Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

69 | Autumn 2017 Varia Editors: Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher, and François Hugonnier

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1845 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 December 2017 ISBN: 978-2-7535-6516-6 ISSN: 0294-04442

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and François Hugonnier

Articles

Blurring the Boundaries: Dreaming Children in Katherine Mansfield's "Sun and Moon" and Daphne du Maurier's "The Pool" Michaela Schrage-Früh

Katherine Mansfield and the Trauma of War: Death, Memory and Forgetting in “An Indiscreet Journey,” “The Garden Party,” “At the Bay,” “Six Years After” and “The Fly” Stephen Edwards

When Fear is Feared: Repression, Anxiety, Trauma and War Neurosis in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Fiction Kate Imwalle

The Aesthetics of Orality in Langston Hughes’s Short Stories The Best of Simple Christine Dualé

Chess Problems and the Otherworld in Nabokov’s Short Stories Eric Hyman

Communities of Self: Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Cycle Tamas Dobozy

Tim O’Brien as Grail Knight: “On the Rainy River” Jay Ruud

“East is East”: Thematic and Textual Confluence in Jane Gardam’s “Chinese Funeral” Helen E. Mundler

Illusions that Resemble Reality: Salman Rushdie’s “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” Aloka Patel

De la divergence culturelle à la confluence transculturelle : rencontres de l’altérité dans The Thing Around Your Neck de Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Julia Siccardi

Book Review

Book Review: Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian and British Writing, Ed. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergman (London, Routledge, 2015) Beryl Pong

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Foreword

Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and François Hugonnier

1 We are pleased to present the Autumn 2017 issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English featuring articles on 20th and 21st century short-story writers. Though they appear in chronological order according to dates of short-story publication, they may also be read thematically.

2 The first article, by Michaela Schrage-Früh, compares the function of dreamlike elements in Katherine Mansfield’s story “Sun and Moon” and Daphne du Maurier’s “The Pool,” exploring not only how the dream experience and the short story form may be related, but also how reading the two texts in light of their references to dream may yield new insights regarding their psychological and artistic depth as coming-of-age- stories.

3 Stephen Edwards also studies Katherine Mansfield, but, as do Kate Imwalle and Jay Ruud for their respective writers, from the angle of war and war trauma. According to Edwards, “war permeates Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, to a greater extent than critics have acknowledged, in pervasive images of death, violence, and loss.” He uses contemporary neurosis theories to illuminate how Mansfield’s diverse fiction “both attempts and refuses to heal the self when exploring traumatic memories” and sees the essential ambiguity of her modernist narrative techniques as being a means to express this.

4 Elizabeth Bowen wrote the short stories studied by Kate Imwalle not in relation to WWI, as did Mansfield, but to WWII, and more precisely to the London Blitz and the trauma it provoked in the population. Imwalle argues that “although Bowen’s work falls under the category of Gothic Literature and has remained in the conversation of the gothic by most scholars, her work goes far beyond the site of the everyday ghost story when examined through the lenses of realism and trauma theory.”

5 Jay Ruud studies a more recent author, Tim O’Brien, affected by the Vietnam War and who, says Ruud, conceived his 1990 story “On the Rainy River” as a reversal of traditional attitudes toward war: heroes do not go to Vietnam but more courageously to Canada, a place which represents spiritual and psychological renewal and

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restoration. Because, says Ruud, “the archetypal literary symbol of these things has, historically, been the Grail,” his article envisions O’Brien’s story as a rewriting of the original Grail story, Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval.

6 Five articles study stories which in some way are connected to cultural in-betweenness. In her article on the short stories collected in 1961 in The Best of Simple, Christine Dualé studies how Langston Hughes was influenced by African American cultural traditions and folklore to create an elaborate written art form based on orality. She argues that Hughes’ aesthetics of orality can be understood by looking at the close relationship between language, history and black music. The story-telling of Simple’s stories, says Dualé, is anything but simple.

7 In “Communities of Self: Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Cycle,” Tamas Dobozy looks at the different communities which make up Montreal society—and so Linnet’s sense of self— in Gallant’s Linnet Muir stories. For Linnet, says Dobozy, “Montreal is the scene of incompatible ideologies—English and French—whose meeting, rather than being a scene of confusion, enables her to offset one socially proscribed role against another. This ‘meeting,’ and the opportunity it offers for subversion, is articulated throughout the cycle.”

8 Helen Mundler studies Jane Gardam’s 1990 story “Chinese Funeral,” a story in which a group of British tourists are destabilized by their visit to China as their colonial certainties become post-colonial uncertainties and as the relationship between dominant and dominated are reconfigured. She then draws a parallel between this story and a passage from a later novel by Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat, showing that in both texts, discovering the Eastern Other is problematic for the Westerners.

9 Salman Rushdie’s story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” is the subject of Aloka Patel’s article. Patel examines the ways in which Rushdie’s story, a story of exile based on the novel and movie The Wizard of Oz, questions the concept of “home” in a globalized world. The narrator of the story, says Patel, “dismantles the notion of a static, mythical home and perpetuates the notion of home as a transformative agent fraught with ambiguity as it inheres within its frame both the real and imaginary homelands.”

10 Julia Siccardi also deals with exile and identity as she examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), a collection which recounts the experiences of characters migrating from Nigeria to the United States. She observes in the stories that “if the encounter with alterity is underpinned by compassionate ethics that acknowledge the other person’s uniqueness (thus avoiding his/her reduction to a stereotype), the notion of transculture might offer the hope of a cultural confluence.”

11 Eric Hyman, in his article “Chess Problems and the Otherworld in Nabokov’s Short Stories,” deals with a different question entirely. As the title suggests, his approach is reader-oriented. Indeed, according to Hyman, “reading a Nabokov short story is like solving a chess problem: readers are challenged to seek a key move, which solves and explains all the elements of the chess problem/short story.” Hyman takes this observation further by noting that the key move often connects to a transcendent Otherworld.

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12 We thank our Research secretary Aurélie Reuillon for her continued dedication and skilled handling of these articles, allowing us to bring this short-story research to readers worldwide.

AUTHORS

LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN JSSE Director of Publication

MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Editor

GÉRALD PRÉHER JSSE Associate Editor

FRANÇOIS HUGONNIER JSSE Editorial Assistant

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Articles

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Blurring the Boundaries: Dreaming Children in Katherine Mansfield's "Sun and Moon" and Daphne du Maurier's "The Pool"

Michaela Schrage-Früh

1 This article explores the use of dreamlike elements in two short stories which have not received the critical attention they merit, respectively Katherine Mansfield’s “Sun and Moon” (1920) and Daphne du Maurier’s “The Pool” (1959). As I will argue, the genre of the short story is in many ways well-suited to convey the experience of dreaming. Thus, concerning the often fragmented quality of the dream, Colin McGinn rightly notes that dreams “can be more like sketches than fully realized representations” (85). Conversely, Clare Hanson emphasizes the “‘open’ quality of the short story” (Things 23) which lends itself to a comparison with the characteristic incompleteness of the dream experience. Another similarity is that both the dream and the short story are often image-dominated as well as elliptical. As Adrian Hunter argues, in contrast to the novel, the short story tends to cut away “the kind of material we normally depend upon for narrative continuity and coherence, […] working with these tactical omissions to suggest and imply meaning, rather than stating it directly” (2). While the short story depends on images to retain a sense of narrative continuity and coherence, these images often “tend to resist such interpenetration and integration [as takes place in the novel], which is why they disturb us in a particular, a distinctive and distinctly non- novelistic way” (Hanson, Things 24). Besides disturbing us, these images can also provide us with moments of psychological or existential insight: moments of being (to use Virginia Woolf’s term) or glimpses (to use Katherine Mansfield’s)— fleeting, intense and dreamlike. According to Hanson, the short story is thus often fuelled by “images from the unconscious mind” which can be presented “in the text in a relatively untranslated state. Such images retain an air of mystery and impenetrability, an air of dream” (Things 25).

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2 Besides these structural analogies between dreams and short stories, further similarities include the dreamer’s/focalizer’s typical self-absorption as well as the dream’s/short story’s characteristic focus on the present. As Nadine Gordimer succinctly puts it: “Short story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of—the present moment” (Gordimer 1968 qtd. in Hunter 2). Or, in Frank O’Connor’s words, the condensed life stories which are presented in the short story are “lit by an unearthly glow, one that enables us to distinguish present, past, and future as though they were all contemporaneous” (22). The same is true of the dream, which rearranges “the contents of the real world according to a non-historical, extratemporal, and subjective directive” (States, Dreaming 29). What is more, the dream experience, and especially the liminal borderland between dreaming and waking, is ideally suited to destabilize established boundaries between inner and outer reality, self and other, reality and fantasy. Thus, in the same way that a short story’s setting tends to reflect its focalizing character’s psychological concerns and frame of mind, the dream environment is often a projection of the dreamer’s emotions and mood. In their fragile, image-dominated restructuring of reality, then, both the dream and the short story are arguably predisposed to the questioning and breaking down of established certainties, conventions and norms, providing a natural outlet for subjective, and often marginalized, perspectives and voices.1

3 In what follows, I will explore the ways in which dreamlike elements may be translated into and fuel literary texts that do not, at first glance, narrate a dream. As I will argue, the fact that Mansfield’s “Sun and Moon” and du Maurier’s “The Pool” are narrated from a child’s point of view enhances both their dreamlike effect and credibility, drawing the reader into an imaginative world experienced as real. Blurring clear-cut boundaries between waking and dreaming, these stories open up liminal spaces which give expression to the protagonists’ inner life and their subjective perception of reality. As Claire Drewery notes, drawing from Victor Turner’s theory on liminality, such “psychological and literal thresholds are places of fear and ambivalence” but also potentially “liberating, enabling the transgression of social boundaries, a confrontation with otherness, and a challenge to the limits of subjectivity” (2). From this precarious vantage point, these stories of childhood seek to “fracture the conventionally agreed upon world by reshuffling conventional meanings” (Mageo 29). Accordingly, my analysis will explore not only how the dream experience and the short story form are related but also how reading the two stories in light of their references to dream may yield new insights regarding their psychological and artistic depth as initiation stories or rite-of-passage tales.

Katherine Mansfield, “Sun and Moon”

4 My first example is Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Sun and Moon,” written in 1918 and first published in Bliss and Other Stories (1920). According to Mansfield’s account in a letter to John Middleton Murry, the story was actually inspired by a dream: I dreamed a short story last night, even down to its name, which was Sun and Moon. It was very light. I dreamed it all—about children. I got up at 6.30 and wrote a note or two because I knew it would fade. I’ll send it some time this week. It’s so nice. I didn’t dream that I read it. No, I was in it, part of it, and it played round invisible me. But the hero is no more than 5. In my dream I saw a supper table with the eyes of 5. It was awfully queer—especially a plate of half-melted ice-cream… (Letters 161)

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5 Mansfield ’s use of the term “queer” seems to refer to the bizarreness of the dream experience which, in turn, is linked to the child’s point of view. Barbara Meier explains that even if the dream elements typically considered bizarre such as “strange settings, incongruent characters, objects out of place, inappropriate or impossible actions, perception deviating from normal experience […] do not comprise a substantive amount of all the dream elements, they may color a whole dream, giving it its touch of strangeness” (65). This seems to be precisely the case here and even though the short story does not explicitly narrate a dream, the dream’s “touch of strangeness” is preserved in the telling.

6 Jacqueline Bardolph points out that Mansfield “dismissed ‘Sun and Moon’ as easy and minor, and so do most critics. […] It is an idyllic tale, according to Murry, but the sign of pathological longing for childhood refuge, according to Jeffrey Myers, and a ‘purely sentimental story of children,’ according to Claire Tomalin.”2 Yet, as Bardolph rightly cautions, “maybe we should question Mansfield’s flippant dismissal of a story so close to basic emotions” (165). I certainly agree with Bardolph that, on closer reading, the story’s supposed lightness proves deceptive. I would add, though, that reading the story in terms of its dreamlike elements helps bring to light some of its emotionally salient implications which are most poignantly conveyed by its instances of narrative discontinuity and bizarre, dreamlike imagery. Harry T. Hunt suggests that in dreams the element of surprise is achieved by the predominantly visual element of dream bizarreness, arguing that “it is just these image-based transformations of experience that introduce the unexpected into the dream narrative and push the dreamer toward some response (whether during the ongoing dream or upon awakening)” (161). According to Hunt, then, “unexpected visual-spatial transformations do not so much disrupt narrative continuity as provide the dramatic sense that fulfills and completes it” (166). In this sense visual dream bizarreness, far from being randomly disruptive, can be considered “the very fabric of dream semantics” (Hunt 167) by means of which a trivial action sequence may be turned into a meaningful and coherent story. In “Sun and Moon” these instances are unobtrusive enough not to disrupt the dreamer’s “complete conviction in the exclusivity of the dream Umwelt” (States, Dreaming 34), yet occasionally they may lead to moments of surprise or hesitation on the reader’s part. Such moments of hesitation arguably link the dreamlike mode to Todorov’s well-known definition of the fantastic. However, while in Todorov’s theory the fantastic is dependent on “that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (41), situated between belief (the marvelous) and disbelief (the uncanny) and always on the verge of turning into one or the other, in Mansfield’s story hesitation is caused by the continual blurring of inner and outer reality. It is impossible for the reader to know for certain where waking reality ends and dreaming begins.

7 Even though “Sun and Moon” does not present itself as a dream narrative, then, it creates a dreamlike atmosphere by means of narrative point of view. This is because a child’s perspective allows for the simultaneous perception and acceptance of bizarre elements. A child’s psychological boundaries are not yet fully formed; they are “thin boundaries,” facilitating an easier blurring of inside/outside realities, which is precisely what dreamers experience in their malleable, unstable dream environment (cf. Hartmann, Nightmare 213). According to Ernest Hartmann, thin boundary personality types will “often experience states of being half-awake and half-asleep, or

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will become deeply immersed in daydreaming and reverie, so that sometimes the boundary between real life and fantasy may be unclear” (Nature 89-90). The child’s perspective, then, makes the dreamlike effect plausible for the reader without causing them to doubt the story’s overall reality status, despite occasional moments of hesitation. As Uri Margolin points out: Both science and common sense distinguish between standard and non-standard modes of perception and resultant mental images. Nonstandard modes, resulting in a disproportionate or distorted visual image, are associated in literature with the defamiliarization effect on the reader, and are realistically motivated by the perception of an infant or small child. (291)

8 This defamiliarization effect can, in turn, open up new and subversive perspectives on everyday practices and norms, in the same way that dreams can “offer an incipient critique of cultural reality, and people within it, by mirroring that reality [and] by offering us abnormalized copies of our waking worlds” (Mageo 26). Finally, it has been noted that “Sun and Moon” is reminiscent of a fairy tale such as the Grimm brothers’ “Hänsel and Gretel.” As such, it conveys a vision of “natural human anxieties” (Bardolph 165) that are also at the heart of the dream.

9 The story’s beginning—“In the afternoon the chairs came […]” (SM 153)—corresponds to the characteristically in medias res beginning of a dream, as the dreamer, simply thrown into the dreamworld, can never consciously grasp the dream’s precise beginning but always experiences it as already in progress. The little boy Sun, through whom the story is focalized, is witnessing the preparations for a party that the grown- ups are having later that evening. He and his little sister Moon are more or less left to their own devices, trying to keep out of the way and taking in the bustling activity with childlike wonder and curiosity. Sun’s liminal state is recurrently hinted at. Thus, in terms of psychological development he is situated between his little sister and the adults’ world as well as between perceptive observation of waking reality and his own dreamlike imagination. He repeatedly sets himself apart from his “silly” (SM 158) little sister but secretly still longs to receive the same kind of emotional attention bestowed on her: “He did so hate being sent stumping back to the nursery. It didn’t matter about Moon. If she got tangled in people’s legs they only threw her up and shook her till she squeaked. But Sun was too heavy for that” (SM 154). Characteristic dream transformations are suggested from the beginning, for instance when the flowers for the party are being delivered: “When you stared down from the balcony at the people carrying them the flower pots looked like awfully nice hats nodding up the path” (SM 153-154). This imaginative transformation of people and flowers into hats has an Alice in Wonderland quality, and even though Sun prides himself on being able to know “the difference between real things and not real ones” (SM 154), in the course of the story this difference will repeatedly blur, suggesting a gap between objective reality and subjective experience. From the beginning the reader, too, is implicated in this blurring of boundaries because of the inclusiveness suggested by the pronoun “you.”

10 Significantly, the supposed lightness of the story is undermined by the subtly suggested neglect and carelessness with which the children are treated. This strategy is in line with Mansfield’s frequent depiction of “the child’s entry into the world as one of pain, cruelty and oppression” (March-Russell 207). While this tendency is more blatantly realized in Mansfield’s early stories, notably “The-Child-Who-Was-Tired” (1910) and “The Woman at the Store” (1913), the seemingly idyllic environment in “Sun and Moon,” too, is ultimately one that is hostile to the children. Early on in the story we

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learn that “[t]here was nobody to look after Sun and Moon” (SM 154). Their mother tells them to keep out of her way, and Sun is surprised at Cook’s unusual kindness (cf. SM 154). When his father contradicts his mother, Sun is certain that “Mother would have been dreadfully cross” (SM 159). Similarly, he repeatedly expresses his surprise at “this jolly Father” (SM 159), which suggests that this is not the kind of father he normally knows. What is more, throughout the story, the children are treated like objects; they are dressed up and presented to the guests who are allowed to fondle them as though they were pets or puppets. In fact, they are continuously given pet names such as “ducks,” “lambs” and “sweets” (SM 157). Their very names Sun (most likely derived from son) and Moon depersonalize them, emphasizing their gender rather than their individuality. The brutal carelessness inherent in this treatment becomes obvious when “a skinny old lady with teeth that clicked said: ‘Such a serious little poppet,’ and rapped him [Sun] on the head with something hard” (SM 157). As Bardolph notes, animate and inanimate objects continually blur in the story, as when food is humanized (“almond finger,” “collar on the ham,” “fishes, with their heads and eyes”) and the children objectified (as suggested by the passive voice indicating the way in which they are being handled: “unbuttoned,” “dressed,” “picked up”). These descriptions help create what Bardolph calls “a Hansel-and-Gretel atmosphere” in which “desire and eating seem to be of a cannibal order, and the intimacy of the parents aggressive and threatening, as when Father ‘pretended to bite [Mother’s] white shoulder” (166).3 It is in line with this atmosphere that, when looking at the magnificently transformed and decorated dining-room table, Sun asks, much to the adults’ amusement, “Are people going to eat the food?” (SM 155). This anxious question foreshadows the ending of the story, when Sun is quite upset at the sight of the ruined dinner table and the melted house, and suggests Sun’s futile longing for a lasting state of beauty and perfection.

11 The story hinges on two central images that turn the relatively simple plot into an emotionally and symbolically resonant story: the miniature house and a character referred to as “little grey man” (SM 157). Ernest Hartmann has extensively studied interconnections between dream imagery (especially what he terms the “central image” of a dream) and the underlying emotional concerns experienced by the dreamers at the time the dream occurred. According to his model, “the central imagery of the dream seems to be picturing [...] clearly, though metaphorically, the emotions of the dreamer” (Underlying 202). In Mansfield’s story, these central images indeed contextualize Sun’s emotional concerns and provide the sense of bizarreness that makes the story “shimmer with instability and otherness” (States, Bizarreness 25). They also serve to structure the text and mark Sun’s emotional development. Thus, for instance, “the text presents the little house three times, following the pattern of folktales” (Bardolph 166).

12 Sun gets his first glimpse of the house when the children are allowed to admire the ice pudding while it is still in the fridge: “Oh! Oh! Oh! It was a little house. It was a little pink house with white snow on the roof and green windows and a brown door and stuck in the house was a nut for a handle” (SM 155). The sight of this perfect, miniature house has a strong emotional effect on Sun. At first, “when Sun saw the nut he felt quite tired and had to lean against Cook” (SM 155). In Bardolph’s words, the “small house of make-believe and dreams” provides “a promise, a vision that makes Sun nearly faint” (166). Before Sun catches another glimpse of the house, however, the

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children are dressed up and briefly presented to the party guests. It is on this occasion that Sun, for the first time, notices a grey-haired stranger among the guests: There was only one man that Sun really liked. He was a little grey man, with long grey whiskers, who walked about by himself. He came up to Sun and rolled his eyes in a very nice way and said: “Hullo, my lad.” Then he went away. But soon he came back again and said: “Fond of dogs?” Sun said: “Yes.” But then he went away again and though Sun looked for him everywhere he couldn’t find him. He thought perhaps he’d gone outside to fetch in a puppy. (SM 157-158)

13 After this episode, there is an abrupt change of scene; the children are in bed, falling asleep: “A long while after Sun woke up again” (SM 158). He wakes his sister and suggests going to the landing, from where the children watch the party guests stroll over to the dining-room and Sun catches a second glimpse of the house: Then that door was shut; there was a noise of ‘pops’ and laughing. Then that stopped and Sun saw them all walking round and round the lovely table with their hands behind their backs like he had done. Round and round they walked, looking and staring. The man with the grey whiskers liked the little house best. When he saw the nut for a handle he rolled his eyes like he did before and said to Sun: “Seen the nut?”(SM 158)

14 It is easy to miss the implied change of consciousness here, but in fact Sun is dreaming this scene. After all, it is not possible for the children to witness what the grown-ups are doing in the dining room since “that door was shut.” So Sun must be imagining their childlike amazement, projecting his own sense of wonder onto the party guests, who most likely are not as deeply impressed with the decorations as Sun was earlier that day. He also dreams about the mysterious man with grey whiskers, who communicates with Sun in the dream and shares the boy’s particular fascination with the little nut serving as a handle to the little house’s door. That Sun may well be dreaming the scene is further suggested by his short discussion with Moon over who is nodding their head, immediately followed by the sentence “When they woke up again they could only hear Father’s voice very loud, and Mother, laughing away” (SM 159). The party guests have left and when the parents discover the children asleep on the landing, they allow them to briefly come down and “have some pickings” of the leftovers, including the ice pudding: And so they went back to the beautiful dining-room. But—oh! oh! What had happened. The ribbons and the roses were all pulled untied. The little red table napkins lay on the floor, all the shining plates were dirty and all the winking glasses. The lovely food that the man had trimmed was all thrown about, and there were bones and bits and fruit peels and shells everywhere. There was even a bottle lying down with stuff coming out of it on the cloth and nobody stood it up again. And the little pink house with the snow roof and the green windows was broken— broken—half melted away in the centre of the table. (SM 159)

15 The shock that Sun feels at the sight of this ruined dinner table, and the broken little house in particular, is deepened by his father’s “smashing in some more of the roof” as well as Moon’s careless way of picking the little nut “out of the door and scrunch[ing] it up, biting hard and blinking” (SM 160). His reaction of starting to wail and cry—“I think it’s horrid—horrid—horrid!” (SM 160)—is in line with this shock but totally incomprehensible to his parents, who are ignorant of the boy’s imaginative inner life and angrily send him off to the nursery.

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16 Again, this story, even though allegedly based on a dream, is not presented as a dream narrative and apart from the short dining-room scene in which Sun imagines or dreams that the adults are marveling at the dinner table and the little grey man addresses him once more, indicating the nut, there are no other clearly demarcated dream scenes. And yet the emotional significance attached to the miniature house and what Sun perceives as its cruel destruction lends the story a dreamlike quality. As Hanson points out, like dreams, “Mansfield’s fictions are built on a technique of suggestion. The themes are not stated directly but conveyed obliquely through concrete images” (Short Stories 78). To Sun, the fragile little ice-pudding house is real. It does not just represent food but an ideal little world, with the nut as handle providing entry. He is not at all able, then, to tell “the difference between real things and not real ones” (SM 154) because in his dreamlike world things keep shifting and transforming: “men in black with funny tails on their coats [look] like beetles” (SM 157), while a dinner table is transformed into a landscaped garden: “Red ribbons and bunches of roses tied up the table at the corner. In the middle was a lake with rose petals floating on it. […] Two silver lions with wings had fruit on their backs, and the salt-cellars were tiny birds drinking out of basins” (SM 155). This picturesque miniature landscape is “where the ice pudding is to be” (SM 155). At the same time, the children themselves are transformed into puppets, Sun being dressed up in what Nurse calls his “Russian costume” (SM 156) and Moon being turned into “a sweet little cherub of a picture of a powder-puff” (SM 156). They are also associated with birds, when, for instance, their mother tells them to “[f]ly up to your little nest” (SM 158). They thus mirror the table decoration of “tiny birds drinking out of basins” (SM 155).

17 In this world of dreamlike transformations, the solitary little man with grey whiskers who, unlike other characters in the story, seems genuinely interested in Sun, able to mindread his wishes and sharing his particular fascination with the house and the nut, assumes a symbolic quality which is often inherent in dream and fairy tale characters.4 He seems rather out of place in the party surroundings; walking by himself, talking with no-one, he has seemingly vanished when Sun tries to find him. By emphasizing his part in the short dream scene, Mansfield casts doubt upon his overall reality status within the story. The reader begins to hesitate and wonder whether Sun has dreamed up his presence from the beginning. The little grey man provides the element of bizarreness precisely because his behaviour deviates from that of all the other grown- up characters and he seems out of place within the contours of the story world. For instance, he takes an interest in Sun rather than in Moon, and he notices the little nut that is ignored and unappreciated by the other adults. His seemingly unmotivated question—“Fond of dogs?” (SM 157)—particularly contributes to this impression. This question seems to mirror Sun’s secret longing for a dog and suggests that the little grey man is a dreamlike projection of his wish to be taken notice of. Like the house, “conceived against social pressure and adult order” (Bardolph 167), the little grey man provides an elusive glimpse of an alternative fantasy world. The ending of the story, in which the disappointed and disillusioned little boy “stumped off to the nursery” (SM 160) may well signal the loss of this fantasy world: the little house’s door and its handle have been destroyed and the little grey man with his eyes rolling “in a very nice way” may have disappeared for good. The reader, identifying with Sun, experiences the ending as the harsh awakening from a dream in which something initially beautiful and treasured has undergone a transformation into something “horrid.” According to Pamela Dunbar, “[b]eyond its apparent slightness the sketch is another rite-of-passage

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tale; a fable about the inevitable spoiling of perfection and of the child’s primal sense of contentment. The notion of the house’s ideal nature, here a figure of family happiness, has lasted only as long as the dream” (150). Ultimately, as Jacqueline Bardolph notes, “[b]ecause ‘Sun and Moon’ is so anchored in the little boy’s perception, it is more a nightmare than a dream; the little house is lost, its key eaten up” (168).

Daphne du Maurier, “The Pool”

18 Though significantly longer and more complex than “Sun and Moon,” Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Pool,” first published in the collection Breaking Point (1959), in many ways lends itself to a comparison with Mansfield’s piece. Not only does the story focus on two children, a brother and sister, but it is characterized by a similar mixture of fairy tale and dream elements as well as the blurring of inside/outside and sleep/wake boundaries. Like “Sun and Moon,” it is, moreover, “concerned with the inevitable sadness of growing up” (Forster 300). In a letter to a friend, du Maurier explained that the stories in the collection “are all a protest at the cruelty and misunderstanding which abound in the world—beneath the surface lurk evils we do not understand, things in ourselves” (Du Maurier qtd. in Hodges 37). This sense of the self as Other finds expression in the liminal state between childhood and adolescence which is, in turn, characterized by blurred dream/wake boundaries. It is noteworthy that, in contrast to Mansfield, du Maurier rarely featured children as protagonists in her stories. In this regard “The Pool” is a remarkable exception and invites a comparison with Mansfield’s more frequent childhood depictions.

19 Mansfield’s enormous influence on du Maurier is well-documented. Margaret Forster notes that, even though not typically visible in her thematic choice and style (cf. Forster 55), du Maurier repeatedly acknowledged this influence and claimed that her first impulse to become a writer was sparked by reading Mansfield’s stories (cf. Forster 30). Likewise, Jane Dunn calls Mansfield the young du Maurier’s “muse […], whose stories she so admired and longed to emulate” (Dunn 134). She notes that du Maurier’s imagination was further stimulated by learning that Mansfield and her husband John Middleton Murry had actually lived close to the du Maurier family in London. In fact, long after Mansfield’s premature death, du Maurier learned that the admired writer used to watch Daphne and her sisters “playing on Hampstead Heath and longed to talk to them” (Dunn 135). It is tempting to speculate whether the sight of the du Maurier girls at play may have inspired some of Mansfield’s own childhood portrayals. To du Maurier, the anecdote seems to have signified a spiritual connection between Mansfield and herself and she indulged in the romantic notion that “something of Katherine’s creative spirit had entered her soul” (Dunn 135).5

20 While du Maurier’s story may not be based on an actual dream, according to Sally Beauman it was written during a time of psychological strain, “compounded by the onset of menopause, which brought with it recurrent dreams of drowning—an influence apparent in ‘The Pool’” (xii).6 The story is focalized mainly through Deborah, a girl in her early teens, and, to a lesser extent, her slightly younger brother Roger. It narrates the story of one of the children’s summer holidays, which the half-orphans habitually spend at their grandparents’ estate in the English countryside. Like “Sun and Moon,” the story can be classified as an initiation story or rite-of-passage tale. However, while Mansfield’s story depicts a five-year-old boy’s first disillusioning

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glimpse into the adult world, spoiling his vision of lasting perfection and beauty, du Maurier’s story more dramatically narrates the end of childhood, marked by the girl’s passage into puberty. Indeed, Deborah’s transition from childhood to adolescence can be read as a rite of passage in terms of the three stages defined by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner: separation, margin (or limen) and aggregation. Thus, from the beginning of the story, Deborah displays “symbolic behavior signifying detachment” (Turner 235) from the social structures of her small household community. She then passes through a transitional or liminal realm “that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (Turner 235). This realm is physically located near and within the pool and marked by increasingly permeable dream/wake boundaries. At the end of the story, Deborah experiences her first period and finds that entry into the “hidden world” of childhood “is out of her reach for ever” (TP 158). The young girl “is in a stable state once more […] and is expected to behave in accordance with certain customary norms” (Turner 235). This stable condition, however, is experienced in terms of irretrievable loss. In the following, I will retrace Deborah’s rite of passage in connection to dreamlike elements and their functions within the story.

21 The in medias res beginning still presents the children as a unity: “The children ran out onto the lawn. There was space all around them, and light, and air, with the trees indeterminate beyond. […] The children said nothing. The first moment always took them by surprise” (TP 128). The spacious, seemingly carefree world of childhood is juxtaposed with that of the grandparents, or, more generally, with the adult world. Deborah, in particular, repeatedly muses on what she perceives is the old people’s wasted, routine-filled life, which, to the girl, seems “unreal” (TP 140), “remote” (TP 141) as well as devoid of “meaning” (TP 141) and “knowledge” (TP 141). On the other hand, the two children also represent opposite ways of perceiving the world. Deborah’s view is a mythical, spiritual and imaginative one, whereas Roger has a more rational, down-to-earth outlook. This becomes obvious, for instance, in their different ways of taking in the garden. Practical Roger appreciates “how Willis the gardener had mown the lawn to just the right closeness for cricket” (TP 129), worrying that his older sister is “in one of her absent moods and would not concentrate on the cricket” (TP 130). Deborah, in turn, loses herself in mystical contemplations, solitary games and imaginative rituals. To her, the garden is alive and animate and the borders between her own self and the natural world are fleeting. In a sense, she displays the self- absorption of a dreamer, projecting her own desires, fears and wishes onto her surroundings.

22 In the parts focalized through Deborah, inanimate and natural objects are personified and endowed with a secret life of their own with such consistency and intensity that the boundaries between reality and dream increasingly blur, conveying “a mystical quality” (Forster 300)—threatening and enchanting at the same time. Thus, Deborah’s sense of loneliness throughout the long school year is projected onto the garden, as the girl marvels at “[t]he fact that the garden waited for them” and that it “had to endure month after month of silence, when the children were gone” (TP 128). She communicates with the garden “in the silent voice she used for her own possessions” (TP 128) and, in a sacrificial rite, she lays on the grass “like Jesus on the Cross, only face downwards […] [t]o offer herself to the earth, to the garden, the garden that had waited patiently all these months since last summer” (TP 129). The same consciousness is granted to objects such as the summer-house, “open to understanding, sharing complicity” (TP 142); everyday items like a croquet clip, which she fears might “turn

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malevolent, and haunt her” (TP 131); or her talisman, a stub of pencil, which she offers as a sacrifice to the pool in the woods. In seeking communion with the inanimate world and creating her own imaginative rituals, Deborah increasingly withdraws from the demands made on her by the everyday world of family obligations and social rituals.

23 This initial state of separation is soon followed by the girl’s entry into a liminal state physically associated with the woods and the pool. Deborah feels that, in contrast to the cultivated garden, “[t]he woods were made for secrecy. They did not recognize her as the garden did. […] The woods would never miss her: they had their own dark, passionate life” (TP 133). The woods, and, in particular, the dark waters of the pool, then, represent the untamed natural world of primal emotions, instincts and desires: in short, the world surfacing in dreams. To Deborah, the pool is a sacred place which provides her with a ghostly reflection of her own inner self: “Her reflection wavered up at her, and it was not the face she knew, not even the looking-glass face which anyway was false, but a disturbed image, dark-skinned and ghostly” (TP 134). The continual personification of the natural world likewise creates a dreamlike atmosphere, always verging on the brink of nightmare, as the following passage illustrates: “There was a dead tree standing by the far end of the pool. He could have been fir or pine, or even larch, for time had stripped him of identity. He had no distinguishing mark upon his person, but with grotesque limbs straddled the sky. A cap of ivy crowned his raked head” (TP 134). And even more intensely: “She sensed approval as she ran the gauntlet, the tall trees watching. Any sign of turning back, of panic, and they would crowd upon her in a choking mass, smothering protest. Branches would become arms, gnarled and knotty, ready to strangle, and the leaves of the higher trees fold in and close like the sudden furling of giant umbrellas” (TP 143). The reader, who is increasingly drawn into this world, shares Deborah’s vision of the “kingdom that lay below,” patiently waiting for the initiate: It did not become blacker as the pool was penetrated, but paler, more golden-green, and the mud that people told themselves was there was only a defence against strangers. Those who belonged, who knew, went to the source at once, and there were caverns and fountains and rainbow-coloured seas. There were shores of the whitest sand. There was soundless music. (TP 135)

24 This paradisiacal vision of “soundless music” is closely associated with the comfort of the mother’s womb, suggestive of Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora, as opposed to the everyday world of the symbolic, the Law of the Father, in which “Time was all- important” and in which “the adult reigned supreme” (TP 136).

25 Accordingly, it is during nighttime that Deborah hopes to find entry into the secret world of the pool, which is why she slips out into the darkness when everyone else is asleep on the first night of her summer vacation. Reaching the pool in the dead of night, after a terrifying walk through the woods, “she had no more fear. The woods had accepted her, and the pool was the final resting place, the doorway, the key” (TP 143). Like Sun in Mansfield’s short story, Deborah, too, is attuned to a world of dreamlike transformations. Being older and well-versed in religious legends, myths and fairy tales,7 her interpretation of this world is even more imaginative and freighted with complex rituals and rites. Accordingly, her solitary night spent by the pool is indeed meant to be nothing less than a rite of passage: “‘I shan’t sleep,’ thought Deborah. ‘I shall just lie awake here all the night and wait for morning, but it will be a kind of introduction to life, like being confirmed” (TP 143). The girl feels at peace, safe and protected as if in her mother’s womb: “The trees were no longer menacing but

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guardians, and the pool was primeval water, the first, the last” (TP 143). It is at this point that the dream world takes over, but, as there is no perceptible break in the story, the reader can’t be sure whether Deborah has crossed the border of sleep or the border into the secret world—or both: “Then Deborah stood at the wicket-gate, the boundary, and there was a woman with outstretched hand, demanding tickets. ‘Pass through,’ she said when Deborah reached her. ‘We saw you coming.’ The wicket-gate became a turnstile. Deborah pushed against it and there was no resistance, she was through” (TP 143). The woman at the turnstile is reminiscent of Sun’s little grey man—a wise and sympathetic figure, who provides answers to Deborah’s questions, though in an ambivalent and mysterious way familiar from both dreams and fairy tales: “What is it?” she [Deborah] asked. “Am I really here at last? Is this the bottom of the pool?” “It could be,” smiled the woman. “There are so many ways. You just happened to choose this one.” […] “Why only now, tonight?” asked Deborah. “Why not in the afternoon, when I came to the pool?” “It’s a trick,” said the woman. “You seize on the moment in time. We were here this afternoon. We’re always here. Our life goes on around you, but nobody knows it. The trick’s easier by night, that’s all.” “Am I dreaming, then?” asked Deborah. “No,” said the woman. “This isn’t a dream. And it isn’t death, either. It’s the secret world.” (TP 144)

26 But despite this tantalizing invitation, Deborah is not granted entry into the secret world. Even though the woman insists that “this isn’t a dream,” the reader is clearly inclined to assume that the girl has fallen asleep by the pool and is subjected to a sudden, harsh awakening just when she experiences a moment of lucidity, deep insight and happiness amidst the “beating of wings” (TP 144): “Don’t let me go!” It was a pulse in her ear, and a cry, and she saw the woman at the turnstile put up her hands to hold her. Then there was such darkness, such dragging, terrible darkness, and the beginning of pain all over again, the leaden heart, the tears, the misunderstanding. The voice saying “No!” was her own harsh, worldly voice, and she was staring at the restless trees, black and ominous against the sky. One hand trailed in the water of the pool. (TP 145)

27 The woman’s earlier words about “the secret world” seem to confirm Deborah’s formerly vague sense that she has always belonged to that otherworldly place rather than the human, daytime world. There are possible overtones here of fairy legends about changelings from the otherworld, the secret realm of the “little people.” Experiencing “joy […] a surge of feeling […] the invasion of knowledge” (TP 144), Deborah is confronted with her own two-year-old self at the moment of ultimate loss, her mother’s death in childbirth: “I’m not myself, then, after all,” she thought. “I knew I wasn’t. It was only the task given,” and, looking down, she saw a little child who was blind trying to find her way. Pity seized her. She bent down and put her hands on the child’s eyes, and they opened, and the child was herself at two years old. The incident came back. It was when her mother died and Roger was born. (TP 144)

28 The reader learns about Deborah’s deep-seated childhood trauma, the loss of her mother at her younger brother’s birth. In psychological terms, the child’s escape into an alternative secret world/self can now be understood as a coping strategy, helping her deal with the painful loss: “‘It doesn’t matter after all,’ she told the child. ‘You are

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not lost. You don’t have to go on crying’” (TP 144). Addressing what Jeremy Taylor calls the “wounded child within” (198) may be a first step towards healing. As Taylor elucidates, in dreams, “the decision to come to the rescue of the child-self invariably results in a release of emotional and creative energies in other areas of the dreamer’s waking life” (198). However, facing the memories of her mother’s death is more than the girl can handle on her own; Deborah is cut off from the “child within” and her terrifying dream makes her flee towards the safety of her grandparents’ house. And yet, despite this plausible psychological explanation, the reader cannot help but share Deborah’s doubts after she has reached her grandparents’ “slumbering solid house” (TP 145): “The thing was, though […] which was real? This safety of the house, or the secret world?” (TP 146). The boundaries remain deliberately blurred.

29 After her nightly encounter with the secret world of the pool, Deborah seems stuck in the ordinary world. She finds temporary shelter in her grandparents’ house: “The slumbering solid house received her. […]. ‘Don’t take any notice of them,’ it seemed to say, jerking its head—Did a house have a head?—towards the wood beyond. ‘They’ve made no contribution to civilization. I’m man-made and different. This is where you belong, dear child’” (TP 145). Her experiences at the pool seem “unreal” (TP 145) and she even draws the curtains, shutting out the night, “as her grandmother might have done” (TP 145). Her mind is preoccupied with “practical difficulties” (TP 146) and her disillusioned mood lingers on throughout the next day: “Such deception everywhere. Such sour sadness. It was like Adam and Eve being locked out of paradise. The Garden of Eden was no more. Somewhere, very close, the woman at the turnstile waited to let her in, the secret world was all about her, but the key was gone” (TP 147-148). The contrast between the two worlds is reinforced by the onset of a heat-wave, whose dampening effect on the characters is dwelt on in some detail in parts two and three of the text. The heat even seems to extinguish Deborah’s thirst for knowledge: “‘Grandmama says it can’t go on,’ he [Roger] announced. ‘There’ll have to be a storm.’ But why? Why not forever? Why not breathe a spell so that all of them could stay locked and dreaming like the courtiers in the Sleeping Beauty, never knowing, never waking, cobwebs in their hair and on their hands, tendrils imprisoning the house itself?” (TP 151). Deborah even falls asleep during the day, “a thing she never did” (TP 152), which leaves her feeling unwell and heavy-headed.

30 The girl’s energy only returns when, at night-time, a thunderstorm wakes her and she has yet another vision of the secret world: Suddenly the lightning forked again, and standing there, alive yet immobile, was the woman by the turnstile. She stared up at the windows of the house, and Deborah recognized her. The turnstile was there, inviting entry, and already the phantom figures, passing through it, crowded towards the trees beyond the lawn. The secret world was waiting. Through the long day, while the storm was brewing, it had hovered there unseen beyond her reach, but now that night had come, and the thunder with it, the barriers were down. Another crack, mighty in its summons, the turnstile yawned, and the woman with her hand upon it smiled and beckoned. (TP 155)

31 The story reaches its climax towards the end of part three, when Deborah follows the silent summons, reaching the pool after an ecstatic run through the woods to catch another glimpse of the woman, “who had set up her turnstile in the middle of the pool, beckoning them once more” (TP 157), and to follow her into the pool’s muddy waters. What follows is a moment of epiphany: Deborah’s eventual realization that the secret

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world is lost to her, that she has to remain behind in the ‘real’ world: “‘Take me, too,’ cried the child. ‘Don’t leave me behind!’ In her heart was a savage disillusionment. They had broken their promise; they had left her in the world. The pool that claimed her now was not the pool of secrecy, but dank, dark, brackish water choked with scum” (TP 157). This moment of disillusionment ends the liminal phase of Deborah’s passage into adolescence.

32 In part four of the story, the reader learns that not only has Deborah been saved from the pool but the ‘real’ world has ultimately triumphed; the secret world is lost to Deborah for good, her “passage is consummated” (Turner 235). Roger informs his sister that his grandfather is going to have the pool fenced round: “‘A proper fence, then nothing can ever happen. But barrel-loads of shingle tipped in it first. Then it won’t be a pool, but just a dewpond. Dewponds aren’t dangerous’” (TP 157). After Deborah’s vivid descriptions of the secret world and its messengers, the reader is torn between sharing her “sorrow” (TP 158) at the loss of a magic place that may or may not have existed and relief at seeing the danger averted. The overall tone of the very short fourth section of the story, however, is kept deliberately matter-of-fact and conveys a sobering and bleak atmosphere, suggesting that “the intense transformative power of [Deborah’s] own imagination” (McGrath n. pag.) may indeed be lost.8 Her nightly excursions are given a rational explanation by the household’s male members though Deborah weakly tries to resist this approach: “‘I did not walk in my sleep,’ said Deborah. ‘Grandpapa said you must have done,’ said Roger” (TP 159). Deborah, so the story suggests, has entered the realm of patriarchal authority, in which her place will from now on be prescribed, her life as a woman mapped out for her. In contrast, the secret world suggested a matriarchal realm, as indicated by the woman at the turnstile, references to a pagan goddess (cf. TP 133) as well as to the primal waters of the pool evoking the womb and its amniotic fluid.9 Deborah has experienced her personal fall from grace, which is every young girl’s destiny, and which can’t be named. The servant Agnes’ well-meant question: “‘Have you got a pain? It’s usual, the first time’” (TP 159) is answered with a curt ‘No’ on Deborah’s part: “What had happened to her was personal. They had prepared her for it at school, but nevertheless it was a shock, not to be discussed with Agnes” (TP 158). Her first period leaves Deborah excluded from the paradisiacal secret world, the realm of childhood and imagination, which she has to exchange for “the heaviness of knowledge” and “a strange, deep sorrow” (TP 158). Du Maurier’s vision of a girl’s coming-of-age is as bleak as the “flat and dull […] empty sky” (TP 158) which Deborah can glimpse through her bedroom window. Her certain knowledge is that she has “lost the key” and that “[t]he hidden world, like ripples in the pool soon to be filled in and fenced, was out of her reach for ever” (TP 158).10

33 Just like Sun, who witnesses the destruction of his perfect childhood world as symbolized by the little house, helplessly watching the nut-made door handle disappear into his sister’s mouth, Deborah experiences the loss of the key to childhood as a painful awakening. Even though her story is significantly darker and given added momentum by her rite of passage into puberty, the disillusionment of a child’s first initiation into an adult world devoid of imagination, magic and wonder is depicted in strikingly similar terms. At the heart of both stories is the child’s unique perspective that allows for, and gives credibility to, the blurring of inside/outside and dream/wake boundaries. The subjectively experienced world of imagination and dream as depicted in both stories opens up liminal spaces in which emotional concerns and social critique

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can be expressed by means of dreamlike images and projections. Thus, Sun dreams up a friendly, grey-haired stranger who reflects his wishes and provides him with the sense of comfort and understanding his ordinary waking environment lacks. The little grey man thus provides an example of what Mageo refers to as “counteridentities—identities that go against the grain of established hegemonies” (38). The little ice-pudding house metaphorically expresses Sun’s longing for a happy family life as well as the futility of this wish as indicated by the inevitable destruction of the house at the end of the story. Likewise, Deborah’s imaginative perception of the inanimate world, and the secret world of the pool in particular, highlights the lack of emotional and maternal sustenance provided by her social environment, be it the dreaded boarding school or the world of her grandparents’ rigid and unimaginative everyday routines. It is through images such as the little grey man or the mysterious pool, characteristic of both dreams and short stories, that these emotional states and fleeting moments of insight can be captured and metaphorically expressed. By blurring the boundaries between dreaming and waking these metaphors have an even stronger impact on our perception and potential reimagining of the waking realities reflected in the stories. Ultimately, then, both Mansfield’s “Sun and Moon” and du Maurier’s “The Pool” testify to the intricate ways in which short stories and dreams are interconnected and suited to the articulation of alternative and potentially disruptive ways of looking at the world. Both also remind us to pay attention to and take seriously a child’s inner world of imagination whose transformative power and potential insight we ignore at our own peril.

