Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle
38 | Spring 2002 Special issue: Poetics of the everyday in the Canadian short story
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Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2002 ISSN: 0294-04442
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis
Preface Laurent Lepaludier
Strategies for Survival: Daily Trot and Sudden Insights in Sinclair Ross’s “Cornet at Night” Miroslawa Ziaja-Buchholtz
Surreality, not dull fidelity: Marian Engel’s Poetics of the Everyday Afra Kavanagh
The everyday in “The Closing Down of Summer” by Alistair McLeod Laurent Lepaludier
Carol Shields and the poetics of the quotidian Marta Dvorak
The Ordinary as Subterfuge: Alice Munro’s “Pictures of the Ice” Héliane Ventura
Ordinary Tragedies in Madeleine Thien’s “A Map of the City” Christine Lorre
Book reviews
Gabriella Goliger, Song of Ascent Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2000 Carole Birkan
Karen Smythe, Stubborn Bones Vancouver: Polestar Book Publishers, 2001 Manuel Martinez
Journal of the Short Story in English, 38 | Spring 2002 2
Foreword
Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis
1 The present issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English has been prepared in cooperation with Laurent Lepaludier, head of the English branch of the CERPECA (Centre de Recherches en Etudes Canadiennes d'Angers). His preface presents an overall view of the poetics of the everyday in Canadian short stories as well as the articles which have been selected for publication. This special Canadian short story issue also contains book reviews of short story collections by two promising young Canadian writers – Karen Smythe and Gabriella Goliger. Copies of the collections were generously provided by Raincoast Books, Vancouver, BC Canada.
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Preface
Laurent Lepaludier
1 Whether fiction focuses more on the ordinary or on the extraordinary would be a matter of endless debate, for examples of the two trends in literature abound. The form of the short story certainly allows the extraordinary to be represented – for instance in heroic, gothic or fantastic modes – but the genre can also underscore the quotidian – modernist and post-modernist writers have often focused on it. It seems that if the focus on the everyday can do without the extraordinary, the exceptional can only be perceived in relation to the ordinary. The poetics of fiction often explicitly set the extraordinary in the context of the everyday. Or else – as is sometimes the case in the marvellous mode or in science fiction stories – the narrative appeals to the reader’s implicit knowledge of the everyday. The theme of this special issue of The Journal of the Short Story in English, the everyday in the Canadian short story, raises the question of the nature, forms and functions of the quotidian in fiction. The purpose of this issue is not so much to define the characteristics of a typically Canadian quotidian life – whatever it may be – as to approach its treatment in the Canadian short story.
2 Linguistic forms of the quotidian can certainly be identified. The everyday is represented explicitly by iterative1 time indications. Semantic, modal, verbal, adverbial or adjectival iterative forms indicate an everyday or usual occurrence. A few examples taken from different short stories by Jane Urquhart will illustrate this. “Every night I danced La Sylphide, creating my reputation with them as ‘the daughter of the air’”.2 The iterative adjective “every” obviously defines a quotidian habit. “The Death of Robert Browning” provides us with a similar example: “He took a cold bath each morning and every afternoon insisted on a three–mile walk during which he performed small errands from a list his sister had made earlier in the day.”3 The plural indicating frequency is used in another story of hers, “Italian Postcards”: “The room she lies in on weekdays, when she has managed to stay home from school, is all hers.”4 In this sentence the present tense also conveys the idea of the usual. The use of the present is not rare in Jane Urquhart’s stories – or in Alistair McLeod’s – as the following example shows: “Sometimes what you are running away from and what you find when you stop running and arrive somewhere else are almost the same thing – variations on a ghostly theme.”5 If in this case, one could argue that the adverb “sometimes” does not apply to
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the everyday strictly speaking, the linguistic forms will nevertheless be the same. Because most stories are told in the preterite, it is not surprising that the iterative forms of the preterite – would, used to – should be more commonly employed. Such forms are often – but not exclusively – found at the beginning or at the end of a story. Each example given above is actually part of an incipit and contributes to creating a background to the story. In fact, even at the beginning of a story, explicit references to the quotidian are by no means the most frequent forms of the everyday.
3 Narratives depict the everyday with the simple past. The beginning of “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro clearly conveys the idea of the quotidian: “My father was a fox farmer. That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed them and sold their pelts to the Hudson’s Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders.”6 One could argue that the preterite can linguistically express a habit, but narratives can do without specific linguistic forms to convey a sense of the quotidian. Thus a description of a familiar setting or domestic objects, common activities in the home or at work, the mention of traditions, a simple time indication such as “in the morning”, an ordinary character – especially when presented as a type or named in a way which suggests it – implicitly refer to the everyday and call upon the reader’s inferences and knowledge (Umberto Eco’s “encyclopaedia”) of the quotidian. Most articles in this issue are based on this assumption, whether they are written by scholars who are Canadian, have been to Canada, know or imagine what daily life can be or was in Canada.
4 Is there such a thing as a Canadian everyday? Canadian fiction doubtless reflects historical, geographical or cultural characteristics of daily life in Canada in the past or in the present. However, the local and the universal often undermine the Canadian dimension of a story. Does “Post and Beam” by Alice Munro focus on a Canadian couple, on their life and experience in Vancouver, or more generally on human relationships? On all three, certainly, but in different ways. The deepest emotional impact of the story will – arguably – depend on its universal appeal. In the same way, “The Closing Down of Summer” by Alistair McLeod is not just a story about Canadian miners and their daily life during the holiday season. It is also – and more typically – about Cape Breton miners of Scottish descent. But it also exemplifies the life of a community of men – akin to the experience of the community of fishermen in my French native village – and powerfully deals with universal issues such as work, death and social rites. This raises the question of the functions of the representation of the everyday in fiction.
5 The mimetic interest of a story cannot be denied, the representation of the everyday being part and parcel of its aesthetics. The effect of verisimilitude often depends on it. Fiction does not however simply imitate life: it gives it significance. The everyday is shaped by the narrative, the plot, descriptions, dialogues and other literary devices so that it becomes a meaningful form. It is schematised and turned into an aesthetically meaningful form. Its narrative and dramatic functions must be mentioned too. If, for instance, the representation of the everyday in an incipit provides the story with the creation of a background on which the action will take place, its situation in an excipit will be understood as an outcome of the events of the plot. In addition, the quotidian is not devoid of ideological interest. It may trigger reflections on gender stereotypes or social habits and rites. The everyday may also have a psychological function if it appeals to the reader’s delight in the familiar – the regressive pleasure of enjoying what is well known – or to a voyeuristic fascination with the daily life of others – the
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characters. Finally, an aesthetic function of the representation of the quotidian will involve the creation of images with familiar objects and setting and a work of symbolisation of the everyday. Thus the mundane will acquire an aesthetic dimension and escape triviality. The role of fiction, as indicated by the identification of all these functions, is to transcend the everyday whether by miming it, or turning it into an object of reflection or beauty.
6 In this collection of essays, Miroslawa Buchholtz and Afra Kavanagh emphasise two different aspects of the quotidian. Studying Sinclair Ross’s “Cornet at Night”, Miroslawa Buchholtz focuses on experience and growth in a context of “quotidian drudgery” while Afra Kavanagh shows how Marian Engel, dismissing “kitchen sink realism” and using Surrealist strategies, underlines the “magic of the ordinary”. In a study of Alistair MacLeod’s “The Closing Down of Summer”, I try to analyse how the construction of the everyday evokes transience rather than stability and suggests that transcendence is partially achieved through the community’s rituals and myth-making. Three contributions focus more particularly on the poetic role of quotidian objects. Marta Dvorak examines the treatment of objects in Carol Shields’s stories and their transformation into signs, “symbols or emblems of an ontological stance”. Among the various everyday objects mentioned in both Héliane Ventura’s article on Alice Munro’s “Pictures of the Ice” and Christine Lorre’s study of Madeleine Thien’s “A Map of the City”, photographs are seen as ways of transforming ordinariness into transcendence and ways of knowing the others or the self. Hopefully these articles will contribute to a better knowledge of Canadian short stories and of the way writing explores and transcends the quotidian.
NOTES
1. . Genette defines the iterative as telling once what happened several times (« raconter une seule fois (ou plutôt : en une seule fois) ce qui s’est passé n fois »), Figures III, Paris : Seuil, Coll. Poétique, 1972, 147. 2. . “Artificial Ice”, in Storm Glass, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000, 101. 3. . Ibid., 3 4. . Ibid., 139. 5. . « John’s Cottage », ibid., 21. 6. . Alice Munro, « Boys and Girls », Dance of the Happy Shades, Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1968, 111.
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AUTHOR
LAURENT LEPALUDIER Université d’Angers
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Strategies for Survival: Daily Trot and Sudden Insights in Sinclair Ross’s “Cornet at Night”
Miroslawa Ziaja-Buchholtz
1 The lives of Sinclair Ross’s characters are full of quotidian drudgery and constant tug of war against nature. They plod along with little hope for a reward, and the suspense the reader experiences with them takes on an existential dimension. The questions underlying Ross’s fiction and answered inconclusively are these: Will they have their crops? Will they survive? The readers’ and the characters’ concern with these dilemmas renders all other issues insignificant by comparison. The relentlessness of oppressive circumstances drains the characters’ energy and makes them seek strength and hope, which are indispensable to survival, in beliefs and stories whose vestiges are recognisable in their verbal and non-verbal behaviour. John Barth once compared readers to ducks which “ [t]ake a breath, take the plunge, take [their] tidbit, and soon surface” (quoted in Curnutt 1). It seems that this statement applies just as well to the characters in Ross’s short narratives. Not that they are avid readers in the primary sense of this word. They are readers, however, in the sense of absorbing and internalising already available models of behaviour. They take occasional plunges deep beneath the surface of their daily routine to gather nourishment and strength.
2 This paper studies the partial and unreliable wisdom the characters in “Cornet at Night” (first published in Queen’s Quarterly in 1939) derive from a variety of sources. The story has been selected for analysis because it is both typical and exceptional among Ross’s narratives. Its cast of characters – a close-knit, nuclear family consisting of mother, father and son – resembles other stories by Ross. In spite of mutual affection, each member of the family chooses to serve a different deity, and each adopts a different strategy for surviving. The story is exceptional among Ross’s oeuvre in its narrative technique. Along with “The Outlaw” and “The Runaway,” “Cornet at Night” is one of the few texts in which Ross “venture[s] from third-person into a retrospective first-person narrative voice” (Gadpaille 33). Very much like Conrad Aiken in his famous “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” Ross endows an observant boy with adult eloquence thus
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fusing two characters: the young boy who can experience without evaluating and the adult man for whom retrieved experience equals naming and evaluation. One would be tempted to say that in “Cornet at Night,” Ross gives voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. And yet, the composite nature of the first-person narrator (he is both a boy and an adult man) makes the situation more complex. The voice and the power emerge as the benefits of socialisation. In one respect the story is a true boy’s narrative; namely, it provides no information about the social or political context. To the boy, the prairie is the whole world, and historical contingencies do not exist. It remains for historians of Canadian literature to explain that his short fiction “is a legacy of the drought years of the thirties on the prairies – the depression moving imperceptibly into the war years” (Djwa 190). As Lawrence Mathews observes, however, As For Me and My House is characterised by similar ahistoricism: “it is remarkable that so much of what realism normally includes has been edited out of Ross’s depiction of Bentleys’ lives” (158). Matthews argues further that in Ross’s novel “[t]here is no serious examination of political and social issues, no indication that collective action may be as interesting or important as individual action” (158–159). This statement applies to “Cornet at Night” as well.
3 Indeed, as in Ross’s novel, in “Cornet at Night” “[t]he significance of the protagonist’s experience is personal; that is, it is to be understood in terms of his or her individual growth, development, identity” (Mathews 159). The short story dramatises the crucial moment of Tommy’s development as a social being. Challenged to choose one of the available adult roles, he looks further afield than his home and family, and finds his own mode of existence. In his narrative, the mother emerges as a grotesque character whereas the father remains a marginal figure. Waging a never-ending war against each other, both parents treat their son as a territory to be claimed and appropriated. Both want to have their ways perpetuated in the youth, who in spite of the pressure, finds teachers elsewhere. Seen in retrospect, both parents are larger than life and stand for irreconcilable notions and traditions.
4 The boy’s mother, Mrs Dickson, who takes refuge in exaggerated piety, appears to be a ludicrous figure. She insists that on “the Lord’s Day” her husband should not do any work (Ross 35), and her son should do nothing but behave like a Christian and a gentleman (37). The narrator consistently inscribes her in the semantic field of religious principles. She spends with her son “an austere half-hour in the dark, hot, plushy little parlour,” which the son labels as “a kind of vicarious atonement.” The boy submits to this practice because he realises that his mother is “in no mood for granting dispensations” (36). He notices the august tone in her voice, the “unappetizing righteousness” of the atmosphere she creates, and decides that his mother is “a case of downright bigotry”(37). The very objects surrounding her serve as symbols of her religious beliefs. The plushy parlour is furnished with “straight-backed leather chairs” facing “a big pansy-bordered motto on the opposite wall: As for Me and My House We Will Serve the Lord” (36). The motto is the ever-present vestige of the Bible, from which on Sundays the mother also reads to the boy (37).
5 And yet, the mother’s religious fervour has clear social underpinnings, which the composite boy-adult narrator unfailingly exposes. Her strictness is the front she puts on for the sake of others, the wealthy Aunt Louise in particular. The Sunday visitor is supposed to see that mother and son remain “uncontaminated by [the] father’s sacrilege,” and that at least the boy is brought up decently (37). Since the plushy room
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can hardly impress the relative, Mrs Dickson invests in her son’s music lessons to boast of him as “a man-child and prodigy” able to eclipse Aunt Louise’s motor-car (38). In spite of Mrs Dickson’s stated intention, the two do not go to Church after all. When it becomes obvious that no visitors are coming, the mother allows the boy to play lighter music, to put on his comfortable clothes, and then to run in the fields. Mrs Dickson’s affectionate inconsistency, along with her social concerns, takes the edge off her religious strictness. Far from enforcing any of her principles on either her husband or her son, she is reduced to mere sulking.
6 When the thin veneer of religion is scratched off, the mother’s social ambition becomes a glaring contrast to Mr Dickson’s life in, for, and by nature. Whereas the mother is to the boy a repository of social values, the father stands for nature. This is how Tom describes him at the outset of the story: “Ordinarily my father was a pleasant , accommodating little man, but this morning his wheat and the wind had lent him a sudden steel” (35). Apart from uniting the temporal and the spatial, the alliterating metaphor evokes with astounding economy the image of nature as an army, and of a farmer as a fighting soldier. The above quotation may well substantiate Gadpaille’s claim that Ross “perfect[ed] in his stories the use of landscape as a symbol – fusing man and prairie in interlocking metaphors” (32). However, Gadpaille’s argument that all men in Ross’s fiction belong “to the gang of futility” (31) needs to be qualified. It is a sign of power that Mr Dickson is the first person to speak in the whole narrative, but what he says is a declaration of his powerlessness. His first words are: “Can’t help it” (Ross 35). And yet, in his skirmishes with his wife, who stands for social values, he always has the upper hand. He remains helpless only in confrontation with nature, from which he also derives all heroism he is capable of. When the musician fails as a farm hand, the narrator realises that his father’s accusations come from helplessness and not from anger. “Helplessness to escape his wheat when wheat was not enough, when something more than wheat had just revealed itself” (50).
7 It is neither his middle-class mother nor his farmer father whom the boy chooses as his role model. He inevitably and inadvertently takes after both; like his father he accepts the manly challenge of an unaccompanied ride to town, like his mother, he is concerned with his social status. However, he consciously learns from others. One of his preceptors is the old horse Rock, who leads him to the town. The other is the musician Philip whom he meets in the town and brings home. The very name of the horse suggests stability, reliability, and imperturbability. Repeatedly personified, Rock is “philosophic enough to meet motor-cars and the chance locomotive on an equal and even somewhat supercilious footing” (39) and to relish “oats even within a stone’s throw of sophisticated Main Street” (42). The boy tries to emulate Rock’s behaviour. And yet the old, reliable Rock, the boy’s surrogate father, goes berserk when Philip begins to play his cornet on the way home. “But there was only one note – only one fragment of a note – and then away went Rock. I’d never have believed he had it in him” (46).
8 The horse runs away shortly after Philip has enlarged on the difference between the boy’s wild pony Clipper and the “sleepy old plow-horse” like Rock, drawing an analogy between horses and humans. Rock’s unpredictable outbreak of wildness may well be viewed as a protest against this unfair classification. And in retrospect, Philip’s philosophic monologue may appear as a challenge of both the old horse and the boy’s parents, whom the horse substitutes. The distinction Philip draws is not, however, a
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value judgement. The etymology of his name, which means horse-lover, suggests that he offers himself in his art to all alike. The boy’s and the musician’s eyes meet for the first time “in the big mirror behind the counter” in the Chinese restaurant, where the boy comes to have his soda (43). Before they enter a companionship in reality, it exists as a reflection in both meanings of this word. This first sign of understanding reached between the boy and the musician in the mirror suggests a level of communication beyond reality, where one person can mirror or even become another.
9 The illusion of mixed or exchanged identities does not hold, however. The boy’s possessiveness derives from three impulses he develops or inherits: his love of music, his mother’s social ambition, as well as his father’s responsibility for others. The boy looks at the musician travelling with him and muses: “This stranger with the white thin hands, this gleaming cornet that as yet I hadn’t even heard, intimately and enduringly now they were my possessions.” In front of his sceptical parents, the boy tries to “champion” the musician (47). Tom’s companionship with Philip has every appearance of the communion between kindred spirits. The musician does not tell any stories, as if the two “had always known each other and long outgrown the need of conversation.” Nor does he explain “where he came from, why he should be here to do [the] stooking” (48). There is music, instead, which gives “life expanse” and “float[es] up against the night” (49). Both parents listen and acknowledge the high art, which is, nevertheless, useless to them (50). They are polite and considerate, but the crops are far more important to them than an artistic whim. The final sentence is a maxim which the narrator ascribes to his mother because he seems afraid of admitting his own complicity in the betrayal of art: “A harvest, however lean, is certain every year; but a cornet at night is golden only once” (51).
10 Unlike the protagonist of Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” Tom does not hold on to his illusion, and becomes socialised. This happens when he suppresses his desire to rebel “against the clumsiness and crudity of life,” and passively accepts his father’s decision to bring the musician back to the town and to look for a better worker. The reader is prepared for such an outcome because the boy’s readiness to oblige and comply has been mentioned before. For example, when the parents quarrel early on over the boy’s ride, Tom does not rebel “for the hope that by compliance [he] yet might win permission for the trip to town with Rock” (37). In retrospect, the narrator thus excuses his behaviour: “For while it was always my way to exploit the future, I liked to do it rationally, within the limits of the sane and probable. [...] I have always been tethered to reality, always compelled by an unfortunate kind of probity in my nature to prefer a barefaced disappointment to the luxury of a future I have no just claims upon.” (38)
11 The final scene and the mother’s maxim concluding the narrative illustrate the introspective generalisation quoted above. And yet, although a precious possession is lost, much is won. Read as a story of a budding musician (a reading encouraged by the narrator’s concern with sound effects and rhythm), “Cornet at Night” dramatises the moment when freedom is discovered in music and through music. Ross supposes cautiously “you could call it an aesthetic wakening” (quoted in McMullen 19). The boy is at first surrounded with the sounds which belong to the respective spheres of his parents: nature and society. He hears Rock munch unconcerned, and realises his own nervousness (41). He hears Clipper whinny as if in invitation for a ride, only to resist the temptation (36). The squeaking of his Sunday-best corduroys is an unbearable
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affliction (36-37). The boy plays either wooden Church hymns or else marches which inevitably end “in the bitter dust of dissonance” (38). It is only Philip’s cornet that has the power to transform reality. “Somehow its gold and shapeliness persisted, transfiguring the day, quickening the dusty harvest fields to a gleam and lustre like its own. And I felt assured, involved. Suddenly there was a force in life, a current, an inevitability, carrying me along too” (47). Thus the boy discovers a power which eclipses that of nature or society. He complies with his parents’ decision to find another farm hand, but he gives to his reminiscence the title “Cornet at Night,” and in so doing contradicts his mother’s wisdom. Far from being golden only once, a cornet at night gleams and lives every time the story is read, remembered, and mentioned.
12 The title, which subverts the interpolated moral, proves that the apparently powerless have their strategies for keeping forbidden dreams. It seems that on the whole too much is being made of the tragic quality of Ross’s fiction, its “relentless realism,” its “depiction of suffering, its “stoic humanity,” and its exploration of “the everyday trials and tragedy of ordinary people” (Gadpaille 34). The same critic argues that the “debunking of the soft, romantic prairie myth,” characteristic of Ross’s work, “creates a myth of its own – of the prairie as a place of trial, tragedy, and catharsis” (32). If it is indeed so, at least in the case of “Cornet at Night,” the tragedy has a comic lining. Not only does the story contain humorous touches (e.g. the parents’ squabble (35), the sense of victory experienced by all three (38-39), the parents’ secrets (39), Philip’s recommendation (44)), but it virtually hinges on irony (which Lorraine McMullen notices “in most of Ross’s writings” (17)) and self-irony. Read in this fashion, the narrative carries the following message: It may well be as difficult to make a farm hand out of a musician as it can be to make a musician out of a country boy. In that case, the only legacy of the chance intrusion of a musician into the prairie town is the story itself. Paradoxical though it may seem, Margaret Laurence’s observation about the unflagging optimism of Ross’s fiction holds true (12). Ross’s artistic optimism did not go as far, however, as to help him materialise the plan of making “a group of short stories having to do with the same boy” (quoted in McMullen 19). The unity of such narratives as “Cornet at Night,” “Circus in Town, ” “A Day with Pegasus,” and “One’s a Heifer” remains in the eye of the critic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Curnutt, Kirk. Wise Economies: Brevity and Storytelling in American Short Stories. Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1997.
