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Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle
36 | Spring 2001 Varia
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/107 ISSN: 1969-6108
Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes
Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2001 ISSN: 0294-04442
Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 36 | Spring 2001 [Online], Online since 13 June 2008, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/107
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Melville’s Wall Street: It Speaks for Itself Matthew Guillen
Preferring not to:The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby” Jane Desmarais
James Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” and Chandler’s Tears of Remorse Mary Lazar
The fragment, the spiral and the network: the progress of interpretation in Louise Erdrich’s “American horse” Isabelle Thibaudeau-Pacouïl
The narrator in Neil Jordan's short stories Maguy Pernot-Deschamps
Journal of the Short Story in English, 36 | Spring 2001 2
Melville’s Wall Street: It Speaks for Itself
Matthew Guillen
1 Subtitled “A Story of Wall Street”, Herman Melville’s compact and—compared to its controversial immediate predecessor Pierre or the Ambiguities—“tidy” piece, “Bartleby the Scrivener” evokes an insular, and cartographically almost peninsular, portion of Manhattan Island shimmering in the newly emerging largesse which will soon typify New York as the grand commercial crossroads of the world.1
2 The tale involves the relationship between Bartleby and his employer, the attorney narrator, and unfolds within office spaces only explicitly defined by two windows facing exterior walls as well as by a wooden screen and a folding panel with panes of ground glass—the former separating Bartleby from the lawyer and the latter effectively separating the lawyer and Bartleby from Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut, the other characters in the lawyer’s employ.
3 Bartleby soon begins reducing his workload (much of which entails hand copying legal documents) by extending his “preferences” not to compare manuscript copies to other tasks, and eventually, not to copy or write at all—in short, he ceases work entirely. In the process, the lawyer comes to discover that Bartleby has also taken up residence in the office. Despite attempts to dislodge the scrivener or, at the very least, exact some form of labor from him, Bartleby resists, spending the workweek in idle contemplation while the rest of the firm tries going about its routine. The lawyer nevertheless attempts adapting to the circumstances. As rumors spread among clientele and colleagues, however, Bartleby’s employer opts in favor of sounder business judgment and moves his practice elsewhere, thereby ridding himself of Bartleby while avoiding the moral dilemma of an outright eviction. The new office tenants discover Bartleby rooted in their midst and, less inclined to tolerate his presence, have the scrivener arrested and imprisoned in a lower-Manhattan penitentiary of the day known as the Tombs, where Bartleby refuses nourishment and eventually dies. Finally, in a “sequel” to the short story, the lawyer recounts “one little item of rumour” to the effect that prior to his arrival in New York, Bartleby had worked in the “dead-letter office” at Washington, D.C., charged with reading and then destroying undeliverable mail. The
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mail would have been undeliverable largely due to the death of the addressee—the putative “melancholia” associated with such tasks offered as explanation for the scrivener’s eventual behavior.
4 Apart from identity analyses of the recalcitrant scrivener who, three days after his job debut, begins stating his “preferences” not to perform certain, nor finally any, of his assigned tasks, the story’s subtitle has raised certain premises of its own, many of which tend towards the esoteric. Bartleby is twice described as slipping into “dead-wall reveries” before one of the office windows.2 And in conjunction with the four other references to “walls” apart from the Wall Street locale, many critics have teased out of the reading Melville’s service to a generally symbolic convention, representing as such the figurative insularity of existence bound by the void girding birth and death.3 Ronald Hoag, for example, refers to the story’s “much-discussed wall imagery” which, “as elsewhere in Melville’s fiction” symbolizes death and mystery: All of the lawyer's office windows open into cavities, and in the space between the white wall of a sky-light shaft and a brick wall “black by age,” the lawyer makes his office and lives much of his life. These walls, however, suggest more than has been noted. Although the black wall, darkened by an “everlasting shade,” clearly represents death by aging, the skylit wall, while similarly “deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life,’” is nonetheless a mixed symbol that, in part, connotes birth, as in a delivery into the light.4
5 Hoag’s felicitous use of “clearly” in referring to Melville’s age-blackened wall is, meanwhile, indicative of the sort of pre-apocalyptic (or, in the words of Jenny Franchot: “post-Scriptural”) cast given by a number of critics to virtually anything issuing from the Melville canon.5 “Life, then,” Hoag continues: goes on in the brief space between the shaft of the birth canal and the shaft of the grave. Within this intramural Vanity Fair the lawyer exists in a precarious interregnum in the sovereignty of annihilation […] the lawyer’s office is a flimsy fortress against the recognition of mortality. Despite its superficial vitality, it is fundamentally imbued with death.6
6 The merit of this and similar observations notwithstanding, it will be suggested that the subtitle is of paramount importance, but it is rather the moral insularity of a financial community anent the social ills accompanying New York’s diverse and sudden population growth during the first half of the nineteenth century—the first strains of urban blight and personal alienation—which lies at the center of Melville’s tale.
7 A lawyer whose sense of place and time, not insignificantly, corresponds perfectly to events that occurred in New York prior to the story’s publication, narrates “Bartleby”, yet he preens on the “petty triumphs of the age” (his “enviable” former association with millionaire John Jacob Astor), which Mumford credits Melville for introducing a “tragic sense of life” this era lacked.7 The “tragic sense of life” of Melville’s New York entailed acknowledgment, which the story’s narrator refuses, of the cruel juxtaposition of wealth with a poverty of epic proportion, the principle victims of which, in reality, were the recently arrived Irish. One poignant element of their displacement from a disease and famine wracked homeland was the failure of mail to reach its destination due to the death of the intended recipient, and this detail is underscored in a newspaper account deemed the source to Melville’s “dead letter” epilogue to the short story, a source (and the implications of which) most readers of the day, it will be argued, would have immediately recognized. Bartleby thus becomes an “everyman”
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representing the shadowy substance behind the elegant façade of New York’s financial prowess.
1. Melville’s “dark beetling secrecies of mortar and stone”
8 In the first half of the nineteenth century, the unpleasant byproducts of Hamiltonian industrial incentive—government policies virtually eliminating all forms of corporate liability for conditions detrimental to their workforce—radiated throughout the Northeast: sweatshops, overcrowding, illiteracy, filth, and disease ravaged a growing mass of industrial workers, their conditions aggravated by the unemployment financial panics in 1837 and 1857 spurred.
9 Melville was born in New York City on August 1st, 1819, into the Gansevoort family— replete, in this epoch, with lawyers of every stripe, many of whom had direct connections with government—and grew up in what is today’s Chinatown. At the age of five, after his father’s death and a decline in family finances, the Melvilles moved north to Bleecker Street in present-day Greenwich Village. Brother Gansevoort Melville opened a haberdashery on Market Street and when Herman was fifteen, Gansevoort got a job as clerk in the New York State Bank—originally founded by Alexander Hamilton, and of which Herman’s uncle Peter Gansevoort was one of the trustees. Brother Allan became a lawyer and practiced from an office building at 14 Wall Street. Although Melville aspired to the country life—living for several years near Pittsfield, Massachusetts—he invariably returned to New York City to garner income, whether writing or working at the Customs House in a lower Manhattan become increasingly poverty-ridden and dangerous.
10 By the time Melville was ten, an area known as Five Points, named for the intersection of Park, Worth, and Baxter streets, northeast of City Hall, had become famous for its squalid, overcrowded dwellings, raucous, licentious street life, polyglot population and 12,000 impoverished blacks, remaining notorious as a center of vice and debauchery well into the twentieth century. Describing a visit in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote: [T]he Five Points […]This is the place: these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth […]The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays.8
11 Northeast of the intersection, Park spilled into a street named Bowery—eventually lending to the New York theme the image of “Bowery bum”—dereliction synonymous with this neighborhood even today. Originally intended as a middle-class district, the area had been hastily built on poorly laid landfill near the East River. As the houses started to sag, most of the original residents fled, abandoning the area to those who could afford no better. Again, Dickens on the Five Points, “Where dogs would howl to lie, women, men and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.”9
12 In a six-week period in 1832, a cholera epidemic killed 3,512 New Yorkers—most of them blacks and poor Irish immigrants from this district—occasioning desperate city officials to distribute coffins to the poor. Jacob Riis later reported: “[I]n one cholera
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epidemic that scarcely touched the clean wards, the tenants died at the rate of one hundred and ninety-five to the thousand of population.”10 By 1850, the Five Points claimed the highest population in America, accommodating upwards of 75,000 Germans fleeing persecution, as well as more than one million Irish escaping the disease and famine from the Irish potato fields. In less than three decades, more to the point, by the time Melville had attained adulthood, a pocket of poverty once concentrated around the Five Points had expanded more than a mile uptown—past Tompkins Square, all the way to 14th Street.
13 The Harpers, publishers of Moby Dick and Pierre; or, the Ambiguities were headquartered at Cliff Street and Wall, four blocks east of Broadway, a quarter mile directly south of the Five Points intersection and close to where Melville’s brother practiced law. Melville lived on Fourth Avenue, on the South side of 26th Street, and he would, traversing to the South and East—avoidance of the heart of the area itself requiring a bit of circumambulation—necessarily follow the fringes of the slum. Later in life, when employed as chief inspector of customs, he would go West to Madison Square, follow Fifth Avenue down to 14th Street and then follow the thoroughfare on foot over to Hudson Street, where he would turn to the block below, to the Gansevoort Market and his customs office. In the first quarter-century, this lay just West of the major slums, but by the time of Melville’s death, one year after Riis’ exposé of economic misery advancing on three-quarters of the city’s population, this area too was well in abandon —note Riis’ reference to “the bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand grenades, and the Gatling guns” of the U.S. Sub-Treasury situated just 4 blocks away from Melville’s workplace: Where are the tenements of to-day? Say rather: where are they not? In fifty years they have crept up from the Fourth Ward slums and the Five Points the whole length of the island, and have polluted the Annexed District to the Westchester line. Crowding all the lower wards, wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and filling up Harlem with their restless, pent-up multitudes, they hold within their clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold them at their mercy in the day of mob-rule and wrath. The bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the Sub-Treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of the mercy expected. The tenements to-day are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population.11
14 Violence erupted routinely on the streets of the lower wards, particularly wherever business left “a foot of ground unclaimed”: working-class against upper class, nativists against the foreign born, and riots against the Irish, the English, and the Blacks. In the Fifth Ward, and the adjacent “Bloody” Sixth, rival gangs of Protestants and Catholics vied for control of the streets, resulting in the creation of New York’s first police department in 1844. Melville’s awareness of these gangs and their street slang may be found in Redburn (1849) where Redburn comments on a native New Yorker’s use of words like highbinders and rowdies—the Dictionary of American English giving highbinder as New York slang for a member of one of the Irish street gangs from the Five Points. There is evidence, meanwhile, that more abrupt negotiations with the environment were visited on Melville. To be precise, on May 10, 1849, 8,000 Irish workers descended upon the Astor Place Opera house incensed by the presence of an aristocratic English actor named William C. Macready in a performance of Macbeth. The evening ended with militia firing directly into the crowd, killing 22 and wounding 150 others. This continued two more nights for a total of 30 deaths, and according to John Bryant,
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Melville joined other members of a political-literary faction called “Young America” in petitioning Macready to continue his tour “but a riot ensued (ironically) on Melville’s Astor Place townhouse doorstep.”12 A slight inaccuracy considering Fourth Avenue indeed runs through Astor Place, although Melville’s address on 26th and Fourth would place his “townhouse doorstep” half a mile to the north. The point remains: Melville was scarcely oblivious to the incident.
15 As for Wall Street itself in the 1850s, John Randall describes it as representing “a callously self-interested mercantile society in which any deviance from its norms, if at all insisted upon, leads to punishment by imprisonment and even death.”13 As such, one can well imagine the following, taken from another urban-conscious work of Melville’s: Pierre; or, the Ambiguities—“First Night of their Arrival in the City” (Book XVI)—as derived from Melville’s recurring and immediate experience of the New York quotidian: “The pavements, Isabel; this is the town.” […] “It feels not so soft as the green sward, Master Pierre.” “No, Miss Ulver,” said Pierre, very bitterly, “the buried hearts of some dead citizens have perhaps come to the surface.” […]“And are they so hard-hearted here?” asked Isabel. “Ask yonder pavements, Isabel. Milk dropt from the milkman’s can in December, freezes not more quickly on those stones, than does snow-white innocence, if in poverty, it chance to fall in these streets.” […]“I hear a strange shuffling and clattering,” said Delly, with a shudder. […]“Yes,” returned Pierre, “it is the shop-shutters being put on; it is the locking, and bolting, and barring of windows and doors; the town’s people are going to their rest.” […]“They lock and bar out, then, when they rest, do they, Pierre?” said Isabel. “Yes, and you were thinking that does not bode well for the welcome I spoke of.” “Thou read’st all my soul; yes, I was thinking of that. But whither lead these long, narrow, dismal side-glooms we pass every now and then? What are they? They seem terribly still. I see scarce any body in them; —there’s another, now. See how haggardly look its criss-cross, far separate lamps.—What are these side-glooms dear Pierre; whither lead they?” “They are the thin tributaries, sweet Isabel, to the great Oronoco thoroughfare we are in; and like true tributaries, they come from the far-hidden places; from under dark beetling secrecies of mortar and stone; through the long marsh-grasses of villainy, and by many a transplanted bough-beam, where the wretched have hung.”14
16 Like Pierre or the Ambiguities, “Bartleby” never explicitly names New York, arguably mythifying its function as the Unstated.The “City” in Pierre is recognizable with its “great Oronoco thoroughfare” indicating Broadway and the “large, open triangular space, built round with the stateliest public erections” referring to City Hall Park. But the omission of place-names suggests Pierre's city more as paradigmaticurban setting, rapacious and corrupt, appropriate to the destruction of Pierre’s idealism. In “Bartleby,” New York can be identified through verifiable references: Wall Street, Broadway, Trinity Church (an Episcopalian Church near the lawyer's office, renowned for its wealthy congregation),The Custom House, which stood at Wall and Nassau streets (where Ginger Nut buys the apples, and perhaps the ginger wafers from which he got his nickname, and where Melville ended his days as customs inspector), as well as areas immediately adjacent—Jersey City, Manhattanville, Astoria—wealthy communities identifying New York, contrastively, as fulcrum to the swings of the narrator’s locale.
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2. The Narrator’s “fraternal melancholy”
17 The lawyer-narrator in “Bartleby” seems to represent an amiable but certainly uncomprehending upper-class view of the scrivener—newly-arrived to New York and in need of work—and arguably symbolizes one of the many stone-hearted “dead citizens” Melville, in real life, encountered in the City. The lawyer does indeed attempt making accommodations with the “peculiarities” of his employee, but all within the context of a self-oriented sense of composure and dignity which nonetheless rejects the possibility of comprehending the Other. He is consoled by readings of theologian Jonathan Edwards and scientist Joseph Priestly (“Edwards on the Will” and “Priestly on Necessity”), both having denied the doctrine of free will and encouraging the notion that history was pre-ordained.15 This tactic conveniently obviates the need to reflect more deeply on Bartleby’s condition since, whether the product of free will or destiny, the repercussions of Bartleby’s actions, in keeping with these principles, would reside beyond the ken or responsibility of the lawyer, thus remaining the scrivener’s own business entirely.
18 With reference to Bartleby’s repeated “preferences” (typically: “I would prefer not to,”) along with his final statement on his condition in the Tombs: “I know where I am”(72), Liane Norman suggests that what Bartleby is really saying is: “I know your freedom and prosperity and I want nothing to do with them. They did not permit me to choose.”16 This tacit “knowing” which seems to undergird much of Bartleby’s impermeable (from the narrator’s standpoint) interiority resonates with the legal principles in the process of evolving at the time and otherwise of sufficient social import as to have doubtlessly received widespread publicity. The question remains whether “know” in this sense entails familiarity with freedom and prosperity—which may be accepted or rejected— or whether it refers to certain “assumptions” society entertains with reference to individuals in marginal positions or in positions of distress relative to the mainstream.
19 In association with the “dead wall reveries” in which Bartleby indulges himself, “I know where I am” could easily refer to being “walled-in” or “up against the wall” in terms of choices. In this case, Bartleby has not exercised a free choice against “your freedom and prosperity” as much as simply expressing the awareness that he may never know freedom or prosperity because of the obstacles placed by the society he lives within. And the scrivener’s unwillingness to elaborate on justifications for his conduct amount to the equivalent of “Open your eyes.” A most telling exchange between narrator and scrivener reveals Bartleby’s impatience with as well as the absurdity of such interrogations: “And what is the reason?” queries the narrator upon revelation of Bartleby’s preference to stop all work entirely. “Do you not see the reason for yourself?” responds the scrivener (52), leaving the lawyer to founder in suppositions related to Bartleby’s health, eyestrain principally, but overall revealing the lawyer “perceptiveness” as crude and facile. Kingsley Widmer, who judges the lawyer’s “caritas as the product of ‘mere self-interest’,” is very much on point in his harsh judgment of the narrator. The story manifests “a generosity which reveals both incomprehension and contempt” and further “shows the obtuseness of such rationality and the brutality of such decency.”17
20 W. B. Stein argues that, in the extreme case, Bartleby's employer through “inadvertent revelations of his corruption” demonstrates the “hypocrisy of contemporary Christianity.”18 One example occurs at a critical moment in the short story, when the
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narrator seems to undergo a crisis of conscience: “For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness.” One finds here the striking admission to entertaining “sadness” as its own parodic counterpart in what is blithely referred to as “the blues”— the essence of a reassuring self-pity associated with lyricism, soft ballads, dim lighting and alcohol—certainly “not unpleasing” in the least: The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none (p. 23).
21 Midway through this passage, the narrator emerges from his “gloom” by speaking with an assertive, personal voice: “For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered […]” This kind of ingenuousness has prompted critics to affirm the lawyer's capacity for “considerable moral growth” but the charitable impulses of Melville’s narrator are extremely tenuous; they are consistently qualified and called into question by the narrator's easy return to a safe and detached point of vantage: These sad fancyings-chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain-led on to other and more special thoughts, concerning the eccentricities of Bartleby. Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me. The scrivener's pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding-sheet (23).