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Drewery, Claire. Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Print.

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Dunn, Jane. Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing. London: HarperPress, 2013. Print.

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Forster, Margaret. Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller. New York and London: Doubleday, 1993. Print.

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NOTES

1. For a more in-depth discussion of similarities between dreaming and literary genres cf. Schrage-Früh 166-205. 2. Jeffrey Myers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (London, 1978); Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London, 1987). 3. Interestingly, preschool children have been found to experience nightmares in which “the predominant themes were the danger of the child’s being bitten, devoured, and chased” (Mack 23). 4. The “little grey man” is a popular character in various fairy tales, for instance in the Grimm Brothers’ “The Golden Goose,” where he functions as disguised helper. An even earlier story by Sophie Albrecht, titled “Graumännchen oder die Burg Rabenbühl [The Little Grey Man or the Castle Rabenbühl]” (1799), can be considered as one of the predecessors of the more famous Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale “Rumpelstilskin.” 5. In her memoir Growing Pains, du Maurier comments on visiting Mansfield’s grave in Paris in her early twenties and notes: “I knew by now that she had lived so near to us at Cannon Hall, and watched us as children, and I wondered if, now dead, she understood how much her stories meant to me, and how dearly I wished I could write as well as she had done” (147). 6. In a letter to Oriel Malet, dating from March 1958, du Maurier herself writes: “My own recurrent dreams are so often about an overwhelming high tide. Sometimes I am trying to swim and can only just keep afloat, and I do not know if this is the tide of my emotions, which threatens to drown me from time to time, or just a hint that I get overwhelmed by my own tidal C. of L. [Change of Life] which makes me unable to settle to London. It could mean both. I don’t have any other C. of L. symptoms, but just no Robert [i.e. period] now for a year. Only the high- tide dream is rather strange, don’t you think, and must mean that Something keeps recurring, and threatens to overwhelm me! Perhaps my own subconscious?” (Letters from Menabilly 107). 7. The story is replete with references to Biblical stories (cf. TP 129; 133; 142; 147); the Greek myth of Icarus (cf. TP 150) and the Titans (cf. TP 156); and fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty (cf. TP 151). 8. Deborah’s suspended state between childhood and adolescence may well refer to du Maurier’s sense of herself as harbouring multiple identities, including what she called her “disembodied self” or “boy-in-the-box.” In a letter to Ellen Doubleday, she describes her own memories of

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growing up to be a girl in terms that vividly echo Deborah’s experience: “And then the boy realised he had to grow up and not be a boy any longer, so he turned into a girl, and not an unattractive one at that, and the boy was locked in a box forever. D. du M. wrote her books, and had young men, and later a husband, and children, and a lover, and life was sometimes lovely and sometimes rather sad, but when she found Menabilly and lived in it alone, she opened up the box sometimes and let the phantom, who was neither girl nor boy but disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see…” (Du Maurier qtd. in Forster 222). According to Horner and Zlosnik, du Maurier came to identify “her writing persona as having sprung from a repressed ‘No. 2’ masculine side” (6). 9. Tellingly, at an earlier point in the story, her wasp-slapping grandfather makes “Deborah think of Jehovah” (TP 153). 10. According to du Maurier’s biographer Margaret Forster, Deborah’s adventure was based on the author’s own, very similar experience. One summer du Maurier spent several nights sleeping out in the garden of Menabilly, her Cornish estate, and on one occasion woke up convinced that “someone was there—not a real person, but not a ghost. She sensed all around her another time and another world—it was thrilling but also distressing, and afterwards she went into the house and slept. When she woke up, she found she was menstruating after months of not doing so and of believing she was through the menopause. The whole atmosphere of ‘The Pool’ was an attempt to recapture what she felt had been a psychic experience” (301).

ABSTRACTS

Cet article propose une analyse de la fonction qu’occupent les éléments oniriques dans deux nouvelles quelque peu négligées par la critique : « Sun and Moon » de Katherine Mansfield et « The Pool » de Daphné du Maurier. Au cœur de chacun de ces deux textes se trouve la perception spécifique à l’enfant pour qui intérieur et extérieur, rêve et éveil n’ont pas de frontière distincte, ce qui renforce la pertinence et la qualité de la perception subjective de l’imaginaire et du rêve qu’ils esquissent. L’analyse proposée ne se contente pas d’explorer la relation entre l’expérience du rêve et la structure épisodique de la nouvelle ; elle s’efforce aussi de mettre en lumière la profondeur tant psychologique qu’artistique qui s’y déploie en ce qui concerne l’évocation du passage à l’âge adulte. Le lien entre la forme de la nouvelle et le rêve se montre ainsi particulièrement à même de révéler des façons alternatives, « non traduites », non explicites et potentiellement dérangeantes d’envisager la réalité.

AUTHORS

MICHAELA SCHRAGE-FRÜH Michaela Schrage-Früh is a lecturer in English at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz (Germany). Since 2012 she has been on leave to teach German literature and culture at the University of Limerick (Ireland). She is the author of Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation and Gender in the Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian (WVT, 2004) and co-editor of Medbh McGuckian, The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems (Salem-Winston: Wake Forest UP,

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2015). She has published numerous articles on contemporary literature in peer-reviewed journals and essay collections.

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Katherine Mansfield and the Trauma of War: Death, Memory and Forgetting in “An Indiscreet Journey,” “The Garden Party,” “At the Bay,” “Six Years After” and “The Fly”

Stephen Edwards

1 In a November 1919 letter, Katherine Mansfield expressed disappointment at Virginia Woolf’s recently published Night and Day and asserted the need for a new type of writing after the Great War: The novel can’t just leave the war out […] I feel in the profoundest sense that nothing can ever be the same—that as artists we are traitors if we feel otherwise: we have to take it into account and find new expressions, new models for new thoughts and feelings. (Katherine Mansfield’s Letters 380)

2 However, the common critical view concerning the presence of war in Mansfield’s fiction is to argue for its absence. For example, Delia da Sousa Correa firmly sees its effect in terms of aesthetics and insight rather than content: “Mansfield saw the war as something that must transform writers’ responses to the world, making them see the common things of life with a new intensity and illumination” but the war itself “had to be communicated indirectly” (98). Consequently, while issues such as gender and class in her work have been relatively well explored, the war has not, being deemed prominent in only a few of her stories. In contrast, Angela Smith, in tantalising passing comments, suggests that Mansfield “entered the forbidden zone of the war both physically and intellectually, and this is reflected in the experimentation of some of her fiction,” so that in the seemingly idyllic “Prelude,” for example, “from within the harmony of the setting, she implies the unspeakable, the tragedy of the lost” (The Second Battlefield 162, 163). It is the contention of this paper that such insights can be

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profitably pursued further. Indeed, “the tragedy of the lost” can be seen to permeate Mansfield’s fiction to a greater extent than is normally supposed in images of death and violence inspired by war, however indirectly war itself is treated. In addition, it will be argued that putting the stories in the context of early twentieth-century theories of neurosis, with the additional helpful focus that modern trauma theory brings, enables a fuller understanding of their artistry and essential ambiguity.

3 The link between First World War writing and neurosis has been latterly much explored. Margaret Higonnet, for example, sheds light on diarists’ responses to war, in particular “the traumatic stress suffered by members of a specific non-combatant group—nurses and orderlies—who recorded repeated confrontation with men’s mutilated bodies” (92). Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate also observe that much modernist writing raises questions about the war neuroses suffered by civilians, about “who suffers and who bears witness to suffering during the Great War” (Women’s Fiction and the Great War 15). Of course, it must be stated at the outset that the intellectual history of what has later been established as trauma theory has always been a contentious and controversial area. Ruth Leys, for example, has characterised the history of psychiatry as oscillating between entirely opposite tendencies. She argues that the attempted healing of the damaged psyche, and of the disordered memory that has been termed post-traumatic stress disorder, has veered between the mimetic and anti-mimetic, between confronting repressed memories and forgetting them (2-17). With this in mind, it must be acknowledged at the outset that there is no evidence to suggest that Mansfield the artist was consciously responding to conflicting psychiatric ideas of her day nor that she was aiming for her own kind of scientific coherence. Indeed, her fiction’s obsessional return to questions of death, grief and memory shows related themes being examined from very different perspectives and in very different registers. Consequently, it must be stressed that it is the illuminating context of the contemporary neurosis theories of, for example, W.H.R. Rivers and Pierre Janet, that is suggestive and one should not look for simplistic direct parallels in Mansfield’s fiction. However, despite this, their overlapping and sometimes opposed thinking about the psychological effect of war does shed new light on how her artistry operates and on how far her fiction is concerned with recovery and healing. This paper, then, will use divergent theories from her own time to question how far Mansfield’s diverse fiction both does and does not react to traumatic memories with a desire to heal the self. In the process, it aims to shed light on Mansfield’s manifold narrative techniques and their consequent quandaries of interpretation. It is, of course, conscious that any retrospectively applied critical framework must be used cautiously and that the nature of war narrative must not be over-schematised or over-simplified. On the one hand, Jane Robinett, for example, helpfully argues that the form of war narratives such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War “reveals a close correlation between the experiences of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and narrative structure itself” (29). Yet, the sometimes fragmentary structure of Mansfield’s fiction refuses to be squeezed into any one critical approach. Her divergence from theoretical models is as important and as illuminating as its similarities, as will be seen in what follows. Trauma theory must be used to illuminate, but not to dictate or limit, interpretation.

4 Any reference to trauma theory, however, seems at first sight irrelevant to the tone of Katherine Mansfield’s “An Indiscreet Journey” (1915). Based on her brief affair with Francis Carco within the French war zone forbidden to civilians, it represents an

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intriguing contrast with the pre-war “The Woman at the Store,” which employs transgressive images of a brutalised woman shooting and burying her husband. Patrick Morrow argues that the extent to which the war gave rise to modernist styles of writing has been exaggerated and that in Mansfield’s case we see a “continuation and affirmation of an already established ‘Modernism’” (23). However, we can identify an increasing nuanced complexity and technique in the later work that was not evident earlier. In “An Indiscreet Journey,” the uncompromising brutality and hopelessness of a wasted life in “The Woman at the Store” appears to be replaced by the apparently hedonistic assertion of female sexual freedom and identity, against the backdrop of a male war. Indeed, some readings take the narrator’s gaiety in the face of war at face value, as, for example, in her comic view of soldiers: Down the side of the hill filed the troops, winking red and blue in the light. Far away, but plainly to be seen, some more flew by on bicycles. But really, ma France adorée, this uniform is ridiculous. Your soldiers are stamped upon your bosom like bright irreverent transfers. (Collected Stories 620)1

5 Accordingly, Angela Smith interprets the story in feminist, sociological terms as allowing “women the same needs and desires as men, particularly in a wartime situation […] she is in control of her own destiny and in no way a victim. The overall texture of the narrator reinforces the vagueness of her relationship with the little corporal” (The Second Battlefield 166). For Smith, this control enables the female narrator to become “the mediator through whom the unconnected experiences of a group of individuals are disseminated. It is the war that has given her the space to do this effectively” (169). Her later critical reading is, however, not quite so sure about the positive nature of the wartime experience and she observes of the opening train journey into the forbidden zone, “the narrator’s excitement seems increasingly inappropriate” (“Katherine Mansfield at The Front” 68). Indeed, one should not ignore the story’s inconclusive and downbeat end as the angry Madame in the Café des Amis ushers the after hours drinkers into a “dark smelling scullery, full of pans of greasy water, of salad leaves and meat-bones” and shouts at them: “You are all mad and you will end in prison, —all four of you” (633). Moreover, earlier images such as “beautiful cemeteries” that “flash gay in the sun” where “cornflowers and poppies and daisies” turn out to be “not flowers at all” seem more equivocal the more one looks at them. Since “they are bunches of ribbons tied on to the soldiers’ graves,” the text appears to be aligning frivolity with inhuman lack of concern (619). Con Coroneos argues, however, that the war imagery is so complex and transgressive that it “puts up a very productive resistance” to simplistic models of “teaching superficiality a lesson,” such that it embodies the self-conscious stylishness or “intoxication” that is the “condition and goal of the writing” (205, 209). Yet, the example of aestheticism she gives— “policeman are as thick as violets everywhere” (624)—is not conducive to her argument. Surely this image combines ominous and meaningful associations with hints of surrealism and cliché, if one remembers that violets are a funeral flower. The unexpected strangeness of the imagery, as the little corporal seeks to conceal his guest when “fools of doors” refuse to remain closed, brings us up short. It is the combined associations of frivolity, transgression, stupidity and death that refuse to be integrated into easily satisfying language of assertiveness or beauty. Satirical seriousness can be detected beneath the troubling wordplay.

6 Therefore, the complexity of the text opens up if we consider the narrator’s distance and unfeelingness towards what is described. A notable lack of comment accompanies

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images of violence undercutting the surface lightness, such as that of the wounded, probably gassed, man. “He shrugged and walked unsteadily to a table, sat down and leant against the wall. Slowly his hand fell. In his white face his eyes showed, pink as a rabbit’s. They brimmed and spilled, brimmed and spilled” (628). The emotionless repetition and telling detail here challenges us as to how to respond. Although it would be going too far to suggest that the narrator exhibits precisely the numbness of traumatic recollection, any comparison of the story with the frivolity of Mansfield’s journal entries suggests that dissociated memories are under scrutiny. It is therefore relevant to note that a contemporary psychiatrist such as W.H.R. Rivers saw shell shock as a disorder of memory, although, unlike Freud, he attributed this to the disruption of evolutionary self-preservation instincts plus guilt about survival. He argued in The Lancet in 1918 that medical symptoms were “due to repression of painful memories and thoughts, or of unpleasant affective states arising out of reflection concerning this experience” (quoted by Robertson and Walter 87). The repetition of “brimmed and spilled,” therefore, can perhaps be seen in relation to the dreams Rivers saw as having “the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident” (Talbott 447). Allan Young has described how Rivers’ observed symptoms of paralysis, “mutism,” loss of sensation and numbness, and these are a useful context in which to consider a story where a cold depiction of the pity of war undercuts itself and displays ambivalence toward its own cleverness (Young 364). They are of particular relevance to a text which exhibits the time displacement of a daytime nightmare, when both death and apocalypse are prefigured: I heard the ghostly chatter of the dishes. And years passed. Perhaps the war is long since over—there is no village outside at all—the streets are quiet under the grass. I have an idea this is the sort of thing one will do on the very last day of all—sit in an empty café and listen to a clock ticking until— Madame came through the kitchen door… (627)

7 If this is not exactly the type of traumatic war experience that Robinett had in mind as producing “narrative structures that are fractured and erratic, structures which will not sustain integrated notions of self, society culture or world,” then it is surely not far from it, being that of a civilian directly exposed to the effect of the war on those around her (297). Certainly the text does embody the fragmentation and ambiguous anxieties of memory in which pain is ignored, if not repressed. Ambivalence toward the self- assertion being advanced behind the lines in an antipathetic environment of male violence cannot be concealed.

8 Issues of pain and aestheticism also arise when considering “The Garden Party.” The turning point of the story occurs when the youthful, middle-class Laura, after continuing with her party on the insistence of her mother, views in a house nearby the corpse of a local carter who has died earlier that day. Rather than following the typology of the mutilated casualty of war, his body seems to her to be “simply marvellous” in its stillness: There lay a young man, fast asleep—sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again […] He was given up to his dream. What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. (261)

9 Critics such as Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr see this as evidence of immaturity since Laura demonstrates a “romanticising of the corpse.” In their reading, “she views the

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body as if she were in a fairy tale” (122). Similarly, Andrew Bennett observes a structure exhibiting “a certain bathos, by the building up of expectation […] that is then undermined by the disappointment of resolution,” when Laura is finally unable to articulate her insight into life and death (80). However, it is also possible to consider this moment as, partly, quite the opposite—one of sincerity, enshrining an inexpressible epiphany. Moreover, fuller appreciation of the poignancy of Laura’s vision is gained by comparing it to Mansfield’s own grief at the loss of her brother Leslie, blown up at the Front in a grenade training accident in October 1915. “You’re in my flesh as well as in my soul [….] Dearest heart, I know you are there, and I live with you and I will write for you” was her immediate response in her journal (86). Christine Darrohn argues convincingly that the story’s language—“There lay a young man, fast asleep”—which mirrors that of a dream of her brother recorded in the journal —“Wherever I looked, there he lay […] I saw my brother lying fast asleep” (95)— suggests that the story springs from her own painful sense of loss (515). Yet, if the story might to an extent be a private memorialisation of her brother, finding comfort and significance in the fictional recreation of his dead body, one must ask what significance this has to potential interpretations of the public, published story. Mary Burgan’s psychoanalytical view of Mansfield’s response to her brother’s death as “hysterical in its intensity but which enabled her to re-work the past” leading to “an eventual understanding of her destabilising anxieties” seems at once both too literal and biographical (90). Certainly, the calm, peaceful image of the dead body, since we see it through Laura’s eyes in the free indirect discourse of the text, is in some sense comforting: “Oh so remote, so peaceful [….] All is well said that sleeping face” (261). This moves us beyond autobiography, therefore, because it is not unlikely that it would have been read in consoling fashion at the time of writing (1922) by those who had lost loved ones in the war. Indeed, personal experience has been universalised and it is unhelpfully constrictive to read the story solely through the lens of the author’s imagined psychopathology. The calmness and repose of the corpse seems to make death meaningful for us too. It appears almost voluntarily chosen, a state that grieving relatives then and now could accept as one of wholeness and perfection.

10 Yet one must also return to Andrew Bennett’s objection and account for the subsequent ambivalence when Laura attempts to confide in her brother: “It was simply marvellous. But Laurie—” She stopped, she looked at her brother. “Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life—” But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood. “Isn’t it, darling?” said Laurie. (261)

11 Since we still see through Laura’s consciousness, there is no way of knowing whether Laurie really understood or not, or whether Laura’s failure to encapsulate her epiphany in words indicates ineffability or incoherence. As Stephen Severn notes, we have also returned to middle-class linguistic structures where “language as primary means for establishing control” is evident in the flourish of rhetorical questions (3). So, “isn’t it” parallels the earlier “Don’t you agree, Laura?” and “Don’t you think?” (250). It should not be forgotten that the body that Laura idealises is that of a working-class man and that Laura’s empathy with the workmen helping prepare the party has earlier been satirised. It is not surprising, therefore, when William Atkinson concludes that we are “thrust back into a fallen world characterised by hierarchy” with the text trying “to imagine a moment when class and gender division no longer matter but fails to do so” (54). Yet the intensity of Laura’s vision stays with us. As Jane Robinett observes, the

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vivid physical sensations and intense highly detailed depiction involved in traumatic war memories persist even in images of beauty and peace (303). Comfort is, therefore, available and unavailable at the same time. Certainly, it is not accessible to the grieving woman in the kitchen whose “face, puffed up, red, with swollen eyes and swollen lips, looked terrible” and whose puzzled response to the proffered basket of party leftovers is not articulated (260). Nor is it deemed worth considering by Laura’s sister who declares “You won’t bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental” (254). Yet, transcendence is possible for Laura and, partly, for the reader, too. The bittersweet intensity of her vision is both overpowering as well as momentary, flawed as well as perfect. Therefore, many of the conflicting interpretations of the story can be held in balance as partial understandings of the text’s full, equivocal potentiality. If we see it as a concealed post-war story where mourning encompasses a deep sense of ambivalence about the recreated past, and about the healing powers of narrative itself, then its strengths and complexity come more fully into focus.

12 Contradictory processes can also be seen at work in the recreation of Katherine’s, and her brother Leslie’s, New Zealand childhood in “Prelude” and “At the Bay.” Before work was started on “The Aloe,” which she later re-worked into “Prelude,” Mansfield’s journal records “I hear his voice in the trees and flowers […] I feel I have a duty to perform to the lovely time when we were both alive. I want to write about it and he wanted me to” (89-90). Here, however, the pitfalls of biographically based interpretative approaches must be once again acknowledged. Authorial intention may not always be helpful in understanding the complexity of the resulting work and recreation of personal experience can subtly change its import in its final written form. In “At The Bay,” for example, any consolation provided by nostalgic memories is qualified by child-like but disturbing visions of death. When Kezia urges her grandmother to promise never to die, she pictures her dead uncle William, in a curious simile with hints of bathos and the apocalyptic, as “a little man fallen over like a tin soldier by the side of a big black hole” (226). The childish view of death is then followed by the poignant stoicism and muted regret of the adult: “Does it make you sad to think about him, grandma?” She hated her grandma to be sad. It was the old woman’s turn to consider. Did it make her sad? To look back, back. To stare down the years, as Kezia had seen her doing. To look after them as a woman does, long after they were out of sight. Did it make her sad? No, life was like that. (226)

13 The writer’s and the woman’s role to “stare down the years” unflinchingly is set out, one where memories must be re-visited, re-created and examined from all angles and where acceptance is sought but never easily achieved. If this verges on a tone of commonplace tragedy and stoicism, then Kezia’s preceding simile suggests the blackly comic and unresolvable. This tone is a significant one, woven into the story’s contrasting sections. Earlier, the sexually transgressive Mrs Kember is comically imagined as having been murdered by her philandering husband: “even while they talked to Mrs Kember and took in the awful concoction she was wearing, they saw her, stretched as she lay on the beach; but cold, bloody and still, with a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth” (219). Fear of death and of the sexually transgressive combines with social satire and attempted insouciance in an image whose subtlety is impossible to encapsulate. Equivocation therefore predominates as premonitions of betrayal and later, very real deaths are prefigured within the story. Intriguingly,

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imagery of light and shade is made even more explicit at the end of the story when the philandering Harry Kember and his wife reappear at night in the garden, or, perhaps in Beryl’s frustrated imagination, as memories of the day’s conversations whirl through her head. The enticement to sexual dalliance becomes dangerous as desire now almost brings a metaphorical death sentence: “now she was here she was terrified and it seemed to her everything was different. The moonlight stared and glittered; the shadows were like bars of iron. Her hand was taken” (244).

14 Even more significantly, memory is at the heart of the story’s episodic, twelve-section structure and birth to death imagery is at the centre of its unifying focus. So, its multiple mediating centres of consciousness, perhaps mirroring the recreation of a dysfunctional family unit, can be seen as partly reflecting the fragmented narrative of disturbing memories. This fragmentation, however, sits alongside contrasting structures of metaphor, which create redolent, and aesthetically satisfying, unifying patterns. “At The Bay” moves from dawn to dusk, from the birth or creation of the land from the sea, dripping and covered in sea-mist, to a setting sun associated by Linda with the Day of Judgement and ending in an eerie death-like calm: A cloud, small, serene floated across the moon. In that moment of darkness the sea sounded deep, troubled. Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dark dream. All was still. (245)

15 It is almost as if the text is staging its own epiphany here, in the conclusion’s evocation of dreamlike intensity. The same is true of the opening where immense rippling waves hint at Maori creation myth: Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. […] Drenched were the cold fuschias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling— how far? (205)

16 Certainly, as in “The Garden Party,” the moments of insight are unstable and unsatisfactory as well as transcendent. Pamela Dunbar points out how Linda’s transfixed attraction to her newly born son’s smile, is typical of Mansfield’s modernism, “intuitional, ecstatic but also tentative and temporary” (164): “That was not what she felt; it was something far different, it was something new, so… The tears danced in her eyes; she breathed in a small whisper to the boy, ‘Hallo, my funny!’” (223). It is noteworthy that the baby in question is a fictionally revived Leslie, but one who does not adhere to any nostalgic script. At the very moment Linda’s previous indifference is transformed into empathy, “by now the boy had forgotten his mother. He was serious again. Something pink, something soft waved in front of him” (224). As he grabs for his toes, he rolls right over in a parody of the “serious.” It is, however, also noteworthy that the “forgotten” parent is seated beneath the flowering manuka tree, about which Linda meditates—“Why then flower at all? Who takes the trouble—or the joy—to make all these things that are wasted, wasted” (221). The context is therefore one of mutability and death and a frozen memory looks forward to a time when the grown-up child might also be “forgotten.” The interpenetration of past and present implied in this scene repeats the birth to death progression of the opening and closing epiphanies, which in turn mirrors the story’s life cycle structure with its twenty-four hour span. Intriguingly, such an interpenetration of past and present has been considered as a symptom of the traumatic memory. For example, in the 1890s, the psychologist Pierre Janet talked of the importance of self-narration combating neurosis

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by enabling the past to be narrated as past (Leys 111). That “At the Bay” is simultaneously willing and unwilling to do this gives it its poignant, emotional power and its ambiguity. Trauma theory models both apply and are redundant when considering a structure where fragmented memories co-exist with the ordered framework of ambivalent aesthetic patterns. A childhood world is recreated where the past lives on in an eternal Eden-like present, but one that does not feel able to escape the shadows of death.

17 The perpetual re-experiencing of the past in a painful, disassociated traumatic present is nowhere more evident than in “Six Years After,” an unfinished story started six years after Leslie’s death. Jay Winter’s characterisation of post-war literature of the time as keeping “the voices of the fallen alive, by speaking for them, to them and about them” is apposite here, albeit that resurrection is now the stuff of nightmare (204). The mother gazes out to sea: And it seemed to her there was a presence far out there, between the sky and the water; someone very desolate and longing watched them pass and cried as if to stop them—but cried to her alone. “Mother!” “Don’t leave me,” sounded in the cry. “Don’t forget me! You are forgetting me, you know you are!” And it was as though from her own breast came the sound of childish weeping. (458-459)

18 The vision therefore appears to come from within as well as without, and the intensity of the dream-like, or nightmare-like, recollection is shattering: “I called and called to you—and you wouldn’t come—so I had to lie there for ever” (459). The self-questioning torment of the response to this imagined voice is clear. The heavily hyphenated syntax stalls the narrative movement and emphasizes the mother’s agitation: “Far more often —at all times—in all places—like now, for instance—she never settled down” (459). The mother’s earlier addressing of her husband as ‘Daddy’ reinforces her identification with her son killed in the war and leads to another hallucinatory time-shift and unfulfilled yearning for renewal and new birth: When the war was over, did he come home for good? Surely, he will marry—later on —not for several years. Surely, one day I shall remember his wedding and my first grandchild—a beautiful dark-haired boy born in the early morning—a lovely morning—spring” . (460)

19 At the time of writing, C.S. Myers and William McDougall were using cognitive talking cures, alongside hypnosis, to help patients re-synthesize fragmented memories and create a more coherent narrative of their past lives. As part of this, they stressed the importance of gaining distance from troubling memories (Leys 100). It is as if the story itself is attempting to do this, its very title asserting the passage of time, while at the same time its principal character is unable to cooperate. The sense of over-powering grief at a loss that can never be alleviated is unmistakeable in the story’s raw emotion. Moreover, the accusation of forgetting is surely guiltily self-castigating. It seems as if the mother’s inner being is crying to herself, unable to experience the past as history and yet unable, and perhaps unwilling, to reach into the future. The story, as well as reflecting innumerable personal experiences of loss among its first readers, and that of its author, arguably also connects with post-war society’s indirect, complicated mourning processes. These, Jay Winter has characterised as simultaneously remembering and forgetting, in an attempt to make sense of what had happened (2). Janet Wilson comments that the mother’s pain reflects “the widespread suffering at needless deaths in the years after the Great War” and that, since “the ghost-like child

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appropriates and ventriloquizes the mother’s voice,” we see the needs of the dead continuing “to intrude upon and interrupt the lives of the living” (38). Although this is true, the intervention of the third person narrator makes it even more complicated than that: “This is anguish! How is it to be borne? Still it is not the idea of her suffering which is unbearable—it is his. Can one do nothing for the dead?” (459). This implies that the mother’s suffering may in some sense be deserved and that her self-torture is necessary as well as unendurable. Importantly, the narrator’s intervention not only universalises personal trauma. Clearly, a coherent narrative of the past and integrated untroubled memory is not only unachievable but, perhaps, ethically undesirable.

20 Variations on the theme of memories of the dead continuing to trouble the living are explored in a variety of tones and emphases, sometimes comic, often satirical, in other stories. In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” for example, the cowed daughters of an overbearing patriarchal figure are convinced that their father’s spirit lives on, locked in the dresser drawer with his handkerchiefs, or in the wardrobe with his overcoats. Even when he is buried, his baleful influence lives on in darkly comic fashion: Josephine had had a moment of absolute terror at the cemetery, while the coffin was lowered, to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. (268)

21 One must also note the inclusion of an unannounced segue into flashback in sections viii and ix, when, as Cyril comes for tea to make desperate, polite conversation with his grandfather, it is indeed as if the apoplectic Colonel Pinner is brought back to life. Death even hovers in the background of the light social satire of upper middle class snobbery in “Two Tuppenny Ones, Please.” Here, a “Lady” travels with her friend by bus since “both the cars on war work” require it (639-640). Amid the disconnected, trivial monologues—and arguments with the bus conductor over paying an extra penny for the fare—the “Lady” tells us of an acquaintance in the War Office: Lady. […] She’s something to do with notifying the deaths or finding the missing. I don’t know exactly what it is. At any rate, she says it is too depressing for words, and she has to read the most heart-rending letters from parents, and so on. (641)

22 Since this news is sandwiched between the inconsequential comments that “I believe she got a rise the other day” and “happily, they’re a very cheery group in her room,” the effect is mainly to satirize the unfeeling shallowness of the speaker. It is the failure of the living to be made uncomfortable by the omnipresence of death, and the moral demands of doing right by the dead, that is the problem here. In “The Stranger,” on the other hand, the opposite is the case as we move away from cynical comedy to the melodramatic. In this story, which on one level satirizes a husband’s selfishness and possessiveness towards his wife, we can also discern deeper associations surrounding the persistent, dreadful thought of the unknown man who died in his wife’s arms of a heart attack. It is as if this ghostly presence in the husband’s mind melodramatically symbolises the impossibility of full union with his soulmate and represents the unbridgeable gulf between them: No; he mustn’t think of it. Madness lay in thinking of it. No, he wouldn’t face it. He couldn’t stand it. It was too much to bear! […] “You’re not—sorry I told you, John darling? It hasn’t made you sad? It hasn’t spoilt our evening—our being alone together? But at that he had to hide his face. […] Spoilt their evening! Spoilt their being alone together! They would never be alone together again. (363-364)

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23 This self-aggrandisement and failure to achieve honesty or equilibrium in a relationship is far from war trauma but it does uncannily manifest some of the same pathological symptoms.

24 If interpretative challenges here raise the question of how the symbolism in Mansfield’s work should be approached, nowhere are the hermeneutic quandaries that such symbolism can generate more obvious, and fundamental to appreciating the subtle artistry of the fiction, than in “The Fly.” The central image of the boss drowning a fly in his inkwell and thereby forgetting his original intention to grieve over his lost son, killed during the war, is a troubling and puzzling one. In 1962, the pages of Essays in Criticism were full of conflicting interpretations about whether the torturing of the fly carries anti-war meaning or not. Critics as perceptive as Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr fail to see any subtlety in the image. They claim that the equation of the boss toying with the fly with God playing with human beings is chilling, but too rigid, containing a “simplicity that verges on the crude” (129). Yet, this rather underestimates the ambiguity of the depiction. The fly seems at one point to represent the pathos of soldiers stunned and struggling out of the trenches: The little beggar seemed absolutely cowed, stunned and afraid to move because of what would happen next. But then, as if painfully, it dragged itself forward. The front legs waved, caught hold, and, more slowly this time, the task began from the beginning. (417)

25 The insect seems to have become for the boss a highly questionable anthropomorphic substitute for those who have died, as clichéd military epithets abound: “He’s a plucky little devil, thought the boss, and he felt a real admiration for the fly’s courage. That was the way to tackle things; that was the right spirit. Never say die” (417). At other points, it is the fly’s otherness that is stressed, with a tactile concentration on its waving legs and stretching wings. This leads to the distasteful conclusion of it being flung into the wastepaper basket and then being forgotten, just as, after this prolonged scene of torture, his dead son has been. Kathleen Wheeler helpfully conceives of Mansfield’s elusive symbolism, with its multiple connotations, as demonstrating the “use of imagery as a unifying and structuring principle” (129). In this sense, contradictory associations of shame, anger, compassion, numbness, cruelty, loss, endurance and pain all circle round the fly. Trapped as we are by the free indirect discourse within the boss’s consciousness, there are few hints as how to interpret passages such as: But the fly had again finished its laborious task, and the boss had just time to refill his pen, to shake fair and square on the new-cleaned body yet another dark drop. What about it this time? A painful moment of suspense followed. But behold, the front legs were again waving; the boss felt a rush of relief. He leaned over the fly and said to it tenderly, “You artful little b…”. (417)

26 We can discern authorial irony behind the cliché “fair and square,” but what are we to make of the boss’s “rush of relief”? The use of cliché here seems also to reinforce the inability of language to communicate the dark essence of inner experience.

27 Yet the fierce clarity of the story’s gaze cannot be avoided. The cruelty exposed can be compared to a 1919 journal entry in which Mansfield considers lice and bedbugs and how the ugly and parasitic exist alongside aesthetic beauty: ‘how perfect the world is with its worms and hooks and ova […] the shape of a lily, and there is all this other as well. The balance how perfect!” (168). Coroneos considers this balance of beauty and ugliness, of parasitism and independence, and of sickness and health, as illuminating

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the symbolism of the fly: “her war story is a form of self-inoculation; it understands the boss’s action as a saving brutalism, a health because of disease” (216). This is arguably only part of the picture it paints, however. If one sees the symbolism, in part, through the lens of survivor guilt and the way emotional memories work, then its essential ambiguity becomes evident. William James, for example was exploring at the end of the nineteenth century the concept of the “revivability” of memory and the way humans “produce, not remembrances of the old grief or rapture but new griefs and raptures” (Leys 95). Certainly we can perceive a grief transference process operating as the boss tortures the fly. Pierre Janet also talked of “techniques of liquidation” deployed during self-narration with the proviso “one must know how to forget” (Leys 111). Mansfield’s story seems however both to understand the boss’s need to forget and feel deeply ambivalent about it. His cruelty and the linking of the fly with soldiers in the trenches suggest that the boss, to some degree, bears responsibility for his son’s death. On the other hand, the sterility of the photo of the ironically described “grave-looking boy” in “one of those spectral photographers’ parks,” in turn mirrors the cold sterility of the “nice broad paths” of the cemetery in which he is buried (413-414). This stillness and frozenness of the public memorial, and of the human record that once was his living, breathing and suffering son, suggests an understanding for the boss’s inability to grieve properly. Therefore, it is perhaps appropriate here to consider the story’s complexity in relation to Cathy Caruth’s analysis of the way literature relates to trauma, in its grappling with “the complex relation of knowing and not knowing” and using “language that defies, even as it claims our understanding” (3, 5). Mansfield’s symbolic language here evocatively stages language’s inability to express the inexpressible.

28 Therefore, no simple summary or theoretical approach can do justice to Katherine Mansfield’s stories. This paper has argued that the impact of war on Mansfield’s work has not so far been sufficiently acknowledged, but that placing it in the context of contemporary concerns about wartime and post-war neurosis, disordered memory, and the inability to forget, can help to open up its richness and complexity. Trauma theory can indeed help to elucidate the intricate aesthetic mix of realism, surrealism and symbolism in her stories. However, it is important to note that Mansfield’s fiction has a narrative drive of its own and one that refuses to come to terms with the concepts and emotional problems that it is grappling with, ultimately circumventing any healing process. As such it is, partly, the work of a covert war writer, or at least, one for whom traumatic war experience led to the unresolved omnipresence of death and loss in her art. This art transcends its autobiographical origins and equivocal private memories to create public works of spiritual but ambivalent power. As this paper has tried to show, it is the case that never is the war more present in her work than when it seems to be absent. Allyson’s Booth’s overall summary of the relation of modernism to the First World War could not be more apposite to Mansfield in particular and her preoccupation with grief and memory: Even at moments when the spaces of war seem most remote, the perceptual habits appropriate to war emerge plainly […] the buildings of modernism may delineate spaces within which one is forced to confront both war’s casualties and one’s distance from those casualties (4).

29 If Mansfield’s narrative structures and techniques do partly reflect the form of trauma, as Robinett suggests war stories do, then their modernist, self-questioning complexity also reflect the tensions caused by their distance from the very experiences they have so numinously re-created. They open up private, but also commonly and deeply felt

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experiences, for examination in a public setting where memorialisation and emotional acceptance both are and are not possible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atkinson, William. “Mrs Sheridan’s Masterstroke: Liminality in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party.’” English Studies, 87 (2006): 53-61. Print.

Bennett, Andrew. Katherine Mansfield. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004. Print.

Booth, Allyson. Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Print.

Burgan, Mary. Illness, Gender and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994. Print.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Print.

Coroneos, Con. “Flies and Violets in Katherine Mansfield.” Women’s Fiction and the Great War. Ed. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 197-218. Print.

Darrohn, Christine. “‘Blown to Bits!’: Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and the Great War.” Modern Fiction Studies 44 (1998): 513-539. Print.

Dunbar, Pamela. Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Print.

Hanson, Clare and Gurr, Andrew. Katherine Mansfield. London: Macmillan, 1981. Print.

Higonnet, Margaret R. “Authenticity and Art in Traumatic Narratives of World War 1.” Modernism/Modernity 9 (2002): 91-307. Print.

Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. Print.

Mansfield, Katherine, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Print.

---. Journal of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. J. Middleton Murry. London: Constable, 1954. Print.

---. Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry 1913-1922. Ed. John Middleton Murry. London: Constable, 1951. Print.

Morrow, Patrick. “Katherine Mansfield, the Great War, and Modernism.” Focus on Robert Graves and his Contemporaries 1 (Winter 1989-1990): 23-25. Print.

Raitt, Suzanne and Trudi Tate, Eds. Women’s Fiction and the Great War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Print.

Robertson, Michael and Walter, Garry. “W.H.R. Rivers and the Politics of Trauma.” Acta Neuropsychiatra 22 (2010): 87-89. Print.

Robinett, Jane. “The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience.” Literature and Medicine 26 (2007): 290-311. Print.

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Severn, Stephen E. “Linguistic Structure and Rhetorical Resolution in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’.” Journal of the Short Story in English 52 (Spring 2009): 1-9. Print.

Smith, Angela K. “Katherine Mansfield at the Front”. First World War Studies 2 (March 2011): 65-73. Print.

---. The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print.

Sousa Correa, Delia Da. “The Stories of Katherine Mansfield.” Aestheticism and Modernism: Debating Twentieth Century Literature 1900-1960. Ed. Richard Danson and Suman Gupta. London: Routledge, 2005. 68-116. Print.

Talbott, John E. “Soldiers, Psychiatrists and Combat Trauma.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27 (Winter 1997): 437-54. Print.

Wheeler, Kathleen. ‘Modernist’ Women Writers and Narrative Art. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Print.

Wilson, Janet. “Mansfield as (Post)colonial-Modernist: Rewriting the Contract with Death.” Katherine Mansfield and the Post(colonial). Ed. Gerri Kimber, Delia Da Sousa Correa and Janet Wilson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. 29-44. Print.

Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.

Young, Allan. “W.H.R. Rivers and the War Neuroses.” Journal of the History of Behavioural Sciences 35 (1999): 359-78. Print.

NOTES

1. All subsequent references to the short stories are to this edition.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article a pour but de démontrer combien la critique a sous-évalué l’empreinte laissée par le traumatisme de la Grande Guerre dans la fiction de Katherine Mansfield. La relecture qui y est proposée – à la lumière des théories actuelles sur l’écriture du trauma – fait apparaître la fréquence des images renvoyant à la violence, à la mort et la perte. L’examen de “An Indiscreet Journey”, “The Garden Party”, “At The Bay”, “ Six Years After” et “The Fly” révèle que, dans l’exploration de la mémoire à laquelle elle se livre, la fiction de Mansfield tente simultanément de guérir et de ne pas guérir la psyché. Alors que le texte de “An Indiscreet Journey” semble réprimer les réactions émotionnelles en situation de guerre, dans “The Garden Party”, le personnage de Laura perçoit la beauté du corps sans vie du charretier Scott, la dimension universelle de sa perception faisant écho au deuil de Mansfield dont le frère est mort au front. L’article souligne la finesse des techniques narratives modernistes de Mansfield qui sont à l’œuvre dans l’épiphanie ambivalente de “At the Bay”, et aussi dans la complexité de la symbolique de la violence dans “The Fly”. La maîtrise artistique que l’auteur déploie lui permet

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souvent, c’est le cas dans “Six Years After”, de maintenir à tout prix la douloureuse tension émotionnelle qu’elle recrée sans que ce choix de la complexité entame sa remarquable force.

AUTHORS

STEPHEN EDWARDS Stephen Edwards is a postgraduate student at Southampton University, UK, currently researching the work of Mrs Humphrey Ward. In particular he is exploring how contemporary responses revealed a nuanced complexity, which has since been under-valued, but which can help recover its relevance/interest for a modern audience. He is particularly interested in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature and how realist texts in part prefigured those of modernism.

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When Fear is Feared: Repression, Anxiety, Trauma and War Neurosis in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Fiction

Kate Imwalle

1 WWII was a time in which fear was the dominant emotion of the civilian experience in London. Elizabeth Bowen is arguably one of the best at realistically portraying the various ways in which London civilians struggled with the terror that war and the London Blitz induced. However, due to the communal efforts to maintain high morale in Britain, outward demonstrations of fear were looked down upon during the time and considered shameful. Thus, civilians suppressed natural desires to physically show their fear, and “fear was to be feared” (Bell 156). Historian Amy Bell highlights this situation, stating that “Fear is an emotion that is easily understood intuitively but that is difficult to define historically. […T]he first difficulty in examining wartime fears lies in the nature of the available sources” (154). Therefore, Bell argues that we must look at wartime fiction in order to evaluate the effects on the psyche from wartime fear, since such information is frequently left out of historical documents (165).

2 The work of Elizabeth Bowen is crucial when examining the fiction that came out of the Second World War era. More specifically, her short stories from the war years most significantly evoke the uncanny and continual haunting fear that loomed in the subconscious of her characters. Although aspects of Bowen’s fiction have been aptly characterized as gothic and have been meaningfully explored as such by scholars including Jessica Gildersleeve, Diana Wallace, Janice Rossen, and many others, Bowen’s wartime fiction has yet to be examined through the lenses of realism and trauma theory. I argue that much of Bowen’s short fiction, especially “The Demon Lover,” “The Happy Autumn Fields,” and “Mysterious Kôr” are much more than examples of typical gothic literature, and are instead prime sources of study for war neurosis in a cultural discourse rather than a literary one. Although I find Gildersleeve’s characterization of hallucinations and dreams in the texts as realms of “protection and safety” useful, my study examines them more as case studies to acquire a better understanding of war neurosis at the time (88).

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3 Gothic literature became popular in the eighteenth century and made a revival years later with the coming of the World Wars (DiBiasio 85). Up until this point, Bowen’s short fiction has mostly circulated within gothic literature; Diana Wallace goes so far as to say that Bowen is one of the leading figures in the female ghost story (57). Janice Rossen sums up most scholars’ attitudes about Bowen’s short stories, stating that Bowen uses “gothic tradition to challenge [her] characters’ thoughts and beliefs about the powers of reason” (7). Becky DiBiasio views Bowen’s work as taking on an evident postmodern shift, yet still classifies them as unrealistic ghost stories. She argues that “[Bowen’s] fiction is representative of the shift from the traditional ghost story and the weird tale to postmodern horror and science fiction” (93). Although Bowen’s stories contain many of the technical features of gothic literature, the exquisitely realistic aspects of Bowen’s depiction of her characters’ trauma are not sufficiently accounted for by the description of “ghost story.” As Robert Calder states, “Given her other writing, Bowen is unlikely merely to have written a ghost story or a tale of murder” (93). In other words, classifying some of her works as a mere ghost story limits our consideration of their meaning and purpose. Bowen herself points this out to us, explaining that her stories “may be found interesting as documents, even if they are negligible as art. This discontinuous writing, nominally ‘inventive,’ is the only diary I have kept” (Ivy xiii). Thus, Bowen’s war stories invite scholars to move beyond literary consideration in order to fully explore the cultural and historical significance of her depictions of trauma and war neurosis.

4 Before an in-depth analysis of Bowen’s war stories can occur, one must have an understanding of the psychological discourse about war trauma prevalent at the time Bowen was writing her short stories of war. During a pivotal time period for psychology, W.H.R. Rivers was considered a founding father of the field in late- nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain and focused most of his work on soldiers of WWI (Hemmings 29). His text “The Repression of War Experience” (1918) states, “There are few, if any, aspects of life in which repression plays so prominent and so necessary a part as in the preparation of war” (2). Thus, Rivers’s definition of repression is essential in regards to war, defining it as “the process whereby a person endeavours to thrust out of his memory some part of his mental content, and it is also used for the state which ensues when, either through this process or by some other means, part of the mental content have become inaccessible to manifest consciousness” (1; emphasis in original). However, when anxiety and trauma are felt as a result of war during typical daily life, in addition to having repressed memories of war experience, the combination of symptoms is called war neurosis (Hemmings 34-35).1

5 In Modern Nostalgia, Robert Hemmings provides an excellent, in-depth explanation of the exact manner in which the most notable early twentieth-century psychology figures construct war neuroses. When it comes to trauma and war-related psychological issues, Hemmings contends that “the response occurs not immediately, but in a series of delayed and repetitive after-effects” (29). These “after-effects” may vary depending on the individual and the exact trauma that he or she has experienced. Rivers’s 1920 introduction to Instinct and the Unconscious also affirms that “the shell- explosion or other event which forms the immediate antecedent of the illness is only the spark which sets into activity a morbid process for which the mental stresses and strains of warfare have long prepared the ground. […T]he essential causes of the psycho-neuroses of warfare are mental, not physical” (2-3). A majority of Bowen’s

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characters live through both World Wars and experience episodes of mental breakdowns for long periods after the initial shock, similar to those described in Rivers’s work.