Djwa, Sandra. “No Other Way: Sinclair Ross’s Stories and Novel” Writers of the Prairies. Ed.
Donald G. Stephens. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1973.
Gadpaille, Michelle. The Canadian Short Story. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Laurence, Margaret. Introduction The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968.
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Mathews, Lawrence. “Calgary, Canonization, and Class: Deciphering List B” Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
McMullen, Lorraine. “The Author” The Race and Other Stories by Sinclair Ross. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1982.
Ross, Sinclair. “Cornet at Night” The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968.
ABSTRACTS
Cet article est consacré à « Cornet at Night », nouvelle de l’auteur canadien Sinclair Ross. Pour composer ce récit d’initiation l’auteur adopte le point de vue d’un jeune garçon qui vit avec ses parents dans une ferme. D’une part sa mère, qui personnifie la société dont elle honore ordres et préceptes, de l’autre son père, qui représente la nature avec laquelle il est en union, constituent deux modèles au sein de cette famille nucléaire que le jeune protagoniste doit respecter et suivre. Cependant, l’enfant découvre la musique et en est fasciné. Si, à la fin de la nouvelle, le jeune protagoniste finit par embrasser les valeurs que lui imposent ses parents, l’histoire ne reste pas moins un hymne au pouvoir magique de l’art, pouvoir dont la réalité touche aussi surtout le lecteur
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Surreality, not dull fidelity: Marian Engel’s Poetics of the Everyday
Afra Kavanagh
Said Life to Art – “I love thee best Not when I find in thee My very face and form, expressed With dull fidelity, “But when in thee my craving eyes Behold continually The mystery of my memories And all I long to be.” Charles G. D. Roberts (1896)1 “Straight realistic narrative still bores me. I don’t think it gives any meaning to reality.” Marian Engel (“Bear Summer, 1976”)
1 The relationship of art to life, memory and desire were the issues at the heart of Marian Engel’s literary deliberations. She had considered form, realism, and her desire to avoid telling the same old stories in the same old ways in “Bear Summer” where she wrote: “ I have until very recently been most interested in it [the novel] in its experimental variety, believing that since there are no new things to say one must find new ways to find old things ... I was very excited about the ideas about the nouveau roman in France in the ‘60's ...” (12).2
2 An important figure in Canadian fiction for almost two decades, Engel (1933-1985) published seven novels and received major awards for some of them. She also wrote short stories, a number of which appeared in women’s magazines in the 1970s. The first volume of her collected short stories, Inside the Easter Egg, was published by Anansi Press in 1975, and her second, The Tattooed Woman (TW), which contained several stories written for Robert Weaver’s avant-garde CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio show, “Anthology,” was published by Penguin in 1985, the year she died. Some of the stories in the first volume are experimental in their approach to depicting the lives of educated Canadian women at home or abroad, yet to some extent they do support her
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uncharitable retrospective assessment of them in her introduction to The Tattooed Woman. She wrote in 1985, many years after they were first written and published,3 that these stories in which she chronicled the everyday of personal relationships and their disintegration as slice of life narratives, sketches, and incidents, did what they were told and failed to be any kind of art; she judged that they were mired in “kitchen sink realism” and could only go so far. Engel reveals in this context a divided sense and contrary urges. She dismisses “kitchen sink realism” in one interview, but then talks about the magic of the ordinary, of “kitchen sinks,” in several places including the introduction under discussion, which was her last public writing, and probably represents her final understanding of her own difference and of her valuation of the ordinary. Referring to being sickly and in hospitals and foster homes until she was adopted by the Passmores when she was three years old, she wrote: “I wish I had started from zero, an ordinary Canadian Child in an ordinary family with her own house and her own bed, so that ordinary kitchen sinks wouldn’t still be magic to me.” But she was not ordinary. She struggled against the ordinary while she longed for it, and her inscription of the everyday of female protagonists very much like her– educated, middle-class, rebellious and hungry for fulfilment and recognition– is far from ordinary; for even though she had started as a realist, she knew that realism was not the appropriate style for representing modern women’s lives.
3 Her own writing about these issues in “Bear Summer” in 1976, and the introduction to The Tattooed Woman almost 10 years later in 1985, shows her developing thinking and her changing poetics of the short story and the everyday. What becomes evident in several of the stories in the second volume is that she felt that she had searched for and found new and effective ways to write her narratives. She had carefully moved away from realism, because as she said to Graeme Gibson in a 1973 interview, “[M]aking fictions is an opportunity to add two and two and make five. If you’re too careful, if you work it out too neatly, you’ll only get four.”4
4 In this essay I argue that Marian Engel, in order “to make five,” chose to bring about in some of her stories a recognition of the unconscious and the imagination by experimenting with free forms of association and by imitating the unchecked process of thought. Engel, in order to portray the absurdity of enforced dichotomies in a modern woman’s everyday, also used other surrealist strategies, such as startling images, black humour, and flights of fantasy. Her short stories, particularly the four discussed here, attempt to create what Patrick French claims for Surrealism, that it is “a transcendent vision of the space beyond the limit,”5 a limit imposed by social and logical constraints.
5 Engel’s understanding of the everyday, that it is not simply physical or simply historical, is evident in her short story “The Confession Tree” in which the protagonist, Mary Abbott, is just home from the hospital where she has had a cancerous tumor removed. The narrative shows Mary dealing with her own grief at the same time as she deals with a demanding and unhappy mother and a sweet but needy husband. The text gives her thoughts equal space as it does the inter-personal exchange, the dialogue with her mother. Thus Mary, who is unable to speak about her illness to either her husband or her mother, thinks, “I shall make myself a wig of apple petals,” before responding to her mother’s question, “Is that Osborne coming down?” Mary, in effect, telegraphs to the reader her grim, but imaginative, anticipation of losing her hair after chemotherapy. The story had opened with her “staring at the [freshly blooming] apple
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tree ... hard enough ... to be swallowed by, to enter into, that cloud of pink and white unreality” (97). Mary’s wanting to enter the tree and its blossoms represents her unconscious acceptance of her imminent death. Imagining dying as being absorbed back into nature is Mary’s way (Marian’s too, as Engel was dying of cancer herself when she wrote the story) of thinking beyond the limits of her mother’s conventional belief that death is undesirable, and must be painful. Her stance is evocative of the longing for “easeful death” expressed in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” Mary is also shown moving back and forth between the moment and the remembered past as she finds the “gears in her mind slipping, as if her father’s movie projector was running backwards and she was a child again, rising from an untidy splash backwards like a bent hairpin to the smooth rock they dived off” (99). This jolting image is a novel combination of the organic and the mechanical reminiscent of those created by surrealist artists, and together with the reference to the tree or outside reality as a cloud of “unreality,” point to the artificial divisions between the past and present, and between reality and unreality.
6 In this and the other stories, Engel does not pin down what she means by the unconscious. It often seems a nebulous entity, a “cloud” of unknowingness (unknown- ness?). Often represented by metaphors, the unconscious is a murky underground like the salt mines6 featured in the short story of the same name. Dark and hidden, the mine in that story is the site for the protagonist’s extra-marital sexual encounter. Her initial fear of it is replaced with delight; a paradise, the loss of which is worth crying over (39), the mine contains a history of desire and pain. For Engel and her protagonists, the unconscious has the allure of the mine. It is perhaps the element of the irrational that she had to introduce into her stories to make them come alive. The unconscious is attractive because mysterious. Once discovered and acknowledged it becomes the true identifier of the female characters who suffer from too much self-consciousness. For example, in “The Confession Tree,” Mary longs to lose consciousness of herself, and gain the “unconsciousness” or un-self-consciousness of the tree, because her state of self-consciousness is intolerable. In the stories, the unconscious is favoured over the rational mind. Engel, like the Surrealists who challenged the establishment, depicted the unconscious as the seat of memory and desire and sought to valorize these elements and emphasize their importance to living creatively.
7 In his prefatory comments to The Tattooed Woman, Timothy Findlay equates the apparent “oddness” of Engel’s stories with “apartness,” a quality he attributes to “Her people [who] lived apart, making peace with life and what passed for life ... The great wonder is the way they went about their lives, working out their problems as if what they were doing was ordinary and everyday. But, of course, it wasn’t” (viii). Findlay’s assertion about Engel’s writing and her characters helps define how she writes the everyday. It is not simply the recording of daily activities, such as people getting up, brushing their teeth, or voiding their bowels. Neither is it a chronicle of the daily intake of fluids and solids, sounds and sights, but a presentation of interior reality and exterior reality, currently posited by society as in contradiction, as two elements in the process of unification.7 So she shows in “The Confession Tree” the discrepancy between a woman’s thoughts and her words and actions, processes that she wished to see unified. However, they are still unintegrated in this story, because Mary is part of a generation of women who felt that they had to hold their tongues, sandwiched as they were between their mothers and their husbands.
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8 Engel wrote in the introduction to The Tattooed Woman about her changing poetics for representing everyday reality. She was leaving behind realistic representation of a modern woman’s everyday because it was no longer adequate. As early as 1976, she had written, “Straight realistic narrative still bores me. I don’t think it gives any meaning to reality” (“Bear Summer,” 12). Then in 1985, she described how as she readied to write a story, her tools for writing came up “from some inner region which obeys no rules in the matter” (TW, xi). She spoke of a literary kit bag containing workshop tools such as a Hysterical Wrench and Faulkner’s Torque Assembly (x), associating in these images mechanical elements with the creative (mystical, magical, she says elsewhere) aspects of the writing process, forces also at work in daily life. But she chose to focus on the irrational, “the area where, when the skin of logic is pulled back, anything can happen.” Engel also claimed that she found the material for creating the fictive world of her short stories “when the mirror cracks,” (xii) and that more and more, the irrational dominated her work. This emphasis on the unconscious, here expressed as an inner region, a place where logic and reason have no sway, is poetics based on a view of the world promoted during her lifetime by movements such as psychoanalysis and Surrealism; like them, she suggests, our experience is of an illogical and incomprehensible reality, and creativity emerges from the unrestrained forces of the unconscious.
9 Yet Engel was a fan of the modernists, especially Virginia Woolf8 – a particularly attractive model because she had shifted the emphasis so that her fiction no longer centered on the romantic and interpersonal themes that dominated fiction by women.9 She referred to this needed shift in her comments about the novel as a form that delighted her because of its freedom. She wrote that she was very excited about the nouveau roman in France, “but now I find even Butor more or less unreadable though his theory is very pure and good. ... And perhaps the nouveau roman was a necessary attempt on the part of the French to escape the roman” (“Bear Summer” 12). So she too went beyond romances for centres and weddings as endings; her first novel rejects affairs and marriage in favour of the passionate life,10 and her second begins several babies after the “happily ever after.”11
10 Engel included in this last volume several stories that are based on an absurd premise or a dream-like sequence and portrayed in her endings seemingly opposed elements– such as the past and the present, or the conscious and unconscious, as well as the rational and the irrational– in the process of unification, forcing, in this way, some coherence on what she perceived as a disjointed and choppy reality.12 Like other writers and visual artists who adopted surrealist principles, she imitated “the unchecked process of thought,” and experimented with novel forms of association. An admirer of French Symbolist poetry, and of English works such as prototype surrealist works Alice in Wonderland and Tristram Shandy, Engel is most ostensibly surrealist in the premise of her award-winning novel, Bear (1976). The novel is a fabulation, a “take” on a deep and suppressed human desire; her story about a woman and a bear resonates in the imaginations and memories of readers with the power of the truly mythic.13
11 Other strategies in the short stories create similar effects. For example, she uses absurd and irrational elements to create specific effects. In one story, such an element illustrates the fragile and splintered selves of her main character on their way to integration; in other stories, to produce a surreal scenario that heightens the unreality,
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the very absurdity of the dichotomies in day-to-day life, especially those between public and private perceptions of the self, and between male and female roles and lives.
12 Her early stories, she opined, “did what they were told to do and failed to be any kind of art,” until “irrationality” crept in. The reward for letting this happen is a richness that was missing before. “[H]aving written long enough to know it is no use holding anything back” (xii), she depicted the absurdity of the everyday: the repetitiveness and vacuity of actions and events, and the complete isolation of her subject. Her poetics of the short story was that “A good story comes from a single impulse ... ,” and referring to her three short stories: “Transformations,” “In the Sun,”and “Madame Hortensia, Equilibriste,” she described the impulse involved in each. “It is an absurd feeling that one isn’t there in the mirror ..., that one’s body incorporates the three-year-old one used to be, that life is a tightrope act”(xiii). The feeling that one has no real being (not in the mirror), is both absurd and a “documented” reality for the multitude of women who have problems with self-esteem. This fear manifests itself in worries about being four-feet-tall, or three-years old.14 People look in the mirror every day, but it is only in the debilitating world of female subjectivity that this becomes a self-negating act.
13 “Transformations,” is a story from the first collection about a woman who can no longer see herself in the mirror. It begins by establishing that we grow into who we are depending on the models and expectations surrounding us. She writes that Having been told that it was the highest virtue to see herself as others saw her, Lou learned in the company of the elegant to feel shabby, in the company of the shabby- genteel to feel worldly and slight, in the company of boys her own age to feel hairy, and with girls to feel inferior. She was only comfortable with two of her mother’s sisters... who ... looked on her as a kind of miracle, which she then became. (51)
14 Lou has let others define her, and it is her husband’s complaint that she cannot pass a mirror or a store window without looking in it that is at the centre of the story. “Was she afraid she wasn’t there?” is his question, and it brings on her terrible crisis. Lou’s preoccupation with her image, however, is not anomalous; in fact, it is typical. Women have been trained to check their appearance in the mirror, to tuck in their tummies, and they always do. However, this practice has not resulted in good vision. Women often have problems with their reflections. They see not what is actually in the mirror, but what they have been taught to expect to see – so the anorectic girl sees a fatty staring back at her 85-pound-frame. The mirror, as a symbol, has been depicted as a woman’s enemy, even in fairy tales; “Snow White,” for example, depicts the uncomfortable relationship between woman and mirror. In that story, the beautiful stepmother, a queen no less, keeps going back to her magic mirror. When the message received is that she is deficient, that she is less attractive than someone else, she condemns the mirror to silence. The mirror has been used by writers to represent a cultural tool, and women who historically have not been “subjects” in their own right, it has been suggested, become the mirror and reflect whatever is expected of them, embodying cultural values and appropriate models of sexuality. Writing about women caught in such a predicament, Sharon Pollock, another Canadian author, has her protagonist say, “I am supposed to be a mirror. I am supposed to reflect what you want to see, but everyone wants something different.” The damaging corollary to this conclusion, as Pollock’s Lizzie points out, is that: “If no one looks in the mirror, I’m not even there, I don’t exist!”15 In our society, Pollock’s work suggests, woman may be the mirror, and therefore not a subject; or she may be, as Engel’s story suggests, a
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reflection, and thus an ephemeral product. She may also be for a while, like Lou, without a reflection, a ghost haunting her own form.
15 When Lou turns forty, she looks in the mirror, and “she wasn’t there. She looked again, expecting one of her faces to emerge from the clouded glass; but in none of her guises was she there; ... no Lou. No one” [my emphasis](53). This metaphoric representation of a mid-life crisis is surreal and points to Lou’s lack of an identity independent of others, a self that she is sure of, or that is certain in itself. But Lou is not sure, and wonders why, “if she was so good at putting things away, she had lost herself.” (53) This statement gives rise to two questions. First, how can Lou lose something that she never had? Second, what things is Lou good at putting away? Underscored here is Lou’s perception of herself as house-wife who puts things away including her own desires in order to service an image of herself as upright and unselfish. Lou does not begin to regain her sense of self or her desire for life until she is overwhelmed by a huge wave of lust. Absurdly, “She couldn’t pass an upright branch of driftwood, let alone a suburban father in shorts playing volleyball with his four-year-old. The people two lots up had planted yuccas along the front of their property and the great phallic calyxes were thrusting up: my god, she thought, I’d do it with them too. Then laughed: it was shaming, but somehow good” (57). Accepting her own desire helps to bring her around. Her image begins to come back when she begins to feel good about herself. Lou knows “what the past meant, now, but the present was the problem.” She also begins to appreciate that she had always had an inner core, that she had always been herself (and therefore not just a construct, a mere reflection in the mirror), when she discovers that the local psychiatrist with whom she had grown up– “unpleasantly pretentious,” but solid and dignified by what he has had to do– has loved her and still admires her, and in his office, in his company, she has a reflection in the mirror. After these two sequences, Lou begins to re-emerge in the mirror; glimpses of herself begin to appear when she takes the time to be alone, to flatter herself, to speak to that self as if it were a child, “you are good, you are sweet...” She coaxes it back by writing it messages in the sand, “I love you, me.” Her child-like behaviour of talking to the mirror is discovered by a child on the beach who says to her, wisely, that only on television do mirrors speak back to people. Engel portrays Lou as going back to being a child and learning from a child in a reversal of the traditional growing and learning paradigms, in a rebelliousness similar to that expressed in the Surrealist manifesto. The story ends with the promise of Lou’s successful recovery of her reflection, and thus her self. Lou’s image is back in the bedroom mirror, but she has yet “to beat plate glass windows” (59). She is now one who understands her relationship to the mirror and to others and is working on her underdeveloped self-love.
16 Engel depicts “the irrational, the area where, when the skin of logic is pulled back, anything can happen” (TW, vii) in the story, “In the Sun.” Sylvie is all women who have said secretly or aloud, I am still the same little girl inside I’ve always been; unlike them though, she literally confronts her little girl self, holds her hand and takes her along to lunch. This surreal scenario succeeds because Engel deftly moves back from Sylvie’s present downtown Toronto to her past, and her childhood which is suddenly very much with her. Sylvie, we are told is “splitting and shedding. And what she is shedding is the adult part of her consciousness; it is peeling away from her, leaving her vulnerable, soft-shelled” (130). She becomes little Sylvie, the baby, “the dumb one, stumblebum, leafhopper; the one who ran from one end of the house to the other
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trying to split her body against the fine force of the walls.” Now, Sylvie finds joy in looking at her image as a grown woman (131), and in seeing in the plate-glass that she is “wearing little white socks and buckle shoes and hopping; much more interesting to travel on one foot and watch the faces on one’s shoes” (131). Engel thus weaves the two selves– adult and child– together as Sylvie approaches self-realization, and her short narrative becomes a setting for her protagonist’s effort to integrate these selves. This “[w]oman with grey-middle-aged silk bottom sits hatching outside [the] Royal Bank surrounded by heliotrope, ... takes the child like a pea out of a pod, catches her before she flies off like milkweed floss,” and immediately segues into a parenthetical question, a sample of the unchecked process of thought: “was it rubber or parachute silk people meant to make out of the milkweed pods they gathered during the war?” She sits there, “watching the child grow,” and asks, “What is all this about?” She then remembers, “Sylvie in a white dress, being an airplane, careening towards Daddy and sexual mistakes. Sylvie, tendrils sprouting from her fingers, curling around Daddy like a succubus.” This is the first time Sylvie has become aware of her child self’s sexuality and desire for her father (132). She “picks the child up tenderly, soothes and smoothes” her and promises her a stick of red licorice if she’ll grow up a little. Then she takes her hand, and begins to walk towards the hotel, to lunch. As she walks she plans, “I’ll have the sole ... it will be easier for a young person to manage.” She may also have sex with her lunch date, a nice professional man her age, a prospect she quite likes, her desire acknowledged and to be acted on. The past and the present, the conscious and the unconscious are thus depicted as realities that exist side by side in the protagonist’s psyche just as they are in the narrative itself.
17 The unusual short story, “The Life of Bernard Orge,” in which the protagonist, Marge Elph, “transforms” into a man she invented, also contains surreal flights of fantasy and black humour. Engel uses allusion in a startling new way. Marge says that her sons drove her potential lovers, “from the paths of dalliance up the walls” (38). When the hospital psychiatrist asks her if she has a different name when she wears her Groucho glasses, she reports, “I lied. There are hawks’ wards and handsaws’ wards and it wasn’t for this I’d kept up my medical insurance” (43). Ophelia’s and Hamlet’s lines have a tragic effect, recalling as they do the madness and sad fate of these characters. But by attaching these lines to Marge’s daily reality of children who drive adults up the walls, Engel also uses the allusions to Shakespeare to create a comic effect both here and in Marge’s reference to “Sonnet 73", where she combines the inevitability of aging with her everyday reality and says, “Now my body is as ruined as any choir, I have big feet and I wear unisex Birkenstocks” (38).
18 Marge is in the grip of a mid-life crisis brought about by the departure of her twin sons, the incarceration of their father for killing a woman he mistook for her– she says she had earlier caught him playing hangman with their kids, and the hanged man had her face!– and the recent loss of her sexual differentiations. In a dream-like sequence, someone places a set of Groucho Marx glasses on her nose, and as soon as she looks at herself in the mirror, she says she changed, and asserts, “I am Bernard Orge.”16 This transformation is remarkable because it turns Marge into a male other. Marge deliberately sets about to create a character for this person she has chosen to become, including the detail that he “hated chairs. They reminded him of the laps of old women in church, and he fears to see bloomer and garters” (39). We accept what is happening to Marge, surreal or mad as it may seem, because we accept that we all transform ourselves into identities we invent both in dream states and reality. Like Marge, fueled
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by memories of our past lives and selves and a vision of what we could be– and encouraged by psychiatrists (37)– we seek to change ourselves.