22 In other words, in the space of a single stretch of discourse, the narrator has transformed an empathetic “melancholy” to a more easily manageable identification— since we are both “sons of Adam” I too have reason to feel despair—to the outright denial of the original emotion by relegating it to the realm of the infirm. In typical fashion the narrator divests himself of personal responsibility to Bartleby by invoking the mysterious, inexorable world of “sad fancyings,” “special thoughts,” and “presentiments.” The reference to “chimeras […] of a sick and silly brain” blatantly undercuts not only the sympathetic tendencies just exhibited but also the charitable thrust implicit in the funereal vision of Bartleby's form laid out “among uncaring strangers, in its winding sheet.” Bartleby’s fate is thus prefigured by the narrator’s casting away of negative emotion evinced through their contact—this feeling too, thus shelved in its winding sheet.
3. Dead Letters from the land “of promise and of plenty”
23 The puzzling postscript to the story mentions Bartleby having worked in Washington’s Dead Letter Office prior to coming to New York, a possible reason, the narrator suggests, for the scrivener’s fatal melancholy. A dead letter is one that cannot be delivered for whatever reason. There exist several possible sources for this reference, the second of which, I suggest, introduces an interesting analysis of the tale as a whole. There was a vogue of Dead Letter Office articles about the time “Bartleby” was written. One possible Melville source, Timothy Quicksand's “Dead-Letters,” which appeared in The New-England Magazine in 1831, works toward a somewhat different effect from the somber tones encountered in "Bartleby". Referring to the letter contents:
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What love and hatred, advice and entreaties, prayers, deceit and cunning; what malice, pride, avarice and hypocrisy; what charity and friendship, what grief, and pangs, and humiliation, annoyance and trouble; what parental anxiety, and alluring persuasion, what fraud and folly, fears and hopes, ambition and corruption; slander and meanness; soundness and insipidity, speculations and castles in the air; what disappointments, vanity, lies and flattery, arrogance and foppery; what kindness, true religion, and rank zeal and persecution; what villainy and virtue, knowledge and nonsense, was concentrated here, within a few bags from all the quarters of the globe--all to be cancelled within a short time! 19
24 George Monteiro concludes that this is thesource for the ending of "Bartleby", where Bartleby’s condition, the narrator makes us understand, may have been linked to job- induced melancholia occasioned by prior employment in Baltimore’s dead letter office. Published until 1835, The New-England Magazine was the most famous journal to appear in New England prior to The Atlantic Monthly. Melville's interest in it may have dated from his Berkshires meeting with Nathaniel Hawthorne just as he was writing Moby- Dick. Hawthorne was an early and frequent contributor to its pages, publishing there, for the first time, such stories as “Wakefield,” “Young Goodman Brown,”and “The Grey Champion.”20 There exists another candidate, however. A likelier inspiration for the ending of “Bartleby”is a widely disseminated essay, “Dead Letters—By a Resurrectionist,” which first appeared in the Albany Register for September 23, 1852. As the editor of the Register observed, “It is written in a style admirably adapted to the subject, and conveys much information with regard to the interior working of the Dead Letter office that is both interesting and new.” In the building known as the General Post Office, and on the first floor thereof, there sit from morn till night, and day after day, a body of grave, calm men, whose duty it is to deal with these mortuary remains, sadly exemplyfying [sic] the scripture teaching of the nearness of life to death […] The rooms which these co- laborers with the worm inhabit are tomb-like and dark--echoing to the foot-fall like crypts and like them, finished with groined arches while the air is close and smells of decay […] Piled in the halls, outside the doors of these melancholy vaults, are great sacks, locked and sealed and labelled “DEAD LETTERS,” and ever and anon, appears a grim, sexton-like old negro, who seizing a bag disappears with it into one or other of the tombs. You may enter with me if you will, and treading carefully over the ashes that lie scattered everywhere beneath your feet, watch the processes by which living thoughts and high aspirations, and love's word-tokens, and the burning phrases of ambition, and hope, and joy, and the fitful dreamings of the poet, the cool calculations of the money getter, the prophetic outgivings of the politician--all the thousand varied emotions, sympathies and expressions that go to make up “correspondence” are here converted into lifeless, meaningless trash.[…]
25 From his temporary country home named Arrowhead, just across the state border near Pittsfield, Melville had every chance to read this evocative and informative article at the moment of its appearance, especially since his relatives in and around Albany would have been worriedly scanning the papers for reviews of Pierre. Parker points out that Melville items had appeared in the newspaper (including a review of White-Jacket and a partial reprinting of the first Literary World notice of Moby-Dick), so Melville or his family might well have been on the lookout for a review of Pierre in September, 1852.21 In any event, by the time Melville was writing “Bartleby”, the piece had already been reprinted in the principal New York City papers before being circulated around the country. HershelParker has tracked down at least four such occurrences, all of which Melville would have had access to prior to “Bartleby”, and stresses the fact that Melville’s first readers were predisposed to interpret what the narrator calls the
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“sequel” of “Bartleby” in the light of their own acquaintance with many periodical pieces “exploiting the mournfully suggestive name of the postal department.”22 For our purposes, the following excerpt from the Register’s article seems by far the most illuminating, considering the New York locale Melville was most familiar with. It is the only extended concrete reference to dead letter destinations in the piece, and it raises the singular tragedy of the Irish immigrant. The passage begins: “The now constant emigration of the Irish people, especially, affords another reason for the miscarriage of letters addressed by adopted citizens here, to their relatives and friends at home.” Many letters are returned, which after having passed through perhaps a dozen or twenty offices, and become completely covered untill the memoranda of Postmasters, to “Try Drogheda,” “Try Ballymuck,” “Try Kinsale,” &c., and the Postmaster of the various places “tried” finally get back with the legend, in great letters, “gone to America,” inscribed across the face.
26 Referring to those letters returned during the famine “with the one word ‘dead,’ upon them”, the author remarks: “We will only say that they were numbered by thousands.” He adds: “Many letters, thus returned, find their owners here, and the little pittance, which thoughtful friends had intended to aid in bringing them out of the land of starvation to that of promise and of plenty, is drawn at the counters of the bankers who issued the draft.”
27 Thus, in this analysis, Bartleby comes to represent the unacknowledged human misery of the epoch riding the fringes of the Wall Street legal and financial mentality. Melville’s relationships to the legal community notwithstanding—it has been argued that the narrator is modeled after Melville’s father-in-law Justice Lemuel Shaw, in real life draconian in his Massachusetts State Supreme Court opinions with reference to fugitive slaves as well as railroad workers—one draws little by way of charitable comparison aside from perhaps an unintentional blindness to the ills perpetuated through his decisions. Ills particularly in evidence in Melville’s own milieu due, again perhaps too kindly, to economic factors essential to the growth of the new nation and by extension, as in the case of Shaw, to professionally ethical commitments flowing from the conferral of judgeships in that era. This idea, therefore, departs considerably from Richard Chase’s analysis: The strained and complex relationship between Bartleby and the lawyer may have certain similarities to the relationship between Melville and his father-in-law, also a lawyer, who helped the Melville family finance itself while Melville went on writing instead of getting a job.23
28 Such felicitous and vain mirroring of the personal in Melville’s artistry certainly occurs in several chapters of Pierre—added rather recklessly and spitefully after a last-minute royalties reduction on the part of his publishers—but in the absence of which, as evidenced in Hershel Parker’s interesting if controversial “Kraken Edition” (see footnote 20), the work’s unrivalled excellence and beauty emerges. This is not the case in the tight, coherent “Bartleby”. Although it could be argued that Bartleby’s several gestures of turning away from conversation to staring at a “dead wall” could be taken to correspond to Melville’s own chosen seclusion, as a figure in the short story this stance rests within the theme of being “in the world yet not of it”—possibly by choice, as in Melville’s case, but not exclusively so—as evidenced by the disenfranchised millions of New Yorkers who, in the heart of fabulously wealthy Gotham, constitute nevertheless marginalia to society. By far the most appealing statement available on this theme comes from the pen of Richard Fogle, who characterizes such direct
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autobiographical associations as denigrating Melville’s work to that of “a puerile irony” and, by extension, “an elaborate trick upon the reader”: If […] these themes represent his main intention in the story, then the worse for Melville. It would make him guilty of a puerile irony and an elaborate trick upon the well-meaning reader […] Bartleby as representative man is certainly more interesting than Bartleby as author, or than Bartleby as Melville.24
29 Bartleby becomes Wall Street’s “Secret Sharer”, a dark stone in the heart of the thriving financial center which New York has become by this era. The Tombs, where Bartleby ends his days, was the principal vehicle for debtors, homeless derelicts such as Bartleby, and murderers alike—notable in the extended reference in the story to the Colt-Adams murder case. “Bartleby”, hence, in this scheme, could be taken as Melville’s attempt to penetrate the outward respectability of the financial district’s façade.
30 He issues from this wealth as dross spewed as byproduct from a gigantic factory works. He is there, in short, since wealth generates employment, however meager or demeaning—as it did for the starving Irish, for all the good it did them in the Five Points. In closing, Bartleby is New York, the meanness of life within which, particularly for Pierre’s “snow-white innocence, if in poverty” goes without saying for Melville’s contemporaries—as, some may argue, remains the case in our time.
NOTES
1. “Bartleby” first appeared in two parts in November and December 1853, in Putnam's Monthly Magazine. It was later included in a collection of short stories by Melville entitled The Piazza Tales (1856). All references in this article are to the Simon & Schuster Edition, New York, 1997. 2. “Bartleby”. 47, 61 3. The “Walls” appear on the third page of the original edition (21- 22 in Simon and Schuster’s) in the context of the “great height of the surrounding buildings”, and briefly on 30 and 46 in describing Bartleby’s habit of staring at the blank wall opposite his window. 4. Ronald Wesley Hoag, “The Corpse in the Office: Mortality, Mutability and Salvation in Bartleby, the Scrivener”, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 38 (1992) Washington State University: 141. 5. “…[Melville’s] prose and poetry rival Scripture, ingesting it into his own innovative, post- Scriptural voice that uses biblical sublimity against itself.” Jenny Franchot, “Melville’s Traveling God” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, Robert S. Levine, ed., London: Cambridge UP, 1998. 177 6. Hoag. 142 7. “Melville left a happy and successful career behind him, and plunged into the cold black depths of the spirit, the depths of the sunless ocean, the blackness of interstellar space, and though he proved that life could not be lived under those conditions, he brought back into the petty triumphs of the age the one element that it completely lacked: the tragic sense of life.” Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision; New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929. xvi
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8. Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy, London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. 101. It was not until 1867 that owners of swine were prohibited by ordinance from letting them run at large in the built-up portions of the city. 9. Dickens. 103 10. Jacob A. Riis, A Ten Years' War: An Account of the Battle with the Slum in New York, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969, originally published by Charles Scribner and Sons, New York, 1890. 4. 11. Ibid. 15 12. John Bryant, “Moby-Dick as Revolution” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, Robert S. Levine, ed., Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998. 81 13. John H.Randall III, “Bartleby vs. Wall Street: New York in the 1850s.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 (1975), 144. 14. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, the Ambiguities: the Kraken Edition, New York, Harper Collins, 1995 (orig. Pub. Harpers, 1852). 328-9. Hershel Parker, Kraken editor, has been criticized (particularly by Richard Poirier, “The Monster in the Milk Bowl”, London Review of Books, October 3, 1996. 19-22) for deleting chapters of Pierre which appeared after Melville’s dispute with Harper’s. In fact, these very chapters constitute such a drastic departure from the tone and coherence of the main piece as to render the basis for such criticism questionable to say the least. Take for example the differences between Henry James’ 1881 edition of Portrait of a Lady and the 1908 New York edition (in the Norton Critical Edition of Portrait, there are 80 pages of “substantial”, as opposed to “accidental”, changes—accompanied by the editor’s observation that James “literally rewrote” the novel during the 2 years preceding the New York publication in 1908—effectively changing the novel to include a more mature theory of art as well as recent developments in the field of psychology). It has been widely established that Melville’s financial instabilities figured significantly in his various switches in theme as well as in his decision to fairly abandon this career for the remaining 4 decades of his life. 15. Note the use of “preference” in Edwards’: “in every voliton there is a preference, or a prevailing inclination of the soul” Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey, New Haven: Yale U P, 1957. 140 16. Liane Norman “Bartleby and the Reader,” New England Quarterly 44 [1971]: 38 17. Kingsley Widmer, “Negative Affirmation: Melville's 'Bartleby,'” Modern Fiction Studies, 8 (1962), 283. 18. W. B. Stein, "Bartleby: the Christian Conscience," Melville Annual 1965. 105. 19. Timothy Quicksand, "Dead-Letters," The New-England Magazine, 1 (1831), 505-506 20. George Monteiro, “Melville, ‘Timothy Quicksand,’ and the Dead-Letter Office,” Studies in Short Fiction, 9 (Spring 1972), pp. 198-201. 21. Parker, Hershel. “Dead Letters and Melville's Bartleby,”Resources for American Literary Study 4: 90-99. 1974 Pennsylvania State University The entire article is with an introduction by Hershel Parker. 22. Hershel Parker “The "Sequel" in "Bartleby"* M. Thomas Inge from Bartleby the Inscrutable (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979), pp. 159-65 23. Richard Chase, Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems, New York: Macmillan, 1950. 147. 24. Richard Harter Fogle, Melville’s Shorter Tales, Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1960.23
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AUTHORS
MATTHEW GUILLEN Matthew Guillen, maître de conférences at the University of Nantes, has, in addition to a French doctorat, a Juris Doctor from Columbia University and is admitted to the Bar of the State of New York. He has published several articles in the Revue française d’études américaines, and has written two books—Reading America: Language, Law and Literature and Manuel du droit américain—which should be coming out next year.
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Preferring not to:The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”1
Jane Desmarais
“I would prefer not to.” “You will not?” “I prefer not.”
1 “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) is a story of passive resistance. And as the narrator is forced to admit, “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.” Refusing to kow-tow to the demands of his employer, and working to his own individual rule, Bartleby represents a challenge to capitalist, corporatist ideologies. He declines to do what is asked of him over and above the basic task of copying documents. He is an unostentatious figure, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”, who works “silently, palely, mechanically”, but he exercises enormous power by refusing to comply with simple and undemanding requests. On the third day of being installed in a legal office in Wall Street, he is asked by his boss to examine a paper with him, but “without moving from his privacy”, he replies “I would prefer not to”. Towards the end of the story, he is discovered occupying the office at weekends. Bartleby’s verbal obstruction becomes physical.
2 The phrase “prefer not to”, or what Gilles Deleuze has called the “Formula”,2 recurs throughout the story and its repetition drives Bartleby’s colleagues to combative fury. In their simplicity and politeness, these five words -“I would prefer not to”- and the use of the verb “prefer” most notably - achieve a paradoxical significance within the narrative. The statement juxtaposes a conditional with a negative sense, and this lends the reply its force. On the one hand, Bartleby refuses politely, using the conditional form “would” suggesting that there might be a choice in the matter. On the other hand, this choice and therefore expression of politeness is an illusion, for Bartleby blatantly refuses to do anything asked of him. What we witness in the story is a form of resistance based on the paradox of appearing to yield while yielding not at all.3 Bartleby’s politeness is browbeatingly powerful, disarming both the reader and the
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narrator. How could one fault such a genteel reply? Even when challenged “You will not?” Bartleby counters with a quiet “I prefer not.” Like the semblance of choice in his response, “prefer” is both illusive and allusive. Unspecific in what it refers to, the word alludes to a choice which it denies. The implicit suggestion that there might be something Bartleby would prefer to do is an illusion. The use of the word, “prefer”, then, appears contradictory and strikes an ambiguous note in the story. A comparative verb is articulated by Bartleby as an absolute. The narrator declares that he is “More a man of preferences than assumptions”, but Bartleby effectively turns the expression of preference into a statement which has the force of an assumption. This small verbal paradox is just one of a whole set of tensions which shape the narrative.4
3 Bartleby’s loss of appetite and his increasingly pallid and deathly demeanour offer valuable clues to our understanding of his character. Bartleby does not like change. “I would prefer not to make any change” he says, and a little later states “I like to be stationary”. In fact, he prefers not to go very far at all, working, eating, sleeping all in the same place. He is unable to move out of his private world and make public aspects of himself. He copies documents, but refuses to compare them for that would mean working with someone, and his aim is to remain autonomous and self-contained. This neurotic behaviour is underlined by Bartleby’s anorexic characteristics. Ultimately he refuses to take in any nourishment, but this is prefigured in the text by his refusing to take on more work.
4 Melville uses the metaphors of eating and digestion repeatedly. Before Bartleby’s arrival we are apprised of the alimentary economy of the law office. The work habits of Turkey, whose “clothes were apt to look oily, and smell of eating houses” complement those of his colleague, Nippers, whose “brandylike disposition” rendered him irritable for a morning’s work. In spite of these idiosyncracies, they perform their roles “like guards”. The lawyer-narrator informs us that he “never had to do with their eccentricities at one time.... When Nippers’[fit] was on, Turkey’s was off; and vice versa.” Bartleby disrupts this economy. When he arrives at the office he appears to be breaking some kind of fast: At first, Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion.
5 He nourishes himself on paperwork to such an extent that he becomes identified with the document copies, and we might consider the ambiguity in the statement, “I like to be stationary”. Bartleby is and is not what he eats. He feeds on documents and is “stationery”, but in general he eats very little. It is not surprising that the narrator observes “he never went out to dinner”. Bartleby survives on handfuls of gingernuts which are then consumed alone. The spicy biscuits have no effect on Bartleby’s mild nature and passivity, unlike the Englishman, Turkey, whose feisty, aggressive behaviour after a liquid lunch stands in contrast to his subdued efforts in the morning. The contrast between Bartleby’s self-denial and the epicureanism of the other characters, whose behaviour is influenced by what they eat and drink, is made explicit. The “energetic”, “noisy” insolence of Turkey is induced by his noonday tipple, while Nippers, afflicted by the “two evil powers” of “ambition and indigestion”, is calmed after a good lunch.5 The twelve-year-old Ginger Nut nibbles throughout the day and one of his duties is as “cake and apple purveyor” for the other clerks. The word play (stationary/stationery), verbal repetition (gingernut/Ginger Nut) and references to food which cannot be eaten (Turkey), without implications of the ultimate taboo,
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cannibalism, create a kind of linguistic indigestion at this point in the story, which worsens as Bartleby repeats his refusal, “I would prefer not to”. The phrase is, we might say, regurgitated, burped, repeated, in the text, and this calls to mind the impossibility of digestion and satiation for Bartleby. He refuses, in effect, to be fed, except insofar as he feeds (on) himself.