6 Following WWI, Rivers conducted a study on soldiers who were experiencing high levels of mental distress. He argues that “the most trying and distressing symptoms from which the subjects of war-neurosis suffer […] are due to the attempt to banish from the mind distressing memories of warfare or painful affective states” (“The Repression of War Experience” 3). Rivers’s study revealed that, in most cases, soldiers experienced distorted and terrifying versions of their frightening war experiences in their sleep when asked to forget about the war memories during the day. The soldiers felt immense feelings of anxiety and dread for each night to come, knowing that their suppressed memories would resurface in their dreams. Hemmings also touches on the notion of “dream despair,” when the repressed memories that are manifested through dreams add to the total collection of the war experiences for the individual, and, regardless of conscious or subconscious reality, both are equally traumatic for the subject. Thus, even during an individual’s post-war life, he or she is still living in war subconsciously (44). Rivers argues that the purpose of the dreams is an attempt of the unconscious to solve an underlying, traumatizing issue that has been occupying the conscious reality of the dreamer (Hemmings 45). In extreme cases (which were numerous), repressed experiences that dwell within the subconscious can also be brought into consciousness through hallucinations, which, according to Hemmings, was another common symptom of war neurosis (41).2

7 Hemmings also discusses Charles Myers’s study of the effects of shell shock on individuals. The final results led Myers to conclude that when an individual is subject to the physical effects of a bursting shell or any other type of explosive from war, he or she suffers either from symptoms of concussion or from a state of “mental shock” in which a loss of vision, smell, taste, and/or memory may be experienced. However, the root of the condition is the individual’s “mental strain” or “emotional disturbance” which any type of sudden shock or fear is capable of activating (Hemmings 32). Thus, a subject is susceptible to experience a loss of the senses for long periods following the occurrence of the initial “mental shock.”

8 Additionally, there were many civilians living during the Second World War who were also alive during the First. Therefore, there was a unique situation in which memories from years before were repeating themselves. Hemmings defines the experiences as follows: Conscious anxiety-provoking thoughts in the present about the possibility of a new war with Germany forged a connection with the unconscious memories of the war past. On a more passive level, the sounds of traffic invoked echoes of bursting shellfire. The memories and extreme anxiety of the past experience were thus drawn up into the conscious mind with confounding consequences. (38)

9 According to Hemmings, these “consequences” are, in a sense, the effects of the double repression and war neuroses of two wars instead of one. Furthermore, with the Blitz and V-raids that took place in Britain during WWII, and “the alarming prospect of widespread bombardment of civilian targets, there was also the expectation of extensive afflictions of war neuroses in civilians,” not just soldiers. With civilians among the possible victims of war neurosis, the overall issue of the illness intensified. Hemmings explains that “Psychological illness in a soldier could remove him from the battle zone, but for a civilian there was no escape when the battle zone was where he

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lived and worked” (38). One could therefore argue that in certain ways, civilians had a more intense feeling of being trapped within the constraints of the mental condition.

10 Bowen’s fiction can be read as a prime source of study for war neurosis because among the various symptoms and outcomes of the war neurosis, none are physical. Bowen’s short stories execute the mental manifestations in such a realistic and powerful manner that it is arguably only possible because she brings her own war experience into her fiction. In 1945 she served as an air raid warden, which exposed her to aspects of the war that most other civilians did not encounter. During a BBC interview, Bowen describes the atmosphere during air raid duty, explaining that “You stump up and down the streets making a clatter with the boots you are wearing, knowing you can’t prevent a bomb falling” (Hepburn 334). In addition to serving as an air raid warden, Bowen was affected by the air raids on multiple other levels. Her London home was bombed first in 1941, with repairable damages, and again in 1944 by a V-1 bomb that forced her family out for several months. Bowen notes the toll that the bombings had on her body in a letter to Noreen Colley: “I am getting quite nice and thin. Air raids are slightly constipating” (Glendinning 160). Bowen also lived through both World Wars which took a toll on her mental state. Heather Bryant Jordan explains that war “weighed on her consciousness increasingly heavily throughout her life” (13). When WWII began, her own repressed memories of the prior war (WWI) came back to her with “renewed urgency” (13). For example, Bowen’s husband Alan Cameron died after the end of WWII, but due to injuries he had sustained from WWI from which he never fully recovered (Bloom 162). Although it is unknown whether or not Bowen personally suffered from war neurosis, she did struggle with depression and admits, “undoubtedly bombing does something to you” (People, Places, Things 55). Bowen reveals the “after- effects” that war leaves on the psyche throughout her short stories.

11 “The Demon Lover” is arguably Bowen’s most popular story and one that has garnered the most critical attention; it is the ultimate example of showcasing war neurosis in wartime civilians. Heather Bryant Jordan even goes so far as to argue that the entire story is a fabrication of the mind, stating that “As [Mrs. Drover] struggles to escape [the soldier’s] hold on her, the reader realizes that what she is really trying to flee from are demons created by her own mind” (133). In the story, Mrs. Drover visits her abandoned, damaged house to “look for several things she wanted to take away.” It is significant that the “things” she wants to take out of the house are never specified and are kept hidden away, under lock and key “in a bedroom chest” (Bowen 661). In relation to repression, we can view the “bedroom chest” as the site for Mrs. Drover’s subconscious: a locked box within the walls of a bombed-out structure during wartime. One can therefore view the unspecified items, or subconscious, as her repressed memories of war. It is only after she “went to the chest where the things were, unlocked it, threw up the lid and knelt to search” that Kathleen experiences her first hallucination of her past during the previous war with the soldier where she “had not ever completely seen his face” (663). As Robert Calder notes, “The faceless, featureless soldier becomes a representative figure, a threatening everyman in military uniform […] a ghastly symbol of endless, inescapable violence” (95). Jessica Gildersleeve also argues that “the demon is an allegory for war” (91). However, instead of viewing the unidentified soldier as a symbol of generalized violence and “the face of war itself,” it appears the soldier might actually represent much more (Calder 97).

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12 Bell discusses the meaning behind the faceless soldier and contends that “His unseen face is the perfect metaphor for Londoners’ wartime fears” (175). However, the faceless soldier may stand as a metaphor for a more specific fear than just wartime in general. The soldier, whose face is repressed from Mrs. Drover’s memory, could be emblematic of the London V-raids, instead of war in general. This distinction in the root of Kathleen’s repression is significant because, when it comes to war neurosis, victims feared specific traumatic events from war, not the idea of war itself. Thus, Kathleen’s trauma effects the narratological and linguistic elements of the story in that the appearance of the faceless soldier is meticulously described similarly to the way Londoners described and feared the V-raids during that time. Given the level of engagement Bowen had with the war and the V-1 and V-2 bombs, the connection between the faceless soldier and the V-raids becomes relevant for analysis. In the summer of 1944, the Germans introduced the V-1 rocket which, in essence, was a “flying bomb” carried in the air by an automatic pilot system. They produced a “distinct buzzing sound” and when detected, civilians below had only twelve seconds to find cover. During the fall of the same year, a more sophisticated version of the rocket was created, the V-2 (162). The main advancement in the rockets was their speed. Bell explains that “Like the V-1’s, the V-2’s could and did come at any time of day or night. They traveled from their launching pads in Holland in four minutes, faster than the speed of sound” (163). Thus, civilians maintained a constant level of high anxiety due to the inevitable and untraceable raids that they could not stop or hide from.

13 Kathleen Drover’s anxiety of the inevitability of the bombings is evident: “There were some cracks in the structure, left by the last bombing, on which she was anxious to keep an eye. Not that one could do anything” (661-62). Bell’s article also touches on the factor of the “unknown” and “unidentifiable” quality that the rockets held: “Eyewitnesses heard loud explosions, but they had no idea what this new weapon was [….] The constant fear created a feeling of helplessness in civilians [….] No one in London knew what they were when they began to fall” (162, 163). Thus, the feeling that was given by the V-raids is similar to the tension that Kathleen feels toward the faceless soldier. Bowen’s text describes a situation in which “under no conditions could she remember his face. So, wherever he may be waiting, I shall not know him. You have no time to run from a face you do not expect” (665; emphasis in original). Much like the unexpected and unpredictable nature of the V-raids, there is also an acute awareness, yet unpredictability, ascribed to the faceless soldier. Therefore, not only does Kathleen hold repressed memories, hidden in the locked chest of her bombed-out bedroom, but she also suffers from bombing anxiety and shell shock, which, as already noted, may result in a loss of vision and memory (32). Such symptoms of shell shock help to explain why she cannot remember the face of the soldier from her past. In addition, just before Kathleen leaves her former house with her “items,” or repressed memories, that she has uncovered through her earlier hallucination, she feels a draft coming from the basement: a common site of repression in fiction. Bowen writes, “down there a door or window was being opened by someone who chose this moment to leave the house” (666). In this context, it is arguable that the faceless soldier, representative of bombing anxiety from the V-raids, is the root of Kathleen’s repressed war memories that she has not yet faced.

14 The striking of the clock throughout the story also evokes the “distinct buzzing” and bombing anxiety that Kathleen still struggles with from the V-1 and V-2 bombs.

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Moments before her first hallucination, “the clock of the church that still stood struck six—with rapidly heightening apprehension she counted each of the slow strokes” (Bowen 663). The anxiety produced by the strokes of the clock are similar to the high anxiety produced by the buzzing and ticking of the approaching bombs that Kathleen had also experienced in her past. Thus, the ticking of the clock activates the sudden fear explained in Charles Myers’s study, and, in Kathleen’s case, triggers the “mental shock” produced from having experienced shell shock (Hemmings 32). Bell also emphasizes that “The 1944-45 attacks could have no such consolatory meaning, and coming after five years of civilian stress, anxiety, and privations, they led many people close to the breaking point” (163). Therefore, towards the end of the story, just as Kathleen “put her hand on the door” of the taxi driven by the faceless soldier, “the clock struck seven,” which is, arguably, “the hour arranged” in his letter, pushing Kathleen to her breaking point from the various mental struggles of war neurosis (Bowen 666, 662).

15 The story’s conclusion allows Kathleen to finally confront her most repressed war memories as she literally meets them face to face and “remain[s] for an eternity eye to eye” through her scream (Bowen 666). The scream is not let out until after she has seen the face of the soldier, metaphorically bringing her repressed memories to the surface, and finally allowing her fear to become traceable through the outward projection of her voice. Thus, “her first scream” is the sole purpose of the story (Bowen 666). Kathleen had to revisit her bombed-out house in order to retrieve her repressed memories from the locked chest. From there, the faceless soldier was able to leave the basement, or deepest realms of her subconscious, and finally allow Kathleen to confront the two wars that she had lived through. The scream signifies both Kathleen’s collapse and recognition of her innermost fears caused by war. Therefore, because Kathleen uncovers so much of her past and former repression, she is able to finally confront it.

16 Although much more complicated in its sense of time and place, “The Happy Autumn Fields” features many of the same elements that point towards war neurosis amongst civilians as “The Demon Lover” does. In the story, Mary sleeps in a bombed-out home so covered in white dust that it seems “it must have snowed” (Bowen 676). She dreams or hallucinates about an earlier time with her family as they walk through a field in Ireland. Jessica Gildersleeve contends that for Mary, “escape is a fantasy,” and that in her hallucinations “Ireland represents a region of safety for the psyche desperate for survival” (92). Comparable to “The Demon Lover,” “Happy Autumn Fields” is infused with descriptive elements that indicate a character has suffered through two wars. Kathleen lives in the war zone of WWII, but hallucinates back to moments before her unidentified fiancé leaves for duty in WWI. Some critics highlight the intense effects that double war trauma has on the psyche, arguing that when the faceless soldier drives Kathleen away at the end of the story that “he drove her to his no man’s land, the place where two world wars converge in perpetuity” (Lassner 155). Others also argue that it is “the victim of war reaching across time to claim one of its survivors” (Greaves 48). Similarly, Mary’s hallucination includes moments when the characters feel as if the past is repeating itself. For example, while walking in the fields, Henrietta states, “we know this is only something happening again. It happened last year, and it will happen next” (Bowen 672). A sense of anxious apprehension is conveyed once again when Sarah states, “But something terrible may be going to happen” (682). Arguably, in Mary’s subconscious mind, both Sarah and Henrietta are referring back to

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the past war that is undoubtedly repeating itself. According to Hemmings, the result of war neurosis from two wars has “confounding consequences” on the psyche, which Mary experiences throughout the story (32). However, it is when Mary is in a state of consciousness that her most evident symptoms of war neurosis occur.

17 While conscious, both Mary from “The Happy Autumn Fields” and Kathleen from “The Demon Lover” experience physical effects from the wars past. While thinking back to an earlier time, Kathleen notices “an intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth” (Bowen 663). Just moments after coming out of her hallucination from the past, Mary feels a “shock of striking pain in the knuckles” (675). There is no obvious reason for these bodily reactions to occur for either character, and thus, their presence within the stories is worth examination. These unusual physical manifestations during times of stress can be better understood by connecting them to Rivers’s study on war repression in which an individual is still experiencing real war trauma during his or her postwar life. Rivers notes that “The special function of the unconscious is to act as a storehouse of instinctive reactions and tendencies, together with the experience associated with them […W]hen present, they produce pain and discomfort” (Instinct and the Unconscious 38). In other words, the unconscious pairs reactions with experiences which are brought back to the surface and enacted when a similar experience or memory of the experience occurs. His study on postwar dreams also helps to explain Mary’s statement that “I am a person drained by a dream. I cannot forget the climate of those hours” (Bowen 684). Rivers’s work on war dreams suggests that “It is as if the process of repression keeps the painful memories or thoughts under a kind of pressure during the day, accumulating such energy by the time night comes that they race through the mind with abnormal speed and violence” (“The Repression of War Experience” 13). Mary’s experience of two wars heightens these after-effects where the consequences that follow the initial trauma are much more real for the victim.

18 Mary and Kathleen are both stuck in a bombed-out house because they are determined to retrieve “things” out of the structures in which they reside. In “The Happy Autumn Fields,” Travis tells Mary: “You keep telling me that you have things to see to” (Bowen 676). Although the items that Mary is after are identified in general terms (unlike Kathleen’s), one can still view them metaphorically as her repressed memories that sit in a house of a war zone in which she must confront, as Travis defines them, “good morbid stuff” (678). Similar to Kathleen—whose subconscious is represented by a locked chest—Mary’s “things” lie within “a musty old leather box.” Critics such as Kristine Miller argue that Mary shows characteristics of having a complete mental breakdown with the box, where “Mary is more interested in losing herself in this box than in protecting herself from an air raid, and she therefore becomes ‘a person drained by a dream’; her identity is ‘irrelevant’ because she has mentally ‘shut up shop’ during the war”, contends Miller (39). Others also argue that “a box of old letters brings her into uncanny contact with a moment of threat” (Walshe 88). While discussing the items with Travis, Mary states that “Everything one unburies seems the same age” (Bowen 677). This is a peculiar statement in general terms; however, when the items are viewed as Mary’s repressed memories, one can argue that Mary is continuously struggling with the war trauma from her past, and thus, it still consumes her present. Although a breaking point and consumption of identity from the box are probably not present, the box does make it evident that Mary is still struggling with war trauma from her past.

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19 The faceless soldier holds a significant role in “The Demon Lover” and is also present in “The Happy Autumn Fields,” however, in a much more subtle manner which has been left unexamined by scholars. Because loss of vision is a symptom of both shell shock and war neurosis in general, Mary is unable to see clearly. Similar to the faceless soldier, when Travis first enters the room, he is described by Mary as “A man she knew to be ‘Travis’, but failed to focus” (Bowen 676). Additionally, Travis has qualities similar to those of the faceless soldier. They both have elements resurfacing from an unrealistic or subconsciously manifested world that is feared. In the text, it is stated that “Travis’s presence preyed on her as figments of dreams that one knows to be dreams can do” (677). The unusual term “preyed” in this context parallels the uncanny trope of the faceless soldier in “The Demon Lover.” Travis also proves to be the apex of Mary’s repression—as the faceless soldier was for Kathleen—when he takes away her box of items or repressed memories. Bowen evokes the same demonic qualities in Travis: “[Mary] did not therefore see him pick up the dangerous box, which he took away under his arm, out of her reach” (678). Although Travis comes across as a typical friend of Mary, his actions and descriptions by Bowen necessitate a deeper reading, revealing another “demon” amongst her short fiction.

20 While the constant anxiety from the V-raids becomes visible through the faceless soldier in “The Demon Lover,” bombing anxiety is also manifested in “The Happy Autumn Fields.” With added emphasis on the psychological effects of the V-raids, the implications of bombing anxiety are an element of the story that has been left unacknowledged by other scholarship. Sarah reveals the same anxiety in waiting for Eugene as one would experience in waiting for the inevitable explosion of a bomb. Bowen writes, “The ordeal of awaiting Eugene’s approach thus became for Sarah, from moment to moment, torture” (674). Similar to Mrs. Drover’s apprehension about the inevitable and unknown arrival of the soldier, Sarah fearfully anticipates Eugene. The intense speed of the V-2 rockets is also addressed: “One more moment and it will be too late; no further communication will be possible. Stop oh stop.” Interestingly, just after this moment, a character shows symptoms of shell shock in the form of a loss of memory. It is impossible to recall the right word: “Say—oh, say what? Oh, the word is lost” (675). Like Mrs. Drover, who had “no time to run from a face you do not expect” and “under no conditions could she remember his face,” both characters manifest their anxiety for bombs in other parts of their life (665; emphasis in original).

21 Similar to “The Demon Lover,” repression and hallucinations from war neurosis are paramount in “Mysterious Kôr,” to the extent that Heather Bryant Jordan contends, “This story provides an alternate vision to the daylight demons of Mrs. Drover” (139). Just as the basement is the site of repression for Mrs. Drover, while Arthur and Pepita walk the deserted London streets in “Mysterious Kôr,” “the Underground sounded loudest” (Bowen 728). One may argue that Bowen is speaking to both Arthur and Pepita’s repressed memories from war, which are “loudest” during their walk as they discuss an imagined, utopian city called Kôr. Thus, it is plausible that Kôr serves as a hallucinatory safety net for the characters, where they are able to escape a war zone by letting their minds travel to a safer place. Past critics have conducted a psychological reading of Pepita, where the notion of Kôr serves for her as a metaphorical breaking point and total collapse from reality. Edward Mitchell argues that “For Pepita mysterious Kôr […] represents the isolation, the withdrawal from time and reality […I]t is both a product of the desiccated world and the final symbolism of Pepita’s desire to

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escape into nonentity” (45, 46). Phyllis Lassner contends that “The very ‘finality’ of Kôr which represents the end of imperial solutions is for Pepita the beginning of a new kind of plotting for a female character entrapped by war” (154). Therefore, similar to Mrs. Drover, Pepita is haunted by the demons of war from which she struggles to escape.

22 Although it is a scene scarcely discussed by critics, Pepita’s unconscious act of “fl[inging] out one hand [… and] knock[ing] Callie lightly across the face” is crucial in terms of the after-effects of war neurosis (Bowen 739). Prior to the event, Callie’s body lying next to Pepita’s is described as being “sword-cold,” as if it were a weapon of war. Critics such as Phyllis Lassner argue that Callie’s function in the story is to keep Arthur and Pepita apart from one another (Lassner 153). In this regard, we might view Callie as a personified “demon” of war, and interpret Pepita’s smacking Callie while asleep in bed as her subconscious actively confronting her repressed memories of war. Bowen further describes Pepita’s state of mind after the hit, stating that “Pepita’s act of justice had been unconscious” (739). By using the term “justice” to describe Pepita’s gesture, this otherwise insignificant, sleep-induced fling of the hand becomes an act of war. We may also connect Pepita’s act to Rivers’s study where the unconscious deals with repressed war memories that are often of “distorted importance and significance” (“The Repression of War Experience” 14). Much like the function of Mrs. Drover’s scream in “The Demon Lover,” Pepita’s act of smacking Callie allows her to confront her repressed war memories.

23 Arthur could also be the “alternate vision” to the faceless soldier. Just as Kathleen is unable to remember the soldier’s face, Callie exhibits the inability to see Arthur. While waiting for Arthur and Pepita to arrive at her London flat, she “sat like an image, facing the three cold cups, on the edge of the bed to be occupied by an unknown man” (Bowen 732). The “unknown” and imaginative qualities are emphasized later in the story: “With awe she pictured, asleep, the face that she had not yet, awake, seen” (733). Although Arthur in no way presents the same demonic characteristics of the man in “The Demon Lover,” there is a compelling peculiarity in the consistency of the “faceless soldier” trope throughout Bowen’s war fiction.

24 Similar to “The Demon Lover,” “Mysterious Kôr” depicts bombing anxiety within the psyche through clocks. The story shows an acute awareness for the striking of clocks. While Pepita and Arthur walk through London, “a clock near […] set about striking midnight.” However, just following the striking of the clock, “Pepita, feeling Arthur release her arm with an abruptness that was the inverse of passion, shivered” (731-32). Arguably, the clock is what provokes both Arthur’s release of Pepita and Pepita’s shiver. The “mental shock” of bombing anxiety for both characters is due to the similarity between the sounds of the clock and the buzzing of the V-1 and V-2 rockets. Later in the story, the clock also affects Callie in the same way: “A clock struck four as Callie woke up again—but something else made her open her swollen eyelids” (737). Once again, the consistent levels of anxiety produced by intense bombing among the civilians force them to keep a heightened level of hearing, where even the strike of a clock can cause a feeling of shock apprehension for the victim.

25 During WWII, war zones were in close proximity to where London civilians “lived and worked.” Through the disastrous bombings that occurred frequently, these civilians were just as susceptible to war neurosis and war trauma as were the soldiers. However, the ways in which war neurosis can affect the mind are immeasurable. Critics have and will continue to study Elizabeth Bowen’s war stories because of her incomparable

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ability to portray the mental disturbances caused by war in civilians, as well as her firsthand war experience. Heather Bryant Jordan affirms that “Bowen’s private understanding of the world as a dangerous and mysterious place contributed to the way she evoked war’s effects in her fiction” (11). These “effects” are arguably, purely psychological. Jordan later observes, “[Bowen] frequently resorted to the world of the hallucinatory in her short stories to counter the psychic stress of war” (130). Therefore, in order to fill in the gaps that historiography has been unable to document, one must look to the wartime fiction of the culture. Although most scholars use the lens of gothic literary studies to explore Bowen’s war stories, approaching her work from a more historically and culturally realistic perspective will lend significant insight into not only Bowen’s fiction, but also our understanding of war neurosis during World War Two. This initial survey of Bowen’s short stories provides the groundwork for locating symptoms of war neuroses in London civilians. Bowen’s short stories such as “The Demon Lover,” “The Happy Autumn Fields,” and “Mysterious Kôr” serve as the foundation for analyzing the various ways a civilian experiences mental trauma from war. The peculiar similarities between the stories point toward a deeper understanding of war neurosis as a whole. The vivid examples of war neurosis that Bowen provides may move us closer to obtaining a more accurate picture of wartime London. Because “fear was to be feared,” the personal mental struggles were “repressed” from London’s subconscious; like some of Bowen’s war-time characters, we may only confront these memories years later through fiction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Amy. “Landscapes of Fear: Wartime London, 1939-1945.” Journal of British Studies 48.1 (2009): 153-75. Print.

Bloom, Harold. “Chronology.” Elizabeth Bowen. New York, NY: Chelsea House, 1987. 161-62. Print.

Bowen, Elizabeth. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2006. Print.

---. Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. New York, NY: Knopf, 1946. Print.

---. People, Places, Things. Ed. Allan Hepburn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Print.

Calder, Robert L. “‘A More Sinister Troth’: Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’ as Allegory.” Studies in Short Fiction 31.1 (1994): 91-97. Print.

Corcoran, Neil. “Words in the Dark: The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945).” Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 147-67. Print.

DiBiasio, Becky. “The British and Irish Ghost Story and Tale of the Supernatural.” A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story. Eds. Cheryl A. Malcolm and David Malcolm. 1st ed. Vol. 96. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. 81-95. Print.

Dillon, Sarah. “Elizabeth Bowen: ‘The Demon Lover’ and ‘Mysterious Kôr.’” A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story. Ed. Cheryl A. Malcolm and David Malcolm. 1st ed. Vol. 96. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. 236-43. Print.

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Gildersleeve, Jessica. “Safe: Wartime Short Fiction.” Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. 87-109. Print.

Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. New York: Anchor, 2006. Print.

Greaves, Richard. “Responses to War: 1914-1918 and 1939-1945.” A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story. Ed. Cheryl A. Malcolm and David Malcolm. 1st ed. Vol. 96. Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2008. 35-50. Print.

Hemmings, Robert. “Rivers, Myers and the Culture of War Neuroses.” Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. 28-53. Print.

Hepburn, Allan, and Elizabeth Bowen. Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Print.

Jordan, Heather Bryant. How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1992. Print.

Kardiner, Abram, and Herbert Spiegel. War Stress and Neurotic Illness. New York: Hoeber, 1947. Print.

Lassner, Phyllis. “No Place Like Home: The British Home Front.” British Women Writers of World War II. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 127-66. Print.

Mengham, Rod. “Broken Glass.” The Fiction of the 1940s. Ed. Rod Mengham and N.H. Reeve. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 124-33. Print.

Miller, Kristine. “Mobile Women in Elizabeth Bowen’s War Writing.” British Literature of the Blitz. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 26-58. Print.

Mitchell, Edward. “Themes in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Stories.” Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 39-50. Print.

Rivers, W. H. R. Instinct and the Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1922. Print.

---. “The Repression of War Experience.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine. 11.Sect Psych, 1918. 1-20. Print.

Rossen, Janice. Women Writing Modern Fiction: A Passion for Ideas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print.

Wallace, Diana. “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic.” Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004): 57-68. Print.

Walshe, Eibhear. “Bowen and the Modern Ghost.” Elizabeth Bowen. Portland: Irish Academic Press, 2009. 77-94. Print.

NOTES

1. Rivers’s original suggestion for the name of the illness was “repression neurosis”; however, war neurosis was the term that caught on. 2. The concept of hallucinations also goes along the lines of Freud’s theory of “The Uncanny” in which one struggles to decipher the real versus the imaginary.

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ABSTRACTS

Pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la peur était l'émotion dominante de l’expérience civile à Londres. Elizabeth Bowen est sans doute l’une des meilleures interprètes réalistes des différentes facettes de la lutte menée par les civils londoniens contre la terreur induite par la guerre et le Blitz de Londres. Cependant, en raison des efforts communs visant à garder un moral élevé en Grande-Bretagne, les manifestations extérieures de peur étaient méprisées et considérées comme honteuses à l’époque. Les civils ont ainsi refoulé le désir naturel de montrer leur peur physiquement, entraînant une difficulté extrême dans la recherche de sources disponibles pour étudier la peur de la guerre. L’œuvre d’Elizabeth Bowen est cruciale pour étudier la fiction issue de l’époque de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Plus précisément, ses nouvelles des années de guerre évoquent de façon plus significative la peur incessante et dérangeante qui hante le subconscient de ses personnages. Bien qu’il relève de la littérature gothique et alimente des discussions sur le gothique chez la plupart des chercheurs, le travail de Bowen sort largement du cadre de l’histoire de fantômes ordinaire lorsqu’il est examiné à travers le prisme du réalisme et de la théorie du trauma. Ainsi, cet article avance que les nouvelles d’Elizabeth Bowen, telles que “The Demon Lover”, “The Happy Autumn Fields” et “Mysterious Kôr” sont bien plus que des exemples typiques de littérature gothique : ce sont plutôt des sources majeures pour l’étude de la névrose de guerre dans un discours plus culturel que littéraire.

AUTHORS

KATE IMWALLE Kate Imwalle is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, where she focuses her study on Women’s Literature after 1800. She graduated with highest honors from Wright State University in 2016 with an MA in English Literature and Women’s Studies. Her thesis explores Elizabeth Bowen’s portrayal of the effects of trauma on the psyche, specifically, trauma during wartime. She currently teaches at Miami University and the Lake Campus of Wright State University. She is also a professional English tutor for the Student Success Center of Wright State University’s Lake Campus, and a co-editor with Dr. David Wilson (Wright State University) for Anti-Oedipus Press.

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The Aesthetics of Orality in Langston Hughes’s Short Stories The Best of Simple

Christine Dualé

1 This exchange between the main character, Simple, and the narrator (Boyd) in one of the seventy short-stories of The Best of Simple (1961), 1 exemplifies Langston Hughes’s literary use of music through his black hero. Music is one of the central motifs of Hughes’s writing to tackle the personal and social themes of the black community. Music and the spoken language are intertwined in Simple’s stories to create an original narrative form, influenced by the oral tradition. Hughes’s technique serves important cultural functions as they exemplify the writer’s concern with creating an art form vested in the African American experience and with creating “a realistic character whom black readers accepted as one of their own people (Harper 92).” Hughes’s short stories give the illusion of simplicity, yet they illustrate a complex use of language.

2 The stories of Jesse B. Semple were written by Langston Hughes in 1943, twenty years after the Harlem Renaissance,2 and were collected in 1961 in The Best of Simple, which is ranked among the best books of the twentieth century by the New York Library and is regarded as one of Langston Hughes’s most inspired creations. The 1940s, the period of creation of Simple, “gave Hughes a new era of fame and achievement. Viewing the decade retrospectively in the headnote about Hughes in their anthology, James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross praise the creation of Jesse B. Semple as a major accomplishment in Hughes’s career (Harper 2).” For Hughes, Simple was Harlem’s everyman, an ordinary working man and a representative of the black folk. Hughes uses his character to teach his readers about the Harlem Renaissance and the connection between Harlem and the world but above all, Hughes was praised for creating the most famous black character in black fiction. Simple was meant to give black literature the hero it was lacking.3

3 A lot has been written on Hughes’s poetry, however critical works barely mention his aesthetic and oral creation in his Simple’s stories. Thus, in this article we will bring to the fore how Hughes, who is a sort of “unofficial ethnographer” here, intertwines

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music and oral speech patterns to convert his tale into a valuable document and shows his concern with creating an art form based on the African American experience. We will see how Hughes decodes the language and standard English thanks to his character, who helps him dismantle previous stereotypes and also deconstruct images of the black male.

Orality in Simple’s stories

4 In The Best of Simple the vernacular language of Simple contrasts with the educated diction of the narrator (Boyd). The main character speaks in an oral style, while the narrator preserves a standardized diction and acts as a foil to Simple. Social barriers are thus broken down with these two men as they meet on an equal plane (usually in a bar or in the streets of Harlem) and show how Harlem is in fact a world within a world. The intrusion of the vernacular in Simple’s language is one of Hughes’s techniques to give the reader the impression of simplicity and to propose a realistic orientation: The modern dialect school—if it may so be styled—has developed a simplicity and power unknown to the earlier writers, and has revealed a psychology so much more profound and canny than the peasant types with which we were so familiar (Chapman, ed 532).

5 Hughes was not the first writer to use oral speech patterns and the black vernacular. Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus Stories, 1899), Charles W. Chestnutt (The Conjure Woman, 1899), and Paul Laurence Dunbar (The Sport of the Gods, 1902) among others, had already used dialect stories. Hughes, however, proposed a new “aesthetics of existence and resistence” (Hutchinson 186) or what Hutchinson also calls “social consciousness (187).” Quoting a review of Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew by Margaret Larkin in 1927,4 Hutchinson also underlines: Capturing the “dialect, speech cadence, and character of the people,” Hughes writes an accessible, socially engaged poetry that expresses the philosophy of the black working class. Poets looking for “native American rhythms” can learn something from his deft use of the blues. Hughes’s work exerts an important counterforce to the elitist philosophy “that art is the precious possession of the few initiate (187).”

6 In 1926, Hughes had claimed his aesthetic orientation in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and how he connected to a new literature through artistic freedom, experimentation, “music writing,” and the use of the vernacular: Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. […] Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. […] We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves (Hughes, 1926).

7 Hughes didn’t hesitate to flout literary conventions to advance a social and political message and to experiment the possibilities of blues and jazz in some of his poems. With Simple’s narrative, Hughes reverted to the first choices which had guided his poetry. To Hughes, using oral speech patterns in Simple’s stories aimed at giving

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authenticity and ordinariness to his character. Authenticity meant grounding the character in the African American experience to enhance cultural traits that directly came from the people. Written first in the format of columns for the Chicago Defender, Hughes created a character that could appeal to most readers of the newspaper; Simple was also a way of creating new spaces “for the development of African American culture (Hutchinson 208),” as well as an approach sensitive to the black working class: […] Hughes was holding a mirror to urban, working-class African-American men, he was also smashing the false images of ‘the Negro’ which white society had created. Hughes wanted to show heroism and greatness, and he saw such greatness among the common people (Harper 10-11).

8 Simple’s orality shapes the aesthetics of the narrative. Storytelling and music, which are intertwined within a lot of sketches, affect the narration and exemplify a space between print and orality. Hughes’s concern with creating an art form vested in the African American experience reveals, once again, his attempt to challenge white American assumption about African American art and literature as he had evidenced during the Harlem Renaissance. His art form also reveals an aesthetics strongly influenced by oral tradition and folklore. Hughes reverts to this specific technique with Simple to enhance his own relationship to language and history and to give new validity to old forms and social fights. By discarding standard English, Hughes not only shows his own creativity but also the creativity of the black spoken language which is, at times, intertwined with rythms of blues, jazz, or be-bop in an attempt to transcend the written form. As Rouffineau states: Such stylisitic effect, which is a way of reaching authenticity, is somehow articificial as it leads to confusion in terms of oral communication. […] The reader is, thus, truly active to be able to understand the meaning (Rouffineau 127).5

9 The following examples testify to the creative power of black spoken language: I tell you, winter is a worriation (“Letting off Steam” 36). I am glad I am not as ageable as you (“Shadow of the Blues” 166). You know, white folks would not put up with Jim Crow, if they ever got Jim Crowed themselves (“Duty Is Not Snooty” 198). Whatever you are talking about with your see-antics [semantics], Jack, at my age a man gets tired of the same kind of eggs each and every day (“Two Sides Not Enough” 214).

10 Hughes’s semantic creations reveal his desire to create a language within the language, a technique which made Hughes’s reputation during the Harlem Renaissance and which is not so far from “minor literature” as defined by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, namely in Mille Plateaux (1980). As Brinkley puts it: [The] characteristics of minor literature [is] the deterritorialization of the language, the connection of the individual and the political, the collective arrangement of utterance. Which amounts to this: that “minor” no longer characterizes certain literatures, but describes the revolutionary conditions of any literature within what we call the great or established (18).

11 Through his aesthetic technique, Hughes participates in the construction and the definition of a people at the margin (or “minoritarians” to quote the Deleuzian philosophy again). Such characteristics show how the poet appropriates the language of the norm to write from the margin and for the people of the margin. Simple’s orality provides a particular aesthetics leading readers to reconsider all assumptions and to create their own reading and deciphering grids to be able to decode the character’s metaphorical and symbolic codes. Hughes’s technique presents similarities to the style

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of Zora Neale Hurston described by Trinna S. Frever. As in Hurston’s “The Eatonville Anthology,” Simple’s short stories offer “a recreation of the relationship between author, text, and [readers], realigning the normally individual act of reading with the shared act of listening, and of participating in narrative construction (Frever 3).” Hughes’s oral aesthetics is heightened when we discover Simple’s own language and vernacular. His expression evades the dominant linguistic model where reading becomes the expression of different and multiple interpretations. Hughes offers a language beyond the academic standard English and proposes not only a new character but also a new writing within his national context. By so doing, Hughes creates a form of language grounded in the African American experience and in a culture particularly influenced by the oral tradition. Simple’s black dialect is an illustration: Here, I ain’t scared to vote (“A Toast to Harlem” 21). To tell the truth, I has not heard of him at all (“Jazz, Jive, and Jam” 242). I do not know no place in the country where I am welcome (“Wooing the Muse” 31). Mens will have girl friends all over the world (“High Bed” 55).

12 Simple’s dialect leads to different interpretations and maintains ambiguity. To use irregularities is a way of showing the ignorance of the character and to play on the stereotype that all Black males did not express themselves correctly: I ain’t is often used instead of “I’m not;” I has not heard him instead of “I haven’t heard him;” I do not know no place, instead of “I don’t know any place” and “Mens” whose irregular plural form is “Men,” also appear regularly in the text. These differences with standard English are indeed wrongly seen as incorrect language, since Simple’s language typifies a language within the language, with its own rules and grammar, which is the particularity of black vernacular: African American Vernacular English as a dialect of English deserves respect and acceptance. It has a degree of regularity and stability attributable to a set of rules of grammar and pronunciation, as with any language. It differs strikingly from Standard English but there is no more reason for calling it bad Standard English than there is for dismissing Minnesota English as bad Virginia speech, or the reverse. [...] AAVE shows that it has certain regular syntactic principles of its own [...]. Languages have many rules and regularities of sentence structure and speakers select from the possibilities in ways that are highly complex (Pullum 45).

13 Hughes’s aesthetics exemplifies the gap between standard English and the English spoken by the black community of Harlem. Simple, who is the representative of the black community, is also the best example of this oral difference which is assumed through the language he uses. Nevertheless, the difference Simple’s language conveys is not only a matter of oral difference. The antagonism within the black community as well as the social and geographical differences are also translated through orality.

14 Simple and his girlfriend, Joyce, illustrate the ideological opposition within the black community in the first half of the twentieth century. During the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes rebelled against the black middle-class ideals and expressed his rejection of the black elite’s literary and cultural orientations. The relationship between Simple and Joyce mirrors such differences and is expressed through Simple’s words. In “Jazz, Jive, and Jam” (239-245) Simple, the Southern uneducated black man, makes the reader laugh but he mainly serves as a foil to Joyce, the emancipated and educated black woman of the North, when she asks him: Dr. Conboy is smart, says Joyce. Did you hear him quoting Aristotle? Who were Harry Stottle? I asked. Some people are not even misread, said Joyce. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher

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like Socrates, a great man of ancient times. He must of been before Booker T. Washington then, I said, because, to tell the truth, I has not heard of him at all (“Jazz, Jive, and Jam” 242).

15 The cultural and social differences between the two characters are enhanced by the vocabulary and syntactic schemes created by Hughes. By having Simple use an altered language not totally “jive” not totally “negro dialect,” Hughes shows how he deals with standard English to give his character his specific African American identity: Jess, watch your grammar in public. Don’t say is you, and you is. That is not proper, Joyce says. I begs your pardon, I says. Forgive my down-home talk. Down-home or up North, says Joyce, such terms is not correct. You know it. You have been to school. Colored school, I said. Which is neither here nor there as long as you understand what I am saying (“Once in a Wife-Time” 172).

16 With this technique, Hughes is able to subtly question the social system of his country. This form of popular culture is also a means for the character to lessen the racial and social problems he is the victim of and to offer a new appreciation of history and of racial issues. The opposition between Simple and Joyce also mirrors the racial opposition in the United States as a whole: I am sorry white folks is scared to come to Harlem, but I am scared to go around some of them. Why, for instant, in my home town once before I came North to live, I was walking down the street when a white woman jumped out of her door and said, Boy, get away from here because I am scared of you. I said, Why? She said, because you are black. [...] I got more reasons to be scared of white folks than they have of me (“A Toast to Harlem” 22).

17 As his close friend Carl Van Vechten wrote to him in 1945, Hughes “[had] a special aptitude for speaking for the ‘people’ and more and more [he] bec[a]me their official spokesman and more and more [he] told the world what the more miserable members of [his] race [were] seeking (Van Vechten in Bernard 235).”

18 Just like the slaves before him, Simple creates his own language and style. His technique points at the oral strategy slaves reverted to in the aim of surviving in a hostile world.6 Simple, indeed, plays the dozens, which he explains to Boyd and indirectly to readers unfamiliar with black culture. To play the dozens means to play an oral game. In this game, two contestants insult each other until one gives up. The game is a way of protection for Blacks against racial tensions and aggressiveness. Simple also speaks the jive, the Harlem dialect. These different forms of language are answers to the inadequate language which is too standardized and does not fit the needs of black people. The jive functions as an intermediate and codified language with no grammar rules. It permits easier communication to insiders. In the 1940s, the Harlem jive was a coded language outsiders could barely decode. Magazines published explanations, as this extract from Esquire (1944), and quoted by Anderson in This was Harlem, shows: True jive is not the stereotyped jargon affected by the high school ice cream palor crowd and brain-fagged comedians. Jive has etymology, formal rules, a constantly expanding vocabulary currently estimated at over a thousand words and an infinite number of phrase combinations. Burley calls it “language in motion”, and though he often discusses it in the most scholarly terms, he claims you can’t understand the idom unless you understand the people who use it. Jive, he says, is the Negro’s defense mechanism. (316)

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19 Simple’s jive is full of images and expressions of his own creation: she jumps salty (“Landladies” 5),” “I’m tired of trickeration (“Conversation on the Corner” 13),” “to be jim-crowed (“Temptation” 27),” “What’s on the rail for the lizard this morning? (“Vacation” 34),” “hysterian” for “historian (“ An Auto-Obituary” 239).” All these expressions are examples of this typical mode of expression. Body language goes hand in hand with this idom, which is easy to imagine with Simple. Simple’s spontaneous language adds confusion to the meaning of his stories. This is also part of the entertaining quality of the character whose jokes are tied up with the jester figure and discourse. Simple is imbued with such traits and displays a deep sense of humor that readers, especially when he first appeared in The Defender columns, appreciated: To be shot down is bad for the body, but to be Jim Crowed is worse for the spirit. (“Simple on Military Integration” 81)

20 or, I am glad I am handsome instead of wise. (“Jazz, Jive, Jam” 242)

21 In another story Simple proposes a far-fetched idea of a “game preserve for Negroes” to point at racism but still with a layer of humor: I have been up North a long time, but it looks like I just cannot learn to like white folks. […] While they’re making all these laws, it looks like to me they ought to make one setting up a few Game Preserves for Negroes. […] We need protection. […] Congress ought to set aside some place where we can go and nobody can jump on us and beat us, neither lynch us nor Jim Crow us every day. Colored folks rate as much protection as a buffalo, or a deer. (“There Ought to be a Law” 62)

22 Hughes wants “to elicit both laughter and serious consideration of the effects of racism in the military—and of the possible solutions. His nonfiction proposals amuse us, but the notions make some sense. […] For Hughes, especially in his Simple voice, the average black man overcomes racism by maintaining his morality and his sense of humor. […] Whether one evaluates the humor as an example of the folk tradition or as political humor, Hughes uses and advocates the use of humor to balance one’s mental outlook (Harper 53, 64).” This tone and timeless humor made the columns a success; it also explains the transition from newspaper to book. In fact, Simple displays the characteristics of the buffoon who can reveal embarrassing truths without fear and thus denounces the social wrongs of his time, when he says, for instance: “If Negroes can survive white folks in Mississippi, we can survive anything” (“Radioactive Red Caps” 213); or “You don’t learn everything in books (“Income Tax” 69).” His position towards life and events allows him to warn the reader but he knows how to keep his distance from all this: Why, man, I would rock so far away from this color line in the U.S.A., till it wouldn’t be funny. I might even build me a garage on Mars and a mansion on Venus. […] Man, if I had a rocket plane, I would rock off into space and be solid gone. Gone. Real gone! I mean gone! I think you are gone now, I said. Out of your head. Not quite, said Simple. (“High Bed” 57)

23 Henry Louis Gates defines the figure of the “signifying monkey” as the rhetoric principle characteristic of African American vernacular texts. This principle, which he explains as follows, is part of Simple’s characterization: The Signifying Monkey exists as the great trope of Afro-American discourse, and the trope of tropes, his language of Signifying, is his verbal sign in the Afro- American tradition. […] The figure of writing appears to be peculiar to the myth of Esu, while the figure of speaking, of oral discourse densely structured rhetorically,

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is peculiar to the myth of the Signifying Monkey. […] As figures of the duality of the voice within the tradition, Esu and his friend the Monkey manifest themselves in the search for a voice […] (Gates 22).

24 The reader must, indeed, be receptive to this form of language filled with double meanings and double entendres. To Hughes, it is a means of “reappropriating” or “redistributing” (redistribuer) the language, to quote Barthes in Le plaisir du texte, and to move between the margin and the norm to inscribe his text in minority writing or minor literature. Hughes constantly manipulates the black vernacular but also reappropriates the literary norm. He merges the African American oral tradition with the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition to achieve an original and successful aesthetic creation which is intellectually stimulating and which helps denounce the social reality of the black community of his time. This manipulation, which shapes the writing, reveals the rebellious character of the writer who was reviled by the dominant black middle-class culture because of his rejection of the literary canon but who ended up being accepted thanks to Simple’s stories.

25 In her essay based on the concept of “narrative community,” Sandra Zagarell notes that a “narrative community” means texts “that take as their subject the life of a community, and portray the minute and quite ordinary processes through which the community maintains itself as an entity (499).” Such a process departs from single- protagonist narratives, yet in The Best of Simple, Hughes maintains both processes as he conceives Simple as a character fully participating in the narrative construction and whose individuality functions within the collective framework of the black community of Harlem. Simple’s narrative parallels real-life community. These constant shifts between fiction and reality, the norm and the margin, between simplicity and deceptive simplicity are also inscribed in the character himself “whose name and history represent the illusion of being simple (Harper 1).” Naming is, indeed, important in Hughes’s creative strategy. By giving maximum personality to his character, Simple’s name and nickname and their spelling deserve closer attention, as we shall see now.

Naming in The Best of Simple

26 The character’s name (Jess B. Semple) is based on the pun: “Just be simple.” This apparent simplicity hides a complex use of language and beyond that, multiple interpretations to be given to Simple’s stories and to Simple himself who can also be deceptive. His friends and the reader may find him stupid and naïve but is he really so stupid?: Joyce, after all these years, is you trying to play me for a sucker? If you is, lemme tell you—I might look simple, but I definitely ain’t no fool (“Once in a Wife-Time” 172).

27 Simple is no fool and thinks his ancestors were more naïve than he is: You have to ask my great-great-grandpa why. He must of been simple—else why did he let them capture him in Africa and sell him for a slave to breed my great- grandpa on slavery to breed my grandpa in slavery to breed my pa to breed me to look at that window (“Feet Live Their Own Life” 3).

28 However, he admits his friends called him “Simple Simon” when he was a little boy: I am really Jess Semple—which the kids changed around into a nickname when I were in school. In fact, they used to tease me when I were small, calling me ‘Simple Simon’. But I was right handy with my fists, and after I beat the ‘Simon’ out of a few

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of them, they let me alone. But my friends still call me Simple (“Simple on Indian Blood” 18-19).

