Imaginary Specters, Imagined Listeners

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Imaginary Specters, Imagined Listeners:

The Undecidable in Graham Swift’s Tomorrow and Mothering Sunday

Rebecca Weiger

English Studies – Literary Option Bachelor 15 credits Spring Semester 2021 Supervisor: Martin Cathcart Fröden

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Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the possible connection between specters and silence in

Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007) and Mothering Sunday (2016). In both novels, the protagonists predominantly speak in interior monologues, recounting the memories and secrets that haunt them, in what could be construed as an attempt to exorcise the ghosts of their past. The paper’s understanding of specters is based on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of

Marx (1993), and the idea that specters—as figures that exist in states of in-between—disrupt not only temporality, but what we know to be true. Much like specters, the protagonists vacillate between states, neither speaking nor remaining silent, as they address absent or imagined listeners. This undecidability leaves one to wonder if their ghosts are—or ever can be—truly exorcised.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i

1. Introduction ...... 1

2. Theory and Analytical Tools ...... 4 2.1. Specters ...... 4 2.1.1. A Briefer Definition ...... 5 2.1.2. Application to Literature ...... 5 2.2. Monologues ...... 8 2.3. Listeners ...... 10

3. Tomorrow ...... 12 3.1. Haunted by Father Figures ...... 12 3.2. Silently Speaking ...... 15 3.3. Imagined Conversations ...... 18

4. Mothering Sunday ...... 21 4.1. Spectral Memories ...... 21 4.2. Untold Stories ...... 25 4.3. Fairytale or Obituary? ...... 28

5. Conclusion ...... 31

Works Cited ...... 34

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1. Introduction

In Understanding Graham Swift (2003), David Malcolm analyzes a selection of Swift’s earlier works—from The Sweet Shop Owner (1980) to The Light of Day (2003)—in terms of motifs and characters, highlighting the “sameness, within considerable differences, that mark

Swift’s novels” (10). One of his key points of interest is the “distinctively Swiftian narration”

(110), which Malcolm defines as the “isolated monologue to an absent listener” (110). These monologues are further distinguished by a combination of eloquent language and incomplete utterances (15), which arguably emphasizes the notion that “there are deep silences in some narrators’ lives” (15)—silences that they struggle to break. Malcolm also highlights the lack of chronology in Swift’s novels, as the narrators—who tend to be burdened by their past

(16)—move back and forth between the present and the past events they are recounting.

Interestingly, although Malcolm underscores the lack of female narrators in this collection of novels (18), little research has since been done on how this characteristically Swiftian style applies to the sole, female voices of Tomorrow (2007) and Mothering Sunday (2016).

While there are no spectral sightings in either of these novels, both protagonists can be said to be haunted by their past—at the very least, certain parts of their past that they have always kept secret, or certain people they have lost. Therefore, the haunting only ever occurs inside their minds. This is further emphasized by the narrative styles of the novels; although one is speaking in the first person, and the other in the third, both narratives take the shape of inner monologues that drift back and forth in time, recounting memories and imagining what could have been or might come to pass. Swift himself comments on this narrative choice of his in an interview quoted by Isabelle Roblin, reportedly saying that his voices “aren’t usually spoken voices, they are internal voices” (75)—voices that are meant for “a silent reader, the inner ear of that reader” (75). This raises the question of whether or not such monologues are

“sent into a void” (Malcolm 112).

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In Tomorrow, the reader is introduced to the first-person narrator Paula Hook, a middle-aged mother of two teenaged twins. During a sleepless night in 1995, Paula reflects on what will come to pass in the morning, when her husband will finally tell the children that— due to infertility—he is not their biological father. In an inner monologue primarily addressed to her sleeping children, Paula returns to various parts of her and her husband’s past, revisiting family deaths and her secret affair with another man, in an attempt to construct a narrative of how the twins came to be. The novel pays great attention to the idea of fatherhood and lineage, which is emphasized by the various father figures that haunt Paula’s memories, including the unknown sperm donor whom Paula refers to as a ghost in need of exorcising

(Swift 205). Ironically, though the novel is titled Tomorrow, the morning never actually arrives, as the story ends before the twins wake up. Instead, the reader is left only with the possibilities of what is to come—and the question of whether or not Paula will actually exorcise the ghosts of her past in a vocal confession.

The story of Mothering Sunday is mediated through Jane Fairchild, who—at the age of ninety-eight—looks back on her journey from maid to successful writer, exploring her past in a monologue without a specified addressee. In a series of flashbacks, she returns to Mothering

Sunday of 1924: the day of her last rendezvous with Paul Sheringham—the heir to a neighboring estate—and, also, the day of his tragic death. While the novel revolves heavily around the way Jane transcends her class status on this last day of their seven-year-long affair, there is also a significant focus on history—in particular, the impact of the First World War.

The novel can therefore be said to be haunted in more than one sense: by the aftermath of the

Great War, which has deeply impacted Jane’s local community; by the sudden death of Paul, which leaves this day forever imprinted on her mind; and by the state of being either childless or motherless on Mothering Sunday. While Tomorrow’s narrator mainly imagines what might come to pass in the future, Jane consistently imagines what could have been, conjuring scenes

Weiger 3 that she knows never actually occurred. This, in combination with the way she refers to herself as a ghost, arguably lends a spectral quality to her memories—a quality that is only enhanced by the underlying sentiment that Jane is now near the end of her life.

While I intend to analyze these novels separately, I am interested in exploring them both in terms of imaginary specters, interior monologues, and the ways in which the narratees can be seen as spectral. My analysis of the spectral will—much like the majority of my secondary sources—be based on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), while the notions of silent narrators and absent listeners, as introduced by Malcolm, will be further discussed with the help of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction: Contemporary

Poetics (2002) and a variety of scholarly articles. I am primarily interested in the undecidability of the spectral—that is, as Colin Davis phrases it, how the specter is “neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (53)—and how this is mirrored in the undecidability of the silent narratives. In other words, the protagonists are neither speaking nor silent, and their listeners can arguably—much like a specter—be interpreted as imagined presences.