6 In the course of the story Bartleby concedes a few biscuits and a morsel of cheese, and accordingly expends little energy. Repeatedly he is described as “motionless”, “sedate” and “still”. This reliable serenity is described at one point as an attractive feature, but the narrator becomes only temporarily “reconciled” to Bartleby’s “unalterableness of demeanour”. By refusing to move, take on more work and take in more food, Bartleby achieves an ascetic purity, and this is borne out by significant references to his “hermitage”, a place of silence and solitude for him. By the end of the story, the constant refusals wear everyone down. Locked away in prison, Bartleby refuses to eat: 'I prefer not to dine today,' said Bartleby, turning away. 'It would disagree with me; I am unused to dinners'. So saying, he slowly moved to the other side of the enclosure and took up a position fronting the dead-wall.
7 This is portentous, for the man who “lives without dining”, gives up living. Even in death -the ultimate defence- Bartleby is mild and courteous. He politely refuses to eat, and simply so to live. Curled up, foetus-fashion, he becomes identified with the object against which his head rests -the prison wall. We are prepared for this early on by references to his pallid complexion, his withdrawal from social life and refusal to take anything- food, money and even the offer of human empathy. The emptiness of Bartleby’s life is alluded to in the paradoxical references to Egypt. There might be a regal dignity to Bartleby’s last moments, but unlike Egyptian kings, he is buried without sustenance for the afterlife, but this is appropriate since he is a man without power, appetite or desire.
8 Bartleby’s disengagement from life is not presented as disagreeable. Indeed, his exit is quiet and contained. For the time he survives he does so on nothing. He makes no demands, and is constantly in the position of reaction. Bartleby does not revolt in terms of a physical attack, but through a repeated set of verbal refusals, he achieves the effect of revolt. In anorexic style, he is able to live while taking no nourishment, either physical or spiritual. His is a quiet battle, concerned less with attack than defence.6 He might be a small component in the relentless law machine of Wall Street, but he brings significance and power to his position as a copyist in the office. The small man in his small way interferes with processes which are repetitive and uncreative.
9 An absent figure in so many ways (he says little, does little, is little), Bartleby has a powerful presence, and we are astonished, I think, at how so slight a character can represent, in F.O. Matthiessen’s words, “a tragedy of utter negation” (493). The haunting reality of Bartleby’s situation is real enough, and his increasing isolation combined with his determination not to comply creates the most intriguing and perplexing psychological profile of passive resistance in nineteenth-century literary history. In 1978, Q.D. Leavis, declared of “Bartleby” that in spite of “plenty of critical attention... there is no disagreement as to its meaning and the nature of its techniques... present no difficulty” (199). This characteristically dogmatic view is not only outmoded, but is demonstrably inaccurate. The proliferation of critical readings of “Bartleby” testify to the story’s complexity and significance. Some critics, like Morris Beja, have warned against an “either/or approach”, but the tendency has been to view
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the story as either a socio-economic parable or a psychological study. This probably accounts for why much of the critical work on “Bartleby” is disappointing. Some readings overemphasise aspects or elements of the story at the expense of others. In 1962, when the psycho-critics were refining their notions of doppelgangers and split selves, Marvin Felheim, in an article in College English, tried to categorise the various treatments of the story. His categories were not helpful, but his project highlighted two readings of the story that were particularly popular.
10 The first, political, reading locates the story within the context of America’s capitalist expansion. Bartleby refuses to accept the structures imposed on him by a modernising world interested more in collective strategies and “Yes” men than the individual seeking to live outside mainstream ideals. The lawyer-narrator’s chambers become, so to speak, Everyoffice. Bartleby becomes the archetypal clerk, a figure bowed to his task and of whom it is demanded absolute compliance and reliability. His preference “not to” becomes the insistent and impeccable articulation of resistance in the wilderness called Modern America. He fights by refusing to fight and so he has become an icon for various Peace Movements in the twentieth century. Thus “Bartleby” is an allegory of modern America and the failure of democracy to preserve the individual’s right and freedom to choose. It is a story about the failure of modern social life. It is also the story of political unrootedness, of the consequences of living in a society operating at an alienatingly high level of production and consumption.
11 It is not surprising that many critics sought to locate the source of this political reading in the writings of H.D. Thoreau. As Michael Paul Rogin comments in Subversive Genealogy, although Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” is an echo of Thoreau’s “I simply wish to refuse allegiance, to withdraw”, it is not a straightforward debt to the author of Walden. Rather, Melville’s tale inverts Thoreau’s notion of passive resistance. Thoreau went to jail for not paying his poll-tax (because it contributed to slavery), but unlike Bartleby whose sense of self is dramatically reduced by confinement, Thoreau felt that to be physically immured was not to lose his sense of personal civic liberty: I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.
12 In Thoreau’s confinement, he retains the idea that he is “free”, and he goes on to say that imprisonment is a mere physical restriction. He insists that a part of him cannot be imprisoned and this resistance has no cost because it is not part of the civil or political domain. Confinement in his view does not inhibit a man’s sense of his own intellectual or moral worth. “I was not born to be forced”, Thoreau insists, “I will breathe after my own fashion.” His sacrifice is never more than partial because his virtue has only to be civic or public. In fact, his psychological freedom could even be thought of having been enhanced by his corporeal imprisonment. This is not the case for Bartleby, however, whose sacrifice is so much the greater because these binary divisions are abandoned. After Bartleby is en-Tombed,7 his withdrawal is severe, and this leads to his self-destruction. This is paradoxical and inverts the whole notion of defence which is to keep out the dangerous object: “Hence what was designed in the first instance as a guard or barrier to prevent disruptive impingement on the self, can become the walls of a prison from which the self cannot escape” (Laing 150). At the end of the story Bartleby walls himself out of his own life, and he thereby destroys himself while conserving others. The denial of others, for Bartleby, necessarily involves self-
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denial and withdrawal, and the punishment of himself. This takes us a long way from the political ideal of passive resistance, behind which the idea is to “save the adversary as well as to triumph over him” (Rogin 195), and brings us closer to a psychological reading.
13 The psychological reading presents a more disturbing view. Bartleby’s lifelessness is both the product and outcome of a sterile bureaucracy which as an external reality has little to do with the natural impulses and desires of the individual. This reading offers an image of neurotic vulnerability. Such is the incurable isolation of individuals whose personal histories are lost in and to the System. Desks and chairs may be repositioned and partition doors may fold down, but there is little change or hope for the individual like Bartleby whose internally-constructed walls are more impermeable than any person can understand. His elegant and economical “I would prefer not to” becomes the mantra of the dispossessed and unlocated. It becomes another wall between him and external reality.
14 Both readings have their merits, but are often presented as mutually exclusive; whereas the political-allegorical reading hails Bartleby as a hero, the psychological spin demonstrates the ways in which he fails. Might there be a way of transcending the distinction between a political and a psychological reading? Might there be an alternative, paradoxical, reading of the text, which puts the psychology at the heart of the politics rather than treating them as discrete? The language of anorexia is helpful here, because, as an illness with which we are becoming increasingly familiar, that condition operates extremely successfully as a form of resistance. The nature of the resistance, however, is paradoxical and tragic. In many cases, as in Bartleby’s, it is withdrawal in extremis, a slow suicide. By keeping everything and everyone out, the anorexic is able to achieve a state of ascetic purity, but this purity leads ultimately to death and is quite literally short-lived. When Bartleby is at his most resistant, the office becomes his “hermitage”. He changes working space into a space of retreat, as he does with his own inner life. As many studies show, anorexics prefer to retreat from social life and seek out places of silence and solitude, where they are able to regulate meagre meals and live on virtually nothing. This is how the narrator describes Bartleby’s routine. The paradoxical nature of anorexic behaviour, the diligence and energy involved in not eating, in not consuming, in not complying, is also represented in Melville’s text by character of Bartleby and his recurring phrase, “I would prefer not to”. As I explained earlier, the force of this refusal derives from the way in which the comparative statement is turned into an absolute. At a social and political level, this mode of resistance is highly effective, and capable of undermining oppressive governments and military regimes. When adopted by the individual, the consequences can be self-destructive. Melville offers both possible outcomes in “Bartleby” and by so doing reveals the contingent nature of the distinction between private and public realms and thus of denial.
15 It would be a mistake to treat Bartleby as a case study of anorexia, as it has been to see him simply as a schizophrenic with various compulsion neuroses. Although some early critics have identified Bartleby with Melville himself (Mumford 238), Bartleby is a literary construct, and provides only an abstract version of a psychological case study. However, the paradoxical condition of anorexia is a useful model in analysing the complexity of Melville’s characterisation, and is suggested by the metaphors of feasting
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and fasting, the recurring statement “I would prefer not to”, and also by what Leo Marx has called the “controlling symbols of the story”: the walls.
16 In his study of the relationship between Melville’s politics and art, Rogin makes reference to the various walls in the text. He describes the way in which Bartleby is confined in his work, screened and “bounded” by a “white wall” at one end and a “lofty brick wall” at the other, and the way in which he withdraws to “dead-wall reveries” when he is sick of copying. And Wall Street, of course, provides the appropriate backdrop. More concerned with the political resonances of Bartleby’s character for Melville, Rogin merely alludes to the psychological significance of these walls. He refers to them in the mode of leitmotifs, as boundaries, partitions, parameters, which create the idea of isolation and the breakdown of “rooted relationships” (194). Bartleby, according to Rogin, is a cog in the political machine; he is “Tocqueville’s democratic individual, cut off from family, class, and community” (196). This is a useful reading but it does not take into account the screen and the walls within walls which constitute Bartleby’s paradoxical and tragic condition.
17 A wall is defined as a structure which defends, holds back, fortifies, encloses, and by its very nature, separates and divides. In “Bartleby”, there are two kinds of wall: the physical boundaries of Wall Street, the law offices and the internal partitions, and the psychological walls which Bartleby erects in order to defend himself from entreaties to change. He says to the lawyer-narrator, “I like to be stationary. But I am not particular”.8 As long as he can stay in one place, he is content and quite literally “contained”. The walls which surround him give him a sense of place if not identity, and there is a certain security in this. These external and inner walls are of course interrelated. Bartleby’s physical environment metaphorically figures his psychological barricades. The lawyer’s office is a walled block surrounded by walls. At one end there is light afforded by a “spacious skylight shaft”; at the other, there is the “everlasting shade” of a “lofty brick wall, black by age... which... required no spyglass to bring out its lurking beauties, but, for the benefit of all nearsighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my windowpanes.” The narrator adds, “the interval between this wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.” Bartleby’s working space is further defined by a wall three feet away and a “high green folding screen” which demarcates his space from that of his boss: “And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined.” Bartleby’s space therefore is rather like a series of boxes placed one inside the other, the smallest box being the internal walled area within Bartleby himself, which keeps others out and keeps him inside. This is most powerfully conveyed when he refuses to admit the lawyer to his own offices, thus displacing and reducing him to walking “around the block two or three times”. The complexity of this situation surely recalls Thoreau’s “Essay on Civil Disobedience” and the idea that the psychological part of man cannot be imprisoned because it is not part of the civil or political domain.
18 It is interesting that the serialised version of the story first appeared in Putnam’s Magazine in two parts. Part One ends with the lawyer’s decision to try and cope with the scrivener’s announcement that he has given up copying. Part Two opens with a role reversal. Bartleby is inside the office; the lawyer-narrator is refused entry. The ec- centric Bartleby occupies the central space and his patron is forced to find alternative accommodation. Part One treats the themes of displacement and social alienation whereas Part Two focuses more on the notions of self-alienation and self-division, from
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which both Bartleby and the lawyer suffer.9 We might remind ourselves here of R.D. Laing’s 1959 existentialist study, The Divided Self, which, as Morris Beja has noted, is highly suggestive in reading Melville. In Laingian terms, Bartleby and the lawyer are divided selves. They are “cut off from others and from the world, but also self-divided, dissociated” (Beja 559). Bartleby’s self-dissociation, however, has damaging consequences. He becomes “petrified”. He turns from an alive person into a dead thing, into a stone, or wall. Laing describes this as the schizoid’s adoption of various paradoxical forms of self-protection, and terms it “petrification”: If the whole of the individual’s being cannot be defended, the individual retracts his lines of defence until he withdraws within a central citadel. He is prepared to write off everything he is, except his “self”. But the tragic paradox is that the more the self is defended in this way, the more it is destroyed (80-1).
19 As Laing remarks this can be a strategy adopted by all types of person, not just the “unembodied” schizoid personality, and in Melville’s story the line between sanity and madness is shown to be thin. “Normal” behaviour is behaviour which fits in with the majority view. Those, like Bartleby, who do not measure up, are “luny” and “deranged”, and their defence becomes one of self-ostracisation and petrification.
20 While Laing’s work provides real insight into the “unembodied” character of the scrivener, recent psychoanalytical studies of eating disorders (such as bulimia and anorexia) provide a more sophisticated psychological model.10 Some research, most notably, that of L.K.G. Hus, E.S. Meltzer and A.H. Crisp, bridges understanding of the disorders of schizophrenia and anorexia nervosa11 and, more recently, Gianna Williams’ model of a “No Entry” system of defences, developed from the theories of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, provides a way of understanding the character of Bartleby and his series of refusals. In her book, Internal Landscapes and Foreign Bodies (1997), she touches on “a range of feeding difficulties or eating disorders which may be seen as further facets of the pathology associated with impairments in ‘taking from another’” (11). Drawing on the lives of “patients who protect themselves from the experience of an inimical input” (12), Williams describes the ways in which keeping everyone and everything out becomes paramount for the anorexic/bulimic in particular: I think it becomes clear ... that the relinquishment of defences against forming a dependent relationship on a human being, free to come and go ... represents a shift especially in the area of eating disorders, from valuing possessions to valuing a different aspect in one’s quality of life. It could probably be most concisely defined as a transition from lending value to having, to finding greater fulfilment in the more painful but richer predicament of being (13-14).
21 Bartleby does not make this transition, because he cannot move beyond a state of self- denial. In order to be he would have to dissolve some of the boundaries and walls and admit (in both senses of the word) assistance (and existence). He is concerned most of all to protect himself from invasion. His invasion anxieties are not circumscribed, but manifest themselves variously as refusals to take food in, to take work on, to admit the need of help, and to allow others access (into either a physical or psychological space). Most pertinently in the story they manifest themselves as refusals of nourishment. In Williams’ terms, these refusals constitute a “no-entry” syndrome which “performs the defensive function of blocking access to any input experienced as potentially intrusive and persecutory” (121). Bartleby constructs a chinese box of walls, and, paradoxically, this is both a gesture towards life and death.
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22 This “no-entry” syndrome is psychological stoicism and we should recall by way of conclusion Melville’s references to Cicero - a re-presentation of reason, eloquence and stoicism. We encounter the bust first of all through the eyes of the lawyer-narrator, who remarks that “doubtless I should have violently dismissed him [Bartleby] from the premises. But as it was I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of- Paris bust of Cicero out of doors.” A little later on, Bartleby fixates on the head. He declares that he preferred not to examine the fourth quadruplicate, but instead “kept his glance fixed upon [the] bust of Cicero”. Through the suggestive double appearance of the bust in the text, Melville is able to adopt into “Bartleby” both the political and psychological notions of stoicism, which becomes a way, as I hope to have shown, of setting up the problem of Bartleby’s retreat from the public world and his self-denial. Using political thought as well as psychology in our reading of the text allows us to overcome the dichotomy in the critical literature. In the end, because the story of Bartleby is a “tragic paradox” in psychological terms it must be a “tragic paradox” in political terms. Bartleby’s freedoms are incompatible with life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beja, Morris, “Bartleby and Schizophrenia”, Massachusetts Review, 19 (Autumn 1978), 558-68.
Deleuze, Gilles, “Bartleby; Or, The Formula.” In Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. London and New York: Verso, 1998.
Farrell, E.M., Lost for Words: The Psychoanalysis of Anorexia and Bulimia. London: Process Press, 1995.
Felheim, Marvin, “Meaning and Structure in ‘Bartleby’”, College English, 23 (February 1962), 369-76.
Hardwick, Elizabeth, Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962.
L.K.G. Hus, E.S. Meltzer and A.H. Crisp, “Schizophrenia and Anorexia Nervosa”, Transactions of the Clinical Society (London), 7 (1974?), 22.
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Laing, R.D., The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Tavistock Publications, 1959.
Lawrence, Marilyn, The Anorexic Experience. London: The Women’s Press, 1995.
Leavis, Q.D., “Melville: The 1853-6 Phase”. In Faith Pullin, ed., New Perspectives on Melville. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978.
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Mordecai Marcus, “Melville’s Bartleby as a Psychological Double”, College English, 23 (February 1962), 365-8
Marx, Leo, “Melville’s Parable of the Walls”, Sewanee Review, 61 (Autumn 1953), 602-27.
Matthiessen, F.O., American Renaissance. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1941.
Mumford, Lewis, Herman Melville. A Study of his life and vision. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929.
Perry, Dennis R., “‘Ah, Humanity’: Compulsion Neuroses in Melville’s ‘Bartleby’”, Studies in Short Fiction, 24 (Autumn 1987), 407-15.
Phillips, Adam, “On Eating, and Preferring Not To”. In Promises, Promises. London: Faber, 2000.
Ripa de Meana, Gabriella, Figures of Lightness: Anorexia, Bulimia and Psychoanalysis. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1999.