19 Like many women at her age, Marge is faced with what seems the end of what has been her defining “everyday” – motherhood and wifehood (35)– and has given herself over to the surreal dream of a gender switch. Engel constructs her narrative in such a way as to illustrate that Marge’s use of her imagination for fantasy and escape– despite her psychiatrist’s and doctor’s warnings– aid her to accept aging and this manifestation of her masculine self. Freely paraphrasing and adapting John Moss’ comments on Engel’s Bear, we can say that in “a meeting between myth and psychoanalysis”, Marge confronts the man within as a separate creature, and makes love to it.17 Marge writes “long, intense letters to Bernard Orge in [her] notebook,” even though she also “is”, at the time, Bernard. A little later, hospitalized for not looking after the “heart” of this body containing this dual self, she says she knew that she had not turned permanently into Bernard Orge, that she and he were “intertwined in a different way. He had become not a second self, but a sort of lover” (42). At first she is disappointed because she had failed to change when she had desired change so much. Absurdly, she puts an ad in the paper looking for a companion for “him.” A man shows up claiming to be Bernard Orge and speaking the script Marge had created, blurring any distinction between fantasy and reality, but Marge is happy. She is also aware that he may be an impostor(!) and could disappear from her life at any time (45).
20 The story ends with Marge back to her self, in her own home, with her “friend.” This story of her survival suggests that life contains fantastical elements (first, acquiring the glasses and nose, and later, breaking off the nose), and happiness may be surprisingly found in everyday things such as cooking, cats, and company. The story shows that Marge has learned that she can live with the knowledge of her masculine self, and therefore also with her female self. The separation between the two has all along been socially imposed. The narrative suggests that society does not tolerate too graciously the masculine older woman,18 as is intimated by Marge’s comment: “My friends say [of her and Bernard Orge] we are an unlikely couple” (45).
21 Engel thought that in her early short stories she wrote chronicles that failed because they relied on “kitchen sink realism.” She later added a surreal element to her stories to bring them alive. The surreal in Engel’s stories aids her depiction, and our understanding, of the fragile and splintered selves of her protagonists. Using the interaction between the conscious mind and the unconscious, and the intersections between the subject’s perceptions and recollections, she presented a modern woman’s everyday as an absurd reality. Engel created surreal scenarios that served to heighten the unreality or absurdity of the dichotomies in day-to-day life between public and private perceptions, adult and child selves, and men’s and women’s roles. In the minds of her characters, which are reflections of her own,19 absurd and fantastic possibilities are entertained.
22 Engel says she did not let ordinary reality keep turning on her (xii), that she dealt with “super-reality, that element in everyday life where the surreal shows itself ..., and people have extraordinary conversations because they have confused clam and lamb soup” (xii-xiii). She wanted to represent women’s daily reality, but not necessarily in a realistic way, and her techniques and images recall the Surrealists, as do her goals. She wanted to liberate the unconscious and remove guilt, and thus envision a different space or reality for women. This was necessary because of the restraints placed on
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women’s sexuality, and because historically both women and women’s fiction were “bogged down” by excessive attention to the detail of domestic life and personal relations. She had a personal investment in this, as woman and author. She refers to the story, “Initram,” by Audrey Thomas in which “two writers discuss the conversion of their unhappiness into fiction,” and concludes that her fiction “goes at it the other way around. It does things to me” (TW, xiii). Her fiction, now arising from a magical impulse, did liberate what she called her “well-disciplined Ontario subconscious,”20 and made her happy. She also reported Hugh MacLennan’s statement, that “the best writing comes from a well-rested subconscious,” and used it as an excuse for “innumerable dreams” (TW, xiv)– or stories, we might say. In these stories discussed, she portrays women who grow happier – more integrated– as they embrace their unconscious, and accept their desires: Sylvie walking happily “In the Sun” towards her sexual rendez-vous, Lou from “Transformations” with her good lust, and Ruth from “The Salt Mines” trying but failing to feel guilty over her affair.
23 Engel wrote more than fifty years after the original Surrealist Manifesto (1924) which declared war on moral and social constraints over the unconscious only to find that attitudes had not changed significantly since; the Western world view still favoured reason over emotion, the conscious over the unconscious and the present over the past. In the short stories discussed here, she showed the unhappiness produced in her female characters as a result of the creation by mainstream culture of a dichotomy between these forces.21 She also created, using surreal images, a world like the one dreamed by the Surrealists and which offered a resolution. In this world, these forces are not opposed; instead, they are portrayed as equally important, indeed complementary, in the mind/body/spirit mix that each of us is.
NOTES
1. . Engel read Charles G.D. (“God Damn” – as she interpreted his initials once!) Roberts’ animal stories, and studied his works for her Master’s thesis on the Canadian novel at McGill University under the supervision of Hugh MacLennan. She also went back to his works when as a mature writer she was trying to find the right approach to her story about a woman’s love affair with a bear for her award winning novel, Bear (1976). 2. . “Bear Summer,” The Marian Engel Archives, Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University. Box 14, F15 (Page dated “Tuesday 11 or 12"). 3. . For example, “Transformations,” was collected into Inside the Easter Egg in 1975, and “The Life of Bernard Orge,”was broadcast on “Anthology” in 1980. 4. . Graeme Gibson. Eleven Canadian Novelists. (Toronto: Anansi, 1973). 5. . Patrick French, “Tel Quel and Surrealism: A Re-evaluation. Has the Avant-Garde Become a Theory?” Romanic Review Vol.88 Issue 1 (Jan 1997): 189-197. 6. . “The Salt Mines,” in Inside the Easter Egg, 34-41. 7. . This and other references to Surrealism are to Andre Breton’s What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings. Trans. Franklin Rosemont (London : Pluto Press, 1978). The essay “What is Surrealism?”is also available at
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8. . Her “Bear Summer,” as well as several of the novels pay a tribute to librarians who steered young women such as her and her “protagonists” away from pulp romances and towards the writings of Virginia Woolf. 9. . As argued by Rachel Blau Duplessis in Writing Beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985). 10. . Sarah Bastard’s Notebook (c1968, reprinted Don Mills, ON: PaperJacks, 1974). 11. . Honeyman Festival (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1970). 12. . “Fiction probably arises out of a need to integrate the elements of one’s life in narrative form,” she wrote in “Bear Summer”, p. 13. Breton wrote that “there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future ... are not perceived as contradictions.” 13. . Robertson Davies wrote on January 6, 1976, to J. G. McClelland, the publisher: “ The theme of Bear is one of the most significant and pressing in Canada in our time - the necessity for us who are newcomers to the country, with hardly four hundred years of acquaintance with it, to ally ourselves with the spirit of one of the most ancient lands in the world. In our search for this spirit, we are indeed in search of ourselves.” (For Your Eyes Alone: The Correspondence of Robertson Davies, 1976-1995. Edited by Judith Skelton Grant. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Inc., 1999) p.3. 14. 14. In her embargoed notebook, Engel wrote about her interpersonal problems with a husband who acted as if she were not there, and made her feel four-feet-tall (MEA, Box 6, F 28). 15. . Lizzie Borden in the play, “Blood Relations,” in Harbrace Anthology of Literature. Ed. Jon C. Stott, Raymond E. Jones, and Rick Bowers (Toronto: Harcourt Brace & Company, Canada, 1994). 1322-1364. 16. . Here too the mirror serves as a way to illustrate the unreality of the character’s exterior and its disconnection from the interior self. 17. . John Moss wrote about Bear and the beast in his Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel (Toronto: MacClelland and Stewart, 1987), p.101. 18. . Engel’s novel, The Glassy Sea, contains a diatribe by the protagonist against a society, and specifically its patriarchy, that ignores and denigrates women past their reproductive years. 19. . She wrote, “I suppose that leads to an anthropological view of history...It means finally admitting that most literature is middle class and that most personae are oneself...” (“Bear Summer” 12) 20. . In this quote and the next one, regarding Hugh MacLennan’s influence, Engel seems to use the term “sub-conscious” as s synonym for “unconscious.” 21. . Christl Verduyn, in her study of Engel’s work, Lifelines: Marian Engel’s Writings, also argues that Engel believed in and sought to portray multiplicities, not dichotomies, in her works.
ABSTRACTS
Les premiers récits de Marian Engel, ainsi que l’écrivain le déclare dans la préface de La Femme tatouée, ne sont rien de plus que des chroniques : des tranches de vie dont le réalisme terre-à- terre les confine dans la réclusion de la fiction mimétique. Pour pourvoir ses histoires de souffle et les doter d’âme il fallait les exposer à l'ingérence de l’absurde, à l’irrationnel. Dans les nouvelles ici abordées, Engels a recours à des procédés chers au surréalisme. Elle les emploie dans le but de mieux dépeindre et de mieux faire partager le monde brisé de ses fragiles
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personnages féminins. Ainsi, c’est par le biais du fantastique et de l’humour noir qu’elle parvient à dépeindre l’absurdité du banal dans la « réalité » quotidienne de ses héroïnes. C’est par des méthodes surréalistes qu’elle met en perspective les dichotomies entre enfance et âge adulte, identité privée et identité publique, masculin et féminin pour libérer les mécanismes du désir et les tisser en complémentarité harmonieuse entre passé et présent, conscient et inconscient, vérité et imagination dans une prose bien équilibrée qui inscrit l’expérience du quotidien de la vie des femmes dans un registre qui, cette fois, est celui de l’art.
AUTHORS
AFRA KAVANAGH Afra Kavanagh is assistant Professor of English in the Department of Languages and Letters at The University College of Cape Breton in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her main research interest is Marian Engel though she also reads and writes about other contemporary Canadian authors. Afra Kavanagh is co-ordinator of the Annual UCCB Storytelling Symposium. She has edited two books of proceedings of the first and third Symposia.
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The everyday in “The Closing Down of Summer” by Alistair McLeod
Laurent Lepaludier
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven”(Ecclesiastes, III, 1)
1 Studying the theme and poetics of the everyday in Alistair MacLeod’s stories is particularly appropriate because they are often set in the Cape Breton area in Nova Scotia and describe the life of its inhabitants. As Elizabeth Lowry points out, Alistair MacLeod is “an astute observer of a very specific local setting (…); of its landscape and industry, its closed communities, quotidian tragedies and domestic disappointments.”1 The everyday is usually connected with the idea of stability in terms of setting –the home, the workplace or the usual haunts. A familiar setting may find a corresponding structure in time –the repetitive and iterative modes expressed in semantic, verbal, adverbial or adjectival ways. In drawing a picture of how a group of Canadian miners spend their holidays in their native place on the west coast of Cape Breton, “The Closing Down of Summer” highlights unchanging traditions and portrays social habits. Yet this short story conveys a sense of change, notably through its title which suggests a passage to another season. A study of the poetics of the quotidian and of its significance is bound to tackle the question of the representation of time but also the theme of the changeable and the unchangeable, the particular and the universal, to try and interpret the philosophical, symbolic or aesthetic implications of the story. The narrative constructs the everyday of a community as dual, as this essay will first show. If duality suggests potential changes, it is confirmed by a paradoxical impression that the quotidian works as a form of transience rather than one of stability. Whether the everyday can be transcended is the last question addressed in this study.
Constructing the everyday
2 The quotidian is obviously a matter of time. In this story, what occurs every day or just about every day is not mainly expressed in the preterite - only a section is - but in the present tense. The use of the present strikes the reader because it is unusual in
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narratives and because it is regularly used throughout the story: “Here on this beach, on Cape Breton’s west coast, there are no tourists.” (7)2 This statement presenting a fact –the specific assertive value of the present tense- also suggests in the context an unchanging characteristic of the place which seems to be taken from a documentary – the generic value of the present tense establishing a characteristic or a usual fact3. Other statements describe the scenery and the miners’ attitude in the present tense too, bringing together an unchangeable setting and an attitude shown as a regular and unchanging habit: “The golden little beach upon which we lie curves in a crescent for approximately three-quarters of a mile and then terminates at either end in looming cliffs.” (8) Also close to a present of description in the following instance, the telling of habits is expressed through iterative forms enhancing the recurrence of events: At the south cliff a little brook ends its journey and plummets almost vertically some fifty feet into the sea. Sometimes after our swims or after lying too long in the sand we stand underneath its fall as we would a shower, feeling the fresh water fall upon our heads and necks and shoulders and running down our bodies’ lengths to our feet which stand within the sea. (9)
3 Different aspects of the present tense can also be found in consecutive sentences with the same blurring effect: indeed one is tempted not to make a difference between the descriptive assertion, the general characteristic and the daily routine of holidays: Beside us on the beach lie [descriptive] the white Javex containers filled with alcohol. It is the purest of moonshine made by our relatives back in the hills and is impossible to buy [general]. It comes to us [habit] only as a gift or in exchange for long past favours (…) It is as clear as water [descriptive], and a teaspoonful of it when touched by a match will burn with the low blue flame of a votive candle until it is completely consumed, leaving the teaspoon hot and totally dry. (10)
4 It is noteworthy as well that the modal “will” is here used to depict a present habit and not the future.
5 The use of the present tense does not correspond to the creation of a background to a singular event. In fact, it is sustained - apart from the section in the preterite - and together with the present perfect, shapes the structure of the story. Indeed, one can find it on page 12 (“Out on the flatness of the sea we can see the fishermen going about their work”), 17 (“In my own white house my wife does her declining wash among an increasingly bewildering battery of appliances.”), 27 (“I must not think too much of death and loss, I tell myself repeatedly.”), and in the very last pages. The iterative meaning of the present tense is often highlighted by adverbs of frequency or phrases such as “unaccountable times” (9). The story does not have a singulative value: it is meant to convey a sense of the usual, to depict the daily life of these miners on holiday. No singular event occurs to disturb the regular order of things.
6 The description of the setting also shapes the everyday, creating familiar landscapes or seascapes. Actually the quotidian is not that of the home with its domestic activities – the women’s everyday in the story. It is that of the men’s haunts outside. The beach, the brooks with their trout, the gardens, what they hear about tourists, highways, cars, motels and lobster traps are part of the men’s daily life. The plural, often used, also contributes to the evocation of recurrent activities seen in their multiple and iterative aspects. Besides, taking showers under a fall displaces the domestic into outside natural surroundings. The “quiet graveyards that lie inland” are also their concern because the miners are the ones who take the dead back home.
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7 The narrative voice which constructs familiar time and setting is first identified as collective. Six pages have to be read before finding the first person of the singular “I”. The first person of the plural controls the narration almost from the very beginning: “We have been here for most of the summer.” (7-8) Its use continues consistently over the next pages, alternating with the singular in most personal episodes until the very end. Even though the singular has an importance, it essentially illustrates the plural: what concerns the narrator - the loss of his brother, memories about his father, remarks about his wife - is typical, usual. It also appears that the narrator is the miners’ authority, not an authoritarian leader at all, but someone who discreetly signals what the collective spirit has already decided, as the conditions of their departure show at the end of the short story. Obviously his function is essentially collective. His words “strike the note for (…) the translation of personal experience into motifs which have a collective significance.”4 His voice is thus much more the voice of a community of men than that of an individual, which contributes very much to the originality of the narrative, particularly in an enunciation that sounds both immediate and timeless because of its general value5.
8 The collective self present in the narration reflects upon itself and the everyday of a community treated as a whole. If individual bodies are a matter of concern, it is because of their collective value, for they are “our bodies” (9). The narrative depicts them as though they were not separate: “We have arms that cannot raise above our heads” (9). Numbers matter more than individuals (“many of us”, “few of us”). Singularity has been lost to the collective being of the community, which further enhances the importance of routines. The everyday defines the community.
9 The everyday in Cape Breton functions as a point of reference for another sort of daily life, away from home, the daily round of mining work. General remarks such as “we are perhaps the best crew of shaft and development miners in the world” (8) or “our crew is known as McKinnon” (26) evoke the mining trade. Occasionally - but seldom - is mining an object of iterative description in the present (“when we work we are often twelve hours in the shaft’s bottom or in the development drifts and we do not often feel the sun.” (9). It is the mining work that holds the community of men together in its daily round. The presence of everyday work also transpires in the sentence “we are all still in good shape after a summer of idleness” (8) The miners’ bodies bear the marks of the other - and more lasting - quotidian: the skin, the hair, the scars, the limbs testify to this other daily activity: Bodies that when free of mud and grime and the singed-hair smell of blasting powder are white almost to the colour of milk or ivory. Perhaps of leprosy. (…) Only the scars that all of us bear fail to respond to the healing power of the sun’s heat. (…) Many of us carry one shoulder permanently lower than the other where we have been hit by rockfalls or the lop of the giant clam that swings down upon us in the narrow closeness of the shaft’s bottom. And we have arms that we cannot raise above our heads and touches of arthritis in our backs and in our shoulders, magnified by the water that chills and falls upon us in our work. Few of us have all our fingers and some have lost either eyes or ears from falling tools or discharged blasting caps or flying stone or splintering timbers. (9)
10 Bodies bridge the gap between the miners’ two lives: “We are always intensely aware of our bodies” (10). The other link is memory, which functions in connection with bodies: “Lying now upon the beach we see the external scars on ourselves and on each other
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and are stirred to the memories of how they occurred.” (10) The permanence of the marks of the daily routine of work impinges upon that of the summer holidays.
11 The miners’ life at work surges when brought into contrast with the domestic routine of the narrator’s wife: Her kitchen and her laundry room and her entire house gleam with porcelain and enamel and an ordered cleanliness that I can no longer comprehend. Little about me or about my work is clean or orderly and I am always mildly amazed to find the earnings of the violence and dirt in which I make my living converted into such meticulous brightness (…) For us most of our working lives are spent in rough, crude bunk-houses thrown up at the shaft-head’s site. Our bunks are made of two- by-fours (…) Such rooms are like hospital wards (…). (17)
12 His working life is also contrasted with that of his children and comes in the form of a wish: I have always wished that my children could see me at work. That they might journey down with me in the dripping cage to the shaft’s bottom or walk the eerie tunnels of the drifts that end in walls of staring stone. And that they might see how articulate we are in the accomplishment of what we do. (23)
13 Everyday work also permeates life at home, as the episode of the narrator’s father’s coffin falling down upon the bearers recalls the dangers of mining. The irony of the choice of such a trade does not escape the narrator’s notice: “I was aware even then of the ultimate irony of my choice.” He dropped out of the university because he wanted to “burst out”, “to feel that I was breaking free” and chose precisely to “spend his working days in the most confined of places” (25).
14 If the miners’ everyday life is dual, that of their families bears the mark of permanence. The adverb “permanently” typifies the life of the narrator’s wife: “Now my wife seems to have gone permanently into a world of avocado appliances and household cleanliness and vicarious experiences provided by the interminable soap operas that fill her television afternoons.” (18) The miners are estranged from the daily round of their families’ activities. Their sons will live completely differently from them. The wives’ and the sons’ everyday, characterised by permanence and security, function as foils to the miners’ dual and seasonal quotidian with its risky aspect. Indeed, in constructing the miners’ everyday, the narrative conveys the transience of the quotidian.
The transience of the everyday
15 Time seems to be hinging on the present moment. The title of the short story evokes an end suggesting the closing down of a shop, a factory, a club or the termination of an activity. A sense of impermanence is conveyed by the use of the progressive form as in “We are lying now in the ember of summer’s heat and in the stillness of its time.”(12) The instantaneous and temporary value6 is reinforced by the temporal deictic “now” and the image of the ember expressing the end of summer. The present moment is felt as protracted and precarious. The present tense can also intimate the provisional character of the everyday: The sun no longer shines with the fierceness of the earlier day (…) Evening is approaching. The sand is whipped by the wind (…) We flinch and shake ourselves and reach for our protective shirts (…) In the sand we trace erratic designs and patterns with impatient toes. (27)
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16 Transience also connotes the perspective on the quotidian implied in the use of the present perfect. If it brings together past and present7 it also defines a time-bound and short-lived period: “All summer it has been very hot. So hot that the gardens have died and the hay has not grown and the surface wells have dried to dampened mud. The brooks that flow to the sea have dried to trickles.” (7) This feeling of the passing of time, on being on the edge is sustained throughout the story with a very consistent use of the present perfect together with the present. This is reinforced by adverbs denoting mutability such as “still”, “not yet”, “as yet”, etc.
17 The ephemeral nature of the everyday is thematically illustrated by the seasonal quality of the period described. The characteristics of the end of summer suggest the round of the seasons, creating a sense of expectancy even at the very beginning of the story: “We have been here for most of the summer. Surprised at the endurance and consistency of the heat. Waiting for it to break and perhaps to change the spell.”(7-8). The slight changes in the weather signal the end of the holidays. The narration underlines the transitory character of the period: “Still we know that the weather cannot last much longer and in another week the tourists will be gone and the school will reopen and the pace of life will change.”(8) Implied in the seasonal inscription of time is the cyclical nature of the everyday. There is indeed a time for everything, a time for work and a time for idleness - which is coming to an end. The miners’ bodies themselves bear the mark of a long summer approaching its end as recalled by the permanence of the scars: All summer we have watched our bodies change their colour and seen our hair grow bleached and ever lighter. Only the scars that all of us bear fail to respond to the healing power of the sun’s heat. They seem to stand out even more vividly now, long running pink welts that course down our inner forearms or jagged saw-tooth ridges on the taut calves of our legs. (9)
18 The theme of transience seeps into the very description of the landscape with verbs suspiciously redolent of the end as in “ The golden little beach (…) terminates at either end in looming cliffs.” (8) Or again in “At the south cliff a little brook ends its journey” (9).