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2. Theory and Analytical Tools

2.1. Specters

Derrida’s Specters of Marx is centered around his discussion of hauntology, a term that refers to the idea that elements from the past may always return. This is exemplified by the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s play, as its stage directions reflect its ability to come back more than once: “’Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost’ (Hamlet)”

(Derrida 19). Arguably, then, the “time is out of joint” (Shakespeare qtd. in Derrida 20), and this leads Derrida to ask the following questions of the temporality of the specter:

What is the time and what is the history of a specter? Is there a present of the

specter? Are its comings and goings ordered according to the linear succession

of a before and an after, between a present-past, a present-present, and a

present-future, between a ‘real time’ and a ‘deferred time’? (59)

In other words, Derrida argues that we cannot put ghosts—or elements—from the past to rest, claiming that, as “a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back” (118).

Although the title of Derrida’s work conveys his political focus, the specter is primarily linked to undecidability and deconstruction—that is, the way that it exists in states of in-between, pointing towards “a thinking […] that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic” (83). Again, Derrida draws a parallel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as the specter arguably exists in-between the famous “opposition between ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’”

(28) and is instead defined as “this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one” (24). To haunt, then, “does not mean to be present” (182)—a claim that is of relevance for the imaginary ghosts in Swift’s novels.

Another interesting concept brought forth by Derrida is the notion of conjuring, which he immediately links to exorcising: “For to conjure means also to exorcise: to attempt to both destroy and to disavow a malignant, demonized, diabolized force, most often an evil-doing

Weiger 5 spirit, a specter, a kind of ghost who comes back or who still risks coming back post mortem”

(68). Although the imaginary specters of Tomorrow and Mothering Sunday may not be seen as evil, there is indeed a connection here, as both Paula and Jane are arguably conjuring ghosts and secrets from their past in an attempt to exorcise them. In other words, they can be seen as being “occupied with ghosts by being occupied with exorcising them” (Derrida 161).

2.1.1. A Briefer Definition

Colin Davis offers a shorter definition of hauntology in “État Present: Hauntology,

Specters and Phantoms”, in which he explains that the term replaces “the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (53). Davis also emphasizes that hauntology has nothing to do with “whether or not one believes in ghosts” (53), linking it instead to deconstruction and the way in which the specter, by hovering in-between states, pushes at the boundaries of knowledge and makes

“established certainties vacillate” (56). This creates an interesting way to view Swift’s narratives, as it could be seen as connected to the way Paula and Jane—to borrow Davis’ word—vacillate between the past, the present, and the future, conjuring scenes that might have been or may come to pass.

2.1.2. Application to Literature

An important point to underscore is the fact that the specter does not have to appear as an apparition—which is exactly what is emphasized in Joanne Watkiss’ “Ghosts in the Head:

Mourning, Memory and Derridean ‘Trace’ in John Banville’s The Sea”. Just like Tomorrow and Mothering Sunday, Banville’s novel lacks spectral sightings, focusing instead on

“hauntings where the ghost does not appear; the haunting of ourselves by ourselves” (55).

Watkiss also focuses on the connection between space and mourning, arguing that the

Weiger 6 narrator’s “obsession with memory” drives him to seek out spaces that can act as “archives of his past” (56). However, it is not just physical spaces that can act as such. The narrator himself becomes a “haunted space” (63), as “the mind’s ability to remember (or archive) permits the production of a catalogue of spectres: concealed until mourning encourages their resurfacing” (58).

Mourning thus, according to Watkiss, has the power to “provoke past mournings to resurface” (56), indicating how the ghosts of one’s past can exist as haunting memories that return psychologically rather than physically (56). This notion of “memorial haunting” (56) exemplifies two of Derrida’s points: one, that ghosts do not need to materialize or be present in order to haunt, and two, that ghosts will always come and come-back. In other words, they are “always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet” (Derrida 197).

Another example of how Derrida’s theory of specters can be applied to works of literature is Claire Wrobel’s “Haunted Houses, Haunted Bodies: Spectral Presence in

Arlington Park”, in which Specters of Marx is used to analyze Rachel Cusk’s novel. One of the things Wrobel highlights is the “repeated use of the words ‘ghost’ and ‘spectre’, their derivatives, as well as related cognates such as ‘shroud’ or ‘tomb’” (1), which Wrobel argues suggests at “lurking violence and self-estrangement” (1). While violence—such as the idea that “there is more to suburban life than meets the eye” (2)—is of little relevance for Swift’s novels, the idea of self-estrangement rings truer. In Cusk’s novel, Wrobel argues that there are moments when the characters, “when perceived by others, are assimilated to ghosts” (8). In

Tomorrow and Mothering Sunday, however, Paula and Jane are only perceived by themselves, meaning that these are perhaps rather moments when they “feel estranged from themselves” (Wrobel 9).

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Wrobel also discusses the notion of “spectral selves” (8), which refers to the way that the novel “stages women who look back on their life choices” (9) and, in the process, bring

“their pre-marital selves […] back to life” (9). Wrobel thus argues that Cusk’s female characters are haunted not only by past versions of themselves—who have not yet completely disappeared, but rather exist as “fleeting presence[s] in the background” (9)—but also possibilities of who they might have been (9). This discussion is linked directly to Derrida, and the idea that specters “upset the linear conception of time, beckoning to the future as well as to the past” (10). Wrobel pairs this with Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s theory of haunting, which highlights that the “present—if there is such a thing—is haunted by what is to come” (11).

While different from Derrida, both theories emphasize how haunting disrupts temporality

(11), and provide two alternative—albeit similar—ways of approaching Tomorrow and

Mothering Sunday.