Rogers, Robert, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970.
Rogin, Michael Paul, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
Thoreau, H.D., “Civil Disobedience” (1848).
Widmer, Kingsley, The Ways of Nihilism: A Study of Herman Melville’s Short Novels. Los Angeles: California State Colleges, 1970.
Williams, Gianna, Internal Landscapes and Foreign Bodies. London: Duckworth, 1997.
------, “Reflections on some dynamics of eating disorders: ‘No Entry’ defences and foreign bodies”, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78 (October 1997), 927-41.
NOTES
1. My thanks to Michael Brearley, Joseph Holt, Matthew Pountney and John Shaw for helping to shape my own dead-wall reveries. 2. Deleuze uses this term in “Bartleby; Or, The Formula”, in Essays Critical and Clinical, which was first published in 1993, and brings together his essays on a variety of writers and philosophers. To “Bartleby”, as to the other essays, Deleuze adopts a ‘symptomatological’ approach, diagnosing the ways in which language, pushed to and beyond its own limits, represents the process of life itself. He writes: The formula bourgeons and proliferates. At each occurrence, there is a stupor surrounding Bartleby, as if one had heard the Unspeakable or the Unstoppable. And there is Bartleby’s silence, as if he had said everything and exhausted language at the same time. With each instance, one has the impression that the madness is growing: not Bartleby’s madness in “particular”, but the madness around him, notably that of the attorney, who launches into strange propositions and even stranger behaviours. 3. The affirmative and negative nature of Bartleby’s “preferring not to” has been noted by Jaworski: Bartleby “does not refuse, but neither does he accept, he advances and then withdraws into this advance, barely exposing himself in a nimble retreat from speech” (19). 4. Apart from Deleuze no critic has bothered to unpack this statement. In Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays, Elizabeth Hardwick writes tentatively: “I do not think he has chosen the verb ‘prefer’ in some emblematic way. That is his language and his language is what he is. Prefer has its power, however” (224). With which last sentiment I concur. The phrase is mobilised by the
Journal of the Short Story in English, 36 | Spring 2001 23
other characters too, who, described by the lawyer-narrator as having “got the word”, involuntarily “roll it from their tongues” [p.20]. 5. Epicureanism involves an appreciation of the centrality of pleasure, especially consumption, for the good life. Acknowledging this in the story gives Nippers and Turkey (and by extension Ginger Nut and the grubman), a philosophical meaning of their own. Are they epicureans, or, do they reveal the problems encountered by the other side of the argument? Whatever, epicureanism does have the virtue of making food a necessary element in the story rather than the metaphorical object of denial in the narrow political reading. That is, seeing stoicism in dialogue with epicureanism makes food the necessary dramatic heart of a broader reading since epicureanism necessarily emphasises consumption. 6. Deleuze describes the quiet, dignified, “agrammatical” Bartleby as a modern Messiah: “A schizophrenic vocation: even in his catatonic or anorexic state, Bartleby is not the patient, but the doctor of a sick America, the Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother to us all” (90). 7. The “Tombs” are the so-called Hall of Justice in downtown Manhattan used mainly as a prison. 8. This is part of the same lexical paradox as “prefer” for he is not “particular” as long as he gets what he wants. 9. See, for example, the literature on “doubling” in Melville: Marcus, “Melville’s Bartleby as a Psychological Double” 365-8; Widmer pp.112f.; Rogers pp.67-70; Keppler pp.115-20. 10. Two recent and particularly useful studies are Farrell (1995) and Lawrence (1995). 11. See the work of Hus, Meltzer and Crisp.
AUTHORS
JANE DESMARAIS Jane Desmarais teaches literature and art history at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is currently writing A Cultural History of Decadence for Polity Press.
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James Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” and Chandler’s Tears of Remorse
Mary Lazar
1 Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” has not generated significant critical debate, despite Warren Beck’s unorthodox interpretation of the denouement in 1969. Although speculation about the title has resulted in several theories–the most recent from Corinna del Greco Lobner suggests links to Byron and Dante and refines Stanislaus Joyce’s terse observation that the story reveals “a little cloud over married bliss” (“Background” 526), scholars have generally agreed that the ineffectual protagonist abuses his infant son and refuses to take responsibility for his own shortcomings. I suggest that Chandler’s relationship with the child–not with his wife Annie or journalist/friend Gallaher–is the crucial, epiphanal element of the story and that Joyce portrays a flawed father who is just beginning to “learn [...] what the heart is and what it feels” (James Joyce A Portrait 252), a man whose conscience is awakened, despite his flaws.
2 In the final scene, a thirty-two-year-old law clerk living in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century dreams of being a poet although he has never written a poem and has just been belittled by Gallaher, an unmarried exfriend who is now a successful London journalist. The clerk, who appears to be trapped in a boring job, returns to his small apartment, his wife Annie, and their sleeping male infant. When Annie leaves to get the coffee he has forgotten, he tries to read an early poem of Byron’s but can’t because the baby starts to fuss. Little Tommy Chandler, the name which Joyce chose for the father, not for the infant, then begins to lose his temper. As the baby cries, Tommy doesn’t hit or even shake it, but he does yell “Stop!” in its face (Dubliners 84). The child becomes terrified and, in that cadence which all parents know, cries so violently that Chandler begins to count the seconds between screams. Joyce writes, “He tried to soothe it but it sobbed more convulsively. He looked at the contracted and quivering face of the child and began to be alarmed. He counted seven sobs without a break between them and caught the child to his breast in fright. If it died!...” (84). Annie returns, glares at Chandler accusingly, and tries to calm the baby. The story ends with the following paragraph:
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Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused with shame and he stood back out of the lamplight. He listened while the paroxysm of the child’s sobbing grew less and less: and tears of remorse started to his eyes” (85, emphasis added).
3 Although I believe that Chandler is genuinely sorry for having frightened his son, most Joyceans insist that the protagonist cries out of self-pity, that his “epiphany,” if he does experience one, is egocentric--in short, that Chandler doesn’t change from the Bartleby- like scrivener who may dream and suffer but who will never “produce.”1
4 Except for Beck, many veteran Joyce scholars affirm that “A Little Cloud” develops Joyce’s famous “paralysis” theme and that it complements, in tone and circumstance, the other pieces which precede the final story, “The Dead.” For example, Walzl believes that “‘The Dead’ seems to reverse the pattern of increasing insensibility that Dubliners otherwise traces” and that no one prior to Gabriel, the protagonist, “undergoes a comparable change or has such an enlightenment” (“Gabriel” 430). Similarly, Ghiselin suggests that “A Little Cloud” fits into the over-all schema of Dubliners by representing the sin of envy (323). Ruoff asserts that the story “describes a would-be artist’s pathetic failure to transcend a narrow existence of his own creation” (108), and Bernard Benstock’s interpretation mentions that Chandler “regresses to adolescent self-pity” (Narrative 137). Characteristically witty, Zack Bowen views the story’s denouement as a competition between father and son for baby of the year, and suggests that the race ends in a photo finish (“All Things” 140). Indeed, all of the annotations for “A Little Cloud” in the 1992 illustrated edition of Dubliners by Jackson and McGinley focus on Chandler’s “sloth, his cowardice, his self-delusion, and his final rage and humiliation.” They assert that he is “shamed, not ashamed,” and ignore Joyce’s use of “remorse” (75, 74).
5 Examining some of the reasons behind this critical response may soften the impact of a variant reading, for Joyce’s biography and details from the story itself allow readers to better appreciate Joyce’s word choice.2
1. The Critical Response
6 Probably the most important reason for assuming that Chandler is not enlightened by his experience involves several of Joyce’s own statements. “A Little Cloud” was written in the early months of 1906, when Joyce was 23 and the father of a six-month-old son, Giorgio (Scholes, “Further” 116). But in 1904, speaking about Dubliners, he had told a friend that he wanted “to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city” (Letters 55). Another frequently quoted letter asserts, “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories” (Letters 63-64). The combination of “paralysis” and “odour,” then, while justified by many details in the works themselves, may have also clouded our perception of scattered, positive sensations which some of the pieces generate. As Gillespie argues, “The opinion that this [negative] attitude dominates the final form of the stories [...] oversimplifies Joyce’s emotional attitude toward his country and unjustly circumscribes the artistic potential of the work” (154). Similarly, Garrison observes that “Joyce’s explicit statements concerning his artistic intentions in Dubliners are not very useful as a basis for interpretation” (226). Although Joyce’s defense of his work provided us with an opportunity to clarify his intent, I don’t think that it was meant to narrowly limit or define our reactions as readers.3
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7 Scholars also tend to emphasize organizational patterns in Joyce’s work. As early as 1939, for example, Daiches wrote, “No English short-story writer has built up his design, has related the parts to the preconceived whole, more carefully than Joyce has done in stories such as ‘The Sisters,’ ‘Two Gallants,’ or ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’” (85). And after six decades of scholarship which escalated critical appreciation for the complexity and success of Joyce’s fictional constructs, Beja and Shari Benstock called him “a creator of systems” (xiv). But when Joyce wrote in 1906 that he envisioned Dubliners as containing four groups of three stories each to represent “childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life” (Letters II 134), he had completed only twelve stories. He would later write three more, “Two Gallants,” “A Little Cloud,” and “The Dead,” in that order (Scholes, “Further”). His decision to place “A Little Cloud” at the beginning of the maturity series (the exact center of the collection) has probably contributed to the belief that Chandler is as “little” at the end of the story as he was at the beginning. After all, the next three pieces in the collection involve a drunken father beating his praying son, teenaged girls ridiculing an aging spinster, and a neglected wife stumbling Karenina-like onto the tracks of an oncoming train. Viewing the denouement of “A Little Cloud” in a positive light might be regarded, then, as a challenge to the perfection of Joyce’s design.
8 But Dubliners evolved from a few stories into its present form over a period of three years, and “A Little Cloud” was penultimate in the order of composition. If Joyce at least partially intended the final story, “The Dead,” as a tribute to the more positive aspects of Dublin culture (Letters II 166), it is not unreasonable to discern a hint of this attitude in “A Little Cloud.” Joyce once told his sister, “The most important thing that can happen to a man is the birth of a child” (Ellmann 204), and since his only son and first-born child was about six months old when “A Little Cloud” was begun in the early months of 1906, life circumstances are relevant to this discussion. But such issues do not necessarily help us interpret the story, for Joyce might, after all, have been drawing a portrait of an unfit father. Reviewing the story’s link to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man while examining information about the young writer should enrich our understanding of his state of mind, reveal key similarities and differences between Joyce and his protagonist, and test the validity of an alternate reading of this story.
2. Scene i
9 “A Little Cloud” has three basic scenes: the first describes Chandler’s revery at work and then en route to a meeting with Gallaher; the second reveals their not-so-friendly drinking bout; and the final section portrays the frustrated and belittled law clerk at home. Thematically, the story examines interlocked aspects of Chandler’s identity--his job as a clerk in the King’s Inns and his role as husband and father. Opposed to these are his unfulfilled aspirations to be a poet (though he never writes) and his desire for a more exotic sexual life.
10 In general, Chandler’s disposition is melancholic, “but it [is] a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy” (73). He is fastidious about his appearance and, probably, careful about his work even though he finds it “tiresome” (71). Joyce also emphasizes Little Chandler’s shortcomings throughout the story. He lives in a “little house” (83), reads by a “little lamp” (82), drinks “small whiskies” (80), displays “childish white front teeth” (70), and is given “short answers” by his prim wife
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(82). In the first scene, Joyce invites us to imagine an ordinary man, still capable of a dream, but ruled by circumstances and his own, considerable inadequacies.
11 Still, Chandler experiences an occasional, artistic vision. Though he “gave no thought” to the “horde of grimy children” he walked through on his way to meet Gallaher for a drink after work (71), his ego expands as he thinks about his old friend’s invitation. After all, Gallaher has been gone for eight years, and Tommy is the only member of the “old crowd” whom he plans to meet at the pub. En route from his workplace to the uptown inn, Tommy experiences a poetic moment as he gazes down from Grattan Bridge “at the poor stunted houses” near the river (73). The sensation is prompted by a sense of his own importance, but, as he admits, “For the first time in his life he felt himself superior to the people he passed” (emphasis added), and the sensation results in a metaphor which reveals empathy, not disdain: “[The houses] seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled together along the river-banks, their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night to bid them arise, shake themselves and begone” (73). At this point, Chandler considers his own situation and wonders, first, if he is capable of writing “something original” and, second, whether he has “a poet’s soul” (73).
12 Joyce employs important imagery at the end of the first section which firmly links this story to central Joycean themes: “[T]he thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope [...] and “[a] light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind. He was not so old--thirty-two” (73, emphasis added). Linking “infant hope” with “a light” so early in this story hints at Joyce’s lifelong interest in the “consubstantiation” of father and son as well as procreation in the literary sense (Ulysses 32, 155). By the time Joyce wrote “A Little Cloud,” both physical and artistic generation had become realities.
13 Of course, the reader soon realizes that Chandler won’t succeed, despite his “soul,” for he is not original and hopes to capitalize on popular trends, although he realistically admits that “he will never be popular” and hopes only to “appeal to a little circle of kindred minds” (74). Recalling Joyce’s claim in 1904 that only “two or three unfortunate wretches [...] may eventually read me” (Ellmann 163) offers an interesting echo.
14 The location of Chandler’s poetic “mood” (84) is also relevant, for it may be based on one of Joyce’s own experiences. A similar incident occurs at a pivotal point in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Chapter 4, Joyce presents a rare interaction between the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and his brothers and sisters during the family tea. Structurally, this scene occurs at an important juncture. Immediately preceding the epiphany of "profane joy" which Stephen experiences on the beach while watching a girl wading (Portrait 171), this episode also follows the interview with the religious director of his school, after which Stephen decides not to become a priest. As he walks home to a squalid, over-crowded house, interesting parallels to "A Little Cloud" occur. Like Chandler, he crosses a bridge, symbolically connected to opposing attractions, but clearly, like Chandler, moving toward a new possibility. Stephen notices a shrine to the Virgin which is "in the middle of a hamshaped encampment of poor cottages" (162). Unlike Chandler, however, Stephen does not romanticize the image, for he actually lives here, and he laughs to think of the man "considering in turn the four points of the sky and then regretfully plunging his spade in the earth" (162). Without even a hint of
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rain, the man must begin work. The cloud image in this scene of Portrait is intentionally delayed.
15 Stephen then enters his home and finds his brothers and sisters seated at the table: "tea was nearly over" (163). (Remember that Chandler returns too late for tea and babysits while his wife goes out to buy some. Thus, if not for the missing "tea," there would have been no father-son conflict.) Stephen, the university student, realizes the contrast between his privileged position as the eldest son and theirs: The sad quiet greyblue of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen's heart. All that had been denied them had been freely given to him, the eldest: but the quiet glow of evening showed him in their faces no sign of rancour (163, emphasis added)
16 After one of his sisters, who is as nameless as Chandler's son, tells him that the family has once again been evicted, her similarly unnamed little brother begins to sing. The others join in, and Stephen thinks, "They would sing so for hours [...] till the last pale light died down on the horizon, till the first dark nightclouds came forth and night fell" (163, emphasis added). Stephen joins the chorus, but only after listening to them for a while. He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through an endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children: and heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring note of weariness and pain. All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it (164).
17 If Joyce had ended the passage here, one would be quick to note the similarity to Little Chandler's comment about the children in the park: "He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad" (71). But Joyce does not end Stephen's musings on a negative note, just as I believe he does not end "A Little Cloud" with a protagonist who pities himself more than his screaming son. Stephen remembers that Newman had heard this note also [...] giving utterance, like the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things which has been the experience of her children in every time. (164, emphasis added).
18 Despite their circumstances, the children sing. Faced with the guilt of primacy, the oldest son is forgiven by his brothers and sisters. Again, Stephen’s vision is superior to Chandler’s. He will retain the mood of this experience, be more receptive to future encounters, and sustain an ethos which will allow him to reject home and family to pursue an artist’s life, perhaps with a family of his own making. Stephen is an artist; Chandler only longs to be one.
19 And I don’t minimize that difference. In Stephen Hero, written between 1904 and 1906, Joyce viewed the “artist [...] standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams–a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty” (77-78). Chandler certainly dreams, but his production is entirely physical. He is a parent, not an artist. At the same time, in a collection of stories which includes a series of married men who beat children (Mr. Hill in “Eveline,” Old Jack of “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and Farrington of “Counterparts”), Chandler faces the truth about himself after merely shouting at his son. His experience prepares us for Gabriel’s, just as the family tea prepares us for the strongest epiphany of Portrait.
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20 To return to the story itself, since Joyce often built major characters in Dubliners “on more than one real person--usually himself and one other” (Atherton 46), when “A Little Cloud” was composed, Joyce was twenty-four (Chandler was twenty-four when Gallaher left Ireland) and had already contemplated several careers. He had abandoned medical school twice, both in Dublin and in Paris; he had hoped to sing professionally and briefly pursued that option; and he had also tried teaching, an endeavor which would keep the family afloat for many years. Although he possessed a strong sense of his vocation as an artist, continued to write, and probably never seriously doubted his talent, Joyce realized that some mundane job was needed to pay the bills, despite the funds he could wrangle from others. Surely he, like Chandler, often felt trapped in “tiresome” tasks. And, although Joyce would work as a clerk in Rome a few months after mailing “A Little Cloud” off to the publisher and felt superior to his fellow employees who “were forever having something wrong with their testicles... or their anuses” (Ellmann 226), Chandler, unlike them, is fastidious about his manners and appearance and at least longs for an artist’s life. The first portion of “A Little Cloud” also reminds us of Joyce’s sentimental, poetic temperament while living in Paris as a medical student from December 1902 until April 1903, when he was called home because of his mother’s illness. Stanislaus reports, He told me that often when he had no money and had had nothing to eat he used to walk about reciting to himself for consolation, like ‘Little Chandler’ in Dubliners, his own poems or others he knew by heart or things he happened to be writing then (My Brother’s 231-21).
