Journal of the Short Story in English, 64

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64 | Spring 2015 Special Section: The Modernist Short Story, and Varia Guest Editors of the Special Section: Mathijs Duyck, Michael Basseler, Anne Besnault-Levita, Christine Reynier, Bart Van Den Bossche

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1548 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2015 ISBN: 978-2-7535-5056-8 ISSN: 0294-04442

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Gérald Préher

Special Section: The Modernist Short Story

Re-framing the Modernist Short Story: Introduction Michael Basseler and Christine Reynier

Outside the Canon — T. F. Powys’ Short Stories and the Ordinary Milosz Wojtyna

Spatial, Temporal and Linguistic Displacement in Kipling’s and Maugham’s Colonial Short Stories: The Disrupting Power of the “Colonial” in Modern Short Fiction Jaine Chemmachery

“Flying Round Her, Across Her, Towards Her in a Pattern”: Towards a Materialist Historiography of Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction Amy Bromley

The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove Andrew James

A Normal Biography Reversed: The Temporalization of Life in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” Michael Basseler

Theorizing the Queer Modernist Short Story: From Failures of Socialty to Negative Affects Bart Eeckhout

Theorizing the Modernist Short Story with Woolf (and Agamben) as an Art of Empowering “Poverty” Christine Reynier

Afterword: Modernism, Formalism, and the “Edwardian Bypass” Adrian Hunter

The Modernist Short Story: A Bibliography Mathijs Duyck

General Section: Varia

What Time is “The Next Time”? Writing, Gender and Temporality in Some Short Stories by Henry James Bryony Randall

“Like Following a Mirage”: Memory and Empowerment in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” Robert Lecker

Narrative, Itineraries, and the Negotiation of “Domestic” Space in Cherie Jones’s The Burning Bush Women Andrew Armstrong

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Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner Stories, or the Recreation of Virginia as the Biblical Promised Land with Abner as its Prophet Suzanne Bray

Charles Baxter’s “Gryphon”: A Postmodernist Substitute in a Traditional Classroom Quan Manh Ha and Jonathan Mark Hoyer

Another Kind of Hell: Fundamentals of the Dystopian Short Story Charles Holdefer

“The Hurt Mind”: A Paleo-postmodern Reading of Tom Mac Intyre’s Short Prose Catriona Ryan

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Foreword

Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Gérald Préher

1 We are pleased to present this sixty-fourth issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English which proposes a dual format, including a thematic section and a general section.

2 The thematic section in part I of this volume deals with the short story in the modernist period with articles that seek to reinvestigate traditional concepts of modernism and the short story form. These articles were collected following a conference “The Short Story and Short Story Collection in the Modernist Period: Between Theory and Practice,” organized by the departments of literary studies of the universities of Ghent, Leuven and Perugia in September 2013 at the Academia Belgica in Rome. The guest editors include the following scholars: Mathijs Duyck, Michael Basseler, Anne Besnault-Levita, Christine Reynier, and Bart Van Den Bossche. These articles are framed in the first part of this issue by an introduction by Michael Basseler and Christine Reynier, and a probing afterword by Adrian Hunter. The contributors to this special section raise new questions about what we call the “modernist” short story and thus open new avenues for future research. We are very pleased to include it in this issue.

3 The general section in part II of this volume proposes a striking array of articles that attest to the transnational dimension of short story production. Authors from places as diverse as Barbados, Canada, the United States (north and south), England and Ireland are explored by researchers, and the variety of methodological approaches accentuate this multiplicity by manifesting a broad range of conceptual approaches.

4 Three articles propose a studied focus on gender. Bryony Randall, in “What Time is ‘The Next Time’? Writing, Gender and Temporality in Some Short Stories by Henry James,” examines a cluster of stories Henry James wrote specifically about women writers. With a focus on four tales written in the mid-1890s, Randall discusses the imbrication of temporality and the relationship of gender to writing. She argues that the stories appear to foster hierarchical gendered distinctions between narrative models. However, the narrative structure, unexpectedly, ultimately breaks down such hierarchies to confirm the power of the woman writer.

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5 Robert Lecker also engages with the question of time and gender, as he explores the nature of memory, narrative and female duplicity. In “‘Like Following a Mirage’: Memory and Empowerment in Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain,’” Lecker shows how Munro’s story proposes a portrait of grief, loss, betrayal and, surprisingly, female agency. Lecker studies the “double edge” apparent in the story, as the main character, Fiona, copes with Alzheimer’s and the loss of her memory. He notes how this story appears at first sight to be a simple story of loss of the self. However, the narrative develops in a more subtle fashion, leading the reader to wonder if Fiona is not simply proposing a performance of memory loss to become empowered and escape from a difficult marriage. Her withdrawal from the world appears to be suggestive of a different form of freedom, therefore contributing to Munro’s preoccupation with the everyday lives of women.

6 Andrew Armstrong demonstrates a similar preoccupation with the situation of women, but engages with questions of gender through the lens of space in “Narrative, Itineraries, and the Negotiation of ‘Domestic’ Space in Cherie Jones’s The Burning Bush Women.” Armstrong explains how Barbadian writer Cherie Jones’ collection explores the concepts of “home” and “away” in relation to ideas of migration, identity formation, travel and exile. He sees these dominant themes as being intertwined with gender relations, space and society, as they relate to the lives of Caribbean women at home and abroad. The collection is shown by Armstrong to propose a counterhegemonic potential to creating alternative spaces for enacting female subjectivity. As opposed to Randall, he privileges space over temporality, in order to show how the short story genre can allow for specific forms of “architexture” (Gretlund).

7 Suzanne Bray demonstrates a similar preoccupation with identity and territory but turns her attention to the South of the United States in “Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner Stories, or the Recreation of Virginia as the Biblical Promised Land with Abner as its Prophet.” Bray studies how the success of the Uncle Abner series by Melville Davisson Post can be attributed to the context in which the stories take place. Virginia is explored as being representative of the Promised Land, in which Uncle Abner appears as a sort of Old Testament prophet figure who gives divinely inspired advice to people for whom law appears as a distant entity. She proposes a specific focus on the first story in Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries, “The Doomdorf Mystery,” studying the parallel between Hebrew texts and the atmosphere, discourse and world vision proposed.

8 Quan Manh Ha and Jonathan Mark Hoyer, in “Charles Baxter’s ‘Gryphon’: A Postmodernist Substitute in a Traditional Classroom,” propose an exploration of intellectual territory, that of the classroom. These authors address how Charles Baxter’s short story “Gryphon” can be placed within a framework of intellectual and pedagogical history from the end of the European Enlightenment through the rise of postmodernism. They focus on Immanuel Kant’s subjectivism as it contributes to the attribution of a relative value to material traditionally presented in the classroom as fact. They see this Kantian shift as being the focus for events in the story. Ha and Hoyer use Reader-Response interpretation in order to explain how the classroom context is used by Baxter to confront philosophical and pedagogical perspectives. In this sense, the story cannot be reduced to binary oppositions, but rather proposes a more subtle representation of classroom thought.

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9 Charles Holdefer deals with similar conceptual issues, but directs his attention to the genre of the dystopia and the short story with his article: “Another Kind of Hell: Fundamentals of the Dystopian Short Story.” His article seeks to study the relationship between the short story and the concept of dystopia with its different representation of topos in relation to the short story’s close relationship to the spaces of myth. Through a study of stories by Shirley Jackson, Kurt Vonnegut, Jennifer Egan and George Saunders, Holdefer isolates specificities of the dystopian short story, studying, for example, how the representation of states of hell function as social commentary, and how such representation ultimately highlights and exploits some of the fundamental aspects of the short story form.

10 Catriona Ryan demonstrates a similar preoccupation with social commentary, but her focus is on Ireland and the short stories of Tom Mac Intyre in “‘The Hurt Mind’: A Paleo-Postmodern Reading of Tom Mac Intyre’s Short Prose.” As suggested in the title, Ryan proposes a new paradigm she identifies as “paleo-postmodern” through which she analyzes Mac Intyre’s aesthetics. She borrows from psychoanalysis (notably Lacan) and trauma studies to explain how Mac Intyre’s stories bring together postmodern deconstruction and Yeatsian revivalism. Tragic characters are shown to be in search of an unreachable Irish identity, hindered by a Hiberno-English language that fosters alienation.

11 We are particularly thrilled with this dual issue as it is rich in insights about evolving perceptions of the short story genre and proposes many paths for future research.

AUTHORS

MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Editor

GÉRALD PRÉHER JSSE Associate Editor

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Special Section: The Modernist Short Story

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Re-framing the Modernist Short Story: Introduction

Michael Basseler and Christine Reynier

1 This issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English offers a selection of essays from the conference on “The Short Story and Short Story Collection in the Modernist Period: Between Theory and Practice” that was organized by the departments of literary studies of the universities of Ghent, Leuven and Perugia and took place in September 2013 at the Academia Belgica in Rome. The conference’s primary aim, as stated in the call for papers, was “to reflect on the modern short story [...] from a theoretical perspective, but it also [sought] to contextualise this theoretical approach through a number of case studies from different literary traditions.” As a result, the papers gathered in this issue all attempt to critically re-examine and broaden our understanding of “the” modernist short story, while grappling with questions of canon- formation, dominant aesthetics and politics, modernist ideologies and the very role of the short story genre within the larger modernist literary field.

2 Through various methodologies and theoretical approaches, the selected papers, which deal primarily with modernist British and American short story writers, thus undertake to “reframe” the modernist short story. As a conceptual metaphor, the notion of reframing is meant to highlight the deliberate changes in vision and perspective that the present papers seek to facilitate. While there arguably exists a dominant picture of the modernist short story, usually framed by short story criticism as an art of epiphany, fragmentation and formalist experimentalism (see Adrian Hunter’s afterword for a detailed discussion), the contributions to the issue at hand use new frames, so to speak, in order to refashion this picture. They thereby bring to the fore alternative modernisms in which the short story plays a crucial role in one way or another. Informed by the latest advances in literary and interdisciplinary theory and philosophy, these papers provide fresh readings of specific short stories as well as new insights into the modernist short story itself. Definitely turning away from formalism and structuralism, but also from post-structuralism and deconstruction, the essays collected in this issue adopt and advance innovative theoretical approaches, favouring more interdisciplinary readings that go beyond the familiar frameworks of short story

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theory, and explore new ways of contextualizing the short story that bring out the very stuff life is made of.

3 While under-valued short stories by canonical writers like F.S. Fitzgerald, Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf are re-valued, the limits of the modernist canon are extended so as to include short story writers regarded as marginal: T. F. Powys, F. P. Grove, as well as colonial writers like Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham. The modernist canon is thus tentatively reframed.

4 The very definition of the modernist short story is in the process extended as the present essays take into account the way in which the socio-historical context is instrumental in shaping this definition. In the end, not only is an alternative genealogy of the modernist short story provided, but undervalued aspects of the modernist short story are brought out. Indeed, critics have long followed the Modernists’ own emphasis on their radically new experimental mode of writing. This has prompted studies that try to connect modernist and postmodern forms of experimentation. Recently, in Modernism, Postmodernism and the Short Story in English, Jorge Sacido attempted to assess how the short story helps to redefine modernism and postmodernism and the way they relate to each other. The essays collected here take a different but complementary direction and delineate, along the lines of Hunter’s previous work and of his afterword in the present issue, an alternative genealogy of the modernist short story, pointing out what the modernist short story, in spite of its innovative impulse, owes to the nineteenth century. Acknowledging this means reassessing the very modernity of the modernist short story; it also helps to shift the emphasis from structural matters to little explored aspects of the modernist short story: the simple, the aging, the destitute, the ab-normal and more generally, poverty and humbleness, which may in turn help to reframe the modernist canon and the picture of the modernist short story. As David Trotter has argued, the novel is “a literary form largely given over to affirmative action” (4) and the stabilization of categories like nation, class or sexual orientation, while the modernist short story is marked by its tendency toward dis-enablement and dis-affirmation. This thesis surfaces to a greater or lesser degree in some of the essays (James, Eeckhout, Basseler) and is challenged or expanded by others (Reynier). Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, this issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English thus explores and maps out new paths for future readings of the modernist short story.