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2.2. Monologues

The protagonists’ imagined hauntings are further emphasized by the narrative styles of the novels—that is, the fact that both Tomorrow and Mothering Sunday are told in the form of inner monologues. A quick distinction can, however, be made between the two protagonists: one is a narrator, and the other a focalizer. In other words, the third-person narration of

Mothering Sunday is mediated through Jane, while the true identity of the narrator remains unknown. However, as Rimmon-Kenan argues in Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, there is “no difference between third-person centre of consciousness and first-person retrospective-narration” (73), as the focalizer in both is “a character within the represented world” (73). Bożena Kucała echoes this statement in “Unspoken Dialogues and Non-

Listening Listeners in Graham Swift’s Fiction”, writing that Swift’s use of a focalizer does not “depart very far from the mode of first-person narration he favours” (117), as both reflect a “focus on a subjective consciousness engaged in the task of narrativising its experience”

(117).

In both novels, the protagonists set out to recount—or, alternatively, confess—untold stories of their past, but choose to do so in the space of their own minds, thus remaining outwardly silent. In the introduction to Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in

English, Vanessa Guignery sees such protagonists as being “[t]orn between a powerful reluctance to say the unsayable and an urge to indulge in wordy confessions” (3), thus struggling with “the inability to speak, the inability to be silent” (Beckett qtd. in Guignery 3).

This duality—or, rather, shifting between two opposite states—could therefore be said to mirror the specter’s undecidable quality.

Petr Chalupský identifies a similar trend in “A Romance with Words: Graham Swift’s

Mothering Sunday as a ‘Coming-of-Voice’ Novel”, in which he argues that Swift’s protagonists tend to be prompted by two contradictory urges: the urge to “talk over the

Weiger 9 troublesome past, take it out of the unconscious domain and prevent its uncontrolled, obtrusive recurrence” (38) and the urge to “justify and comfort themselves” (38). If we dissect the first part of this quote, the notion of wanting to prevent the past’s recurrence could be connected to Derrida, as it seems to convey that elements from a protagonist’s past have the ability to return over and over—and that, in order to exorcise these imagined ghosts, one must conjure them by “[taking them] out of the unconscious domain” (Chalupský 38). Combined with the second urge, the result is the protagonists’ choice to recount their stories in the privacy of their own minds, where they can be, as Chalupský phrases it, their “own judge and confessor” (38). Chalupský also highlights how these interior voices provide insight into what is going on inside the narrators, especially into “the thoughts and feelings they do not intend to show or say aloud” (41). Their outward silence therefore allows for imagined words to be heard—or, as Chalupský writes, “words that could or should have been said but were not”

(40).

Another thing Chalupský touches upon is the idea that Swift’s protagonists are hovering between speaking and remaining silent (39)—a notion that can be traced back to

Kucała’s aforementioned article, in which she sees Swift’s narrative as a “paradoxical situation of both telling and not telling, revealing the truth and concealing it simultaneously, of seeking a listener and yet choosing someone who is in no position to receive the story”

(124). Based on this, Kucała makes the claim that it “might be supposed that the narrators’ need to conceal their stories is even stronger than their need to share them” (123). Regardless of one’s take, however, this exemplifies how the Swiftian protagonist can be said to—much like a specter—vacillate between binaries, neither speaking nor remaining silent.

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2.3. Listeners

One aspect of Kucała’s analysis of Swift’s narrative that can be discussed further is the very last part of the aforementioned quote—that is, how Swift’s protagonists are paradoxically “seeking a listener and yet choosing someone who is in no position to receive the story” (124). This listener is mentioned by Malcolm, too, as he—as previously established—defines Swift’s narration as an “isolated monologue to an absent listener” (110).

The question both of these sources seem to be raising is the following: Who, if anyone, is the protagonist addressing in their monologues?

To understand the impact of these addressees further, one can return to Rimmon-

Kenan’s Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. The addressee—that is, the “agent addressed by the narrator” (103)—can also be defined as the narratee, and Rimmon-Kenan argues that this role is just as “indispensable to narrative fiction as narrators” (103). While the narratee can be defined according to various narrative levels, perhaps the most relevant feature when discussing Swift’s novels is that of covertness versus overtness. According to

Rimmon-Kenan, a covert narratee “is no more than the silent addressee of the narrator, whereas an overt one can be made perceptible” (104) through, for example, the “narrator’s inferences of his possible answers” (104). This range is reflected in Tomorrow and Mothering

Sunday, as the novels’ interior monologues are addressed very differently.

Going back to Kucała’s article, there is an interesting debate regarding the role—and definition—of the narratee that should be mentioned here as well. While James Phelan and

Peter J. Rabinowitz distinguish between “the narrative audience (‘a role that the actual reader takes on while reading’) and the narratee as ‘the intertextual audience specifically addressed by the narrator’” (Kucała 118), Gerald Prince reportedly argues that all narrations establish a dialogue between the narrator and the narratee (118). Thus, the definition of the narratee becomes broad, as one could arguably detect “his or her invisible, implied presence even in

Weiger 11 narratives which do not appear to be addressed to anyone in particular” (Prince qtd. in Kucała

118). Again, this broadness is reflected in Swift’s novels, as Paula’s inner speech is “aimed at a well-defined audience” (Kucała 118) while Jane’s addressee remains unknown—or, perhaps, as Swift himself has phrased it, identical to the “silent reader, the inner ear of that reader” (Roblin 75).

Laurence Tatarian comments further on the narratees in Swift’s fiction in “Graham

Swift’s Vocal Silences”, in which the narratee is defined as a “blank space which is always implied and there to be filled” (53). Tatarian argues that Swift’s fiction always appears to include a “third party eavesdropping on private words, or acting from behind the scenes to elicit them, or collect them” (53)—a presence that prompts the protagonists to speak “with the idea of an audience, or a readership, at the back of their minds” (53). This argument falls in line with Guignery’s introductory article, in which she argues that a passive narratee serves the talkative narrator’s need to be “stimulated by the conviction that they are listened to” (des

Forêt qtd. in Guignery 4). In other words, even when there is no direct address to a narratee, there appears to be an imagined presence that urges the narrator to speak. Much like the protagonists’ monologues, then, there seems to be a spectral quality to their listeners, as these could be seen as neither present nor absent from the novels.