29 All these possible interpretations point at the different meanings readers can give to Simple’s words. In this light he is closer to the buffoon whose mission, in European medieval courts, was to make his audience laugh and think at the same time. Simple’s name is multi-layered and can also be understood as “sample,” a sample of the ordinary black man, or Harlem everyman. “Because he love[s], respect[s], and identifie[s] with ordinary African Americans, Hughes [is] able to faithfully represent the attitudes and the speech patterns of the Negro everyman, an ordinary Harlem resident (Harper 9)”: I cannot truthfully state, as some novelists do at the beginnings of their books, that these stories are about “nobody living or dead.” The facts are that these tales are about a great many people although they are stories about no specific persons as such. But it is impossible to live in Harlem and not know at least a hundred Simples, fifty Joyces, twenty-five Zaritas, a number of Boyds, and several Cousin Minnies or reasonable facsimilies thereof. (Hughes, The Best of Simple, vii)

30 This is only the tip of the iceberg, however, since Simple’s first name is also highly symbolic. Indeed, in the Bible, Jesse is King David’s father and is a prominent figure in the Old Testament, and he taught the Torah. In the short stories, Simple plays the same part as he also teaches readers about the social and racial issues of his community throughout history. In this light, Simple can be seen as a jester since his teachings are a means of warning readers and showing them what reality looks like in Harlem, the microcosm of the society of his time.

31 Simple adds another layer to his surname when he warns the narrator and the readers that he could as well be named Job, instead of Jesse (“Final Fear” 57-61). According to him, this is a more appropriate name in keeping with his ordeals: “‘Suffered!’ Cried Simple. ‘My Mama should have named me Job instead of Jess Semple (60).’” This first name is highly symbolic when referring to Simple. In the Book of Job, Job is portrayed as a good man beset with disasters. Hughes’s reader is made to establish a link between Simple’s plight and Job’s ordeals, particularly when Simple says: I have been underfed, underpaid, undernourished, and everything but undertaken. I been bit by dogs, cats, mice, rats, poll parrots, fleas, chiggers, bedbugs, grand- daddies, mosquitoes, and a gold-toothed woman (“Final Fear” 60).

32 Simple’s sorry plight is a new interpretation of black history and of social issues through the lens of the American society of the 1940s and 1950s. Here, naming is a symbolic process as it allows Simple to claim his own genealogy and to build his own identity, which was refused to his enslaved ancestors. Naming reverts to stating one’s identity, the identity of Black people. Thus, it allows Hughes to inscribe Simple in common and national history and to transcend it through intercultural and transnational references and dimensions. All along his career, Hughes also demonstrated strong bonds to black history and black music by using it in his writing and by appyling the same rhythms as in the blues or jazz to his poetry. In Simple’s short stories, Hughes reverts to this technique from time to time, so that the use of black music shapes the aesthetics of the narrative and reverberates in Simple’s words and stories, much as a bluesman.

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Hughes’s aesthetics of musicality

33 During the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes became a “blues poet” and “merged the African American oral and written traditions, exploiting conventions, techniques, and the goals of both to achieve a poetry that [was] intellectually stimulating, socio- politically responsible, and aesthetically pleasing both as folk poetry and literature (Tracy 2).” With the Simple stories, Hughes established the continuity with black music he had started to work on as a young poet and reverted to music to tackle the social themes of the black community.

34 Just like bluesmen who sing and tell microstories, Hughes uses Simple as a bluesman to create a character accessible to all and whose stories are devoted to the oppressed and marginalized black people: […] The blues offer a language that connotes a world of transience, instability, hard luck, brutalizing work, lost love, minimal security, and enduring human wit and resourcefulness in the face of disaster. The blues enjoin one to accept hard luck because, without it, there is “no luck at all” (Baker 188).

35 These characteristics appear in Simple’s stories and daily ordeals. Through the pattern of the blues, Hughes incorporates the difficult conditions and living circumstances of the black working class into Simple’s biographical narrative: The next time I visited Simple, I found him convaslescent, slightly ashy and a bit thinner, sitting up in bed but low in spirits. […] You talk as though you’ve had a hard time, I said. […] What’re you talking about? Cried Simple, sitting bolt upright in bed. Not only am I half dead right now from pneumonia, but everything else has happened to me! I have been cut, shot, stabbed, run over, hit by a car, and tromped by a horse. I have also been robbed, fooled, deceived, two-timed, double-crossed, dealt seconds, and mighty near blackmailed—but I am still here (“Final Fear” 57, 60).

36 Simple describes his sorry plight and misfortunes and tells the story of a man who tries to pull himself together in spite of what happens to him. His story is reminiscent of the stories recorded in blues and “it seems appropriate—even natural—that the act resulting from such bitter black [urban] circumstances should be expressively framed by blues (Baker 190).” Simple realizes that in fact, he is not so changed by what he condemns (“I am still here!”) and the blues helps him assert his human identity “in the face of dehumanizing circumstance[s] (Baker 190)” just when he says for instance: And to tell you I am tired of working like a Negro all week in order to live like white folks on Saturday night. What I want is a part-time job with full-time pay, or else a position where you take a vacation all summer and rest all winter. But I am colored, so I know nothing like that is going to happen to me. […] I look in the mirror in the morning to shave, and what do I see? Me. From birth to death my face, which is my race, stares me in the face (“Present for Joyce” 173).

37 Simple speaks in an oral style that contrasts with the narrator’s formal and standardized diction. He is both an orator and a story-teller as he says to Boyd: “I can talk, but I can’t write (“Income Tax” 69).” Music is part of his story-telling and if he can easily be compared to a bluesman, he often does not hesitate to transform his language into a sound-moment or a jazz-moment when he tells the narrator of his nights out: “The joint were jumping—rocking, rolling, whooping, hollering, and stomping. It was a far cry from ‘Stardust’ to that spider walking up the wall (“Jealousy” 41).” As Hutchinson quotes: “jazz is a specifically American music that enhances experiences of everyday life […] (Hutchinson 423)” and as it is the case with Simple. As a Southern

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black man, Simple is deeply attached to black music, be it blues or jazz, which frames his everyday life and he wants Joyce to share his interest: What’s the matter? Don’t you like blues? Joyce said, You know, I never did like blues. I am from the North. North what? I said. Carolina? I thought this was a refined cocktail lounge. […] But I see I was in error. It’s a low dive. Let’s go downtown […]. No, no, no. No, after all for me, I said. Here we are, and here we stay right in this bar till I get ready to go… (“Jealousy” 41-42).

38 The blues is the expression of Simple’s Southern roots, of the sufferings of his people, and as such of the African American experience.7 Simple’s blues frame his stories but also the history of his people: [...] In this life I been abused, confused, misused, accused, false-arrested, tried, sentenced, paroled, blackjacked, beat, third-degreed and near about lynched (“Final Fear” 60).

39 Simple’s blues also expresses his sorrow after his girlfriend’s rejection. Like the bluesman, he is vulnerable and at a loss. To talk of his frustration is a way of liberating himself and getting rid of his deep dissatisfaction: I phoned her seventeen times. She will not answer the phone. I rung her bell. Nobody will let me in. I sent her six telegrams, but she do not reply. If I could write my thoughts, I would write her a letter, but I am no good at putting words on paper much. The way I feel now, nobody could put my feelings down nohow. I got the blues for true. I can’t be satisfied. This morning I had the blues so bad, I wished that I had died. These is my bitter days (“Blues Evening” 88).

40 Simple, who often plays with women and is not always loyal, is here a victim. As in some blues, the accumulation of negative forms underlines the victimization of the character and ensures the dynamism of the writing; the very short sentences also add to the dynamism of the writing and to the sense of urgency proper to blues text. Just as in blues songs, death appears as the right conclusion to end Simple’s misfortune. Simple’s blues are not only the expression of a state of mind, they also are a way for him “to laugh to keep from crying” and to keep his problems and ordeals at a distance. After recovering, he says later to Boyd about his girlfriend: She better let me know where she’s at by Monday morning, said Simple. If she do not drop me a line at once now, she will find herself dropped. Joyce is embarrassing me. F.D. thinks I know all about womens, and here I don’t even know where my own woman is at (“Boys, Birds, and Bees” 156)

41 The blues pattern also provides Simple with a means of expressing his concern about racial relationships and to move away from it at his convenience: There is also one more resolve I have resolved. Believe it or not, buddy-o, and that is this: To let the Race Problem roll off my mind like water off a duck’s back—pay it no attention any more. I have been worrying as long as I have been black. Since I have to be black a long time yet, what is the sense of so much worriation? The next time I read where they have lynched or bombed a Negro, I will just shrug my shoulders and say, It wasn’t me […] (“Tied in a Bow” 182).

42 Framing Simple’s stories with the blues is not only a way of expressing the character’s vision of life as a black man; it is also a way of paying tribute to this style of music and to great singers. By regularly mentioning or hinting at blues singers like Mamie Smith,8 Bessie Smith,9 and Clara Smith,10 the motif of the blues is regularly maintained in the

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writing and in Simple’s stories. Simple shows how fond he is of these women and of the music they sing and play when he says: Since I’m busting this dollar, I might as well put a quarter in the juke box. What would you like to hear? If they’ve got any old-time blues on it, play them. Will do, said Simple. But there ain’t no Bessie these days. Do you remember Bessie Smith? I certainly do. And Clara? I bet you don’t remember Mamie? Yes, I do—all three Smiths, Bessie, Clara, and Mamie. […] Speaking of blues singers, how about Victoria Spivey?11 […] I just recall my Uncle Tige had one of her records when I were born which he used to play called “The Blacksnake Blues”. I almost disremembers it (“Shadow of the Blues” 166).

43 The titles of some short-stories are also reminiscent of the blues and of black music in general as: “Blue Evening (83-89),” “Bop (117-119),” “Shadow of the Blues (165-168),” and “Jazz, Jive, and Jam (239-245).” The blues is about the sorrows and pains of Blacks’ daily lives; it is about their loneliness and weaknesses too. Just like the bluesman he personifies, Simple can go through ups and downs (“High Bed” 52-57; “Final Fear” 57-61) and when he is described, the narrative voice takes up the style of the blues as we saw in “Final Fear”.

***

44 Interestingly, the pattern of Southern blues is based on “assertions and conclusions to give irony or unexpectedness to the assertion. [The blues] almost always suggests a call to real social changes. […] Such anticlimax is highly subtle in Hughes’s writing […]” (Sylvanise 63, my translation)12 Simple’s stories are built on the same pattern when he says, for instance, “I am trying to figure out how to stay alive until I die” (“Sometimes I Wonder” 183) or also when he states: “Sometimes I wonder what made me so black (186).” In “Two Sides Not Enough,” we find another proof of Sylvanise’s assertion and of the blues pattern which Hughes adapts to Simple’s story-telling when Simple starts his story with: A man ought to have more than just two sides to sleep on. Now if I get tired of sleeping on my left side, I have nothing to turn over on but my right side. […] Also if I sleep on my left side, I am facing my wife, then I have to turn over to see the clock in the morning to find out what time it is. […] A human should have not only a left side and a right side, but also a port side and a starboard side (“Two Sides Not Enough” 213).

45 Simple tries to understand why things are the way they are and his speech, jive, and blues “carry him toward some newly expressive work (Baker 135)” that produce a reading of black life through a narrative proper to Hughes. His usage of black music and of the blues transforms Simple’s story-telling into moments bearing clues and interpretations intrinsic to that type of music: Did you know who my father was, Cousin Jess? F.D. asked me last night, because I never even as much laid eyes on him. I knowed the Negro, I said. I met him once when I were home on a visit before I settled permanent in the North. He were a big black handsome man. Folks called him John Henry because he worked on the railroad and were just passing through with the construction (“Kick for Punt” 147).

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46 John Henry is, indeed, a central character of the blues songs and by mentioning his name, Hughes makes a symbolic use of blues. Thus, as Frever puts it in her analysis on Hurston’s style, we can assert that Hughes’s “fiction forces the reader to reconsider language and textual construction through the moment of orality [and musicality] in the narration (Frever 6).” By doing so, Hughes creates a flowing language style that asks the reader to participate in the appreciation of history and of the social and personal issues Simple depicts. To Simple, the pattern of the blues helps him fight against social injustices and racial violence. It is a way of transcending and evading the harsh reality and capturing his frustrations.

47 Be-Bop is another way to pay tribute to famous black musicians. Like the blues, it expresses the pains and wounds Blacks articulated through music: Be-Bop music was certainly colored folks’ music—which is why white folks found it so hard to imitate. But there are some few white boys that latched onto it right well. And no wonder, because they sat and listened to Dizzy,13 Thelonius,14 Tad Dameron, 15 Charlie Parker,16 also Mary Lou,17 all night long every time they got a chance, and bought their records by the dozens to copy their riffs. [...] It all sounds like pure nonsense syllables to me. Nonsense nothing! Bop makes plenty of sense. […] You must not know where Bop comes from. […] From the police beating Negroes’ heads. […] Every time a cop hits a Negro with his billy club, that old club says, ‘bop! Bop! …Be-Bop! … Mop! … Bop!’ […] Old cop just keeps on ‘Mop! Mop! … Be-bop! … Mop!’ That’s where Be-Bop came from, beaten right out of some Negro’s head into them horns and saxophones and piano keys that plays it. Do you call that nonsense? (“Bop” 118)

48 As with the blues, Hughes’ weaves sadness and joy in his writing and speaks for every Black man. Here, Simple uses be-bop to liken its rhythms and sounds to the police violence against Blacks and thus points at a very intimate interrelation between musical experience and oppressive measures against black people. The uses and functions of both orality and musicality are tied up with the character of Simple and his streetwise assessment of the lives of African Americans in the urban North.

49 Hughes’s writing and aesthetics were his instruments to create linguistic and musical moments reminiscent of the blues, the jazz, and be-bop. Orality and musicality “allowed Hughes to enhance the folk tradition, converting the telling of the tale into a written document that becomes a unifying tool for social change (Blake 168).” He defied the language system by creating his own words that brought to life a black realistic hero whom black readers accepted as one of their own and whom white readers identified as someone they knew. Through Simple the blues motif is a way for Hughes to express Simple’s story and the history of his community: Music explains things better than words and everybody in all kind of languages could understand it then. My music would say everything my words couldn’t put over, because there wouldn’t be many words anyhow. The words in my song would just say a black man saw a star and followed it till he came to a stable and put his presents down. But the music would say he also laid his heart down, too —which would be my heart. It would be my song I would be making up. […] It would be the kind of song everybody could sing, old folks and young folks. And when they sing it, some folks would laugh. It would be a happy song (“Christmas Song” 180).

50 Beyond Hughes’ aesthetics, “the actual saga of Simple shows that the translation of folk characters and vernacular narration into universally celebrated fiction required both talent and tenacity on the part of the author (Harper 17).” In one of his letters to Hughes, Carl Van Vechten congratulated Hughes for his writing of Simple’s stories

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which he described as “a sane approach to real insanity (Bernard 268);” Hughes was a spokesman for Blacks and Simple embodied this role perfectly. All along his career, Hughes created an art form transcending the written form and remained influenced by African American cultural traditions and folklore that eventually led him to recognition and acceptance by the American canon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Jervis. This Was Harlem. A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950. New York: The Noon Press, 1981. Print.

Baker, Houston A. Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973. Print.

Bernard, Emily. Remember me to Harlem. The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintge Books, 2002. Print.

Blake, Susan. “Old John in Harlem: The Urban Folk Tales of Langston Hughes,” Critical Essays on American Literature. Ed. Mullen Edward J. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986, 168-75. Print.

Brinkley, Robert. “What Is a Minor Literature? Author(s): Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari.” Mississippi Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, (1983): 13-33. Print.

Chapman, Abraham, ed. Black Voices. New York: Mentor, (1925) 1968. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Mille Plateaux. Paris : les Éditions de Minuit, 1980. Print.

Frever, Trinna S. “‘Mah Story Ends,’ or Does It?: Orality in Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘The Eatonville Anthology’” Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 47 | Autumn 2006. Web 1 December 2008. Accessed 27 November 2015.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr., The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African American Literay Criticism. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Print.

Griffin, Sarah Jasmine. Harlem Nocturne. Women Artists & Progressive Politics during World War II. New York: Basic Civitas, 2013. Print.

Harper, Donna Akiba Sullivan. Not so Simple: The Simple Stories by Langston Hughes. Colombia, London: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Print.

Hughes, Langston. The Best of Simple. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. Print.

---. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Nation, 1926. Print.

Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print.

Jones, Leroi. Blues People. Negro Music in White America. New York: Harper Perennial, 1963 (1999). Print.

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Pullum, Geoffrey K., “African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes.” The Workings of Language. Ed. Rebecca Wheeler. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1999, 39-58. Print.

Rouffineau, Isabelle. “The Color Purple ou la Féminitude Pourpre”, La Couleur du Temps dans la culture afro-américaine. Claudine Raynaud, ed, Cahiers de Recherches Afro-Américaines Transversalité 1 (2005). Tours : Presses Universitaires François Rabelais (2005): 113-31. Print.

Royot, Daniel, et al. Histoire de la culture américaine. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. Print.

Sylvanise, Frédéric. Langston Hughes, poète jazz, poète blues. Lyon: ENS Editions, 2009. Print.

Tracy, Steven. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Print.

Zagarell, Sandra A. “A Narrative Community: The Identification of a Genre.” Signs 13.3, (1988): 498-527. Print.

NOTES

1. In this article, we use the original version: Langston Hughes. The Best of Simple. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. The original version was illustrated by Bernhard Nast. 2. The Harlem Renaissance (also termed the New Negro Movement) grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African American community since the abolition of slavery. There was a prolific expression of black creativity at the beginning of the twentieth century in Harlem (New York) to which Langston Hughes took part. Many creative projects were launched in Harlem or created by artists who lived and worked in Harlem. This cultural watershed participated in Harlem’s revival and the Harlem Renaissance movement. 3. In his article entitled “The Need for Heroes” which was published in 1940 in The Crisis, Hughes wrote about the need to create black heroes in literature to inspire the young generation: “We have a need for heroes. We have a need for books and plays that will encourage and inspire our youth, set for them examples and patterns of conduct, move and stir them to be forthright, strong, clear-thinking, and unafraid.” (Hughes, in Bernard 189) 4. Hutchinson refers to Margaret Larkin, “A Poet for the People—A Review”, Opportunity 5 (1927): 84. 5. My translation of: “Cet effet de style, qui recherche une authenticité qui ne manque pas d’artificialité, introduit une confusion supplémentaire dans la communication. [...] Le lecteur est rendu doublement actif pour appréhender le sens.”. I translated all French quotations into English to avoid any break in the reading. The original quotes are mentioned in the footnotes. 6. As Daniel Royot states: “Because of their dissemination in the South, slaves could not form ethnic groups nor speak a common dialect. Words in English invaded the negro dialect, which became a tool for oral communication.” (Royot et.al 297) 7. Leroi Jones says on the origin of the blues: “The emergence of classic blues and the popularization of jazz occurred around the same time. Both are the results of social and psychological changes within the Negro group as it moved toward the mainstream of American society […]. The term blues relates directly to the Negro, and his personal involvement in America. […] Blues means a Negro experience, it is the one music the Negro made that could not be transferred into a more general significance than the one the Negro gave it initially (Jones 93-94).”

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8. Mamie Smith (1883-1946) was nicknamed the “mother of blues.” Mamie Smith recorded Crazy Blues in 1920, it was the first recorded blues album under the Okeh label. 9. Bessie Smith (1894-1937) was nicknamed the “Empress of the blues.” She became popular thanks to Ma Rainey who performed in the same company and guided her first steps. Langston Hughes deeply admired Bessie Smith and probably found inspiration in her blues songs. 10. Clara Smith (1895-1935) was also a praised blues singer. 11. Victoria Spivey (1906-1976) was an American blues singer and songwriter. She started her career by performing in vaudevilles and clubs and then worked with Louis Armstrong and Clarence Williams among other black famous musicians. 12. “Le blues fonctionne sur un schéma d’affirmation et de conclusion qui donne le plus souvent à l’affirmation un sens ironique ou inattendu. […] [Le blues] suggère presque toujours un appel à un réel changement social. […] L’art de la chute chez Hughes est porté à un haut degré de subtilité et d’implicite […].” 13. Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993): a jazz trumpet player. He participated in the creation of Be-Bop. 14. Thelonius Monk (1917-1982): a pianist and a jazz composer. He was an important figure in modern jazz. 15. Tad Dameron (1917-1965): a jazz pianist whose style was inspired by be-bop. He worked with Dizzy Gillespie and for Artie Shaw. 16. Charlie Parker (1920-1955): a saxophonist, whose improvisations made him famous. He also interpreted be-bop. 17. Simple refers to Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981), a pianist and jazz composer. She worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, and Charlie Parker. She became famous thanks to her performances at Café Society, a jazz club located in Greenwich Village (New York). Along with the lives of Pearl Primus and Ann Petry, Farah Jasmine Griffin depicts Mary Lou Williams’s story in her book: Harlem Nocturne. Women Artists & Progressive Politics during World War II. 2013.

ABSTRACTS

Langston Hughes livre une restitution particulièrement originale de la communauté noire et de son histoire à travers les aventures d’un personnage phare, Simple, qui va définitivement asseoir sa notoriété d’écrivain. Cet article montre comment Hughes, à travers une apparente simplicité de forme, articule l’oralité de son personnage à l’histoire et à la musique noires américaines, ce que nous nommons « l’esthétique de l’oralité de Hughes ». En analysant l’oralité des histoires de Simple, rassemblées dans The Best of Simple en 1961, nous proposons de lire entre les lignes afin de mettre à jour la vérité artistique de l’écrivain et montrer comment Hughes, influencé par les traditions culturelles et folkloriques noires américaines, créa une autre forme artistique pour mieux transcender la forme écrite traditionnelle.

AUTHORS

CHRISTINE DUALÉ Christine Dualé is Associate Professor-HDR at Université Toulouse 1 Capitole. She is the author of Les Noirs et la réussite universitaire aux États-Unis, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007, and Harlem Blues:

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Langston Hughes et la poétique de la Renaissance afro-américaine, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014. A third book, entitled Langston Hughes et la Renaissance de Harlem: émergence d’une voix noire, is forthcoming. Her main themes of research are the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes’s writing in light of the Deleuzian concepts of “margin,” “minor literature,” and “rhizome.”

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Chess Problems and the Otherworld in Nabokov’s Short Stories

Eric Hyman

1 Chess problems are very different from chess games. A chess game is a sequential narrative, like a novel, with an Aristotelian opening, middle, and endgame, a contest between two opponents, White and Black. Not all of the pieces might be functional; some of the pawns at the far files might never move. A chess problem, on the other hand, is usually only two or three moves, is an entirely artificial construct, and is much more a patterned interaction than a narrative sequence; that is, it exists more in space than in time. The contest is between the composer and the solver, or would-be solver. The composer’s mission is to arrange the pieces so that one key move will lead to the postulated outcome, mate in two or three moves; and the solver’s objective is to figure out that key move. Every piece, even the most apparently irrelevant pawn or deceptively placed bishop, has a function, a function which is often not apparent at first. Nabokov composed and published chess problems (Poems and Problems; Speak Memory 608-612).1 As Nabokov says in his Strong Opinions, “problems are the poetry of chess. They demand of the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, and splendid insincerity” (160-161). And then from the memoir Speak Memory, [C]ompetition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of “tries”—delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. (610)

2 What is most important are the details, that is, every single piece, and the patterning, their interaction, which the solver understands retrospectively.2 Thus there is a parallel between chess problems and short stories, especially Nabokov’s. But, as far as I have been able to ascertain, the connection of chess problems to Nabokov’s short fiction has rarely been made overtly.3 This essay will concentrate on Nabokov’s short fiction,4 partly because his short fiction deserves to be better known, 5 but mostly because the short story shows the chess problem key move structure better than the

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longer fiction does, especially the connection to Nabokov’s transcendent Otherworld. Readers are challenged to find the key move in a short story by figuring out the patterning and the functioning of all the details. Nabokov’s painterly sense of visual setting in his fiction and poetry is part of the reason for those details, but I argue that they also largely function like chess pieces, as hints to the key move solution. Some readers solve the short story; some don’t; I confess that many of them I couldn’t solve myself but discovered the key moves either in one of Nabokov’s headnotes or in the criticism.

3 Finding the key move in a chess problem or short story might seem like reading a mystery story to find out who did it, but they are not quite the same. Nabokov has said that he abhors mystery stories (Strong Opinions 43, 219). In mystery stories finding out who did what is mostly for the sake of plot, but in Nabokov’s fiction solving the key move has thematic, even metaphysical, implications well beyond plot.

4 I need to stress here that the key move solution is not quite equivalent to an epiphany, for an epiphany is achieved by a story character, but the key move is an achievement (or not) by the reader. Short stories are not quite chess problems, of course. Well- formed chess problems have a deterministic solution, and only one, although it is always possible that a less-skilled solver won’t find it. But short stories are to some degree open to readers’ individual interpretations. What the key move does for a short story is to give the literal text coherence, but readers are still free to follow their own choices and predispositions to the emotional import and thematic significance. Solving chess problems and discerning a short story’s key move are algorithmic, but connecting that key move to the rest of the story, especially readers’ judgments of the characters, begins heuristically and proceeds to hermeneutic. Perhaps Riffaterre says it best, “communication is a game, or rather a kind of calisthenics, since it is guided and programmed by the text” (4).

5 And here is the main point of this essay: quite a few, though not all, of those key moves involve some kind of connection to a Hereafter or transcendent Otherworld. The impinging of the Otherworld occurs in many of the novels (Alexandrov Nabokov’s Otherworld 15, 37-38), notably Invitation to a Beheading; the poetry; and especially Canto Three of Pale Fire, which speculates on the Institute for the Preparation of the Hereafter, I.P.H., or “if” (461-471). Humbert’s travels through America in Lolita derive from Nabokov’s own [butterfly-seeking] expeditions through America, so in his postscript to Lolita Nabokov writes about “[t]he obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of ‘reality’ (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes)” (314).6 I understand “such local ingredients” as signs of the phenomenal, familiar, lesser ‘reality’ in quotes as contradistinctive from the transcendent Otherworld, the superior reality without quotes.

6 I don’t here discuss the novels, which are thoroughly discussed elsewhere, or the poetry,7 in order to focus on the short fiction, because I think the short fiction is where Nabokov’s use of the Hereafter or Otherworld most obtrudes.

7 Vladimir Nabokov, speaking in more or less his own voice, opens Speak, Memory with: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness […] Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft […] I rebel against this state of affairs […] Over and over again, my mind has made

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colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. (369)

8 And then from Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one’s individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only common sense rules immortality out. (377)

9 Vladimir Alexandrov, in part quoting Nabokov’s wife Véra, identifies potustpronost, roughly translated as “the hereafter” or “the beyond,” as Nabokov’s “main theme,’’ “saturat[ing] everything he wrote” (Nabokov’s Otherworld 4-5). Precisely what the Nabokovs meant by potustpronost is “ultimately incommunicable” so Nabokov “used only circumlocutions to describe it” (Alexandrov “The Otherworld” 567). As Nabokov elliptically says in Strong Opinions: “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I known more” (45); (similarly Speak Memory 387, speaking of his mother but metonymically of himself). 8 It is very important to understand that for Nabokov the Otherworld is a metaphysical reality, however partially unknowable and incompletely understood it might be; it is not a metaphor for artistic imagination, although artistic imagination is subsumed within it. As Fyodor says in The Gift: If he [Fyodor] had not been certain (as he was also in the case of literary creation) that the realization of the scheme already existed in some other world, from which he transferred it into this one, then the complex and prolonged work […] would have been an intolerable burden on the mind […] Everything had acquired sense and at the same time everything was concealed. Every creator is a plotter; and all the pieces impersonating his ideas on the board were here as conspirators and sorcerers. Only in the final instant was their secret spectacularly exposed […] but perhaps the most fascinating of all was the fine fabric of deceit, the abundance of insidious tries (the refutation of which had its own accessory beauty), and of the false trails carefully prepared for the reader. (171-172; emphasis added; Rampton 3)

10 Fyodor is meditating on the connection between chess problems and his poetry, rather than short fiction; and Nabokov explicitly denies that he should be identified with Fyodor (Foreword to The Gift, n. pag.), but I argue that we can discern the applicability.

11 That impingement from the Hereafter “may even affect […] a text being generated by an unsuspecting narrator” (Connolly “Nabokov’s Approach” 31), as in perhaps the best known of Nabokov’s short stories dealing most explicitly with a hereafter, “The Vane Sisters” (615-627),9 Nabokov’s next-to-last short story and perhaps the only one where the presence of a Hereafter is undeniable. Its last paragraph is an acrostic, with the first letters of each word spelling out a message from beyond the grave10: I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies— every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost. (627)

12 Once reader-solvers discover this, one way or another, they then go back to reread the story11 and everything unfolds, like the themes in a chess problem. Note especially that once the acrostic has been solved, some of the individual words acquire thematic significance, like the obscure at-first-glance-irrelevant pieces in a chess problem: acrostics refers pointedly to this paragraph and its consequent salience for the whole story; recollection[s] form[ing] ripples of mysterious meaning; theopathies, an obscure word meaning “experience[s] or capacity for experience of the divine illumination”

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(“Theopathy”)—even its obscurity points to the obtuseness of the first-person narrator, as do the inept of inept acrostics and seemed blurred […] nothing tangible. The icicle formed acrostically by the first six words of this paragraph connects back to the second paragraph of the story, a vision of icicles, which the narrator finds “teasing as a coin trick” and “delightful but not completely satisfying” (615), and whose functionality in the story readers will not realize until they retrospectively apply this key-move acrostic. And, like a chess problem, Nabokov has his unaware narrator drop a hint—to an alert reader—that “the first letters of the words in [the] last paragraph formed a message from [a dead person]” (622). Cynthia and Sybil are the eponymous Vane sisters.

13 Typical of Nabokov’s key moves is that if there is imagery of the sky or something above, and if the protagonist is unfortunate in one way or another, then there is likely to be some connection to an Otherworld. To me the paradigmatic Nabokov short story is “Details of a Sunset.” The tipsy Mark Standfuss is walking the streets of Berlin to visit his fiancée. The following passage is both deceptive and revealing: That was stupid. Almost got run over by a bus […] […] The colors of the sunset had invaded half of the sky. Upper stories and roofs were bathed in glorious light. Up there, Mark could discern translucent porticoes, friezes and frescoes, trellises covered with orange roses, winged statues that lifted skyward golden, unbearably blazing lyres. In bright undulations, ethereally, festively, these architectonic enchantments were receding into the heavenly distance, and Mark could not understand how he had never noticed before those galleries, those temples suspended on high. (83)

14 Readers must pay careful attention to every detail, every word, just as a chess problem solver must pay attention to every piece, every interaction. Note the words glorious, translucent, ethereally receding into the heavenly distance, temples suspended on high. These are not just Turner-like visuals but hint at, literally, a heaven. Mark is like a reader- solver, who “could not understand how he had never noticed before […] those temples suspended on high.” The reason Mark had never noticed before but now can is that now he is dead and “could discern” what the living usually don’t or couldn’t. The deceptiveness, like an obscure chess bishop off in an apparently irrelevant corner, is the “Almost got run over by a bus […].” Mark was, indeed run over by that bus, which he doesn’t know or yet realize, and some readers won’t figure out. In the last paragraph Mark experiences what amounts to a second death. He “had departed—whither, into what other dreams, no one can tell” (85). In a slightly different reading, Shrayer “suggests that Mark’s death in a hospital bed [means that] dying is not to be equated with entering the space of the otherworld, much as glimpses of the otherworld are not to be equated with […] the domain of the dead” (26).

15 This also illustrates one feature of Nabokov’s aesthetics and metaphysics, which are intimately linked, although many American academic critics see only the aesthetics and overlook the metaphysics.12 Nabokov is at least tinged with Gnosticism 13 (one of the characters Nabokov approves of, Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading, is condemned for “Gnostic turpitude” [72]); and, as in “Details of a Sunset,” the gloriousness of the Hereafter/Otherworld is contrasted with the tawdriness of the familiar, material world: the “tawny brilliance” of the evening sky is explicitly “sharply” contrasted “with the drab façades beneath” (82). I am struck by how often Nabokov’s detailed descriptions of the material world emphasize how shabby, how second-rate, both the man-made world and the natural one are, in contrast to the color, the light, the iridescent beauty of

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some other realm. As Alexandrov says in a different context, Nabokov “render[s] the artificiality of the physical world in comparison to a spiritual one” (Nabokov’s Otherworld 45).

16 It is a contrast in “Details of a Sunset,” but Blackwell, Kuzmanovich, and especially Alexandrov (Nabokov’s Otherworld 5-7) remind us that for Nabokov the Otherworld and the familiar but deceptive material world are a continuum, part of a whole, almost but not quite an antithesis. The details and patterning of the phenomenal world, specifically of nature as revealed in butterflies, point to an ultimate common ontogeny.

17 And there is a moral, emotional dimension to the tawdry world: just before the end of the story Mark has a passionate reunion with his fiancée, but it is a posthumous fantasy, for a neighbor has told Mark’s mother earlier that the fiancée has left Mark for another lover. It is an indirect chess-problem move, for Mark doesn’t know this, but readers do (or alert readers do), because Mark went straight to his fiancée’s apartment instead of going to his mother’s (81-82). His life, had it continued, would have been sad, tawdry, like that of so many of the protagonists of Nabokov’s short fiction.

18 Nabokov’s Otherworld is not necessarily a Hereafter, however (Barabtarlo, “Nabokov’s Trinity” 135; Kuzmanovich 38). In “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” a Russian émigré in Berlin, Vasiliy Ivanovich, has won a ticket to a vacation excursion. All his accompanying excursionists—not “fellow excursionists”—are Germans who torment him; and the scenery is described as “the configuration of entirely insignificant objects.” This is easily interpreted as a parable about the sufferings of a Russian émigré at the hands of crass Germans in Berlin of 1936 or 1937 (Shrayer 134-135), but there is more to it, consonant with Nabokov’s whole oeuvre. For on the train ride, because of the continuum between the phenomenal world and the Gnostic Otherworld, Vasiliy Ivanovich does get glimpses of attractive scenery, parts, fragments, shards of a not-yet whole (428; Shrayer 139-142). Eventually, however, [t]hat very happiness of which he had once half dreamt was suddenly discovered. It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central Europe, but just this one—in the inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of its principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it had, my love! my obedient one!—was something so unique, and so familiar, and so long-promised, and it so understood the beholder that Vasiliy Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart was there in order to give it away. (431; emphasis Nabokov’s)

19 Then in the castle’s room for travelers […] from the window one could clearly see the lake with its cloud and castle, in a motionless and perfect correlation of happiness. Without reasoning, without considering, only entirely surrendering to an attraction the truth of which consisted in its own strength, a strength of which he had never experienced before, Vasiliy Ivanovich in one radiant second realized that here in this little room with that view, beautiful to the verge of tears, life would at last always be what he had always wished it to be. What exactly it would be like, what would take place here, that of course he did not know, but all around were help, promise, and consolation—so that there could not be any doubt that he must live here. (431-432; emphasis added)

20 Vasiliy Ivanovich is forced to return to Berlin, where he begs his employer, who in a typical Nabokovian touch is also the rarely appearing first-person narrator, to allow

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him to resign his position, “that he had not the strength to belong to mankind any longer. Of course, I let him go” (433). (I surmise the apostrophe to “my love! my obedient one!” is not to some extra-textual woman but is to Vasiliy Ivanovich. Nabokov’s narrators are often stand-ins for Nabokov himself, and, just maybe, for some extra-textual, extra-worldly deity figure. On the other hand, Shrayer suggests the addressee is a woman beloved by both Vasiliy Ivanovich and the narrator, who have fused [159].)

21 The cloud, castle, lake are some version of the transcendent, non-sublunary world. Note the oxymoronic “something so unique, and so familiar” as well as the “and so long-promised.” How, when, or even whether Vasiliy Ivanovich returns to the castle we are not told.14 The simplest reading would be to psychologize Nabokov’s Otherworld as a longing for his lost idyllic aristocracy in Russia. But I argue that that reading is reductive. Speak, Memory hints that Nabokov’s imagining an Otherworld antedates his exile from Russia (387-396). Nabokov only hints at his Hereafter/Otherworld, perhaps because it is private, perhaps to defuse skepticism and a resultant depreciation of his artistry, but more probably because, as an Otherworld, he cannot fully formulate it even to himself. Like Vasiliy Ivanovich, we cannot know with any degree of certainty “[w]hat exactly it would be like.”

22 Other Nabokov short stories that might connect in some way to a Hereafter or Otherworld are “Christmas,” “The Return of Chorb,” “Wingstroke,” “Perfection,” “A Busy Man” (one of the more obvious of Nabokov’s key moves is in “A Busy Man” where a prominent benefactor is named Mr. Engel, German for angel). How many of Nabokov’s short stories depend on, or just include, intimations of potustpronost cannot be calculated, for the allusions are subtle (key moves in chess problems), depend on readers’ inferences, and are therefore easy to miss or even deny.

***

23 And those subtle, easy to miss, allusive key moves bring us to Nabokov’s most enigmatic, most discussed, most debated, and perhaps least understood story, “Signs and Symbols.” Nabokov the chess problem composer seeks to deceive the solvers, or to challenge the more astute to work out the key move. Unlike chess games, [c]hess problems provide for mistakes only in the form of inviting false key moves, which, with the responses to them, are interesting hypotheses more or less parallel to the true solution: the element of uncertainty all but disappears; a sound problem is designed to admit of only one solution, and the solver is not really expected to miss it, although he may be interestingly diverted. (Gezari and Wimsatt 106-107; similarly Gezari “Game Fiction” 64; see also Kuzmanovich 27)

24 As Terry J. Martin says “Signs and Symbols” engenders a kind of interpretive paradox, […] for if it calls attention in a variety of ways to the need to interpret, it […] simultaneously challenges our ability to do so. The story is a self-conscious and brilliantly constructed trap for interpreters, much like the chess problems Nabokov loved to create […] [A]ny interpretation of the story [is] at best tenuous and equivocal. (105)

25 In “Signs and Symbols” an elderly couple has a suicidal son who has been institutionalized with […] ‘Referential mania’ [where] the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence […] Pebbles or

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stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. (595)

26 The couple tries to visit the son in the sanatorium to bring him a birthday present, a collection of ten small jars of fruit jellies. (What those fruit jelly jars might be a sign or symbol of is a matter of much critical discussion, none of it very persuasive.15) The parents are turned away when a nurse tells them that the son has again attempted to take his life. When they return to their apartment they receive three telephone calls. Two seem to be simply wrong numbers. In the story’s last paragraph, the husband “reexamine[s] with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, red little jars.” Then the very last sentence: “He had got to crab apple, when the telephone rang again.”

27 “Signs and Symbols” ends abruptly with no apparent resolution. Readers are challenged to solve what that third telephone call is. Among the candidates are the same wrong number (the least likely); the sanatorium calling to say the son is all right; the sanatorium calling to say the son is dead; the son still alive calling to report something; an unreliable narrator (Andrews).

28 “Signs and Symbols” is one of very few short stories to have an entire book devoted to it, Yuri Leving’s Anatomy of a Short Story, a collection of scholarly articles. Much of Anatomy of a Short Story is very close reading, often word by word, New Criticism style, as if “Signs and Symbols” were a Shakespeare sonnet—indeed the reprint of “Signs and Symbols” in Leving numbers its lines like a poem for close reference (9-14). I need not recapitulate all those close readings here because they are so many and so various that they would expand this essay well beyond readability; more saliently, the upshots of all those close readings are so inconclusive that they point to readers creating their own meanings, even derived from very close readings.

29 Yet, despite, or maybe because of, those varying conclusions, those close readings are correct in one important aspect: they perceive the relevance and interconnectedness of every single, apparently irrelevant, maybe gratuitous or merely descriptive detail, like all the pieces in a chess problem; and they obey the very human impulse to try to solve “Signs and Symbols.” But all those close readings are what chess problem solvers would call “false tries”: they are intelligent, worthy efforts, not quite wrong, but they miss the correct key move—if there even is one.16

30 I am here following, but going one step beyond, William Carroll’s very influential article.17 Carroll argues, persuasively in my judgment, that “[r]eferential mania” is a critical disease that all readers of fiction suffer from. Our duty as critics is to explicate and analyze the signs—which point to a single meaning outside the work itself […] Over-reading is another, milder form of referential mania, and Nabokov has insured […] that the reader will succumb to the same mania that afflicts the boy. The story is studded with apparent signs and symbols that the gullible reader—that is, any reader—will attempt to link together in a “meaningful” pattern. (211-212) The overdose of meaning is our own; we can’t accept a third random phone number but must see the “death pattern” completed, because that is the way our minds work. (214)

31 Nearly all commentary on “Signs and Symbols” agrees that the story is not just mysterious but sad, somber, even terrifying. Carroll (203) paraphrases King Lear’s Gloucester: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport” (4.1.37-38). An example of understanding reached through close reading of details is one important element, not quite explicitly stated in the text but clear enough through

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allusions; it is that the elderly couple are almost certainly Jewish refugees from the Nazi Holocaust or perhaps Russian pogroms (Nabokov Selected Letters 117; Toker 174-177; Leving “The Jewish Quest”)—a synecdoche for the horror of this world. We live in a stochastic world, not fully understandable and to some degree causeless, with patterning either incomplete or misleading, so “Signs and Symbols” can be read as a somewhat more desperate verisimulacrum for our material world, our ‘reality’ in quotes. An important component of Carroll’s argument is that the human mind rebels against this state of affairs. We seek some kind of relief or escape, through any possible means fictively available, i.e. by imposing some kind of order or regularity on phenomena, and thereby meaning and maybe solace, whether or not that imposition is ontologically justifiable. That is, for Carroll, key-move solving of fiction, at least of “Signs and Symbols,” is a mistake, a mild form of referential mania or paranoia, however human, hopeful, or hopeless that might be.

32 In most of the short stories and in his other works that have an Otherworld, Nabokov plants clues to its presence, or potential presence. (How obvious these clues are will vary from story to story and reader to reader). Lane explicitly mentions chess problems and quotes the passage from Speak Memory that I quote above but does not consider solving “Signs and Symbols” by finding a key move—in fact, Lane’s reading is much like Carroll’s. In “The Vane Sisters” the clues are not just the acrostic but the apparently stray remarks by the unaware narrator; in “Details of a Sunset” the clue is the literally celestial imagery; in “A Busy Man” Mr. Engel.

33 But by contrast in “Signs and Symbols” all the details (chess pieces), all the interconnectedness, and all but one of the phrases direct readers’ attention to this material, phenomenal, sad and cruel world, not to a possible transcendent Otherworld. The one exception is The last time [the son] had tried [to commit suicide] his method had been, in the doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow patient thought he was learning to fly—and stopped him. What he really wanted to do was tear a hole in his world and escape (595; emphasis added).

34 I reproduce the whole paragraph to show several features. One is how easy it is for readers to overlook that last sentence, inserted in an account of the son’s madness. Another is the “masterpiece of inventiveness”: Nabokov’s madmen are often creative, quasi-artistic masters of inventiveness. Then the fellow patient is “envious,” an important but easily overlooked detail hinting that escaping this world is a desideratum for more than one person. In true chess problem fashion, the hes and the last his might even be ambiguous pronoun references anaphoric to the envious patient as well as to the son. All of this might point to some other world.

35 Perhaps Carroll is correct that deciphering the story and solving the third phone call are irrelevant and/or reader-created. But in a letter to Katherine White, a New Yorker editor, Nabokov says many of his stories, including “the one about the old Jewish couple and their sick boy,” are composed “according to [the] system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one” (Selected Letters 117). I take this as evidence that readers are expected to find whatever that “second (main) story” would be. Thus my candidate for the solution to the third phone call, that the son having successfully escaped from his world is calling from a Hereafter, derives from my immersion in writing this essay and looking for indications of that Nabokovian Otherworld18; that is, I had imported my own predispositions into

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the reading activity. Whether the son actually escapes into some transcendent, metaphysically real Otherworld or is just dead—or neither—the story does not tell us. The criticism of “Signs and Symbols” is littered with chess problem-like false tries; and mine might well be one of them, but Nabokov invites us to seek a key move solution. If the son has indeed achieved some escape from this unhappy world into a better one, then perhaps there will ultimately be an escape for the parents too—and maybe even for all of us. No, the story does not tell us, but readers have the freedom to infer, or even to (co-)create, a “rebel[lion] against this state of affairs.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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---. “The Otherworld.” Garland Companion. 566-571. Print.

Allan, Nina. Madness, Death and Disease in the Fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. Birmingham Slavonic Monographs. Birmingham UK: U of Birmingham P, 1994. Print.

Andrews, Larry R. “Deciphering ‘Signs and Symbols.’” Nabokov’s Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on his Life’s Work. Eds. J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. 139-52. Print. Rpt. in Leving. 286-97. Print.

Assa, Frances Peltz. “Solving ‘Signs and Symbols.’” The Nabokovian 72 (Spring 2014). 20-25. Print.

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---. “Nabokov’s Trinity (On the Movement of Nabokov’s Themes).” Nabokov and his Fiction. Ed. Julian W. Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 109-38. Print.

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Carroll, William. “Nabokov’s ‘Signs and Symbols.’” A Book of Things about Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Carl R. Proffer. Ann Arbor MI: Ardis, 1974. 203-17. Print. Rpt. as “Pnin and ‘Signs and Symbols’: Narrative Strategies.” Leving Anatomy. 236-50. Print.

Connolly, Julian. “Nabokov’s Approach to the Supernatural in the Early Stories.” Torpid Smoke: the Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics 35. Eds. Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodop, 2000. 21-34. Print.

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---. “The Otherworldly in Nabokov’s Poetry.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 24 (1991). 329-353. Print.

Davydov, Sergej. “Invitation to a Beheading.” Alexandrov, Garland Companion. 566-571. Print.

Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Little, Brown. 1967. Print.

Fowler, Douglas. Reading Nabokov. Cornell UP, 1974. Print.

Gezari, Janet. “Chess and Chess Problems.” Alexandrov, Garland Companion. 44-53. Print.

---. “Game Fiction: The World of Play and the Novels of Vladimir Nabokov.” Diss.Yale U, 1971. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Web. 16 June 2014.

Gezari, Janet and W. K. Wimsatt. “Vladimir Nabokov: More Chess Problems and the Novel.” Yale French Studies 58 (1979). 102-105. Print.

Grayson, Jane, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer, eds. Nabokov’s World. Vol 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World. Houndmills Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Print.

The Great Courses. “Masterpieces of Short Fiction.” Michael Krasny. Advertisement. The New York Times Book Review. 27 July 2014. 32. Print.

Hagopian, John V. “Decoding ‘Signs and Symbols.’” Leving, Anatomy. 298-303. Print.