Reframing the modernist canon

5 Following H.E. Bates, Milosz Wojtyna pinpoints in “Outside the Canon—T. F. Powys’s Short Stories and the Ordinary” the binding and misleading nature of concepts developed by modernist critics who often followed in the footsteps of the modernists themselves. T. F. Powys is shown to deflate eventfulness in his short stories and promote events that are trivial, repetitive and synonymous with boredom. The value of the everyday and the ordinary as an end in itself (rather than its transformation into some epiphanic experience) is emphasized and re-examined in the light of Lefebvre and de Certeau in an attempt to break with a negative aesthetics of the quotidian and the commonplace. Characterization is also revisited in the short fiction of a writer who undermines realist conventions without resorting to the modernist representation of

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human consciousness. On the whole, because they stand on the margins of modernism, Powys’s short stories compel us to reframe the modernist canon.

6 In her article “Spatial, Temporal and Linguistic Displacement in Kipling’s and Maugham’s Colonial Short Stories: the Disrupting Power of the Colonial in Modern Short Fiction,” Jaine Chemmachery brings two short story writers who also wrote from the margin, center-stage. Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham are shown to resort, in their early short stories, to experimental narrative discourse and polyphony, while displaying an interest in psychoanalytic theories and developing themes like exile, usually connected to modernist writing. Re-valuing undervalued short stories, Chemmachery points out not only what Kipling and Maugham owe to the Victorian era and a conservative ideology, but also how they connect, both through their poetics and thematics, to modernist short story writing. She thus comes to question the critical consensus, gives a fresh appraisal of Kipling’s and Maugham’s short stories and of these two writers’ positions in relation to, rather than outside, modernism. Conversely, the modernist canon is reframed.

Extending the definition of the modernist short story

7 Building on the existing criticism on Woolf’s short stories while decentering critical practices, Amy Bromley offers a fresh perspective in her essay entitled “‘Flying round her, across her, towards her in a pattern’: Towards a Materialist Historiography of Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction.” Bromley interrogates framing and editorial decisions, which leads her to embrace the historical context. Looking at the magazines some short stories were published in, and examining Woolf’s own framing practices (punctuation, for example), Bromley exposes the unstable nature of Woolf’s short stories in a new way and positions Woolf among the Surrealists and the Parisian avant-garde. This exciting research promises to renew the definition not only of Woolf’s short stories but also of the modernist short story at large.

8 Andrew James focuses on a lesser known short story cycle Tales from the Margin by German-Canadian writer Frederick Philip Grove. In his carefully researched essay, “The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove,” James explores how our interpretation of these stories changes when they are read as tales. With reference to canonical writers like Chaucer, Poe, and Conrad, James argues that tales are marked by three characteristics, namely a tendency to cross class barriers, a “psychological penetration” of marginal characters, and a rather subjective style of narration. All of these characteristics are shown to be central in Grove’s short story writing. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Grove’s “tales” with episodes from his own troubled life as an immigrant not only discloses the author’s socialist ideals and his striving for a new identity, but also brings to the fore the cultural climate in early twentieth-century Canada.

The modernist short story redefined as an art of dis- enablement

9 With “A Normal Biography Reversed: the Temporalization of Life in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’” Michael Basseler offers a radically new reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” often dismissed as of

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little interest. Fitzgerald’s introduction of “fabulous time” and anomalies in the aging process of his protagonist are read through the defamiliarizing lens of life-course studies. Fitzgerald’s seemingly absurd and inconceivable character, a seventy-year old baby, is analyzed as an inverted but very “normal biography,” the outcome of his own time. A marginal short story is thus reassessed as bearing directly on the social upheavals of modernist times and the alienating effects of the modern life-course regime.

10 In “Theorizing the Queer Modernist Short Story: from Failures of Sociality to Negative Affects,” Bart Eeckhout focuses on non-normative sexualities in six stories by Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, D.H. Lawrence, and Gertrude Stein, and thus sheds light on the queerness of Anglophone literary modernism. Drawing on the work by contemporary theorists such as José Munoz and Heather Love, Eeckhout is primarily interested in what these stories reveal about modernism’s normative social discourses that are most significantly reflected in failures of sociality and negative affects. While a melancholic experience of feeling backward pervades most of the stories, the close analyses reveal a great deal about the structures of feeling of modernist queerness that are somewhat at odds with the progress narrative of today’s LGBT criticism and activism.

11 Taking its cue from the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and particularly his concept of poverty as bareness and use, Christine Reynier’s thought- provoking essay, “Theorising the Modernist Short Story with Woolf (and Agamben) as an Art of Empowering ‘Poverty’” zeros in on the ethical dimensions of the genre in general and of Virginia Woolf’s writing in particular. What Woolf has in common with other great writers of the modernist era like William Faulkner or F. Scott Fitzgerald, is that her short stories have been hitherto regarded as secondary to her achievements in the novel. Reynier challenges this position by pointing out the great variety and artfulness of Woolf’s short fiction which she defines as an “empowering art of poverty” since it combines a simplicity of style with an ethical disposition, intensity, and a “use” of the property of other writers and artists (i.e. intertextuality). This notion of the short story as an art of poverty provides an intriguing theoretical angle for reassessing the significance and the very conception not only of Woolf’s short fiction but of the modernist short story in general.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Sacido, Jorge, ed. Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Short Story in English. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2012. Print.

Trotter, David. “Dis-enablement: Subject and Method in the Modernist Short Story.” Critical Quarterly 52.2 (2010): 4-13. Print.

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AUTHORS

MICHAEL BASSELER Michael Basseler (Dr. habil.) is Academic Manager of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus Liebig University Giessen. He received his PhD for a study entitled Cultural Memory and Trauma in Contemporary African American Fiction; his second monograph tackles the relationship between literature and knowledge with a study on the 20th- and 21st- century American short story, conceptualized in this work as a genre of “life knowledge” (forthcoming). In addition to his book on Kulturelles Gedächtnis und Trauma im zeitgenössischen afroamerikanischen Roman (2008), his publications include a handbook on the History of the American Short Story (2011, ed. with A. Nünning) as well as volumes on The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction (2013, ed. with A. Nünning and C. Schwanecke) and Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature (2015, ed. with D. Hartley and A. Nünning). Moreover, he has published articles and book chapters on, e.g., (the legacies of) modernist poetry, new historicism, narrative strategies for staging memory processes, and a variety of authors from Joseph Conrad to Suzan-Lori Parks. His current research project focuses on North American “Cultures of Resilience.”

CHRISTINE REYNIER Christine Reynier is Professor of English Literature at the University of Montpellier III, France. She has published Virginia Woolf's Ethics of the Short Story (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), “Virginia Woolf’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy” (Philosophy and Literature 38/1) and edited the JSSE Special Issue on Woolf’s short stories (n° 50, July 2008). She has also published on other modernist writers and short story writers (recently: “The Outrageousness of Outrage in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Monte Verità’,” Etudes britanniques contemporaines 45 (Dec. 2013) http:// ebc.revues.org/577; “Musing in the Museums of Ford’s Provence,” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry. 30:1 (May 2014): 57-63. She is currently preparing the publication of a book on Aestheticism and Modernism after having co-organized a European Science Foundation Workshop on that subject.

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Outside the Canon — T. F. Powys’ Short Stories and the Ordinary

Milosz Wojtyna

1 The fixed quality of the canon of the British modernist short story is evident—the influence of Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Lowry, and Beckett is so beyond question that any discussion of their contemporaries will inevitably make reference to the giants of the time, and adopt the vocabulary employed in the discussions of their fictions. Still, attempts have been made to extend the image of the modernist short story.1 What follows here aims to add to this positive trend by observing an author that remains in the margin of the literary canon of the period. By analysing the short stories of T. F. Powys–especially their treatment of plot, of characterization and of the underlying theme of the ordinary—the article presents a body of short fictions that provide an alternative for the modernist re-evaluations of the short story form and of the conventions of realism.

2 T. F. Powys was by no means a modernist–neither his works, nor any participation in appropriate literary circles would classify him as one. His position in the history of twentieth-century British literature is difficult to determine. David Malcolm claims that “Powys is an original in the history of the British short story” (157). Charles Prentice, in his preface to God’s Eyes A-Twinkle (1947), notices that “it would be a mistake to attribute to Powys any systematic theory, either theological or metaphysical” (xiii). The unusual quality of his work and the idiosyncrasies of his biography ensure Powys a place among the substantially underestimated writers of the century. It is difficult specifically to indicate the origins of his prose, detect contextual parallels with other authors, or observe any influence he might have had on any other writer.

3 His originality has resulted neither in readerly nor in critical attention. His books are now mostly out of print,2 and a thorough monograph on his work is still to be written.3 Whether this inattention is caused by some striking limitations of his work (such as the obsessively consistent use of the same narrative strategies and an equally prominent misanthropy on a thematic level), or by the author’s relative neglect of publishing, publicity and writing circles, is difficult to decide. The size of Powys’ oeuvre is

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considerable, and its central part consists of over a hundred short stories, most of which were written in the 1920s and the 1930s (Hanson 104).4

4 It is not, however, only the time of their appearance that makes my placing of them in relation to the modernist short story a valid one. Above all, it is also justified by the author’s systematic treatment of a similar subject matter (the ordinary), his modernist- like insistence on form, and his appreciation of values alternative (polemical, non- identical) to the values of modernism. These features make Powys’ short fiction a good vantage point for the observation of the modernist short story. This analysis will focus on Powys’ negotiations with realism (“some dissatisfaction, some difficulty” [Woolf 904]), with regard to two basic questions that modernism also attempted to re-evaluate —the problems of plot and character presentation. Additionally, though the dominant formal and thematic traits of Powys’ stories may seem to be only of tangential relevance to the history of the modernist short story, throughout the present argument I want to insist that Powys’ texts are rich, though perhaps unusual, examples of how varied the twentieth-century short story is, and how much the fiction of a non- canonical writer may offer striking commentary on aspects of the fixed dominant group of texts from a given period.

5 An important, if not altogether central, theme of T.F. Powys’ stories is that of the ordinary. Presentation of the ordinary, in the most basic sense of the word (a sense quite different from the one we shall discuss later with regard to normative systems)— of human habit, routine, of laws of nature, of rules of the world, of recurrent situations —is not only a prominent thematic element in Powys’ short narratives, but also of modernist short fiction in general. This fact is frequently overlooked in the face of the usual range of issues that criticism of the modernist short fiction is concerned with (Olson 3): modernist difficulty, its elitism, its “perpetual fixation on formal attributes of literature” (Mozejko 12), its “broadly anti-materialist critique of modern mass culture” (A. Hunter 45), inter alia. Critical discourse also abounds in well-established analytical concepts which, though perfectly valid and useful as such, have been disseminated so widely that they now tend to obscure some important features of the texts in question. As it is, modernist studies (including modernist short-story studies) in a variety of ways have pinpointed two crucial issues that we shall address here: that of plotlessness and that of the representation of characters’ inner experience. However, as Dominic Head’s audacious analysis of “the non-epiphany principle” in Dubliners shows (37–78), such concepts when related to modernism are both explanatory and misleading: the textual material itself seems resistant to generalising simplifications. Thus, any analysis of ossified assumptions about modernist short fiction will benefit from new contextualizing readings that include non-canonical writing.