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3. Tomorrow

3.1. Haunted by Father Figures

As previously mentioned, Paula’s monologue is prompted by imaginings of what will come to pass in the morning, when her husband, Mike, will sit their teenaged children down and tell them that he is not their biological father. Therefore, one could argue that Paula’s present is—like Wrobel writes—“haunted by what is to come” (11), so much so that she tries to anticipate the thoughts that might pass through her children’s minds, as well as prepare for every small detail of the conversation:

As [your father] asks you to sit, side by side, on the sofa (we’ve even discussed

such minor details), you’ll do a quick run-through in your minds of all those

stories that friends at school have shared with you: inside stories, little bulletins

on domestic crisis. It’s your turn now, perhaps. (Swift 4)

This haunting could therefore be said to disrupt the temporality of Paula’s narration, as she moves ahead in time to imagine scenes that have not yet occurred—and might not occur.

After all, the novel ends just before the morning arrives, making these scenes no more than possibilities of what is to come.

It is not just the children’s immediate reaction that Paula is preparing for, though.

What haunts her more is the fear of what will happen after the conversation—that is, the fear that this confession will somehow result in the loss of Mike: “I have the shivery feeling that he won’t be here any more (sic), not after tomorrow” (169). This creates an interesting connection to Watkiss’ article, and the notion of mourning provoking “past mournings to resurface” (56). In this case, it would appear that Paula is anticipating the mourning of Mike as a father—and it is this sense of mourning that prompts her to revisit the many father figures that have passed away, such as the twins’ grandfathers. Interestingly, though, these mournings

Weiger 13 also work in the reverse order, as it is the death of Mike’s father that prompts the couple to believe they should confess their secret to the children earlier than planned:

You’ll understand now how, despite our sixteen-year rule, both Mike and I,

after his dad’s funeral, went through a fever of feeling that this might be the

right time, the best time even, never mind empty embargoes. You’d behaved in

such a grown-up way, after all, and what could be more appropriate: after the

death of one father? (Swift 304)

There are more layers to this fear, too, as it is not just a fear of the children questioning

Mike as their father, but a fear that revealing this secret will strip the twins of their physical connection to him, creating a future in which Mike will completely cease to exist once he passes away: “[T]here’ll be someone, when you look [in the mirror], who you won’t see, and now you’ll know it. When I look at you, I don’t see, I can’t see your father. […] If Mike were suddenly not to be here, I wouldn’t have anywhere to look” (242). This highlights another interesting connection, as well as a contrast, to Watkiss’ article—in particular, the discussion of memorial hauntings and how the narrators themselves can become haunted spaces (63). In the case of this quote from Tomorrow, Paula appears to imagine that her mind is unable to archive Mike, and that she needs a physical marker of her husband in order to preserve the memory of him.

Although Swift’s narration is commonly, as Malcolm writes, connected to “the power of memory” (110), Paula vacillates between believing that she can still see her loved, lost ones, and mourning their invisibility. An example of the former is her memories of her cat,

Otis, whom she lost shortly before giving birth to the twins: “I can think of him now, and my eyes go watery. I can picture him now, as if he might be out there, too, his fur getting saturated in this rain. I can recall with an extra thud of my heart that little thud on our bed”

(247). Her memories of Otis almost bring him into the present, placing him in the rain—“this

Weiger 14 rain” (emphasis added)—outside her bedroom window. However, while she is able to recount various moments with her now deceased father, such as the evening Mike first met him, she also reflects on his visual absence from her mind: “I wish you could have seen him. Not your dad when he was twenty-one in his cream shirt (though I wish that too): your Grandpa

Dougie. I wish you could still see him—I wish I could—from some special gallery” (88). In other words, she seems to wish for an archive of the past (Watkiss 56), without realizing that she has created such an archive in the space of her own mind.

Among this catalogue of specters is also a person who may or may not still exist: the biological father of the children; the nameless sperm donor whom Paula and Mike refer to as

Mr. S. This figure is described as a looming presence (Swift 227), a “ghostly one” (231), whose existence haunts Paula even before she chooses to go through with the donor insemination. In fact, throughout the night, Paula reveals that her secret affair with another man is the result of this anticipated haunting: “[T]he only way I could surmount this obstacle and know my own mind on the matter was to exorcise this ghost-in-advance, to do the real thing, in the flesh yet hypothetically, and see how it felt” (205). Not that it has, according to

Paula, exorcised his ghost (231). Instead, she admits that she still looks for this unknown figure in crowds, and that she wonders if he knows about her and the twins—if he’s “been watching us all this time, unseen himself—from some special gallery” (232). Again, the special gallery comes into play, though this time the perspective is reversed, much like

Derrida reverses it in Specters of Marx: “ghost or revenant, sensuous-non-sensuous, visible- invisible, the specter first of all sees us” (119). This reversed perspective thus makes one wonder whether Paula is, indeed, conjuring this specter in order to exorcise it, or if it is

“always there” (Derrida 196). After all, can one really exorcise a ghost—and does Paula even wish to, seeing as she is keeping these confessions to herself?

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3.2. Silently Speaking

It’s one thing we’ve agreed on: your father will do the talking. Who else, in the

circumstances? But he’s asleep now, amazingly, before the biggest speech of

his life. And I want him to sleep. Sleep on, Mikey, as long as you can. And

what is your mother supposed to do, while these last vigilant hours slip away?