Henry-Thommes, Christoph. Recollection, Memory and Imagination: Selected Autobiographical Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Heidelberg: Universitäts Verlag, 2007. Print.

Howell, Yvonne. “Science and Gnosticism in ‘Lance.’” A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov’s Short Fiction. Eds. Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo. New York: Garland, 1993. 181-92. Print.

Johnson, D. Barton. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985. Print.

Johnson, D. Barton and Brian Boyd. “Prologue: The Otherworld.” Grayson, McMillin, and Meyer. 19-25. Print.

Kuzmanovich, Zoran. “‘Splendid Insincerity’ as ‘Utmost Truthfulness’: Nabokov and the Claims of the Real.” Grayson, McMillin, and Meyer. 26-46. Print.

Lane, John B. “A Funny Thing about ‘Signs and Symbols.’” Leving, Anatomy. 114-129. Print.

Lee, L.L. Vladimir Nabokov. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Print.

Leving, Yuri, ed. Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov’s Puzzles, Codes, “Signs and Symbols.” New York: Continuum, 2012. Print.

---. “The Castling Problem in ‘Signs and ‘Symbols.’” Leving, Anatomy. 270-276. Print.

---. “The Jewish Quest.” Leving, Anatomy. 165-68. Print.

Maar, Michael. Speak, Nabokov. Trans. Ross Benjamin. London: Verso, 2009. Print.

Martin, Terry J. “Ways of Knowing in ‘Signs and Symbols.’” Leving Anatomy. 101-13. Print.

Meyer, Priscilla. “Dolorous Haze, Hazel Shade: Nabokov and the Spirits.” Grayson, McMillin, and Meyer. 88-103. Print.

---. “Nabokov’s Short Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. Ed. Julian W. Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 119-34. Print.

Moreno, Alvaro Garrido. “The Referential Mania: an Attempt of the Deconstructionist Reading.” Leving Anatomy. 304-24. Print.

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Nabokov, Vladimir. The Gift. Trans. Michael Scammell. New York: Vintage, 1963. Print.

---. Headnote to “The Vane Sisters.” Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Print.

---. Invitation to a Beheading. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Vintage, 1959. Print.

---. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt, 1980. Print.

---. Lolita. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1955. Print.

---. Pale Fire. (1962). Rpt. New York: Library of America, 1996. 437-667. Print.

---. Poems and Problems. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Print.

---. Selected Letters 1940-1971. Eds. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989. Print.

---. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Library of America, 1996. 358-629. Print.

---. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995. Print.

---. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973. Print.

Rampton, David. Vladimir Nabokov: A Literary Life. Houndmills Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Richter, David H. “Pnin and ‘Signs and Symbols’: Narrative Entrapment.” Leving Anatomy. 224-35. Print.

Riffaterre, Michael. Text Production. Trans. Terese Lyons. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Print.

Rosenzweig, Paul J. “The Importance of Reader Response.” Leving Anatomy. 158-64. Print.

Rowe, William Woodin. Nabokov’s Deceptive World. New York: New York UP, 1971. Print.

Rutledge, David S. Nabokov’s Permanent Mystery: The Expression of Metaphysics in His Work. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Print.

Shrayer, Maxim D. The World of Nabokov’s Stories. Austin: U of Texas P, 1999. Print.

Stegner, Page. Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Dial, 1996. Print.

“Theopathy.” Merriam-Webster Online. n.d. Web. 3 October 2014.

Toker, Leona. “‘Signs and Symbols’ in and out of Contexts.” A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov’s Short Fiction. Eds. Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo. New York: Garland, 1993. 167-80. Print. Rpt. Leving Anatomy 203-15. Print.

Tolstaia, Nataliia and Mikhail Meilakh. “Russian Short Stories.” Trans. Maxim D. Shrayer. Alexandrov Garland Companion. 644-59. Print.

Trzeciak, Joanna. “The Last Jar.” Leving Anatomy 143. Print.

Vicks, Meghan. “The Semiotics of Zero.” Leving Anatomy. 191-99. Print.

NOTES

1. For a thorough discussion of chess problems, see Gezari, “Game Fiction” 60-80, 85-87, 102; Gezari and Wimsatt; and Wimsatt. In good New-Criticism style, Wimsatt’s essay is a close reading of a chess problem (not one of Nabokov’s) but is more how to solve (i.e., read) chess problems than how to compose them.

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2. Rowe describes reader participation in extracting significance from Nabokov’s details (61-71); Nabokov says “there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader’s attention” (qtd. in Rowe 61, 70). 3. Although chess as a theme or allusions to chess are frequently mentioned in criticism of Nabokov, Leving’s “The Castling Problem in ‘Signs and Symbols’” (Leving, Anatomy 270-276) is the only work I know of that explicitly connects chess problems to Nabokov’s short fiction. Gezari’s thorough account of chess problems in her “Game Fiction: The World of Play and the Novels of Vladimir Nabokov” (emphasis added), as her title shows, never mentions the short fiction. Alexandrov focuses almost exclusively on Nabokov’s novels, poetry, and discursive writings; Rampton’s Vladimir Nabokov: A Literary Life, although a chronological study of Nabokov’s style, never mentions the short fiction at all. Johnson devotes a chapter to chess patterning and imagery (Worlds in Regression 79-111) but he doesn’t mention any short fiction in this context except Solus Rex, and then only in passing as a chess problem theme (81), not the short story of that name (which is actually a fragment of an unfinished novel). 4. For convenient overviews of Nabokov’s short fiction, see Barabtarlo (“English Short Stories”); Meyer (“Nabokov’s Short Fiction”); and Tolstaia and Meilakh. 5. As an informal survey, I checked as many anthologies of short fiction I could find in a major university library. Of the 22 anthologies that aim for some degree of comprehensiveness, 14 did not include any Nabokov short fiction. Of the eight that did, “Spring in Fialta” was included three times, “Christmas” and “Cloud, Castle, Lake” once each, and “First Love” twice (but one of them was removed from a later edition). If we count the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction as more or less canon setting, “Signs and Symbols” is included in some editions, including the most recent (2006) (Bausch and Cassill 1165-1169) but not the shorter editions. An advertisement for Great Courses “Masterpieces of Short Fiction” lists 23 short fiction masterpieces, the ones one would expect, but none by Nabokov. 6. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this article for calling my attention to this remark. 7. For a discussion of the Otherworld in Nabokov’s poetry, see Connolly “The Otherworldly.” 8. See also Alexandrov, “Nabokov and Uspensky”; Blackwell; Connolly “Nabokov’s Approach”; Henry-Thommes 20-23, 33-40; Johnson; Johnson and Boyd; Maar 75; Meyer “Dolorous Haze”; Rampton 7-8; Rowe 86-87; Rutledge 121-140, 182-186; Shrayer 17-70). Kuzmanovich suggests some caution, though not dismissal, for claims about the pervasiveness of Otherworlds in Nabokov’s oeuvre. 9. Except as noted, all references to Nabokov’s short fiction are to The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, and will be cited in the text. Most of Nabokov’s Russian stories were translated by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with his father Vladimir; but a few were translated by others, one was written in French, and ten were originally written in English and thus need no translator, as noted in the Appendix (657-659). 10. I didn’t catch this myself but learned it from Nabokov’s headnote to the story reprinted in Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (218). 11. “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader” (Nabokov Lectures on Literature 3; emphasis Nabokov’s). 12. For example, Bader 2; Lee (Preface n. pag.); Stegner. Rutledge is aware, as he must be because he cites Alexandrov, that Nabokov treats the Otherworld’s existence as a metaphysical reality, but Rutledge is not alone in consistently treating the Otherworld only as an aesthetic realm. Fowler says that Nabokov thinks that transcendence from death can be achieved only in art (16). Moreno’s explicitly deconstructionist reading, which emphasizes subjectivity, even solipsism, in both fictional characters and readers, implicitly denies or ignores the possibility of metaphysics

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in Nabokov and, consequentially, the possibility of a key move pointing to a presence of a transcendent Otherworld. 13. Gnosticism is much too large and complex a topic to discuss here; and, more saliently, we can’t know which version would be applicable to Nabokov. See Johnson Worlds in Regression. For a discussion of Nabokov’s use of it in Invitation to a Beheading and implicitly elsewhere, see Davydov esp. 191-201. For Gnosticism in Nabokov’s very last short story “Lance” see Howell. 14. That is, we are not told in the story text. Field reports Nabokov as saying that Vasiliy “will never find it [the castle] again. If I let him go, it is in the hope that he might find a less dangerous job than that of my agent” (197; qtd. in Fowler 66). I suspect that Nabokov here is tongue in cheek with Field—Nabokov is never explicit with interviewers about his belief in a real, metaphysical transcendent otherworld. On the other hand, Fowler thinks Vasiliy Ivanovich’s “recovery […] is Platonic; the vision seems to have existed before, in a dimension that now penetrates into Vasili[y]’s and that he seems to recognize from prior knowledge” (66). Note Fowler’s hedging (“seems to”). Allan thinks the story’s last paragraph is Vasiliy Ivanovich committing suicide (62-63). 15. Some perhaps desperate attempts: Barabtarlo suggests “the jellies are arranged in order of increasing astringency” (“Five Missing Jars” 141); Trzeciak (somewhat arbitrarily) takes four of the last five jars and anagrammatizes their last letters of the fruit to arrive at “theme,” and then uses part of the Latin scientific name for crab apple, paradisaca to suggest that it hints at the Adam and Eve story, “a vague resemblance to the forbidden fruit”; Assa uses Morse code to arrive at I SENT and I SEND. 16. Leving “The Castling Problem in ‘Signs and ‘Symbols’” (270-276) explicitly uses the “chess problem as a structural matrix” to solve ‘Signs and ‘Symbols.’ He argues “the Husband eventually dies in the story’s timeframe and his death coincides with its textual end […] The Husband’s decision is an ethical one: he withdraws from this world, freeing their tiny two-room apartment to make room for the son to return […] the Husband withdraws from the scene in a conscious attempt to strike a winning combination in life’s conundrum: if his son has survived, then the Husband has created the conditions for his successful return; if the son has committed suicide, then this is the Husband’s escape into a safe place where he can reunite with the deceased. In other words, one hero moves aside in order to save another” (272). I think this is a “false try,” because it is not so certain that the husband dies, and, more significantly for the schema I argue here, it does not answer the puzzle of the third phone call: a chess problem key move must account for all the details, all the possible moves. 17. It is reprinted in Leving (236-250) under a slightly different title, but I am citing from the original publication because Leving’s reprint has production errors. As only one sign of how influential Carroll is, contributors to Leving cite it 36 times (Leving’s Index 394). Richter (233-235), Rosenzweig, and Vicks make similar arguments. For a rebuttal to Carroll and this line of thought, see Hagopian. 18. Chronology is a factor here. Carroll’s article was first published in 1974, well before Alexandrov’s Nabokov’s Otherworld in 1994, and most of the criticism referring to a Nabokovian Otherworld follows Alexandrov, both chronologically and as an influence. My essay was completed in 2016 and thus has been influenced by all the criticism that precedes it.

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ABSTRACTS

De nombreuses nouvelles de Vladimir Nabokov sont structurées comme des problèmes d’échecs, qui sont basés sur des motifs et diffèrent des parties d'échecs, qui dépendent quant à elles des événements. Ainsi, lire une nouvelle de Nabokov revient à résoudre un problème d’échecs : les lecteurs sont mis au défi de trouver un coup clé expliquant tous les éléments du récit/problème d'échecs. Dans de nombreuses nouvelles de Nabokov, ce coup clé se connecte à un monde transcendant. Les nouvelles « The Vane Sisters », « Cloud, Castle, Lake » et « Details of a Sunset » sont paradigmatiques. Le coup clé de « Signs and Symbols » n’a jusqu'à présent pas été révélé de façon concluante.

AUTHORS

ERIC HYMAN Eric Hyman is a Professor of English at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, where he teaches composition, British Literature, and linguistics. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He is on the editorial board of the online journal GLINT, where his responsibility is reviewing short fiction submissions. His present contribution to the JSSE is a much expanded version of a paper given at the Vladimir Nabokov Society Meeting, Modern Language Association Convention, New York, 27 December 1996.

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Communities of Self: Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Cycle

Tamas Dobozy

Introduction: Cycles of Commitment

1 Since Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, first published in 1919, critics have grappled with “locating unifying elements” (Kennedy, “Poetics” 11) that might define linked short stories as a genre. James M. Cox argues that if the novel “federalizes,” or subordinates variety to a central and overriding logic, then the short story serves to decentralize control: “As a convention, the novel, with its federalizing plot, tends always to subordinate the parts to the whole, whereas the collection of short stories does precisely the opposite” (Cox 781-82). Nowhere is the tension between part and whole so fruitful than in linked stories, which balance discreteness against assimilation, offering a “structural dynamic of connection and disconnection” (Kennedy, “Semblance” 195). Linked stories rely on a balancing of “centrifugal and centripetal impulses and on the ambiguous interplay between [...] discrete narrative parts and the formal or aesthetic whole” (Kennedy, “Introduction” xi). Cox’s claim politicizes linked stories, suggesting a unity based not on the centralizing agenda of “federalism,” but rather dispersal—constant negotiation rather than subordination.

2 The political organization hinted at by Cox’s comment is most usefully represented by the term “short story cycle.” Suzanne Ferguson observes that “A cycle by its name should ‘go around’ something—in time, in the consideration of a theme (returning to its point of origin?); [whereas] a sequence should be linked by development (going from one place to another), whether in time or theme” (104). The teleology that marks the “sequence” subordinates the stories to a logic external to each particular story, to “larger unifying strategies that transcend the apparent gaps between stories” (Luscher 150). In contrast, the “cycle “ offers a continual return to a beginning, to another equal but different variation on the subject matter.

3 Lorna Irvine characterizes the “Linnet Muir” cycle as one that allows “the author to emphasize beginnings [as] each story structurally starts again, while the content,

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autobiography, emphasizes beginnings” (252). Each story reconsiders Linnet’s “beginnings” until it becomes apparent that origin, rather than being absolute, is always renegotiated by context. While the sequence posits individual stories in a progressive revelation of a unifying logic, the cycle posits individual stories as challenging such logic. The “Linnet Muir” cycle thus works to critique the “larger meanings” that would subsume individual stories. This critique becomes most visible in Gallant’s depiction of self, whose parameters are always renegotiated. It is here that Gallant locates the agency of her narrator, Linnet Muir, who, in allowing the voices of her childhood to speak through her, demonstrates that self is not arrayed against social forces but indivisible from them. Yet, it is precisely in bringing the voices of her community together that she enables herself to escape their deterministic logic, precisely because the voices are always in dialogue, negotiating a reality on which they do not agree, and because their coming together always creates yet another variation on past and present. It is in this near-infinite variability that Linnet grasps her agency and escapes from what others would have her be, i.e. from the “federal logic” that would subordinate her story and thus her self. In place of this federalism, then, Gallant’s cycle offers a radical pluralism, a “community of self.” She uniquely adapts the short story cycle to a particular political vision: that of subjective agency realized in and through oppressive community.

States of Disorientation

4 Gallant thereby writes against the modernist short story sequence, which is “assembled partly in response to the writer’s alienated position within the system of literary production” (Kennedy 195). The “writer’s alienation” that J. Gerald Kennedy finds in Winesburg, Ohio emblematizes the fear of modernist writers: namely, that mass appeal equated to a dangerous and numbing conformity to the status quo (Schaub 16), as if appealing to the “lowest common denominator,” was a surrender to uniformity and the doctrinaire. The modernist writer, in Kennedy’s estimation, chose the genre of the sequence precisely because it gave play to this alienation.

5 The “Linnet Muir” cycle discloses an even greater fear: namely, that there is no longer any way to separate the individual, even through alienation, from the anonymous citizenry of the state. As Gallant notes, in “The Writer in the State,” when “you approach the structure [the 20th century democratic state]—the smooth wall, seen from within as a smooth, large surface—you will notice it dissolves into thousands of people, not one of whom seems authorized to take down a message” (101). While Gallant sees society as made up of individuals, not one of them has the agency to address (“message”) the state they constitute. The democratic state, dispersed across its constituents, is unlocatable. Linnet describes her experience in Montreal as “being part of something that was not really mine” (280), an experience of the polis, and its citizenry, she is part of but cannot claim. For Gallant, this is the basis of the loss of “authority” within democracy: since everyone, in theory, has a vote, authority and responsibility are dispersed across a spectrum of citizens, which makes it impossible to locate the site of the authority to whom one might address a “message,” a “status quo” that would allow the author a “monolithic” (92) presence to rail against. Any exemption from society is illusory, based upon an unsustainable differentiation. No longer does alienation offer the privilege of standing outside a given social structure, as

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it does in Anderson, because alienation is society. Alienation is the basis of “assimilation” (95), since everyone is unified in the state on the basis of an irremediable atomization. Even writing cannot exempt itself from the state, because it too is borne in alienation: “But in the Ideal [political situation], if it ever came about, no one would ever write a word. Perfect societies must be like an anaesthetic” (“State” 97). The proximity of a nation to utopia is inversely proportional to an author’s capacity to write, which means that an author’s creations exist precisely in the mutual experience of atomization, another community of self. It is in embracing this experience that Linnet Muir will find a way to make peace with it.

Canadian Cycles

6 The political ramifications of Gallant’s writing are further touched on by Gerald Lynch, who suggests that Canadian short story cycles are “wary of the traditional novel’s grander ambitions—suspicious of its totalizations, of its coherent plot, neatly linear sense of time and drive towards closure,” or characterized by a “unity in disunity” (18). These generic features, as W.H. New further elaborates, are at least partly explained by cultural discourse in Canada during Gallant’s lifetime: There were some who denied the existence of Canadian culture; there were others who claimed it existed only to so narrowly define it as to leave out most Canadians or so widely define it as to include everyone else. But the multiplicity was the common denominator: multiculturalism, bilingualism, regionalism—all such isms (even separatism) were asserting the need to accept variation. The society was polymorphic, yet growing a recognizable tradition. And the fiction that took the culture as at least one level of its subject—that is to say, some fiction, not all fiction —sought a generic method for expressing the shifting multiple set. (96)

7 New speaks to “fragmentation” (96) as an emergent feature of Canadian writing, pertinent to the experience embodied in “Linnet Muir,” with its associative shifts that suggest Linnet is sifting bits and pieces of memory and experience. “Shifting multiple set” is likewise pertinent to Gallant’s structure and content. “Set” suggests not only the discrete unit in relation to other units that constitute the “set,” but also “social set,” the focus of much attention in “Linnet Muir.” The phrase indicates a malleable form, a “shifting” “multiplicity,” that still presents itself as a “set,” containing a limited number of elements. Canadian writers were faced with a vision of community based not in fixed relations between a centre (federal government) and margin (geographical regions) but in mobility itself. The “form,” then, becomes less a “what” than a “how,” less a determinate position than a process. To satisfy the “common denominator” of “multiplicity” that informs Canadian literature at the time—which is New’s privileging of both the discrete and the mutual—one had not only to construe “variation” within the text but the text as variation.

8 Thus, we have Janice Kulyk Keefer’s identification of Gallant’s style with movement: “Were it not for the sharpness and rightness of the language these narratives might collapse at their joints, work themselves loose, and rattle away from both characters and readers. They tend to be filled with unexpected, unconnected observations and incidents” (67). Variation and “multiplicity” are kept in check by a “rightness of language” which counterbalances what Danielle Schaub calls the “asides, voices, abstract considerations, [and] anachrony of multiple voices” (“Squeezed” 57) in the stories. The refusal of Gallant’s stories to cohere under a unified voice or vision says as

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much about her writing as the specific meanings embedded in the words. The “Linnet Muir” cycle employs her stylistic incoherence on the level of structure itself, since the stories, rather than recording the trajectory of Linnet’s maturation—the realization of herself—instead depict her jettisoning the frames—familial, societal, historical—that provide overarching meaning for experience, a central interpretative frame. The stories are anti-deterministic. As opposed to naturalist authors, who trace the inevitable internalization of social forces to the point where the protagonist is a machine acting out the role demanded of her by society, Gallant demonstrates that the proliferation of interpretative frames, the multiplicity of social roles, permit an undoing of naturalistic fatalism.

Montreal, Quebec

9 The “Linnet Muir” cycle is deeply embedded in the politics and culture of its moment— Montreal, Quebec, Canada during World War Two—and marked by an obsessive examination of selfhood as political and civic category and liability. Linnet Muir has returned to Montreal, her birthplace, on the cusp of adulthood, seeking emancipation from her family background, as well as economic independence, to realize her self beyond the artificial barriers imposed by poverty and gender. One understands that she does not remain in Montreal for long; that her marriage (to a character we never see directly, since he leaves for war) does not last; that her work, largely for radio and newspapers, is a stepping stone not an end goal. Beyond this, the stories themselves are a hybrid of narrative, memoir, and cultural essay, and thus exceedingly difficult to summarize. There seems little progression within stories, never mind from story to story, so that they can be read in any order (a point I will return to later on), and suggest writing from a remove. Primarily, they deal with Linnet’s awakening to the cultural and historical forces that beset her parents and which both shaped her and permitted her escape.

10 The first story in the sequence, “In Youth is Pleasure,” deals with Linnet’s uncovering of the circumstances of her father’s death, when she was a child, and which turned her life “into a helpless migration” (253).1 Part of this “helplessness” is her realization that the ultimate truth of her background, and who she is, cannot be uncovered, which prevents her emergence in a world governed by pre-emptive definitions: “In Canada you were whatever your father happened to be, which in my case was English” (253). The story is everywhere marked by identifications imposed rather than actual. Part of this imposition is the “prison” of her childhood self, a source of early oppression she is determined to free herself from (259). In the end, Linnet realizes that what saves her is not the truth of her origins, but the work of time (272), the inevitable change that makes a mockery of any enforced identity. This stands in contradistinction to what one male character in a later story remarks: “Change is always for the worse” (282). Unlike many of the men she meets, who cling to static modes of self-definition, Linnet comes to revel in the empowering force of change, in the alteration, transfiguration, reiteration of identity wrought by time.

11 The next story, “Between Zero and One,” explores Linnet’s place within the gendered environment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where she lands a job. The drama of the story derives from Mrs. Ireland, who competes in the male-dominated workplace by being even more misogynistic than the men she rises above. The title

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refers to Linnet’s musing, throughout, on the question of selfhood, the idea of being somewhere between nothing (“zero”) and fully realized (“one”): “What occupied the space between Zero and One? It must be something arbitrary, not in the natural order of numbers” (295). Ultimately it is this uncertainty upon which the story ends: Linnet figuring her passage from zero to one not as an arrival at selfhood, but selfhood as a perpetual question: “And what will happen at one? Yes, what will happen?” (298). This lack of arrival provides agency in the form of a perpetual self-fashioning, freed from permanent attachment to a fixed sense of identity.

12 “Varieties of Exile” deals with refugees, from the war or otherwise, each one figured as a “book” (299) she attempts to read, and defined by national, religious and political tags: “Belgian, French, Catholic German, Socialist German, Jewish, German, Czech” (299). The story is taken up with Linnet’s relationship to one refugee in particular, a “remittance man,” Frank Cairns, from England, disowned by his family for an unnamed sin (305) and sent into exile in Canada with a meagre allowance. Cairns ultimately dies fighting in Italy, leading Linnet to remark upon her tendency to regard the lives of others as “plots” in novels, or stereotypes enacted in fictions (300), which is her way of dealing with what she cannot “decipher” in life (300). Cairns’s death makes her remark that this strategy of “putting life through a sieve and then discarding it” is itself “another variety of exile” (322). Life is, in fact, what cannot be “sieved,” or made coherent. It resists encapsulation in plot.

13 “Voices Lost in Snow” tells of Linnet’s early life with her parents, prior to their divorce and the death of her father, Archie. The story treats the relationship between Archie and her godmother, nicknamed Georgie, who are on the cusp of an affair. The central scene—though the story ranges far and wide over the distant past—takes place in Georgie’s living room, where Archie tests her love for him. Ultimately, it is the presence of Linnet that prevents the affair. The relationship is compared to a game, in which Linnet, Archie’s daughter by another woman, is the “card” Georgie will not “gamble” on (337). Once again, social standards intervene on the realization of a life outside the sanctioned plot. That this life is compared to a card game underscores both the formal strictures under which characters conduct their relationships, but also the “play” that everywhere marks the cycle, where roles and friendships can be “discarded” (330) as if there were no more actuality to them than a parlor game. The experience reminds Linnet of the way “the most pointless sort of training” can be made to “seem a natural way of life” (328). The game, in other words, is real insofar as everyone participates in playing it.

14 The penultimate story, “The Doctor,” dwells on art (painting and writing) as a means of arresting the flux of life. The story depicts Linnet’s relations with Dr. Chauchard, her childhood physician, who, it turns out, has led a triple life: one as physician and friend to the Anglophone circle of Linnet’s parents; one as a Francophone doctor; and one as a published writer of poetry. Like the other stories, “The Doctor” dwells on the “pretense (339) of an intrinsic selfhood: “I called […] believing still that moi would take me anywhere” (341) says Linnet, learning late that there is no “moi” in the sense of an autonomous selfhood, but only the roles we are permitted to play. The story revisits categorical definitions derived from national, cultural and civic associations: “Montreal was a Scottish city” (346); “French was his language for medicine; I never heard him give an opinion in English” (346); “It did not enter the mind of any English speaker that the French were at a constant disadvantage” (348); “Once you have jumped out of a

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social enclosure, your eye is bound to be on a real, a geographical elsewhere; theirs seemed to consist of a few cities of Europe with agreeable sounding names like Vienna and Venice” (350). The “real” is a function of the “social enclosure,” the expectations of a particular social set. If there is any “transcendence” of this (362), the story suggests at the end, it is through the collision of the expectations of the different social sets to which one belongs.

15 Last, “With a Capital T” follows Linnet’s work for a newspaper, The Lantern. It opens with a long disquisition on the skills required to caption photographs in the paper, with the subversion that accompanies any deviation from the literal (365). The story culminates in Linnet’s meeting, once again, with Georgie, whom she has to interview for her work on a “committee” aiding the war effort. Both women fail to recognize each other beyond the social roles and stereotypes each attributes to the other. Georgie’s apartment building emblematizes imperial hegemony: “Designed to impress on the minds of indigenous populations that the builders had come to stay” (373). She brings this imperial imposition to her relationship with Linnet. Her smile is one of her many “instruments of repression” (375). But Linnet herself is capable of stereotypes: “How do you deal with life? her particular Canadian catechism asked. By ignoring its claims on feeling” (375). In the final passages we find that beyond the official account of Georgie’s committee work there is nothing to bind the two women, and that this account, in fact, establishes their “final remove from each other” (377). The official record eclipses any potential living relationship they might have had, but then that has always been the problem—the refusal of Georgie to regard Linnet as anything other than what her culture has conditioned her to regard in the younger woman.

16 For Linnet, then, Montreal is the scene of incompatible ideologies—English and French —whose meeting, rather than being a scene of confusion, enables her to offset one socially proscribed role against another (Selected XV). This “meeting,” and the opportunity it offers for subversion, is articulated throughout the cycle: This overlapping in one room of French and English, of Catholic and Protestant—my parents’ way of being, and so to me life itself—was as unlikely, as unnatural to the Montreal climate as a school of tropical fish. Only later would I discover that most other people simply floated in mossy little ponds labeled “French and Catholic” or “English and Protestant,” never wondering what it might be like to step ashore […] To be out of the pond is to be in unmapped territory […] My parents and their friends were, in their way, explorers […] Explorers like Dr. Chauchard and Mrs. Erskine and my mother and the rest recognized each other on sight; the recognition cut through disguisements of class, profession, religion, language, and even what poll takers call “other interests.” (349-50)

17 Linnet’s parents and their friends find themselves in “umapped territory” because they have dared to mingle irreconcilable social sets. The “recognition” this enables exposes “class, profession, religion, language” as “disguisements,” or roles. What emerges here is similar to what emerges from my earlier considerations of Gallant’s style, namely, that the human is not a stable content or a specific anything, but an action—a manipulation of various disguisements through which it articulates itself but to which it is never reducible. The mention of “poll takers” further complicates the easy transaction between the state and its machinery—such as the census—and that uncategorizable residue of agency, “other interests,” that always exceed the determinative categories statistics offers as an index of being. There is always a residue that results from categories brought to bear on any given person, e.g. something the category cannot account for, or which is anomalous in it. Here, statistics attempts to

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explain away this residue with the term, “other interests,” but “other” is so inchoate that, in the story, it indicates the provisionality of any category, including English/ Protestant or French/Catholic. These people are a community based on something “other” than the sanctioned ones. In fact, their affiliation rests on being “explorers,” those who transgress given limits to discover the new or unheard of. The divisions necessary to maintain categories are played upon, destabilized, cut through, though it is the very existence of categories that makes this possible.

18 The scene is one of “overlapping,” yet without diminishing the categories that overlap. “Life itself” is a “way of being” determined by social enclosures: French Catholic, English Protestant. “Life itself” is the play of intersecting cultural systems. More to the point, “self,” here, is not ontologically figured; rather, Gallant recognizes that selfhood appears in variously assigned social roles, foreshadowing Judith Butler’s similar assessment, fifteen years later, that selfhood exists only as “discursive practices” or performances of socially assigned roles (148). The “fishpond” scene is characterized by hybridity, in which, by virtue of the mingling of mutually exclusive performances, the idea of an intrinsic identity is destabilized. Self appears as a social “practice”; as such, it becomes open to the particularities of the scene of that practice, permitting it to be deformed and subverted. A new kind of society emerges: pluralistic, improvisatory, experimental. The self, likewise, becomes the scene of a pluralistic voicing of multiplicity in the form of various disguisements.

19 Lesley D. Clement argues that these displacements reflect “the value of perspective, proportion, context, composition, and coloration in projecting [a] vision of the world where multiplicity, depth, and the invisible must be acknowledged” (168). While Clement is speaking of what Gallant, in the alter ego of Linnet, knows as a writer, she demonstrates how the stories undermine “federalism” by continually recalling the point of view in any “composition” of scene. Questions of “perspective,” “proportion,” “context” lead to an “acknowledgment” of “multiplicity,” “depth” and the “invisible.” In bringing together various viewpoints, Gallant “acknowledges” a “multiplicity” that breaks down social norms. By mingling and transecting normative categories, in other words by enacting “multiplicity,” these people undermine sanction itself. Their ways of life have “depth” and are “invisible” since they do not openly oppose or stand apart from the social order but rather redistribute elements of it in unexpected ways. There is no abiding in categories.

Is that “I” or is it “Me?”

20 In Gallant, then, the “scene of disjunction” that features so prominently in Andersen (i.e. where the individual stands in opposition to society) is untenable. Gallant’s cycle does not set an internal subjectivity against an external society, but collapses the boundary between them. Linnet is a community, the scene of a radical mingling. Thus, at the end of “The Doctor,” she presents us with the difference between the dream of an essential self and a self always emerging in the variations of sanctioned performance. This arises in her discussion of Dr. Chauchard’s secret lives: I am sure that it was his real voice, the voice that transcends this or that language. His French-speaking friends did not hear it for a long time […] while his English- speaking friends never heard it at all. But I should have heard it then, at the start, standing on tiptoe to reach the doorbell, calling through the letter box every way I

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could think of, “I, me.” I ought to have heard it when I was still under ten and had all my wits about me. (Truths 362)

21 The “real voice” that “transcends” language is what Linnet feels she should have heard in her own “call,” the “I, me” that, instead of recognizing a singular selfhood recognizes self as a series of options provided by social education: self articulated in “every way [Linnet] could think of.” What “transcends,” paradoxically, is the sheer variety of possible articulations, which seems to breach the limits of confinement. This is precisely Chauchard’s “true self”: the imaginative exercise of a multi-faceted identity. It is also, not accidentally, what writers do: enact other possible contexts for and combinations of identity/identities. It is Linnet’s desire to be seen and heard that is transcendent, the call as yet unarrived to definitive identity, unappeased by any given category, always in exile. Ronald Hatch comments on this vis-à-vis “Varieties of Exile”: “The act of writing, then, has been a kind of exile, an exile from life” (112). Note that I am not talking here of writing as “refuge” from life, but as the material trace of a desire to exceed the given. One of the ironies here is that writing in fact concretizes “the story,” sets it into “plot,” makes character as inalterable as ink on the page. Gallant’s challenge is to create a mode of writing that always calls itself into question: displacing the dream of a definitive self with the possibility of unexpected transformation and fragmentation. The “Linnet Muir” cycle reminds us, through language and structure, of the inevitable passing and transformation and misprecision of any assertion of selfhood, which never articulates the “I, me” definitively, but only through the “many ways” given us to “think of.”

Stories like Doorways

22 In each of the stories that constitute the “Linnet Muir” cycle, Gallant examines the disparity between the materiality of text and the fleeting voice. Critics have noted that Gallant’s texts are frequently the scene of a writing against definitive rendering. Danielle Schaub argues that Gallant’s syntax and structure work to reinforce the limitations and entrapment of the social, political and economic life of Montreal (Shaub, Gallant 100-01); at the same time, by an effect of “layering” disjunctive elements (“memory,” “historical time,” and “spatial reflection”), the prose also works against the emergence of a monolithic frame of reference. The stories disclose the “multiple facets” of experience (Gallant 111). Karen Smythe comments that Gallant’s stories, despite being materially stable, prevent a “single reading” (“Home” 107), and connects this with the lack of “consensus” over what constitutes the Canadian, and that “truth” is not a permanent condition but an unending process, the generation of “stories” (Smythe, “Home” 109). Neil Besner suggests that the ending of “The Doctor” draws attention to a “language defeated by time” (138), recognizing the transformation of utterance by historicity. Janice Kulyk Keefer argues that Gallant illuminates the “insubstantiality not of language, but of human definitions and evasions of time” (58). Thus, language is substance, or substantial, but to be distinguished from what we attempt to render in language: ephemerality itself. Our definitions cannot stand for long. For all its materiality, Gallant’s language reflects “her recognition of the inefficacy of our power over time, of our attempts, through memory and fictions, to control the past and direct the future” (Keefer 58). What becomes visible in her text is a

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medium at odds with itself, yet another irresolvable conflict, or scene of discordance, that articulates another kind of many-voicedness.

23 The stories of “Linnet Muir” circle around this treatment of the ephemerality, amorphousness and structurelessness of time (75) in relation to individual agency (77). In speaking of Gallant’s “novel,” Green Water, Green Sky (itself a collection of discrete stories), Keefer enlarges upon the failure of containing experience within narrative limits, the failure of “self-definition through closure” (142). As the end of “The Doctor” tells us, rather than mobilizing closure for the purposes of delimiting self, and thus having a self, Linnet reminds us that one is, more often than not, enabled precisely by resisting closure, and its limiting of self to determinate coordinates. As Smythe writes, “If to lose ‘home’ is to experience psychic dislocation, then exiled ‘travellers’ must find contentment—consolation—in imaginary realms” (Smythe, Grief 52). “Contentment” and “consolation” are not to be found in physical locations, but in the “imaginary,” in cognitive release from precedent. To continually embark is to resist the entrapment of having arrived.

Homeward Bound

24 The loss of home Smythe remarks on is a continual process throughout the “Linnet Muir” cycle. Exile most notably informs the story “Varieties of Exile,” which probes various forms of displacement. From the “refugees” (Truth 299) that appear in the first sentence, to Linnet’s fascination with exile (300), to Frank Cairns the “remittance man” (305), to the veterans with whom Linnet works and who are reminded by Linnet’s marriage of their own “war and separation” (318), the stories everywhere evoke deracination. The story also points out that exile can be, given a certain disposition, liberating. Linnet derides the “same situation” (300) that encompasses all women in Canada, connecting definition and location in her critique. To be located, to be spatially fixed, is detrimental. Even biological succession, with its genetic inheritance, is an enclosure: “As for a family, the promise of children all stamped with the same face, cast in the same genetic mold, seemed a cruel waste of possibilities. I would never have voiced this to anyone, for it would have been thought unnatural, even monstrous” (301). Linnet would prefer to “voice” “possibility”; as the story and cycle suggest, possibility is continually voiced only by de-situating the self, making instrumental use of our mutual state of exile.

25 Frank Cairns allows himself to be determined by one specific plot, mistaking the condition of his story with his actual condition. Linnet, by contrast, recognizes that we are never “at home” in any given plot, and thus can always escape: “Like all superfluous and marginal persons, remittance men were characters in a plot. The plot began with a fixed scene, an immutable first chapter, which described a powerful father’s taking umbrage at his son’s misconduct and ordering him out of the country” (305). Cairns’s problem—as his name indicates—is that he permits himself to become a memorial to a cultural practice; he has taken residence within his exile, has accepted the dominance of the “home” nation that determines his “plot.” His exile institutes a fixed condition. It is not surprising that he dies fighting for a colony. In contrast, Linnet determines a way out of this condition not by envisaging exile as an unnatural remove from where we belong, but as our inability to ever achieve belonging, or what Diane Simmons refers to as the “full infirmity” of an “inner sense of exile” (29).

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26 Throughout the cycle, Gallant questions the delimitation of self either by an internalizing of geo-political coordinates, or by an isolation of self from one’s current social and geographical condition. Instead, we have a selfhood of competing social forces, which, because of the contextual particularities of every scene wherein this competition occurs, always interact to different effect, calling into question their ability to produce a stable category of subject. This idea—in which the multiplicity of forces acting upon/enacted by the individual short circuit determinism—fits with the “negotiated” subject Margot Kelley describes in her essay on “novels-in-stories”: By foregrounding the constructedness of the characters’ identities, and by recapitulating the formal discontinuities at the level of characterization, novel-in- stories writers prompt us to think about the characters (and, by extension, the subjects more generally) as multiply identified, as entities for whom identity is relational and, equally significant, negotiated. (305)

27 Kelley’s gendered reading of the short story cycle and Gallant “foregrounds” the inseparability of subject from social context. This is evident in Gallant in the aforementioned fishpond scene where various cultural voices compete with, and contradict, and cancel, each other’s privilege. While her subjects rely on various discourses to articulate themselves, the discourses are unable to gain primacy because their conflict and interdependence allow them to be recombined in unexpected and thus uncontrollable ways. As Kelley says, the “subject is aware of its multiple, ideologically interpolated subject-positions and, in fact, consequently is able to act subversively” (305). The knowledge that one has only the variety of social discourses to work with, rather than being a source of despair, is a source of power, since it foregrounds the disconnect between subject and category, permitting a play upon rather than adherence to social categories.

28 Thus, Gallant’s short story cycle demonstrates that “identity is constituted through relations with other subjects, and is continually negotiated and renegotiated, making identity itself a somewhat evanescent phenomenon” (Kelley 306). “The Doctor” makes evident how the continual “renegotiation” of identity, in all its “evanescence,” liberates the subject from definitive position. The performance of selfhood undermines the culture that sets the standards of and demands that performance. “Voices Lost in Snow” depicts Linnet’s escape, through memory, from the “web” (331) of surveillance and education foisted upon children (326). By recalling the “voices lost,” Linnet becomes conscious of herself not as a seamless subject, blind to the forces acting upon her, but as a node of competing voices which she can manage by playing them off one another. “In Youth is Pleasure” details Linnet’s “fascination” with the absence of “cause and effect,” first vis-à-vis her mother’s behavior (251), then its manufacture and maintenance in the capitalist and patriarchal world (260) of Montreal to enforce a banal reality. Against this positivistic plot, Linnet mobilizes chance, luck, and the arbitrary, until reality becomes a proliferation of questions that can only be dealt with by an acceptance of “irrational endings to life” (270)—the absence of causality. “Between Zero and One” comments upon the determination of self by a society that ascribes presence to the masculine and absence to the feminine, with Linnet coming to understand that she dwells within the infinite space—the fractions of fractions— between nullity and an indivisible (but illusory) presence. Working at the CBC, in whose offices much of the story takes place, she describes the regard there for women: “The salary was seventy-five dollars a month, which was less than a man’s if he was doing the same work […] When I protested that I had the same expenses as any bachelor and

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did not live at home, it was countered by a reasonable ‘Where you live is up to you.’ They looked on girls as parasites of a kind, always being taken to restaurants and fed by men” (293). She has no claim on the work men do, even if she is doing it, nor on the reward, even if she deserves it. When she says she has the same material needs as a man (“bachelor”) she is not so much countered as unheard. They see her as “parasitical,” existing only by virtue of the male presence. “Varieties of Exile” charts the power of fiction to make sense of the “knots” (300) of our historicity through the imaginative exercise of fictional rendering. Finally, “With a Capital T” explores the gap between meaning and what is said (363-64). The story examines how what is perceived and what is said cannot be made to match, so that “homesickness” (372) is the desire to recover loss whose vocabulary manifests in terms of place, with Linnet claiming that one’s geographical location is not analogous to one’s ontological condition. One is always embarking on the journey home, never arriving.

Story to Story to Story

29 In keeping with the absence of home, or origin, the cycle remarks on its inability to be sequential, since there can be no journey from point A to point B if point A cannot be determined. In its first appearance, in the collection entitled Home Truths, the stories were presented in an order different from that found in the later Selected Stories, which instead presents them chronologically, and leaves out “With a Capital T,” the story that earlier ended the cycle. This suggests that the stories can stand rearrangement. As Gallant remarks in the introduction to Selected Stories, even in this chronological presentation the stories are not to be thought of in the federalizing sequence: “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along” (Selected xix). Since this volume includes almost all of the “Linnet Muir” cycle, Gallant clearly does not conceive of their narrative along a continuum, much less suggesting that they should be read as a set, without other unconnected stories intervening. Gallant encourages a random and even capricious reading and interpretive experience. This, in contrast to an arrangement that is authoritative, forcing the reader along predetermined linkages.

30 Thus the various relations between the stories suggest, in the absence of an A to B developmental sequence, or the wholesale dropping of stories altogether, that Linnet’s “development” can be continually recomposed. Selfhood becomes radically contextual. While Linnet preserves her agency by tuning in, or tuning out, various voices, such as that of Mrs. Ireland at the end of “Between Zero and One” (297-98), disconnecting them from relevance to herself, Gallant suggests that self is exactly this occasion of “tuning.” Mrs. Ireland advises her not to marry, that it’s a trap preventing her emancipation, just as she herself is not free because of her oppressive marriage (297): “‘Don’t you girls ever know when you’re well off? Now you’ve got no one to lie to you, to belittle you, to make a fool of you, to stab you in the back’” (298). Linnet remarks: “But we were different—different ages, different women, two lines of a graph that could never cross” (298). The takeaway, for Linnet, is not Mrs. Ireland’s advice, but her failure to see Linnet at all, superimposing on the younger woman only her own experience with patriarchal oppression. In fact, Mrs. Ireland has tuned out Linnet from the start, and this is suggestive not of Linnet’s failings, as Mrs. Ireland would have it, but of her own. By contrast, Linnet peers beyond her own horizon to realize something of her co-

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worker: that self is always determined in reference to others. The self is less developmentally determined—moving experience by experience to full realization— than the scene of a constant negotiation, always in reference to material and temporal conditions, neither self-determining nor reducible to circumstance—always in “the passage [...] between Zero and One” (298).

31 Because self is the scene of competing voices, Gallant enacts selfhood as simultaneous participation in and distinction from given discourses. If, as Ferguson suggests, “[Sherwood] Anderson uses a recurrent principal character [in Winesburg, Ohio…] whose development is a thread throughout, and whose departure from Winesburg is the culminating moment, the ‘way out’ of the book” (107), then Linnet’s “development” is not the storing, compacting and summarizing of experience into a transcendental “way out” of historicity. Rather, “development” is an awareness of the individual—including individual memory—as always “inside,” negotiating selfhood in the processing of discourse, which constitute not only the tools through which self is articulated but its very substance. In Gallant’s stories, “reality [...] cannot be so easily dissociated from the perception of it” (Clement 166). Hatch also notes that Gallant’s “work reveals time and again the impossibility of divorcing content from perception” (93). The only scene of reality is the matter of its processing. Nor is the artist exempt from this.

32 “Linnet Muir” thus dramatizes one of the recurring problems in mid- to late-twentieth century literature: in the absence of a definitive “origin,” in the realization that “true voice” is nothing but an improvisation with given voices, how is one to politicize selfhood? How can there be a critique in the absence of definitive boundaries between artist and society? If Anderson regards the individual in exile in the midst of society, then Gallant regards the individual in exile from self, or at least the autonomous self that makes the alienation of Winesburg, Ohio possible.

33 To return to Cox, rather than a federalizing schema, in which a developmental logic exists outside of and organizes each of the stories to some end, Gallant’s cycle is democratic, organized not by supersession or subordination, but by an equal right to speak and be heard. This protest is evident in “The Doctor” when Linnet recalls, “There came a point like convergent lines finally meeting where orders to dogs and instructions to children were given in the same voice” (349). Children and dogs receive similar address, meant to negate their presence in adult company. The irony is that Linnet ultimately becomes the “voice” of these grown-ups in writing the story of their silencing her. In the end, everyone speaks, and Linnet is not a gradually accumulating but still singular self that parses experience and carries forward what is useful, but rather a node for voices, a community of self. There is no dispensing with, or escape from, community, because it is the possibility of selfhood.

34 The endings of each story bear out Linnet’s recognition of the community constituent of self. “In Youth is Pleasure” ends on a series of “mysteries” (271) around why her parents sent her to convent school: neither to make her “tolerant” (271); nor to help her with “French” (271), a language she was already fluent in; nor to provide the “discipline” she already had (272). There is only her parents’ decision, still informing her. “Between Zero and One” suggests that a fully realized selfhood will not be achieved (298), only a selfhood maintained by the “squares and walls and limits and numbers” (298) of her workplace, and the roles forced upon women by a patriarchal society (274). “Varieties of Exile” closes with Linnet’s admission that writing—“putting life through a sieve and then discarding it”—is “right and [...] natural” (322), suggesting

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that “nature,” far from being an essential marker, is also a discourse. “Voices Lost in Snow” fades on the image of a card offered but not accepted, the preference of life lived according to a paradigm of “building”—conservative, safe, isolating—rather than “gambling”—risky, uncertain, unsanctioned (337). “The Doctor” finishes on the realization that Linnet should have heard the “true” voice when she was “under ten and had all [her] wits about [her]” (362), stressing again the importance of listening to what, for better or worse, offers a transcendence via the system, rather than to someplace outside it, by alerting Linnet to the many voices whose continual reactivation keeps alive a story in excess of its plot. It keeps alive all the possible stories, the choices that were made, the choices that weren’t, those that could be contained in the telling, those that could only be touched upon, and those that provide openings or questions never to be resolved.