6 Defining the ordinary is a challenge, but the theme has found several insightful commentators, including modernists themselves. “[Poetry] has never been used for the common purpose of life. Prose has taken all the dirty work on to her own shoulders; has answered letters, paid bills, written articles, made speeches, served the needs of businessmen, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, peasants,” Virginia Woolf wrote in “The Narrow Bridge of Art” (906), where she prophesied the need for fiction to accommodate a new kind of the ordinary, different from the one responded to by “that cannibal, the novel” (907). To Woolf the ordinary seemed polymorphous, but at least one aspect of it required enhanced attention: “the mould of that queer conglomeration of incongruous things—the modern mind” (908). Apart from criticizing the materialist orientation of

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the Victorian novel in the essay, which insistently acknowledges neglected narrative material, Woolf draws attention to a major feature of the modern ordinary—its seemingly limited tellability (“Can prose, we may ask, adequate though it is to deal with the common and the complex—can prose say the simple things which are so tremendous? […] I think not” [908]). Concerned with the ability of fiction to encompass the subtle elements of the modern ordinary, throughout her short fiction Woolf tests the limits of prose that she delineates in the essay.

7 The philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who made major philosophical attempts to define the ordinary, notices another aspect of the problem of tellability: The quotidian is what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted and that of which all the parts follow each other in such a regular, unvarying succession that those concerned have no call to question their sequence; thus it is undated and (apparently) insignificant; though it occupies and preoccupies it is practically untellable, and it is the ethics underlying routine and the aesthetics of familiar settings. (24, qtd. in Olson 12)

8 Lefebvre’s observation about the “unvarying succession” inherent in the ordinary, compatible with the etymological origin of the word “prose”—from Old Latin provorsus “(moving) straight ahead”—poses a question about a different meaning of the tellability of narrative material. That is, does quotidian-oriented fiction possess the potential to generate readers’ interest? The questions of representation and of the purposefulness of representation are both critical to fictions of the everyday. Moreover, the problem of the interest value of a story material is necessarily linked to the difference between the ordinariness of what is represented and of how the representation is conducted.

9 Michel de Certeau, author of an important treatise on the commonplace (The Practice of Everyday Life), notices the artfulness of representation. He observes that “stories provide the decorative container of a narrativity for everyday practices […]. As indexes of particulars—the poetic or tragic murmurings of the everyday—ways of operating enter massively into the novel or the short story” (70). The decorative indexing of detail, responsible for Roland Barthes’ l’effet de réel (141–148), is one of the bones of contention in the polemics of modernism with realism. What is to be contained in fiction that is supposed to generate a more authentic “texture of human consciousness and the nature of experience” (A. Hunter 45)? The transformation and distortion of the ordinary within the material of literature has seemed to many, including the Russian Formalists, to be the essential feature of art (Olson 4; Shklovsky 4). But the degree to which the ordinary can be free of artistic remoulding, seems imprecise.5 The disputes of modernism with realism frequently miss the problem of necessity. Rita Felski addresses this matter in “Everyday Aesthetics”: On the one hand, the everyday is associated with habit, repetition, convention, the unthinking performance of routine activities—all those qualities frequently excoriated in modern art and criticism as indices of existential alienation or of conservatism and petit bourgeois complacency. On the other hand, an element of sheer necessity adheres to such elements of everyday living that the modern tradition of negative aesthetics seemed ill-equipped to capture or comprehend.

10 T. F. Powys’ short stories acknowledge the necessity mentioned above: they are strongly referential. Theirs is not, however, the straightforward referentiality of realism. On the contrary, problems of realism receive an unexpected treatment in Powys’ short fiction which, in many ways, offers an alternative to modernist approaches to plot(lessness) and character presentation. At the same time, Powys’

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polemics with realist fiction are also connected with other problems important to modernism—textual recalcitrance (difficulty) and social concerns (the mass versus the individual, critique of the bourgeoisie).

11 Anker Gemzøe writes that two reactions to realism could be noticed at the time when its conventions were questioned. One tendency is the rejection of narrative in favor of realism: the very recognition of a mimetic obligation towards modern reality similar to the motivation of realism leads to a denouncement of realist narrative as a conventional form that does not transmit reality but stereotypes. This is in line with the impressionist aversion against telling—represented by the sovereign narrator in the finalized life stories of the Bildungsroman, conceived as a linear development, as well as by the “improbable” intrigue plots of the romance and the adventure novel. The preferred alternative is showing—a semi-dramatic form with scenes, dialogues and related devices such as interior monologues (or soliloquies). Epic narration is replaced by “phenomenological apperception,” an attempt at a direct rendering of impressions (from specific, subjective points of view) while avoiding a logical and analytical rearrangement of the impressions. There is no (strong) plot line and the world is dissolved into cuts between points of view, fragmented sensations and an unseizable manifold of unfinished utterances […]. The complementary reaction is the rejection of realism in favor of narrative. The conventional conception of reality represented by the psychological and social realism of the nineteenth- century novel is problematized by the introduction of eccentricities and alternative worlds. This line continues and renews a long grotesque tradition including the fantastic tale of romanticism. (125)

12 These two kinds of reaction provide, indeed, crucial vantage points for the observation of literature that is sceptical towards realism. What I want to argue, however, is that Powys’ short fiction offers yet another different approach to the matter, and an altogether original treatment of both realism and the ordinary.

13 Powys’ stories are almost exclusively event-oriented. Summary of any random text will show that it contains at least one event of a high degree of eventfulness. In “The House with the Echo,” a friendship of two misanthropes is broken by the disappearance of one of them. “The Painted Wagon” features an unhappy lover who hangs himself from a tree. In “Suet Pudding,” a wife murders her sadistic husband. A moronic husband commits suicide in “His Best Coat.” Death, a total event,6 is presented in a great majority of stories. The principle of plot-orientation is not, however, as self-evident as it might seem. On the contrary, in every story the proportion of narrative material devoted to static exposition and that devoted to the presentation of change privileges the static passages. In other words, any event in Powys, in order for it to take place, requires a preceding thorough expository sequence to prepare the background for change. No norm is broken before it is carefully presented. Expository events are informative about state, not variation. The difference is discussed by Peter Hühn, who in his article on eventfulness develops definitions for both types of event: event I and event II: We can distinguish between event I, a general type of event that has no special requirements, and event II, a type of event that satisfies certain additional conditions. A type I event is present for every change of state explicitly or implicitly represented in a text. A change of state qualifies as a type II event if it is accredited —in an interpretive, context-dependent decision—with certain features such as relevance, unexpectedness, and unusualness. (1)

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14 The second category is, as Hühn himself notices, quite vague. It is closely connected with acts of reading: The difference between event I and event II lies in the degree of specificity of change to which they refer. Event I involves all kinds of change of state, whereas event II concerns a special kind of change that meets certain additional conditions in the sense, for example, of being a decisive, unpredictable turn in the narrated happenings, a deviation from the normal, expected course of things, as is implied by event in everyday language. Whether these additional conditions are met is a matter of interpretation; event II is therefore a hermeneutic category, unlike event I, which can largely be described objectively. (5)

15 Seen in a larger sequence, numerous happenings that are narrated in Powys’ short stories do not manifest the features of type II events. Much of what is presented in the stories escapes some narratological definition of event.7 The actions are either trivial activities similar to procedures rather than to situation-changing events, or they are examples of a character trait. But their role is significant. The commonplace background of repetitions increases the level of unpredictability (and thus of general eventfulness) of the actual event of type II. Fictional norms (determining which happenings are plausible and which are not) are established in the expository sequence.

16 Thus (and we are dealing here with a vigorous polemic with traditional realist plot- oriented narrative), type I events are the markers of the ordinary that Powys formulates in extreme terms by consistently promoting them as being as important as changes.8 He does so by highlighting frequency in the most rhetorically prominent part of almost every story—in the beginning. The exposition of “The House with the Echo” (1928) already offers plenty of examples: “I don’t know why, but I can never make myself respectable”; “I always rested at ‘Pidden Gap’”; “Mr. Dove and his daughter Jane were always the same, always loving and kindly”; “I knew that none of the so called ‘upper classes’ ever visited at Mr. Dove’s,” we read in “The House with the Echo” (House 1–4). The rhetorical effect of this insistence on frequency, and on the inescapability implied in the expressions, is that the attention paid to the mechanics of the everyday seems reasonable—if stasis is what dominates, the focus of narrators on it is easy to understand.

17 Type I events dominate in “The Clout and the Pan,” in which a family’s life, observed by kitchen utensils, seems shockingly simple. It is concerned with the moving of chairs carried out by spouses: “Mr. Keddle would have moved his hands as if to help her, though at the same time he used to move himself out of her way, and then sit, with a smile of relief, when the chairs were altered, as if it were he who had moved them” (Fables 6). Each day, we read, “as like to each as brother to brother–passes by in Enmore as well as all over the world” (8). The attention to regularity of habit is striking, when we realize that the main issue in the story is the silent conflict of the spouses, arising from their pedantic, maniacal attitude to the interior of their house. The procedure becomes, for them, an everyday practice and an anxiety-generating necessity: “Every morning Mr. Keddle let his hand rest upon the wrong chair a little longer, and Evelina, though she moved it at last, was slower in doing so” (8–9). The triviality of the situation and its commonplace repetitiveness point to Powys’ interest in trifling typicalities, but also illustrate Ben Highmore’s observation about the everyday as being based on the “repetition-of-the-same [that] characterizes an everyday temporality experienced as a debilitating boredom” (Highmore 8).

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18 The sense of destructiveness that the iteration introduces is visible in the story precisely when the decisive event takes place. The expository sequence is broken by the death of the husband. The event is introduced as laconically as possible: “When Mr. Keddle had by a few months overreached the span of life that is allotted to man, he caught a cold and died of it” (Fables 9). The disproportion between exposition and the narrative passage presenting the event draws attention away from the crucial happening. The debunking of eventfulness is all the more visible when one observes the state that follows the event to be another solid equilibrium. “The chair will stay by the window and the porridge will never be cooked again,” the dish clout ends the narrative in a way that manifestly rejects the possibility of change (14). At the same time, an escape from past habit is shown to be a simple solution to the wife’s miserable condition. The experience of the characters seems regular and simple (something always happens, then it never happens), and its presentation is dogmatic and untainted by doubt. Nothing could be more distant from a modernist dislike of clear-cut causality governing clear-cut event sequences. However, when one considers the story’s focus on an absurdly mechanical mania and its de-emphasizing of death as event, one notes that the definitiveness of event is undermined by irony. Foregrounding repetition in event sequences has the paradoxical effect not of adding to the eventfulness of the happening that breaks the norm (as it would do in realist narrative), but rather of pointing to the stability of situations. As it is, the wife goes on to live another series of repetitions.

19 The distinction presented by Hühn leads us towards a second problem. Proportion (stasis-ekstasis) aside, the type II events that actually introduce change are not always completely eventful. As a hermeneutic category, an event of the second type is only seen as such (as highly eventful) in the process of readerly judgement. Such judgment, to use Wolf Schmid’s thorough categories, is based on seven aspects of a narrative happening: reality, resultativity, relevance, unpredictability, persistence, irreversibility, and non-iterativity (9–12). Two of the seven features—relevance and unpredictability—largely depend on the rhetorical dynamics of the text (they are based on different normative systems, against which the reader confronts information about the event). In other words, a change of state functions in the narrative as (more or less) eventful only if it is of utmost importance to the fictional world (seen both against the backdrop of its intratextual doxas and of the norms of the real world) and if it violates a pattern of expectations (also constructed on the basis of various norms). The other five aspects remain purely textual—the way they are judged is not affected by extratextual norms.9 Moreover, dealing with eventfulness means thinking about what precedes and follows the happening, that is, about the stability/instability of the situation changed and generated anew. To talk of these criteria within the boundaries of a rhetorical analysis of a story’s progression is to actually measure its plot-orientation or plotlessness.