21 Another habit which the two shared involved night excursions. The timid Chandler usually hurried home after dark: Sometimes, however, he courted the causes of his fear. He chose the darkest and narrowest streets and, as he walked boldly forward, the silence that was spread about his footsteps troubled him, the wandering silent figures troubled him; and at times a sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf (72).
22 Approximately two years before writing these lines, Joyce had composed the short prose meditation, “A Portrait of the Artist,” in which he spoke of the Impulse [which] had led him forth in the dark season to silent and lonely places where the mists hung streamerwise among the trees; and as he had passed there amid the subduing night, in the secret fall of leaves, the fragrant rain, the mesh of vapours moon-transpierced, he had imagined an admonition of the frailty of all things (45).
23 Although the settings are different and Chandler chooses to “court” his fears of forbidden sexual encounters whereas the young Joyce, having already experienced them, reports a more Romantic venue, both accounts hint at an openness to life and desire as well as a resigned acceptance of the futility of “struggl[ing] against fortune” (Dubliners 71).
24 In fact, two paragraphs after the passage from “A Portrait” mentioned above, another intriguing link between the two works occurs: “The cloud of difficulties allowed only peeps of light; even his rhetoric proclaimed transition” (47). It is also significant that in 1906 Joyce chose prose over poetry, asserting, for example, that “A page of ‘A Little Cloud’ gives me more pleasure than all my verses” (Letters II 182). Dubliners also reveals a tighter style than Stephen Hero, the precursor of the novel APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Joyce stopped working on six months prior to the composition of “A Little Cloud” (Walzl, Dubliners 161). Unlike Chandler, Joyce had matured as an artist, but
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he probably regarded those early actions, sentiments, and poetic explorations with fondness, especially in light of his domestic situation in Trieste.
25 Approximately ten months after leaving Ireland with Joyce, Nora Barnacle, a beautiful and independent twenty-one-year-old woman from Galway, gave birth to a son on July 26, 1905 (Maddox 63).4 Since the two weren’t married, the child forced his father to consider the practical results of illegitimacy as well as the novel realities of life and work in a two-room apartment. In fact, although Joyce had tentatively chosen the names George and Lucy several months before the baby was born, the infant was still nameless at two months old (Letters II 95, 107). (Recall that neither Chandler nor Annie refers to the child by name.) Although Joyce was the eldest of ten children and was used to writing in the midst of noisy chaos (Ellmann 144, 224), he probably became frustrated by the brevity of his flight from responsibility. According to Nora’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, even before the baby was born, Joyce had already begun to drink heavily, and Nora was miserable (62-64). She cried so much that Joyce worriedly wrote to Stanislaus, “I do not know what strange morose creature she will bring forth after all her tears” (Letters II 95).
26 Accounts of their life during this period reveal the typical struggles of young parents, but the Irish couple surely faced extraordinary difficulties. Both had left fairly devout Catholic families; they were unmarried parents, and compared to her twenty-three- year-old husband, Nora was uneducated and probably unconvinced of James’s genius. Not five months after Giorgio’s birth, despite Joyce’s occasional delight in singing arias to him (Maddox 64), the young father hinted of serious problems in a letter to his aunt: “[T]he present relations between Nora and myself are about to suffer some alteration”; however, he didn’t “wish to rival the atrocities of the average husband” (Letters II 128).
27 In retrospect we can judge this difficult period as just that, for James and Nora stayed together until his death in 1941, and her importance in his life remains undisputed. Beyond this, however, Joyce’s concern for his son, Giorgio, and for Lucia, born two years later, permeated his life. And the infant son certainly charmed his father. Writing to Stanislaus on January 10, 1907, when Giorgio was eighteen months old, Joyce called the child “the most successful thing connected with me” (Letters II 206), and Stanislaus reports, “In spite of his struggle with poverty, [Joyce] believed in fatherhood and considered it a form of cowardice, ‘too great a fear of fate’, not to have children” (My Brother’s 152).
28 Joyce’s attitude about family life and his own vocation as artist must have been quite complex as he conceived and composed “A Little Cloud” between February and July of 1906, but such information doesn’t weigh the scales of interpretation in one direction or another. Fortunately, the second scene of the story does. Through the encounter with Gallaher, Chandler appears provincial, timid, and curious about “immoral” sexual practices, but he definitely emerges as the better human being.
3. Scene ii
29 Asserting a direct correlation between Little Tommy Chandler and the young Joyce as husband and father is unfounded. Just as extreme, though, is assuming that Joyce wanted his readers to feel no sympathy at all towards his protagonist. However
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negative one’s opinion of Chandler might be after reading the first section of the story, Joyce’s juxtaposition of the two friends in the second scene inches us toward sympathy.
30 Physically, the two are almost stereotypically opposite. Chandler, though average in height, seems small; he has a “fragile” frame and is well-groomed. He uses “perfume discreetly on his handkerchief,” has “fair silken hair and moustache,” and blushes easily (70). Gallaher, on the other hand, is boisterous and balding, has a “large” head and a “heavy, pale and clean-shaven” face; he wears an orange tie to a Dublin pub and affects Britishisms, calling Chandler “old chap” and using “blooming” as an adjective (79, 81). Ellmann reports that Gallaher is based on a combination of Fred Gallaher, an Irish journalist whom Joyce includes in his “galaxy of stocky insensitives,” and Oliver St. John Gogarty, an ex-friend and rival with whom Joyce had once lived in Martell Tower (220, 46). In early 1906, however, they were estranged and, like Chandler, Joyce resented Gogarty’s success and considered himself superior to his old friend “in birth and education” (80).
31 Further proof of the derogatory link between Gogarty and Gallaher can be found in Joyce’s prolonged refusal to renew their friendship, despite Gogarty’s overtures (Ellmann 236) and in his reaction to Gogarty’s marriage to a woman of means. Having received an Irish newspaper by post in Trieste, Nora met Joyce at lunch to announce Gogarty’s changed status. We might well imagine his reaction to Nora’s news: Gogarty had married; Joyce, already a father, had not. Whether Joyce regarded her action as a protest we cannot know; however, he did write acerbically to Stanislaus a few weeks after mailing “A Little Cloud” to his publisher, “[T]o be charitable, I suppose we had better wish Mr and Mrs Ignatius Gallaher health and long life” (Letters II 148). We can safely assume, then, that, whatever Chandler’s weaknesses, Joyce had an even lower opinion of Gallaher.
32 Florence Walzl’s important essay, “Dubliners: Women in Irish Society,” also reveals significant information about Irish demographics at this time and supports a more positive view of the Chandler household. The Irish middle class was experiencing tremendous economic hardships and either postponed marriage or abandoned it altogether: the translation for a Catholic country meant a diminished population (33-34), a fact which Joyce surely noticed. A closer look at Chandler’s “sit” (75) reveals that he is, indeed, more successful, economically and biologically speaking, than many of his generation. Not only does he have a job, but he can also provide for a wife and child, a situation which Walzl reports was also rare since the typical Irishman delayed marriage until the age of thirty-five or forty-five (Dubliners 34). Unlike O’Hara, for example, a character in the story who fails because of “boose” and “other things” (76), Chandler is abstemious, employed, married, and a parent.
33 In the second scene, conversation dominates the prose, allowing us to experience, along with Chandler, his friend’s inflated ego and patronizing attitude toward “dear dirty Dublin” and Tommy Chandler, despite Gallaher’s claims of being “a sincere friend” (75, 79). Unlike the first scene, we are not as often informed of Chandler’s thoughts. Joyce relies, instead, on our imagination and ability to identify with the inhibited, limited law clerk. The final sentence of this encounter, for example, consists of Gallaher’s derogatory remark about Chandler’s being married and having sex with the same woman year after year: “Must get a bit stale, I should think, he said” (82). Although Joyce does not provide Chandler’s reaction, he is careful in structuring this conversation, offering an early example of the belief that “For [artists] a portrait is not
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an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion” (“A Portrait” 41). We can safely assume that Chandler felt insulted.
34 The meeting at Corless’s, despite Tommy’s dream of launching into a writing career with Gallaher’s help, offers a series of moments in which Chandler assumes a muted, almost subservient role while he reassesses Ignatius Gallaher and finally asserts the inevitability (and perhaps primacy) of married life. The “stale” insult serves as a powerful ending to an exchange which illustrates the validity of Joyce’s claim to have written the Dubliners stories in “a style of scrupulous meanness” (Letters II 134). Prior to this final blow, however, Chandler had asserted himself by saying that Gallaher, too, would marry someday “if [he could] find the girl” (81), perhaps hinting that convincing a woman to do so might be a problem. His balding friend’s responses reflect the sting of this comment as he eventually resorts to hyperbole, claiming that there were “hundreds [...] thousands of rich Germans and Jews, rotten with money, that’d only be too glad” to marry him “to-morrow” if he asked them to (81). Incapable of the kind of wit which might successfully redeem his position, Chandler is ultimately defeated; however, our sympathies lie not with the victor but with the young clerk and father. Gallaher may have had the ability to “fly by [the] nets [...] of nationality, language, religion,” an aim to which the protagonist of Joyce’s next major work aspires (A Portrait 203), but he is little more than a bragging, rude scribbler in the worst Swiftian sense.
35 The first two scenes of the story, then, reveal that Chandler, however remote from being either a poet or the “old hero” which Gallaher initially calls him (74), remains physically and morally the more appealing character. Still, Chandler himself probably feels anything but heroic, and during the gap between scenes, we imagine him returning, deflated, to his family. Bernard Benstock writes, “Like the dog viewing his reflection in the pond, Chandler drops his bone in envy of Gallaher’s, preferring the exotic narrative not of his own experience” ("Narrative" 558). His mood at the beginning of the final scene in the story is reflective, self-pitying, and, ultimately, enraged. However, the intensity of his son’s suffering and the coldness of his wife’s accusation eventually result in unselfish shame and genuine contrition.
4. Scene iii
36 The end of this story, though straight-forward in terms of action and narration--we know precisely what Chandler does and thinks, for example, until the final paragraph-- also reveals a key thematic concern in Joyce’s later work, the relationship between sexual and artistic generation. The precise nature of the final epiphany hinges on this theme, and the denouement is rich with dramatic pauses and religious allusions which link Chandler’s “remorse” with Stephen’s “agenbite of inwit” in Ulysses (14).5
37 When Chandler reaches home at 8:45 p.m., his wife, Annie, is “[o]f course [...] in a bad humour” (82). She’s been caring for the infant all day and now must buy the makings for tea. Chandler looks at her photograph and concludes that Annie is, by nature cold and too “lady-like” (83). The reader suspects that Chandler would never have married a bold woman, but once again Chandler envies Gallaher’s life among “rich Jewesses [...] full [...] of passion, of voluptuous longing” and resents his present condition. True to his nature, Tommy concentrates on his own inadequacies rather than Gallaher’s. (The differences are not wasted on the reader, however, as we wonder which two of the “thousands” of rich Jewesses would actually compete for Gallaher’s bed.)
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38 Carefully holding the baby, Chandler thinks again of writing poetry and begins to read one of Byron's early pieces which reminds Tommy of “his sensation of a few hours before on Grattan Bridge” (84). In a few moments, a triple dissatisfacton–with his mate, his life in Dublin, and his career–creates a rising flood of self-pity which results in a selfish and ineffectual response to his son’s crying. Yet, unlike Father Boyle, who calls Chandler’s yelling at the infant “an irrational and even brutal [...] attack” which “no normal man” would consider (84), others might regard Little Tommy’s response as understandable. Unlike Annie, who has obviously had far more practice calming the baby, Chandler is inept. When it continues to fuss, Tommy “began to rock it to and fro [...] faster,” adding sound to rapid movement by yelling in its face, not an uncommon practice for inexperienced babysitters. Chandler is also uncharacteristically drunk and probably wondering why a man of superior “birth and education” (80) should have so little control over an infant.
39 Joyce then invites the reader to imagine Annie on her way home, hearing her son's screams, rushing in, “glaring into [Tommy's] face” and charging, “What have you done to him?” (85). The narration focuses on Tommy’s reaction, revealing that “his heart closed together as he met the hatred” in Annie’s eyes, those eyes which he had so recently judged as too composed and lady-like (83). Indeed, Joyce’s use of metonymy, writing “Why had he married the eyes in the photograph?” (83) is a psychological masterpiece, distancing both character and readers from this "young woman... panting" (84). But we would be nearly as naive as Chandler if we assumed that Joyce had no sympathy for Annie.6 Once again, biography becomes relevant.
40 The narrator doesn’t divulge the child’s exact age but does offer a few clues. Little Tommy has told Gallaher that he “was married last May twelve months” (79). Since it is now “late autumn” (71), the story takes place in October or November; Chandler has been married, then, for approximately eighteen months. Unless Annie was pregnant before the marriage, the infant would now be no more than nine months old and could be even younger. Recall that Giorgio Joyce was approximately six months old when “A Little Cloud” was begun in early 1906 and that Nora took in other people’s laundry to help support the family only three weeks after giving birth to him (Maddox 65). Even while teaching during the day and trying to write in stolen moments in the small apartment in Trieste, Joyce surely realized the hardships which Nora faced, regardless of his own.
41 Joyce’s memories of his own mother, Mary (May) Joyce, were also fresh. Notified on Good Friday, 1903, that she was dying, Joyce left his medical studies in Paris. En route to Dublin, he must have considered the rigors of her life–mortally ill at forty-four, pregnant thirteen times, and married to John Joyce, a handsome man of wit and charm, but an alcoholic spendthrift who continually failed his family in all but the procreative sense. In a letter to Nora in late August, 1904, Joyce wrote, My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill treatment, by years of trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin–a face grey and wasted with cancer–I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which made her a victim (Letters II 48).7
42 Once again, however, this information could support both positive and negative interpretations of Chandler’s reaction at the end of the story. We can’t assume that Joyce’s experience with either his mother or his wife informs Chandler’s psyche. After all, Chandler, perhaps unfairly, judges Annie’s eyes as “cold,” and Annie does calm the
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child–as Joyce himself calmed his nine-year-old sister after his own mother’s death (Stanislaus Joyce My Brother’s 236-37). Any sympathies which the author may have felt for Annie could support the claim that Chandler suffers by comparison. At this point in the drama, Chandler surely realizes that Annie could succeed where he had failed. Ultimately, however, Joyce’s focus is not on the mother but on the father’s link to his own child. Joyce provides an important dramatic shift by revealing Chandler’s final thought before Annie’s arrival: “If it died!” (84).
43 Most of us realize that infants can cry for hours without any discernable damage; most of us have also experienced the irrational fear that an infant will, indeed, fail to inhale at the last moment. The three words “If it died!” depict genuine emotion. We would have to ignore Joyce’s repeated references to Chandler’s bone-deep, insurmountable timidity, to his frequent blushes and delicate temperament, in order to believe that he was not genuinely upset by his son’s “paroxysm of sobbing” (85). Chandler is a hard- working, fastidious individual whose dreams complement, not dominate, his daily world. Byron’s poem about the death of a young girl may have evoked a mood, but the infant’s condition sparked a much deeper emotion. And when Chandler “caught the child to his breast in fright” (84), he was finally reacting as a parent should. Surely Joyce structured these thoughts and gestures to indicate a growing awareness on Chandler’s part.
44 Rather than end the story at this point, however, Joyce brings Annie back, for human families are, after all, a trinity (or they were in the biotechnology-free world of 1906). Before examining the rich (if abbreviated) interaction between the parents, however, I’d like to turn once again to biographical evidence: Joyce was fully aware of the pain which a child’s death could cause.
45 He knew that his mother had given birth to three male infants who died and that one of her greatest sorrows was the death of fourteen-year-old Georgie in 1902, her favorite, after continued religious clashes with James. Stanislaus Joyce describes George as handsome, intelligent, and musical: “After Jim he was the most promising member of the family” (My Brother’s 131, 133). Contracting typhoid and then peritonitis, Georgie lingered in Joyce's mind, prompting several written epiphanies (Epiphanies 4, 17; Stephen Hero 167, 169; Ellmann 94; Stanislaus Joyce My Brother’s 136, 235). At the time of Georgie’s death, James was “toying with the idea of a medical career” and had unsuccessfully tried to revive his dead brother (Ellmann 78, 94). Never a good student in chemistry or biology, Joyce may have regretted his inadequacies when his brother’s life was in danger. Later choosing the name Giorgio for his own son, a more suitable form in a European milieu than “George” (although Nora always called him “Georgie” [Maddox 64]), Joyce, a writer obsessed with onomastics, honored his younger brother. Even before becoming a father, Joyce had known the pain of watching a child die.8
46 In depicting Chandler and Annie’s encounter, Joyce handles the difficult task of representing overlapping, almost simultaneous conversation in a linear format by employing ellipses.9 Beginning with Chandler, Joyce once again encourages us to imagine what he thinks during the pauses. When Annie enters, Chandler says, "It's nothing... He began to cry... I couldn't... I didn't do anything... What?" (85). The reader is then given a sample of Annie’s babytalk, which, interestingly, doesn't include the child's name, but is rather a litany composed of cooing phrases–“My little mannie! Was ‘ou frightened, love?...There now, love! There now!”–and the more intriguing “Lambabaun! Mamma’s little lamb of the world!” (85). Since these words immediately
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precede the final paragraph wherein Chandler backs out of the light and since his asking, "What?" implies that Annie's comments were interspersed with his own, we should imagine their effect on him as well as references which may resonate in "kindred minds."
47 Aware of the Celtic literary movement, Chandler may have realized that the Gaelic words lampa beag meant both "a little lamp" and "a little cloud" or that "leanbhan, which is often pronounced 'lannabawn,' [meant] something like 'babykins'” (Jackson and McGinley 72, 74), but I suspect that Joyce was more likely than Chandler to have been intrigued by these connections. The not-so-young father had more immediate concerns, but the words "little lamb of the world" probably did catch his attention and may explain why he asked, "What?" The phrase conjures the English translation of the "Agnus Dei" portion of the Catholic Mass which refers to Christ: "Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us [...] grant us peace." Although Joyce offers no direct proof, Chandler was probably Catholic; in any event, we know that Joyce was raised in that faith and once seriously considered becoming a priest. Why, then, does Annie (perhaps named for St. Ann, the mother of the Virgin Mary) call this nameless, nebulous, yet noisy child "little lamb of the world"?