19 The quotidian holiday routine is beset by foreshadowing and memories of the other everyday, that of mining. The scars on the miners’ bodies remind them of accidents: “memories of how they occurred” (10). Remembrances are conjured up in the form of analepses, either singulative - i.e. referring to one event - or iterative - i.e. referring to an habitual one (with the use of “would” and adverbs of frequency as in page 13). They bring the quotidian past of work into the present. But what awaits them in the near future is anticipated. It is sometimes implied in the use of the present tense characterising the miners’ life, sometimes announced by the modal “will” as is their future employment in Africa: “In Africa it will be hot too, in spite of the coming rainy season, and on the veldt the heat will shimmer and the strange, fine-limbed animals will move across it in patterns older than memory.”(16) The determinant “the” implies knowledge of a place familiar to the narrator. Because “will” sometimes announces the future and sometimes characterises the miners’ activities, the gap between present and future tends to be reduced, suggesting the invasion of daily work into an idle everyday.
20 The everyday is fraught with intimations of death, past and future. Memories of death, the ultimate passage, surge from the familiar setting itself: “In the quiet graveyards that lie inland the dead are buried. Behind the small white wooden churches and
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beneath the monuments of polished black granite they take their silent rest.” (12) The lexical field of death conjures up immediately the death of fellow miners: “Death in the shafts and in the drifts is always violent and very often the body is crushed or so blown apart that it cannot be reassembled properly for exposure in the coffin.” (13) Then through analepses, the narrator recalls the deaths of miners in Ontario’s Elliot Lake and Bancroft uranium shafts “some twenty years ago.”(13) There follows another flashback to the time when the narrator’s younger brother died in Newfoundland “fifteen years ago.”(14) The memory expands over two pages.
21 Such memories together with the unchanging everyday life of his wife remind the narrator of the fleeting nature of time: “It is difficult to explain to my wife such things and we have grown more and more apart with the passage of years.” (17) The estrangement from his children encourages the same feeling: (…) And of how I lie awake at night aware of my own decline and of the diminishing of the men around me. For all of us know we will not last much longer and that it is unlikely that we will be replaced in the shaft’s bottom by members of our own flesh and bone. (22)
22 The discrepancy between the songs his family sing and those he knows inevitably evokes death: There was always a feeling of mild panic on hearing whole dance floors of people singing aloud songs that had come and flourished since my departure and which I had never heard. As if I had been on a journey to the land of the dead. (19)
23 Even the Celtic revival, which should have brought together the older and the younger generation, is “a revival that is very different from our own” (20) and the narrator feels closer to the Zulus than to his own sons. A sense of an oncoming death permeates the narrator’s comments: “I would like to tell my wife and children something of the way my years pass by on the route to my inevitable death.” (22) In a comparison, he pictures himself as “a gladiator who fights away the impassiveness of water as it drips on darkened stone.”(22) So it is not simply the idle quotidian of holidays that is at stake but his life. The narrator cannot help facing death in his risky work - and in the narrative itself: I must not think too much of death and loss, I tell myself repeatedly. For if I am to survive I must be as careful and calculating with my thoughts as I am with my tools when working so far beneath the earth’s surface. I must always be careful of sloppiness and self-indulgence lest they cost me dearly in the end. (27)
24 In that context, the change in the weather takes on a symbolic dimension. The waves breaking upon the beach, the wind in their faces and the approaching evening lead to questions expressed as direct thought ambiguously evoking change and death: “Perhaps this is what we have been waiting for? Perhaps this is the end and the beginning?”(27) The wind and the men’s sigh are actually compared further on: “There is a collective sigh that is more sensed than really heard. Almost like distant wind in far-off trees.”(28). The waves stand as a symbol of death in the miners’ eyes as they destroy the shapes of their bodies in the sand: The waves are higher now and are breaking and cresting and rolling farther in. They have obliterated the outlines of our bodies in the sand and our footprints of brief moments before already have been washed away. There remains no evidence of what we have ever been. It is as if we have never lain, nor ever walked nor ever thought what thoughts we had. We leave no art or mark behind. The sea has washed its sand slate clean. (28)
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25 If the signs of death are sometimes implicit in the obliteration of the outlines of the bodies and of the footprints, they are explicitly commented upon.
26 The visit to the churchyards, the farewells and the journey to Toronto in the cars take on a symbolic dimension. The miners, numbed with moonshine, undertake a night journey to the land of the dead, ready to face their doom and the narrator feels “like a figure in some mediaeval ballad who has completed his formal farewells and goes now to meet his fatalistic future.”(30) The fifteenth century Gaelic song which surges like a “towering, breaking wave”(31) illustrates the theme of the journey towards death: I wend to death, knight stith in stour; Through fight in field I won the flower; No fights me taught the death to quell- I wend to death, sooth I you tell I wend to death, a king iwis; What helpes honour or worlde’s bliss? Death is to man the final way- I wende to be clad in clay.(31) The dirge which concludes the short story echoes in the reader’s ears and comments upon the symbolic value of the title: the closing down of summer might be permanent and not just seasonal. The miners’ everyday is never seen as trivial for it is endowed with a transcendent dimension.
Transcending the everyday
27 A miner’s life is not devoid of a confrontation with the customary. It might be a harsh life with its “twelve-hour stand-up shifts” (10) or the rudimentary housing conditions - the “rough bunkhouses”(17) - or the triteness of community living with its “snoring and coughing or spitting into cans”(17). The narrator even confesses it might lack originality: “Perhaps we are becoming our previous generation?”(18) Yet the everyday is transcended by work. Expressing his wish that his children could see him at work, the narrator celebrates the miners’ achievements as with a litany, repeating the same structural pattern at the beginning of each sentence: That they might journey down with me in the dripping cage to the shaft’s bottom or walk the eerie tunnels of the drifts that end in walls of staring stone. And that they might see how articulate we are in the accomplishment of what we do. That they might appreciate the perfection of our drilling and the calculations of our angles and the measuring of our powder, and that they might understand that what we know through eye and ear and touch is of a finer quality than any information garnered by the most sophisticated of mining engineers with all their elaborate equipment. (23-4)
28 The isotopy of scientific precision illustrates and corroborates that of perfection. Work is indeed magnified. The “joy of breaking through” and the pride of “liberating resources” enhance the “glamour” of professionals living a nomadic life that “sedentary” people cannot understand. The miners’ work attains an aesthetic perfection that transcends the quotidian. The isotopy of perfection is here connected with that of beauty: (…) there is perhaps a certain eloquent beauty to be found in what we do. (…) It is perhaps akin to the violent motion of the huge professional athletes on the given days or nights of their many games. Men as huge and physical as we are; polished and eloquent in the propelling of their bodies towards their desired goals and in
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their relationships and dependencies on one another but often numb and silent before the microphone of their sedentary interviewers. (24)
29 The movements of the bodies transcend the utilitarian to reach an elaborate rhetoric needing sophisticated interpreters. Ironically, only the miners themselves seem to be in a capacity to appreciate their own performance in dark and enclosed tunnels. The modalising adverb “perhaps” -used twice - barely contains the temptation of grandiloquence. For work magnifies the MacKinnons and endows them with the qualities of mythic heroes.
30 The narration verges on myth-making, defamiliarising the MacKinnons’ quotidian working life and giving it a magnified status. They form a sort of tribe of nomads, only comparable perhaps to this other tribe of fishermen with whom they exchange favours. In the tribe each individual finds his purpose in the collective being. The personal pronoun “we” gathers and defines the community of miners. The narrator certainly feels closer to the Zulus than to his own family. He takes interest in the nomads of Africa. He is attentive to their bodies, their shouts and their eyes and reads their feelings in their dance. The bond between tribal men is implied in the sentence: “Hoping to find there a message that is recognisable only to primitive men.”(20) Their bodies “magnified” (9) by the work and full of scars resemble the bodies of warriors. Their status is given epic proportions. Their working clothes make them “loom even larger than we are in actual life” (29). As primitive men, the MacKinnons form a tribe of warriors like their Scottish ancestors on the “battlefield of the world”(11), fighting “adversary” walls (25). They have their own rules and seem to be above the laws applying to ordinary citizens, speeding and drinking moonshine, “seldom fined or in odd instances allowed to pay our speeding fines upon the spot.”(11) Adventurers and treasure-hunters, they can be found in Haiti, in Chile, in the Congo, in Bolivia, in Guatemala, in Mexico, in Jamaica or in South-Africa - the enumeration magnifies their importance. The narrator compares himself to “a gladiator who fights always the impassiveness of water” (22). He also feels like a figure in a medieval ballad “who goes to meet his fatalistic future” (30). In fact, the miners belong to a timeless, hence mythical world for they also feel “As if we are Greek actors or mastodons of an earlier time. Soon to be replaced or else perhaps extinct.”(29). The significance of their lives must be appreciated in relation with the Ancient times, the Middle Ages or the timelessness of tribal consciousness. The phone calls announcing the deaths of miners lose their specificity in time. The comparison with the ballads and folktales underlines their unchanging truth and testifies to their timelessness: The darkness of the midnight phone call seems somehow to fade with the passing of time, or to change and be recreated like the ballads and folktales of the distant lonely past. Changing with each new telling as the tellers of the tales change, as they become different, older, more bitter or more serene. It is possible to hear descriptions of phone calls that you yourself have made some ten or fifteen years ago and to recognize very little about them except the undeniable kernel of truth that was at the centre of the messages they contained. (14-5)
31 The notion of telling as recreation participates in the mythical conception of time and rituals. The miners’ working life seems to unroll in archaic time, free from the bonds of change or progress, or from the tyranny of the fleeting moment. Yet “The Closing Down of Summer” conveys the sense of a coming end. To exorcise the fleeting of time and share in the world of myth, the miners perform rituals of many kinds.
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32 Drinking is treated as a community ritual, a sort of bond connecting the miners with their families back in the hills or with the fishermen who act out “their ancient rituals” (12) and with whom they trade alcohol for fish. Moonshine cannot be bought and, because of its symbolic value in the eyes of the community, it is essentially a sign of social belonging, part and parcel of the rituals of barter and mourning: “It comes to us as a gift or in exchange for long-past favours: bringing home of bodies, small loans of forgotten dollars, kindnesses to now-dead grandmothers.”(10) It burns with the purity and religious significance of “a votive candle” (10). The miners also carry it along with them in their cars on their way to Toronto as they leave, as a sort of viaticum or part of a rite of passage since the departure takes on a dimension of death. The postcards sent home, although they only “talk about the weather continents and oceans away” (21-2) participate in the ritual of exchange with the younger children: “postcards that have as their most exciting feature the exotic postage stamps sought after by the younger children for games of show and tell.”(22).
33 The MacKinnons perform their “rituals of farewell” (29) at the end of their holidays. These rituals have the power to transform everyday life, to give it a holy dimension because they imply a belief in the invisible. Visiting the banks, checking out the dates on the insurance policies, gathering the working clothes, but also visiting the churches or standing by the graves constitute the different steps of a rite of passage which reveals the spiritual nature of the everyday. Indeed the narrator realises that “we have become strangely religious in ways that border close on superstition.”(29) The various objects - Christian or pagan symbols - taken along keep the miners close to their ancestors and their past in a timeless and archaic dimension: We will take with us worn family rosaries and faded charms and loop ancestral medals and crosses of delicate worn fragility around our scar-lashed necks and about the thickness of our wrists, seemingly unaware of whatever irony they might project. This too seems but a further longing for the past, far removed from the “rational” approaches to religion that we sometimes encounter in our children. (29)
34 These sacred objects keep the miners in touch with their homeland and families in spite of the distances and differences. This is also true of the sprigs of spruce trees “wedged within the grillework of our cars or stuck beneath the headlight bulbs”. (11) The sprigs bring together the everyday of summertime and the ordinary working days. What is collected by chance is deliberately given significance, made sacred and ritualised: “We will remove them and take them with us to Africa as mementoes or talismans or symbols of identity.”(11) The rather unspecified value attached to the sprigs brings together the roots, the sacred, the homeland and the identity of the community. The significance of the quotidian must be found in this connection. This is expanded in a comparison with their ancestors: Much as our Highland ancestors, for centuries, fashioned crude badges of heather or of whortleberries to accompany them on the battlefields of the world. Perhaps so that in the closeness of their work with death they might find nearness to their homes and an intensified realization of themselves.(11)
35 The meaning of life is inseparable from death, expressed in the many rituals of death evoked or remembered in this short story.
36 Visits to churchyards, wakes, “youthful photographs” (13) or the yellow telegram “kept in vases and in Bibles and in dresser-drawers beneath white shirts”, “[A] simple obituary of a formal kind”(15) both recall and exorcise death. Mourning joins in with a cult of the dead and of the ancestors. Memories of burials, such as that of the narrator’s
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younger brother, link up with the conditions and dangers of mining in a compelling manner. The collapse of the grave, with the sliding earth and cracking wood, evokes the brother’s death and a miner’s typical professional risks: The next day at his funeral the rain continued to fall and in the grave that received him the unsteady timbers and the ground they held so temporarily back seemed but an extension of those that had caused his life to cease. (16)
37 It is in those rites of death that the everyday routine finds its profound significance as a struggle against death and the proud continuation of community traditions.
38 Daily life is also transcended through Gaelic music and folktales. Gaelic songs constitute a link with the past. The miners remember them from their early youth; they sing them on the beach, on their journey and at work. They differ from the songs of the modern hit-parades in that they are “so constant and unchanging and speak to us as the privately familiar.”(19) Their presence in their childhood and youth and their continuity in mature age certainly accounts for their familiarity. The Gaelic language of their Scottish forebears had been instilled into them but came up in the isolation of the shafts: As if it had sunk in unconsciously through some osmotic process while I had been unwittingly growing up. Growing up without fully realizing the language of the conversations that swirled around me. Now in the shafts and on the beach we speak it almost constantly though it is no longer spoken in our homes. (19)
39 The “ballads and folktales of the distant lonely past” (14) come up as a point of comparison to account for the meaning of phone calls. Traditional music, when the bagpipe-player plays “Flowers of the Forest” causes “the hair to bristle on the backs of our necks” (14) awakening a sense of social identity and prompting people to speak the Gaelic language in outbursts of mourning farewells. Contrary to an artificial summer- culture “Celtic Revival”, the MacKinnons experience a descent into their remote past, the depths of their archaic nature and community spirit: “Singing songs in an archaic language as we too became more archaic and recognising the nods of acknowledgement and shouted responses as coming only from our friends and relatives.” Although the songs are “for the most part local and private” and would lose “almost all of substance in translation”, they reach for the universal as the narrator hopes, referring to a quotation from his daughter’s university textbook. It is because the archaic or mythical constitutes the universal foundation of the particular, the local or the private. The Gaelic songs and folktales revive the past and the present in a timeless mythic transformation. In singing in Gaelic, the men’s quasi-unconscious incantation reaches the depths of the collective unconscious in which they experience a sense of the familiar: “After a while they begin to sing in Gaelic, singing almost unconsciously the old words that are so worn and so familiar.”(30) Time is thus ritually abolished and the everyday acquires another dimension since it shares in the traditional expression of a community. The quotidian mining work and the singing in Gaelic are but two ways of using traditional tools: “They seem to handle them [the old words] almost as they would familiar tools.”(30)
40 In the fifteenth-century Gaelic song which concludes the short story, life –and the everyday- is seen as a journey towards death: “I wend to death”. In the perspective of the short story, it is the miners’ everyday which is endowed with epic overtones: “knight stith in stour/Through fight in field I won the flower/ No fights me taught the death to quell”. The alliteration in [kl] in “clad in clay” draws attention on the final word “clay” as
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both the symbol of death and the familiar element of mining work, the word combining the metaphysical and the everyday.
41 It is the Cape Breton miners’ quotidian life of labour, which haunts the whole story. The miners’ summer-time everyday only finds significance in relation to it. It shows the transience of life which can be transcended by everyday work itself, by myth-making and rituals. The purpose of the narrative is not simply to construct the everyday. It aims at giving a voice to often felt but unexpressed feelings of identity. Miners do not speak directly in this short story. Yet through an essentially collective voice (“we”) mixed with a discreet personal one, with recourse to the experience of a community, their rituals, gestures, traditions, myths, songs or language, the narrative recreates folk culture – as “the ballads and the folktales of the lonely distant past”(14) would, not reproducing bygone legends but seeing the archaic in the contemporary. Thus Alistair MacLeod participates in what John Barth called “the literature of replenishment”.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lapaire, Jean-Rémi & Wilfrid Rotgé. Linguistique et grammaire de l’anglais. Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1991, 393-404.
Lowry, Elizabeth. “Little Red Boy”, a review of MacLeod’s Island: Collected Stories and No Great Mischief, The London Review of Books, 20 September 2001, 21-2.
MacLeod, Alistair. “The Closing Down of Summer”. As Birds Bring Forth the Sun & Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, (1986), 1992, 7-31.
Quirk, Randolph & Sidney Greenbaum. A University Grammar of English. Harlow: Longman, 1973.
NOTES
1. . Elizabeth Lowry, “Little Red Boy”, a review of MacLeod’s Island: Collected Stories and No Great Mischief, The London Review of Books, 20 September 2001, 21. 2. . All references to “The Closing Down of Summer” are taken from As Birds Bring Forth the Sun & Other Stories, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, (1986), 1992, 7-31 and are given parenthetically in the text. 3. . These notions are taken from Jean-Rémi Lapaire & Wilfrid Rotgé, Linguistique et grammaire de l’anglais, Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1991, 393-404. 4. . Elizabeth Lowry, ibid. 5. . See Randolph Quirk & Sidney Greenbaum, A University Grammar of English, Harlow: Longman, 1973, 41 6. . Randolph Quirk & Sidney Greenbaum, op. cit., 41. 7. . See Jean-Rémi Lapaire & Wilfrid Rotgé, op. cit., 457.
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ABSTRACTS
Le quotidien évoque généralement l’idée de stabilité en termes de spatialité : la maison, le lieu de travail ou les lieux habituellement fréquentés. A un environnement familier peut correspondre une structure temporelle : modes répétitifs et itératifs exprimés sous forme sémantique, verbale, adverbiale ou adjectivale. Par la peinture de la vie d’un groupe de mineurs canadiens en vacances sur la côte ouest du Cap Breton, leur région d’origine, « The Closing Down of Summer » met en scène des traditions immuables et décrit des habitudes sociales. Cependant cette nouvelle communique aussi une sensation de changement, en particulier par son titre, qui suggère le passage à une autre saison. Une étude de la poétique du quotidien et de sa signification se doit de traiter la question de la représentation du temps, mais aussi les thèmes du changement et de la permanence, du particulier et de l’universel, afin d’interpréter les implications philosophiques, symboliques ou esthétiques de la nouvelle. La narration construit le quotidien d’une communauté comme double, comme le montre d’abord cet essai. Si la dualité suggère des changements potentiels, cette impression est confirmée par un paradoxe selon lequel le quotidien fonctionne comme forme de l’éphémère plutôt que gage de stabilité. La question de la possibilité de transcender le quotidien vient clore cette étude.
AUTHORS
LAURENT LEPALUDIER Laurent Lepaludier, agrégation and Doctorat d’Etat, teaches English literature and critical theory at the University of Angers. He has written a thesis on Joseph Conrad and published various articles on Victorian and Edwardian novelists and short-story writers. Head of the CRILA research centre of Angers, and in charge of the research on the short story, he is also head of the English section of the CERPECA (Canadian studies research centre of Angers). He has published several articles on contemporary short fiction. His research currently focuses on fiction and knowledge.
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Carol Shields and the poetics of the quotidian
Marta Dvorak
"The quotidian is where it's at," Herb Rhinelander wrote last week in his nationwide syndicated column. "People are getting their highs on the level roller coaster of everydayness, dipping their daily bread in the soup of common delight and simple sensation." (Carol Shields, "Soup du Jour")
1 A prolific writer whose corpus includes three short story collections and seven novels as wells as plays, poetry, criticism, biography, and essays, recipient of a Governor General's Award, an American Books Critics Circle Award, and a Canadian Authors' Association Award, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded a Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries (1993), Carol Shields has built her international reputation on her uncanny ability to re/present the details of everyday life, to anatomize the mundane. In an essay entitled "The Same Ticking Clock", Shields denounces the way in which serious literature previously suppressed the domestic component of our lives and replaced the "texture of the quotidian", rich in meaning, with "the old problem- solution trick", that she likens to "a photo opportunity for artificial crisis and faked confrontation" (258). Her own aesthetics of the domestic have both enthused and irritated: reviews of her work alternately dub it smaller than life or else praise it for its alchemy of the everyday1. Her trademark role, bard of the commonplace, is so firmly established that in "Soup du Jour", one of the stories in her latest collection, Dressing Up for the Carnival, Shields parodies the very aesthetics in which she grounds her writing. The extract quoted in the epigraph above encapsulates the writer's characteristic combinatory tropological strategy consisting in mixing irony, paradox (highs/ level), or oxymoron (level roller coaster) with the powerful transforming figure of the metaphor (here dominantly alimentary but also carnivalesque) in order to suspend the referential function of language and set up a state of contemplation. Having overturned with light
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irony the journalistic mixture of truisms, faddish colloquialisms, and facile alliterative metaphorical style, Shields's extradiegetic narrator then goes on to proclaim: The ordinary has become extraordinary. All at once - it seems to have happened in the last hour, the last ten minutes - there is no stone, shrub, chair, or door that does not offer arrows of implicit meanings or promises of epiphany. (Dressing Up, 163)
2 The flow of the syntagm with its enumeration implying an open-ended amplification, an infinity of possibilities to be envisaged and celebrated, is interrupted by the figure of the parenthesis, which not only self-reflexively foregrounds the process of enunciation, but also satirizes literary fashions through the device of hyperbole (in the absurdly restrictive temporal precision), aporetically cancelling out the promises of higher meaning and epiphanic disclosures behind pedestrian objects. Yet, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, this is precisely what Shields does offer: through stones and shrubs, chairs and doors, objective correlatives or figurations of nature and culture, she transforms objects into signs - symbols or emblems of an ontological stance.