20 Examples of ambiguous eventfulness of happenings are easily found in Powys. In “Squire Duffy,” the realisation of a mistake is not explicitly shown to be of consequence (that is, it is not resultative) other than in the final sentence: “The Squire groaned” (House 25). In “No Room,” the death of Barker is no event at all; the condition of unpredictability is unfulfilled because the character, as all other inhabitants of the fictional village of Tadnol, has impatiently expected to die, and—when the time has come—he does so with pleasure. In the same story the final event is problematic because of its lack of completion. When Truggin, the sexton who looks after the local

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graveyard, diagnoses himself as having an illness, he expects to die and goes to take his place in the grave he had prepared for Barker. The norm of the fictional world is that everybody wants to die. However, the sexton does not complete the act of dying within the boundaries of the narrative. The narrator does not claim that he is dead. Indeed, it is most often the case that Powys’ laconic treatment of the decisive event results in an opening of interpretive possibilities. Hardly ever does the ending offer complete information on the resolution of instabilities. Happenings are mostly highly eventful— they conform with the general pattern of violation in Powys’ stories by destroying a previously established equilibrium, but their consequences are hardly ever discussed. A strong sense of definiteness adheres to events, but their consequences are inferable only on the basis of implicit information. It seems that there are things not to be talked about.

21 As these examples show, Powys’ treatment of event is laconic and subversive. Where states are presented, examples abound. When a decisive change takes place, brevity dominates. When a crucial happening seems to solve a number of textual instabilities, it is ultimately shown to be less consequential. Such an ironical attitude, in turn, is much closer to modernist practice. Head is polemical about the oft-trumpeted “plotlessness” of the short story in British modernism: It is true that plot is deemphasized in the stories of Joyce, Mansfield and Woolf, and this distinguishes their work from the more carefully plotted short fictions of, for example, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. But this de-emphasis is not a rejection: on the contrary, the adaptation of well-plotted story types is an important feature in the stories of Joyce, Mansfield, and Woolf, in whose works a consciousness of conventional story forms provides structure and referential landmarks, even where such conventions are subject to revisionist or ironical treatment. (17)

22 Similarly, plot (or event-sequence) is not a clear centre of Powys’ short fiction but rather a material which undergoes severe revision, also in connection with the rules of the ordinary. Alternating stages of equilibrium and disequilibrium show how prone each state is to change, and how volatile the change itself seems.

23 A similarly subversive treatment is given to characterisation. Powys’ characters are predominantly poor, humble, and in some way incapacitated.10 Again, extremity is a principle and, again, it is evident from the very beginning. Where modernists are said to render a varied, subjective representation of the inner experience of characters, Powys transforms the “old stable ego of character” (D. H. Lawrence, qtd. in Hanson 56) into a maniacally unchangeable skeleton of several attributes, or usually just one dominant feature. In “In Dull Devonshire,” we read that “Rev. Robert Herrick was an amiable man” (House 25). Other examples are easily found: “Mr. Duffy was proud of his name” (“Squire Duffy,” House 17); “Dr. Snowball lived at Bolen. He had lived there for ever” (“The Two Horns,” House 144); “The Reverend John Gasser was a believer; he was also a man” (“The Dewpond,” Bottle’s Path 203); “In all the world there lived no one who thought more of weddings than did Miss Hester Gibbs” (“The Seaweed and the Cuckoo- Clock,” Fables 43). Nothing could seem more definite than the authoritative declarations made by the omniscient heterodiegetic-intradiegetic narrators that predominate in Powys’ short stories. A fixed and permanent characteristic, announced usually in an adjectival predicate, is to be explored from that point onwards.

24 Because characterisation through definition is direct—it ascribes features to character in a textually overt way (Jannidis) rather than offering material for inference—it uses an informative pattern that promotes telling over showing, diegesis over mimesis, and

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critically depends on narratorial reliability and narratorial judgements. The rhetorical strength of the definitions in Powys is, therefore, considerable. Still, each narrative offers examples of characters’ behaviour to support further the validity of the characterising definitions. The examples are not sources of implicit information, but confirmations of narratorial claims. Additionally, in opening sentences as well as in entire beginnings, Powys makes use of totalising expressions (such as “never,” “always,” “for ever,” “no one”) and of aphoristic statements in the gnomic present (“Human beings are glad to be alive, some for one reason and some for another” [Fables 125]). Both kinds of utterance highlight the complete validity of expository information and enhance the static aspect of the stories.11 This simplicity is rarely departed from; hardly ever is there any detailed description of psychological complexity, appearance or mental processes. Where definitions about characters are presented, nothing else counts. Application of Joseph Ewen’s three axes of character analysis (“complexity, development, penetration into the ‘inner life’” [Rimmon-Kennan 43]) will inevitably produce an image of a Powysian character as stable and simple. If a character [X] is said to be [Y], there is hardly an exception to this rule in what follows in the text.

25 Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan notices that in non-traditional, post-Victorian fiction, “the economy of definition is grasped as reductive” (63). This statement is clearly true about Powys’ stories, where characterising definition is omnipresent. Still, as we shall see, the consequences of the proliferation of such economy are not the same in Powys’ short stories as in realist fiction. An extreme example of the reductionism introduced by characterological definition can be found in “Squire Duffy.” The story not only announces its interest in a fictional person in the title, but also declares it in the first sentence (“Mr. Duffy was proud of his name,” House 17), and it highlights the focus by devoting the entire first paragraph to an elaboration on the defined feature. That the simple statement is used in the opening establishes a norm in the fictional world. It is important because of the primacy effect—what comes first, is important.12 The feature, which seems to be the only trait of the character’s personality that needs mention, is later dramatised in a number of expository examples, which take the form of type I events and only confirm the undeniable—that the character is obsessed.

26 The heterodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator is typically authoritative (“he naturally had more than one question to ask” [17, emphasis added]), but manifestly allies with the character, as in the reported dialogue, where the narrator imposes his perspective on the words of the character: “During lunch at his club, Mr. Duffy inquired in confidence whether any other nobleman or gentleman named Duffy lived in the neighbourhood of Stonebridge. ‘He only asked this,’ he said, ‘because he did not wish his letter-bag to go wrong’” (18). The one-dimensionality of Duffy is highlighted by the presentation of his wife, who is equally obsessed: “Her only pleasure in life was the playing of hymn tunes upon the grand piano with one finger” (19). Humorous examples of the initial definition follow: “Mr. Thomas Duffy […] arranged his morning letters in row so that he could see his name written ten times. After doing so he nodded in a friendly way to the typed ones, as though to say, ‘That’s how it shows the best.’ […] He commanded Mrs. Duffy, in a tone he was practicing for the bench, to get some new calling cards printed with a more distinctive ‘D.’” (20). The routine of obsession is uninterrupted up to the point when it turns out that a local lunatic called Cooty, who has just died, was in fact called Thomas Duffy, and was therefore the squire’s namesake.

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27 The progression of the narrative from a definition of initial equilibrium based on unchangeable personality to examples that prove the validity of the state and to its ultimate violation, is typical of Powys’ work. Despite the lack of any narratorial comment on the consequences of the significant moment of revelation (other than the ultimate “The Squire groaned”), the story (through its rhetorical progression) promotes the event (the discovery of an insane namesake) as decisive. Still, however, one has to notice how relatively unimportant the revelation-event is to the state of the fictional world. The realisation that the lunatic and the squire have the same names is not said to cause any change to the situation, nor even to the character’s personality. Obsession has led Mr. Duffy quite far, but not to the point of reconsideration. A similar solidity of personality features is manifested by characters in different stories in all Powys’ collections.

28 Severe reductionism in the treatment of fictional figures excludes any psychological complexity. This, and other principles that govern characterisation in Powys, are indeed very distant from those accepted by modernists, e.g. from Woolf’s “ideas about the fragility of understanding and the intangible complexity of personality” (Head 10). I want to claim, however, that they are essentially predicated on the same assumption— that the human consciousness is difficult to penetrate, and the realist treatment of material manifestations of the personality is not sufficient. While Powys conducts a perhaps less ambitious task of not representing the content of the human consciousness, he takes an antagonistic position towards the conventions of realism so powerfully undermined by modernist fiction. In his short stories Powys renders the realist referential assertiveness completely untenable by “resolutely resisting […] the blandishments of realism” (Malcolm 157).

29 The use of direct definition is related to communicative clarity and, consequently, to textual recalcitrance. The issue of difficulty, so prominent in the modernist writings, is, again, treated in an extreme way in Powys. Despite their linguistic simplicity, and the dominance of explicit information in narratorial utterances, Powys’ stories contain a surprisingly large number of lacunae. A truly singular text, “The House with the Echo,” one of very few stories in Powys’ large oeuvre that make use of a homodiegetic- intradiegetic narrator, contains some strikingly underspecified points.

30 The beginning of the opening story of Powys’ first short story collection of the same title (The House with the Echo [1928]) characteristically focuses on the despicable. I don’t know why it is, but I can never make myself respectable. I have an inane friendliness to mould and to all those who touch and handle this primeval substance. The others, the many who have to do with the paper niceties of life, look disdainfully at me. This may be because I live in a mud hut, drink tea without milk, and have only once had a friend. I cultivate my garden. An uncle upon my mother’s side sends me a few shillings sometimes, that is all I have to live upon. My hut is as lonely as ever a hut could be, and my nearest town is Stonebridge. I have many peculiarities, one of the queerest being my interest in religion. Not in the religion that is preached in the churches, but in the religion that moves with the boots of a man. The religion that makes a mark of a nail in the mud. As to my friend, I must tell you about him. (House 1)

31 Despite the general linguistic clarity of the passage, substantial questions arise. Typically, the main characterological trait of eccentricity, which underlies all other themes of the story, is announced in a prominent place—the first sentence. The narrator’s admission of his lack of understanding of his own predicament parallels the

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initial situation of the reader and thus works as an implicit appeal for interpretation. However, even in the light of the textual material offered within the same paragraph, the validity of the self-definition is dubious. The narrator’s claim that he has had a friend seems to undermine his own previous statement about non-attainable respectability. “What friendship is possible without respect?”, one could ask.

32 The difference between the narrator and the rest of the fictional world seems to explain the inconsistency. Disparate norms are juxtaposed. What these norms are is not explicitly said, but the narrator seems to be at a loss in the coordination of them. As we learn later, he builds his own categories of people on the basis of the normative systems that they follow. Although the clash between “mould” and “paper niceties of life” is clearly open to interpretation (who belongs to each category?), it locates the narrator outside a larger social group (“the others, the many”), which appears to be associated with weaknesses implied in “paper.” It seems, however, that despite his separateness from mainstream society, the narrator partly relies on its norms, when he claims his “friendliness” to be “inane,” and believes his alienation to be related to a different way of conducting such a mundane activity as tea drinking. Both the mould and the tea without milk draw attention to the simple, tawdry kind of the ordinary that Powys presents in most stories. The problem of friendliness closely relates to the only friend, who thus appears likely to be connected to “mould” as well. Very clearly, some “earthly” domain is presented here. What it is, and how these specificities are to be developed, are impossible to decide when the first paragraph ends.

