Mavis Gallant

UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI UDINE CORSO DI DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN SCIENZE LINGUISTICHE E LETTERARIE CICLO XXIV TESI DI DOTTORATO DI RICERCA NEGOTIATING LANGUAGES AND IDENTITIES IN THE FICTION OF MAVIS GALLANT Relatore Dottoranda Chiar.mo Prof. VALERIO BRUNI ROBERTA BORGNA ANNO ACCADEMICO 2011/2012 CONTENTS ROBERTA BORGNA ~ NEGOTIATING LANGUAGES AND IDENTITIES IN THE FICTION OF MAVIS GALLANT Contents List of Abbreviations iv Introduction v 1. Mavis Gallant: The Identity of a Writer 1 1. Why, when, and what interest in Gallant’s biography? 2 1.1 A voice lost in snow: brief survey on early critical interest 5 1.2 Preliminary remarks 7 2. The several lives of Mavis Gallant 10 2.1 Contents and aims of a new biography 10 2.2 Parents and life at home 12 2.3 The school of life 20 2.4 Mavis at work 27 2.5 Flying Mavis 32 2.6 Gallant today 38 2.7 How to look at these data? 39 3. A case of ‘fictional biography’ 40 3.1 Step 1: ‘coherence’. Notes on reliability 41 3.2 Step 2: ‘control’. Who is interviewing whom? 43 3.3 Step 3: ‘style’. Is Gallant good at doing the gardening? 46 Notes and References to Chapter 1 48 i Tesi di Dottorato di Roberta Borgna, discussa presso l’Università degli Studi di Udine CONTENTS ROBERTA BORGNA ~ NEGOTIATING LANGUAGES AND IDENTITIES IN THE FICTION OF MAVIS GALLANT 2. Identi fying Language(s): essential theoretical framework and exemplificative case studies 64 1. The word and the world: a theory on theory 66 2. The Identity of Language(s): pluralizing in different directions 72 2.1 Things are not always said in words: non-verbal languages 79 2.2 Renarration as rewriting: functions and dysfunctions of written language(s) 86 3. From theory to practice: selected case studies 96 3.1 Final remarks 117 Notes and References to Chapter 2 119 3. Silent words and speaking objects in Mavis Gallant’s ‘novels’ 127 1. Fragmented identity of a genre 129 2. Several lives within several lives, or on the identity of these stories’ writer: deciphering transtextual and narrative strategies 134 3. “Clothes [...] always mean something”: through the fabric of self-identity and relationships 155 4. Biting words and a few leftovers 168 5. What’s new in the novels then? 187 Notes and References to Chapter 3 189 Conclusion 204 ii Tesi di Dottorato di Roberta Borgna, discussa presso l’Università degli Studi di Udine CONTENTS ROBERTA BORGNA ~ NEGOTIATING LANGUAGES AND IDENTITIES IN THE FICTION OF MAVIS GALLANT Sinossi in lingua italiana 208 Abstract 209 1. Mavis Gallant: l’identità di una scrittrice 211 2. Identificare i linguaggi: modello teorico essenziale e casi studio esemplificativi 218 3. Parole silenziose e oggetti parlanti nei ‘romanzi’ di Mavis Gallant 225 Conclusioni 230 Selected Bibliography 231 1. Works by Mavis Gallant 231 1.1 Collections of Stories 231 1.2 Novels 233 1.3 Theatre 233 1.4 Selected Works of Non-Fiction 233 1.5 Manuscript Collection 234 2. Works on Mavis Gallant 235 3. Other Works 252 iii Tesi di Dottorato di Roberta Borgna, discussa presso l’Università degli Studi di Udine CONTENTS ROBERTA BORGNA ~ NEGOTIATING LANGUAGES AND IDENTITIES IN THE FICTION OF MAVIS GALLANT List of Abbreviations * AB Across the Bridge: New Stories (1993) AFGT A Fairly Good Time (1970) CL The Cost of Living (2009) EW The End of the World (1974) FFD From the Fifteenth District (1979 ) GA Going Ashore (2009) GWGS Green Water, Green Sky (1959) HT Home Truths (1981) IT In Transit (1988) MHB My Heart is Broken (1964) MS Montreal Stories (2004) MW The Moslem Wife (1994) OB Overhead in a Balloon (1985) OP The Other Paris (1956) PJ The Pegnitz Junction (1973) PN Paris Notebooks (1986) PS Paris Stories (2002) SS The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (1996) VE Varieties of Exile (2003) WBD What is to be Done? (1983) * Detailed bibliographical references to the above collections are listed in the section “Works by Mavis Gallant” of the “Selected Bibliography” at the end of the present work. iv Tesi di Dottorato di Roberta Borgna, discussa presso l’Università degli Studi di Udine INTRODUCTION ROBERTA BORGNA ~ NEGOTIATING LANGUAGES AND IDENTITIES IN THE FICTION OF MAVIS GALLANT Introduction “Why aren’t people ever clear? Why don’t they say what they mean?” Mavis Gallant, A Fairly Good Time In the 1976 short story “Varieties of Exile”, the character of Linnet Muir says: “everything I could not decipher I turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots” (HT: 261). Stating, as agreed by most critics, that Linnet is Gallant’s literary alter ego , one of the things that the writer could not decipher is certainly hinted at in the questions contained in the above epigraph. The answers are countless in general, and several are provided specifically by Gallant, whose fictions often revolve around language, not so much to point at its inefficacy (which the writer in fact never laments), but rather to show that, because language encompasses unlimited potentialities, these include both the