3 I shall argue that Shields's poetic practice functions simultaneously - and aporetically - in a vertical and a horizontal fashion. The writer paradigmatically reconfigures universal aesthetic and metaphysical concerns, all the while that she syntagmatically questions the ontological existence of any reality outside of representation. Coral Ann Howells's article "In the Subjunctive Mood: Carol Shields's Dressing Up for the Carnival", studying the collection from the angle of fantasy and masquerade, judiciously grounds the critical discussion in an essay by Shields in which the author makes an analogy between her vision and mode of writing and the subjunctive mood of grammar: Diurnal surfaces could be observed by a fiction writer with a kind of deliberate squint, a squint that distorts but also sharpens beyond ordinary vision, bringing forward what might be called the subjunctive mode of one's self or others, a world of dreams and possibilities and parallel realities. (Shields, "Arriving Late", 246; emphasis mine)
4 At the core of Shields's writing, then, is a paradigm characteristic of modernism suggesting a supra-reality beyond the senses, deeply concerned with figuration and representation, or the order of the world. But this vertical mode is enmeshed with a horizontal one characteristic of postmodernism: it is concerned not with re/ presentation, but with the presentation of a world through the "parallel realities" of fiction.
5 From the ordered world of homely things, we constantly slide into the ordered world of language and representation. Rather than "artificial crisis and faked confrontation", Shields pursues "the real mystery" of the self, of the other, of the creative process itself. In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, "real mystery" takes on the contours of the following interrogations: "How do you know anyone? How does art come out of common day?" ("Interview", 41). The writer confesses her fascination with numinous moments, when we sense "the order of the universe beneath that daily chaos" (43). She argues that in order to perceive the pattern of the universe, in order to lead creative lives, we need order and safety: I think creativity flourishes in tranquil settings ... What the writer needs is everydayness. (Wachtel, "Interview" 39)
6 Recognizable in her statements is a rather neoclassical mode of idealism which marks a certain verticality2 of the quotidian, metaphor of a higher order, sign of a supra-reality: fiction represents things as something beyond which is more elevated.The preoccupation with an undisclosed meaning underlies and even catalyzes Mary Swann, a
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novel in which ambitious academics unscrupulously reconstruct, even reinvent, the biography and oeuvre of an ordinary farmer's wife who has inexplicably authored extraordinary poetry: The mythic heavings of the universe, so baffling, so incomprehensible, but when squeezed into digestible day-shaped bytes, made swimmingly transparent. Dailiness. The diurnal unit, cloudless and soluble. (Mary Swann, 21-22)
7 Dailiness as the doorway to the mythic heavings of the universe, but also the thingness of Being-there or Being-in-the-world, containing its own meaning and needing no explicatory act of language - reminiscent of Heidegger's Dasein - are fundamentally what the stories in Dressing Up for the Carnival aporetically revolve around.
8 The writing, rooted in everydayness, is profoundly metaphorical. At the core of the metaphorical network are the alimentary and vestimentary dynamics that both codify and are codified by a given sociocultural reality. These are the leitmotifs that provide the point of emergence where the pattern of relations constructed by the text rise to the surface and proclaim the power of invention.
9 Defying the linear plot of conventional short story structure, the title story of the collection is constructed upon the rhetorical devices of seriation and hypotyposis3. The omniscient narrator chooses one spring day in a North American city and juxtaposes a dozen scenes made even more vivid and dynamic through the use of the nunegocentric present tense, grounded in the here and now, focussing in turn on characters of different ages, backgrounds, and sexes without ever providing a narrative interconnection. The only linking thread is the vestimentary leitmotif proclaimed in the opening sentence: "All over town people are putting on their costumes" (Dressing Up, 1). As the choice of the theatrical term indicates, the accoutrements that the characters take up are not merely vestimentary items but accessories that include a mango, a bouquet of daffodils, a football, a violin case, or an English pram. The opening sequence sets the tone, as a young woman, Tamara, dresses for work in an apparently non-functional way. Without checking the weather, she chooses a yellow skirt and white blouse, along with a straw belt, yellow beads, earrings, bone sandals, and bare legs. The outfit can be viewed simply as a carnivalesque disguise or concealment, or as a form of conformity to or transgression of social codes and conventions, yet by setting it within the framework of the multiple segments or variations that it anticipates, Shields nudges it towards an ontological statement. Yes! The yellow cotton skirt with the big patch pockets and the hand detail around the hem. How fortunate to own such a skirt. And the white blouse. What a blouse! Those sleeves, that neckline with its buttoned flap, the fulness in the yoke that reminds her of the Morris dances she and her boyfriend Bruce saw at the Exhibition last year. Next she adds her new straw belt; perfect. A string of yellow beads. Earrings of course. Her bone sandals. And bare legs, why not? She never checks the weather before she dresses; her clothes are the weather, as powerful in their sunniness as the strong, muzzy early morning light pouring into the narrow street by the bus stop, warming the combed crown of her hair and fuelling her with imagination. (1-2)4 She taps a sandalled foot lightly on the pavement, waiting for the number 4 bus, no longer just Tamara, clerk-receptionist for the Youth Employment Bureau, but a woman in a yellow skirt. A passionate woman dressed in yellow. A Passionate, Vibrant Woman About To Begin Her Day. Her Life. (2)
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10 In a pastiche of the headlines of trashy tabloids, Shields capitalizes even unstressed grammatical words that serve merely to specify the relationship among the lexical words that carry meaning, and that normally remain uncapitalized, thus placing the authorial voice as well as the receptor at an ironic distance from the free indirect discourse containing the character's inflated lexicon and melodramatic statement. Yet we cannot help noticing the multiple existential resonances. The final word sentence concluding the segment contains the single noun "life". The juxtaposition of the penultimate and ultimate sentences, with the added parallelism of the possessive adjective, generates an equivalence between "day" and "life": we construct our lives just as we structure our days. The grammatical ellipsis of the verb "to be" throughout this incantatory passage is significant through the presence of its absence. We divine that the portrait of Tamara conforms to the rhetorical convention regulating description, designed to move from effictio (outward appearance) to notatio (inward moral qualities). The surface (the yellow skirt) does not cover but rather unveils the inner truth of the self (passionate/ vibrant). Or even more radically, the skirt is the self, in the Hume-like sense that there is no definitive self, only a collection of perceptions and habits.
11 The vignettes that follow vary the accessories as well as the protagonists in a metonymic fashion, antonomastically multiplying individual flat characters that function synecdochically as universal, even allegorical types. Roger, of average age, height, class, and profession, has impulsively bought a mango for the first time in his life, and carries the sensuous exotic fruit in his hand, all the while that the epanalepsis "Mango, mango" of the free indirect discourse transforms the alliterative acoustical image into a mantra. The prosaic, everyday scene - a man on the street hurrying back to work after his coffee break - is a scene of revelation reminiscent of the Hegelian quest for self through encounters with the Other, but with a light touch that invites celebratory laughter: he freezes and sees himself freshly; a man carrying a mango in his left hand. Already he's accustomed to it; in fact, it's starting to feel lighter and drier, like a set of castanets which has somehow attached itself to his left arm. Any minute now he'll break out into a cha-cha-cha right here in front of the Gas Board. The shrivelled fate he sometimes sees for himself can be postponed if only he puts his mind to it. Who would have thought it of him? Not his ex-wife Lucile, not his co-workers, not his boss, not even himself. (3; emphasis mine)
12 The collision of incongruous, almost antitheticalterms, such as Gas Board/ cha-cha-cha, suggests that the self is a performance, that being is a representation, a construction. From Roger breaking into a cha-cha, to Wanda delivering her employer's empty pram home and soothing the imaginary baby in a gesture she has rehearsed in dreams, or little Mandy "striking a pose" at the traffic light as she races to the field with the football helmet that her adulated older brother, star halfback, has forgotten at home, all the characters envisage life as a spectacle, and represent themselves to themselves as well as to others on the stage of the world.
13 The verb "to be", elided in the initial segment, becomes omnipresent in the subsequent scenes that equate representing and being. Running along to deliver the helmet, her breath blazing in "heroic pain", Mandy is touched by an epiphanic recognition: for the first time "she comprehends who her brother is, that deep-voiced stranger whose bedroom is next to her own" (8), and who previously held only a spatial reality. The
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process of sympathy corresponding to the aesthetics of sentimentalism set up by Adam Smith5 is so complete that [t]oday, for a minute, she is her brother. She is Ralph Eliot, age seventeen, six feet tall, who later this afternoon will make a dazzling, lazy touchdown, bringing reward and honour to his name, and hers. (8)
14 The exploration of being-in-the-world is consolidated by the shortest vignette, made up of three brief sentences grounded in three different angles of vision: Jeanette Foster is sporting a smart chignon. Who does she think she is! Who does she think she is? (9)
15 The initial objective point of view - narrator as external observer - shifts through the play of italics to, first of all, inner polyfocalization, recording in essence the struggle for control of image, the disapproval of the social group confronted with a gap between image already held (static), and image newly-generated (dynamic), and then to the subjective point of view of the omniscient narrator musing over the nature and power of the self.
16 The antonomasia that catalyzes the allegorical dimension of the apparently banal episodes is reinforced by the fact that the next to last character remains anonymous ("a young woman"), and the identity of the protagonist of the closing scene is explicitly effaced: he is designated by the letter that conventionally represents an unknown factor. X is an "anonymous middle-aged citizen" who represents existential uncertainty in the form of ambivalent sexual orientation: behind closed doors, he takes pleasure in "waltz[ing] about in his wife's lace-trimmed nightgown"(9). In this attire, the liminal character's glance out the window discloses a world suffused with aporia, a fertile flux of inexpressible sensations dissolved in the objective correlative of the pear tree, and grounded in the cosmology suggested by sun and evening: He lifts the blind an inch and sees the sun setting boldly behind his pear tree, its mingled coarseness and refinement giving an air of confusion. Everywhere he looks he observes cycles of consolation and enhancement, and now it seems as though the evening itself is about to alter its dimensions, becoming more (and also less) than what it really is. (9, emphasis mine)
17 To be remarked above is the final word which concludes the story on its major key or motif, just as a musical composition ends on the main centre of its tonal framework. Within the verb denoting existence, Shields slides from the world of substantial things, the world of the senses, to the mental acts of perception, thought, and representation.
18 Nowhere is this clearer than in Shields's trademark rhetorical device of enumeration, such as the list of items in the story "Keys", that, along with a bent key just found and so devoid of any usefulness, are contained in a cracked china cup in a kitchen drawer: a single hairpin, a handful of thumbtacks, a stub of a candle, half an eraser, a blackened French coin, a book of matches from the Informatic Centre, a rubber band or two, and a few paper clips. (Dressing Up, 101)
19 The enumeration functions on several levels: one remarks the exophoric dimension inviting the receptor to identify with the odds and ends of dailiness, as well as the entropic implications of dysphoric words such as "stub", "half", or "blackened". Simultaneously, even before they become more explicitly metaphorized, the items quietly evoke desire and despair. The cracked cup with its "miserable, broken, mismatched contents, its unsorted detritus of economy and mystery" (102) is a synecdoche of life, and one night when the character, a thirty-four-year-old single woman named Cheryl, sits reading a book significantly called The Sands of Desire, she
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suffocates, opens a window, and begins to fling out the objects that come to hand: a package of Cheese Twists that is ironically family-sized, a brown-edged head of lettuce, and finally the contents of the cup. The series of word sentences that accompany the objects rattling down and that conclude the sequence, Ping. Tut. Tsk, Tick. Gone.
20 shift from the phonic symbolism of the opening onomatopoeic lexeme evoking an objective physical act/ sound to the phonic symbols of regret, transgression, and mortality, in which the final component of the series is an abstract odd man out. Remarkable throughout the whole sequence revolving round this character is the ontological vehemence, to borrow a term from Paul Ricoeur, that underlies the naming process. When Shields names or enumerates, she is in effect creating the be-ing of the object, affirming that it exists. Yet by limiting herself to the point of view of the same character, the writer aporetically questions the existence of any material reality outside the perceptions of the mind: The real world, of course, is in her own head, which she sometimes thinks of as a shut room provisioned with declaration and clarity, everything else being a form of theatre. (100)
21 In this, Shields reconfigures the pre-existent aesthetic traditions that have subtended the texts of writers from Shakespeare to Milton and Shelley. The relationship between external and internal, mind and matter, thought and thing have been since the Renaissance at the core of seminal works such as The Tempest6, As You Like It7, and Macbeth8, as well as Paradise Lost9, or Prometheus Unbound10, to take but a few of the best- known examples. Shields's originality in reconfiguring what is essentially an ancient metaphysical as well as an aesthetic preoccupation may consist in the manner in which her reclaiming the familiar entails not only a cosmological assessment, but also an assessment of commodity culture.
22 In one of the final segments of the title story "Dressing Up", previously discussed, Susan, an arts student who has been assigned Beckett's Waiting for Godot to read, "strides along, strides, her book flashing under her arm" (8) with the title plainly visible. What clearly amounts to a performance contains ontological overtones that a simile conveying an axiological collision deflates but does not cancel: She is a young woman who is reading a great classic. Vistas of possibility unfold like money. (8, emphases mine)
23 The inner focalization behind the pecuniary analogy implies that while high culture still enjoys a comparably high status in the dominant socioeconomic community, a certain commodification of the aesthetic has nonetheless occurred. Shields suggests that commodity culture has been naturalized, and that the social cost may be high because, as Jed Rasula argues, "the very ground of the given, the immediate, is saturated with the logic of the marketplace, seeming to be 'given' along with the natural elements" (718).
24 The everyday has been undeniably conceptualized and integrated into postmodern artistic praxis in a systematic way: one has only to evoke the work of a conceptual artist like Andy Warhol, fascinated, like modernists before him, with the thingness of things. Warhol defamiliarized the subject of representation by painting indifferently Mao Tse Tung and Mick Jagger, and he equated people and things by filming celebrities and doorknobs alike, and by promoting with his silk screens the serial principle of mass production. The first filmmaker to use real time as story time, or to place ‘real’ time in
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synchronicity with ‘reel’ time11, Warhol also blurred the distinctions between the kitchen and the art gallery, or even between artwork and the support used for representation. Such formal vindication of banality in literature as in the visual arts has interestingly been accompanied by a fascination with the text/ context dialectic - whereby the one constitutes the ground for, and cause of, the other - and the object/ ivity or object/ifiability of the aesthetic object. Postmodernists like Shields challenge representational veracity, positing that the only reality or ontology to which we can cling is that of language or story, or the story of language, which can be identified with the genre-transcending mythos that Northrop Frye defines in Anatomy of Criticism as structures of imagery in movement (140).
25 Not surprisingly, then, Dressing Up for the Carnival is self-conscious writing that is language-centred rather than plot-centred, belonging to the mode that Linda Hutcheon has identified as "narcissistic narrative", which shifts the focus "from the 'fiction' to the 'narration'" and makes the narration "into the very substance" of the content (Narcissistic Narrative, 28). The story "Invention" notably begins by recounting how the narrator's grandmother invented that pedestrian object, the steering-wheel muff, and built a commercial empire that destroyed her marriage as it grew. The story slides imperceptibly from narrative to narration as the focus glides from the world of commodities to the world of language. In an appropriately random, digressive fashion, the narrator challenges the notion of perfectibility along with that of scientific or technological progress by proclaiming that "invention is random and accidental" (Dressing Up, 178). The text deflates the mythical overtones that have been culturally constructed around certain products or theories, by resorting to seriation, periphrastic parallelisms, and juxtapositions that engender unusual equivalences between, for instance, gunpowder and the hoola hoop, or chairs and Darwinism: For instance, someone discovered one idle afternoon that a loop of plastic tubing will defy gravity if gyrated rapidly around the human body. Someone else, in another slot of time, noticed that a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur will create a new substance which is highly explosive (...) Other people - through carelessness or luck or distraction or necessity - invented keys, chairs, wheels, thermometers, and the theory of evolution. (Dressing Up, 178)
26 Simultaneously, the narrator celebrates other inventions that pertain to the world of writing, and that remain unacknowledged and unsung: the banal word-space, the full stop, the comma, and the hyphen. Through a litotic analogy with the apparently insignificant yet ground-breaking zero, the narratorial voice lauds the blank, praises the oxymoronic weight of emptiness, and celebrates the silence that "distinguishes speech from speech and thought from thought" (176). Playfully attributing the scriptoral invention of the comma to a slip of the pen of another absurdly precise yet historically vague member of the family ("one Brother Alphonse, a very distant cousin on my paternal grandfather's side" [177]), the narcissistic narrator's voice, overlapping with Brother Alphonse's, metalinguistically dubs it "a curled worm of ambiguity", and describes it in temporal and spatial terms as the very site of creation in process: "a sacred pause, a resting place during which time he might breathe out his thanks to God for the richness of his blessings, and prepare his next imprecation"(177).
27 Mixing fantasy and self-reflexivity, the narrator attributes the invention of the hyphen to a sixteenth-century cooper-cum-grammarian ancestor. The extravagant logic according to which a barrel-maker is best qualified to be a word-smith is presented by an analogy between the hyphen and a barrel which is so extra/ordinary that it verges
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on the conceit. The barrel is held together by an iron hoop, which "connects what is unconnectable", for as the personification makes clear, the barrel-maker's bent staves "long to spring apart" (177). With the implied authorial voice overlapping, the narrator argues that the hyphen takes on the same function. A diacritical mark of great simplicity, it joins what is similar and also what is disjunctive. Two words may be read as one, a case of compounding meaning and doubling force, but this horizontal bar, requiring only a sweet, single stroke of the pen, divides as well as marries. (178)
28 The metalanguage sets up a parallel between the page and the land, between art and craft, between the building materials of a text - signs of its object/ivity - and those of a farm: Aesthetically, the hyphen is superior to the slash, you will agree, and it makes a set of parentheses look like crude homemade fencing (178).
29 The resonances with the stance of Utilitarianism, which links the beautiful and the good with the concept of the useful, making them convertible and indissociable, are made explicit in the affirmation that "successful inventions are both functional and elegant" (178).
30 The self-conscious short fiction I have been discussing posits that life is spectacle, an artistic performance in process, while art, in a complementary fashion, is a constructional craft grounded in the daily world of things. The writer's preoccupation with representation is an attempt to make sense of what we call reality, to make sense of our past and present in order to allow us to at least begin to picture - as one of the child protagonists in "Keys" cannot yet do - the "unscrolling of a future" (106) in which a key ring represents the societal comforts and obligations of house, office, club, and cottage. YetShields's poetics of the quotidian are also grounded in postmodern aporia. On the one hand, her metalinguistic self-consciousness never ceases to call attention to itself and to its own process. On the other hand, her stories are suffused with the ontological vehemence that seems to be the metaphysical equivalent of Austin's concept of the performative. When Shields announces "This is", she is in effect creating the be-ing of the object, making her scene operate with a centripetal force, revolving and closing in upon its own centre. In poetic texts, as Ricoeur argues, such a practice contains the ex-tatic moment of language, when language is outside of itself, expressing a desire to efface itself, to vanish within the confines of the "l'être- dit"(313),the being-said - in turn the consequence of the act of speech. The Word creates: telling engenders being.
31 The cosmological reckoning subtending Shields's aesthetics of the commonplace does not deny the referential function of language: on the contrary, her texts seem almost to defy the Saussurean principle that a linguistic sign unites only a concept and an acoustical image, so intensely do our senses perceive the materiality of the objects conjured up. They seem to be the verbal equivalent of the still lifes of baroque painters like Chardin, which suggest that the meaning of life is right here at hand, in the very substance of the silently luscious fruits. Yet at the same time, objects are often signs or figurations of something beyond - or meta. Grounded in postmodern aporia, Shields's poetic practice reconfigures universal aesthetic and metaphysical concerns, confirming Benveniste's affirmation that language literally re-presents or re-produces reality (25), all the while that the writer questions the ontological existence of any reality outside of representation. We cannot fail to recall the "diurnal unit" of dailiness in Mary Swann, or the writer's confessed fascination with the "diurnal surfaces" in her essay "Arriving
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Late, Starting Over", which etymologically suggest daily occurrences or realities, but also evoke coexisting paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions. They evoke invisible realities - the hidden world of the diurnal flower that closes at night, that the figurative "squint" cultivated by the writer and resulting in sharpened vision promises to disclose. Yet they also evoke a juxtaposition of the diurnal and the elided nocturnal: two worlds placed side by side. The writer's poetics, in which the texture of the quotidian is distorted but also sharpened, takes us effectively into a world of parallel realities in which the ordinary exists extraordinarily.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benveniste, Emile. Problèmes de linguistique générale I. Paris: Gallimard, nrf, 1966.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. London: Penguin, 1990.
Heble, Ajay. "Letters in Canada" 1997. University of Toronto Quarterly 68.1 (1998): 235-254.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: the Metafictional Paradox. New York: Methuen, 1988.
Howells, Coral Ann. "In the Subjunctive Mood: Carol Shields's Dressing Up for the Carnival". The Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001), Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association: 144-154.
Rasula, Jed. "Strategizing the Ordinary". University of Toronto Quarterly 67.3 (1998): 715-724.
Ricoeur, Paul. La Métaphore vive. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Shields, Carol. Dressing Up for the Carnival. London: Fourth Estate, 2000.
—. Mary Swann. Hammersmith, London: Flamingo/ HarperCollins Publishers, 1993.
—. "Arriving Late: Starting Over", in How Stories Mean. Eds. John Metcalf and J.R. Struthers. Erin, Ont: Porcupine's Quill, 1993: 244-251.
—. "The Same Ticking Clock", in Language in Her Eye: Writing, Gender, Views by Canadian Women Writing English. Eds. Libby Schaer, Eleanor Wachtel. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990: 256-259.
Smyth, Donna E. "Shields' Swann". Ed. E. Wachtel. The Carol Shields Issue, Room of One's Own: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Criticism 13.1-2 (1989): 136-146.