33 The interest in mould seems financially motivated, as it turns out in the following sentence that the man lives off the land. The image of the character is soon, in the third paragraph, complicated again by a completely idiosyncratic, obscure theology. Separateness dominates (“not in the religion that is preached in the churches”), but the actual nature of the religion is not precisely specified. The figurative statement that defines seemingly very concrete beliefs (“the religion that moves with the boots of a man”) is not helpful at all. A completely different effect is produced by information about geographical setting: “My hut is as lonely as ever a hut could be, and my nearest town is Stonebridge.” The statement underlines the separateness that has already been stressed several times, and supplies information about the town that, as it later turns out, does not add anything to the narrative, apart from the name itself. A signal of Powys’ parodic anti-realist convention, the minute detail is syntactically and structurally separate from the rest of the utterance. Thus, the effet de réel receives an ironical treatment: details abound, but they do not ornament or ground, but pose questions.

34 Self-contradictory utterances of the narrator appear at other places in the story and they indeed create a confusing rhetorical effect. When the narrator mentions his trip home from his uncle’s town (House 6), he offers topographical information with the diligence, it seems, of an ideal narrator of a realist narrative. However, he says he was going westwards, although from the previous paragraph it is known that his actual movement was from the north to the south. In the same passage, the speaker says that he was returning home when the summer had finished. Immediately after that he claims that it was “a wild autumn evening,” and adds that the rain was “of a winter’s night.” This preoccupation with the passing of time (change of seasons, the sun setting in the west) is characteristic for most characters in Powys’ death-obsessed world. The inconsistency is at the same time typical for the narrator, who makes claims that are

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only valid for an omniscient narrator: “My knocking reverberated through the house; it sounded in all the rooms as a knock will when a house is empty” (7). If we remember that the narrator did not enter the building, the factual status of the claim is doubtful. How can he possibly know the reverberation within the rooms if he remained outdoors when the noise of the heavy rain and strong wind must have been very loud? Similarly, in the last scene of the story, the titular echo responds to the second question asked by the narrator, but remains silent to the first. Questions arise again, and they are typically left with no answer. Still, they point to the original, complicated creation of the narratorial figure whose paraleptic features undermine the mimetic logic of the narrative,13 and put into doubt the narrating competence of the speaker.

35 The clash between linguistic clarity and interpretive ease is a prominent feature in Powys’ short stories. Analysing similar problems of narration on the sentence level, Susan Lohafer refers to Francis Christensen’s distinction between dense and thin sentences (Lohafer 44). It is specifically the neglect of sentences “with a high quotient of embedded information—and particularly of added free modifiers” for the sake of those with a lower quotient that makes Powys’ narratives seemingly simple (44). This simplicity, it often turns out, is highly recalcitrant in terms of interpretation. For example, contrary to what it seems, in the rhetoric of the whole narrative (i.e. in the light of what follows) the clarity of an opening sentence turns out to be only relative.

36 Lohafer addresses this issue when she writes that “the first sentence is, no matter how obvious in its referential function, almost totally composed of anticlosure elements; one could almost say that however clear its sentence meaning, its story meaning is opaque” (54). Story meaning for Lohafer is equivalent to deferred cognitive closure, that is, an understanding of the overarching meaning of the whole narrative. While physical closure (the end of the act of reading) and immediate cognitive closure (the understanding of the surface of the narrative) are easily achieved in Powys (language is simple, stories are short), deferred cognitive closure is unlikely to be complete at all. Here, then, we deal with another disjunctive parallel between modernist short stories and the work of Powys. “The cost of narrative information” (Barthes 143) in the “difficult” short stories of modernism is very different from that in Powys’ work, specifically because of his use of definition-like statements and of simple diction. This does not, however, mean that the textual recalcitrance of Powys’ stories is limited. It functions in a different way—it poses lacunae where it is difficult to expect them—and perhaps opens as many interpretive possibilities as modernist stories do.

37 Powys’ fiction is thoroughly problematic, especially when it comes to the issues of plot and characterisation, and to its general re-evaluation of realist narrative. The proliferation of passages devoted to the presentation of static material (uneventful states rather than eventful happenings) undermines the notion of event as central to the stories. The fact that “something happens” does not automatically and unproblematically qualify his narratives as plot-oriented. Also definition-based characterisation does not necessarily make Powys’ characters prototypically realist. On the contrary, the degree to which characterisation in Powys seems one-dimensional, ridicules the realist belief that personality is graspable in language. Additionally, the ordinary as a theme, seemingly unchangeable and obvious in assertive, linguistically simple narratorial utterances, is presented in narratives that contain impenetrable lacunae. The definitiveness of narratorial declarations becomes the object of ridicule of the implicit, ironic narrative communications of the implied author. The authority of

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the paradoxically very authoritative narrators is often doubtful. Furthermore, the simplification of the world is a source of comedy in the stories, but also of a bitter commentary on the human condition. A marker of Powys’ distancing from realism, the strategy of reduction is reminiscent of the conventions of the folktale. For instance, Powys’ Fables openly treat humans as faulty and worth laughing at. Both in these supernatural stories, and in other texts, the norm is always unstable.

38 To use the conventions in the ridicule of conventions—this modernist paradigm works perfectly well, if largely differently, for Powys. Originality in the treatment of characters and events has a de-automatizing effect for the implied reader, who is bound to detect narratorial inconsistencies, and see the representation of the world as based on mistaken promises of truthfulness that lie at the foundations of realist fiction. At the same time, the insistent referentiality of the stories offers a fresh view of the necessary component of narrative—the ordinary. The intensive focus on this subject, in turn, is flavoured with an inconsistent, but distinctively alienated approach to society. If realism is, as Astradur Eysteinsson puts it, “a mode of writing in which the subject ‘comes to terms with’ the object, where the individual ‘makes sense’ of the society in which there is a basis of common understanding” (195), what could reject the literary and social context of realism more explicitly than a story in which an idiosyncratic, unreliable narrator loves mud and an echo responds only to random calls? The Powysian treatment of literary context is, indeed, as bizarre as are his fabular ideas. By bombastically exaggerating the markers of an exhausted convention, Powys separates from realism in a different way than modernists do in their preference for the psychological, the inward and the minute.

39 As this essay has shown, reactions to realism are not limited to the two kinds Gemzøe presented. Partly rejection, partly adaptation, the stories of the ordinary we have discussed are a response that cannot be called a modernizing one. Powys’ response simplifies, reduces, ridicules and rejects in a critical mode. Claiming that the author is not a modernist is hardly sufficient; his short stories offer plenty of material to classify them as extremely distant from central ideas of the time. Yet it is fruitful to observe the short stories both on their own terms and against the backdrop of modernist short fiction. Such a juxtaposition may show that both Powys’ and modernists’ respective stories address, in innovative ways, some issues connected with plot, character presentation, the theme of the ordinary and the heritage of the realist narrative. While modernist treatment of these matters is predominantly based on rejection of the conventions of realism (and thus results in an aesthetic largely dissociated from them), Powys’ approach relies on a critical escalation—on a strikingly different application of what has already been exhausted. All in all, what these two kinds of fiction have in common is the manifest thematic and formal distinctiveness within their immediate literary and social contexts. Incidentally, such distinctiveness is not that distant from the modernist idea of the autonomy of a work of art.

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Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso, 2002. Print.

Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Print.

Lotman, Yuri. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. Print.

Malcolm, David. The British and Irish Short Story Handbook. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Print.

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Mozejko, Edward. “Tracing the Modernist Paradigm: Terminologies of Modernism.” Eysteinsson and Liska 11–34. Print.

Olson, Liesl. Modernism and the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

Powys, Theodore Francis. Bottle’s Path and Other Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 1946. Print.

----. Fables. 1929. Brighton: Hieroglyph, 1993. Print.

----. The House with the Echo. Twenty-Six Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 1929. Print.

Prentice, Charles. “Preface.” God’s Eyes A-Twinkle. By T. F. Powys. London: Chatto and Windus, 1947. ix–xv. Print.

Prince, Gerald. The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin: Mouton, 1982. Print.

Rimmon-Kennan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 1983. London: Routledge. 2005. Print.

Sacido, Jorge, ed. Modernism, Postmodernism and the Short Story. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Print.

----. “Modernism, Postmodernism and the Short Story.” Sacido 1-23. Print.

Schmid, Wolf. Narratology: An Introduction. Trans. Alexander Starritt. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. Print.

Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 3–22. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Modernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 903–909. Print.

NOTES

1. “The Short Story and Short Story Collection in the Modernist Period: Between Theory and Practice,” a conference organised in Rome in September 2013, acknowledged the need for a new, more extensive view of the short story of Modernism. Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Short Story in English, a collection of essays edited by Jorge Sacido, offers an equally fresh view. 2. Faber & Faber has released a series of Faber Finds, which at present includes Powys’ short story collections (Fables and God’s Eyes A-Twinkle) and novels (Innocent Birds, Mark Only, Mockery Gap, and Mr. Tasker’s Gods). Previously to this, however, only small independent publishers such as Brynmill Press published Powys’ work after his death. 3. One has to mention, however, attempts at a systematic treatment of the biography and work of the author, for example, William Hunter’s The Novels and Stories of T. F. Powys and Henry Coombes’ T. F. Powys, as well as several publications in the periodical of the Powys Society (http:// www.powys-society.org/). 4. Most of them were published between 1928 and 1947. A portion, however, including three important collections (The Market Bell, Mock’s Curse and The Sixpenny Strumpet), appeared posthumously, late at the end of the twentieth century (1991, 1995, 1997), through the efforts of Elaine and Barrie Melcher. 5. Liesl Olson is equally evasive about the problem, when she claims that “The ordinary is not always transformed into something else, into something beyond our everyday world; the ordinary indeed may endure in and of itself, as a ‘final good’” (4). 6. In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin introduces a way of seeing death as a motor that efficiently fuels narrative. “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death,” he writes (94). Death is a key theme to Powys–it is

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referred to in a great majority of stories, frequently either ends or opens sequences of events, and, above all, supports the implied author’s misanthropic image of man. 7. See, for example, the definition of event offered by Mieke Bal: “An event is the transition from one state to another state” (5). Other theoreticians define event in different ways (e.g. Prince 62; Lotman 233; Schmid 24), but the essence of their observations remains similar–the opposition of change and state. 8. At the same time the promotion of type I event underlines the repetitive nature of the ordinary. 9. Schmid explains that relevance and unpredictability are “particularly dependent on interpretation. This dependency has two facets: (1) reference to textual entities and (2) context- sensitivity” (14). What Schmid points to is the co-functioning of textual and readerly dynamics that comes into play in connection with these two elements. The other requirements (reality, resultativity, persistence, irreversibility, non-iterativity), on the other hand, can be determined on the basis of textual phenomena alone. If they cannot, as often happens, this is the result of information lacunae in the text, not of contextual possibilities. 10. The presentation of characters expresses some dissatisfaction with the condition of human kind. Most of the figures present manifest symptoms of mania, or of complete mental illness. This image of man is vaguely similar to that of the modernist protagonist, as described by Georg Lukács in “The Ideology of Modernism” and recalled by Jorge Sacido, who defines characters of Modernist fiction as “typically self-encapsulated heroes (undeveloped, insubstantial, lacking individual history) who inhabit a nightmarish ‘ghostly’ world and find no way out but a retreat into ‘psychopathology,’ ‘Angst’ and ‘morbid eccentricity’” (Sacido 6). Failure, limited power of action (Frye 33) and madness are typical of Powys’ characters. 11. “Definition is akin to generalization and conceptualization. It is also both explicit and supra- temporal. Consequently, its dominance in a given text is liable to produce a rational, authoritative and static impression” (Rimmon-Kennan 62). 12. “Primacy effect: our tendency to accept as valid the information we are initially given, even when that information is contradicted later in the same message,” Emma Kafalenos writes (151). 13. The mimetic dimension is undermined again at the end of the story, when the echo responds only to some questions, as if entering into conversation with the speaker.