Simply keep silent? (Swift 119)

The quote above highlights a variety of interesting features in Paula’s inner speech: the direct, second-person address to her sleeping family, the acknowledgment of who is supposed to be breaking the silence in the morning, and Paula’s refusal to stay silent during the night. Paula herself seems to interpret her internal voice as something that can permeate the silence of the house and reach the minds of her sleeping audience. Even though her silent speech cannot disturb the twins, Paula still considers—as Kucała phrases it—“some parts of her narrative too intimate even for this undelivered account” (122). At several points, she interrupts herself, suddenly aware that she may be saying too much—even though she technically isn’t speaking aloud. For example, she advices her children to tune her out with phrases such as “[s]top listening, if you prefer” (143) and “[c]lose your ears if you wish” (145)

And yet, at the same time as she imagines that her children can hear her, she remains just as aware of their sleeping condition and the silence that surrounds her: “I’m in a house full of sleeping babies. Even this rain, like some second guardian, seems aware of it and is pressing a finger to its lips: Sssshhhh…” (190). In “Contemporary Fiction and Narratorial

Acoustics: Graham Swift’s Tomorrow”, Stephen Benson comments on this, too, arguing that

Paula’s acknowledgment of the silence inside her house is synonymous with her “establishing herself as a listener” (590). It could therefore—in line with Chalupský’s argument that Swift’s protagonists want to be their own “judge and confessor” (38)—be argued that this is the basis for her confession: the fact that she is her only true listener. After all, Paula admits that these

Weiger 16 are the rules of her storytelling: “It’s a bedtime story: exactly. I’m telling it, you’re fast asleep.

It’s just as well Mike is too” (203). Thus, the twins need to remain asleep “if the storytelling is to continue” (Benson 591).

In other words, Paula vacillates between believing her voice can reach her children and believing she is speaking to none but herself—an undecidability that is summarized in her own words: “But listen to your mother, pillow-talking to herself” (28). Similarly, the silence of the twins can be interpreted in different ways. According to Benson, it is against the twins’ silence that we “imagine and measure a voice that appears to speak” (591)—that is, it could be argued that it is their silence that allows Paula’s inner monologue to be heard. Isabelle

Roblin offers a slightly different take in “Graham Swift’s Tomorrow, or the Devious Art of

Procrastination”, in which she argues that the twins’ silence is the only real silence in the novel. Roblin views this as a “forced passivity of the narratees” (77), and argues that Paula’s narrative voice becomes “excessive and strident” (76) in contrast to the sleeping, silent audience of her husband and children. Paula’s voice—though arguably “designed for silent

‘speaking’” (Kucała 121)—can thus also be interpreted as “hyperbolic, apocalyptic and sometimes [verging] on the hysterical” (Roblin 78).

Another point to mention is that, in spite of her believing she has “said too much already” (Swift 145), Paula also admits that there are secrets that will not be aired in the morning: “I’ve got to the nub, but there are harder things still to come, things your dad won’t even touch on tomorrow” (199). The main example of this is Paula’s one-night affair with another man. With Mike having planned a romantic getaway at the same hotel where she once cheated on him, Paula realizes that there may be one more confession coming up ahead: “I can’t get out of it. I’ll just have to pretend, smile and pretend. Or treat it as some grotesque and appalling opportunity for confession. On top of everything else?” (221). To put it differently, Paula seems to waver between believing that this—her monologue—is a rehearsal

Weiger 17 of the morning’s conversation, and admitting that her words, and secrets, are not what will be spoken tomorrow. As Kucała puts it, Paula’s story “contains much more than what [the twins] are going to hear” (126).

As a result, the reader is left unaware of whether any of the silences that Paula covets ever actually get broken. This is further emphasized by the ending of the novel, which, as previously established, means that the twins’ reaction remains “forever untold” (Roblin 79).

So, what does that mean for Paula’s voice? According to Benson, “a voice that remains silent is only perceived as such in relation to the possibility, implied or otherwise, of its breaking the silence” (591). However, with the open ending of the novel, there is an equally plausible possibility that Paula and Mike might change their minds in the morning—and never confess anything at all.

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3.3. Imagined Conversations

While Paula can be said to establish herself as her own listener, there is more to be said about her choice of narratees—that is, the sleeping children she primarily addresses throughout the night. Kucała phrases this choice interestingly, in spite of not talking about specters, saying that Paula’s mode of storytelling seeks to “conjure up an audience” (122).

This is reflected in the novel’s opening line, in which Paula conjures listeners where there are none: “You’re asleep, my angels, I assume” (1). In other words, she addresses a specific audience “whose presence is immediately put in question” (Kucała 123). However, in spite of this questioning, Kucała also highlights an interesting technique used by Paula—namely, the

“record of the listeners’ reaction, or anticipated or imagined reaction” (119). To use Rimmon-

Kenan’s terms, these narratees are therefore overt ones, as seen by the “narrator’s inferences of [their] possible answers” (104).

For example, Paula often interrupts herself with comments regarding what her children must be thinking in response to her monologue: “But I have to say—and you must both be starting to muster an intense interest—that this was, in all we’d known so far, the worst moment of our lives” (124). This, according to Kucała, dramatizes the children’s “imaginary presence” (119), as it displays “the speakers’ awareness of their audience” (119) and creates responses where there is, in fact, only silence. However, while it can be said that Paula’s establishing a dialogue between herself and this imagined audience, she arguably “usurps the place of the other side of the dialogue” (Kucała 120), imagining rather than actually receiving reactions and responses. Indeed, it would appear that she, at times, imagines such responses in order to spur herself on, an example of this being: “But you’ll be thinking: vet? What vet?

How does a vet come into the story?” (Swift 118). The reason for such usurping, Kucała argues, is that Paula is seeking a way to “manipulate her narrative and tell half-truths to herself” (126).

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This authoritative technique, according to Kucała, is further emphasized by her choice of a bedtime story: “You’re sixteen and the night’s not young, but here’s a bedtime story”

(Swift 12). This bedtime story is, in Kucała’s view, a “last and self-negating attempt to treat them as children” (124), as this belittling of the sixteen-year-olds can be seen as a way to dominate the narrative. However, let us return to the opening line of Tomorrow: “You’re asleep, my angels, I assume” (emphasis added). This line does not just betray the unconscious state of Paula’s imagined audience—it also reveals that she does not know for sure if her children are actually asleep in their rooms, silently receiving her story. This is reinforced later on in the novel, as Paula says: “[B]oth of you are usually far beyond consciousness in the early hours of the morning. I hope you are now” (165). The image of them that she speaks to is only that, then: an image, based on assumptions.