Vauthier, Simone. "Closure in Carol Shields's Various Miracles", in Reverberations: Explorations in the Canadian Short Story. Concord, Ont: Anansi Press, 1993: 114-131.
Wachtel, Eleanor. "Interview with Carol Shields". Ed. E. Wachtel. The Carol Shields Issue, Room of One's Own: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Criticism 13.1-2 (1989): 5-45.
Yanofsky, Joel. Rev. of Dressing Up for the Carnival. Quill & Quire 66.2 (2000): 14-15.
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NOTES
1. . Cf Joel Yanofsky's delight in Shields's alchemy in his review of Dressing Up for the Carnival, or Ajay Heble's professed boredom in his review of Larry's Party with respect to what he qualifies as the "non-meteoric rise of Larry Weller from one kind of ordinariness to another" (256). 2. . Interestingly, the suggested verticality is inverted. In the phrase "the order of the universe beneath that daily chaos" it is expressed in the term "beneath" rather than "above", implying the possibility of stripping away the layers that veil the core of meaning. 3. . The technique seems to be an elaboration of the scenic epanalepsis that Simone Vauthier remarks in her study of "Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass" in Various Miracles (Reverberations, 126). 4. .Emphases in the text unless otherwise indicated. 5. .Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759) notably proclaimed sympathy or empathy to be the principal motivation of our acts and the basis of our moral judgments. 6. . "We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on". IV, i, 148-149. 7. . "All the world's a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players:/ They have their exits and their entrances,/ And one man in his time plays many parts". II, vii, 139-142. 8. . "Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more". V, vi, 24-26. 9. . "The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n". Book I, 254-255. 10. . "He gave man speech, and speech created thought,/ Which is the measure of the universe." 11. . Warhol notably recorded the Empire State Building in continuity for eight hours by shooting consecutive rolls of film with a stationary camera. He filmed a friend sleeping for six and a half hours, then provocatively copied one and a half hours of the reel and reinserted it to make a total of eight hours of ‘sleep’, the artistic mediation thereby self-reflexively challenging the very idea that he playfully posited: that mimetic art can capture and re-produce or re-present reality.
ABSTRACTS
Carol Shields a construit sa réputation internationale sur une certaine esthétique du familier: elle sait à merveille re/présenter les détails de la vie quotidienne et anatomiser le banal. Cet essai vise à montrer que sa pratique poétique, ancrée dans l'aporie, fonctionne à la fois de manière verticale et horizontale. D'une façon paradigmatique, l'écrivain reconfigure des préoccupations esthétiques et métaphysiques universelles, alors que d'une façon syntagmatique elle interroge l'existence ontologique de toute réalité en-dehors de la représentation. Au coeur de son écriture se trouve un paradigme qui est caractéristique du modernisme, qui évoque une sur-réalité au- delà des sens, et qui se préoccupe de questions de figuration et de représentation, autrement dit, de l'ordre du monde. Or, ce mode vertical se mêle d'un mode horizontal qui, lui, est caractéristique du postmodernisme: à la place de la représentation, ce mode se préoccupe de la présentation d'un monde par le biais des réalités parallèles de la littérature. Cette étude analysera son dernier recueil de nouvelles, Dressing Up for the Carnival, et montrera que ces textes métaphoriques et métalinguistiques propose de révéler de l'autre côté du quotidien le flux mythique de l'univers, mais aussi la choseté de l'Etre-là qui ne manquera pas d'évoquer le Dasein de Heidegger. En même temps, ces récits auto-réflexifs postule que la vie est spectacle ou
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représentation artistique, alors que l'art est un métier de construction ancré dans le monde quotidien des chose
AUTHORS
MARTA DVORAK Marta Dvorak is a professor at Université Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research focusses particularly on Canadian literature and culture: three of her articles have received international awards, and among the books she has edited are collections of essays on Margaret Atwood, on auto/biography, and Canadian cinema. One of her latest books, Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment, was published by Wilfrid Laurier UP in September 2001. She is currently organising an international conference on Carol Shields.
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The Ordinary as Subterfuge: Alice Munro’s “Pictures of the Ice”
Héliane Ventura
1 In his essay entitled Le récit est un piège (The tale is a trap) Louis Marin relies on the supposed evidence of a XVI century Venetian treatise on the composition and use of traps to distinguish between three types of entrapment. Through fantasy, through appetite, and through strength which he envisages respectively as the traps of the imagination, of need, and of movement, in French fables and histories of the XVII century, I use the theoretical framework proposed by Louis Marin, after Gian Battista de Contugi, to examine a story by Alice Munro from her 1990 collection Friend of my Youth. This story is remarkable for its use of devices linked with deception and as such is emblematic of the work of this most Machiavellian of writers.
2 As often in a Munro story, one is confronted with two story lines which are partly an extension and partly a reflection of each other. The main story line apparently concerns Austin Cobbett, a retired minister who engineers a fake scenario to indulge his passion for self-sacrifice in secret. Austin tells his grown-up children and the community he has lived in for many years that he is about to get married again to a rich widow in Hawaii and live the well-earned leisurely existence of a contented pensioner, walking the sandy beach of an earthly, and mundane, paradise. Because this choice is out of character, the former minister takes great pains to establish the veracity of his tale, buying summer clothes, joking with the bank clerks, and showing likely photographs as material evidence. In reality, he is covering up for the fact that he is about to be hired as a minister for a godforsaken community in Northern Ontario, where he will live in a trailer, in sub-zero temperatures, dedicate himself to thankless people, and (as it turns out) get drowned in a treacherous lake.
3 The subsidiary story line, or what appears to be such, concerns his housekeeper, Karin Duprey, whose life is shadowed by a traumatic event the nature of which we only discover in the last pages: her baby died of meningitis during a winter storm when the road to the hospital was blocked. She is the only one to discover Austin’s subterfuge and she equally indulges in deceptions of her own. Like the minister, she is about to
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embark on a new life, far from her original community, although her plans are only hinted at and not disclosed in the narrative.
4 Related to both story lines we find the character of Brent Duprey, Karin’s former husband and Austin’s former protégé. Brent is rescued from drunkenness by Austin. He becomes a hard-line teetotaller, makes final demands on Karin before separating from her, and eventually dispossesses Austin of the temperance house he had created in order to take full control of the renamed establishment.
5 The story could be regarded as an ordinary tale of human betrayal and deception except that it embeds treacherousness in such a way as to transform subterfuge into selflessness and ordinariness into transcendence. Such is the art of entrapment, says Louis Marin , that it relies on ordinariness: This is what is strange. It is not because this type of writing is ordinary that it is not strange. This is what the art of entrapment relies on: the ordinary. This is what, as a consequence, the art of deconstructing artifice must rely on: locating the strange in the ordinary. (Marin 75; my translation)
6 Louis Marin establishes a protocol for reading the story : no matter how ordinary the writing pretends to be, it is ciphered and requires to be treated like a cryptogram. Consider the opening paragraph of the story: Three weeks before he died - drowned in a boating accident in a lake whose name nobody had heard him mention - Austin Cobbett stood deep in the clasp of a three way mirror in Crawford’s Men’s Wear in Logan, looking at himself in a burgundy sports shirt and a pair of cream, brown, and burgundy plaid pants. Both permanent press.(Munro 137)
7 The painstaking attention to the different items of clothing worn by the main character, whose death is announced before the relation of his life has begun, immediately strikes a discordant note which hardly conceals the shafts of wit which surround the description or lie in the blanks, one of which being the suppressed name of the obscure lake: Shaft Lake, which also refers to Austin’s «shafting» the community. The allusion to permanence with regard to the shirt and pants appears as an instance of ironic displacement which, «under cover» of ordinariness, metonymically points in the direction of the minister’s lifelong commitment. It is also a profoundly ironic detail, particularly ill-fitted for a man who dedicated his life to the reformation of sinners and maintained his hope in the possibility of change by creating a house called «Turnaround House», not to mention the choice of colour for the shirt and the pants, extremely ironic for a man who encouraged abstinence from alcohol. The minister’s reflection «in the clasp of the mirror» is equally proleptic and programmatic in its apparent ordinariness: one simultaneously perceives the clasp of ice which will seal his fate and the multi-faceted dimension of the character who indulges in deception.
8 The doubleness which results from the simultaneous presence of the character and of his reflections immediately points in the direction of duplicity, a duplicity openly acknowledged by Austin himself. His first words are: «Did you ever hear that expression ‘mutton dressed as lamb’?» This reference to duplicitous metamorphosis is particularly ironic because Austin was a minister, in the service of the lamb of God. By choosing casual clothes for his Hawaiian retirement he seems to draw away from the lamb of God while pretending to be a lamb. This is the most significant clue given to the reader at the start: even though Austin pretends to have turned around and relinquished his religious commitments, he is not to be trusted. Once a minister, always a minister: his commitment is as permanent as the crease in his new pants. The
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minister’s new vestments act as a lure or a decoy to convince the community that he is now different when he is essentially the same. According to Marin’s terminology, supposedly borrowed from Gian Battista de Contugi, the type of entrapment represented here is the trap of fantasy: The trap of fantasy is the one through which the adversary finds himself confronted by his own image, one which is particularly pleasing. By making him stop, entranced, in front of his own image, one can easily and safely hit him. The principle of this type of trap is the appeal to sameness and the pleasure engendered by imitation. However, experience indicates that the efficacy of the trap does not lie in fantasy itself or in the images it creates. They are only the means that make the trap function. Efficacy lies in the appeal to sameness and the pleasure in likeness. Thus, the decoy carried by the hunter on his fist to call back his hawk, or the decoys that he sets up in marshes when the wild ducks pass by; the female flies towards the image of the male and the male towards the image of the female, and both find themselves within reach of the swift arrow shot by the man who lies in wait. (Marin13; my translation)
9 The image in the mirror that Austin offers the community in Logan is the image of their expectations in terms of retirement. The socially acceptable form of withdrawal from the sphere of work is linked with enjoyment of life. The ascetic minister offers a version of himself as a consumer and hedonist. He covers up his difference with counterfeit similarity to square with the doxa, and the community is taken in precisely because of the attraction to similarity and the pleasure in imitation. Austin pleases them by imitating their ways or doing what they would do if they were in his place.
10 Austin’s self- transformation into a decoy meant to deceive people in Logan can also be deciphered through the extended metaphor and the rhetorical internal rhyme used by an authoritative narrator: «he was a stringy old rooster - stringy but tough, and game enough to gear up for a second marriage». It is also to be found in the explicit double- entendre: «Austin needed all the cover-up he could get»(Munro 137). Not only do we find the setting up of a trap in narrative utterance but we also encounter it in the process of enunciation. In fact the suggestion of entrapment through polysemy and metaphors precedes the discovery of the subterfuge. The reader is confronted with a double-barreled process of entrapment. She is shown the mechanism of the trap before the revelation of the fake scenario is conveyed to her. In other words she is alerted to the process of entrapment; she knows, being a Munro devotee, that she is being led astray which triggers a desire to discover other lures.
11 These lures can be perceived in photographs, which supplement, in narrative economy, the initial mirror image. Like the mirror image, the photographs and postcard pictures belong in the category of traps of fantasy. They rely on complacent stereotypes to delineate Austin’s future existence in a Hawaiian town, the name of which is written «in flowing letters like silk ribbon» on the postcards that he shows Karin. Of this name the narrator says: «the name floating in the sky looked as possible as anything else about it.» (Munro 140) It is precisely this assertion of likelihood which strikes up the chord of suspicion and leads us to investigate a striking stylistic feature linked with the description of the pictures and the characters they display. «Fluffy white hair, trim figure. Chic». «The town where he will live in Hawaii. Also a photograph of her house». (Munro 140) The ekphrastic narration is based on nominal sentences which, so structural grammar tells us, give the text an appearance of irrefutability by identifying the embedded predicate with the subject. (Dupriez 306) As Louis Marin further develops:
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What is strange is precisely this: 1-that «a minimal assertion should coincide with an item of syntax which, from the morphological point of view, belongs to the category of nouns», that «a form morphologically characterized as nominal should play the syntactic role of a verb» (Benvéniste, Problems of General Linguistics) 2-that this assertion should in the present situation be a narration describing a way of being and a situation … Its use reveals something of great import: that the event, the way of being, are in effect described in the present moment but as a complete essence, an absolute truth, a permanent value, timeless and placeless, without any relationship with the one who speaks, describes, or narrates; a final assertion, an authoritative argument. (Marin 75; my translation)
12 The process of nominalization reinforces the power that photographs have «to ratify what is represented.»(Barthes 133) What matters in the photographs, as in the nominal sentences which describe them, is the «certificate of presence», «the power of assertion» which make this scenario exist as an indubitable reality. (Barthes 135) The narrator joins hands with the character to try to authenticate the phony tale of the second marriage in Hawaii by seemingly eliminating subjectivity. By conspicuously taking away from the sentence part of the ordinary syntax, the narrator indulges in a process of effacement which has far-reaching significance. It provides one with a morphological clue to the presence of «holes» in the text, which gape open like so many pitfalls to alert one to the fact that something is missing, that some things are concealed in the textual blanks that have been purposefully constructed.
13 Together with the strategy of depletion which curtails sentences, one finds devices aimed at replenishment or redundancy which are similarly suspicious and similarly draw attention to the rhetorical nature of the process of entrapment. Alliterations and consonance, for example, are particularly conspicuous in the description of the photographs: «a postcard picture», «a bit of balcony», «the jewel-bright waves breaking». The imitative value of alliteration makes one hear the sound of waves pounding on the shore, as if to reinforce the referential illusion by buttressing images with sounds in the discourse of fantasy and simulacrum.
14 The traps of fantasy are set up on two levels: in discursive utterance they are set up by one character to entice the other characters in the narrated world and, at the level of enunciation, they are set up by the narrator to lure the reader. The traps of appetite in Munro’s story differ from the previous ones in the sense that they are apparently destined for one set of characters and do not directly aim at taking in the reader. These traps consist in baits and have to do with temptation: The trap of appetite is the one through which the animal or human being that one wants to capture is shown a thing he needs. The violent desire he has to acquire it, whether spurred by hunger, thirst, or sex, or some other appetite, makes him powerless precisely because of his power and renders him defenseless in front of a lesser power. Thus, the lures of all kinds that the hunter or clever fisherman sets in his hoop nets… (Marin 13; my translation)
15 These traps, engineered by Austin, are apparently meant for Karin. Austin has made up his mind to donate his worldly possessions to Turnaround House, now controlled by Brent Duprey and renamed Lazarus House. Out of respect for other people’s taste he has chosen to sell his goods by auction and present Lazarus House with the resulting amount in cash. He has entrusted Karin with clearing everything out but she feels the need to keep some of those things for herself. The things she hankers after are presented in the text through, once more, the use of a truncated syntax: «A willow–
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pattern plate. The blue-and-gray flowered curtains. A little, fat jug of ruby-colored glass with a silver lid.»(Munro 149) The nominal sentences endow the things that Karin has selected with the timelessness of art, they become things of beauty dispensing joy forever. «She can see her place transformed with these things in it. More than that she can feel the quiet and content they would extend to her». (Munro 149) Karin’s appetite is definitely whetted by the thought of stealing, and the materialistic objects displayed in the house do function as baits, yet their status becomes somehow transmuted as Karin imagines that they will trigger off a change in her house and above all in herself. «Sitting in a room so furnished, she wouldn’t need to go out. She would never need to think of Brent and ways to torment him». (Munro 149) These baits are depicted as playing a healing and compensatory part, as Karin’s way to redemption. If she steals the minister’s wife’s valuables, she will lead a better life and be a better person. One should be aware of the fact that this construction of meaning is due to Karin’s focalization. She is the one who is responsible for this casuistry, but far from appearing like an untenable proposition, it becomes more and more validated by the narrating agency, as forcefully exemplified in: «she feels approved of - a most unexpected thing». (Munro 155)
16 The trap of appetite set up by Austin for Karin has been converted into a bait for the reader, meant to make her accept a most unorthodox protocol. The way has been paved for this moral turnaround by the various instances of duplicitous conversion which precede Karin’s smug decision to keep some of the valuables for herself, for example, Brent Duprey’s conversion from an irresponsible alcoholic to a ferocious teetotaller, a process which hints at a total conversion, and his taking over Turnaround House to convert it into Lazarus House, a change of name which signifies conversion from the realm of the dead to the realm of the living. But, above all, semantic and stylistic parallelisms alert the reader to the notion of turning around. For instance, Austin is first seen in Crawford’s Men’s Wear as he looked at himself in the mirror, or «turned around» to respond to a joke, while Karin is first encountered in a doughnut place where «she swung around» on the stool to address her acquaintances. And just as Austin’s doubleness was revealed in the mirror, so Karin’s is indicated by the double colour of her hair, the roots all black and the remaining part all blond.
17 The major instance of duplicitous transformation however, is in the title of the story and what it refers to: «Pictures of the Ice». The «unlikely formations» created by the snow and the ice covering the landscape represent a familiar topos in Munro’s work. For instance, they are to be found in the story entitled «Fits» from The Progress of Love (1986), where they echo the cover-up for a double murder. Here their symbolic dimension is also unmistakable but here they are used to conjure up intimations of paradise through reference to pearly gates and honeycomb: Sheets of ice drop from the burdened branches of the willow trees to the ground, and the sun shines through them from the west; they’re like walls of pearls. Ice is woven through the wire of the high fence to make it like a honeycomb. (Munro 151)
18 Austin captures these radiant moments with his camera the day before he leaves for his supposed retirement in Hawaii. He asks Karin to collect the pictures when they are developed and wait for his instructions. The instructions will never reach her since Austin dies in a boating accident on Shaft Lake. The pictures of the ice become Karin’s implicit inheritance and are in sharp opposition to the objects she acquired by stealth, ethereal radiance set against the substantiality of materialism and the taint of theft.
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But the radiance acquires a supernatural dimension which qualifies the intimations of paradise and lends the pictures a sinister aspect: Karin looks at these pictures of the pale lumpy ice monstrosities, these pictures Austin took, so often that she gets the feeling that he is in them, after all. He’s a blank in them, but bright.(Munro 155)
19 The bright blank does not seem to be constructed as the irradiating brightness of the godhead shining through the ice formation. What Karin sees is more akin to the sheen of glass covering up the monstrous shapes of traitors locked in ice, in Dante’s ninth circle of hell: …e vidimi davante e sotto I piedi un lago che per gelo avea di vetro e non d’acqua sembiante. Canto XXXII 22-241
20 Like the pictures of the ice, the frozen lake of Dante’s inferno «has the appearance of glass and not of water», it is an abyss which constitutes the lowest point in the journey to hell. It seems to be present in Munro’s short story under several guises, as a mirror in the initial paragraph, as Austin’s final burial place in Northern Ontario and as a bright blank in the pictures of the ice.
21 The pictures of the ice are constructed in such a way as to allow room for the imagination to fill in the blank: «shapes of ice that might be people, animals, angels, monsters, left unfinished» (Munro 151). Their elliptical description makes room for the return of the missing, the effaced or the repressed: Austin is explicitly made to inhabit forever the bright blank. Other ghosts might implicitly be lurking: Karin’s baby for instance who died during a snowstorm and seems to be superimposed upon the picture through the play of similes. When Brent, far advanced in drunkenness, finally realized that the baby was «like a hot coal», he wrapped him in wet towels with Karin’s help and brought him to the hospital, but too late. The similes that are used to depict the baby’s death coalesce polarities, the fire of coal and the wetness of towels. These polarities resonate against Austin’s plot conjuring up the mock image of a Hawaiian paradise better to plunge into a frozen hell. They also resonate against the ambivalence of the pictures simultaneously evoking the pearly gates of Heaven and the abyssal lake of icy destruction. The metaphors of «the sheets of ice over pale lumpy monstrosities» provide an additional clue which suggests the unspeakable event repressed under these shrouds of memory, all the more so as what is «buried» in ice is precisely the children’s playground: «And all the playground equipment, the children’s swings and climbing bars, has been transformed by ice, hung with organ pipes or buried in what looks like half-carved statues» (Munro 151). The baby’s death hovers about the bright blank which can be designated as Karin’s private inferno. The pictures of the ice conjure up an empty and frozen universe which seems to encapsulate Austin’s dereliction in the glacial solitude of Shaft Lake and the agonies of his self-sacrifice as well as Karin’s mental torture and her sense of utter deprivation at the time of her baby’s death.
22 The ambiguity of the pictures of the ice constitutes another trap or trick, less clearly designed but more powerfully constructed: The trap of strength or movement…. is the one simultaneously set up and concealed on the path of the animal or man that one wants to capture, it is a mechanism that he encounters by chance, in which he will be caught, without being directed to it through a lure or a decoy… The essence of the trap is thus to create a place where and a moment when a small part of the adversary’s strength or movement becomes
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the cause of the annihilation of his total strength and movement. (Marin 14; my translation)
23 What was Austin’s intention when he entrusted Karin with the photographs? Did he really want to deploy another system of thought than the materialistic one? What is Karin’s intention when she sends these pictures, without a note or a signature, to Austin’s children, Don and Megan, and to Brent Duprey? The last line of the story provides a cryptic answer: «She just wants to make them wonder». To be wonder- struck is to be silenced and arrested in one’s movement by the unexpected, unfamiliar or inexplicable.(OED) All three characters, Don, Megan, and Brent, are high achievers who will doubtless be stopped for a while in their race towards power and control by the sight of the unexplained and inexplicable pictures of the ice. They can be regarded as traps of force or movement leading those who contemplate them to the stasis of self- examination all the more so as, in their arrested dimension, they constitute a «freeze» in which past events are simultaneously crystallized and covered up.
