intelligence that perceives the environment as an extension of a particular somatic state. Julia Jordan notes that Quin’s writing exhibits some reliance on “the world of things exterior to us: space, geometry, matter” and that world’s inherent subjectivities (Jordan 2020, 141); my paper suggests that those subjectivities orbit a cognition borne from the animal and the embodied in conversation with instinct. Anchoring the gut in the supposedly cerebral waters of experimental writing, this paper considers the implications of viscera and body-environment intra-actions in the construction of text beyond the norm and outside reason.