35 “With a Capital T” finds Linnet making a final visit to her godmother, where she realizes that she “did not forget [Georgie], but [...] forgot about her” (377; italics mine). Here, what she forgets about her godmother, and thus calls on us to remember, is the “aboutness” that is necessary if we are to remember the other not as an existent within solipsistic memory, but in all her otherness, the particularities of her life that we are not privy to. Linnet’s last word on their relationship is one of “final remove” (377), while for her godmother she must have seemed “seamless, and as smooth as brass,” giving “no opening” (377). The refusal or inability to remember a person’s circumstances (“aboutness”) beyond our expectations of them is to remember nothing but a name, or the official record in a newspaper. The final paragraph of the story brings us back to the “dog” Linnet earlier compares her childhood self to: “Nobody spoke up for the one legacy the trustees would have relinquished: a dog named Minnie” (378) who belonged to Georgie, and was perhaps the one creature for whose life the old woman showed consideration (374). But of course, Linnet speaks up for her, and, through Linnet, Gallant. Even in Linnet’s inability to speak to Georgie’s final condition Linnet gives her voice, albeit one as mysterious and removed as her parents’ reasons for sending her to boarding school. That no one speaks for the dog speaks volumes about Georgie’s life, and the acuity with which we (as Linnet does) should attend to it.

One of Many Possible Conclusions

36 Here, Gallant’s notion of community becomes most compelling. For if self is a series of discontinuous stories—the discrete moments occasioned by the various props and scripts given to us, and through which self appears—then self is made visible in interaction. These interactions, all of them presented as surfaces without cores (or surfaces to the core), in effect turn Linnet’s memory inside out, until it, too, becomes surface, another moment occasioned by interaction. By interaction I do not mean only the actions and reactions that pass between characters, but the indivisibility of self from other. Selfhood is never possessed but granted, occasioned through encounter. Thus, selfhood is dispersed between subjects, a matter of community. As a result, there is no possibility for alienation as Anderson presents it in Winesburg, Ohio, where it arises from atomization, from individuals’ isolation from one another and thus society. Instead, Gallant’s alienation arises in the context of indissociability, the impossibility of distinguishing self from other. In “Linnet Muir,” the short story cycle plays upon its contradictory characteristics of being discrete and yet unified, presenting stories that

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suggest a larger narrative, but, because we cannot “tell them apart,” or devise a framework that would give them summative order, present us with the fear that terrorizes selfhood: the inability to tell ourselves apart from the people, places, and times through which we are variously made to appear.

37 Thus Gallant employs the short story cycle to de- and then re-situate the self in context. If linear progression marks the short story sequence, then Gallant’s stories refuse to posit origin except in retrospect, based upon the current situation of the subject; she jettisons the model of causal development that permits for a concept of selfhood in isolation from its various occasions. What characterizes the stories is not the linkages that make them “belong together,” but the paucity of such linkages, how the stories drift and resist cohesion. There is no possible generalization to be made regarding the stories en masse, until what becomes remarkable is the failure of such a generalization to emerge. Gallant thus challenges the critic who would seek to address the short story sequence, forcing him or her toward the negative rather than positive side of “connection,” namely, that the stories might not connect, might, in fact, be held together only by the desire to transform doubt into certainty, question into definition, and then, in a twist, to celebrate this incapacity as the source of attendance on the voice, heard or unheard, of the other. What emerges is the importance of attending to the present, to the day-to-day, to the plurality of voices, the community, through which we articulate our selves, and through which those selves are, in the same gesture, articulated. This is the politic of “Linnet Muir,” and Gallant’s signature contribution to the short story cycle.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print.

Besner, Neil K. The Light of the Imagination: Mavis Gallant’s Fiction. Vancouver: U British Columbia P, 1988. Print.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Cox, James M. “Regionalism: A Diminished Thing.” The Columbia Literary History of the United States. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. 761-84. Print.

Clement, Lesley D. Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s UP, 2000. Print.

Ferguson, Suzanne. “Sequences, Anti-Sequences, Cycles, and Composite Novels: The Short Story in Genre Criticism.” Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (2003): 103-17. Print.

Gallant, Mavis. Green Water, Green Sky. Toronto: MacMillan, 1983. Print.

---. “With a Capital T.” Home Truths. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. Print.

---. The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996. Print.

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---. “The Writer in the State.” Queen’s Quarterly 19.1 (1992): 91-104. Print.

Hatch, Ronald. “The Three Stages of Mavis Gallant’s Fiction.” Canadian Fiction Magazine 28 (1978): 92-114. Print.

Irvine, Lorna. “Starting from the Beginning Every Time.” Colby Quarterly 29.2 (June 1993): 119-25. Print.

Keefer, Janice Kulyk. Reading Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1989. Print.

Kelley, Margot. “Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-in-Stories.” American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1995. 295-310. Print.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. “From Anderson’s Winesburg to Carver’s Cathedral: The Short Story Sequence and the Semblance of Community.” Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 194-215. Print.

---. “Introduction: The American Short Story Sequence—Definitions and Implications.” Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. vii-xv. Print.

---. “Toward a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle. “ Journal of the Short Story in English 11 (1998): 9-25. Print.

Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Eds. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. Print.

Lynch, Gerald. The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2001. Print.

New, W.H. Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1987. Print.

Schaub, Danielle. Mavis Gallant. New York: Twayne, 1998. Print.

---. “Squeezed ‘Between Zero and One’: Feminine Space in Mavis Gallant’s Home Truths.” Recherches Anglaises et Nord Americaines 22 (1989): 53-59. Print.

Schaub, Thomas Hill. American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1991. Print.

Simmons, Diane. “Remittance Men: Exile and Identity in the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.” Canadian Women Writing Fiction. Ed. Mickey Pearlman. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1993. 28-40. Print.

Smythe, Karen. Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1992. Print.

---. “The ‘Home Truth’ about Home Truths: Gallant’s Ironic Introduction.” Double Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Canadian Contemporary Art and Literature. Ed. Linda Hutcheon. Toronto: ECW, 1992. 106-14. Print.

NOTES

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations for the Linnet Muir cycle are taken from the volume, Gallant, Mavis. Home Truths. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001.

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ABSTRACTS

La série de nouvelles Linnet Muir de Mavis Gallant critique les « significations plus grandes » sensées inclure les histoires individuelles. Cette critique est particulièrement observable dans la description de l’individualité de Linnet, dont les paramètres sont constamment renégociés tout au long du cycle. En articulant les voix de la communauté dans laquelle elle a évolué pendant son enfance et lorsqu’elle était jeune adulte, Linnet suggère que le moi n’est pas construit en opposition face aux pressions sociales, mais qu’il en est indissociable. En même temps, le fait d’articuler les voix de sa communauté lui permet d’échapper à leur logique déterministe, précisément parce que les voix dialoguent continuellement, négociant une réalité sur laquelle elles sont en désaccord, et parce que leur orchestration crée toujours une variation supplémentaire quant à la signification première du passé et du présent. Dans cette variabilité presque infinie, Linnet saisit son libre arbitre et échappe à ce que les autres voudraient qu’elle soit, c’est-à-dire à la signification déterministe à laquelle on aimerait la subordonner, elle et son histoire. Au lieu de ce déterminisme, Gallant propose un pluralisme radical, une « communauté de moi ». Elle adapte la série de nouvelles à une vision politique dans laquelle le libre arbitre du sujet s’accomplit dans et à travers la communauté oppressante.

AUTHORS

TAMAS DOBOZY Tamas Dobozy is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, Canada. He has published three books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, Last Notes and Other Stories, and, most recently, Siege 13: Stories, which won the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award: Fiction, and the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He has published over fifty short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, and won an O. Henry Prize in 2011. His scholarly work—on music, utopianism, American literature, the short story, and post- structuralism—have appeared in journals such as Canadian Literature, Genre, The Canadian Review of American Studies, Mosaic, and Modern Fiction Studies, among others.

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Tim O’Brien as Grail Knight: “On the Rainy River”

Jay Ruud

1 When former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, architect of the war, said in his 1995 book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam that “We were wrong, terribly wrong” (xx) in our conduct of that war, he was merely admitting, finally, what a large number of 19-year old draftees had been utterly convinced of twenty-five years earlier. “One, two, three, what are we fightin’ for?” sang Country Joe and the Fish, and nobody, least of all the politicians, had a convincing answer. It is important to remember this background when reading a story like Tim O’Brien’s “On the Rainy River” or the story will be woefully misunderstood. Few readers of O’Brien’s fiction, fascinated by the grim details of the brutal war, know what to make of this curious story, and readers seldom mention the story’s ironic punch-line, when the young protagonist of the semi- autobiographical The Things They Carried, whose name also happens to be Tim O’Brien, decides not to flee to Canada, and writes with bitter irony “I was a coward. I went to the war” (63).

2 There was a shift in public perception of the war that was ushered in with the Reagan presidency. Reagan, who said famously of the Vietnam War on the eve of the election of 1980, “It’s time that we recognized that ours was in truth a noble cause,” also famously embraced Bruce Springsteen’s protest anthem about the plight of an unemployed Vietnam veteran, “Born in the USA,” as a great patriotic song that he wanted to use in his 1984 reelection campaign. Reagan, of course, had only listened to the chorus. When O’Brien came to write his book in 1990, twenty-two years after his experience, the United States was on the verge of “kick[ing] the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” in the words of George H.W. Bush, in Operation Desert Storm. Thus O’Brien writes the book as a kind of corrective to the revisionist view of history that had come to prevail, and continues to prevail, among American conservatives.

3 O’Brien opens “On the Rainy River” with a statement of reversed values: he begins by talking about heroism, and his desire as a child to be the Lone Ranger, to “behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit” (43). It becomes apparent by the second page, however, that—contrary to his

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post-Reagan era readers—he is not thinking about the opportunity for heroic deeds on the field of battle that the Vietnam War might provide him. Instead, he says in no uncertain terms that “the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong […] It was my view then,” he goes on, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead. (44)

4 O’Brien makes it clear from the beginning of the story that this war is not a place where heroes go. The courageous choice is instead the Canadian option. In the end, the character O’Brien makes his decision to go to the war not because he decides to do his duty—although I know many student readers oblivious to the facts of the story who read it this way—but because he is a coward. As Christopher Kocela notes, O’Brien “defamiliarizes” the Vietnam War for his readers: “the end of the story defies expectations by portraying this decision as a cowardly act, thereby reversing the poles of a certain conventional, nationalistic morality that depicts war veterans as heroes and draft dodgers as cowards” (86). What Canada means for the protagonist is salvation, renewal, hope, and the restoration of a fruitful life.

5 The most common symbol of renewal and restoration, at least in western literature, has traditionally been the mythic quest for the Grail, an archetypal pattern with roots deep in O’Brien’s Celtic background. It is my contention here that O’Brien’s story is essentially a modernized retelling of the Grail legend. In most versions of the legend, the goal of the quest is seldom the physical Grail itself, but rather what that object symbolizes. In the earliest legends, the Grail Knight is not searching for the Grail, but is expected to ask the right question about it. In Thomas Malory and his medieval French sources, the Grail is synonymous with the Beatific Vision. In O’Brien, Canada itself is the Grail, the attaining of which will bring about renewal.

6 The river itself is important in this regard. Rivers are archetypal liminal symbols, marking passage from one state to another. Kocela compares O’Brien’s Rainy River to the classical river marking the soul’s passage into the underworld, and calls it “a self- reflexive comment on the ‘mythic’ aspect of O’Brien’s fiction” (91). Acknowledging this mythic aspect, I suggest that here the river has more in common with the river of the Grail legend, where the Fisher King resides. In general, O’Brien is drawing not on the “Holy Grail” as authors of the High Middle Ages through Malory depicted it, but the pagan Grail, likely born in Celtic myth, whose origins in fertility rituals were described, almost certainly erroneously, by Jessie L. Weston in her 1920 study From Ritual to Romance.1 Essentially, according to Weston, the core of the Grail Myth involves the task of the Grail Knight, which is to heal the Fisher King, whose wound (affecting his genitals) has caused his country to become a Waste Land. If the knight can somehow heal the Fisher King through the power of the Grail, then the fertility of the land will be restored along with the wholeness of the king. In practice, of course, this is not what happens even in the earliest known versions of the Grail story, but Weston’s rendering is pivotal because of its influence on T.S. Eliot’s epoch-defining poem The Waste Land (1922), and to a lesser extent on texts like Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) —with post-war Paris as a waste land and the impotent Jake Barnes as the wounded Fisher King—and In Our Time (1925), which ends with the psychologically wounded Nick Adams trout-fishing in the woods of Michigan.

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7 Hemingway is the writer to whom Tim O’Brien is most often compared because of their mutual interest in the subject matter of combat and their efforts to portray the truth of war and its traumatic effects on the psyche. Certainly O’Brien must be aware of the towering presence of Hemingway, even if he rejects Hemingway’s style and code; therefore, it should be no surprise that “On the Rainy River” is what Lucas Carpenter calls “a parody of Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River’” (48). O’Brien’s story comes near the beginning of his collection of semi-autobiographical stories about Vietnam; Hemingway’s comes at the end of his collection of semi-autobiographical stories about World War I. In both cases, the protagonist is fishing in a site far from the intrusive presence of others. Both are using the time to deal with inner demons. But in Nick Adams’ case, it is the trauma of the war experience itself that must be dealt with; in the case of Tim O’Brien the protagonist, it is the inner turmoil about how to respond to his draft notice that puts him into a moral quandary throughout the story and brings him to the Rainy River at last. In what may well be a conscious flip-side of Hemingway’s story, O’Brien describes what might be called a kind of “pre-traumatic stress.”

8 O’Brien’s familiarity with the Grail legend is suggested by Lucas Carpenter, who calls the title character of O’Brien’s 1978 novel Going After Cacciato “a postmodern parody of the Fisher King” (46). In that novel, Cacciato attempts to fish in the “lake country”—an area of bomb craters filled with water, before he decides to go AWOL and head toward Paris. Paul Berlin, the novel’s protagonist, struggles mightily with the idea of making a separate peace himself (like Cacciato and, incidentally, Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms) and the novel is largely a fantasy of doing just that. In the climax (an imaginary confrontation between Berlin and Sarkin Aung Wan, his Vietnamese girlfriend) around an imagined conference table in Paris, Berlin comes to a moment of truth: will he choose personal happiness, independence, and regeneration—or will he choose conformity and “duty” as seen by his family and others? As Grail Knight, will he ask the right question? “‘Do not be deceived by false obligation,’” Sarkin tells him. “‘Do not let fear stop you. Do not be frightened by ridicule or censure or embarrassment, do not fear name-calling, do not fear the scorn of others. For what is true obligation? Is it not the obligation to pursue a life of peace with itself?’” (O’Brien, Cacciato 318). But Berlin—the failed Grail Knight—responds: “I confess that what dominates is the dread of abandoning all that I hold dear. I am afraid of running away. I am afraid of exile. I fear what might be thought of me by those I love. I fear the loss of their respect. I fear the loss of my own reputation. Reputation, as read in the eyes of my father and mother, the people in my hometown, my friends. I fear being an outcast. I fear being thought of as a coward. I fear that even more than cowardice itself.” (320)

9 The sentiments are very nearly those of O’Brien in the climax of “On the Rainy River.”

10 O’Brien’s later novel, In the Lake of the Woods (1994) returns to the Grail myth in its own way. Here the protagonist John Wade, a Vietnam veteran who has sought to suppress his complicity in atrocities at My Lai, is himself the wounded Fisher King, psychologically crippled as he takes his boat around the huge expanse of the Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota, searching for his lost wife whom he may or may not have murdered.2

11 The motif of the Grail quest and the Fisher King seems central to O’Brien’s vision, and a wider understanding of what this motif means in his work is suggested by the story “On the Rainy River,” in which the Grail theme is distilled and appears in its most complete form. I suggest that O’Brien, like Hemingway, makes conscious use of the Grail legend,

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but where in Hemingway’s story the myth is merely alluded to rather vaguely, O’Brien uses it in a more detailed and somewhat more sophisticated manner. I outline the story in some detail below, because the details of the story are important in demonstrating its parallels with the traditional Grail myth.

12 “On the Rainy River” opens in the summer of 1968, with the narrator declaring his admiration for heroes like the Lone Ranger, and his secret belief that, in a situation of moral clarity, “If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough,” he would make the courageous choice (44). Upon graduation from Macalester College, he is drafted at the age of 21. Like most college students, he opposed the war, and had “rung doorbells,” he says, for Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, the “peace” candidate who had first challenged LBJ in the democratic primaries that spring. The draft notice puts him in a quandary that eats away at him the entire summer. Far from being the situation of his Lone Ranger fantasies, the war looms as morally suspect: “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons,” he says. “I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty” (44). And this is what he is expected to die for? His first reaction is rage at being drafted over others who blindly and loudly supported the war. As the summer wears on and the day of his induction draws closer, the rage subsides, and the narrator languishes in doubt and numbness. “The only certainty that summer,” he says, “was moral confusion” (44).

13 The narrator spends the summer in the Armour meatpacking plant in his home town of Worthington, Minnesota, where for eight hours every day he removes blood clots from the necks of dead pigs with a water gun. Surrounded by the smell of death all day, he says, “All around me the options seemed to be narrowing, as if I were hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole world squeezing in tight” (47). There seems to be no way out.

14 By the middle of July, the narrator says that he began “thinking seriously about Canada” (48). Canada becomes in his mind a refuge, a place he can go to escape induction and avoid the morally unprincipled act of fighting in this war. What keeps him back from this step, however, is his sense of shame. He knows what the public reaction will be in his small town: “I feared ridicule and censure […] it was easy to imagine people sitting around a table down at the old Gobbler Café on Main Street, coffee cups poised, the conversation slowly zeroing in on the young O’Brien kid, how the damned sissy had taken off for Canada” (48).

15 When the narrator finally cracks, it is with a physical sensation: “a crackling-leaking- popping feeling […] I just concentrated on holding myself together” (49). He drives eight hours north in a kind of daze, until he comes to the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada. Driving along the river, he comes to a ramshackle place called the “Tip-Top Lodge” where he pulls in to rest. The place is run by Elroy Berdahl, a skinny, bald eighty-one year old caretaker with sharp eyes that the narrator says seemed to be “slicing me open” (51). Berdahl tells him dinner is at 5:30 and asks whether he likes fish.

16 The narrator spends six days with Berdahl at the Tip-Top Lodge, still struggling over what to do. His conscience tells him to flee to Canada, but his sense of shame, he says, is “like a weight pushing me toward the war” (54): I did not want people to think badly of me. Not my parents, not my brother and sister, not even the folks down at the Gobbler Café. I was ashamed to be there at the

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Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing. (54-55)

17 During his stay at the lodge, the narrator helps Berdahl out with repairs around the place, and Berdahl ultimately gives the narrator $200, ostensibly for the work he has done, though it seems clear that the old man is trying to help finance the narrator’s flight to Canada.

18 On his final day, Berdahl takes the narrator out in a boat fishing on the Rainy River. When the narrator realizes that Berdahl has brought the boat to some twenty yards from the Canadian shore, he asserts “I could’ve done it. I could’ve jumped and started swimming for my life. Inside me, in my chest, I felt a terrible squeezing pressure. Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness” (59).

19 But the narrator ultimately can’t bring himself to make the leap. His motives are quite similar to those of Paul Berlin in Going After Cacciato: he has a vision of hundreds of people—his own past and future, dead soldiers, dead villagers, all cheering him on to one shore or the other. “All those eyes on me—the town, the whole universe—and I couldn’t risk the embarrassment […] I couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule […] I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to” (61-62).

20 Berdahl finally turns the boat back to the lodge with the enigmatic comment “Ain’t biting” (62). He has said nothing throughout the incident, but was, the narrator says, the one true witness: “like God, or like the gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them” (62). When O’Brien leaves the next morning, the old man is gone: “I do know that by the time I’d finished packing the old man had disappeared. Around noon, when I took my suitcase out to the car, I noticed that his old black pickup truck was no longer parked in front of the house” (62).

21 As the story ends, the narrator makes his way through the familiar prairie towns, then, he says, to Vietnam, and then home again. “I survived,” he says, “but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war” (63).

22 This extensive review of the story makes it clear how much of the text reflects the Grail legend—and not simply the general outline of the Grail legend, but specifically the first known version of the myth in Western literature—Chrétien de Troyes’ late twelfth- century Perceval, or the Story of the Grail, a courtly romance in Old French that O’Brien seems to have deliberately patterned his Grail story upon.

23 At first this may sound improbable. Aren’t the stories in The Things They Carried autobiographical? Aren’t they the thinly-disguised incidents in the life of the main character, “Tim O’Brien,” as he experienced them in the war? The answer is no. In an interview with Josephine Reed for the National Endowment for the Arts, O’Brien distinguished between “fact” and “truth,” and defends fiction as “a way of trying to get at an emotional or spiritual or psychological truth.” Of all the stories in The Things They Carried, “On the Rainy River” is the most fictional: Well that never happened. I did not get in my car and drive to the Rainy River although I was drafted. I didn’t spend six days there. In fact, I’ve never been there in my life. The characters that are up on the Rainy River don’t exist. And yet, although the story is largely invented, it feels to me truer in a way than the literal truth that I could recount about that terrible summer I was drafted. […] I make things up, yes. And invent a whole—whole bunch of stuff but it’s an effort to get at you know, certain emotional or spiritual truths that you just, I can’t get at by recitation of fact.

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24 This is what O’Brien means when he says later in The Things They Carried, “I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth” (203).3

25 Thus, beyond the initial facts of the narrator’s draft notice, his opposition to the war, and his wrenching internal struggle, “On the Rainy River” is a complete fiction, and as such is consciously constructed in a manner that seems a close reflection of Chrétien’s original Grail story. Both are stories not about the Grail itself but about what Richard Barber calls “the development of a knight’s character” (14) in referring to Perceval. The stories begin in roughly the same manner: as O’Brien is raised in rural Minnesota, far from the state’s cultural center of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and even farther from the hub of power in Washington, Chrétien’s Perceval is brought up in the Waste Forest of Wales, many days’ ride from the king’s court.

26 When Perceval first encounters knights from King Arthur’s court, he deems them “more beautiful […] than God and all his angels” (386), and rides off to pursue his destiny as a knight after his mother confides that his father and brothers had all been noble knights but had been slain. O’Brien’s conception of himself as hero, the Lone Ranger fighting for the right, is essentially a modern version of this fascination with chivalry, but when O’Brien’s summons comes, he balks at riding off to join the modern military “knights,” since their chivalric heroism is far less certain. Instead, O’Brien spends his summer on the grotesquely mechanized slaughterhouse line, with the automated procession of slaughtered pigs coming at him in an endless line, like the soldiers on their way to Vietnam, turned into impersonalized cogs in the war machine. The job prefigures as well the impersonal slaughter of the enemy in Vietnam. It turns his life into a waste land—all around him is death and the smell of death—“Even after a hot bath, scrubbing hard, the stink was always there—like old bacon, or sausage, a dense greasy pig-stink that soaked deep into my skin and hair” (47).

27 When O’Brien does leave his own Waste Forest, it is not to become a knight but to evade that process. Yet he, like Perceval, ultimately finds himself at the Grail Castle. In Chrétien’s story, the young knight meets a noble gentleman named Gornemant of Gohort, who instructs the naive Perceval in how to dress, act, and use his weapons, and gives him several pieces of advice: grant mercy to an enemy who asks it; console maidens and wives who are in distress; go to church and pray; and most significantly, “be careful not to be too talkative or prone to gossip. Anyone who is too talkative soon discovers he has said something that brings him reproach. […] Therefore, young man, I warn you not to talk too much” (402).

28 After he leaves Gornemant, Perceval has a number of adventures before he finally comes to a river, in the midst of which are two men in a boat, one of whom is fishing. Perceval asks if there is a way across the river, and the fisherman tells him he is far from any bridge or ferry, but invites Perceval to stay the night in his home. He is well received in the castle, and joins the gentleman—the Fisher King—for dinner. The king cannot rise, he says, because of an infirmity. This is the traditional wound of infertility common in the Grail legend.

29 Consider the parallels between this part of the story and “On the Rainy River.” Both stories contain a boat with two men fishing on a river. In both stories, the young traveler is granted lodging in the home of an older, infirm gentleman. O’Brien’s Tip- Top lodge is hardly a castle, however. It is itself more akin to a waste land: O’Brien writes that it is “in sorry shape. There was a dangerous wooden dock, an old minnow

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tank, a flimsy tar paper boathouse along the shore. The main building, which stood in a cluster of pines on high ground, seemed to lean heavily to one side, like a cripple, the roof sagging toward Canada” (51), almost, a reader might conclude, as if pointing the way. Chrétien’s Fisher King is handicapped by a wound; O’Brien’s Elroy Berdahl is a man in his eighties, still somewhat vigorous but unable to keep up the repairs on his lodge by himself, and certainly beyond the age of fertility. Most significant, however, is his name: Elroy means, of course, “the king.” And Berdahl is a king who fishes.

30 While the caretaker’s name may be the clearest allusion to the Grail story, the most significant parallel with Chrétien’s romance is in the climactic scene. In Chrétien, Perceval is seated at dinner with the Fisher King when a procession passes by: a squire carrying a white lance whose point was dripping blood, two knights carrying candelabra of pure gold, a maiden carrying a golden Grail or platter, and another maiden carrying a silver carving dish. The Grail passes by with each course of the meal Perceval takes with the Fisher King, always passing into an adjoining chamber. Through all of this the lord of the manor is silent, never commenting on the procession or encouraging the young knight to speak. Even though Perceval is deeply curious about the procession and burns to know who is fed by the Grail, he never says a word to the lord, thinking that he will ask some servant the next morning rather than trouble the Fisher King with the question. O’Brien’s Fisher King, Elroy, brings the narrator to the Canadian shore and waits. The irresolute narrator sits in the boat with Berdahl, torn by his inner conflict, and like Perceval can neither speak nor act. Berdahl, like the Fisher King, says nothing at all: “His eyes were flat and impassive. He didn’t speak. He was simply there, like the river and the late-summer sun” (62).

31 Neither Perceval nor O’Brien get any help from their respective “kings,” and both ultimately fail. Perceval fails to ask who is served by the Grail, a question that would, in some mystical way, have healed the wounded Fisher King and restored the fertility of the waste land, as Perceval learns from a damsel later in the story: the king will now never rule his kingdom again, Perceval is told, and as a result of his failure “Ladies will lose their husbands, lands will be laid waste, and maidens will remain helpless as orphans; many a knight will die” (438). As Barber argues, there is nothing magical in this outcome: “merely the stark reality of a land left prey to marauders. The Fisher King got his wound in battle: his enemies are presumably still at large, and because he cannot lead his army to fight them, his land is open to attack” (20). Thus Perceval’s consequences are as real as O’Brien’s. O’Brien fails to leave the boat and flee to the Canadian shore, and the result is told in the grim tale of war’s horrors that populate the rest of the stories in his book.

32 The morning after his failure to ask about the Grail, Perceval awakes to find the Grail castle deserted. None of the household appears to help him arm himself, and when he approaches the chamber doors through which he had passed the previous night, Chrétien says he “found them tightly closed” (422). He rides out the gate but no servants appear. Once he has crossed the drawbridge, it is taken up, but though he calls out to the castle, no one will answer.

33 When O’Brien is ready to leave the Tip Top lodge the day after his failure in the boat, he finds the lodge deserted as well: By the time I’d finished packing the old man had disappeared. Around noon, I took my suitcase out to the car, I noticed that his old black pickup truck was no longer parked in front of the house. I went inside and waited for a while, but I felt a bone certainty that he wouldn’t be back. (63)

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34 In both cases, the failed Grail Knight is left to contemplate his failure alone. There is no way to escape the responsibility for that failure and there is no place to hide.

35 One final parallel between O’Brien’s story and Chrétien’s is perhaps the most significant of all, and that has to do with the motives for their respective failures. In the case of O’Brien, as already noted, that motive is his sense of social embarrassment: “I couldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule” (61). As it happens, Perceval’s reasons for not asking about the Grail are nearly identical: his mentor, Gornemant, had cautioned him against talking too much, and this is what stops his tongue at the Grail castle: He recalled the admonishment given by the gentleman who had knighted him, who taught and instructed him not to talk too much; he was afraid that if he asked they would consider him uncouth, and therefore he did not ask. (420)

36 Thus both protagonists fail as Grail Knights because they allow the petty shame of social embarrassment to override what proves to be a far more significant choice: in the case of Perceval, it is a choice that could have prevented disaster and restored the waste land of the Fisher King’s realm. For O’Brien it is a moral choice that he knows to be right. Life and death decisions are overriden by the need for social acceptance.

***

37 In the end, why is O’Brien’s use of the Grail legend significant? Both are archetypal initiation stories, in which a young man filled with heroic idealism fails in his life’s first difficult test. In both cases the failure is due to societal pressures that cause the young men to fail to do what they instinctively feel is right. The parallel may be meant to suggest that the consequences of O’Brien the character’s failure may ultimately be as dire as Perceval’s. In O’Brien’s case (as in the case of Paul Wade in In the Lake of the Woods), it is not the Fisher King who needs healing, it is the Grail Knight himself, whose waste land is his own psyche in need of regeneration. Thus it might be said that O’Brien’s failure does not have the cosmic significance of Perceval’s. But considering O’Brien’s work as a whole, with its failed Grail Knights and its unhealed Fisher Kings, it might be argued that his use of the Grail myth forms a commentary on American society in general in the second half of the twentieth century. In many ways the O’Brien character in “On the Rainy River” is a microcosm of his own country: as Daniel Robinson writes, “Like the chaotic and morally ambiguous war they fight, O’Brien’s characters are unsure of their purpose or even their actions” (258). Here, the narrator represents small-town America in turmoil over the war. The crowds that he imagines urging him one way or another as he contemplates his future include “several members of the United States Senate, and a blind poet scribbling notes, and LBJ, and Huck Finn, and Abbie Hoffman, and all the dead soldiers back from the grave” (60-61). The great crowd in O’Brien’s mind suggests that perhaps it is America itself that had a chance to back away from the war—perhaps in the election of 1968—and chose not to. Perhaps the reasons for going to war are often, as in this case, petty by comparison with the reasons to eschew war. Twenty-two years later, O’Brien’s narrator finally brings himself to say, like Robert McNamara himself, “we were wrong, terribly wrong.”

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 2004. Print.

Carpenter, Lucas. “‘It Don’t Mean Nothin’’: Vietnam War Fiction and Postmodernism.” College Literature 30.2 (Spring 2003): 30-50. Print.

Chrétien de Troyes. The Story of the Grail (Perceval). Trans. William W. Kibler. Arthurian Romances. London: Penguin, 1991. 381-494. Print.

Country Joe and the Fish. I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die. Vanguard, 1967. CD.

Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land.” Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1964. 49-74. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner’s, 1929. Print.

---. In Our Time. New York: Scribner’s, 1925. Print.

---. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s, 1926. Print.

Jung, Emma and Marie-Louise von Franz. The Grail Legend. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971. Print.

Kaplan, Steven. “The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.” Critique 35.1 (Fall 1993): 43-52. Print.

Kocela, Christopher. “‘Thinking Seriously about Canada’: Defamiliarizing O’Brien’s Work from a Canadian Perspective.” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Tim O’Brien. Ed. Alex Vernon and Catherine Calloway. New York: MLA, 2010. 85-92. Print.

Littleton, C. Scott and Ann C. Thomas. “The Sarmatian Connection: New Light on the Origin of the Arthurian and Holy Grail Legends.” Journal of American Folklore 91 (1978): 513-27. Print.

Loomis, Roger Sherman. The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1963. Print.

Malory, Thomas. Le Morte Darthur. Ed. Stephen H.A. Shepherd. New York: Norton, 2004. Print.

McNamara, Robert S. and Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995. Print.

O’Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. 1978; rpt. New York: Broadway Books, 2014. Print.

---. In the Lake of the Woods. 1994; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1995. Print.

---. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.

---. “Transcript of Conversation with Tim O'Brien.” Interview by Josephine Reed. Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. Rpt. New York: Perennial Library, 1990. Print.

Reagan, Ronald. “Peace: Restoring the Margin of Safety.” Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Chicago. 18 Aug. 1980 (https://reaganlibrary.archives.gov/ archives/reference/8.18.80.html). Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

Ringbom, Lars-Ivar. Graltempel und Paradies: Beziehungen zwischen Iran und Europa im Mittelalter. Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademian Handlingar 73. Stockholm: Wahlstrom and Widstrand, 1951. Print.

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Robinson, Daniel. “Getting it Right: The Short Fiction of Tim O’Brien.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40.3 (Spring 1999): 257-64. Print.

Silbergleid, Robin. “Making Things Present: Tim O’Brien’s Autobiographical Metafiction.” Contemporary Literature 50.1 (2009): 129-55. Print.

Springsteen, Bruce. Born in the U.S.A. Columbia, 1984. CD.

Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1920. Print.

Wolfram von Eschenbach. Parzival. Trans. Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage. New York: Vintage, 1961. Print.

NOTES

1. Weston famously sought the origin of the Grail legends in the survival of ancient pagan fertility rites, a position most serious scholars have dismissed. Roger Sherman Loomis, in his The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol, argued vigorously for the Grail myth’s origins in Celtic mythology preserved in the literature of ancient Ireland and medieval Wales. Though there may be some connections here, particularly considering the influence of the oral traditions of the Celtic Bretons in France, it is generally conceded that Loomis relies heavily on unconvincing analogues and overstates his case. Other suggestions about the Grail’s history suggest an eastern origin: Lars-Ivar Ringbom, focusing not on Chrétien de Troyes but on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, argued for an origin in Persian Zoroastrianism. C. Scott Littleton and Ann C. Thomas found the origin of the legend among the Sarmatian people of the Caucasus, sent by the Romans to fight in Britain in late classical times. Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, in The Grail Legend, explain the various parallel stories and folk-tales recalling the Grail as evidence of a Jungian archetype in the Grail story. In his comprehensive recent book The Holy Grail, Richard Barber, finds the source of the Grail motif in Christian imagery. While it is hard to reconcile this with Chrétien’s initial presentation of the Grail, Barber is not doctrinaire in his arguments. Comparing the many versions of the Grail story with the idea of immram—the voyage taken in a rudderless boat, relying completely on the will of God—which exists in both Old Irish and Buddhist Japan (cultures that could have had no contact with one another), Barber notes: "There is no common source, only a common mode of existence at the edge of an unknown and terrifying ocean. So with the Grail: these widely separated avatars of cups and stones are united not by one text or one tale, but by a common imagination." (248) In the case of Tim O’Brien, it seems implausible that he was familiar with the many controversies surrounding the Grail origins, but more likely that his chief concept of the generic Grail story and its origins came from Jessie Weston through the intermediaries of Eliot and Hemingway. But as I contend below, O’Brien may well have supplemented this with direct knowledge of Chrétien’s Story of the Grail, or was familiar with some abstracted version of Chrétien’s text. 2. In one of the “evidence” chapters of this curiously frustrating novel, O’Brien quotes a passage from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: "What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lien of force, she may fall back on superstition or take up a useless hobby like embroidery, or go ad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"

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(Pynchon 21-22, qtd. in O’Brien, Woods 26) In part this plays on the protagonist’s self-characterization as “The Sorcerer,” but it also makes use of imagery borrowed from the Rapunzel story and, ultimately, the Grail legend: the woman trapped in the tower is in need of regeneration, the kind of escape that the trapped Paul Berlin desires in Going After Cacciato. But the knight here is a failed Grail Knight as well, and the woman finds it impossible to get out of the tower. The tower here is the fortress of denial John Wade has built in his psyche and in his marriage. It is the fortress/prison of Paul Berlin’s need to conform which overrides his need to escape. 3. This aspect of O’Brien’s style—what Robin Silbergleid calls “autobiographical metafiction”— has been the most discussed element in the book. From the beginning, O’Brien establishes the text as fictional: facing the copyright page of the book is a statement reading “This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author’s own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary.” Two pages later, after the “Acknowledgements” page, O’Brien dedicates the book to “the men of Alpha company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa”—that is, to all the characters in the book that he has just claimed were fictional. Naming the narrator Tim O’Brien, a 43-year old writer who has already published two books about the war, adds to the impression of autobiography. As Silbergleid writes, “In forcing his readers to question the truth as he tells it, O’Brien also pushes them to question truth more generally, particularly as it relates to the representation of Vietnam. The narratives and experiences of the Vietnam War, like the postmodern condition, are uncertain, ambiguous, multiple” (148). Steven Kaplan adds that O’Brien’s method of “constantly involving and then re-involving the reader in the task of what ‘actually’ happened in a given situation, in a story, and by forcing the reader to experience the impossibility of ever knowing with any certainty what actually happened, O’Brien liberates himself from the lonesome responsibility of remembering and trying to understand events” (51). He certainly does this in “On the Rainy River,” when, for instance, he speaks of the tightening in his chest that he can still feel, “And I want you to feel it. […] You’re at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest” (59). While this is a significant part of the story, it has little to do with the Grail motif that I am pursuing, so I merely point it out here. For more about this aspect of the story, see Silbergleid and Kaplan.

ABSTRACTS

La nouvelle « On the Rainy River » d’O’Brien prend le contrepied des réactions traditionnelles face à la guerre. Dans cette histoire, le Vietnam n’est pas un lieu où se rendent les héros. Ici, c’est la fuite vers le Canada qui constitue un choix courageux. Aux yeux du protagoniste, le Canada représente un renouveau et un rétablissement spirituels et psychologiques. Historiquement, le Graal est le symbole littéraire archétypal associé à ces éléments. Par conséquent, cet article avance que l’histoire d’O’Brien est une réécriture moderne de l’histoire originelle du Graal, Perceval de Chrétien de Troyes. Dans les deux récits, le jeune héros idéaliste échoue lors de la première épreuve importante de sa vie. Dans les deux cas, les pressions sociales poussent le jeune homme à refréner ce qui lui semble instinctivement juste. Les deux débâcles ont de terribles conséquences dépassant les échecs individuels des protagonistes. La Terre Vaine d’O’Brien ne

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nécessite pas la guérison du Roi Pêcheur, mais celle du personnage du Chevalier du Graal, qui est, dans la version d’O’Brien, le microcosme de sa nation.

AUTHORS

JAY RUUD Jay Ruud is recently retired as Professor and Chair of the English department at the University of Central Arkansas. In addition to articles on Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, Medieval English drama, Dante, and Tolkien, he is the author of “Many a Song and Many a Lecherous Lay”: Tradition and Individuality in Chaucer’s Lyric Poetry (Garland 1992). He has published articles on medieval influence on writers as varied as Terry Pratchett, Thomas Berger, P.G. Wodehouse, John Gardner, and C.S. Lewis. He is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature (2006), the Critical Companion to Dante (2008), and the Critical Companion to Tolkien (2011) from Facts on File. He taught at UCA for thirteen years, prior to which he was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

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“East is East”: Thematic and Textual Confluence in Jane Gardam’s “Chinese Funeral”

Helen E. Mundler

1 Born in 1928, Jane Gardam is a prolific and respected author of both short stories and novels, whose work has been rewarded with a number of prestigious prizes,1 but has received surprisingly little critical attention. The short story analysed in this article, “Chinese Funeral,” concerns a group of British characters visiting China and trying in one way or another to accommodate the strangeness of what they experience. This will constitute the first confluence which will be analysed here. A second confluence is to be found in the way “Chinese Funeral” engages both with the personal and with the political, absorbing the one into the other, so that they become part of the same continuum. The third confluence is textual: “Chinese Funeral” can be compared with a passage in Jane Gardam’s The Man in the Wooden Hat, which takes up the events of the short story and deploys them in a different way, an operation which can be approached through theories of transfictionality.

2 First published in 1990, “Chinese Funeral” tells the story of a group of fourteen characters, defined as “English,” (except for one Nigerian, who is described as such, generically), and “all middle-aged to old, a rather heavy, thoughtful lot” (14), set out from Hong Kong for a day trip to the Chinese mainland. The focus is on a particular couple, Ann, and “her husband” (again, this is a generic—the husband is not named). The group are tourists rather than expatriates—they have only spent a week in Hong Kong (22). The story records their day, from leaving “Kowloon side” (17) early in the morning to getting stuck in a traffic jam, and so failing to get home in the evening (the narrative has an indeterminate ending, with the form echoed by one of the characters: “‘We don’t know what the end of this is going to be’” [23]). In the course of the day, the group first meet their Chinese guide, then travel around in a tour-bus at some length, watch a performance put on by schoolchildren, stop for lunch and visit a market.

3 This story does not, overtly, have a strong narrative drive, and does not move towards any kind of obvious resolution. The narrative is introspective rather than eventful: the

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reactions of the characters to what they observe, rather than what happens, constitute the story, and what could be considered the main events are in a sense placed “off- stage,” so much so that it is not at first easy to put one’s finger on “what the story is about.” Catastrophe is suggested—but it is almost concealed, rather than explicitly evoked.

4 The word “funeral” in the title in fact refers to various events, two of which are explicit: the ferry the group takes on the morning of their trip proves to be transporting a coffin, and later on, from the tour-bus, they see a funeral (21). The story begins with the wife, Ann’s, horrified reaction to the very un-English mourners who accompany the coffin as it is brought onto the ferry: “‘I can see the awful people’” (15). The mourners are described as “noisy men with excited eyes” (15), whom Ann suspects of “‘enjoying it’” (16), while she herself is uneasy at the prospect of travelling with a coffin.

5 The second funeral occurs as the party leave the restaurant where they stop to have lunch. The group’s attention is inevitably called to it when the guide makes the following request: “May I ask you, now at this moment not to look out to the left of the bus, please? Look only straight ahead, please, or to the right.” Everyone at once looked out to the left. [...] “To the right. To the right,” called the guide, “the right.” (21)

6 What they see, on the left-hand side of the tour bus, is a funeral procession. While the guide tells them it is “‘not civilised to watch a Chinese funeral’” (21), one of the party, a “big old Englishman” who has spent twenty years in Hong Kong or China, explains, “‘It is bad luck to watch a Chinese funeral [...] He is being kind to us’” (21). The traffic jam with which the story ends allows the funeral cortège to catch up with the tour bus, and Ann’s husband hopes that she will not see the funeral party for a second time: He hoped that she had not seen that the funeral party of an hour ago had caught up with them and was jogging along the side of the bus between it and the oily ditch of lotuses [...] The crazed tall hats bobbed up and down as they passed by, and out of sight. (23)

7 Thus three episodes involving two different Chinese funerals occur within the space of the eight pages covered by the story, but the narrative centres on an episode which is not overtly described. In the tour bus, Ann is subject to an unpleasant vision: The driver had a long, unsmiling face. [...] His white hands for the moment lay loose on the wheel. The hands of Moiseiwitsch. [...] The guide was jolly, square-faced, amiable, with shaggy, fetching hair [...] Ann suddenly saw the driver’s hands running with blood, and the guide with upflung arms, facing the dark. She cried out. (18)

8 The blood in this vision connects to the “bloodstained bandages” Ann believes she saw during the first funeral. While in that case, the bloodstains turned out to be “vermilion paint” (16), the bloodshed Ann imagines in fact connects to real, political events, external to the narrative, but which function as a sort of metatext which informs and alters the reader’s reception of the short story. The fact that this story was first published in 1990 is significant in that the Tiananmen Square massacre had taken place in 1989. Events may be briefly recapitulated as follows: the predominantly young freedom protesters, many of whom were students like the group’s guide, had been holding a “peaceful pro-democracy protest” for some days; eventually, the Communist

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party sent in 200,000 soldiers in armoured tanks to put down what it saw as an uprising and a threat to the regime (Jian 2014). Many of the protesters were killed—the death toll is variously estimated at hundreds or thousands—while others were imprisoned or exiled.

9 These real events, which are not directly referenced in the narrative, provide a specific framework within which the guide’s politically-charged speech to the group towards the end of the day must be interpreted. Having first assured himself that the driver “‘does not speak English and is in any case asleep’” (the bus being by this time stuck in a traffic jam), and that none of the party “will stay in China more for more than a day,” he makes the following announcement: “It is safe to tell you this then. China now looks forward with hope and joy. There is to be a great and glorious transformation. Blood will flow, but we stand to overthrow evil men and we shall win liberty [...] You will remember me and what I say.” (23)

10 Ann’s bloody vision—although it does not take into account the guide’s distinction between himself, the revolutionary, and the driver, who must not hear him speak of such things—can, indeed must, be, read within this particular historical context. “Chinese Funeral” is thus intimately concerned with geo-political, and the signifier, funeral, is expanded to take in not only the individual deaths of the protesters, but also the dark, terrible, funereal business of a country murdering its own youth, of whom the guide is representative. A sense of threat thus colours the husband’s words to his wife as they find themselves stuck in the traffic jam, and so unable to leave: “‘Better sleep, Ann. We don’t know what the end of this is going to be’” (23). “This” takes on wider significance than the day out itself: in the light of the guide’s last speech in the story, it takes in the future of China and the safety of its youth.

11 It is possible to read a sort of reversal here, in which the (mainly-) English party, the observers, become the observed, since they represent democracy, a political system to which the Chinese guide aspires. In this sense, this story suggests, to some extent, a quasi-colonial sense of British “superiority,” but shifts it into a different register: the focus is not on supposed cultural superiority, but on the benefits of a particular politico-economic system. However, this is a short story which allows for several different layers of interpretation, of which the geo-political is only one. The reactions of the English characters combine the specifically political and the intensely personal, and the characters have other, less easily explained, reactions to China. In fact, it is arguable that the story foregrounds above all the inassimilable strangeness of what Ann, in particular, experiences, since much is seen through her eyes.

12 When Ann gives her appalled reaction to the first funeral (15-16), her husband tries to rationalise the scene, by pointing out cultural differences: “‘The afterlife for them is horrible, you know. ‘The sleep of oblivion’. Desolate. Frightening,’” and adding a little later, “‘Don’t forget they’re surrounded by spirits’” (16). The husband’s reaction sets the tone for the whole story: the couple, as they leave British territory behind them and move into a foreign land, will attempt to analyse, to understand, to assimilate—in other words to create a confluence between their own culture and consciousness, and the alienating strangeness of the people they encounter, and what they see around them. In this they will, however, to a great extent, fail.