Taking this one step further, one can also question if this image is actually of her teenaged children—that is, the actual, real children who are to receive the news in the morning. Instead, it would appear that Paula vacillates between which version of her children she is imagining, as exemplified by the following quote:

Tonight, you’re like those two new babies again, back at Davenport Road, still

deep in that time before you met your memory—or the one we gave you. I

don’t want you to be like that, I want you to be Nick and Kate, sixteen years

old and as grown-up and as unimpededly advanced into your lives as sixteen

can be. But tonight, though you don’t know it and can’t help it, you’re like

babies again. (189)

Similar to the memory of Otis, it would appear that Paula’s narration yet again attempts to bring the past into the present, as she conjures an old version of her children in order to speak to them. No matter which version she is addressing, however, this reveals how the children as

Weiger 20 narratees are—much like the specters that haunt Paula’s memories—only present in the space of her own mind.

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4. Mothering Sunday

4.1. Spectral Memories

All the scenes. All the real ones and all the ones in books. And all the ones that

were somehow in-between, because they were only what you could picture and

imagine of real people. Like trying to picture her mother. Or only what you

could suppose might have been true, if things had turned out differently, once,

long ago. (Swift 147)

Taken from the novel’s final pages, this quote is an apt summary of Jane’s narration, which revolves around imaginings of scenes that might have occurred—primarily scenes involving her and her lover, Paul. Already here, the mentioning of the in-between allows one to draw a parallel to the Derridean specter, as haunting—like Katarzyna Więckowska writes in

“Spectral Economies in Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday: A Romance”—always “takes place in the spaces in-between” (180). An example of such a scene in the novel is the following flashback to 1924, where Jane watches Paul get dressed, and reflects on how this moment could have played out: “It might have been nice to giggle, from her vantage point on the bed. There might have been another world, another life in which all this might have been a regular, casual repertoire. But there wasn’t” (55). These imaginings, much like Paula’s anticipation of the coming morning, “conjure the non-existent” (Swift 63)—though in this case, these non-existent scenes serve as “haunting reminders of unrealized potentials and different futures” (Więckowska 181).

Another interesting connection to Derrida’s theory of specters is the way in which these imagined scenes prompt Jane to question what she knows to be true. For example, as she reiterates Paul’s final words to her, she reflects on how “it would sometimes seem that she had made it up, that he could not have said all those things that she remembered so clearly, even fifty years later” (60). In other words, one could argue that this haunting pushes at the

Weiger 22 boundaries of her knowledge (Davis 56), making her question which memories are real and which ones are more like scenes in a book, passages that “perhaps needed redrafting, that might not yet have arrived at its proper meaning” (Swift 60). This connects to Więckowska’s article, as well, in which she states that “haunting is bound up with uncertainty and doubt”

(180).

This spectral quality of Jane’s memories is further enhanced by way she often views herself as a ghost in her flashbacks—that is, “with her ghostly maid’s clothes back on” (Swift

38). The act of looking back, of bringing these 1920s memories to life, arguably—much like

Wrobel writes—brings these past versions of Jane to life as well. However, the younger version of Jane is not necessarily a “fleeting presence in the background” (Wrobel 9) of her present. Instead, it would seem that it is the older Jane who turns the memory of herself—that is, the memory of herself as a maid in 1924—into a specter. Already in the beginning of the novel, Jane describes herself and her employer’s cook, Milly, as the “dim ghosts” (16) of the employer’s deceased sons. Later on, she comments not only on Paul’s spectral quality—a quality she presumably attributes to him from her older vantage point, seeing as she now knows this was his last day alive—but her own, saying: “She seemed to see him actually doing this, like a ghost in the room. That made two ghosts then. But her ghost was—had been—palpably and unadornedly there. Though no one would ever know” (79).

Assimilating herself to a ghost (Wrobel 8) creates a certain distance between the older

Jane and the fateful day she is revisiting—an effect that may perhaps be attributed to the fact that this day is painful to recount. Still, she admits to having spent the rest of her life trying

“to see it, to bring back this Mothering Sunday, even as it receded and even as its very reason for existing became a historical oddity, the custom of another age” (31). Though her younger self wonders if she will be able to catalogue these memories, the narrating Jane—now ninety- eight—knows she “would remember them always, even when she was ninety, like some

Weiger 23 thumbed catalogue in her head” (69). This—much like Paula’s special gallery—highlights

Watkiss’ notion of memorial hauntings, and suggests that Jane’s mind has become a haunted space in which these memories—and all the ghosts that come with them, including past versions of herself—live.

In her article, Więckowska also highlights the losses that other people in Jane’s life have suffered: “the Nivens, for whom Jane works, have lost in the war their two sons, Philip and James, and two of the Sheringhams’ boys, Dick and Freddy, were killed in France”

(183)—and this is, of course, a reflection of the rest of the world in 1924. As Jane herself puts it, “the whole world was in mourning all around them” (24), and this is further emphasized by the repetition of words that harken back to death, such as “those unalterable shrines of the

[Nivens’] boys’ rooms” (Swift 72). Another aspect that highlights the spectral is the fact that the story takes place on Mothering Sunday—an old custom of, as Więckowska writes, “giving servants a day off to visit their mothers” (181). A different thing, as Jane herself puts it, “from the nonsense they call Mother’s Day now” (Swift 99). This date prompts Jane to reflect further on all the young lives that have been claimed by the war:

She did not know, even on Mothering Sunday, what it would be like to be a

mother and lose two sons—in as many months apparently. Or how such a

mother might feel on such a day. No boys would be coming home, would they,

with little posies and simnel cakes to offer? (28)

It is not just the state of being a childless mother that is emphasized, though. Being an orphan, Jane sees her motherless status not only as the reason for the events of this particular

Mothering Sunday, but as a contributing reason to how the rest of her life has played out:

“Could she have done what she’d done today if she’d had a mother to go to? Could she have had the life she didn’t yet know she was going to have?” (93). Again, the temporality of

Jane’s narrative is disrupted, as she imagines another non-existent scene—that is, a future that

Weiger 24 the old Jane already knows never played out in real life. A spectral future that—for better or worse—never came to be.