positive and the negative ones. Describing her immersion in the German post-war reality, which results in a series of stories published together in the collection The Pegnitz Junction (1973), Gallant claimed that she decided to deal with Nazism and its consequences precisely “pour essayer de comprendre”, ‘to try to understand’ v Tesi di Dottorato di Roberta Borgna, discussa presso l’Università degli Studi di Udine INTRODUCTION ROBERTA BORGNA ~ NEGOTIATING LANGUAGES AND IDENTITIES IN THE FICTION OF MAVIS GALLANT (Girard and Valette 2003). This aspiration certainly extends to all the range of situations she gives attention to, not only the crimes of wartime. Also and foremost, Gallant has always been interested in the circumstances of everyday life: observing the difficulties that undermine clear communication, and incomprehensions or miscomprehensions among people, Gallant magisterially points at the moment in which conversations fail, words mislead, and signs lose their meaning. Each and every time, when she illustrates it, her handling of language is so astoundingly accurate that it never fails her. This paradox fascinated me, and spurred me to focus in my thesis on this and on a manifold of strictly related aspects. My decision moved also from realizing that critics, who often quote language as one of Gallant’s core issues, rarely embarked on a deeper analysis of this subject. Questions about Gallant’s ways of dealing with language are several, and they ‘speak’ from the pages of her fiction as well as from her nonfictional texts. To reply to them, that is “pour essayer de comprendre”, I decided to write the present work. In order to investigate the fiction of Mavis Gallant under the lenses of her assorted uses of language, I selected another theme that is particularly insisted in the fiction of the writer: ‘identity’, meant as a broad label to encompass several related aspects, among which are the perception and the representation of the self. The almost unlimited meanings and implications attached to ‘language’ and ‘identity’ would normally recommend a call for restriction; conversely, I opted for an expansion of both terms, which I put therefore in their plural form. I discuss such pluralisation in Chapter 2, where I present the theoretical framework for my thesis. In short, for different languages I intend first of all the several languages which Gallant mentions and the so called ‘questions of language’, such as bilingualism and translation. Pluralisation goes much further: on the one hand, I consider diamesic variations connected with written forms, either texts written by the characters or their literary background, which resurfaces in form of quotations and misquotations of a myriad of literary works. On the other hand, I analyse nonverbal languages, the ‘language of clothing’ and the ‘language of food’ in particular, trying to describe the ways in which characters ‘speak’ through their outfits or ‘dialogue’ in contexts in which food is involved. In dealing with vi Tesi di Dottorato di Roberta Borgna, discussa presso l’Università degli Studi di Udine INTRODUCTION ROBERTA BORGNA ~ NEGOTIATING LANGUAGES AND IDENTITIES IN THE FICTION OF MAVIS GALLANT identities , I consider different aspects connected with personal, social, and cultural identity, e.g. perception, representation, misrepresentation, and disguise. I give therefore attention to the self as well as to the interactions among characters, all of which result frequently in miscommunication, incomprehension, and lack of mutual understanding. These considerations bring me to focus on the choice of ‘negotiating’ as a verb to encompass interaction and interrelation at different levels. The term ‘negotiation’, usually associated to political contexts, is also quite popular in semiotic studies, where theoreticians made a vast use of the term to represent the moment when a message, passing from ‘encoding’ to ‘decoding’ practices (Hall 1973), is received and understood. The dangers connected with these passages are several, and Gallant is well aware of them all. As Hulme ‘speculated’ in 1924, “language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise”. Such compromise, which is synonym to ‘negotiation’, exists also at the level of the relationship between the writer and her readers. In Chapter 1, I propose a full account of Gallant’s life, in order to disclose the identity of the woman behind the writer. My biographical survey does not report the writer’s life indiscriminately, but centres around those episodes that had an impact on her fiction, either on thematic or stylistic level (Section 2), with particular reference to the main concerns of the present work. Stress falls on her bilingual upbringing (2.3) and her early interest in reading and writing, on the relationship with her parents (2.2), her apprenticeship as a journalist (2.4), and the radical and never regretted decision to ‘fly’ to Europe in order to devote her life entirely to writing.

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