ABSTRACTS

La qualité fixe du canon de la nouvelle moderniste britannique est claire – l’influence de Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Lowry, et Beckett est si évidente que toute discussion de leurs contemporains amènera à convoquer les géants qu’ils sont devenus et à utiliser des commentaires qui ont été formulés à leur propos. De manière à agrandir l’image que l’on se fait de la nouvelle modernistes, cet article se propose d’étudier un auteur en marge du canon littéraire, un auteur qu’il est d’ailleurs difficile de qualifier de moderniste. En analysant les nouvelles de T. F. Powys – en particulier le traitement de l’intrigue, les personnages et le thème central que constitue l’écriture de l’ordinaire – ce travail présente un ensemble de textes brefs et introduit une alternative aux réévaluations modernistes de la nouvelle et des conventions liées au réalisme.

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AUTHORS

MILOSZ WOJTYNA

Dr Miłosz Wojtyna (University of Gdańsk) has published on British and American short fiction and poetry. His current research projects are concerned with the European short fiction canon, and with British and Polish non-canonical short fiction writers. His new book The Ordinary and the Short Story. Short Fiction of T.F. Powys and V.S. Pritchett will be published by Peter Lang in Fall 2015.

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Spatial, Temporal and Linguistic Displacement in Kipling’s and Maugham’s Colonial Short Stories: The Disrupting Power of the “Colonial” in Modern Short Fiction

Jaine Chemmachery

1 While Kipling was considered as an anti-modern writer from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1980s,1 Maugham has been labelled “middlebrow” since the 1920s; both were seen as anti-modernist even if the dates of their published works fit with the period traditionally called modernist, i.e. 1880-1920. Both authors depicted two political and cultural configurations of the British Empire, but the colonial dimension of their short stories is less contextual than critical. It triggers questions as regards colonialism being the ghostly shadow of modernity2 and makes it possible for (modernist) disruption, to emerge.

2 Using Peter Nicholls’s famous statement about the plurality of modernisms and later works on high and low modernisms,3 I want to suggest that Kipling and Maugham may be seen as proto- and para-modernists. Both experimented, at different levels, with early forms of “stream of consciousness” or narrative instability in their short stories, a genre that is well-suited to formal experimentation. From their ex-centric positions— Kipling stood outside the English literary scene, since his first stories were published in India, and Maugham was external to the high literary scene4—the authors also experienced literal and figurative exile, while their colonial short stories precisely tackled exile. The latter may as such be linked to modernist short stories in which exile is also central–both as a trope and a narrative strategy—but they can also be read through Frank O’Connor’s concept of the short story being the “lonely voice,” the genre of exiles. Colonial temporality, as is performed in Kipling’s short fiction—and Maugham’s to a lesser degree, upsets the nation’s temporality or what the American critic Jed Esty calls “the progressive time of the nation” (17). Modernism is often said to

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be a critical response to modernity. I would add that it was a response to the multiple temporalities that existed outside the modern temporality of the nation and that colonial short fictions simply made visible. My contention, all in all, is that the writing of modernist short stories is intrinsically connected to English colonial short story writing.

Kipling’s proto-modernism versus Maugham’s para- modernism

3 The short stories of both authors are characterised by features traditionally seen as modernist, even though critics tend to overlook this aspect when they refer to Kipling’s and Maugham’s stories. For instance, the modernist touch of Kipling’s novel Kim (1901) has been commented upon.5 As the text recalls a fragmented self, the eponymous character’s self-interrogation about his identity reads: “I am Kim. And what is Kim? His soul repeated it again and again” (167). The statement immediately followed by its literal questioning suggests that any stable identity is impossible while the reduplication of the signifier “Kim” and the chasm between “I am Kim” and “what is Kim” stresses the division of the self into two and potentially more facets—a question which certainly preoccupied modernist writers.

4 The few critical studies on Kipling and modernism focused on later short stories, such as “Mrs Bathurst” (1904). In 1999, Harry Ricketts, one of Kipling’s contemporary biographers, wrote: “It was, in effect, the first modernist text in English. Deliberate obliqueness, formal fragmentation, the absence of a privileged authorial point of view, intense literary self-consciousness, lack of closure—all the defining qualities of modernism were present and correct” (288). But earlier Kiplingian Anglo-Indian short stories dating back to the 1880s and 1890s already displayed proto-modernist features. “The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin” (1887; 1888) tells the story of a young man who wants to impose his positivist theories on the members of his club in India: McGoggin […] had read some books written by a man called Comte […] and he came out to India with a rarefied religion over and above his work […]. It only proved that men had no souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry somehow for the good of humanity. (Plain Tales 81)

5 Yet one day, McGoggin is suddenly struck with aphasia and is only able to utter a list of words: “Perfectly conceivable–dictionary–red oak–amenable–cause–retaining–shuttle- cock–alone” (Plain Tales 84). While the sentence mimics an automatic process of speech, the dashes and the paratactic mode convey the fragmentation of Aurelian’s self and that of the English Verb too. The passage underlines the loss of the English power of speech in the colony as it is displaced from its original site of authority. Homi Bhabha famously underlined in The Location of Culture (1994) that, as the authority of colonial discourse was stated, the necessity to reassert it constantly decentred its very authoritative power. Such authority is indeed subjected to hybridity as it cohabits with other cultures in the colony and is consequently dissociated from its initial power position. The authority of the positivist discourse that Aurelian wants to impose on the members of the club is thus progressively disconnected from its original location of power as the speech is uttered in the colonial context.

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6 “In the Pride of his Youth” (1887; 1888) depicts an English civil servant in India whose wife and child remained in England. As the man struggles to support his family financially, his wife writes him a letter which reads: She was not going to wait for ever and the baby was dead and Dicky was only a boy and he would never set eyes on her again and why hadn’t he waved his handkerchief to her when he left Gravesend and God was her judge she was a wicked woman but Dicky was worse enjoying himself in India and this other man loved the ground she trod on and would Dicky ever forgive her for she would never forgive Dicky. (Plain Tales 160)

7 The absence of punctuation mimics the wife’s agitated state of mind while the polysyndeton creates the effect of an uncontrollable flow of speech in the short story. The genre itself is often associated with pressurised writing. Pierre Tibi highlighted this when he quoted Geneviève Serreau who said about her short stories that they “were born out of the need to freeze some vertigo governed by a sense of urgency–as if death were imminent” (50-51).6 In the passage above, no free indirect speech is perceptible as the presence of inverted commas indicates. The use of the third person pronoun yet signals a mediating instance in what “should” have been direct speech because of the very presence of inverted commas. So this is neither direct speech, nor indirect speech, not even free indirect speech, but some hybrid experimental speech that may announce, to a certain extent of course, Woolfian stream of consciousness: Ah yes, she did of course; what a nuisance; and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was that it? For Hugh always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party tonight, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of Jim’s boys. (Mrs Dalloway 9)

8 This passage highlights Woolf’s poetic hypothesis about the flow of human thought, which is underlined by the use of free indirect speech and the absence of strong punctuation. The writing suggests a non-mediatised transposition of a never-ending internal utterance and mimics the way thoughts can follow each other in the mind. This echoes Woolf’s explanation of the stream of consciousness in “Modern Fiction”: The mind receives a myriad impressions–trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and […] if [the writer] could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style. (160)

9 Polyphonic narration is also a common element between Kipling’s and Maugham’s stories on the one hand, and modernist short stories on the other hand. In Maugham’s short fiction, the narrator often delegates the power of narration to an intra-diegetic narrator. When there is no such embedded structure, narrative authority in Maugham’s stories is often upset as modes of focalization abruptly change. “The Outstation” (1924) begins with external focalization: “The new assistant arrived in the afternoon” (More Far Eastern Tales 52). But the voice of this external narrator is progressively mixed with expressions of viewpoints which bring the voices of specific characters to the surface of the text. A passage such as “They went in to dinner” is quickly followed by “He [Mr. Warburton] began to think he was unfair to Cooper. Of course he was not a gentleman […] And he was certainly good at his work” (More Far Eastern Tales 65). There is a move from external focalization to internal focalization and free indirect speech. As the third

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person pronoun initially refers to Warburton, the pronoun “he” in the second sentence refers to Cooper while the adverb “of course” is a direct expression of Warburton’s point of view. Some disturbance is created thanks to a blurring use of pronouns even though the effect is less troubling than in “high modernist” texts, as the overarching narrative structure remains omnipresent in Maugham’s fiction.

10 Even if Maugham’s writing style mainly draws on a traditional conception of the short story as plot-based, his short fiction domesticates modernist preoccupations by thematizing them. As Freudian theories circulated widely within Europe in the first half of the 20th century and many modernist writers were interested in them,7 some of Maugham’s short stories seem to offer an accelerated course on psychoanalysis. His stories particularly stage the liberation of unconscious drives as can be seen in “Rain” (1921) which evokes a sailing journey back to the metropolis. On the boat are a Reverend and his wife, both English, and an American couple. The Reverend’s wife once tells the American man, who is a doctor, that her husband dreamt of the Nebraska mountains on the previous night. The narration then focuses on the doctor’s thoughts through internal focalization: “He remembered seeing them from the windows of the train when he crossed America. They were like huge mole-hills, rounded and smooth, and they rose from the plain abruptly” (East and West 34). Any contemporary reader, familiar with Freudian theories, could easily perceive the erotic nature of the dream thanks to the focus on the doctor’s thoughts. Yet the narrator adds: “Dr. Macphail remembered how it struck him that they were like a woman’s breasts” (East and West 34) as if it were necessary to confirm the previous intuition.

11 Sometimes an ironic distance towards Freudian theories is perceptible, as in “The Vessel of Wrath” (1931), where repression and neurosis are tackled. Martha Jones is forced to spend a night on an island with natives and a disreputable British man. Ted Ginger is not only violent; he is also a drunkard and a womaniser. The succeeding jaunty propositions in a paratactic rhythm mimic Martha’s tense state of mind: Perhaps after he had his will of her he would pass her on to the others. How could she go back to her brother when such a thing had happened to her? Of course he would be sympathetic, but would he ever feel quite the same to her again? It would break his heart. And perhaps he would think that she ought to have resisted more. For his sake perhaps it would be better if she said nothing about it. […] But then supposing she had a baby. (More Far Eastern Tales 115)

12 Apart from slight experimentation with free indirect speech, an interesting phenomenon occurs. Exhausted, Martha finally falls asleep and wakes up on the following morning, unharmed. When Ted and Martha meet, the narrative voice explains: “She could not look at him, but she felt herself as red as a turkey cock” (More Far Eastern Tales 117). The use of “cock” is far from being innocent, especially when the next question Ted asks Martha is: “Have a banana?” Maugham seems to be writing tongue-in-cheek while the text provides us with an accelerated course in Freudian psychoanalysis about repression and the feminine desire for the penis. Maugham’s short fiction thus relies on both a popular reappropriation of modernist themes and an ironic perspective on the modernist interests of the time.