48 To answer this question, we can turn to Joyce's already firm conviction in 1906 that the artist's role was superior to the priest's. Although the strongest evidence for this develoment occurs in later works, Joyce had already rejected the priesthood and aspired to a literary career, claiming a morally and spiritually ascendant position as early as 1904 in "A Portrait of the Artist": To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come [...]; and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action" (48).
49 Calling the child "lamb of the world" instead of "lamb of God" reminds us of an artist's vocation, and the ending of "A Little Cloud" encourages a reexamination of some of the basic facts of the story.10
50 We know that Chandler's son is approximately the same age as Giorgio was when Joyce wrote this story, but fundamental differences between Tommy and Joyce discourage direct parallels. Still, Joyce's disparagement of Gogarty is evident in his portrait of Gallaher, and Chandler's age, thirty-two, also invites scrutiny. Jackson and McGinley report that this places him in Yeats' and Synge's generation, evoking Joyce's artistic rejection of the Celtic movement (64). Walzl offers another helpful theory which suggests that, in describing protagonists to match the "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life" paradigm of the stories, Joyce adopts "the Roman divisions of the life span" in which "young manhood (juventus) [extends] from thirty-one to forty- five" ("Life" 410). While these critics offer helpful information, Joyce's precise choice of thirty-two justifies further speculation.
51 Joyce was twenty-four when he wrote the piece, Chandler's age when Gallaher left Ireland, and he may have envisioned a Dublin alter ego years later. More significant, however, is the age of Joyce's father, John, when the artist was born. According to Ellmann, John Joyce was born on 4 July 1849--recall that Nora also gave birth to Giorgio in July. Joyce’s birthdate was 2 February 1882, making John thirty-two at the time. Although Chandler’s age may be coincidental, the religious overtones encourage another interpretation which explains both Annie’s strange cooing and Chandler’s
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epiphany: Little Chandler represents both John and James Joyce while the infant symbolizes James, Giorgio, and the creative product. Struggling in a small apartment in Trieste with a screaming infant in the background, Joyce recalls his homeland and first family. And in both locales the significant element involves a father’s recognition of the primacy of his son.
52 Culleton succinctly reminds us that "allusion was a serious business" in Joyce's creative paradigm (11). Despite the irony of a "candle-maker" or "candle-seller" as a failed artist, Little Tommy Chandler's tears suggest that he has turned from the worship of a false god (Gallaher and, perhaps, Romanticism) to the true religion of hearth and home through the unconscious intervention of his son as savior. The final clause of the story, "tears of remorse started to his eyes" (85), is precise. Joyce does not write "tears of self- pity"; nor does he promote ambiguity by merely saying "tears started to his eyes" When Chandler “back[s] out of the lamplight” (85), he passes the torch to the next generation, genuinely contrite.
53 Nonetheless, I do not envision a changed life for Chandler; unlike Gallaher, Stephen Dedalus, and Joyce himself, Chandler will remain in Dublin, return to his daily tasks, and pay off the furniture. Yet, like Stanislaus and John, he may also foster the growth of an artist. He is, indeed, "a prisoner for life" (84), but the prison walls offer the hope of graffiti, for the child represents creativity as well as responsibility, and the story offers an early treatment of a central Joycean theme.
NOTES
1. See Beja’s “Farrington the Scrivener.” His lucid comparison of Melville and Joyce doesn’t mention Chandler whose job description, unlike Farrington’s in Dubliners’ “Counterparts,” remains nebulous. 2. See Reynolds’s “Introduction” to the 1993 publication James Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays. Her overview of important critical approaches also emphasizes shifting opinions, sometimes within the minds of individual scholars (4-15). Another excellent piece, Sosnowski’s “Reading Acts and Reading Warrants,” examines interpretations of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man in light of his belief that “hypotheses generate evidence” (43), a claim which I believe also holds true for Dubliners. Finally, Attridge’s essay in the Fritz Senn Fetschrift (1998) provides a carefully reasoned plea for “originality, rigour, responsibility, and precision” in Joyce studies (28) while recognizing the validity of many schools of criticism. 3. Critics who soften the emphasis on paralysis and hopelessness include Beck, Beja (“One”), Daiches, Hedberg, Jones, Leonard, O’Grady, and Williams. 4. Ellmann reports the date as July 27 (204). 5. Although debate about the nature and importance of the Joycean epiphany is ongoing, for general definitions see Silverman, and Scholes and Kain (3-9). Bowen's "Joyce and the Epiphany Concept" offers a helpful overview of the scholarship as well as a concentration on Dubliners. For specific discussions of the epiphany at the end of "A Little Cloud," see Daiches (87), French (458), Garrison (236), Jedynak (48-49), and O'Grady (400). 6. Leonard (166-67) and Henke (13-14) have also concentrated on Annie's situation.
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7. A more intense accusation, that Joyce killed her by “telling her what he thought,” originated from Gogarty (Ellmann 173), further evidence of Joyce's negative opinion of Gallaher. 8. Although the following information may not be relevant to Joyce’s attitude when he composed “A Little Cloud,” when Nora miscarried her third child at three months’ gestation, Joyce carefully examined the embryo and mourned its “truncated existence” (Ellmann 268-69). 9. Lea Baechler reports an interesting trans-generic experiment in which a theatrical adaptation of five of the stories from Dubliners, including “A Little Cloud,” was produced in New York’s House for Contemporary Theatre in 1987 by DearKnows Productions. Slicing the narrative into portions and assigning lines to characters who seemed appropriate–the infant, for example–but who were not always designated as speakers by Joyce, the company focused on Chandler’s inability “to overcome his paralysis” and interpreted the ending as a “near epiphany” which resulted in an “ambiguous endin[g]” (369, 373). Although I disagree with DearKnows’ interpretation, the staging demonstrated the rich, dramatic texture of Joyce’s literary technique in Dubliners. 10. I agree with Bernard Benstock's general premise in "Joyce's Rheumatics." His focus on references to air, breath, and wind in Dubliners suggests that "the aura of the Holy Ghost [is] more notable in its absence than in its presence and [is] consequently a fitting augmentation of the paralytic and simonic themes" (2). However, I do not agree with his placing this story in the same rubric. After all, the infant does catch its breath and recover as his father recedes into the darkness.
AUTHORS
MARY LAZAR Dr. Mary Lazar, Assistant Professor of English at Kent State University’s Tuscarawas Campus, Ohio, USA, has published work on Kurt Vonnegut. Her specialties include Holocaust Literature, Composition Studies, Modern British Literature, and Modern American Literature, especially the work of Jerzy Kosinski.
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The fragment, the spiral and the network: the progress of interpretation in Louise Erdrich’s “American horse”
Isabelle Thibaudeau-Pacouïl
1 Louise Erdrich’s short story, “American Horse”, draws upon a familiar topos in the body of her literary creations and in the canon of Native American literature in general, that of the conflict opposing Native American culture to Western authorities. Here, the conflict materializes through the abduction of a child — Buddy — from his Indian mother, Albertine, by the governmental authorities who deem her unable to bring him up. The story may very well appear as a mere version of a now hackneyed theme but for its original way of tackling it. Erdrich’s approach relies on the introduction of a variety of perspectives which are going to play a key role in the reader’s construction of meaning.
2 The whole narrative seems indeed to be articulated around the protagonists’ different modes of seeing, a number of which are used by the narrator to structure the readers’ own interpretation of the contents of the story. In other words, some of these visions function as images which are going to enable the readers to see/read the short story in a different light, the light of another world view or of a certain type of knowledge.1 This article will show that it is truly in the reader's interpretation of the story that progress is to be found as what is at stake in his reading is his acquiring a new mode of perceiving reality.
3 In “American Horse”, the narrator’s strategy first aims at confronting the reader with a plurality of perspectives and then at leading him to establish a hierarchy between them all. But why does L. Erdrich want her readers to privilege some characters’ perceptions to the detriment of others? The answer can be found in the study of these visions — or of their “mental images” i.e. dreams, memories, fantasies and ideas as Mitchell calls them2 — which, right from the incipit, define a reading contract inviting the reader to replace the story in the spiral of time and read it as an ongoing story, as the visible
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fragment of an underlying larger narrative. Finally (and this will be my last point) such an interpretative construction on the reader’s part is carried one step further with the presence of another essential “epistemological figure”3 — that of the network — which underlies the whole narrative and provides the readers with a new method of reading Louise Erdrich’s “American Horse”.
4 As was mentioned in the introduction, “American Horse” hinges on a conflict opposing two groups of characters: the Western group with Vicki Koob, Officer Brackett and Officer Harmony (who is not white but who all the same works for the white government) and the Native American group with Uncle Lawrence, Albertine and Buddy American Horse. The Western group’s actions are driven by a set of values which can easily be outlined through the way they judge Albertine and her environment. That judgement is conveyed through the vision they have of the context in which Buddy lives. Vicki’s taking stock of what is to be found in Buddy’s homerelies on the careful writing of a list of elements among which she sees no link, no connection (the paratactic mode is here quite evocative). They could see the house was empty at first glance. It was only one rectangular room with whitewashed walls and a little gas stove in the middle. They had already come through the cooking lean-to with the other stove and washstand and rusty old refrigerator. That refrigerator had nothing in it but some wrinkled potatoes and a package of turkey necks. Vicki Koob noted that in her perfect-bound notebook. The beds along the walls of the big room were covered with quilts that Albertine’s mother, Sophie, had made from bits of old wool coats and pants that the Sisters sold in bundles at the mission. There was no one hiding beneath the beds. No one was under the little aluminium dinette table covered with a green oilcloth, or the soft brown wood chairs tucked up to it. One wall of the big room was filled with neatly stacked crates of things — old tools and springs and small half-dismantled appliances. Five or six television sets were stacked against the wall. Their control panels spewed colored wires and at least one was cracked all the way across. Only the topmost set, with coathanger antenna angled sensitively to catch the bounding signals around Little Shell, looked like it could possibly work. Not one thing escaped Vicki Koob’s trained and cataloguing gaze. She made note of the cupboard that held only commodity flour and coffee. The unsanitary tin oil drum beneath the kitchen window, full of empty surplus pork cans and beer bottles, caught her eye as did Uncle Lawrence’s physical and mental deterioration. She quickly described these « benchmarks of alcoholic dependency within the extended family of Woodrow (Buddy) American Horse » as she walked around the room (…). (47, 48)
5 Vicki’s “trained and cataloguing gaze” does not give a flattering image of the inhabitants of the house since it hints at fragmentation and dissociation through the evocation of physical and mental degradation, utter poverty and neglect. Yet, despite the narrator’s choice to present Vicki’s and Brackett’s perspective in great detail and through internal focalization, the readers do not condone their intentions. On the contrary, through the narrator’s use of a number of strategies, they are led to reject their way of looking at things and to wish for Albertine’s victory. These strategies lead the readers to grant more credit to Albertine’s and Buddy’s perspectives and Vincent Jouve’s theory in L’Effet-personnage dans le roman can be very useful here to understand how this process functions.4
6 Vicki’s mode of seeing and the normative system she and the other officials stand for are rejected because we are programmed to do so by our reading. According to Jouve, three codes play an important part in the elaboration of a “système de sympathie”: the
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narrative code, the affective code and the cultural code5 and the three of them can be identified in “American Horse”. The fact that in the opening paragraph, the narrator clearly puts the reader on an equal footing with himself favors what Jouve calls “narratorial identification.”6 Hence the narrator’s choices are significant since they are going to color our approach to the characters and to the narrative in general. For example, in the first two sections of the story the readers are presented with a touching image of filial and maternal love which will effectively prevent them from granting credit to Vicki’s belief that mother and son should be separated. This narrative strategy is made even more effective through the shifts in focalization orchestrated in these two parts. As Jouve explains: “L’identification primaire au narrateur sert à orienter les identifications secondaires aux personnages.”7Through internal focalization the readers can introject themselves into the characters and experience their fear and their anguish. Such strategies (the list of which is not exhaustive) end up creating a distance or tension between the two groups of characters but also between the narrator, the reader and the Caucasian group. This tension is clearly at play in the ironical look the narrator has of that group which he repeatedly ridicules. Irony, because it relies on the notion of “distance”8, brings Lawrence, Albertine, Buddy, the narrator and the reader together. The Caucasians’ system and norms are quickly discarded and so is their fragmented interpretation of the reality of Little Shell.
7 The affective code (which consists in making some characters more likeable than others) also helps the reader privilege Albertine’s and Buddy’s perceptions. We learn a lot about them and this produces an “effect of life”9, and the more we know about a character, the more we feel concerned about what happens to him.10 Buddy and Albertine (unlike the others) are granted psychological depth through the presence of four significant themes: love, childhood, dreams and suffering. The first two sections of the story dwell for example on mother’s and son’s reciprocal feelings of love and on their desires. They are both concerned by the oedipal arrest and the reference to that universal crisis cannot but attract the reader who experienced the same desires and dilemmas once in his past. Childhood is also present through memories which provide the readers with the characters’ background or genesis (and as Jouve indicates, once a character is explained he is already forgiven.11). Thanks to dreams, the reader is also able to get an insight into Buddy’s most intimate self since they give us access to the boy’s personal history and thus enable us to feel closer to him. Finally, the theme of suffering plays a key part. Uncle Lawrence, Albertine and Buddy are clearly presented as the victims, the game in what Albertine sees as a manhunt (“they’re outside, they’re gonna hunt” p. 43); the reader cannot but sympathize with this mother who struggles till the end to keep her child, with that old man who does what he can to trick the aggressors and with that little boy who is taken away from the mother he loves.
8 Finally, the reader’s tendency to privilege Albertine’s and Buddy’s perspectives also relies on the fact that neither of them comes into conflict with the reader’s own axiology or cultural code. Erdrich does not offer a Manichean picture of the characters in “American Horse”; there is no polarisation between Indians and Caucasians since, as was shown previously, Little Shell is far from being a paradise for a child to grow up in and its inhabitants are not irreproachable. But if the Indian group is not idealized, still their perspective functions as a new benchmark of difference for the reader and enables us to question the rightfulness of the Caucasians’ actions.
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9 The narrator’s work clearly consists in presenting a variety of perspectives and in making the readers privilege Albertine’s and Buddy’s visions to the detriment of the other characters’ fragmented outlook. But the reader is also progressively led to understand that the subjects are not as important in the narrative as what they see. He is invited to look at these visions for the message they convey and for the role they play in shaping his construction of meaning. The first step in the progress of our interpretation will depend on our seeing the story not as a mere anecdote, but as a narrative belonging to a larger cycle of stories with no end nor beginning within the textual scope of the short story itself.
10 What is first to be noticed is that Buddy’s and Albertine’s visions are not limited to a mere re-presentation of real objects.Buddy’s dreams have no objects as such in the real world, while Albertine’s visions seem to transcend their objects (for example, the butterfly-shaped buckle triggers images which are based on no existing or tangible reality). Whether they are dreams or memories, Albertine’s and Buddy’s visions open the doors onto the characters’ history and enable the reader to go deep into the spiral of time as the incipit to the short story invites the reader to do. The woman sleeping on the cot in the woodshed was Albertine American Horse. The name was left over from her mother's short marriage. The boy was the son of the man she had loved and let go. Buddy was on the cot too, sitting on the edge because he'd been awake three hours watching out for his mother and besides, she took up the whole cot. Her feet hung over the edge, limp and brown as two trout. Her long arms reached out and slapped at things she saw in her dreams. (42)
11 The incipit is a strategic locus as it provides the readers with guidelines that will help them to interpret the story appropriately. It sets up a reading contract in which Buddy’s dreams and visions play an instrumental part. His two types of dreams have the same outcome even if not exactly the same characteristics. His nocturnal nightmare features his being hunted down by policemen who eventually catch him. Buddy had been knocked awake out of hiding in a washing machine while herds of policemen with dogs searched through a large building with many tiny rooms. When the arm came down, Buddy screamed because it had a blue cuff and sharp silver buttons. (42)
12 His daydreaming is made of two visions which occur separately in time. The first vision appears to be a materialization of his feeling of impending danger in the shape of a dreadful metallic flying monster coming in their direction:
13 There was something coming and he knew it. It was coming from very far off but he had a picture of it in his mind. It was a large thing made of metal with many barbed hooks, points, and drag chains on it, something like a giant potato peeler that rolled out of the sky, scraping clouds down with it and jabbing or crushing everything that lay in its path on the ground. (42)
14 The second one consists in Albertine’s and Buddy’s meeting with the monster and in Buddy’s abduction by the dreadful “thing”: He closed his eyes and got the feeling that the cot was lifting up beneath him, that it was arching its canvas back and then traveling, traveling very fast and in the wrong direction for when he looked up he saw the three of them were advancing to meet the great metal thing with hooks and barbs and all sorts of sharp equipment to catch their bodies and draw their blood. He heard its insides as it rushed toward them, purring softly like a powerful motor and then they were right in its shadow.
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He pulled the reins as hard as he could and the beast reared, lifting him. His mother clapped her hand across his mouth. (43)
15 Both dreams offer two different versions of basically the same story. Such visions might have had no effect on the reader and his reading but for their striking coinciding with what actually happens at the level of the diegesis. A subtle shift in focalization makes Buddy’s vision perfectly fit into the chronological development of the plot as, at the very moment the monster of his first nightmarish vision catches him, he is suddenly woken up by his mother and told that the villains are indeed there to get them: He pulled the reins as hard as he could and the beast reared, lifting him. His mother clapped her hand across his mouth. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Lay low. They’re outside and they’re gonna hunt’ She touched his shoulder and Buddy leaned over with her to look through a crack in the boards. (43)
16 The interlocking of the oneiric sphere with the real sphere contributes to the shaping of the reader’s horizon of expectation and to the significance of the principle of connection. First, the officials’ arrival appears as the logical continuation of what seems to form one single narrative: the reader is therefore invited to grant as much importance to Buddy’s visions as to the real events in the plot because he has had a confirmation of their validity and prophetic value (doesn’t the dream come true?). Second, the readers identify the officials with the policemen of the first dream and the flying monster of the second and can anticipate what is to come: they expect the nightmare to come true and Buddy to be abducted. Our reading is thus programmed by such a foreboding and we will look for signs that confirm or infirm it. Finally, Buddy’s visions are essential in so far as they establish a link between his experience and stories of a similar kind that occurred in the mythical past. Indeed already in the incipit, the reader who has some knowledge about Indian folklore can see the monster as being the embodiment of one of the most cruel mythical figures, Raven, well known for its abductions of women and children.12 Therefore the equation between the officials, the policemen and the mythical monster tends to invite the reader to see Buddy’s story as an updated version of an ancient tale which, because of its reenactment in the present, seems to have no ending and to keep recurring again and again.