24 Just as the characters will be made to wonder about the meaning of the pictures of the ice sent to them anonymously, so the reader is made to wonder about the questions they will ask themselves, perhaps one of them prompted by Umberto Eco in The Name of The Rose: Finally, the basic question of philosophy (as of psychoanalysis) is the same as in the detective novel: Whose fault is it? (Lits 211; my translation)
25 The pictures of the ice can be regarded as «a metonymy for the spiritual quest», as suggested by Mark Lits with reference to Umberto Eco’s monk, William of Baskerville investigating the traces left on the fresh snow around the monastery, or with reference to Gaboriau, making Lecoq say: This waste land covered with snow is like an immense white sheet of paper where the people we are looking for have inscribed not only their movements and their strategy but also their secret thoughts, the hopes and fears which agitated them. What are they telling you these transient traces, Daddy? Nothing. For me they are alive, as the ones who left them there, they are palpitating, they are speaking, they are accusing.(Lits 237, my translation)
26 Palpitating with unknown forces and intent, the pictures of the ice might be regarded as an accusatory document which is all the more mysterious as it is simultaneously anonymous and silent. Who is guilty? What is one guilty of? The pictures point in the direction of a secret transgression. They transform those who send them into accusers, those who receive them into the accused and readers into investigators but the principle of conversion or turnaround which dominates the story prompts the reader to reverse roles and investigate the accuser’s wrongdoing as much as the offences of the accused, only to discover that the categories coalesce. Transformation and tricks are so inextricably linked that deception becomes converted into innocence.
27 Austin’s traps of fantasy, his fake scenario built on lies and equivocation, are an empowering strategy, destined to buttress his apostolic mission among the underprivileged in Shaft Lake. The traps of appetite which lead Karin to pilfer are presented as compensating for her loss and repairing her wounds. Although she is a prey to Austin’s bait, she is constructed as having an interchangeable role with the minister. Like him she uses an empowering strategy which enables her to set up traps of force for other people. Like him she uses dubious double-dealing to try to awaken speculative enquiry or self-examination in the minds of people around her. Brent is equally presented as being condoned for his treachery in taking over Lazarus House. As
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Austin himself says «Who’s to say whether Brent’s way isn’t closer to God than mine is, after all?» Disloyalty, theft, and fraudulent strategies become converted into Christian behaviour or selfless dedication to one’s religious ideal. Thus the story sets up an apology for deception which is further validated by the implicit realization that the ways of God are impenetrable.
28 The transformation of heresy into orthodoxy is all the more slippery as it can also be read as an apology for revenge. Austin donating all his worldly possession to the «snake» who dispossessed him of the house he had created reads like an act of Christian forgiveness which is nonetheless destined to teach him a lesson. It is at the same time a selfless gesture of immense generosity and a retaliation of the most self- righteous kind, which defines Austin as an unrelenting forgiver, and a smug forger, tricking his community into believing in his saintly behaviour at the same time as in his mundane desires, giving away his possessions and re-marrying in Hawaii: «Slipping out from under, fooling them, enjoying it». The process of nominalization captures the permanence of deception in the construction of the character and the metaphor likens him to a snake, the very image that Karin had used to depict Brent Duprey. Just as Karin’s and Austin’s roles are interchangeable, so Austin’s and Brent’s become reversible. Just as Karin and Austin carry echoing first names, which reinforce the possibilities of reversion, so Austin, Karin, and Brent are inextricably linked by the play on words involving their names, Duprey and Cobbett, in which one cannot help hearing a dupe, a prey and a bait, if not a co-bait. The interlaced structure of their stories has created a mesh, a tangled web of deception which renders each of them equally guilty or by the same token, equally innocent, reinforcing their status as confirmed sinners or saviours.
29 Ironically enough, by stressing the possibilities of reversibility, onomastic determinism simultaneously highlights and invalidates the very principle of conversion upon which the story is built. The turning to God of sinners is an irreversible transformation, as exemplified for instance by the conversion of Saint Augustine. Austin, whose name is short for Augustine, falls short of his famous predecessor. Instead of walking the straight path of orthodoxy, he scuttles across the floors of frozen lakes in utter dereliction. As for Brent, whose name evokes migratory geese, he seems condemned to move back and forth according to genetic determinism. Karin’s fate remains unspoken but there is a curse upon her quasi namesake. Karin did not kill her brother but will never forgive herself for her baby’s death. The pictures of the ice are no ordinary snapshots. They are the unresolved enigma in which the characters’ damnation or redemption are forever or momentarily suspended in the stasis of ice and art.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barthes, Roland La Chambre claire. Paris: Seuil, 1980
Dante . L’Enfer Inferno. Paris: Flammarion, 1985. [1314]
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Lits, Marc. «Herméneutique du déchiffrement dans le genre policier. De l’énigme cryptologique comme source du littéraire,» Le roman policier, introduction à la théorie et à l’histoire d’un genre littéraire. Liège: CEFAL, 1993.
Marin, Louis. Le récit est un piège. Paris: Minuit, 1978.
Munro, Alice. Friend of my Youth. London: Vintage, 1990.
NOTES
1. . … et je vis devant moi et sous mes pieds un lac à qui le gel donnait l’aspect du verre, et non de l’eau
ABSTRACTS
La nouvelle d'Alice Munro "Les images de la glace" utilise de façon remarquable des stratégies de feinte. Elle met en scène des personnages qui se servent du camouflage pour donner le change. La vie de tous les jours est représentée comme un subterfuge. La duplicité des personnages est illustrée par les photographies que l'on trouve dans le titre de la nouvelle. En recouvrant le paysage, la glace fournit une métonymie de la quête spirituelle et suggère la possibilité du déchiffrement herméneutique. Cet article envisage successivement les pièges de l'imagination, de l'appétit et de la force tels que décrits dans l'essai de Louis Marin, Le récit est un piège.
AUTHORS
HÉLIANE VENTURA Héliane Ventura, Professor at the University of Orléans, has published a book on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and co-edited Proceedings from conferences on Words and Images. She has written articles on the Canadian novel, short story and poetry and more recently on A.S. Byatt's short stories.
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Ordinary Tragedies in Madeleine Thien’s “A Map of the City”
Christine Lorre
1 “Does my family have any hold on me?”, Miriam asks herself at the beginning of “A Map of the City” (162), the novella that concludes Madeleine Thien’s short story collection Simple Recipes1. This is the kind of question any young woman asks herself, but in Miriam’s case, it also refers to her family’s specific history of displacement: what difference does her parents’ status as Indonesian-Chinese immigrants make to her life? The question has yet a third dimension for Miriam: does her father’s pathological melancholy have any influence on her? Miriam’s reflection is complicated further by her feeling of being caught in “the troubles of day-to-day life” that burden “ordinary people” (176). In giving this double edge to the story—the family’s specific story as Chinese-Indonesian immigrants to Vancouver, and the ordinary character of Miriam’s confusion—Thien adds to the genre of the immigration story: by relying on a narrative of the familiar, she avoids the trap of post-colonial exoticism2 that she could have fallen into if she had exploited the potential for strangeness of the Chinese diaspora motif. She makes strangeness ordinary by suggesting links between the grief Miriam feels as a young adult, and the loss her father experiences as an immigrant. Indonesia, the place of Miriam’s father’s past, plays a key role in the story, but is kept at a distance: it is mediated in Miriam’s reflection through pictures from everyday life—family photographs, postcards, newspaper pictures. Finally, Miriam realizes that strangeness is made up not simply of her parents’ history before they came to Canada, but of the unknown in general, all of which can be charted on a metaphorical map of life.
1. Growing up and immigrating
2 “Does my family have any hold on me?” Miriam’s meandering reflection on the extent of her family’s influence on her brings back childhood memories of her father, which sometimes evoke youth, innocence and hope, and sometimes, bad luck and failure. As Miriam re-examines the bonds between her and her father, she comes to a better understanding of her feeling of guilt, and her confusion abates.
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3 Many of Miriam’s memories, even the ones from which she is absent as a child, are tinged with a double innocence—of childhood and of new beginnings in North America. For instance, her mother thinks of a bright future when seeing children play: “My mother would stand on the porch watching kids race their bikes up and down the back lane, and say, out of the blue, ‘But isn’t it so much cleaner here?’” (179) The mother’s seemingly offhand remark, prompted by an ordinary scene, points at her sense that in Canada, even though she sometimes misses things Indonesian, she is far from the climate of political corruption that prevailed in Irian Jaya, where she immigrated from. Seeing children play in a safe environment and enjoy the sense of freedom their bikes provide, she can trust her own child’s future will be stable.
4 In Canada, Miriam’s father had the opportunity to make a fresh start. Snow is a rich symbol for these hopes and possibilities, for example in the haunting old snapshot of Miriam’s father, “standing beside [the snowman he had created], one arm wrapped around its snowy body. Inside, the image, ghostly, stayed with me. My father in the snow, smiling for all the world to see.” (216) For Miriam, this scene is emblematic both of her father’s hopes as a recent immigrant, of the opportunities existing for his creative potential, but also, in hindsight, of his failure to achieve anything. The snow evokes freshness and innocence, of course, but for Miriam’s father, it remains a blank, a ghost of hope.
5 The second-hand furniture store which constitutes the backdrop to Miriam’s childhood years epitomizes this mix of hope and failure. It is a recurring memory in Miriam’s narrative, a sign of her nostalgia for those years of her life, and for the complicity she then shared with her father. She recalls her vision of the store as a child, when it meant everything to her: I was six years old then, and I dreamed commercials. In my mind, my father was the owner of an exciting retail outlet. Soon the furniture store would be a household word: Bargain Mart. Parents would announce to their children that this weekend’s excursion would be to Bargain Mart, and children across the city would look up from their Cream of Wheat and cheer. From where we lived in Burnaby, in the spill of houses beneath the mountain, to Maple Ridge and Vancouver, people would flock to my father’s store, carting away sofas on their shoulders, tables in their arms. My father standing at the front, hands on his hips, young. (164)
6 She dreamt of excitement, prosperity, popularity, pride and happiness; a sign of her feeling loved and secure as a child. The shop seemed about to become part of the surrounding popular culture; to Miriam it meant social status and belonging. To her father, it could have meant the accomplishment of his dream of success as a salesman3. But years later, Miriam recreates the scene through memory very differently: Now, looking back, I see that the store had an impoverished look to it, that the couches were old and worn, and that my father, once so patient a salesman, had begun to speak to his customers with an air of quiet desperation. (186)
7 The father’s state is reflected in the shop: Miriam sees that he was not a young hopeful anymore, but, like the couches, old. He was not the owner of an exciting retail store, but the impoverished owner of a second-hand furniture store. The atmosphere is not one of excitement, but of “quiet desperation.” She realizes that her father quickly became a nostalgic immigrant trying to make it in Canada, and failing.
8 Miriam wonders about the reasons for her father’s failing in his various business enterprises, which in turn caused her parents to separate. She comes to the conclusion that displacement was his bad luck: according to her, he experienced “the tragedy of
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place. To always be in the wrong country at the wrong time, the home that needs you less than you need it.” (201-2) “Tragedy” implies that personal responsibility or incompetence are not directly involved in what happened: fate played a key role in a plot of which her father is the doomed counter-hero. However, this explanation is betrayed by other memories of Miriam’s; for example the ambiguous moment in the furniture store (166-172), when an embarrassed customer found her sleeping in a closet storage room, hidden behind a curtain. This scene suggests that the father’s indulging in his child’s company was detrimental to his business, as were other weaknesses of his, for instance his not getting angry when Miriam would scribble on pieces of the furniture. His failures may not be entirely attributable to bad luck after all.
9 These elements point at Miriam’s feeling of guilt for having contributed, involuntarily, to her father’s failure. The father-daughter intimacy undermined his business, which he liked to tease her about, following the collapse of the All Day Grill restaurant: Perhaps because of this [the failure of the All Day Grill restaurant at the time of Miriam’s stay in hospital as a baby], my father would often say that I had ruined his life…. When I tell people this, laughing, they shake their heads in disbelief. I suppose I can understand how these words might sound to a stranger. Insensitive. Cruel. But this is not so. Between my father and me there was always a tacit understanding. Despite the teasing, he had an unwavering faith in me. “My daughter, Miriam,” he said to everyone. “When she grows up, she is going to buy her parents a big house. (165)
10 The faith the father puts in his daughter is part of the pattern of the immigration story: he, as a first-generation immigrant, is ready to do all he can for the benefit of his child, in the hope that she, of the second generation, will achieve material success, and eventually express her gratefulness to her loving parents. Miriam understands the implicit contract which binds her to them. But by adulthood, she doesn’t seem to have accomplished her father’s dream for her: after her marriage to Will, she still “loved the transience” of temp work (188).
11 Her guilt for having betrayed her father’s hopes, and therefore contributing to the family’s breakup, becomes pathological in her early twenties. In the opening of the story, she describes an obsession: “In the years after I left home, I used to glimpse my parents in unexpected places…. Of course it was never them” (161). Her vision reveals her attachment to the image of her parents together, before they separated; its obsessive nature is a symptom of her guilt for their separation. Her narrative translates the process through which she tries to come to terms with her grief: in the passage quoted previously, the break between the first two paragraphs (“Of course”), and the use of the form “I used to” in the first sentence, reflect her effort to draw a line between the past and the present time of the narration. She further analyzes how she felt in her early twenties: We had failed each other in so many unintended ways and then we had drifted apart…. So I kept my distance and thought from time to time how things might have turned out differently. If I had been the kind of daughter I never was, faithful and capable, who could hold a family together through all its small tragedies. (166)
12 Instead of being the daughter her father hoped she would become, Miriam felt the urge to move off the path he had set for her, cutting off her bonds to her family, leaving her father to his own grief, testing the scope of her freedom. If the relationship between Miriam and her father is typically one of immigration, as the father’s dream of his daughter buying him a big house indicates, it also fits the universal pattern of the child
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wanting to “kill the father”4, as the distance Miriam keeps shows. But her accomplishment of this act takes a dramatic literal turn when her father attempts suicide. This forces her to physically stand by him, and mentally re-examine their relationship and her attitude towards him until then: How could I change his circumstances? I didn’t know and so I chose to withdraw. There were emotions that he carried—disappointment, regret—that I wanted gone from my present life, as if they had everything to do with him and they had no root in me. (209)
13 Miriam comes to realize that the grief she feels as a young adult is related to her father’s past hopes and failures. Father and daughter have a similar response of nostalgia to their dissatisfaction with the present: Miriam is nostalgic for the innocence of childhood, but in her process of revisiting memories, she realizes that these early years were not the pre-lapserian time she imagined, but a complex period during which crucial bonds developed between herself and her father. As for her father, he is nostalgic for Indonesia, so that assessing how much of a hold her family has on her also implies for Miriam to understand what Indonesia means to him—and to her.
2. Pictures, nostalgia, mourning, and melancholy
14 Miriam undertakes no trip “back to her roots” in order to try to understand her father’s nostalgia. The place of the past he longs for is mediated through pictures she encounters in everyday life: family photographs, postcards, newspaper pictures, news clips. As her reflection unfolds, these pictures set off the contradictions and dangers inherent to nostalgia.
15 In order to analyze the father’s feelings, it is is worth examining the notion of nostalgia more closely. The word nostalgia originally referred to place, as Linda Hutcheon recalls in an essay entitled “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern”: “nostos, meaning “to return home,” and algos, meaning “pain”5”. The father’s longing for Indonesia, a place he considers as home, bears this first literal meaning. Over time, the sense of the word shifted, and it now generally refers to the relations between the past and the present in terms of loss and absence and of desire, as Hutcheon explains further: Nostalgia, in fact, may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessability, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia’s power…. This is rarely the past as actually experienced, of course; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desire. In this sense, however, nostalgia is less about the past than about the present.
16 The father’s nostalgia reflects his mounting dissatisfaction with his present life in Canada more than any genuine attachment to Irian Jaya where he “lived for a short time” (171). When Miriam was six, she asked him if he missed Indonesia. “I only miss the fruit,” he said…. “The country, I’ve almost forgotten.” (171) But ten years later, Indonesia is where he returns, having experienced repeated failures in Canada after the loss of his furniture store, “the last business he would ever own” (187). Old photographs of Indonesia, representing “Indonesian plantations spread out under wide skies” (170), lured him into reimagining that time and place as a lost paradise. Miriam comments on her father’s ritual of revisiting the past:
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He held on to those old photographs of Indonesia, and when he pulled them out, he examined them with an appraising eye. As if to see whether the photographs were true to the memory he carried, if a picture could ever do his country justice. (201)
17 The father “holds on to” the past, instead of “letting go” of it, an inherent part of the immigration process. The photographs are measured up against his memory of a pristine country, in terms of truth and justice, as if his memory was a record more faithful to past reality than the printed image. But ironically, his response to the pictures, as objects, modifies his memory, making him increasingly nostalgic about Indonesia. This is what Susan Sontag explains in her essay on photographs as “Melancholy Objects”: As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality. Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time past.6
18 The past is revisited sentimentally, although the situation the father lived in was far from politically moral: he and his wife moved to Irian Jaya in the early 1960s, when they were in their early twenties. That is when the island was annexed by Indonesia through military force, in a move of colonization of the Irianese and their land. The parents were part of the Chinese-Indonesian minority on the island, which put them in the position of colonists in the community. The father fails to realize that he lived in an intenable position of privilege there, as the mention of the plantation on the picture suggests7. The photographs he holds on to do not convey the colonial reality, but a sentimental view of history, blurring its socio-economic dimension. As “melancholy objects,” they feed his nostalgia.
19 Unlike her father, Miriam is aware of her parents’ past position as colonizers in Irian Jaya and wonders, in adulthood: Some years ago, the students in Jakarta took to the streets, protesting the government. Had my family remained there, would I have been among those students, one more in that sea of faces? Or those nights when rioters set the Chinese shophouses on fire, that bitter violence, what might have become of us then? I did not know where we fit in, or on which side of the line we might have lived. (201)
20 Her parents’ past obviously puts Miriam ill at ease. When her father eventually decides to go back, she admires his decision for its personal courage, calling it his “bravest act,” because he finally “threw caution to the wind” (198). But she is reminded of Indonesia’s violent and upsetting politics by news clips she sees at that time: That year, there was unrest in Indonesia. Small pockets of violence erupting, then brutally dealt with by the military. I saw clips of it on the news, a few seconds, a tiny window. The Irianese were still organized, still fighting Indonesian occupation though it seemed like no one noticed. I thought of Indonesia as the place of tumult, of unrest, where a military dictatorship muscled these disparate islands together, no matter the cost. (202)
21 As a Vancouverite, Miriam lives a fairly sheltered life, but the news clips bring into it a flitting sense of the unrest prevailing in Indonesia, a quick shot of its reality. Although she is aware that her view of the country, as seen through the reporter’s camera, is limited and truncated (“a few seconds, a tiny window”), as well as focused on violence, the clips make her question and piece together the Indonesian present and her parents’ past, putting their story in historical perspective. A few years later, at the time of the Timor referendum, pictures of Indonesia in the newpapers reflecting the political life of
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the country come to contradict further the image of “unfamiliar beauty” conveyed by the family album. And shortly after the explosion of violence in the region, the newspapers abound with “photographs of refugees, the widespread displacement” (213), of a different type from the one Miriam’s parents experienced.
22 In contrast with the unfolding of Miriam’s reflection on Indonesia, her father’s view of the country withdraws further away from reality. The evolution of his grief, or nostalgia, may be analyzed in terms of melancholy, as opposed to mourning. The concepts of melancholy and mourning are used by the Chinese-American critic Anne Cheng, in Melancholy and Race; she relies for her argument on an essay by Freud which proposes two different kinds of grief: According to Freud, “mourning,” is a healthy response to loss; it is finite in character and accepts substitution (that is, the lost object can be relinquished and eventually replaced). Mourning is healthy because, Freud tells us, “we rest assured that after a lapse of time, it will be overcome.” “Melancholia,” on the other hand, is pathological; it is interminable in nature and refuses substitution (that is, the melancholic cannot “get over” loss.) The melancholic is, one might say, psychically struck. As Freud puts it, “[i]n grief [mourning] the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.” Melancholia thus denotes a condition of endless self-impoverishment.8
23 Both Miriam’s parents miss Indonesia at first; in that sense, it can be said that they are to some degree nostalgic for it. But the father’s response to the grief of displacement evolves towards melancholy, wherease his wife completes a process of mourning: she misses things Indonesian, but over time she builds her life anew in Canada. She is hard- working, realistic, adaptable, successful at her work. Although Indonesia is the place she too longs for, she is aware of the political shortcomings of that country. In contrast, the father’s grief is endless: after having to sell the furniture store, for years he “tried his hand at different careers,” before going into real estate, where he also failed (190). Losses accumulate, his life keeps spiraling down, and melancholy looms large. But as Anne Cheng points out, following Freud’s argument, this impoverishment is also nurturing…. The melancholic eats the lost objects— feeds on it, as it were…. The history of the ego is thus the history of its losses. More accurately, melancholia alludes not to loss per se but to the entangled relationship with loss. We might then say that melancholia does not simply denote a condition of grief but is, rather, a legislation of grief. (Cheng, 8)
24 A discrepancy points at this process of legislation of the father’s grief. Although Miriam reports that “My parents (jointly) decided it was time to leave [Irian Jaya]” (180; parenthesis mine), her father later tells his wife, as their arguments become more frequent, that “it had always been her decision to leave Indonesia, and never his.” (192) His personal attachment to Indonesia, stated in hindsight, justifies his grief. When he finally goes back, he sends Miriam a version of Indonesia that matches his distorted vision of it: “From Java, Irian Jaya, then back through Sumatra, my father sent me postcards. I marked his progress through those vivid pictures, the water buffalo and padi fields.” (203) The picturesque images Miriam is sent is a confirmation of the discrepancy between the way her father imagines the country of his youth, and its political and economic reality. The postcards suggest that he has become a tourist in the country he considers as his own. In fact he doesn’t manage to restart a life in Indonesia: he never secures a job there, and keeps asking his wife to wire him money. His attempt at starting over by recovering the imagined lost paradise of his youth was bound to fail.