13 The Chinese people the group encounter are presented in various ways, spanning the clichés of the shady, dishonest Oriental, through the surprise of the new, westernised

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youth, to the inscrutable “other.” When she has the apples she has packed for the journey seized at customs, Ann remarks, “‘I suppose they’ll eat them the minute we’re out of sight’” (17). The first words of the Chinese guide who will be in charge of the group are spoken in answer to this remark: “‘That we do not enquire’” (17). Thus the opening remark of this representative of the Chinese people is in a high register of language, and constitutes a joke. The Chinese guide is the first person in the story to use such language (Ann and her husband speak in a much more familiar register), which is as telling as the description of him as “brilliant-eyed, happy, young. He ran about laughing and shaking hands with the British group” (17). However, while the guide is smiling and hospitable, the Chinese people encountered on the day-trip will elude Ann’s attempts to in some way connect with them: the show put on by the Kindergarten children reveals “a fixed smile on each blank-eyed face” (19), so that Ann longs to see “‘some of the ordinary children,’” but this request cannot be met. Similarly, an attempt to take a photograph of an old Chinese peasant “sowing seeds on the plain” is cut off by that peasant’s complete indifference: “One ancient leather face looked up into Ann’s camera. Looked away” (20).

14 Even the Chinese guide, as the story goes on, seems to become less easy to connect with, less familiar: “They noticed under the high electric bulbs of the echoing restaurant that he was rather older than they had thought and that some of the earlier insouciance was gone. Some of the acting” (20). His image begins to disintegrate, and a dissonance develops between what the host country wants to show, the impression it wishes to create, and what might be termed the “leakage” from behind that impression, as the observers are faced with a reality more complex and contradictory, and in some cases simply less pleasant, than first impressions allow. This dissonance is acknowledged by the guide, in a passage which verges on the comic, through an effect of bathos, as he describes the restaurant where they will be making their midday stop: “We are going to a beautiful place for lunch. Well, it is the only place. Here it comes. It is perfectly hygienic. Do not judge by its surroundings.” They picked their way through filth to the one new building in a sad town. ” (20)

15 This passage, with its short and disappointing journey from “a beautiful place” to “filth,” is an overt illustration of a sense of disappointment generally more covert and subtle in this text.

16 Both the landscape and Chinese people other than the guide are experienced in this story as strange and disconcerting. For Ann, the destabilising newness of the morning’s experiences leads her to have “‘a sort of day-mare’” (19), in which she sees “‘Something coming. Rolling like a sea’” (18). Her husband’s reaction to her “‘shivering’” state (18) is to hope for tea—“‘There’s always tea’” (19)—a superficial point of intersection, or indeed confluence, between Chinese and British cultures, which perhaps serves to highlight more profound differences. The landscape at which Ann looks out in an attempt to feel better is also a locus of strangeness, of something which is banal, but at the same time disconcerting in its unfamiliarity, and thus uncanny. There is an incongruity here between the homely, even child-like, idea of “pencilled,” “matchstick” motifs, and the drag of the double adjective, “endless, endless:” a drag so heavy that it leads Ann to make the obscure remark, “‘Time is over’” (19).

17 In fact, the remarks of the characters are often obscure, and there is a sense in the story that something going beyond what is actually said must be understood, or at least understood to exist. The conversation between unnamed husband and wife often

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consists of remarks with a slightly odd syntax suggestive of a great intimacy (this is typical of the rhythms of speech in Gardam’s work in general). Thus when the husband tells Ann that the coffin will be taken off the ferry at Lamma Island, going into some detail about the route of the ferry and where the dead man died, Ann asks, “‘How do you know it all?’” rather than “How do you know?” or “How do you know all this?” (15), and the husband answers, “‘Oh. I do,’” rather than “I just do.” Husband and wife also communicate through a sort of shorthand: “‘No two ways.’” “‘Glib. Silly’” (15). This private, intimate world in which so much is known that speech is either cut off, or can be interpreted to arrive at the meaning which is intended rather than spoken, makes the characters, finally, not at all generic, and provides a homely contrast to the inexpressible strangeness with which they are surrounded on the trip to China.

18 The version of China presented in Jane Gardam’s story ultimately remains mysterious. While the guide promises, with emphasis, to “‘answer everything. Everything’” (18), finally it proves that, for Ann, the questions to which answers are required cannot even be formulated. To be a guide to this country finally proves an impossible thing, just as it is to be guided in it, and the overriding sense that will emerge is one of alienation. The phrase “crazed tall hats” seems to place the funeral party in the realm of witches and wizards, which could be dismissed as fanciful and not to be believed in, or indeed culturally inferior,2 and the husband, at the end of the story, discards not only the funeral party, but the whole day, even the whole country, telling his wife, “‘Don’t look so doom-laden [...] It’s all education. After all, it’s not our country. It has nothing to do with us’” (23).

19 The short story may be considered to be by its nature fragmentary, and the inconclusive ending is arguably appropriate to the form. Moreover, Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-Russell see the postcolonial short story, in particular, as providing a happy confluence of form and content: according to them, “the restless fragmentation of the short story,” which is often considered only “of marginal interest,” has a role to play in drawing attention to “the postcolonial critique of centres and margins that underwrites the hierarchical practice of Empire” (8). However, interestingly, Jane Gardam revisits this story in her 2009 novel The Man in the Wooden Hat, the second novel in her Old Filth Trilogy, and thus makes it a part of a much longer narrative—the short story flows into the novel, and the novel takes its place between two other novels (Wooden Hat 156-58).

20 A brief description of the trilogy is necessary at this point, in order to explain the new context for this passage. These three novels, Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat, and Last Friends, trace the lives of Old Filth (the name is an acronym for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong”—a joke, considering that Filth, aka Edward Feathers, came joint top in the bar exams for his year) and his wife, Elisabeth (Betty), as they journey between the UK and the Far East. Filth spends most of his legal career in Hong Kong, but a fairly large proportion of the trilogy also focuses on the couple’s retirement in the south of England. The theme of the “Raj orphans”—the children of Empire who were sent back to the UK to be brought up by paid foster parents, and educated at boarding schools—is dominant: motherless, and taken from his Malay nanny at the age of four and a half before being sent to board with an unknown and unsuitable couple in Wales from the age of five, Filth claims that he was never loved from this point on, and the experience emotionally colours his entire life. His wife is also affected: when tempted by Filth’s rival, Veneering, she cannot bring herself to abandon her already-abandoned husband.

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Relations between East and West, specifically between England and Hong Kong and, to an extent, China, are very central to the Old Filth trilogy, and geo-political questions and historical movements in these novels are intricately knitted into the emotional experience of the characters.

21 The Man in the Wooden Hat contains an incident in which a group of tourists, in this case expatriate Britons, take a day trip to Canton by bus. Various elements of “Chinese Funeral” reappear in this passage: the guide complains that the Chinese were cheated by the Russians who sold them factories;3 the thinness of the peasants is emphasised;4 there is lunch in a restaurant—and then a warning by the guide: “‘On no account look left. Do not look left,’” followed by “Everybody looked to the left,” as the funeral procession passes the bus (Wooden Hat 157). The cortège is described in similar terms as in “Chinese Funeral”: “a ragged column of men in white robes and pointed hats jogged along the side of a field” (Wooden Hat 157). The relatively uncommon verb, “jog along” is used in both passages, and it is suggested in both that seeing a Chinese Funeral is bad luck. The later version also stresses the unknowable, alien nature of the Chinese through the eyes of the British, and the fundamental opposition between East and West is highlighted by witnessing the strange funeral rites of the Chinese, as the following fragment of dialogue shows: “Do they dream of Hong Kong?” said Elisabeth. “We don’t know what they dream of.” (Wooden Hat 157)

22 This repetition allows for a hypertextual (see Genette 13), specifically transfictional reading in the mode of expansion, as defined by Lubomir Doležel, who comments as follows: Expansion extends the scope of the protoworld by filling its gaps, constructing a prehistory or posthistory, and so on. The protoworld and the successor world are complementary. The protoworld is put into a new co-text, and the established structure is thus shifted. (206) 5

23 The transfer of “Chinese Funeral,” or a version of it, into The Man in the Wooden Hat certainly fulfils these criteria: the episode does indeed acquire a “before” and an “after” (the reader finds out what leads up to it, and what happens after it), and is set in a whole new structure. Approaching the issue from a different angle, Richard Saint- Gelais sees expansion as bringing into question, particularly, the “limits” of a piece of fiction: Donner à un récit un prolongement, c’est remettre en question les limites qui se fixaient à l’oeuvre originale. Un tel geste ne saurait être innocent dans une culture qui fonde sur l’idée de la clôture sa conception de l’œuvre comme totalité autonome, possédant une « forme » déterminée, instaurant son propre « code » et déployant un « réseau de sens » spécifique. (71)

24 It should be noted that Jane Gardam often revisits the same scene in two novels, or in a short story and a novel: there are many “overlaps” between the three novels which make up the Old Filth trilogy, and also between it and the short story, “The People on Privilege Hill,” which “fills in” an episode which could have occurred in the trilogy6— but how can this particular “transfictional expansion” be read?

25 In reframing the events of “Chinese Funeral” in The Man in the Wooden Hat, Jane Gardam certainly does rework the “limits” fixed by the short story in a way which corresponds to one of the criteria Saint-Gelais lays down to justify identifying a transfictional relationship between two passages:

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Par ‘transfictionnalité’, j’entends le phénomène par lequel au moins deux textes, du même auteur ou non, se rapportent conjointement à une même fiction, que ce soit par reprise de personnages, prolongement d’une intrigue préalable ou partage d’un univers fictionnel. (12)

26 However, Gardam’s rewriting also, importantly, allows the one passage to be read in the light of the other, and the interpretation of each passage to be revisited. This fulfils a further, fundamental, criterion laid down by Saint-Gelais for the definition of transfictions: “Le regard transfictionnel consiste surtout à s’interroger sur les répercussions de ces contacts et de ces déplacements diégétiques” (12). What, then, are the differences between the original short story and its reprise in the novel?

27 Clearly, a short story and a passage in a novel cannot be regarded as “equivalent,” since the former stands alone and the latter is framed in various ways by the surrounding narrative. However, there is also an important difference between the two passages in terms of content. Obviously, this episode within The Man in the Wooden Hat serves to drive the narrative onwards, rather than constituting a world in itself, as the short story allows. In order to do so, it adds an episode which is absent from “Chinese Funeral.” In the novel, Betty’s vision concerns the lamps on display in the shop the group are taken to visit (“Chinese Funeral” does not contain a comparable episode: a visit to a market is mentioned [18], but not developed): Filth asked Betty if she wanted a new table lamp. “No,” she said, “Not these,” and was astonished to find that an image had appeared among the chinoiserie of a heavy brass oil lamp with a globe and chimney, and a thick white cotton wick. As she looked, the misty globe cleared and a flat blue flame appeared along the wick. It bounced up violet, then yellow, becoming steady and clear. A wisp of blue rising from the chimney. Betty stretched towards it and her hand passed through nothing. (Wooden Hat 157)

28 When asked by her husband what she is doing, Betty answers, “‘Nothing. Having a vision or something. Some sort of memory thing.’” The lamp in Betty’s vision is a reference to the one which she broke, many years earlier, while staying at Dexters, the house in the Donheads, in the south of England, which then belonged to friends, and in which she and her husband later live (Wooden Hat 147). The breaking of the lamp is associated with the hysterectomy from which Betty was recovering at the time she first stayed in the house, following an illness which made the operation necessary, in spite of the fact that she expressly claimed to want children. The lamp is thus not an arbitrary vision, but highly symbolic in Betty’s development: the containing globe of light represents the uterus as vessel of life, while the wisp of smoke in the chimney can be read as the extinction of hope for perpetuating the cycle of life. Betty’s vision thus also brings a confluence of time and space into the episode of the Chinese funeral, a sense of unfolding personal history. This is not available to “Chinese Funeral,” which barely glimpses into the lives of Ann and her husband outside the few hours in which they are captured, and contains no backstory to complement or explain Ann’s “vision.”

29 In The Man in the Wooden Hat, having been such a part of the great movements and moments of history, the couple are being “written out”: hence, arguably, the subtitle of the last part of the novel, “Life After Death.”7 For Betty, this experience is mediated through her regret for not having had children, for not participating in the ongoing flow of time in that respect. However, for both husband and wife, being “written out” is accompanied by great uncertainty as to their place in the world in these last years of their lives. In a sense this narrative too is cut off, cut short: Betty and Filth are stranded

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in time—as the party in the bus in “Chinese Funeral” are stranded in space. While fragmentary, “Chinese Funeral” allows certain aspects of The Man in the Wooden Hat to resonate when read in the light of it, particularly the sense of ambivalence and alienation the characters periodically experience, as they seek for a confluence which is not always available.

30 The “Chinese funeral” episode in the novel is surrounded by a dialogue in which Betty and Filth’s questions are made explicit: what are they, and where should they be? Up until this point, the two have been “lifetime expats,” and so there is much more at stake for them than for tourists taking their day trip in “Chinese Funeral.” The Feathers’ lives have been involved with the Empire, and how they define themselves is also very much bound up with huge moments and movements in history: the loss of Hong Kong is now on the horizon;8 China—to them, inexplicably—will be assuming the role hitherto played by the United Kingdom with respect to that region; the old order is gone, and with it the old deference, as Betty complains in the following passage: “Elisabeth: […] Respect is fading. Well, I don’t know if it was ever there. In the jewellers’, the girls hardly bother to lift their heads when I go in. They just go on threading the jade. They used to get me the best stones” (Wooden Hat 155). It is in these senses, rather than “merely” geographically, that they become “‘displaced people.’”

31 Interestingly, prior to the funeral episode, the conversation between husband and wife is actually presented as a dialogue, as in a film or a play, with instructions for the setting of the scene (Wooden Hat 153-56). The dialogue ends as follows: Elisabeth: Filth, we do need to live out here, don’t we? We’re lifetime expats. Aren’t we? Filth (after a long, long pause): I don’t know. (156).

32 The transformation of prose fiction into drama occurs to some extent in all three novels in the trilogy, and serves to foreground certain key points in the development of the characters, and to emphasise a number of particular moments of tension or doubt. This device can in itself be considered a small degree of “transfiction,” in which the characters from the novels are transposed into a play or screenplay, even if the latter is only momentary and fragmentary. At the end of the Chinese funeral episode, the narrative reverts to the standard format of the novel, but the questioning continues: “‘Filth—have we made up our minds? Will we be retiring here?’” (158).

33 When questioned by her husband about her experience with the lamp, Betty attributes her vision to “‘those old expats finding their own country’” (Wooden Hat 157). The “old expats” in question, or a couple very like them, also figure in “Chinese Funeral”: “The old Englishman” says “‘We lived here for twenty years and we left twenty years ago’” (20). In the novel, the exchange between Betty and the characters who fill this role runs as follows: A very old English couple held hands, without looking at each other. “We were born here,” they said. “We’ve been away a long time.” “I was born in Tiensin [...] I grew up in Shanghai.” They looked at her and nodded acknowledgement. “We are displaced people,” said the old woman. (Wooden Hat 157)

34 The certainty the old couple feel serves to throw into relief the uncertainty experienced by Betty and Filth, as they discuss their future: the only certainty Betty feels is “‘there’s absolutely nothing for us here [in China]’” (Wooden Hat 158), the third term serving to throw up the shifting values of the other two. While both the short story and the passage in the novel end with a sense of absolute disaffection expressed in very similar terms (cf. “‘It’s not our country—it has nothing to do with us’” (23), this

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last statement is allowed a much greater resonance in the novel by the expansion of the context in which it is set.

35 The sense of homecoming that the old couple feel runs counter to the alienation of Ann and her husband in “Chinese Funeral,” while in The Man in the Wooden Hat, which, as a novel, allows room for much more development, Betty is in both positions, and feels a profound sense of belonging to both England and Hong Kong. She shares the sense of “displacement” the old woman expresses, being displaced both in East and West, since she cannot be in both at once. For Filth, too, the situation is perhaps more complex, rather than simply binary: he has an inability to see England as “home,” even though this has been encouraged, even required, throughout his life, but Hong Kong is not home to him either. It is when Filth arrives in Malaysia, just before his death, that his last thought is, “[H]e was Home” (Old Filth 156), the capitalisation of the “H” adding a particular emphasis to the idea. This reworking of the short story allows for disruption of the binaries of East/West, home/away, strange/familiar, and strays into the territory of what Jenni Ramone terms “a multiple and uncertain categorisation” (91).

36 The insertion of the “Chinese funeral” episode into the novel can be read as a “pretext” for the much more complex discussion, allowed by the novelistic form, of the characters’ experiences of East and West, and their attempts to bring the flow of these experiences into a coherent confluence of identity, in order to resolve the series of paradoxes and contradictions with which—indeed, almost “in” which—they live. Clearly, the transfictional expansion of short story into novel gives greater opportunities for characterisation, development, and a sense of the sweep of history. However, this does not by any means imply that “Chinese Funeral” should be dismissed as nothing more than a sketch for a vignette in a later novel. It may be noted that Jane Gardam claims, in an interview, to prefer the short story, seeing in it a potential for “completeness” which is unavailable to the novelistic form.9 The “completeness” of “Chinese Funeral” is certainly paradoxical, in that the story is marked by indeterminacy and absence of information. However, these very qualities allow the text to retain an unexplained strangeness—arguably a self-referentially “oriental” strangeness—which is to an extent “argued out” of The Man in the Wooden Hat by virtue of its greater scope.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Awadalla, Maggie, and Paul March-Russell, eds. The Postcolonial Short Story: Contemporary Essays. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Doležel, Lubomir. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1998. Print.

Gardam, Jane. “Chinese Funeral.” Going into a Dark House. London: Abacus, 1997. Print.

---. Old Filth. London: Abacus, 2004. Print.

---. The People on Privilege Hill. New York: Europa Editions, 2008. 1-22. Print.

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---. The Man in the Wooden Hat. London: Chatto and Windus, 2009. Print.

---. Last Friends. New York: Europa Editions, 2013. Print.

---. “Write everything. Write about the linoneum.” The Guardian 22nd Sept. 2015. Web. 1 May 2017.

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes : La Littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Print.

Jian, Ma. “Tiananmen Square 25 years on: ‘Every person in the crowd was a victim of the massacre’.” The Guardian 1st June 2014. Web. 1 May 2017.

Kipling, Rudyard. “The Ballad of East and West”. Web. 1 May 2017.

Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London and New York: Routledge, “The New Critical Idiom,” 2015. Print.

Ramone, Jenni. Postcolonial Theories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

Saint-Gelais, Richard. Fictions Transfuges: La Transfictionalité et ses enjeux. Paris: Seuil, 2011. Print.

NOTES

1. Jane Gardam has twice won the Whitbread Prize for best novel of the year, and was awarded a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of literature. 2. As Ania Loomba observes, “The construction of vast numbers of people as inferior, or ‘other’, was crucial for contructing a European ‘self’ and justifying colonialist practices” (112). 3. The Man in the Wooden Hat: 156; cf. “Chinese Funeral:” “‘The Russians flogged to us that factory [...]. The Russians made mugs of us’” (21). 4. The Man in the Wooden Hat: 156: cf. the “matchstick” figures in “Chinese Funeral” (19). 5. Here, Doležel is specifically discussing postmodernist rewritings of classic works, but the term “expansion” has since been reused and developed: Richard Saint-Gelais defines expansion as follows, without reference to the type of text in question: “La relation transfictionnelle la plus simple, et à coup sûr la plus courante, consiste à proposer une expansion d’une fiction préalable, à travers une transfiction qui la prolonge sur le plan temporel, ou, plus largement, diégétique” (71). 6. For the categorisation of the way in which “blanks” in the original are “filled in” by such techniques of expansion, see Saint-Gelais 77. 7. They are also being written out of the trilogy—in Last Friends, although much referred to, Filth and Betty are both dead. 8. The “Handover” (the transfer of sovereignty from the British to the Chinese) took place in 1997. 9. “I have always preferred writing short stories to writing novels. I have had to learn over thirty years how to attack and survive a novel. A novel is a trek home from the desert, sometimes a journey you wish you had never started. Exhausting and humbling, just occasionally wonderful. But a short story can come from a deeper part of the cave. In a novel you make preparations. You lay in for a siege, carrying a flickering lantern. For a short story you need to carry a blow-lamp for a building site. James Joyce’s Dubliners were the first short stories I read that showed me a completeness that a novel never can have” (Gardam, “Write”).

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ABSTRACTS

“Chinese Funeral” (1990), est une nouvelle de Jane Gardam, prolifique écrivaine britannique qui choisit souvent pour sujet l’expérience des Britanniques dans des pays orientaux. Elle raconte le voyage d’une journée d’un groupe de touristes, pour la plupart Britanniques, de Hong Kong à la Chine continentale. De manière subtile et imbriquée, la nouvelle trace la déstabilisation des touristes à un moment où leurs certitudes coloniales deviennent des incertitudes postcoloniales. Les relations entre dominants et dominés, puissants et impuissants, commencent à se redessiner. Par le biais de la trans-fictionalité, “Chinese Funeral” est comparée à un passage semblable dans un roman postérieur de Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009). Cet article cherche à démontrer comment la lecture de ce roman permet à l’altérité de l’« Oriental » telle qu’elle est présentée dans la nouvelle, d’être redécouverte sous un autre jour, et comment les deux textes explorent les dissonances entre le connu et l’inconnu, l’attendu et l’inattendu, alors que les Britanniques commencent à appréhender de nouvelles altérités qu’ils n’arrivent pas pleinement à saisir ou à comprendre.

AUTHORS

HELEN E. MUNDLER Dr. Helen E. Mundler studied at Durham and Strathclyde before obtaining her PhD in 1998 at the University of Strasbourg, with a thesis on Byatt’s work. The published version is entitled Intertextualité dans l’oeuvre d’A.S. Byatt (Paris, Harmattan, 2003). She has been Associate Professor at the University of Paris-Est Créteil since the year 2000, with a research affiliation at the University of Nanterre-La Défense, where she defended her Habilitation à diriger des recherches in 2014. Helen E. Mundler has written widely on the novels and short stories of a range of British women writers, and has also published a novel and short stories. Another book, The Otherworlds of Liz Jensen: a Critical Reading (New York, Camden House) was published in September 2016.

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Illusions that Resemble Reality: Salman Rushdie’s “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers”

Aloka Patel

1 Towards the middle of his story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” (1994) Salman Rushdie writes: “This permeation of the real world by the fictional is a symptom of the moral decay of our post-millennial culture” (78). By deliberately confusing the fictional with the real, Rushdie playfully conjures up a phantasmagoric world. This imaginary world, real and fictional at the same time, is also the centre where the dynamics of power between the ethical and the wicked are constantly at odds. This paper attempts to understand Rushdie’s short story as a representation of an alternative reality that dramatizes a discourse of historical reality, which is fixed in a specific time and space, in opposition to the “real” world of an exile in today’s globalized context where “home” has become a fluid concept. In addition, the story can be read in Nietzschean terms as a conflict between the “unhistorical” being who is “contained in the present,” and a man who “braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past […] so as to remind him what his existence fundamentally is—an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one” (Nietzsche 61). For Nietzsche, a man who constantly lives in the past and tries to preserve it in his memories considers his own existence in the present as imperfect. On the other hand, the “unhistorical” being also feels incomplete because of his dissociation from the past.

2 In the story, Rushdie dramatizes an auction of a pair of ruby slippers apparently belonging to Dorothy in the classic 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz. The auction hall, with the medley of characters present in it, resembles the contemporary [post]modern, globalized and cosmopolitan world. Removed from their fictional context of the movie, and placed in the auction hall, the narrator questions “the limits of [the magical] powers” (73) of the ruby slippers to take an exile back in space and time to her/his place of origin, or home. He suspects “that these limits may not exist” (73) and tries to prove the inadequacy of reading historical knowledge/meaning into present-day situations. However, while writing the story, the author himself is ironically unable to

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detach the present from the past, and his personal experiences impinge upon the narratorial voice. This paper endeavours also to explain how personal and/or political events shape the opinions of the artist, or in Nietzsche’s terms, the man of “deeds” (64).

3 The Wizard of Oz, a novel originally written by L. Frank Baum in 1900 for children, and popularized in the movie of the same name, idealized “home” as the emblem of one’s ‘true’ identity. ‘Home,’ Kansas in the novel and movie, became the ‘real’ place, and Oz, the emerald world of plenty, became the land of fantasy or dreams. Whereas in the novel Baum makes no explicit remark about Dorothy’s adventures as a dream sequence, the movie presents Dorothy’s journey to Oz as a dream that allows her to escape from the dreary world of her dry and grey Kansas home. After all her exciting adventures into the colourful land of Oz with the Scarecrow, the Tin man, the Cowardly Lion, and her dog Toto, Dorothy returns to Kansas with the realization that “there’s no place like home.” Rushdie counters this notion of “home” as one’s roots to which every exile nostalgically wishes to return, in his essay, “Out of Kansas” (1992): Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf were probably responsible for ‘There’s no place like home’, which, to me, is the least convincing idea in the film (it’s one thing for Dorothy to want to get home, quite another that she can only do so by eulogizing the ideal state which Kansas is so obviously not). (8)

4 Rushdie narrates his thoughts after a viewing of the movie in his childhood in India: I remember (or I imagine I remember) that when I first saw this film, Dorothy’s place struck me as being pretty much a dump. I was lucky, and had a good, comfortable home, and so, I reasoned to myself, if I’d been whisked off to Oz, I’d naturally want to get home again. But Dorothy? Maybe we should invite her over to stay. Anywhere looks better than that. (10)

5 Rushdie undermines the unconditional longing for home as a romantic myth. By linking the notion of home to a material reality and debunking the romantic assumption of “there’s no place like home,” he problematizes the notion of home and situates it in a historical context. He presents migration or exile as a vital experience of the cosmopolitan citizen of the modern “post-millennial” globalized world, a necessary condition for the modern artist. Rushdie dismisses the idea of rootedness of identity or a settled home and notes the embedded urge within humans to move out in search of freer and fertile territories as reflected in Judy Garland’s song, ‘Over the Rainbow’ in the movie. Rushdie comments: Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of ‘home’ over ‘away’, that the ‘moral’ of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly- sweet as an embroidered sampler—‘East, West, home’s best’—would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice, as her face tilts up towards the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is the tension between these two dreams; but as the music swells and that big, clean voice flies into the anguished longings of the song, can anyone doubt which message is the stronger? In its most potent emotional moment this is unarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the greyness and entering the colour, of making a new life in ‘the place where there isn’t any trouble’. ‘Over the Rainbow’ is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where ‘the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true’. It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paen to the uprooted self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere. (“Out of Kansas” 14)

6 The story, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” uses the film The Wizard of Oz as an intertext for the auction of a pair of ruby slippers with magical powers. A motley

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gathering of people fetishizes the slippers because they believe in “their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return” (77). A variety of characters, from actors to physicians, political refugees to even fictional characters from “nineteenth-century Australian paintings” (78) and mad men and orphans arrive with the hope that the slippers may perform “the impossible” (75) and “might transport them back through time and space” (77). The narrative gradually unveils itself to demystify the authority of the magic slippers by poking fun at the “suicidal act of devotion” (74) of the “memorabilia junkies” (74). It builds up an infantile world of “fancy dress party” (74) with “Wizards, Lions, Scarecrows” (74) and mocks senile people who are unable to control their dripping saliva (75). The ironical undertone of the narrative suggests that to believe in the magical powers of the slippers, in contemporary times, is as credulous as to believe in the reality of the slippers in the movie. The narrator expresses his doubts: “will the shoes, like the Grimms’ ancient flatfish, lose patience with our ever-growing demands and return us to the hovels of our discontents?” (78). Just as the movie is fiction, the powers of the slippers are false. One of the women participants at the auction sports a toreador jacket bearing a representation of the great painter Picasso’s “Guernica on her back” (76) while several others wear “glittering scenes from the Disasters of War sequence” (76) by Francisco Goya, another Spanish artist. Guernica is named after a small country town in northern Spain which was bombed and razed to the ground by Germans during the Spanish Civil War. The painting suggestively connects Picasso to Spain, but is an ironical reminder of his lost homeland. Again, the reference to “Children from nineteenth-century Australian paintings” (78) who come to the auction, “whining from their ornate, gilded frames” (78) remind us of Frederick McCubbin’s The Lost Child (1886). The children, “In blue smocks and ankle socks” who “gaze into rain forests and red deserts, and tremble” (78), talk about “being lost in the immensity of the Outback” (78), saying that ‘home’ is too far away. All these references resonate with Rushdie’s own personal history as a migrant and point out that ‘home’ as a concept has lost its mythopoeic power, imagination and promise to arrest our attention and wonder.

7 In his essay, “The Wizard of Oz” (1992), Rushdie comments about the illusory nature of the world of Oz as well as the “real” world of Kansas, both of which exist in the fictional world of the film: “If Oz is nowhere, then the studio setting of the Kansas scenes suggests that so is Kansas” (20). The idea extends to include modern man’s almost impossible desire to claim a non-existent past when the narrator in “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” cynically contests the ideal but polarized concept of home by describing it to be the centre of the exile’s anguish: ‘Home’ has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows anymore. How hard can we expect even a pair of magic shoes to work? They promised to take us home, but are metaphors of homeliness comprehensible to them, are abstractions permissible? Are they literalists, or will they permit us to redefine the blessed word? (78)

8 The narrator dismantles the notion of a static, mythical home and perpetuates the notion of home as a transformative agent fraught with ambiguity as it inheres within its frame both the real and imaginary homelands. To the everyday reality of an exile’s unambiguous alienation, the term “home” has come to refer to a pluralized notion of shared cultural space. Arjun Appadurai claims that the exile occupies “an unbounded

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fantasy space” (170). He speaks of “the seductiveness of plural belonging,” but also points out that exiles “cannot do exactly as they please” (170). The sense of security and belonging associated with the traditional idea of home as fixed and rooted in a specific geographic location has become illusory. The exile occupies a liminal space and any expectation of a temporal or spatial return to an ideal state of the past is a myth, almost impossible. In the story and in the film the story harks back to, Rushdie’s own experience as an immigrant is linked up with his interest in migration and home. He draws upon the image of the pair of ruby slippers to question the impossibility of a return to the past. Rushdie’s own relationship with “home,” particularly after a fundamentalist group declared death sentence against him, has become as he says, “problematic” (“Oz” 436). In a half-mocking tone he states, “I’ve done a good deal of thinking, these past several years, about the advantages of a good pair of ruby slippers” (“Oz” 436). But ironically he does not desire nor does he hope for some ruby slippers to take him home. For Rushdie, the journey matters more than the destination. He calls Dorothy’s journey “a rite of passage” in which she is “a heroine” (“Oz” 433). By the end of her adventures Dorothy has, although accidentally, destroyed the “beautiful wickedness” of the Wicked Witch of the West and “is seen to have grown up” (“Oz” 433). This, according to Rushdie, “is a much more satisfactory reason for her new-found power over the ruby slippers than the sentimental reasons offered by the ineffably soppy Good Witch Glinda, and then by Dorothy herself” (“Oz” 433). For the narrator of the story, or Dorothy of the movie, the physical frontier of a home or the idea of it resonates differently to explain Rushdie’s engagement with a multivalent reality. In the story, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” the narrator is distinctly male, and an artist whose betrayal by his lover, and finally his auction-sale experience, dramatize his personal journey away from the idealized home, symbolically represented by Gale. As he states, “I moved out the same day […] with my portrait of Gale in the guise of a tornado cradled in my arms” (79). Incidentally, Dorothy’s last name in the movie is Gale, and it is a tornado which carries her across the desert to Oz. In his 2002 essay, “Step Across This Line,” Rushdie discusses the advantages of crossing over frontiers and travelling to distant lands. He cites the example of C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka” to suggest the primacy of the Odyssey over the destination, Ithaka: “the point of an Odyssey is the Odyssey” (SATL 410).

9 The ruby slippers trigger the narrator’s memory towards his past lost love. The story about the narrator’s enduring love for his cousin, who has betrayed him, can be seen as an illustration of Nietzsche’s views on history and the role of memory. In his essay, “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Nietzsche argues for a “critical” history against a “monumental” or “antiquarian” approach to history. For him a study of history per se is of no use, and cannot serve the purpose of life or creation. While forgetting the past is the clue to happiness, a deliberate immersion in the past, like the ‘monumental’ or ‘antiquarian’ historian, is considered to be a surrender to the illusory nature of life, and if not destructive, then injurious to the process of artistic creation. However, he also does make a distinction between the animal who does not remember and the human for whom the past is essential for a constructive kind of knowledge. Like the antiquarians who gather at the auction of the slippers as if in a “masquerade,” the fundamentalists who were full of hatred and were censorious of Rushdie’s works are examples of such judges of art as Nietzsche condemns: any art which, because contemporary, is not yet monumental, seems to them unnecessary, unattractive and lacking in the authority conferred by history. On the

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other hand, their instincts tell them that art can be slain by art: the monumental is never to be repeated, and to make sure it is not they invoke the authority which the monumental derives from the past. They are connoisseurs of art because they would like to do away with art altogether; they pose as physicians, while their basic intent is to mix poisons; they develop their taste and tongue as they do so as to employ this spoiled taste as an explanation of why they so resolutely reject all the nourishing artistic food that is offered them. For they do not desire to see new greatness emerge: their means of preventing it is to say ‘Behold, greatness already exists!’ In reality, they are as little concerned about this greatness that already exists as they are about that which is emerging: their lives are evidence of this. Monumental history is the masquerade costume in which their hatred of the great and powerful of their own age is disguised as satiated admiration for the great and powerful of past ages […] whether they are aware of it or not, they act as though their motto were: let the dead bury the living. (72)

10 The slippers have within them the potential of both good and evil for they had belonged, in the first place, to the Wicked Witch of the East. But it was later inherited by Dorothy. Similarly, the slippers at the auction possess the potential of transforming the narrator either into an ‘antiquarian’ who preserves, or a ‘monumental’ who reveres, or else the ‘critical’ being who “suffers and seeks deliverance” (Nietzsche 67). Like the “antiquarian” and the “monumental,” the narrator had at first revered the memory of Gale. As he admits, “I have dedicated myself to her memory. I have made myself a candle at her temple” (80). He had resolved to buy the ruby slippers “whatever the cost” (81) and “offer the miracle-shoes to Gale in all humility […]. Perhaps I might even click the heels together three times, and win back her heart by murmuring, in soft reminder of our wasted love, There’s no place like home” (81). It is only at the end that he gets “detached” (84).

11 Preserving things that are obsolete or revering antiquated ideas in the name of tradition are detrimental to the freedom of the artist. In “Step Across this Line” Rushdie makes explicit his concern over the contemporary political and social scenario where certain bigoted groups with their archaic ideas inhibit the freedom of the artist and the intellectual: Even before the attacks [9/11] on America I was concerned that, in Britain and Europe as well as America, the pressures on artistic and even intellectual freedoms were growing—that cautious, conservative political and institutional forces were gaining the upper hand, and that many social groups were deliberately fostering a new, short-fuse culture of easy offendedness, so that less and less was becoming sayable all the time, and more and more kinds of speech were being categorized as transgressive. Outside the Western world—across the Arab world, in many African countries, in Iran, China, North Korea and elsewhere—writers and intellectuals are everywhere under attack, and more and more of them are being forced into exile. If it was important to resist this cultural closing-in before 9/11, it’s twice as important now. (442)

12 Similarly, in Imaginary Homelands, he cites the example of a dog in Saul Bellow’s novel, The Dean’s December. The central character of the novel, Corde, imagines a dog barking in protest “against the limit of dog experience” (21). Rushdie expresses his desire in the dog’s rage: “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!” (21). What to the conservative is transgression is to Rushdie freedom. He advocates not only “transgression” of speech, but also freedom to cross cultural and geographical borders in order that art may thrive. Art, for Rushdie, “is a passion of the mind. And the imagination works best when it is most free. Western writers have always felt free to be eclectic in their selection of theme, setting, form; Western visual artists have, in this

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century, been happily raiding the visual storehouses of Africa, Asia, the Philippines. I am sure that we must grant ourselves an equal freedom” (Imaginary Homelands 20). Rushdie grants himself the freedom of borrowing from a Western movie to put across his views about “home” and the role of the artist in exile for whom “the past is a foreign country,” a country “from which we have all emigrated” (Imaginary Homelands 12). The ruby slippers as metaphors of home and migration, are also art objects from a fictional narrative and a movie. In the context of the story they give the writer/ narrator further scope for advancing the narrative art form. Nevertheless, the slippers, and by extension the agency of art, and the artist are threatened by fundamentalists who “have openly stated that they are interested in buying the magic footwear only in order to burn it” (77). Ironically, “this is not,” the narrator remarks, “in the view of the liberal Auctioneers, a reprehensible programme” (77).

13 His present “being in a different place from his past” (Imaginary Homelands 12), the modern artist like Nietzsche’s critical historian discovers that he must possess the strength to discard the past, although not altogether forget, in order to be able to live and create. To those present at the auction, the ruby slippers have claimed possession of their souls like the “preserving and revering soul of the antiquarian man [which] has emigrated” into the “trivial, circumscribed, decaying and obsolete” (Nietzsche 73). In opposition to these devotees around the “shrine of the ruby-sequined slippers […] who lack restraint, who drool” (75) is the narrator for whom the same slippers serve as agents that make him realize the futility of claiming the past. The past is also, however, as already mentioned, paradoxically the means to constructive knowledge and so should not be shaken off entirely. In the context of the story, the past is for the narrator the lost “love of [his] life” (79), Gale, and for her, her lost home. It is Gale “in the guise of a tornado” (79) who had transported the narrator to despair, and it is his desire to “win back her heart” (81) that had at first brought him to the auction. Whereas his obsessive love/devotion for Gale had given us the image of an antiquarian, the entire episode of the narrator’s remembrance of Gale and his ruminations over the auction of the ruby slippers becomes an enactment of the motivations of the Nietzschean man of “deeds.” Gale, on the other hand, like the devotees of the ruby slippers at the auction, is immersed in the past. She is obsessed with the antiquated idea of home as rooted and fixed. The narrator remembers that Gale used to cry out during love-making, “Home, boy! Home […] you’ve come home!” (79). Although he claims that “there was nothing abnormal about our love-making, nothing, if I may put it thus, fictional” (79), Gale’s desire to bring “home” all exiles who have crossed frontiers like the “hairy escapee from a caveman movie” (79) and the Martian is an impossibility, a fiction. In the narrator’s imagination, Gale herself may have become fictional: “The real Gale has become confused with my re-imagining of her” (80). Gale becomes transformed into a metaphor for an idealized notion of “home,” an antiquarian. And although she may be unworthy, his love for her transforms the narrator into the man of deeds. His love for Gale, however, stands in contrast to his former employer, the multi-millionaire widower’s materialist obsession for his wife’s underwear. The widower’s fetish for his dead wife’s clothing is literally consuming as the narrator had noted, “My employer’s late wife’s stage act had included the public removal and consumption of such pairs” (83). The narrator calls this consuming passion for objects of the past, the “trivial, circumscribed, decaying and obsolete,” a sickness of the heart (73) and almost agrees with Nietzsche’s statement: “I believe, indeed, that we are all suffering from a consuming fever of history” (60). The attitude

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of the three characters--the widower, Gale and the narrator--illustrate the three different Nietzschean attitudes to history and art, respectively those of the monumental, the antiquarian, and the unhistorical. Nietzsche illustrates his idea of the unhistorical as an “atmosphere within which alone life can germinate” (63) by the example of “a man seized by a vehement passion, for a woman or for a great idea” (64). He elaborates: how different the world has become to him! Looking behind him he seems to himself as though blind, listening around him he hears only a dull, meaningless noise; whatever he does perceive, however, he perceives as he has never perceived before—all is so palpable, close, highly coloured, resounding, as though he apprehended it with all his senses at once. All his valuations are altered and disvalued; there are so many things he is no longer capable of evaluating at all because he can hardly feel them anymore: he asks himself why he was for so long the fool of the phrases and opinions of others; he is amazed that his memory revolves unwearyingly in a circle and yet is too weak and weary to take even a single leap out of this circle. It is the condition in which one is the least capable of being just; narrow-minded, ungrateful to the past, blind to dangers, deaf to warnings, one is a little vortex of life in a dead sea of darkness and oblivion: and yet this condition—unhistorical, anti-historical through and through—is the womb not only of the unjust but of every just deed too; and no painter will paint his picture, no general achieve his victory, no people attain its freedom without having first desired and striven for it in an unhistorical condition such as that described. (64)

14 The narrator, like the lover in Nietzsche’s example, begins to wonder “at the mysteries of love” (74). He chooses not to be immersed in the past, rather through the agency of the slippers, paradoxically uses his experience of the past to transcend it and achieve his artistic destination. The narrator’s recollection of his past engaged him in a mental discourse involving “thinking, reflecting, comparing, distinguishing” which can be said to be the “imposing” of “limits on [the] unhistorical element” (Nietzsche 64). This leads him to realize and come to the ironical conclusion: “It is to the Auctioneer we go to establish the value of our pasts, of our futures, of our lives” (83). Again, like the Nietzschean lover who on recollection of the past realizes “All his valuations are altered and disvalued; there are so many things he is no longer capable of evaluating at all because he can hardly feel them anymore” (64), the narrator’s love for Gale puts him in an unhistorical condition. He forgets most things and begins to bid “literally—for [him]self” (84). Again, like the Nietzschean hero, “ungrateful to the past, blind to dangers, deaf to warnings […], a little vortex of life” (64), he narrates the experience of this artist in exile who has left behind his past, his home: At the height of an auction, when the money has become no more than a way of keeping score, a thing happens which I am reluctant to admit: one becomes detached from the earth. There is a loss of gravity, a reduction in weight, a floating in the capsule of the struggle. The ultimate goal crosses a delirious frontier. Its achievement and our own survival become—yes!—fictions. And fictions, as I have come close to suggesting before, are dangerous. In fiction’s grip […] we may simply float away from our desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial [my emphasis]. We let them go. (84-85)

15 However, this “detachment from the earth” is not like that of the Martian. The astronaut is stranded on Mars “without hope of rescue, and with diminishing supply of food and breathable air” and has no scope of return because of the cancellation of the space exploration budget. Televised images and sentimental renditions of songs from

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The Wizard of Oz project pictures “of his slow descent into despair, his low gravity, weight-reduced death” (80). The narrator, on the other hand, avoids “despair” by gazing backwards. He realizes that what is happening outside the auction hall is as fictional as what is happening inside; and both of them are considered forms of “drama.” That is why, being “absorbed by [the] higher drama” (84) of veneration of the past we forget the importance of the present lived existence where “There’s an explosion in the street outside” (84). Like his author who says “that the facts of my faraway life were illusions, that this continuity was the reality” (Imaginary Homelands 9), the narrator understands that the past was “an invisible world of demons and ghosts” (84) with which one had to “battle,” “struggle” to survive. The achievement of the “ultimate goal” of this struggle, the ruby slippers, which become emblematic of the past, “and our own survival,” are, however, “fictions” (84). In “Out of Kansas” Rushdie had noted that both the real world of Kansas and the fantasy world of Oz were fictional: “It’s hard for a migrant like myself not to see in these shifting destinies a parable of the migrant condition” (30). A writer for whom “the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home’ but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began” (33). The slippers are not meant to take any of the characters to their past “homes.” Rather they dramatize Rushdie’s idea of the “broken glass” which, as he says, “is not merely a mirror of nostalgia. It is also, I believe, a useful tool with which to work in the present” (Imaginary Homelands 12). However, particularly for the man in exile, an engagement with the present does not necessarily involve a forgetting of the past. The present is only a continuity of the past, and it is not entirely possible to break away from the chain of this past.

16 The movie, The Wizard of Oz, which has become the intertext for this narrative about the exile’s desire to return home and the reality of the place where he is located now is a confirmation, albeit a “metaphor for the narrative’s movement through time towards the present” (Imaginary Homelands 13). The illusion that the movie creates, that ‘there’s no place like home,’ itself becomes the reality when Rushdie chooses to “redefine” the meaning of the word “home” when he says that “there is no longer any such place as home” for a person like himself in exile. Frank Soren, in his Migration and Literature, trying to define the position of the migrant, quotes Ian Chambers and says that “migrancy involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are subject to constant mutation. Always in transit, the promise of a homecoming—completing the story, domesticating the detour—becomes an impossibility” (16). For “those of us” as Rushdie states, “who have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties, have perhaps had modernism forced upon us” (Imaginary Homelands 12). Home is no longer rooted in any specific geographical location. In “Step Across this Line” Rushdie narrates from Doris Lessing’s science-fiction, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, a quest story of a group of migrants who are forced by circumstances to leave home and cross the frontiers of their ice-destroyed land. As they cross the frontier to make the difficult journey, they learn that “in order to survive, they would need to change” (409). It is no longer the place of origin or “the points of departure” or “those of arrival” which give the migrant his/her identity. For Rushdie, “The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross” (“SATL” 410). The narrator of our story recognizes

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this truth when he decides to “drop out of the bidding, go home, and fall asleep” (85). Since people “become the frontiers [they] cross,” Gale’s tears for the Martian are, in fact, meaningless.

17 In today’s [post]colonial, [post]modern world, the migrant, already a cultural hybrid, is “the man without frontiers […], the archetypal figure of our age” (SATL 415). Immigrants no longer feel compelled to return home; and the frontier has become “an elusive line, visible and invisible, physical and metaphorical, amoral and moral” (SATL 411). Throughout recorded history human beings from almost every region of the world have travelled and crossed borders, sometimes in pursuit of trade, and sometimes for knowledge, and even to build empires. Kwame Anthony Appiah calls human beings “a travelling species” (215). But today’s migrants with their sense of being rootless and living between “a lost past and a non-integrated present” are seen by Ian Chambers as “the most fitting metaphors of [the]… (post) modern condition” (27). If modernity as defined by Paul de Man, “exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure,” the idea of [post]modernity would advocate the cosmopolitan as the ideal. Rushdie’s postmodern man as a “cosmopolitan” can be understood through Appiah’s definition of a cosmopolitan, as “someone who thinks that the world is, so to speak, our shared hometown, reproducing something very like the self-conscious oxymoron of the ‘global village’” (217). Instead of a cynical rejection of, to borrow a phrase from Appiah, “local loyalties” (218) and a general hostility towards custom and tradition, Rushdie’s call is for universal human solidarity, which is absent in the case of the Martian: “influential voices complained of the sentimentality of the images of the dying spaceman” (80). He makes this amply clear in Imaginary Homelands when he says, “the largest and most dangerous pitfall would be the adoption of a ghetto mentality. To forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers, would be, I believe, to go voluntarily into that form of internal exile which in South Africa is called the ‘homeland’” (19).