17 The reading of the whole story confirms the contents of the horizon of expectation. The mythical reference even becomes striking in the closing section which narrates Buddy’s departure from Little Shell with Vicki and Brackett at his sides. He ate the chocolate, every bit of it, tasting his mother’s blood. And when he had the chocolate down inside him and all licked off his hands, he opened his mouth to say thank you to the woman, as his mother had taught him. But instead of a thank you coming out he was astonished to hear a great rattling scream, and then another, rip out of him like pieces of his own body and whirl onto the sharp things all around him. (52)
18 His eating Vicki’s bar of chocolate reminds us of Raven’s enthralling strategies based on his victims’ eating excrements. His “great rattling scream” indicates that the enthralling process has succeeded and that Buddy has become one of them, i.e. a little raven or in more modern terms, a little white boy. This time the dream actually fuses with the reality of the diegesis to become the diegesis itself. Such a fusion indicates that Buddy’s story is not merely a variation on the theme of the mythical story of Raven but the continuation of that same story. So Buddy’s visions in the narrative are aimed at placing his experience in mythical and historical time. His story is history in so far as it belongs to the cycle or spiral of time. The image of the spiral implies that Buddy’s story
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was written a long time ago and that the short story is actually one version in a cycle which keeps going endlessly. The never-ending process is featured at the end and at the beginning of the story through the pervading reference to traveling (42-3, 51). The fact that the plot has progressed in between these two sections prevents us from seeing the story as a perfect circle but clearly as a spiral form whose end is not yet known because not yet written, whose end remains open as it is not part of the textual space and time of the story.
19 But how is the reader led to understand that Buddy’s story goes on? Through Albertine’s first vision which is based on the same basic pattern of the spiral. Though a memory, Albertine’s first vision is akin to a dream. As Albertine is getting ready to face Harmony, she is suddenly overcome by the memory of an anecdote that took place in her childhood. She remembers her father with “wings of sweat, dark blue, (that) spread across the back of his work shirt” rubbing the wings of a dead butterfly on her shoulders; she remembers him throwing her high into the air and “never landing.” (49-50)
20 This first vision corresponds to her mental return into her past and to her meeting with her father embodied in the stone butterfly (“wings of sweat”, “dark blue”). This memory annihilates the temporal frontiers existing between past and present making Albertine’s father present to her and in her. The interlocking of Albertine’s vision with her subsequent actions gives indeed the readers the impression that the dead father is still living in his daughter and communicating with her. Albertine’s use of the buckle as a weapon and her subsequent desperate and suicidal jump are like manifestations of the past, of the return of the dead father in the present even more so as she eventually becomes —through her acts — a butterfly: Albertine straightened, threw her shoulders back. Her father’s hand was on her chest and shoulders lightening her wonderfully. Then on wings of her father’s hands, on dead butterfly wings, Albertine lifted into the air and flew toward the others. The light powerful feeling swept her up the way she had floated higher, seeing the grass below. It was her father throwing her up into the air and out of danger. (51)
21 The notions of continuity and connection are also clearly put forth through Erdrich’s emphasis on the theme of filiation as the reader’s attention is constantly called to the characters’ family links especially through the stress put on the name American Horse. For example, Buddy’s filiation with his father is denied while his belonging to the American Horse is stressed (hence the title: the story is not that of Buddy alone but that of the whole dynasty and of its history going far back to the dawn of time). This theme thus enhances the spiral or cyclical representation of time in the story. It hints at the numerous patterns of regression to be found in the narrative but also refers to the notion of progression and continuity. In other words, it transcends the present to link it with both past and future time as Albertine’s final jump exemplifies since this act is aimed at featuring her meeting with her father (“it was her father throwing her up into the air and out of danger” 51). But her trip does not stop there on the grass on which she is lying. The last image Buddy has of her invites us to see Albertine as traveling towards the center of the earth: She was stretched flat on the ground, on her stomach, and her arms were curled around her head as if in sleep. One leg was drawn up and it looked for all the world like she was running full tilt into the ground, as though she had been trying to pass into the earth, to bury herself, but at the last moment something had stopped her. (52)
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22 This final representation is evocative of the involutional spiral which was mentioned previously. Albertine’s trip drives us to the center of the earth which is to be equated to the embryonic stage, to the origins of time. Whether she is dead or not does not really matter. What actually matters is the impression the reader is given that Albertine’s spirit is alive forever. Mother and son are going in two opposite directions but which belong to the same spiral. The link between them is thus not severed as a first reading of the story might have implied. Erdrich’s use of the figure of the spiral clearly places her story in an aesthetics where closure is absent, where the reader’s “sense of an ending13” is meant to be transcended or replaced by his acceptance of an absence of ending.
23 The omnipresence of eschatological schemes (especially the cyclical pattern), the temporal links established between Albertine and her father, and the recurring back‑and‑forth movements in time featured in the story invite the reader to go beyond the textual frame of the narrative, to follow the spiral of time and to anticipate a future meeting between Buddy and his mother. The figure of the spiral thus points out the significance of filiation and of the individual's historical background. The individual is not isolated but belongs to a continuum which determines who he is and what is to become of him. The spiral as a link between the protagonists is to be seen as one manifestation of the larger, all‑encompassing “epistemological figure”14 of the network, which clearly stands as the backbone of Erdrich’s aesthetics as well as a guiding principle in the narrative since it also gives it its metatextual dimension.
24 The figure of the network is most explicitly present in Albertine's perception of Harmony when she faces him, just before her ultimate, desperate act. Her perception is focused on and leads to a rather unusual portrait of the man, which stresses what cannot actually be seen: Albertine saw the pattern of tiny arteries that age, drink, and hard living had blown to the surface of the man's face. She saw the spoked wheels of his iris and the arteries like tangled threads that sewed him up. She saw the living net of springs and tissue that held him together, and trapped him. She saw the random, intimate plan of his person. (50)
25 What truly matters in this short description is not so much what it tells us about Harmony as the principles that underlie it15. The description results from a particular way of seeing, which also stands as a guideline for the interpretation of Erdrich's short story.
26 This description first underlines the tension existing between surface and depth, appearances and reality. The tiny arteries that have surfaced on Harmony's face are the visible marks of the more complex inner reality of the man; they are the superficial marks of his history. It also puts forth the notion of entangled unity. Harmony is perceived as a labyrinthine structure (especially through the metaphor of “the living net of springs and tissue”) and as a mechanism, with the image of the “spoked wheel”. The connected arteries make up a sophisticated network (such words as “pattern”, “net” and “plan” echo its semantic field), which in turn gives Harmony his identity, his substance (“sewed him up”, “held him together”).
27 Finally, the representation of Harmony through the metaphor of the network is further developed in the short passage that follows: She saw the black veins in the wings of the butterfly, roads burnt into a map, and then she was located somewhere in the net of veins and sinew that was the tragic
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complexity of the world so she did not see Officer Brackett and Vicki Koob rushing toward her, but felt them instead like flies caught in the same web, rocking it.
28 What this series of associations implies is that the world is to be perceived as a macrocosmic network in which a multitude of smaller—or microcosmic— structures (going from the wing of a butterfly to the human being himself) interlock. But this highly poetic and cryptic passage also functions as a network—a textual one—as it weaves together all the metaphorical associations that have been previously mentioned. It draws on the butterfly imagery and, through it, develops the theme of filiation and connection in general. Besides through the evocation of the « roads », the « map », and «the net of veins and sinew », the passage takes up the image of the network, which is associated, in the final part of the quotation, to that of the web— whose symbolical meaning here is particularly appropriate as it duplicates what comes out of Albertine's perceptions16. Albertine is not deceived by appearances, she is not taken in by Harmony’s sweet talk as she knows that his words are tricky signifiers— they do not have the Signified he claims they have.
29 These two passages are clearly meant to function as a mise en abyme of the whole short story which is to be perceived as a network of images and intertextual references. But it is also a metatextual piece since it provides the readers with the necessary guidelines to the interpretation both of the story and of Erdrich’s aesthetics. This short passage is therefore to be read as a small textual network of signifiers, which have to be deciphered by the reader in order for him to understand its metatextual significance. It invites us to read « American Horse » as Albertine and Harmony read each other's faces: “Each read the face of the other as if deciphering letters carved into softly eroding veins of stone.” (50). The reference to the tension between surface and depth is here made explicit through the evocation of carving and of the dichotomy existing between the signifier (the “letters”) and the signified (which requires a deciphering process to be clearly identified). The main characteristic of the signifier is that it is partial or fragmented; it does not reflect the total complexity of the reality it refers to and therefore should not be interpreted for what it is but rather for what it conceals (this is precisely why Vicki’s mode of perception and interpretation are rejected). Erdrich’s numerous intertextual references, which are disseminated throughout the text in its every nook and cranny, are but the tips of huge icebergs whose main bodies lie concealed in the depth of the text and of Native American culture. Visions are not simply visions but the resurgences and materialization of stories of the past; cars are not merely cars but current manifestations of mythical beings. The short story is therefore a subtle and intricate network of references (“veins of stone”) which are meant to be interpreted (“deciphered”) by the readers. This hermeneutic dimension of reading implies that the readers go beyond the surface of the story and look for signs, which, all linked together, eventually lead to meaning, knowledge and the reader’s own construction of the story. The figure of the network is therefore to be seen as the backbone of Erdrich’s aesthetics—which mainly relies on continuity, on the absence of fragmentation—and of her conception of Indian literature. It is thus to be seen both as a vector of knowledge since it compels the reader to work out the meaning of the text and as the object of knowledge, as Erdrich invites her reader to see reality (time and space) not in a fragmented way but as a web in which everything is linked.
30 Perceptions are clearly meant to structure and govern Louise Erdrich's short story. Vicki's and Brackett's conception of Uncle Lawrence and of his house are characterized by fragmentation, dissociation and meaninglessness and therefore to be dismissed as
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not reliable in the construction of meaning. They cannot understand Buddy's world and culture because they cannot see that, beneath the shell of Little Shell, a coherent world lies.
31 In the end, the short story can be compared to a complex form of stereograph. With a stereograph, the reader is presented with a pattern which a priori does not represent anything but the pattern itself. Only after his gaze has got used to the pattern and transcended it can he see a three‑dimensional image take shape through the net of signs he first had access to. The process in Louise Erdrich's story is more or less the same except that the reader is first given an image (or a story) which he is not to see for itself but as a network which, in turn, contains several smaller networks. These smaller networks are all related to each other and their combination eventually leads the reader to build a three‑dimensional picture which does not have the fragmented and linear appearance of the original one. Hence, through the stress she puts on connections, Erdrich manages to transform her story into an ongoing narrative. Even though the diegesis is textually limited and ends at the final full stop, she invites her reader to transform that full stop into a comma and to move on with the story. She thus turns the reader into the narrator’s creative counterpart as once the diegesis is put an end to, the creative work of interpretation proceeds in weaving the threads of the narrative together. This is the real progress of interpretation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barnow, Victor. Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales and their Relation to Chippewa Life. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977.
Coleman, Bernard, Frogner E., and Eich E. Ojibwa Myths and Legends. Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, 1962.
Encyclopédie des Symboles, La Pochotèque, Le Livre de Poche, 1996.
Hamon, Philippe. « L’Ironie » in Le Grand Atlas des littératures de L’Encyclopaedia Universalis.
Jouve, Vincent. L’Effet-personnage dans le roman. Paris: PUF, 1992.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending — Studies in the Theory of Fiction, London: OUP, 1966.
Landes, Ruth. The Ojibwa Religion and the Midewiwin. Madison: University of Wisconsin P, 1985.
Louvel, Liliane.L’Oeil du texte : textes et image dans la littérature de langue anglaise. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1998.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology, Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Pierssens, Michel. Savoirs à l’œuvre, essais d’épistémocritique. Lille: PU Lille, 1990.
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NOTES
1. We draw here on our reading of the introductory chapter to Liliane Louvel’s recent book: L’œil du texte. In this chapter, entitled « L’image », the author explores such concepts as « image », « figure » and « représentation » which have their relation to knowledge in common. The chapter opens on an important postulate to be found in the words of Michel Baridon: « L’image mentale est une activité symbolique qui joue un rôle dans la cognition au même titre que le langage ». Later on, he adds that both images and language construct the structures of our relationships to the world. Such a postulate will have to be kept in mind throughout our study. 2. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology, Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, 10. 3. Cf. Michel Pierssens, Savoirs à l’œuvre — essais d’épistémocritique, Presses Universitaires de Lille, Lille, 1990. We will use the definition Pierssens gives in his « introduction » of the concept of « figures épistémiques ». This definition is taken up in the third chapter of this analysis. 4. Cf. Vincent Jouve, L’effet-personnage dans le roman, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. Our study mainly draws upon the chapter entitled « le personnage comme personne » pp. 108-149. 5. Cf. V. Jouve, op. cit. 6. Cf. Jouve, op.cit. p. 148. Jouve draws on what Barthes wrote earlier on in Fragments d’un discours amoureux: « je suis celui qui a la même place que moi ». 7. Cf. Jouve, op. cit. p. 128. 8. See the definition Philippe Hamon gives of the concept of irony as being based on « distance » and « tension » in Philippe Hamon, « L’ironie », in Le Grand Atlas des Littératures, Encyclopaedia Universalis éditeur, 1990, p. 57. 9. This expression was coined by Vincent Jouve, op. cit. p. 108. 10. Cf. Jouve, op. cit., p. 132. 11. Cf. Jouve, op. cit., p. 138-9: « L’évocation d’un être dans la durée a une valeur explicative qui
F0 F0 permet de mieux le ‘comprendre’ 5B …5D Un acte compris est déjà à moitié pardonné. » 12. Details concerning Raven’s cruelty and cannibalism can be found in Victor Barnow, Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales and their Relation to Chippewa Life, U. of Wisconsin P., Madison, 1977, in Ruth Landes, The Ojibwa Religion and the Midewiwin, U. of Wisconsin P., Madison, 1985 and in Coleman, Bernard, Frogner and Eich, Ojibwa Myths and Legends, Ross and Haines, Minneapolis, 1962. 13. I borrow this phrase from the title of Frank Kermode’s essay: The Sense of an Ending—Studies in the Theory of Fiction, London: OUP, 1966. 14. This concept is borrowed from Michel Pierssens, op. cit. In his « Introduction », Pierssens questions himself about the various types of knowledge that underlie a literary work. The main question he undertakes to answer is: what does the text know? The part played by what he calls « epistemological figures » is instrumental to investigate into the knowledge of the text since these figures are the manifestation or the vectors of knowledge in fiction or discourse. 15. Somehow, the process used here is closely akin to the ideas developed by Kant and the philosophical movement of « Transcendental Idealism » according to which knowledge does not revolve around the objects themselves but around the representation we make out of them. 16. The symbol of the spider in Native American folklore is a highly positive one. The Encyclopédie des Symboles, in its section devoted to the Spider reads: « La structure de sa toile renvoie aux différents modes de manifestation de l'Être, sans compter que cette toile est filée comme l'aurait fait aux débuts un divin artisan : elle renvoie de ce fait à l'idée de la maya, c'est-à-dire à ce jeu des formes auxquelles nous nous laissons prendre dans notre existence quotidienne, formes réelles au plan des phénomènes, mais en fin de compte illusoires au regard de l’Absolu. » (42).
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AUTHORS
ISABELLE THIBAUDEAU-PACOUÏL Isabelle THIBAUDEAU-PACOUÏL, teaches English at the University of Angers and is currently writing her dissertation on novels by Louise Erdrich.
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The narrator in Neil Jordan's short stories
Maguy Pernot-Deschamps
1 In 1976 in Ireland, a young writer published a collection of short stories. His name was Neil Jordan and Night in Tunisia, his first volume, earned him the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. A number of reviews written at the time praised him highly and considered that he was a very promising young talent, and yet Neil Jordan's career after 1979 was to take a new direction. His interest in literature was gradually to take second place and the world of words was to be taken over by that of images. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Jordan directed 12 films and published only three novels1.
2 The year 1979 can therefore be seen as a turning point, a time when images started to reign supreme. For someone who had always been fascinated by cinema, the transition was quite easy, especially as he was also beginning to find the rich literary tradition of Ireland overwhelming, almost paralysing. What could any young author write about after the great masters like Joyce in particular?2
3 Such a transition, however, did not happen overnight and the writer-director has often been quoted as saying that he is continually struggling between filmmaking and writing and that he wants to remain a writer in order to retain what he calls a certain form of dignity. Even though he often complains that he finds it very hard to have long stretches of time in which to write, he has not lost touch with the world of words since he has written the scripts of most of his films so far.
4 A close reading of the short stories in his only collection makes one strongly aware that a certain type of ambivalence is to be found in their structure and that there is more to the written texts than just a series of narratives centred on various teenage or adult characters. It is as if the early writings contained the very seeds of the future films, thus giving the narrator a position which is halfway between the world of books and that of films. This paper will therefore attempt to show that the narrator's role in the collection reflects the transitional period Jordan was going through at the time of writing.
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5 In almost all of the stories there is a third person narrative and the narrator seems rather uncertain about the characters, teenagers or grown-ups, who are seen through his eyes by the reader. It is as if he were not quite sure what point of view to adopt in the narrative and were trying various roles in order to find the right one for him. He is in turn the traditional omniscient narrator, the supposedly objective narrator after the fashion of Robbe-Grillet, or he tries to find his way through the labyrinth of the characters' thoughts with what has been called the stream-of-consciousness method.