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4.2. Untold Stories

Unlike Paula, who is prompted to speak by the upcoming event of the morning, Jane’s reasons for confessing the details of this Mothering Sunday are less clear. One thing she does clarify, however, is the fact that these are stories she has never told—things she “would never say […] in interviews” (109). Instead, she repeatedly states that these are moments that only exist, unshared, in the privacy of her own mind. An example of this appears in one of her flashbacks to 1924, in which she steals a flower from the Sheringham household and hides it inside her shirt. In what appears to be a flashforward again to the older Jane’s vantage point, she reflects on this private moment, saying: “It would get quickly bruised and tattered perhaps, but it was her proof to herself. It was so she herself would always know. No one else ever would” (88).

Interestingly, as insistent as Jane is on carrying her stories to her grave, she is equally aware of how the people around her are just as full of unaired secrets that she will never know. For example, she admits that she “would never know how Mr Niven might have recorded his own version of this scene and all that followed” (118). Similarly, in an almost metafictional comment, she reflects on her lack of knowledge of the inner workings of Paul’s fiancé: “But only she, perhaps, Jane Fairchild, the maid at Beechwood, would ‘write’ this scene. Emma Hobday wasn’t a character in a book, was she? She hadn’t invented her. She would never know how Emma Hobday herself might have written it” (120). In other words, perhaps Chalupský’s comment—that is, that the protagonists’ interior voices provide insight into the innermost workings of the mind—could be applied to the other characters of

Mothering Sunday as well, as Jane’s insistence on keeping silent allows her to ponder at the words that linger, unspoken, in people’s minds.

This idea is perhaps most aptly captured by Jane herself—or, rather, by the title of one of her most successful books: “In the Mind’s Eye” (111). Such a title could refer to both of the

Weiger 26 overarching silences that exist in this story: the untold story of this Mothering Sunday—a silence that Jane has kept all her life—and the silences she experiences on the actual day of these events. As for the latter, this primarily refers to the silence that hovers between her and

Paul as he gets ready to leave—a silence in which “words that could or should have been said but were not” (Chalupský 40) are able to be heard. For example, she reflects on how Paul’s

“lengthening silence might have given her an increasing power—or compliance. But the moment was passing when he might have said, ‘But I think we have the whole day, Jay, don’t you?’” (39). Similarly, when Paul—a few pages later—is almost done getting ready, Jane wonders what would have happened if she had only broken this silence between them: “Once he put on his trousers all would be lost. If only she had said to him, screamed at him, ‘Don’t put them on!’” (57). Here, Jane seems to step back to her older vantage point, knowing that the story is reaching the point where Paul disappears forever.

As such, this highlights how almost everything, much like the title of Jane’s book, happens in her mind, forever unspoken. Another interesting feature of silence, however, is the incomplete utterance that Malcolm identifies in Understanding Graham Swift, which refers to how the protagonists “allow their utterances to trail off into dashes and ellipsis points” (15) when they are “unwilling to say certain words, or to look at certain issues directly” (15). An example of such an utterance is when Jane, after wandering through the empty Sheringham house, returns to Paul’s bedroom: “Was it really the room in which…? Was it really here that…?” (87). As Malcolm writes, the reader is most likely able to deduce the ends of these unfinished sentences (15), but it allows for Jane to keep her silence.

Another example is when Jane, upon reflecting on how long it would take for Paul to forget their clandestine romance, employs the following use of ellipsis: “And how long before, for him, the catalogue of this place, in his new life, might seep from his head? Not quickly, she imagined, even hoped. And how long before, for him, the catalogue of all the

Weiger 27 moments with her…?” (70) Although this occurs at a point in the novel when Jane has not yet revealed Paul’s death, this incomplete question might signify that she is “approaching the unspeakable” (Malcolm 115). Additionally, this exemplifies one way in which Jane vacillates between states: between the state of being eloquent—or, as Chalupský phrases it, “gaining in eloquence” (40)—and the state of being unable to finish her sentences.

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4.3. Fairytale or Obituary?

Much like in Tomorrow, one can begin by looking at the opening line of Mothering

Sunday—or, at least, the very first part of it: “Once upon a time, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars” (1). The famous first four words are used more than once in the novel, and seem to suggest that the events of this Mothering Sunday—in spite of the day’s tragic ending—are a fairytale. Unlike Paula’s bedtime story, however, this does not seem to be a choice based on the intended, imagined audience. There are no children to tell this story to, and the man Jane later marries has passed away, as she reveals in the following line: “Forty-eight and famous and widowed and childless and not yet halfway through her orphaned life” (117). But, if Jane is so sure that this story will never be revealed to anyone, it begs the following question: Who, if anyone, is this fairytale meant for?

Rather than an “intertextual audience specifically addressed by the narrator” (Phelan and Rabinowitz qtd. in Kucała 118), the narratee in Mothering Sunday seems to be a blank space to be filled—by the reader, or, perhaps, by Jane herself. For example, even though

Jane’s narration establishes that this is neither a conversation nor an interview, it could be argued that the imagined questions of an interviewer are what spur her on: “Adventure stories, not detective stories. Boys’ books. They were the thing. And her interviewer might say, treating it all as a bit of a joke and not anyway wanting the interview to get too ‘booky’, ‘And boys themselves?’” (88). Unlike the way Paula imagines her children’s questions and responses, however, Jane does not see this as a rehearsal for a real confession:

[H]ow, after all, could you admit to such things in a public interview (sprightly

as some of her interviews could be): I wandered naked round a house that

wasn’t even mine, that I’d never even entered before. And how did I get to be

doing that? Well there was a whole story there, a story she’d sworn to herself

never to tell. Nor had she. Nor would she.