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25 The pictures of Indonesia which Miriam comes across elicit two types of response. The old photographs and the postcards are set, and therefore dead images. They offer a picturesque, sentimental view of reality, past or present. One likely response to them is nostalgia. On the other hand, the perceived ephemereality of newspaper pictures and news clips gives a sense of a changing world in which the old order is bound to be contested and, eventually, replaced.
26 The father is embarrassed towards his estranged wife and daughter when four years after leaving Vancouver, he ends up back there, finally calling it “home” (203). His suicide attempt is a desperate call for help from his family. The mother responds to it immediately, and forces Miriam, who is under shock, to stand by her father’s side. During the days that she spends there, Miriam reflects on her relationship with her parents, and revisits her mental map of Vancouver—of her life.
3. The cartography of life
27 As Miriam’s reflection unfolds, the metaphor of the map becomes a device she appropriates to lift herself above the burdensome day-to-day life9. Mental cartography becomes a way for her to get a hold of her life, instead of feeling her life has a hold on her.
28 Miriam wishes her relationships with her family had remained as simple as they seemed in childhood, and that she could represent them as straightforwardly as possible: Perhaps, knowing everything that has brought us here, I would redraw this map, make the distance from A to B a straight line…. But to do so would remove all we glimpsed in passing, heights and depths I never guessed at. That straight line would erase all our efforts, the necessary ones as well as the misguided ones, that finally allowed us to arrive here. (188)
29 To dream of a flawless route, of a straight line is pointless. Life is complex and rich; it takes an adequate metaphor to represent it, and the map as motif has such potential: life’s journeys can be charted on it in many different ways. For instance, Miriam revisits repeatedly the car trips with her parents, which are emblematic of the family relations: There is my mother, the navigator, a map of the city unfurled on her lap. Me in the back seat, watching my father’s eyes as they glance in the rear-view mirror, the way he searches for what might appear. (181)
30 The look of the observing child in the back seat registers how the father looks backwards—towards the past—whereas the mother uses the map to find her way forward—into the future. But the most striking image in Miriam’s many fond and powerful memories of the Sunday drives in the Buick is that of the united family, protected inside the car. By extension, the car and map motifs function together; the car is always associated with family unity and protection, and with Miriam’s sense of confidence as a little girl: My parents and I would drive across the city, going nowhere in particular, all of us bundled into the Buick. Through downtown and Chinatown—those narrow streets flooded with people—then out to the suburbs…. I was the only one of us born in Canada, and so I prided myself on knowing Vancouver better than my parents did— the streets, Rupert, Renfrew, Nanaimo, Victoria. Ticking them off as we passed each set of lights, go, go, go. Stop. (178)
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31 While Miriam’s displaced parents seemed to be wandering during those drives, she gained from them and from her family’s protecting presence a sense of confidence in her surroundings. She feels that she belongs, more than her parents do.
32 The image of the three of them in the car comes back to her years later, when her father is in hospital and the family is reunited around him: We stayed with him all night…. It seemed that only we existed, my mother, my father and me, as it had been on those long drives across the city, the miles we covered. (222)
33 After several days taking turns with her mother by her father’s side, the family intimacy is found again, and sheds a different light on the memories of the Sunday drives: Those tunnels and arteries. It used to be that we could lose ourselves in them, before we came to know the city well. (226)
34 All three are lost and alone together. That was before “we came to know the city well” (emphasis mine). This image stands in contrast with the previous one, in which Miriam remembers how, as a child, she prided herself on knowing the city better than her parents. Here, all three are strangers, lost and isolated. Through shared hardship in adulthood, Miriam feels close again to her parents.
35 It took Miriam a long time to reconcile her own map of Vancouver with her parents’. After years of wanting to walk away from them, at twenty-one, she meets Will and their motorcycle rides together along the coast epitomize the freedom she finds in his company and in marriage at first. But her father’s condition and surroundings come to remind her that his perspective of Vancouver is not as bright as hers. She visits him shortly after he comes back from Indonesia: His apartment building, near Commercial Drive, stood out, grey and rectangular…. I walked onto his tiny balcony, looked across the road at the ramshackle apartments, the wet leaves running bright along the gutters. Out on the harbour, two yellow sulphur hills glowed neon against the grey sky…. [After lunch, w]e went outside and stood together on the balcony, and I told my father that I was planning to marry. He looked out at the grid of streets running down to the docks and said, “So soon ?” (204, 205, 206)
36 Miriam’s father’s place reflects his grim prospects. Commercial Drive is a suburb-like Chinese neighbourhood of Vancouver. The grid of streets evokes the entrapment of her father, who lives on welfare. The familiar sulphur hills, industrial refuse left-over from the exploitation of natural gas10, stand under the grey sky as a glowing symbol of his uselessness. The view as a whole is a reminder of how Miriam’s father had to come back to his point of departure, which looks more and more like a dead end. His presence on her map gradually paralyzes her emotionally, and her silence and the repression of her emotions are unlocked only when he is hospitalized following his suicide attempt. After four days of sitting by his bedside, rediscovering the family intimacy of the past, Miriam walks home to rest: A thick fog had settled over the skyline. It wiped the sky clear of mountains and water. I walked along Broadway, past Main Street, where paper cups and newspapers littered the sidewalk. Past the sign that, years ago, my father told me was the tallest free-standing sign in the world…. He also showed me the narrowest building that still stands in Chinatown. My father, the tour guide who took me everywhere. He must have loved this city. Now it was coated with snow. A white- out, everything vanished, as if this were a game, as if I could bring it back from memory. (224)
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37 Walking in the streets remains a way for Miriam to try and appropriate space, as it was when she was a teenager. But the feeling of aimlessness and blindness which she used to have then during those walks is replaced by the emergence of forgotten happy childhood memories, in which her father is at ease in Vancouver, acting as the tour guide in the Chinatown of her early years. The blank of the snow needs to be filled in, written on: it invites Miriam not only to draw on her memory, but also to tell herself stories, in which space—her father’s Vancouver, which is also hers—is reinvented11.
38 This call upon the imagination is felt by Miriam when she drives to the neighbourhood where she grew up, in the very last section of the story, which functions as a post- script. For a long time, she used to find comfort in the permanence of her old familiar surroundings (172-3). But on this last visit, her impressions are surprisingly different: “I looked for the old store, but the glass storefronts had changed too much. I had thought that what was so vivid in my imagination would call out to me in real life, as if in verification.” (227) In her gesture of verification of the mental map of her childhood, Miriam realizes that the past is not so much remembered as imagined; it is told afresh rather than repeated nostalgically12. The map is a palimpsest on which are charted many life-stories.
39 Miriam’s new approach to the cartography of life is illustrated in the final scene, which involves a little boy whom she observes: We could not see where he was headed, only that his arms were stretched out to both sides, like an airplane. I thought that someone would eventually catch him, his feet swinging off the ground, and lift him high. They would give him an aerial view of this street, these stores, all the people crowding along…. The little boy disappeared ahead of us in the crowd. I knew, then, that I would not find [the old furniture store]. But still I walked in the direction he had gone, at home in this place, though every landmark had disappeared. (227)
40 Miriam has grown up and the old neighbourhood is not that of her childhood anymore, but she should have the confidence to walk ahead into the unknown, all bearings gone, and to both follow and guide the child—the one she can now have with Will—into an uncertain future, ready to confront what life holds in store for both of them.
41 One could say that, in contrast with the Indian-born American writer Bharati Mukherjee, whose stated literary agenda is to “Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar,”13 Thien aims at making the exotic ordinary; the ordinary tragic. She doesn’t celebrate a Canadian multicultural mosaic, nor rootless cosmopolitanism. In “A Map of the City,” she turns displacement into an ordinary family tragedy, developing an aesthetics of the everyday that is based on the limited, confused view point of an ordinary narrator-protagonist; on everyday objects that reflect a far-away reality; and on the narrator’s search for an adequate metaphor to encompass the complexity of her personal life in a global context. In depicting the protagonist’s process of piecing parts together and mapping out her own life, Thien contributes to redefining the changing map of Vancouver and of immigrant fiction.
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NOTES
1. . Simple Recipes (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 2001). 2. . See Graham Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 13: “exoticism…. might be described as a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity.” 3. . For another version of the myth of the North-American salesman, see Clark Blaise’s I Had a Father: A Post-Modern Autobiography (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993). 4. . It is clear that Miriam considers her parents (and parents in general) as an impediment to her freedom to imagine her future when she remarks about Will, shortly after meeting him: “Some facts seem, at first, to explain a person. Will’s mother died of cancer when he was young. His father died not long after, an electrical accident at the plant where he worked. When I first walked into Will’s apartment, I thought it was an elegy, a place of grief…. To me, his apartment was the embodiment of his uncluttered life, exactly the kind of life I aspired to—both feet planted, eyes on the future.” (p. 176) 5. . Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” vol. 6 of the Proceedings of the XVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Literature as Cultural Memory. Leiden, 16-22 Aug. 1997. Online posting: University of Toronto English Library. Last modified: Jan. 19, 1998.
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emigrating to the United States where she now lives and writes (she became an American citizen in 1988).
ABSTRACTS
Au début de “A Map of the City”, le roman court (novella) qui clôt le recueil de nouvelles de Madeleine Thien intitulé Simple Recipes, Miriam se demande dans quelle mesure sa famille a prise sur elle. Le caractère ordinaire de sa confusion et le caractère spécifique de l’histoire de sa famille, ses parents étant des Chinois d’Indonésie immigrés à Vancouver, donne à la nouvelle un double tranchant ; en choisissant d’écrire un récit du quotidien, Thien évite le piège de « l’exotisme post-colonial » que présente le motif de la diaspora chinoise. Thien rend l’étrangeté ordinaire en suggérant l’existence de liens entre la peine que Miriam éprouve en tant que jeune adulte et celle que son père ressent comme immigrant. Miriam approche l’Indonésie, le pays de la jeunesse de son père, à travers des images du quotidien qui soulignent la contradiction entre une vision pittoresque et sentimentale de la réalité, et le caractère éphémère d’un monde changeant. Finalement, la métaphore de la carte fonctionne comme un moyen pour Miriam de s’élever au-dessus d’un quotidien qui l’accable et de reprendre en main sa vie. Thien parvient ainsi à faire de l’expérience de la migration une tragédie familiale ordinaire en développant une esthétique du quotidien fondée sur le point de vue limité et confus d’une narratrice-protagoniste ordinaire ; sur des objets de tous les jours qui reflètent une réalité lointaine ; et sur la quête par la narratrice d’une métaphore capable d’englober la complexité de sa vie. A travers son récit du processus par lequel Miriam réussit à cartographier sa propre vie, Thien contribue à la redéfinition de la carte changeante de Vancouver, ainsi qu’à un renouvellement du récit d’immigration
AUTHORS
CHRISTINE LORRE Christine Lorre is a “maître de conférences” at the University of Paris 3. She spent two years studying in Canada, including one year at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Canadian Studies. Her doctoral thesis was a study of the work of Canadian writer Clark Blaise. Current research focuses on writing by Canadians of Chinese origin and the theory of diaspora literature.
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Book reviews
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Gabriella Goliger, Song of Ascent Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2000
Carole Birkan
REFERENCES
Gabriella Goliger, Song of Ascent, Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2000.
1 Is Gabriela Goliger's début work Song of Ascent a novel or a collection of short stories? "Stories", the title page claims. In fact the narrative and poetic structures point the reader in both directions as this new Canadian writer explores the idea of lineage, both biological and cultural as well as religious. The central axis is the trajectory of a Jewish family, the Birnbaums, emigrating from Nazi Germany to the Holy Land and then to Canada. Interspersed are the stories of friends and relations who ended up in England, remained hidden in Germany or perished in the death camps. The book spans three continents, three generations and an infinite number of responses to Jewish experience and suffering.
2 The book opens with Hannah Birnbaum's story "Breaking the Sabbath": in pre-war Germany, this young woman deserts her Orthodox father's home for a hike in the Giant Mountains. She is seen transgressing the Sabbath laws in order to meet with her Zionist friends. As she climbs the mountains, she almost communes with these secular Jewish people yet is drawn by the force of nature to carry on her journey alone. Singing old German lyric favourites, she feels at one with the fresh alpine air and pine trees but senses a glum premonition about her frail sister Edith, which pulls her back down to the city where trouble is pending.
3 Already, the key motifs of ascending and descending are made to appear in a conspicuous and ominous way. Throughout the book, they will be developed further, as they are both contextualized and rooted in the Jewish tradition.
4 The title "Song of Ascent" is taken from the Psalms, a translation of the Shir Hama'alot which is sung around the Jewish table before Grace ("the tedious Grace After Meals"(5-6) referred to in the first short story). Typically, it is traditionally sung on the
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Sabbath and holidays when Jews celebrate connection to their community and their Maker, whereas the everyday psalm "By the Waters of Babylon" laments the drama of exile. In this vein, in Hebrew, the process of moving to and out of the Holy Land are known as "ascent" (aliyah) and descent.
5 In Goliger's book, ascent to Israel (then Mandatory Palestine), though a refuge for Hannah and her husband Ernst, proves problematic as Ernst finds the heat insufferable and decides to leave, leaving little choice for Hannah, a committed Zionist, to follow him to Canada.
6 For Goliger, Ascent is not necessarily synonymous with connection, as the narrative repeatedly stresses. In may ways, the stories help to trace the itineraries of characters who belong to the same family, the same community or the same people but who tragically cannot connect. Goliger is subtle at showing that the impact of the Holocaust, however silenced for the first twenty years after the events happened, has to be dealt with later, both by the characters who survived under the Nazis and by their offspring. Here Goliger portrays Hannah and Ernst's daughter Rachel as the main sounding- board, fragile recipient but articulator of her parents' suffering. Only through her point of view, as a baby, a teenager and finally as a woman can we glimpse a certain continuity between the various stories in her family. She appears as the author's possible alter-ego, passionate about Jewish Studies, learning Yiddish, speaking German, recalling Israel her place of birth and negotiating with conflicting identities: "Jerusalem of Gold, Jerusalem of dust. Over the years I reconciled the two sets of stories, became adept at entwining their complementary strands." (20)
7 In many ways, Song of Ascent is the embodiment of a literature of displacement and disconnection. The many narrative viewpoints woven into the text, the absence of a mature, unifying voice make this apparent. The three languages heard from one story to another also convey this. German, Yiddish and English are spoken by the various characters, with varying accents and idiosyncrasies. Goliger shows great sensitivity and talent at portraying the German characters' ties to their language, and their scorning of other tongues, especially Yiddish. One passage in the story "Maedele" shows this very eloquently. The central character here is Rachel, daughter of Hannah and Birnbaum, studying and having an affair with Blutstein, a great Yiddish poet who has survived the Holocaust: " Both her parents look down their noses at Yiddish, bastardised German to their ears. To Rachel's too she has to admit. She tries to appreciate Blutstein's poetry which he recites in class and which she can half understand. But she can't get beyond the outlandish sounds, the vowels stretched out like fat wobbling bubbles in the air. A great language, yoking heaven and earth, the sacred texts and the common man, Blutstein tells her. But she is poisoned against it." (67).
8 German ends up being a language which everyone in the family has stopped speaking except for Hannah and her daughter, and which links the two women in a world of their own, where the reader may glimpse a hint of lesbian eroticism in the scenes where Hannah, long disdained by her husband, begs Rachel to stroke her hair. It is worthwhile noting that male sexuality is completely disabled in this book, as well as the ability to provide lineage through love. Typically, in the book, women are the only guarantors of connection, ascent and lineage. The men are reduced to providing economic means of survival (Hannah's son becomes a successful businessman).
9 For this is a book about survival. It has its place in the realm of powerful literature dealing with the Holocaust. It deals with the mourning of souls, with the death of a
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culture and with the next generation's fascination with horror. These themes are brought to a head in the final story, which dramatizes Kafka's ghost visiting the old Jewish graveyard in modern-day Prague. There he is greeted by a stern gatekeeper who asks for tickets. But the character of Kafka is not the only ghost without a ticket. The reader finally witnesses Thomas Birnbaum, Ernst's brother, with his wife and daughter, who did not escape. The little girl has "a coquettish finger on her chin, a pose copied no doubt from a favourite film star" yet the gatekeeper won't have them, not even today: "What am I to do with these? […] "Armies of them pressed against the walls, mouths gaping in every crack. Long lineups in ditches and gutters among the country and everyone of them has a story, why he or she or their child should be allowed in. […] They'd overrun this place in a flash and spoil it for the visitors." (175-177)
10 It is to Gabriela Goliger's credit to have written stories about the Holocaust from a twenty-first century perspective. She has created a series of fascinating characters, speaking with diverse voices, now strident, now hushed, but never completely jarring. Using the short story form to frame what could effectively be called a novel, she manages to conjure up a sense of history from these echoing, constellating tales. A poignant, gripping read.
AUTHORS
CAROLE BIRKAN Maison Française d’Oxford, Université de Paris 7
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Karen Smythe, Stubborn Bones Vancouver: Polestar Book Publishers, 2001
Manuel Martinez
REFERENCES
Karen Smythe, Stubborn Bones, Vancouver: Polestar Book Publishers, 2001.
1 Smythe serves as a guide through the every-day life of extra-ordinary women, a landscape that she demonstrates an intimate knowledge of. For the most part, the stories are told in the first person by women who take the reader through their lives to let him see how they have been injured, to varying degrees, by their relationships with mothers, fathers and lovers, and how they have coped? Thus, in the title story that opens the book, the main character is coming to terms with her love for a former lover as she travels to and from a funeral. In “The Tooth Fairy and Other Inventions”, the heroine deals with issues of abandonment. “In Dress Rehearsal”, Leilah, exemplifies lack of confidence and insecurity, although she is an exceptionnally beautiful woman. “Feliz Navidad” portrays a woman who is trying to come to terms with the trauma of being abandoned by her first husband, and a recent and somehow surprising new marriage. In “Hugging Zero” Mary Beth struggles to sort out her life after the death of her alcoholic father. “Madeleine” is a story in five parts that introduces us to a woman who walks out on her husband and child in order to start a new life. The collection closes with “Strange Relations”, a tripartite story which describes the relationships that span generations within a family.
2 Set against an everyday-life context, love is the major thematic thread that runs through Smythe’s stories; love of self, love of others, sexual love, love between parent and child, love between siblings and love between friends; love leading to disappointment, sorrow, grief, fear, or betrayal. Love is thus explored through a feminine perspective and from the viewpoint of the emotional world of women.
3 Although the above subject-matter and view point have been visited by many writers and constitute an area where a writer can easily fall into the trap of resorting to well
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worn phrases or structures, Smythe never allows her stories to descend into cliché. Her prose is direct without being simple. She gives her reader a glimpse of women’s inner world, full of everyday details without it ever trivializing her subjects. She lays before the reader the quotidian details of “simple lives” that are nevertheless intricate and complex. She is a master in giving the trivial simplicity of every-day life the poetical complexity of inner drama.
4 To evoke her characters’ inner struggles Smythe doesn’t merely describe them; she rather uses episodes that mirror their inner turmoil. In “The Halfhearted Winner”, for example, Carole, an antiques dealer begins to reconsider her decision to reconcile with Grant, her husband after he had an affair. Her stubbornness is therefore obliquely depicted through her mental attitude. Only once had she erred, and suffered the winner’s curse. Last spring, just after Grant had come clean, she bid far too much on a Victorian fire screen when one other woman would not give up the fight. Though it was not in very good condition, and though she did not have a client in the market for it, the screen was a rare find. (89)
5 The stories engage the reader, left in suspense as the stories are left open with simple, yet penetrating closing statements. At the end of the same story, for instance, Carole makes plans for restoring her Victorian fire screen so that “then she could put it on consignment before Grant came back home. He had never liked it much, she thought, and he probably wouldn’t even notice or care that it was gone – though she couldn’t be sure either way”. (90)
6 In “Miss Forbes”, to take another example, Karen Smythe draws a portrait of the title character, a middle-aged woman on the verge of menopause. Miss Forbes is never described; instead, the writer lets us get to know her gradually by letting a few phrases interspersed throughout the story do the job. Thus, we learn that she holds up cars as she drives “very slowly, towards Halifax”. (22) We learn the secret about her father that she “had never told anyone to this day, not even” her boyfriend Ray. (23) Allie remembers getting sent to a Catholic boarding school, her lazy eye, her balding, but most of all about “this life she loved”, and its “independence”. The effect is cumulative and lends an added impact to the ending. Thus, held in a precarious balance, this life which she has built for herself is threatened by a marriage proposal by Ray. Allie was crying now. She was falling apart, and she felt like she was losing more than just her hair. And yet Ray loved her. He said he even loved the way her eye rolled to the side when she looked at him, because it made him think she knew some secret about him that pleased her. He loved her, and because of that Allie didn’t know if she could ever forget herself again. (34)
7 The stories in Smythe’s collection share the same structure. The author lays the story before the reader principally through the words of the women themselves. The focus is maintained throughout as the plots quietly crescendo at the end with emotional impact that is rarely off the mark.
8 Karen Smythe is a gifted storyteller who not only paints her characters to life but lets us see their humanity in many dimensions. They are interesting characters that one is glad to have met. Their spirit is represented by the “bones” of the title. They are women who struggle to keep that spirit intact; characters with “stubborn bones” that refuse to dry, which explains the epigraph Smythe uses at the opening of her book: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bone” – Proverbs 17:22 (9).
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AUTHORS
MANUEL MARTINEZ Université d’Angers
Journal of the Short Story in English, 38 | Spring 2002