6 The omniscient narrator is at home in the characters' minds and can relate all that is going on inside them - he knows about their various thoughts, memories or daydreams. The verbs "think", "remember" and "imagine" are used quite freely, as in this extract from "Mr Solomon Wept" Mr Solomon... looked at the sea. He took a cigarette from his mouth, inhaled and replaced it again. The sea looked dark blue to him... its blueness was clear and sharp, a sharpness emphasised by the occasional flurry of white foam, the slight swell far out. Mr Solomon knew these to be white horses. But today they reminded him of lace, lace he imagined round a woman's throat... Mr Solomon lifted his eyes... He thought of the child he had left... Then he looked down the strand and... only then realised that it was race day. And Mr Solomon remembered the note again... He remembered how his wife had left him...3
7 Through the words of the narrator, the reader is made aware of a number of secrets relating to the characters but at the same time there is a kind of tacit agreement between the author and the narrator - an understanding that the narrator will remain unobtrusive and not attempt to have his voice heard in a blatantly interfering way. The only exception to this implicit rule is to be found in a passage from the story "Skin", where the narrator comments on a woman's life in a manner that sounds rather patronizing because of his tendency to generalize hastily: A housewife approaching middle-age. The expected listlessness about the features. The vacuity that suburban dwelling imposes... But she was an Irish housewife, and as with the whole of Irish suburbia, she held the memory of a half-peasant background fresh and intact. (p. 77)
8 Sometimes the reticence of the narrator borders almost on incertitude. The verbs "seem" and "look", for instance, are used in several stories and the adverbs "maybe" and "perhaps" appear very often in two of them in particular. It seems as if the narrator were hesitant, reluctant almost, as if he both knew and did not know, as if, on a number of occasions, he were a not-so-omniscient narrator after all.
9 The civil servant in "A Bus, A Bridge, A Beach", for example, goes through an experience punctuated by "maybe/perhaps" in the first few pages, when he decides to follow a girl he does not know to the seaside instead of going back to his office. She was holding a towel and... the sight of the towel had made him sweat in his office suit and his sweating and maybe the towel had made him smell the beach again... He sat watching her, thinking that if... perhaps he hadn't glanced twice at the towel or hadn't seen her boatlike platform shoes... he would be now among the files of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, where he belonged. But he didn't know which of these perhapses was the right one...4
10 In the story "Outpatient", the narrator enables the reader to share the uncertainties of a man who is reunited with his wife after a few weeks' separation. He describes her in a very tentative way to suggest the impression he gets on her return. The verb "seem" here is indicative of his confused state of mind. He is trying hard to fit the actual person to the memory he has of her and his confusion is implied by the narrator. "She
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had always been thin, but now her thinness seemed to have lost its allure, her mouth seemed extraordinarily wide, all her facial bones prominent" (p. 89).
11 Finally, in "The Old-Fashioned Lift", we are made very much aware of the narrator's own limitations. He even goes so far as to ask questions about a character he has himself created, Reg the wine cellar attendant in a restaurant: "And who can tell what led to this, what history caused this restrained rigid hand"5. He even acknowledges at one point that he may well be wrong about the character and that his presentation of one particular detail, like Reg's hands for instance, might well produce an entirely different story His hands are red and roughened, but delicate somewhere beneath the palm-welt, and looking at them one could imagine him in other circumstances, with another life-history, as a delicate, somewhat dandyish old man.6
12 All the above examples make it clear that the narrator is in an awkward, ambivalent position since he sounds omniscient but in reality finds himself up against a world of appearances where he is faced with the hesitations and even the contradictions he comes across in the characters. He realizes that he has to respect the mystery that surrounds other people and that, therefore, he cannot state anything too categorically about them. He becomes painfully aware of his own doubts; at times, his own scruples surface in the narrative.
13 Since the position of omniscient narrator does not really suit him, he tries at times to adopt a very different tone - that of the objective narrator. Consequently, the reader finds passages about the thoughts or memories of the characters side by side with fragments of reality that seem to be as non-subjective as possible, since a number of details are offered to the reader in the form of a list of objects or actions that may or may not be either pleasant or worthy of interest. In "Skin", a woman is described in her kitchen She chopped the meat into neat quarters and dumped them with the vegetables into a saucepan. She placed the saucepan on a slow-burning ring. Then she began washing her hands again... She pulled the sink plug then, hearing the suck, scouring the residue of grit and onion-skin with her fingers. She dried her hands, walked with the towel into the living-room. (pp. 76-77)
14 or Mr Solomon on the beach Mr Solomon smoked a cigarette there, holding it flatly between his lips, letting the smoke drift over his thin moustache into his nostrils. His eyes rested on the lumps of rough-cast concrete half embedded in the sand. His breath came in with a soft, scraping sound. (p. 38)
15 In "Last Rites", the narrator even provides the reader with extremely precise figures on three occasions, as if to give the narrative more objective reality. When the navvy in the story is about to walk to his cubicle, the reader is informed that "It was the seventh door down" and, once the young man is inside, that "The wall [was] evenly gridded with the tiles, rising to a height of seven feet" (p. 10). Then the navvy is reminded of another wall: "... there would be... the long sweep of the cement wall with the five-foot high groove running through it..." (p. 12).
16 Such precision is nowhere to be found in the other stories. The reader therefore is left with the impression that the narrator is only trying his hand at one more form of narrative, without really making up his mind as to whether he wants to opt for one or another, and all the more so as he sometimes also uses the stream-of-consciousness
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technique. Thus, in the middle of omniscient or objective remarks, can be found a series of thoughts that become associated through unconscious association rather than logic.
17 In "Skin", for instance, the housewife in her kitchen suddenly thinks of the statue of the Virgin in the hall in her house, while she is preparing her meal: And the day was a mild early September, with a sky that retained some of August's scorched vermilion. The image of the Virgin crossed her silent vacant eyes. She had raised her hand to her hair and saw the light break through her fingers. She thought of the statue in the hall; plastic hands with five plastic sunrays affixed to each...(p. 76)
18 The reader even shares the thoughts and impressions that occur to Mr Solomon while he is watching people getting the course ready for the Laytown Races: But he saw the marquee pole stagger upright and suddenly remembered her as if she had died and as if the day of the Laytown Races was her anniversary. He saw the white horses whip and the marquee canvas billow round the pole and thought suddenly of the dress she had called her one good dress... (p. 41)
19 The same technique is used in parts of the story "Tree" where the reader is made aware that the thoughts that go through the mind of a young woman sometimes bear a very slight relation to each other and to what she is actually doing. For instance, there is a passage about the drink she gets in a pub one afternoon. She stared at the ice in her tonic water. She watched it melt, slowly. She wondered about phrases, how they retain the ghost of a meaning they once had, or grope towards a meaning they might have. Then she suddenly, vitally, remembered the taste of whisky. (p. 99)
20 Throughout the collection, therefore, the narrator tries various forms of narrative but never seems to adopt one for a very long time. He goes from one to the other, as if he were hesitating, dithering almost, as if none of them really suited him. It often seems as if the very genre did not really suit him either and that he was about to give up short- story writing for something else - a means of expression that attracts him like a magnet and which is already present, albeit in a modest way, in the very fabric of the narrative.
21 Discreetly, but nonetheless surely, this other means of expression leaves its mark throughout the collection. The verb "see" in particular but also the verbs "look" and "watch" are to be found on page after page, giving the distinct feeling that the part played by the eyes of the various characters is strikingly predominant in the mixture of narrative forms. The eyes of these people look intently at what is around them, linger over what they are particularly interested in, or concentrate their whole attention on what they are obsessed with.
22 The narrator as it were chooses to stand behind a cinecamera and to use a variety of angles and shots to suggest to the reader a number of things that are not expressed openly in writing. His position is not more objective as such - he is attempting to go beyond mere words in order to give the written equivalent of what the reader- spectator would see on the screen of a cinema. The written form of fiction becomes a medium that enables the author to assert his passion for all that is visual.
23 The attentive reader can even detect a piece of advice given by the narrator in the story "Last Rites". There, the body of the young navy who has just committed suicide is presented as something meaningful to the eyes of the witnesses - something they can
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interpret if they look closely enough, in the same way as what comes across to them through the movements or pauses of the camera in a film. Later [his frail body] would speak, lying on the floor with open wrists, still retaining its goose-pimples, to the old cockney shower-attendant and the gathered bathers, every memory behind the transfixed eyes quietly intimated, almost revealed, by the body itself. If they had looked hard enough, had eyes keen enough, they would have known... (p. 11)
24 In "The Old-Fashioned Lift" too, the narrator introduces himself, and the reader with him, as someone who sees and watches and who then inteprets what his eyes, camera like, have selected and emphasized. After describing the eyes of Reg, the wine cellar attendant, he adds "His eyes are like new-formed embryos; webs of centrifugal blood- red lines, leading to a hard, black alive pupil. Here, an onlooker is conscious, the life is...".7 And what in certain stories, like this one, is overtly, almost awkwardly, made explicit becomes more natural in others and the narrator becomes a veritable cameraman.
25 Indeed, if we accept that what we see is, in its own way, telling, it follows quite naturally that what the characters see or watch again and again "speaks" to the reader, who lets himself be drawn incessantly into the deep currents of a reality full of anguish and obsessions, by what is strangely close to a form of camera work. Although we never get to know the names of the teenagers in the stories, we nevertheless have an insight into their inner selves when their personal obsessions are revealed through what they look at or watch.
26 One of the most striking examples is to be found in the title story. "Night in Tunisia" is quite long, compared to the others in the collection, and yet at no time does the narrator ever say that the teenage boy is obsessed with his sister's body - and all the changes that he has been noticing of late - or that he is very strongly attracted to Rita, a young prostitute who lives in the seaside resort where he spends a holiday every year. In the text, the reader is given a series of sequences where the camera constantly pans what he is looking at, which therefore "speaks" to the reader-spectator.
27 Thus, his sister's body, both very close and very different, is constantly on his mind and his thoughts are revealed through a simple, and apparently banal, sentence: "He looked at his sister's breasts across a bowl of apples" (p. 65). His obsession with the female body, even his nascent desire, become, so to speak, visible to the reader because the narrator regularly shows the boy looking at Rita instead of saying what the boy was feeling in his teenage confusion.
28 A few examples from the first page will illustrate the point, "She was there again... He saw her on the white chairs that faced the tennis-court and again in the burrows behind the tennis-court and again still down..." (p. 47); then a little later, "He had walked up from the beach... He had seen her yellow cardigan on the tennis-court from a long way off, above the strand. He was watching her play now..." (p. 55); and then later again, on the beach, "He... saw her walking down the strand... He looked at her again from the raft, her slack stomach bent forward... He looked towards the strand and saw her on her back..." (pp. 59, 60 & 61).
29 And yet the narrator in Jordan's stories does not merely guide the movements of the camera to show rather than tell us something about the characters. He is also someone involved in the actual making of the film, which implies working out the effects that appear in written form in a film script. In this way, the collection becomes a series of
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potential short feature films - like the films produced for television, for instance - and the reader is made aware of this at two different levels.
30 The first is apparent in the layout of the written text of certain stories. "A Love" and "Night in Tunisia" are divided into a great number of varied sequences separated by blank spaces consisting of a few lines which indicate very clearly that the camera has moved on to something quite different. Similarly, in "Last Rites", the italics that are used take us from the young navvy to the other men who were present in the public baths that day, provide us with points of view that, in a film, could be rendered through a voice-over or be superimposed.
31 Thus the passage about the shower attendant could be filmed while, at the same time, a voice over would convey the man's thoughts The old cockney took another ticket from another bather he thought he recognised. Must have seen him last week. He crumpled the ticket in his hand... He let his eyes scan the seventeen cubicles. He wondered again how many of them coming every week for seventeen weeks, have visited each of the seventeen showers. None, most likely. Have to go where they're told, don't they? (p. 16)
32 and the passage about a young man from Trinidad who is about to visit a prostitute could be superimposed on the bleak scene in the navvy's cubicle to stress the contrast with the young man who is about to commit suicide The young Trinidadian in the next cubicle squeezed out a sachet of lemon soft shampoo... and the water swept him clean again... and he thought of a clean body under a crisp shirt, of a night of love under a low red-lit roof... (p. 18)
33 At a second level, the narrator works on the very fabric of the written texts, rather than their form, to produce his scenarios. Thus very short sentences are put side by side, with no apparent transition, in order to suggest the passage from a long shot to a close-up. In "Sand", for instance, two of the characters meet in just two sentences. They first move forward in each other's direction and then suddenly face each other in a close-up: "As he walked the tinker grew bigger... Then the boy was in front of him, arms on his hips..." (p. 34). Another example is to be found in "A Love", where a young man and an older woman are seen together with the same kind of progression: "And then you opened the glass door and the brass music grew to an orchestra and the door closed and the music faded again... And you were standing over me" (p. 106).
34 There are also a lot of flashbacks, particularly in the story "A Love", where a young man sees for the last time an older woman who had been responsible for his sexual initiation several years before, when he was a teenager. The script-like narrative then consists of a blending of scenes from the past and the present which could easily be superimposed on the screen. Another film-like device is the sudden passage from one sequence to another. The terse style of the narrative, coupled with the apparent simplicity of the words, gives the reader-spectator the feeling that he is following the quick movements of a camera inside a relatively limited area.
35 Thus, in the story "Tree", a very short sentence – "The pub was black after the light outside" (p. 98) - suddenly brings a young woman from the front of a building to an enclosed space inside. When she and her partner finally leave the pub, his gestures are suggested in a similar abrupt way, as with a camera travelling from one angle to another. For example, while she was still talking inside, "He had already gone towards the door" (p. 99) and then, a short while later, when she was paying for their drinks, "He was standing by the door of the car" (p. 99). The narrative is very tight, there is
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nothing superfluous in the written text and the narrator has here turned it into something that very closely resembles a film script.
36 Another story, "Outpatient", illustrates the way in which the first and the last few shots of a film - with the credit titles and the cast list - can be rendered through fiction. At the beginning, it is as if the narrator-scriptwriter were deliberately putting the main female character aside in order to get the start of the film right, in order for the spectator to be plunged into the reality of her background, with the usual shots that tell a lot more than words about the spirit of the film to come. "Mentally she took several steps backwards. She saw two people in a room with three white walls and one orange wall, with blue-coloured armchairs, prints of old Dublin and poster reductions" (p. 91). The end of the story can also easily be translated into a film ending - a silent final sequence where the camera moves, as if questioningly, from the man to his wife: And she saw him open the kitchen door... She saw through the door the green mound of Howth Head, a long stretch of sea and a thin elongated smokestack of grey cloud. She saw his square back moving... to the paltry green rim of hedge at the end... When he reached it he turned. And she walked towards him... There was a wind blowing from the sea, ruffling the hedge, his hair and her kilted skirt. (p. 94)
37 Finally, the fusion between short story and film script becomes complete in some passages of "Night in Tunisia", where a succession of sentences with next to no verbs is like a series of quick notes on a script about the particular movements of a camera concerning such or such a sequence The one bedroom and the two beds, his father's by the door, his by the window. The rippled metal walls. The moon like water on his hands, the bed beside him empty. Then the front door opening, the sound of the saxophone case laid down. His eyes closed, his father stripping in the darkness... (p. 54)
38 In this case, the reader does not know whether he is still a reader or has been unknowingly turned into a spectator. The narrator has very ingeniously merged the two genres and the story is no longer a story but part of an imagined film script.
39 After much hesitation throughout the collection, the narrator has finally been won over by the script writer. Film making has taken over from story writing in a collection where the narrator has been exploring various narrative voices without ever being fully satisfied by any of them. Neil Jordan's almost irrepressible evolution from literature to the cinema is conveyed through the film-like devices used by an uncertain narrator who experiments with words almost to the point where they become pictures. For John Boorman, the film maker who helped Jordan launch into a career in the cinema, the stories in Night in Tunisia are "visual... cinematic" 8 and the careful reader cannot but conclude that the transitional nature of the stories reflects the transition Jordan was going through at the time.
NOTES
1. Angel (1982), Company of Wolves (1984), Mona Lisa (1986), High Spirits (1988), We're No Angels (1990), The Miracle (1991), The Crying Game (1992), Interview With a Vampire (1994),
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Michael Collins (1996), The Butcher Boy (1998), In Dreams (1999) and The End of the Affair (2000). The Past (1980), The Dream of a Beast (1983) and Sunrise With Sea Monster (1995). 2. When he was interviewed by Ray Sawhill in December 1989, he said: "... in Ireland, everything has been written about to a large extent. Particularly after Joyce. I lived in the city he'd written about. Some of the greatest literature of the twentieth century took place in this city I grew up in. It's impossible not to feel swamped by that. You grow up in this culture, this landscape, in which every little detail has been written about. Every little brick, every corner, every place you go has a literary association, be it through Joyce or Patrick Kavanagh or Flann O'Brien or whomever. One's palate becomes sort of jaded. One's imagination becomes paralysed." 3. Neil Jordan, Night in Tunisia, Vintage (London, 1993), p. 39. All future references will be to this particular edition. 4. William Vorm, ed., Paddy No More, Wolfhound (Dublin, 1978), pp. 100-101. The two stories by Neil Jordan included in this anthology will also be used in this paper, with the author's permission, even though they do not belong to Night in Tunisia. It was thanks to Vorm's book that I discovered Neil Jordan in the mid-seventies. 5. Paddy No More, p. 116. 6. Paddy No More, p. 110. 7. Paddy No More, p. 110. 8. Quoted in the script book for Angel (Neil Jordan, Angel, Faber (London, 1988), p. viii). * With many thanks to Pr. McCarthy for his invaluable help with the translation.
AUTHORS
MAGUY PERNOT-DESCHAMPS Maguy PERNOT-DESCHAMPS, teaches Irish Studies and translation at the University of Burgundy and is particularly interested in Irish short stories and Irish rebels.
Journal of the Short Story in English, 36 | Spring 2001