13 Major modernist themes such as cultural degeneration or the end of empire are also at the heart of Maugham’s short stories. As some modernist writers wondered about the future of the novel,8 Maugham’s short stories raise questions about culture as his texts, infused by Spenglerian theories about The Decline of the West (1921), represent the English colonies as a cultural no man’s land, even a dystopia. “Flotsam and Jetsam”

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(1940) describes the evolution in the heroine’s apprehension of the colonial landscape through time: “then, everything delighted her. She was amused by the river life and the life of the jungle, the teeming growth of the forest, the birds with their gay plumage and the brilliant butterflies” (More Far Eastern Tales 158). A happy colonial past is hinted at by the use of “then” and of the past tense but the colony progressively turns into hell, as the repetition of “hate” in the present tense signals: “How I hate this country. I hate that river. I hate this house. I hate that damned rubber” (More Far Eastern Tales 154). This is all the more significant because the short story’s last word is “hell”: “‘To hell with life!’ she shouted” (More Far Eastern Tales 165). Decline and degradation are visibly inscribed in the text, recalling decadent works and the fin-de-siècle movement, but the stories also highlight the exhaustion of a modern European culture by reappropriating modernist concerns from a popular perspective.

14 Yet, other types of displacement—spatial and temporal—operate in both authors’ colonial short fiction and destabilise the time and space of the English nation and the stability of its historical narrative. The notion of a spatial displacement appears particularly through exile which is as central to the works studied here as it is essential to modernist short stories.

Spatial and linguistic displacement in colonial short fiction: making way for the modernist short story

15 Exile is present as a trope in Kipling and Maugham’s colonial short stories insofar as they depict colonisers and planters who feel they no longer belong to any nation. In “The Madness of Private Ortheris” (1888), the eponymous soldier cries out his despair as he feels his mother country and the Queen herself have forsaken their sons of the colonies: Now I’m sick to go ’Ome–go ’Ome–go ’Ome! … I’m sick for London again; sick for the sounds of ’er, an’ the sights of ’er, and the stinks of ’er … An’ I lef’ all that for to serve the Widder beyond the seas … There’s the Widder sittin’ at ’Ome with a gold crownd on ’er ’ead; and ’ere am Hi, Stanley Orth’ris, the Widder’s property, a rottin’ FOOL! (Plain Tales 210-211)

16 Exile is epitomised in the theme of nostalgia expressed through the signifier “Home” and the opposition between “here” and “there,” even though the desire for the colonisers to be part of the nation is still present. Colonisers and civil servants are indeed linked to the mother country even if it is impossible for them to reintegrate it completely. Kaori Nagai and Ben Grant highlighted that “Home” was an absent presence which Kipling’s characters could only love from a far-away location: “Were they truly to return there, the nation would, in this sense, cease to exist […]. So it is only by expatriating themselves that these Anglo-Indian ex-patriots can truly love England, however painful that love may be” (192). Maugham’s planters also suffer from what Nagai and Grant called “expatriotism” to refer to Kipling’s Englishmen even if their relation to England is utterly broken. The planters of English ascendency in Maugham’s fiction do not belong anywhere, as one of them recalls in “Flotsam and Jetsam” (1940): “I’m a stranger in England. I don’t like their ways over there and I don’t understand the things they talk about. And yet I’m a stranger here too” (More Far Eastern Tales 151).

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17 The treatment of exile in Kipling’s and Maugham’s stories can be articulated with Frank O’ Connor’s old, but still critically valid, contention that “the novel can still adhere to the classical concept of civilized society, of man as an animal who lives in a community […] but the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community” (O'Connor 20). The short story, according to O'Connor, is the genre in which the odd voice may be heard, but it is the genre of exiles themselves.

18 Precisely, as exile is mostly thematized in Maugham’s short stories, it literally infiltrates Kipling’s writing: Ye black limb, there’s a sahib comin’ for this ekka. He wants to go jildi to the Padsahi Jhil’–‘twas about tu moiles away–‘to shoot s nipe–chirria. You dhrive Jehannum ke marfik, mallum–like Hell! ‘Tis no manner av use bukkin’ to the Sahib, bekaze he doesn’t samjao your talk. Av he bolos anything, just you choop and chel. Dekker? Go arsty for the first arder-mile fron cantonmints. Thin chel, Shaitan ke marfik; an’ the chooper you choops an’ the jildier you chels the better kooshy will that Sahib be; an’ here’s a rupee for ye! (Plain Tales 55)

19 Kipling’s “soldier speech” has displacing effects on standard English. Visual and audible defamiliarisation provides English readers with an experience of disorientation as if they were themselves estranged from their own language, though one should remember that Kipling originally wrote for Anglo-Indians in India.

20 But even if Kipling’s poetics can be linked to modernist experimentations with language and the notion of exile, it still keeps a strong connection to Victorian ideology. Unfamiliar “Englishes” in Kipling’s short fiction are mainly Orientalised English or Irish English. So power relations are more than often perceptible in such speech occurrences. For instance, in “A Sahib’s War” (1901; 1904) the narrator presents the speech of a Sikh soldier: What orders? The young Lieutenant-Sahib will not detain me? Good! I go down to Eshtellenbosch by the next terain? Good! I go with the Heaven-born? Good! Then for this day I am the Heaven-born’s servant. Will the Heaven-born bring the honour of his presence to a seat? Here is an empty truck; I will spread my blanket over one corner thus–for the sun is hot, though not so hot as our Punjab in May. I will prop it up thus, and I will arrange this hay thus, so the Presence can sit at ease till God sends us a terain for Eshtellenbosch... (Traffics and Discoveries 87)

21 The word “terain” is the Indianised version of the English term “train.” An effect of spontaneity is also produced by the sentences in which the character describes his slightest actions by resorting to frequent uses of the first person pronoun: “I will prop it up thus, and I will arrange this hay thus.” Sophisticated expressions such as “Will the Heaven-born bring the honour of his presence to a seat?” express the respect due by natives to Englishmen as they recall the structure of Indian sentences. The fact that a 19th-century English work should stage Indian characters speaking an English language visibly made to sound other can be interpreted in different ways. Stressing the spoken dimension of the Sikh man’s words refers to what Edward Said called the narrator’s “strategic position.”9 What may be seen as a narrative display of condescending superiority towards the natives is related to the racism that was inherent in the colonial system at the time. So even if the text makes it possible for the reader to hear, see and read alternative English languages, one cannot help wondering whether what is at stake is the desire to make the other’s language visible or the mere exposure of the power relations that exist within the English language. Kipling’s Irish language is

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indeed often caught within a more general reflection about nationalism and colonialism, about England and Ireland, about race and class.

22 A sense of unfamiliarity still emerges in Kipling’s short stories as voices decentring the dominant masculine/ colonial/ English voice can be perceived. In “A Sahib’s War,” the narrator evokes an event that occurred during the Boer War in which his captain, Corbyn Sahib, was involved. The native transforms the captain’s surname into “Kurban Sahib.” Such a transformation does not only account for the Indianisation of the native’s English language. It also represents a new enunciative possibility and conveys the alienation of the English subject in the colonies, its very exile, as it is estranged from his name which granted him stable identity and origin.

23 Robert Dixon offers an interesting analysis of a similar patronymic deformation in R. L. Stevenson’s short story “The Beach of Falesá.” The name of the narrator, John Wiltshire, is modified as the natives call him “Welsher” which associates him with a single British region rather than with Great(er) Britain. According to Dixon, “the native tendency to garble his name turns it into a hybrid, unsettling the point of its origin, alienating the British subject […] and leaving him in the paranoid space between cultures” (181-182). Against the colonisers’ power of nomination, Kipling’s text stages the native reappropriation of such power through Indian re-enunciation of English names.

24 It is then no coincidence that such destabilising voices should often appear in the literal margins of Kipling’s short stories, i.e. in the epigraphs. In the epigraph of “The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney” (1891) one can read: Wohl auf, my bully cavaliers We ride to church to-day, The man that hasn’t got a horse Must steal one straight away. Be reverent, men, remember This is a Gottes haus. Du, Conrad, cut along der aisle, And schenck der whiskey aus. (Life’s Handicap 11)

25 Displacement of the English language and of English narrative authority emerges from the intermingling of English and German within one single text, even within single sentences like in “Du, Conrad, cut along der aisle.” It is troubling to see the term “Conrad” emerge poetically in the writing while this signifier makes the figure of Kipling’s rival author, Joseph Conrad, appear in the text. It is all the more significant because Joseph Conrad may precisely be seen as the epitome of displacement as he was a Polish author exiled from the former Russian empire who wrote in English.

26 As regards the intrusion of voices “othering” the narrator’s voice, in “Beyond the Pale” (1888), one can read the following incipit: “A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black” (Plain Tales 127). Yet, the epigraph before the story is: “love heeds not caste nor sleep a broken bed.” This supposedly Hindu proverb contradicts the English narrative voice and suggests that other voices—voices whose origin is hard to delineate—may decentre the authority of the former. This is precisely where colonial short stories are interesting to study alongside modernist short fiction. The fact that moments of disturbance of the dominant narrative voice—as can often be found in modernist short stories—and other “Englishes” should appear in Kipling’s stories, precisely in textual

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fragments located at the threshold of short stories, is a “mise en abyme” of the troubling potential of short fiction.

27 The fact that many modernist short story writers wrote from the margins is no accident either. When one analyses the conditions of emergence of hallmarks of modernist writing, these margins appear blatantly. Some short story writers wrote from the physical margins of England—Joyce from Ireland, Mansfield from New Zealand —but some also wrote from other marginal locations. D. H. Lawrence, for instance, belonged to the English working class and Woolf certainly wrote, as a woman, from outside the predominantly masculine literary scene. This is what led Joseph Flora to write: “The modern British short story is often the product of ‘refugees’ in exotic places and situations, exiles of culture, of class, of sexuality” (37). Clare Hanson defended a similar argument in 1989: “The short story has offered itself to losers and loners, exiles, women, blacks—writers who for one reason or another have not been part of the ruling ‘narrative’ or epistemological/experiential framework of their society” (xx). It is as if writing modern short stories implied some form of authorial exile while the works themselves seem not to be able to escape it. Mansfield, who spoke about her feelings as an exile in England in her journals, wrote for instance pieces that were literally haunted by it;10 so did Joyce in Dubliners.

28 The representation and poeticisation of exile in Kipling’s and Maugham’s short stories on empire, combined with the authors’ marginal positions—respectively an Anglo- Indian writer trying to enter the English literary scene and a middlebrow author standing outside the Bloomsbury scene, make them interesting figures to study in a reflection about modernism and the short story. The question of colonialism in relation to modernity now remains to be addressed in this discussion about the link between modern colonial short stories and modernist short fiction. Temporality is precisely the site where these notions can be articulated in Kipling’s and Maugham’s colonial short fiction.

Multiple temporalities

29 This is the specific perspective colonial short fiction brings to the analysis of modernist short story writing. Kipling’s Anglo-Indian short stories were produced at a time of colonial expansion, between 1880 and 1910—what Allen J. Greenberger called the “era of confidence.”11 Maugham’s stories focused more on British and Dutch modes of colonisation in the Pacific and South-East Asia and were published in the interwar period, at a time when British colonisation started to be criticised by the Liberals and British power was already on the wane. The tendency of literary criticism to read these stories as ethnographic or exotic studies at the time and even nowadays accounts for the bias through which this type of fiction is perceived while the stories actually played with the conventions of exotic writing.

30 On the contrary, these short stories question the relation between modernity and colonisation through temporality and as such, can be related to modernist writing. While modernity and colonisation tend to be considered as simultaneous phenomena by postcolonial thinkers and imperial historians like Nicholas Dirks,12 these short stories show that colonial modernity is always behind metropolitan modernity; it is always belated compared to the time of London, compared to national temporality. Maugham’s story “The Outstation” (1924) stages a colonial who insists on reading the

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newspaper every day in the chronological order though he receives the London press with a six-week delay: “During the war the suspense sometimes had been intolerable, and when he read one day that a push was begun he had undergone agonies of suspense which he might have saved himself by the simple expedient of opening a later paper” (More Far Eastern Tales 71-72).