18 The choice of The Wizard of Oz as the backdrop in which the story of “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” is set is of huge significance as it demonstrates a liberal world where freedom of expression is of utmost importance for a writer threatened by fundamentalist groups. As already mentioned, in the story the narrator questions the philosophy of the liberal world. He ironically notes the double standards of self- acclaimed liberals in a world of increasing intolerance and terrorism: “What price tolerance if the intolerant are not tolerated also? ‘Money insists on democracy,’ the liberal Auctioneers insist ‘Anyone’s cash is as good as anyone else’s’” (77). Rushdie’s personal opinion of the film is significant: one of the most striking aspects of the worldview of The Wizard of Oz is its joyful and almost complete secularism. Religion is mentioned only once in the film […]. Apart from this […] the film is breezily godless. There is not a trace of religion in Oz itself; bad witches are feared, good ones liked, but none are sanctified; and while the Wizard of Oz is thought to be something very close to all-powerful, nobody thinks to worship him. This absence of higher values greatly increases the film’s charm, and is an important aspect of its success in creating a world in which nothing is deemed more important than loves, cares and needs of human beings (and, of course, tin beings, straw beings, lions and dogs). (“The Wizard of Oz” 434)

19 Just as for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, displacement from “home” becomes a liberating experience for all migrants and writers/artists in exile. The plurality of the identities of

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such writers who straddle at least two cultures dismantle myths of homogeneous identity and national cultures. According to Rushdie, their geographical displacement provides them the fertile ground of ambiguity and multiple perspectives for writing fiction. Like in his novels, even in this story Rushdie explores the anxieties of a culturally displaced migrant and the strategies adopted for survival between cultures. Survival was possible when “Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world” (Rushdie, “The Wizard of Oz” 447). Frank Baum had written thirteen other Oz novels after The Wizard of Oz keeping in view readers’ interest. In the sixth book of the series Dorothy takes Aunt Em and Uncle Henry away from the grey world of Kansas to settle down in Oz. In a persuasive demand for freedom and tolerance for people who cross frontiers, Rushdie raises issues such as: Will we give the enemy the satisfaction of changing ourselves into something like the hate-filled, illiberal mirror-image, or will we, as the guardians of the modern world, as the custodians of freedom and the occupants of the privileged lands of plenty, go on trying to increase freedom and decrease injustice? Will we become the suits of armour our fear makes us put on, or will we continue to be ourselves? The frontier both shapes our character and tests our mettle. I hope we pass the test. (SATL 442)

20 Like the Wizard who does not provide a real heart, or brain, or courage, to those who go to seek it from him, but creates illusions that provide insights to readers of the existence of such things already within the characters who demand it of him, Rushdie believes in the illusion of “home” as a necessary condition for the survival of the immigrant. The solution to the problem of the exile who looks to the past but lost home of her/his childhood days, lies not in miracles, not in the hope of clicking the heels of some “miracle-shoes” (81) to take her/him home, but in the use of the same loss to her/his artistic advantage. As Rushdie declares, “loss of the East—is my artistic country now” (SATL 266). So also Gale loses her hold on the narrator of “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers.” He decides to “drop out of the bidding, go home, and fall asleep” (85). When he wakes up, he feels “refreshed and free” (85). Like Dorothy who wakes up from her dream at the end of the movie, the reader is left in doubt whether the entire episode of the auction was a dream, an illusion. Illusion, of the past ideal world, or reality, of the present ambiguous state, this revisiting of the past (“Next week there is another auction” [85]) and return continues the chain of linking the past to the present and fostering the exile’s identity of being “somebody” (85).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: Minneapolis UP, 1996. Print.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Print.

Chambers, Ian. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

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de Man, Paul. “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Time and the Literary. Ed. Karen Newman et al. New York: Routledge, 2002. 145-67. Print.

Lessing, Doris. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” (1874) Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 59-123. Print.

Rushdie, Salman. “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers.” (1994) East, West. London: Vintage, 1995. 71-85. Print.

---. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta Books, 1991. Print.

---. “Out of Kansas.” Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002. 3-33. Print.

---. “Step Across This Line.” Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002. 407-42. Print.

---. “Wizard of Oz: A Short Text About Magic.” British Film Institute 1 (2012): 433-52. Print.

Soren, Frank. Migration and Literature: Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjaerstad. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Print.

ABSTRACTS

Dans sa nouvelle « At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers », Salman Rushdie s’amuse à mêler une perception alternative de la réalité à l’approche que nous en avons habituellement. Nous nous donnons donc ici pour tâche de voir comment l’auteur y déploie le discours de la réalité historique en opposition à cette autre réalité que constitue la mondialisation pour un exilé. En ne distinguant pas ce qui est fictionnel du réel, Rushdie veut mettre en évidence un monde où la dynamique des forces qui relient ce qui est éthique et ce qui ne l’est pas est en constante contradiction. Notre article propose donc une lecture nietzschéenne de la nouvelle, y voyant un conflit entre l’être « non-historique » contenu dans le présent et un homme qui, selon Nietzsche, use de ses forces pour combattre la pression toujours grandissante du passé afin de lui rappeler que son existence est fondamentalement un temps imparfait à jamais imperfectible.

AUTHORS

ALOKA PATEL Aloka Patel teaches in the Department of English, Sambalpur University, Odisha, India. Her research areas include Postcolonial studies, Women’s writings in English and other Regional languages of India. At present she is working on a project on Early prose writings on Women’s Education in Odisha, India.

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De la divergence culturelle à la confluence transculturelle : rencontres de l’altérité dans The Thing Around Your Neck de Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Julia Siccardi

1 Le mot “confluence”, fréquemment employé de manière métaphorique dans le langage des sciences humaines, renvoie à plusieurs champs sémantiques et son sens est double. Il s’agit en effet de la “jonction des cours d’eau et des glaciers”, mais aussi du “lieu où se produit cette jonction.”1 Dès la définition du mot se dessine une forme de divergence, de duplicité : d’une part, on évoque le mouvement fluide de l’eau, de deux ou plusieurs courants qui se mêlent ; de l’autre, le lieu, fixe, de cette rencontre. Le recueil de nouvelles partage cette duplicité avec la notion de confluence, en ce qu’il se caractérise par une forme de fragmentation : les nouvelles forment un ensemble, en partie discontinu, réuni au cœur d’un même objet, le livre. La recherche d’une confluence dans un recueil de nouvelles est souvent une pierre d’achoppement sur laquelle butent lecteurs et critiques. Dans Des Textes à l’œuvre, René Audet se penche sur cet écueil et va jusqu’à évoquer un “malaise” qui “s’explique par la tension entre la discontinuité du texte du recueil et la totalité du livre” (27). Le recueil de nouvelles remet ainsi en question le sens traditionnel du livre parce qu’il est, toujours selon Audet, la “matérialisation d’un régime de polytextualité, où les textes sont contraints à cohabiter” (23), ce qui rend parfois problématique l’unité du recueil, sa confluence.

2 Si l’on cherche, malgré tout, à dégager une unité dans un recueil de nouvelles, on risque de se heurter à un autre écueil, identifié lui aussi par René Audet : comment, en effet, déterminer “la hiérarchie des procédés unifiants” (9) ? Faut-il chercher une unité thématique ? Stylistique ? La cohérence se trouve-t-elle dans la voix narrative, le ton, “les univers partagés” (9) ? Si tel était le cas, alors, il n’y aurait pas de confluence dans The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) de l’écrivaine nigériane Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,

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dont chacune des nouvelles introduit un univers et un contexte différents de ceux de la précédente. Point de confluence non plus dans la voix narrative, qui mute à chaque nouvelle, de la première à la troisième personne, passant même par la deuxième personne du singulier. Dans cet ensemble de nouvelles qui ont, entre autres thèmes récurrents, la migration, la séparation et la perte, la confluence se crée paradoxalement autour de motifs évoquant l’éclatement et la divergence. C’est sur cette confluence paradoxale que nous souhaiterions nous pencher, afin de clarifier comment confluences et divergences se nourrissent l’une l’autre, et comment ces nouvelles, plongeant au cœur de l’individu, esquissent l’idée d’une convergence transculturelle qui s’ancrerait dans la reconnaissance bienveillante d’autrui.

3 Cette analyse portera tout d’abord sur la notion de confluence, qui est ici paradoxale dans la mesure où elle découle des motifs récurrents de l’éclatement et de la perte, eux- mêmes provoqués par des moments de crise. La crise résultant souvent d’une migration, on analysera ensuite en quoi migrer revient à faire l’expérience de la divergence. L’évolution de la divergence culturelle vers une possible confluence transculturelle formera le dernier point d’analyse de cette réflexion.

Une confluence paradoxale : les motifs de l’éclatement

et de la perte

4 Alors que la notion de confluence est synonyme d’union et de jonction, c’est paradoxalement l’éclatement, la dispersion et la perte qui forment le point de confluence entre les différentes nouvelles du recueil. Nombreux sont les récits qui relatent des rencontres, mais des rencontres qui s’accompagnent d’une perte : dans “A Private Experience”, Chika rencontre une femme musulmane qui lui sauve la vie lors d’une émeute, mais elle perd sa sœur ; dans “On Monday of Last Week”, une jeune femme tombe sous le charme de la mère du petit garçon qu’elle garde, ce qui l’éloigne de son mari ; dans la nouvelle éponyme, Akunna, qui a émigré aux États-Unis et vit des moments très difficiles, fait une rencontre amoureuse, mais il lui faut plusieurs mois pour oser écrire à sa famille et lorsqu’elle y parvient, c’est pour apprendre le décès de son père, survenu cinq mois auparavant. Presque toutes les nouvelles du recueil reposent ainsi sur la présence simultanée de la rencontre et de la perte, du lien et du déchirement.

5 Ces motifs, dans le recueil d’Adichie, surviennent dans des moments de crise. Les nouvelles de The Thing Around Your Neck abordent en effet des crises identitaires, tantôt violentes, tantôt intérieures et discrètes, subies par des personnes qui ont en commun, pour la plupart, d’avoir migré aux États-Unis. Ces personnages sont souvent des femmes qui ont suivi leur mari, et dont le quotidien n’est que dépaysement, désœuvrement et solitude, ce qui les amène à remettre en question leurs choix de vie. Kamara, la protagoniste de “On Monday of Last Week”, voit ainsi ses certitudes éclater lorsqu’elle rencontre la mère de Josh, le petit garçon dont elle s’occupe, une artiste lunatique qui la séduit, mais simplement pour le plaisir de séduire, comme on le comprend à la fin de la nouvelle. Ébranlée par sa récente arrivée aux États-Unis, avec le lot de désillusions qu’elle a entraînées, Kamara, jeune femme diplômée n’ayant pas trouvé d’autre emploi que baby-sitter, remet en question son couple, ses ambitions et

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jusqu’à son identité sexuelle. La nouvelle s’achève brutalement lorsque la mère rencontre et charme la professeure de français de son fils. Kamara comprend alors que l’intérêt qu’elle lui a manifesté plus tôt n’était pas sincère et cette prise de conscience lui fait perdre contenance : “She sat down next to Josh and took a cookie from his plate” (94). Le mouvement descendant sur lequel se clôt le récit symbolise l’effondrement intérieur de Kamara. Incapable de se tenir droite face à la déception et au choc, elle s’assoit et, dans un geste qui contribue à lui conférer un statut d’enfant et non plus de femme, elle grignote un biscuit de Josh. La mère n’a fait irruption dans la vie de Kamara que pour faire éclater ses certitudes intérieures sur son identité, et laisse la jeune Nigériane littéralement effondrée par la crise intérieure et secrète qu’elle vient de traverser.

6 Un autre motif récurrent est celui de l’éclatement, qui est particulièrement travaillé dans la nouvelle “The American Embassy”, dans laquelle une femme patiente pour entrer à l’ambassade américaine de Lagos afin d’y déposer une demande d’asile. Quatre jours auparavant, son mari, un journaliste dissident, a dû s’enfuir clandestinement vers les États-Unis, juste avant que des hommes du gouvernement fassent irruption chez eux et assassinent leur fils, Ugonna. Dans la file d’attente, la mère d’Ugonna, en état de choc, se remémore ces événements traumatisants. Un élément revient régulièrement dans ses souvenirs, et ce n’est qu’à sa troisième occurrence que le lecteur peut en comprendre la symbolique : il s’agit de l’huile de palme, très courante en Afrique où on l’utilise non traitée, ce qui signifie qu’elle est de couleur rouge orangé. L’huile, dans cette nouvelle, agit ainsi comme métaphore et litote du sang qui a taché le vêtement d’Ugonna. Ainsi, elle apparaît paradoxalement comme un motif servant à symboliser la fragmentation, comme en atteste l’extrait suivant, dans lequel la couleur rouge sert à marquer poétiquement la transition entre le souvenir et le moment présent, ainsi qu’à représenter la poitrine du petit garçon qui vient d’éclater sous le coup de feu : Ugonna was screaming now; he never screamed when he cried, he was not that kind of child. Then the gun went off and the palm oil splash appeared on Ugonna’s chest. “See oranges here”, the man in line behind her said […]. (132)

7 Le passage brutal du souvenir à la réalité s’accomplit par l’intermédiaire de la couleur, du rouge sang à l’orange. La mère est subitement ramenée à la réalité par l’interpellation de l’homme qui attire son attention sur les fruits : la couleur s’est atténuée, comme si la réalité pouvait n’être plus que fade après la mort d’Ugonna, mais elle établit un lien visuel qui perpétue le sentiment d’horreur. L’huile de palme a donc une double fonction. En faisant le lien entre le sang et l’huile et entre le passé et le présent, la métaphore forme un point de confluence dans le récit. De plus, sa récurrence crée du “liant” narratif et apporte de la cohésion au texte en renforçant sa symbolique. Mais sa répétition symbolise également l’éclatement et la dispersion : l’éclatement de la poitrine d’Ugonna sous les balles ; l’éclatement narratif, puisque la nouvelle est traversée par les souvenirs qui divisent le récit de la longue attente devant l’ambassade, avec des transitions brusques entre mémoire et réalité (dans l’exemple précédent, l’élément opérant la transition est celui-là même qui crée la division) ; et enfin l’éclatement de la cellule familiale dont les membres sont dispersés géographiquement : le père est aux États-Unis, la mère décide finalement de rester au Nigéria, et, ultime séparation, leur fils est mort.

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8 Ces crises des personnages s’inscrivent en parallèle à celles que peut ressentir le lecteur qui, à chaque texte, est transporté d’un univers à un autre, d’une voix à une autre, d’un pays à un autre. Pour Pierre Tibi, ce choix procède aussi du harcèlement : il y a quelque chose de terriblement efficace dans cette incessante modification des modes, des points de vue, des narrateurs, que la multiplication des récits brefs autorise. […] On peut trouver déroutante, et quasiment vertigineuse, cette remise en question du confort, du monolithisme de la lecture. (44)

9 Le lecteur est donc lui aussi, dans une certaine mesure, en crise, car il partage avec les personnages l’expérience de l’instabilité et du décentrement. À chaque début de nouvelle, il lui faut interpréter les signes et les indices afin de savoir si l’histoire se déroule aux États-Unis ou au Nigéria. Il devient ainsi attentif à des détails significatifs tels que les prénoms des personnages, les descriptions de lieux, la façon de parler des personnages (la présence ou non de mots igbo, la référence à des dieux, l’emploi de proverbes). Les incipits, toujours in medias res, sont impitoyables : aucune explication littérale ne vient aider le lecteur à se situer. Si cette désorientation est assez caractéristique aux recueils qui ne sont pas organisés en cycles de nouvelles, elle prend ici une dimension symbolique très significative. En effet, le lecteur se retrouve dans une position similaire à celle du migrant qui apprend à reconnaître les signes et les codes dans une langue et une culture qu’il ne maîtrise pas—ce qui peut être le cas pour des lecteurs occidentaux vis-à-vis du Nigéria et vice-versa. Dans un recueil de nouvelles qui, par définition, est déjà composé d’une variété de textes, le lecteur recoupe les plus petits éléments, à l’intérieur même de ces textes, pour en faire émerger le sens : cet éclatement du “monolithisme de la lecture” qu’évoque Tibi est donc démultiplié, de la multiplicité des nouvelles à celles des indices textuels.

10 Le choix du recueil de nouvelles est donc particulièrement adapté ici, car la forme dit l’éclatement tout autant que les thèmes principaux tels que la perte, la mort ou la migration : forme et fond confluent pour signifier la divergence. Ces thèmes, particulièrement celui de la migration, mettent en lumière la question de la frontière. Par sa forme même, le recueil est traversé de frontières : les blancs typographiques qui séparent les nouvelles invitent le lecteur à se déplacer mentalement d’un espace à un autre, à l’image des personnages migrants. L’expérience du lecteur devient représentative, toutes proportions gardées, de celle des personnages.

La migration : une expérience de la divergence

11 Dans son analyse du recueil de nouvelles, René Audet évoque “l’indétermination des frontières et du statut textuel du recueil qui se compromettent réciproquement” (68). Le recueil est en effet un objet fragmenté, traversé par des frontières internes qui séparent les différentes nouvelles, ce qui amène à se demander si “le recueil est un texte ou un ensemble de textes” (69). Audet propose, pour sortir de cette contradiction interne, de considérer le recueil comme “une double strate textuelle, à la fois texte global et ensemble de textes” (69). Le recueil serait donc un objet double. Cette oscillation est d’autant plus sensible dans The Thing Around Your Neck que le recueil aborde le thème de la migration, et donc des frontières et de leur passage. Dans son article sur la nouvelle, Pierre Tibi définit la frontière comme une […] zone indécise et ambiguë entre deux polarités opposées, que contradictoirement elle unit et sépare. C’est un lieu où l’appartenance de l’individu

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à son groupe ethnique, culturel ou social tend à se problématiser—un “non-lieu”, en fait, où s’opèrent d’insolites et instables transactions entre le connu et l’inconnu, le familier et l’étrange. (37)

12 Ces transactions entre le connu et l’inconnu, le familier et l’étrange, attestent du fait que migrer revient à vivre une expérience de divergence plutôt que de confluence. Dans “The Arrangers of Marriage”, Adichie met en évidence une divergence linguistique. Le jeune couple nigérian, issu d’un mariage arrangé, vient d’arriver aux États-Unis. Le mari de Chinaza veut ardemment s’intégrer et gommer son origine et son identité nigérianes. Il a abandonné son prénom nigérian au profit du très commun et très américain “Dave”, et impose à sa femme d’employer un vocabulaire spécifiquement américain. Ainsi la reprend-il, au supermarché : “Can we buy those biscuits?” I asked. […] “Cookies. Americans call them cookies”, he said. I reached out for the biscuits (cookies). (174)

13 Le mari ne répond pas à la question, n’y voyant que “l’erreur” de vocabulaire ; il se contente de corriger son épouse sur ce point, en répétant le mot “cookies.” Chinaza répète également le signifié, mais emploie les deux signifiants, dans une hésitation mimétique de l’oral qui ne trompe personne : le mot “cookies” entre parenthèses trahit l’indécision et l’inconfort de Chinaza. Ce petit jeu linguistique se répète à plusieurs reprises dans la nouvelle, Dave reprenant son épouse sur de nombreuses spécificités du vocabulaire américain. Après avoir traversé des frontières géographiques, la jeune femme se heurte donc à une frontière linguistique, subtile et inattendue, matérialisée dans le texte par les parenthèses qui séparent les deux mots dont le sens converge, et qui indiquent un refus—ou une incapacité—de la protagoniste de se les approprier complètement. La migration est donc vécue par Chinaza comme une forte expérience de la divergence, qui s’opère tant dans le langage que dans son couple.

14 Pierre Tibi évoque également la frontière comme un “non-lieu” et c’est effectivement dans un non-lieu, induit par sa solitude et son anonymat, que réside Akunna, personnage principal de “The Thing Around Your Neck”, dans les premières semaines de son arrivée aux États-Unis. Sans ressources, Akunna est employée illégalement comme serveuse dans un restaurant et pendant de longues semaines, sa vie ne consiste qu’à travailler et dormir, dans la plus grande solitude. Elle n’ose écrire à sa famille et ses amis et sombre peu à peu dans un sentiment d’inexistence qui l’étouffe littéralement—c’est “cette chose autour de son cou.” La nouvelle est écrite à la deuxième personne du singulier : la voix narrative, non identifiée, s’adresse à un “you” qui représente non pas le lecteur, comme on pourrait s’y attendre, mais la protagoniste. Il se peut qu’Akunna, ne parvenant pas à s’ancrer dans sa nouvelle réalité, s’adresse à elle-même, dans un dédoublement rimbaldien. Dans cet environnement nouveau et essentiellement hostile, il lui est impossible de trouver un espace où dire “je” ; alors “je” devient un autre, et Akunna, déconnectée d’elle-même, vivant une forme de divergence au cœur même de son individualité, s’observe de l’extérieur et se sent devenir invisible. Le pronom “you” opère un double mouvement contradictoire. D’une part, le dédoublement du “je” au “tu” ouvre la possibilité d’une identification plus facile pour le lecteur : le personnage ne serait pas seul dans cette situation difficile et ce “you” pourrait s’adresser à un lecteur dans une situation similaire à celle d’Akunna. D’autre part, le choix du pronom “you” met la jeune femme à distance, renforçant un isolement que son incapacité à écrire à sa famille intensifie. Il semble ainsi faire exister Akunna dans un “non-lieu”, un à-côté, un vide existentiel.

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…so you wrote nobody. Nobody knew where you were, because you told no one. Sometimes you felt invisible and tried to walk through your room wall into the hallway, and when you bumped into the wall, it left bruises on your arms. (119)

15 La répétition de “nobody” et de sa variante, “no one”, rend la solitude palpable. De même le positionnement des deux mots, à chaque extrémité de la deuxième phrase, encadrant le pronom “you” dans une figure chiasmique, semble enfermer la jeune femme dans sa solitude. Le choix du pronom personnel “you” au lieu du “je” efface d’autant plus l’identité du personnage, qui n’a même plus la possibilité d’affirmer son identité. La sensation d’invisibilité de la protagoniste achève de la déplacer, métaphoriquement, dans un “non-lieu”, qui est peut-être l’espace du migrant.

16 Cette expérience de migrant est la thématique la plus prégnante dans le recueil. Au- delà de la multiplicité des voix narratives, des histoires, des contextes, le même malaise naît chez les personnages lorsque ceux-ci comprennent que la frontière n’est pas seulement une ligne géographique qui sépare les pays ; le franchissement de cette bordure spatiale et politique, qui n’implique qu’un déplacement physique, n’est qu’une étape de la migration. D’autres frontières, plus subtiles, plus mouvantes, plus complexes, se manifestent ensuite, dans les différences de codes sociaux et culturels. Les personnages rencontrent en effet quelques difficultés à s’adapter à des logiques et des codes culturels méconnaissables. The Thing Around Your Neck s’attache donc plutôt à souligner les divergences (culturelles, linguistiques, sociales) que les personnages affrontent en traversant les frontières. La frontière n’est plus conçue ou ressentie comme une ligne géographique qui sépare deux pays, mais comme une “zone indécise et ambiguë”, une zone grise, dont les limites ne peuvent être franchies qu’avec l’acclimatation du migrant à son pays d’accueil. Ainsi, plutôt qu’un lieu fixe ancré dans un espace géographique, la frontière devient quelque chose que le migrant porte avec lui. Une telle conception se rapproche de ce que Edward S. Casey, cité par John J. Su dans Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel, a défini comme “a primal place”, un lieu primitif. Réfléchissant au lien entre éthique et lieu, John J. Su évoque cette notion que Casey décrit comme “an exemplar against which all subsequent places are implicitly to be measured”, un lieu où l’individu intègre des “moyens d’orientation”, grâce au “modèle de réseau social qui [le] guide” (Casey in Su 29). Toutefois, contrairement à Aristote, pour qui, comme le rappelle John J. Su, le “lieu primitif” définit le caractère et les habitudes de l’individu, Casey considère, de manière plus optimiste et certainement plus moderne, que l’on peut s’identifier à plusieurs “lieux primitifs”, dans la mesure où les réseaux sociaux peuvent être “étendus ou reproduits” (Casey in Su 29). Ces propos semblent aller dans le sens de ce qu’écrit l’anthropologue Hans-Rudolf Wicker dans un article intitulé “From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity” : l’auteur refuse l’idée d’une culture “monolinéaire”, arguant qu’il n’existe pas de culture en tant “qu’ensemble complexe.” Ce qui existe, et qui est observable par la science, ce sont des “pratiques culturelles.” Dès lors, Integration can no longer be described as the change from one cultural system to another. Instead, integration becomes a social field of interaction in itself, wherein processes of creolisation occur with increasing frequency to produce culture in the form of new habits. (40)

17 Les personnages d’Adichie, arrachés, pour des raisons diverses, à leur “lieu primitif”, ne sont condamnés à rester dans la zone grise que tant qu’ils ne peuvent profiter d’interactions sociales, et même alors, il leur est difficile de s’adapter à d’autres

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modèles. La raison pour laquelle, d’après Wicker, un tel processus de “créolisation” est lent à se mettre en place tient au “staying power of habit” (41). Chinaza peine à adopter le vocabulaire américain, Akunna trouve difficile de s’intégrer socialement bien qu’elle ait un visa et un petit ami américain, Kamara n’a de contacts qu’avec le petit garçon qu’elle garde et son père : tous ces personnages sont enfermés dans des habitudes qui les emprisonnent en limitant leurs interactions sociales, quand bien même cet isolement se fait en dépit de leur volonté. Ainsi, le malaise persistant des personnages migrants vient peut-être moins du fait d’avoir migré que de l’isolement dans lequel ils se trouvent une fois dans leur pays d’accueil. Cet isolement, souvent plus social que physique, s’explique par le fait que les modèles d’interaction sociale qu’ils connaissent ne fonctionnent plus tout à fait. Le cas de Chinaza, dans “The Arrangers of Marriage”, est exemplaire : lorsqu’au premier matin leur voisine américaine vient se présenter, Chinaza croit s’adresser poliment à cette femme plus âgée, mais sa réponse, en réalité, est incongrue : “‘I’m Shirley from 3A. Nice to meet you,’ she said, shaking my hand. […] ‘You are welcome,’ I said. Shirley paused, as though surprised” (171). Tout lecteur anglophone a la même réaction de surprise, ne comprenant pas cette réponse décalée ; il est évident que Chinaza désire être polie, mais la formule qu’elle utilise ici ne convient pas et pourrait même paraître insolente. Ainsi, si les interactions sociales constituent un moyen d’intégration, elles révèlent aussi aux personnages leur dissonance avec leur nouvel environnement, d’où ce malaise persistant qu’ils ressentent, car ils ne se sentent plus en phase avec la société qui les entoure. Vues sous cet angle, les frontières sont d’autant plus difficiles à dépasser qu’elles sont internes : les modèles de comportement et les codes sociaux qui permettent l’intégration dans le pays d’origine, ou le “lieu primitif”, deviennent un obstacle à cette insertion dans le pays d’accueil, du fait des incompréhensions et malentendus qu’ils peuvent provoquer.

18 La diaspora nigériane pourrait ainsi être qualifiée de divergence confluente, une multitude dispersée qui se rejoint dans un vécu perturbant. De la même manière que les figures de l’éclatement et de la perte créent une forme de confluence au sein du recueil, la diversité de ces histoires de migrations converge dans le récit d’expériences similaires : ici encore, la divergence nourrit la convergence. Ce besoin d’interaction avec autrui pour mieux s’intégrer montre à quel point “l’autre” est indispensable à l’équilibre social et personnel. De la nécessité de ces interactions naît alors une réflexion sur l’éthique de l’altérité, dans la mesure où celle-ci interroge le cœur de la rencontre. Il s’agit donc de se demander ce qui rend possible la rencontre, lorsque cette dernière, comme c’est le cas dans The Thing Around Your Neck, est transculturelle.

De la divergence culturelle à la confluence transculturelle

19 Jusqu’à ce point, la confluence n’a été envisagée que dans la divergence (que ce soit celle des motifs de l’éclatement et de la perte, ou de la migration), ce qui invite à se demander si l’on peut trouver dans The Thing Around Your Neck une confluence peut- être moins équivoque. Réfléchissant sur la notion de diaspora, Daria Tunca écrit dans un article consacré aux nouvelles d’Adichie : Migration from Africa—and the ensuing proliferation of hyphenated denominations —may have become an integral part of Nigerian identity, taken in its widest sense.

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[…] Indeed, culture clashes in all their guises have long been an essential constituent of the nation’s fiction. (293)

20 Tunca évoque ici une nation dont l’identité se construit sur la multiplicité ; si elle n’emploie pas le terme “transculture”, le terme “cross-culture”, défini comme “une réelle fusion entre les cultures” (293) s’en rapproche de manière substantielle. Or, qu’est-ce que la confluence, sinon la fusion de deux éléments auparavant distincts, tels les deux fleuves qui se rejoignent pour n’en former plus qu’un ? Si les “chocs” entre les cultures constituent l’histoire de la nation, c’est bien que la confluence culturelle l’emporte sur les divergences culturelles, les réunissant dans un mouvement transversal et fédérateur. Chez Adichie, la confluence se forme donc, non seulement dans la culture, mais également dans la transculture, telle que définie ici par le théoricien littéraire Mikhaïl Epstein : At its higher levels, transculture integrates many cultural traditions and sign systems and embraces a universal symbolic palette, from which individuals can freely choose and mix colours in order to paint their self-portraits. (343)

21 Certains personnages retiennent ainsi l’attention, en ce qu’ils semblent incarner l’espoir d’une confluence transculturelle. C’est le cas de Josh, le petit garçon métis, dans “On Monday of Last Week.” Son père est juif, sa mère afro-américaine et l’enfant est éduqué dans le respect de ces deux cultures. Il offre ainsi une carte de Shabbat à sa baby-sitter nigériane, sur laquelle il a écrit : “Kamara, I’m glad we are family. Shabbat shalom” (90). Il agit avec une spontanéité qui est peut-être propre à son âge, mais qui est également représentative de la transculture. Il choisit librement parmi ses origines les éléments avec lesquels il se sent le mieux, sans se laisser limiter par les conventions sociales ou religieuses. Il incarne donc une forme de fusion libre des cultures, dans laquelle l’individu se libère de ces “caractéristiques culturelles neutralisées et rigides” (Epstein 344). L’espoir d’une confluence transculturelle, qui invite à sortir de la conception d’une altérité radicale, s’incarnerait alors peut-être dans la jeunesse.

22 Derek Attridge, réfléchissant sur la notion d’altérité, ou ‘otherness’, dans The Singularity of Literature, développe l’idée selon laquelle il n’existe pas d’autre absolu ou d’altérité absolue, car, écrit-il : “si l’autre est toujours et seulement autre par rapport à moi (et donc par rapport à ma culture, […]), je suis toujours dans une sorte de relation à lui” (29) ; or pour qu’il y ait relation, il faut qu’il y ait “un cadre général, même minimal” (29). Chaque relation s’inscrit donc dans le trans-, dans une forme de confluence, si infime soit-elle. C’est ce qu’expérimente Chika, Igbo et chrétienne, dans “A Private Experience” : la jeune femme est en vacances à Kano, une grande ville située au nord du Nigéria, lorsque des émeutes sanglantes éclatent sur le marché. Dans la panique, Chika trouve refuge dans une boutique déserte où se trouve déjà une femme, Hausa et musulmane, parlant un anglais sommaire. Toutes deux passent la nuit là, partageant une intimité forcée, se réconfortant et se rassurant tant bien que mal. Lorsqu’elle lira plus tard le récit des événements dans la presse, Chika ne pourra faire le lien entre ce qu’elle a vécu, “son expérience privée”, et l’histoire officielle. En effet, les journaux présentent froidement une réalité marquée par un étiquetage partial et plein de préjugés, comme l’illustre le choix du mot “reactionary” dans le passage suivant : Later, Chika will read in The Guardian that ‘the reactionary Hausa-speaking Muslims in the North have a history of violence against non-Muslims,’ and in the middle of her grief, she will stop to remember that she […] experienced the gentleness of a woman who is Hausa and Muslim. (55)

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23 Le style journalistique, dans la citation entre guillemets, instaure une opposition absolue et apparemment irréductible entre deux populations qui, pourtant, sont réunies par un “cadre général”, celui de l’appartenance ou non à la religion musulmane. Mais Chika, après avoir passé plusieurs heures avec une Musulmane, ne parvient pas à souscrire à cette interprétation ni à voir cette femme comme une ennemie : l’histoire qui les lie à présent exclut les dissensions politiques. La situation de crise les a amenées à un point de confluence, où l’altérité sociale et religieuse de l’autre n’est plus invincible car une relation transculturelle s’est tissée entre les deux femmes : alors qu’elles craignent pour leur vie et celle de leurs proches, les différences culturelles sont de moindre importance. Pour Attridge, reconnaître l’altérité de l’autre revient à “rencontrer les limites de mon propre pouvoir à penser et juger” (33) et je ne reconnais l’autre comme autre que lorsque j’échoue à “sortir de mes modes de pensées et d’évaluation” (33). Dire d’autrui qu’il est autre souligne une incapacité à répondre de manière créative et à s’adapter à la nouveauté qu’il apporte. C’est précisément ce que ne fait pas Chika, qui vit pleinement l’expérience de la rencontre en reconnaissant, “l’unicité de l’autre personne, et donc l’impossibilité de trouver des règles générales ou des schémas qui expliqueraient entièrement cette personne” (33). La confluence se logerait ainsi dans la relation elle-même, dans une ouverture à l’autre qui soit éthique et authentique, et non dans une réaction de repli vers soi ou dans une réduction stéréotypée de l’identité de l’autre.

24 Cette ouverture à l’autre, qui survient dans des moments de crise, est intimement liée à la condition de vulnérabilité2 des personnages, condition que Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier, dans l’introduction à Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th-to 21st- Century British Literature, définissent comme essentielle au sujet moderne, “dénominateur commun” (17) aux individus du monde globalisé, et peut-être aux personnages du recueil. De ce fait, selon Ganteau et Reynier, la vulnérabilité installerait la relation dans “la dépendance et l’attention” à l’autre (17). Chika et la femme musulmane avec qui elle se réfugie illustrent parfaitement cette double relation, dans l’attention qu’elles vont se porter, et la dépendance qui s’installe entre elles, le temps de la rencontre—rencontre qui survient dans un moment où toutes les deux sont extrêmement vulnérables. L’éthique de l’altérité implique une ouverture, donc une convergence vers autrui, au cœur même de la vulnérabilité, et cette éthique aurait donc en commun avec le transculturalisme de “dissoudre la solidité de notre identité naturelle et de partager l’expérience d’autrui” (Epstein 340).

***

25 Ainsi, l’espoir d’une confluence transculturelle est bel et bien présent dans le recueil, mais c’est un espoir timide, en butte à une réalité encore très divergente. Ce que ces nouvelles ont en commun, c’est leur éparpillement. Éparpillement narratif, d’abord, en tant qu’elles sont des récits distincts les uns des autres ; éparpillement comme motif ensuite, chaque texte abordant les questions de la perte, de la rencontre (souvent difficile), de la migration, de la dispersion. Le point de confluence de ces récits semble se trouver dans une ouverture à l’autre, fût-elle imposée par les circonstances. Le propos d’Adichie n’est pas d’en revenir au truisme selon lequel “nous sommes tous des êtres humains” mais plutôt de sortir des visions stéréotypées, des “histoires uniques”,3 en racontant des histoires individuelles, celles de rencontres transculturelles entre des

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personnages marqués par une vulnérabilité existentielle : avec elles, le lecteur découvre en lui ce que Epstein nomme un “non-moi”, et il “apprend de l’expérience des autres” (341). La lecture, de même que la rencontre de l’altérité, permet de sortir des “oppositions et des identités abstraites” (349) et de s’appuyer sur les différences de chacun pour construire une communauté transculturelle. Aussi pourrait-on conclure en suggérant que The Thing Around Your Neck, parce qu’il ne résout pas les crises identitaires qu’il raconte mais leur donne une visibilité sensible, est une invitation à rencontrer l’autre par la culture. Le lieu de confluence serait finalement le lecteur, le créateur, soi-même, dès lors que, pour reprendre les mots d’Arianna Dagnino, qui elle- même cite Mikhaïl Epstein, “à travers un processus historique et créatif de ‘désorigination et de libération’, la culture fait de nous, êtres humains, ‘une rivière et non un barrage’” (134).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” Conference paper. July 2009. Web. 28/04/16.

---. The Thing Around Your Neck. London: Fourth Estate, 2009. Print.

Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Audet, René. Des Textes à l’Œuvre, la lecture du recueil de nouvelles. Québec: Nota Bene, 2000. Print.

Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Print.

Dagnino, Arianna. “Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity.” Transcultural Studies [Online], 0.2 (2013): 130-60. Web. 28/04/16.

Epstein, Mikhail. “Transculture: A Broad Way Between Globalism and Multiculturalism.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 68.1 (2009): 327-52. Web. 5/11/15.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962. Print.

Reynier, Christine and Jean-Michel Ganteau, Eds. Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st- century British Literature. Montpellier: PU de la Méditerranée, 2013. Print.

Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.

Tibi, Pierre. “La nouvelle, essai de compréhension d’un genre.” Aspect de la nouvelle (II). Cahiers de l’Université de Perpignan n°18. Ed. Paul Carmignani. Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 1995. Print.

Tunca, Daria. “Of French Fries and Cookies: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Diasporic Short Fiction.” The African Presence in Europe and Beyond / Présence africaine en Europe et au-delà. Kathleen Gyssels & Bénédicte Ledent. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2010. Print.

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Wicker, Hans-Rudolf. “From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity.” Debating Cultural Hybridity. Multi-cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. Werbner Pina et Tariq Moodood. London & New Jersey: Zed Books, 1997. Print.

NOTES

1. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. CNRTL. Web. 15/04/2016. 2. Frank O’Connor, dans The Lonely Voice : a Study of the Short Story, évoque une “intense awareness of human loneliness” (18), qui se rapproche de cette notion de vulnérabilité. 3. Voir à ce propos le discours prononcé par Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lors d’une conférence Ted en juillet 2009, “The Danger of a Single Story.” Lien URL : http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story? language=fr (page consultée le 11 avril 2017)

AUTHORS

JULIA SICCARDI Julia Siccardi is holder of the agrégation and a doctoral student at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, working under the supervision of Professor Vanessa Guignery. The tentative title of her thesis is “Voices and Transculturalism in the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith and Jhumpa Lahiri.” Her field of research focuses on such concepts as transculturalism, hybridity, world literature and literary genres, particularly the novel and the short story.

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Book Review

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Book Review: Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian and British Writing, Ed. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergman (London, Routledge, 2015)

Beryl Pong

1 “Liminality as a concept of both demarcation and mediation between different processual stages, spatial complexes, and inner stages is of obvious importance in an age of global mobility, digital networking, interethnicity, transnationality, ecological reconsiderations of species boundaries as well as technological redefinitions of the human” (3). The first sentence of the editors’ introduction to Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing captures perfectly the book’s immediate strengths and potential weaknesses. This is, on one hand, an ambitiously diverse collection that makes a strong case for the concept of liminality as an approach to literary and cultural criticism. On the other hand, if liminality both demarcates and mediates across such a wide spectrum of social, cultural, and political issues, its own boundaries are actually not that obvious. What exactly isn’t liminal?

2 Conscious of liminality’s applicability to seemingly everything and anything, the editors have assembled a collection of essays focusing on short fiction. The genre is an excellent and productive pivot for examining various socio-cultural and philosophical understandings of liminality, as well as the way they intersect with, and manifest in, aesthetic form. As Achilles and Bergmann point out, the short story is liminal because its brevity and often episodic nature privilege ambiguity and transitoriness. It is also liminal because the genre’s own classifications are often unclear and porous, and several essays in this volume address works of generic indeterminacy. Structured around three parts—“Liminality and the Short Story”, “The Liminality of the Short Story,” and “Liminality in the Short Story”—this volume tackles the slippery concept

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from a variety of angles, addressing the way texts cross geographical, theoretical, epistemological, and artistic thresholds.

***

3 Because Part I comprises solely of Achilles’ and Bergmann’s introduction, the bulk of the collection lies in Parts II and III. Part II is subdivided into three thematic sections. The first, “Conceptualizations of Liminality,” includes essays that consider the theoretical underpinnings of liminality, especially as they pertain to Victor Turner’s use of the term in cultural anthropology. Here, Achilles’ chapter offers the book’s first substantial delineation of liminality by exploring the relationship between Turner’s liminality and Foucault’s heterotopia. The next chapter is by Claire Drewery, who scrutinises how Turner’s distinctions between liminality and liminoid function in British modernist women’s writing. In the third chapter, Florian Zappe applies Turner’s ideas to William Burroughs’ satirical and generically amorphous short fictions, which he called ‘routines,’ and which are part prose, part poetry, and part autobiography.

4 The second section in Part II, “Methods of Approach,” analyses the liminality of short fiction in terms of perception and cognition. Michael Basseler’s chapter argues that the short story is an apposite genre for philosophical and epistemological questions because textual brevity foregrounds what the reader does and does not know about the fictional world. This is followed by Renate Brosch’s chapter which draws from the field of neuroscience to argue that short fiction, again as a result of brevity, necessarily involves reading strategies of projection and visualization. Susan Lohafer then examines the borders between fiction and non-fiction, “storyness” and “essayness,” by interpreting empirical data collected in relation to the experience of reading different genres.

5 The third section of Part II, “Concerns of Publication,” features the most thematically interpenetrating trio of essays in the volume, and it is concerned with periodical and book history. Here, Oliver Scheiding explores liminality as a product of contexts of transatlantic magazine circulation in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century short fiction. Alfred Bendixen then argues that the short-story cycle is a liminal genre inflected by periodical contexts, focusing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories, which were published in isolation before being conceived as part of a larger work. Finally, Kasia Boddy assesses liminality as the interplay between unity and diversity in the short- story anthology, elucidating the form’s resonances for issues of American communal and national identity.

6 There are intuitive links between the chapters’ and clusters’ main concerns thus far. Part III, however, which offers more focused readings of specific texts, feels more disjointed. The first subsection, “Contexts of Writing,” covers an essay on magic realism in the short stories of T. C. Boyle and William Kennedy (by Bergmann); an essay on the theme of disability that compares Edgar Allan Poe with Charles Sander (by Suzanne Rohr); an essay on heterotopia and mental illness in Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ernest Hemingway (by Carmen Birke); and an essay on ambivalent cultural integration in immigrant short fiction through the theme of food (by Jeff Birkenstein). The chapters are interesting and stand well on their own, but while Rohr’s and Birke’s essays pair nicely, they are bracketed by chapters of very different concerns, making for a somewhat dislocated reading experience.

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7 The last group of essays in the book, “Topics of Liminality,” is better integrated. These five essays all deal with short-story writers whose identities are liminal, whether in relation to ethnicity, sexuality, or postcolonialism. First, Glenda R. Carpio’s essay considers how Richard Wright’s fiction is doubly concerned with world literature and with the specific predicaments of being African American. Second, Paul March-Russell’s essay plays the contrarian card by arguing against over-determined uses of liminality in short fiction criticism itself; he then analyses how lesbian and science-fiction writer Joanna Russ recuperated her own liminal status for critically transgressive ends. Third, Ailsa Cox reads Alice Munro’s liminality in relation to tropes of spectrality, ghostliness, memory, and perception. Fourth, also looking at Munro, Katherine Orr uses her writing as a case study for how metaphor can operate as a liminal device which cultivates both ambivalence and oppressiveness. Finally, Evelyn P. Mayer discusses the cross-cultural border between America and Canada in Thomas King’s fiction to address the incompatibility of indigenous identities with national boundaries.

8 Interestingly, the only three chapters concerned with Canadian writers are clustered in this last section. It would be helpful if the editors acknowledged more explicitly the implications of privileging liminality as a topic in postcolonial short fiction. Similarly, Drewery’s chapter is the only one on British writing, and the rest of the collection focuses on American short fiction. Although the editors attribute this imbalance to the particular prominence of the genre in America, one again wonders why liminality might appear to be more relevant for certain traditions than others, beyond reflecting and replicating academic interests.

9 As this summary of the book’s contents suggests, introducing such a wide-ranging collection and choosing which intersections to highlight would be a very difficult task for any editor. Achilles’ and Bergmann’s introduction offers a thorough overview of the volume’s thematic architecture, and it also provides extended bibliographies on the concept of liminality and on short fiction genre criticism, which are very helpful indeed. Furthermore, they identify interesting ways that the essays hang together, pointing out, for instance, the conjunctions between essays which deal with issues in versus of short-story writing, and finding thematic echoes between Parts II and III. However, the introduction is also top-heavy in its detailed explication of its contents, and it acts more as a road-map for reading the collection than for the questions which arise. In doing so, it misses an opportunity to distinguish liminality’s relationship to short fiction in a broader, more field-defining way. What are the stakes of conceptualizing liminality in relation to form? How are liminality and short fiction mutually illuminating, or is this only a one-way street, as most of the essays seem to suggest? So much weight is placed on that first, dense sentence in the introduction to capture liminality’s relevance that it is repeated, in part, in the book’s abstract, and verbatim, as the first sentence of Achilles’ own essay in the collection. But without addressing the particular question of why liminality and the short story need to be read together in reciprocally productive ways, one cannot help but have a nagging feeling that the book risks “doing academic criticism while failing to admit the prejudices of the professional academic,” to borrow from March-Russell’s own contribution: that a book “argu[ing] that the short story’s characteristic mode of expression is itself liminal could also be read as crudely deterministic in its construction” (225).

10 Nevertheless, while this issue is not addressed in the introduction, the collection as a whole does reward understanding the two in relation to each other—whether in terms

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of liminality as a mode of open-minded textual interpretation, or as a concept exemplified by the unclear boundaries of the short story genre itself. In sum, this is a useful book for those thinking about liminality and the short story, separately or together, and it represents some of the most stimulating avenues of current work on the short story form. To quote from C. Alphonso Smith, the American critic and philologist discussed in Boddy’s chapter, this critical volume has “variety in unity and […] unity in variety” (147). In this sense, Liminality and the Short Story’s true subject is not liminality at all, but the rejuvenating state of short fiction criticism today.

AUTHOR

BERYL PONG University of Cambridge

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