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Though here she was, look, a storyteller by trade. (99)

The final line of this paragraph is of particular interest here, as the tiny command—

“look”—seems to signal that someone is, in fact, listening. In addition, it arguably marks a difference from the way Jane usually speaks. As mentioned in the beginning of this paper, there is a difference between Jane and Paula, in the sense that Jane is a focalizer rather than a narrator—and that the true identity of the narrator remains, much like Jane’s stories, untold.

Thus, while one could argue that the command in this quote is an address to an unrepresented third party “eavesdropping on private words” (Tatarian 53), it could also be seen as a word spoken by the narrator. In fact, the very last pages of this novel seem to zoom out from Jane’s perspective, and comment on the stories—including the one being told in Mothering

Sunday—of her life:

She would tell in her books many stories. She would even begin to tell, in her

later careless years, stories about her own life, in such a way that you could

never quite know if they were true or made up. But there was one story she

would never tell. (148)

Again, the very last line stands out, as it could arguably be interpreted as follows: if

Jane is convinced that she will never share this story, this must be based on the fact that she knows she will never break her silence—or any silence—again. This is further emphasized by the way her imaginings contrast those of Paula’s—that is, how Jane never imagines what is to come next. As previously established, Jane’s narration revolves around imaginings of what could have been, or what might have happened if something had gone differently, but she never reflects on if any of her present choices—such as the choice to finally reveal this story to someone—will affect what happens next. Instead, what begins as a fairytale in the opening line, seems to turn into an obituary towards the end of the novel, as reflected in the following summary of Jane’s life: “She would know times and changes, and write about them. She

Weiger 30 would live to be over ninety, nearly a hundred” (147). In other words, the spectral quality of

Jane’s monologue seems more concerned with the narrator than the narratee, as it would appear that this unknown presence allows Jane to recount the story of Mothering Sunday to herself—one last time.

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5. Conclusion

Although Malcolm’s analysis of Swift’s novels does not include Tomorrow and Mothering

Sunday, this paper shows how Paula and Jane adhere to the trends he has identified, as both of them recount past events that haunt them in monologues addressed to absent listeners. While neither of the protagonists faces spectral apparitions, they are both haunted in a multitude of ways: by what could have been, what might come to pass, and by people and secrets they have not let go of. As established earlier, these imagined hauntings are further emphasized by the fact that the protagonists only recount their stories internally, confessing secrets and painful truths without speaking them out loud. While this might qualify as “taking [the past] out of the unconscious domain [to] prevent its uncontrolled, obtrusive recurrence” (Chalupský

38), the following question remains: Are the protagonists actually able to exorcise the ghosts of their past?

Paula’s monologue seems prompted by her anticipated mourning—that is, her fear of losing Mike—and this, in turn, provokes past griefs to resurface, such as the grief for her deceased father. However, while such hauntings might be the ones closest to her heart, what is arguably her biggest secret is the one she admits will not be confessed in the morning: her secret affair with another man. In other words, the ghost that might be in the strongest need of exorcising, is the one she will—presumably—never speak into existence. Similarly, the novel’s open ending means that the morning may play out differently than Paula imagines, as it may very well be that no secrets at all get confessed. Thus, even though Paula takes these hauntings out of the unconscious domain, there is nothing that proves that these ghosts do not stand to “come and to come-back” (Derrida 118).

In Mothering Sunday, Jane’s imaginings of potential scenes, in combination with the way she renders herself ghostly, means that many of her flashbacks are given an undecidable, spectral quality. As seen in quotes from the novel, Jane herself seems to doubt the validity of

Weiger 32 certain moments, leading one to wonder what is real and what is not. In addition, as she insists on never sharing her stories, one possible way to interpret this internal storytelling is—as brought forth in this paper—that this might be the very last time her story is recounted before she takes it to her grave. If so, the only reason these ghosts cannot return again is because their host—that is, the archive in which they are stored—is turning spectral, too.

There are, however, other angles to pursue when talking about hauntings and silence in Swift’s fiction. In Understanding Graham Swift, Malcolm also highlights how Swift’s novels “set up elusive echoes of one another” (110), with figures or topics being “elaborated on or reduced to a minor role in subsequent texts” (110). To paraphrase, Swift’s fiction is haunted by his own works, which leads one to wonder how Tomorrow and Mothering Sunday may be haunted in other ways. For example, let us return to a minor character in Mothering

Sunday, who was briefly mentioned in this paper: the Nivens’ cook, Milly. Towards the end of the novel, Jane reveals that Milly was eventually “taken away to some place […] where women of her station and condition got taken away, never to return” (107). This could arguably be seen as an echo of one of Swift’s most known works, Waterland (1983), in which the protagonist’s wife, Mary Metcalf, is institutionalized.

This also serves as an example of one of the main things Swift has previously been criticized for—that is, his lacking, traditional, and/or negative representation of female characters (Malcolm 19). As such, it would be interesting to analyze how—or if—this representation has shifted in Tomorrow and Mothering Sunday, and to look closer at the difference between being silenced and staying silent in Swift’s fiction. This would, arguably, go hand in hand with a discussion of specters and women, as exemplified by Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak’s “Ghostwriting” (1995), which raises criticism towards Derrida’s

Specters of Marx in terms of how it excludes women from the discourse of haunting. In other

Weiger 33 words, then, this paper is only a starting point for a discussion of haunting and female voices in Swift’s fiction.

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Swift, Graham. Mothering Sunday: A Romance. Scribner, 2016.

---. Tomorrow. 2007. Scribner, 2016.

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