31 This echoes what Jed Esty calls “the never-quite modernised periphery” and can be articulated with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of the “not yet” of imperial history and of Western historicism. Chakrabarty underlined how India has been likened to an antechamber of history, “that which already is but is present only as the ‘not yet’ of the actual” (250). There is no single temporal frame of modernity, but a series of modern temporalities which never intersect and such variety is stressed by colonial short stories. The perception of the many modern temporalities in colonial short fiction also echoes Esty’s comment that “the colonial thematics of backwardness, anachronism, and uneven development thus become the basis for a non-teleological model of subject- formation–a late Victorian model of social delay and narrative distension that will, in the hands of Joyce and Woolf, become a hallmark of modernist style” (416). Such a crisis—the discrepancy between the “progressive imperial ethos of global modernization” and the facts of “uneven or under-development in the colonial periphery”—explains how late Victorian-early modernist fiction is linked both to the emergent modernist form and the apex of European imperialism (Esty 423).

32 In Kipling’s short stories, Sara Suleri also notes the omnipresence of young Englishmen whose lives are threatened in the colonial space. This may be interpreted as a reflection on the empire’s atrophy, the fact that the empire must confront “the necessary perpetuation of its adolescence in relation to its history” (111). The effect of conflicting times produced by Kiplingian poetics is further echoed by Suleri: “Imperial time” demands to be interpreted less as a recognizable chronology of historic events than as a contiguous chain of surprise effects: even as empire seeks to occupy a monolithic historic space, its temporality is more accurately characterized as a disruptive sequence of a present tense perpetually surprised, allowing for neither the precedent of the past nor the anticipation of a future. (113)

33 Colonial short stories anticipate the reflection on temporalities developed in many modernist short stories, for example in Mansfield’s “The Wind Blows” (1920) in which a dilution of past and present temporalities occurs. The narrative moves from the evocation of the time of the past event, the windy day on which the children went to the sea, to that of another time, the time of adulthood when the heroine remembers that day: Bogey’s voice is breaking. When he speaks he rushes up and down the scale […]. The wind carries their voices […]. It is getting very dark. In the harbour the coal hulks show two lights–one high on a mast, and one from the stern. “Look, Bogey. Look over there.” A big black steamer with a long loop of smoke streaming, with the portholes lighted, with lights everywhere, is putting out to sea […]. “Look, Bogey, there’s the town. Doesn’t it look small? There’s the post office clock chiming for the last time. There’s the esplanade where we walked that windy day. Do you remember?” (77)

34 A blurring of temporalities is all the more visible in this short story as the present tense is used in the sister’s speech even though she speaks about two different moments. While the repetition of “Look, Bogey” contributes to the blurring of temporal boundaries, other clues such as the use of the past tense in “we walked,” the reference

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to the wind with the use of “that” and the evocation of young Bogey’s high-pitched voice enable us to spot the time variations.

35 Contrary to Mansfield’s short stories, Kipling and Maugham’s stories do not solve the temporal disjunction in some final dilution of temporal boundaries. The depiction of colonisation in these short stories cannot be separated from the evocation of a disjunction which is characterised by effects of temporal acceleration or slowing-down. According to several Kiplingian narrators, young Englishmen experience premature rites of passage when they take part in the imperial effort. The narrator of “In the Pride of His Youth” keeps mentioning the contrast between the protagonist’s young age and the ordeals he experiences through colonisation: “There was the strain of his office work, and the strain of his remittances, and the knowledge of his son’s death which touched the boy more, perhaps, than it would have touched a man; and beyond all, the enduring strain of his daily life” (Plain Tales 159). The opposition between “boy” and “man” emphasises the notion of a temporal gap which cannot be reduced. Time is either accelerated or slowed down in colonial short fiction, always jarring with the present.

36 In Kipling’s stories, many male characters are also considered as children by Anglo- Indian narrators who often call them “boys.” At the beginning of “Thrown Away,” the main character—who is referred to as “the Boy” throughout the whole story—is presented as the son of his parents: “There was a Boy once who had been brought up under the “sheltered life” theory […]. He stayed with his people all his days, from the hour he was born till the hour he went into Sandhurst […] and carried the extra weight of never having given his parents an hour’s anxiety in his life” (Plain Tales 16). The centrality of time is made obvious through the repetition of the term “hour” as the signifier “boy,” opposed to “parents,” enables the narrator to grant the hero the status of a child. When the coloniser is not his parents’ child, he appears to be his wife’s. Many English women in Kipling’s stories indeed call their husbands “boy.”13 Marital tenderness gets transformed into maternal love as husbands are turned into men- children in Kipling’s colonial short fiction.

37 Similarly, many of Maugham’s planters are depicted as children, even babies, as in “The Four Dutchmen” (1928): “They were all big, with large round bare red faces, with large fat arms and large fat legs and large fat bellies” (More Far Eastern Tales 44-45). The three occurrences of “large fat” do not only tell about the characters’ stoutness but they conjure up the vision of “chubby” babies—which goes along with the idea of an empire that is to remain in its infant stage.

38 The fact that young men feel too old or that mature men become children again in the colonies echoes Esty’s contention that English colonial fictions of the modernist period —seen here as the time period between 1880 and 1920—cast doubt on the modern ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence. This also shows how colonial short fiction questions modern teleology and the notion of homogeneous time. The short story itself, as it recalls a fragment, formally conveys disjunction and signals the impossibility for modern time to be thought of as homogeneous or teleological; a preoccupation that is certainly predominant in modernist short story writing. What Kipling’s and Maugham’s fictions suggest is that there are multiple temporalities though the stories do not perform their melting into one another.14

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39 Not only is the temporality of modernity multiple but it is also more complex, at a time when globalisation affects the discourse around the nation and its borders. The representation of ghosts and doubles in Kipling’s colonial short fiction appears as a literalisation of modernity’s complexity. Colonial short stories make entangled duplicities visible as they are necessarily related to domestic short fiction or depict the figures of colonisers who were expected to be “more English than the English,” or even the time of the colonies as being belated compared to national time. But the many ghostly manifestations in Kipling’s short fiction, and more generally in colonial short fiction, echo the comparatist John Jervis’s suggestion about the uncanny dimension of modernity. Jervis wonders, as the uncanny is a state of disorientation, whether it could be a distinctively modern experience. To him, “Th[e] modern self, carrier of civilization and Enlightenment, thus emerges simultaneously as somehow shadowy, spectral” (4). In his book, Jervis recalls that Kant defines Enlightenment as “the freeing of the individual from his fears of shadows” (40). But he adds: But perhaps enlightenment is productive of shadows in the first place: to reveal, to cast light is to constitute the background as dark. In this respect, the Enlightenment would embody the paradox inherent in the Freudian uncanny, the twinfold process whereby hidden becomes unhidden as familiar becomes unfamiliar. (40)

40 The notion of modernity’s structural ambivalence can be used to read Kipling’s Gothic imperial stories “The Mark of the Beast” or “At the End of the Passage” (1891) which stage the white man’s incapacity to simply make sense of his colonial surroundings. Such helplessness is conveyed through the mention of ghosts or holes—both literal and metaphorical—that threaten the white man in the colonies and stand for the many cracks in the colonial ideology of modernity. Kipling’s presentation of colonial modernity as always spectral may certainly be connected to modernist forms of haunting and read in the light of Jervis’s statement about the uncanny being typically modern.

41 Such texts that operated outside the parameters of “modernist aesthetics” were devalued by literary criticism even though they engaged, at their own level, with formal experimentation or shared thematic and poetic preoccupations with modernist writers. Modernist short story writing cannot be separated from the production of more popular texts, particularly when the latter also experimented with the possibilities of the genre. Kipling’s and Maugham’s experimentations with the short story have many connections with modernist short story writing even if they remained ideologically linked to Victorianism or simply more formally conservative. Some major connections between the authors’ colonial short fiction and modernist short stories are the linguistic, temporal and spatial displacements which made short stories of the time —be they proto-modernist, para-modernist or modernist—particularly attuned to modernity and history. The study of the colonial dimension of these short stories throws light on the modernist preoccupation with spatial and temporal disjunction. Colonial short fiction, by suggesting that colonialism is the hidden side of modernity, presents the latter as a complex phenomenon to which modernists responded through their short stories in particular.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. 1994. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. 2000. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Print.

DiBattista, Maria, and Lucy McDiarmid, eds. High and Low Moderns. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Print.

Dirks, Nicholas B., ed. Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print.

Dixon, Robert. Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875-1914. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

Flora, Joseph, ed. The English Short Story 1880-1945: A Critical History. Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1985. Print.

Flynn, Nicole. “Clockwork Women: Temporality and Form in Jean Rhys’s Interwar novels.” Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives. Eds. Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 41-66. Print.

Forster, E.M. Rev. of Letters of Travel. By Rudyard Kipling. The Daily Herald June 9, 1920: 7. Print.

Grant, Ben and Kaori Nagai. “Ex-patriotism.” Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism. Eds. Kaori Nagai and Caroline Rooney. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 185-204. Print.

Greenberger, Allen J. The British Image of India: A Study in the Literature of Imperialism 1880-1960. London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Print.

Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions: 1880-1980. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985. Print.

Jervis, John. “Uncanny Presences.” Uncanny Modernity, Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Eds. Jo Collins and John Jervis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 10-50. Print.

Joyce, James. “Dubliners.” The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. 1977. London: Grafton Books, 1990. 21-174. Print.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. Ed. Edward Said. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. Print.

----. Life’s Handicap. 1891. Ed. A. O. J. Cockshut. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

----. Plain Tales from the Hills. 1888. Ed. Rutherford Andrew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

----. The Man Who Would Be King. 1888. Ed. Rutherford Andrew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

----. Traffics and Discoveries, Doylestown, Penn.: Wildside Press, 1904. Print.

Lawrence, D. H. “Surgery for the Novel–or a Bomb.” 1923. Literary Digest International Book Review 1.5. April 1926. 5-6. Print.

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Mansfield, Katherine. Selected Short Stories. Ed. Angela Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

Maugham, William Somerset. The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, vol. 1: East and West. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1932. Print.

----. Far Eastern Tales. London: Vintage, 2000. Print.

----. More Far Eastern Tales. London: Vintage, 2000. Print.

Murry, John M, ed. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Hamburg: The Albatross, 1937. Print.

Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Print.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. 1963. Hoboken: Melville House Publishing, 2004. Print.

Regard, Frédéric. “Réalisme, fragmentation et roman de formation: l’épiphanie du sens chez Rudyard Kipling.” Logiques de la fragmentation. Ed. Jean-Pierre Mourey. Saint-Etienne: Presses Universitaires de Saint-Etienne, 1996. 23-34. Print.

Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. Print.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Print.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 1920. New York: A. Knopf, 1947. Print.

Stevenson, R.L. “The Beach of Falesá.” Island Nights’ Entertainments. London: Heinemann, 1926. Print.

Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Print.

Tibi, Pierre. “La nouvelle: essai de compréhension d’un genre.” Aspects de la Nouvelle II. Eds. Paul Carmignani and Pierre Tibi. Cahiers de l’Université de Perpignan 18 (1995). 9-76. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. A Haunted House and Other Stories. London: The Hogarth Press, 1944. Print.

----. “Modern Fiction.” 1919. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. IV. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1988. Print.

----. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. London: Urban Romantics, 2012. Print.

NOTES

1. See E. M. Forster’s account of Letters of Travel in which he calls Kipling “The Boy Who Never Grew Up” and explains: “Eternal Youth may be beautiful in theory, but it is most depressing in practice. The world, perforce, grows older, and we must grow old with it, or lose touch. Kipling has preferred to lose touch. He has clung to crudity and silliness as if they were the Gifts of God instead of the accidents of boyhood. He has never re-examined the catchwords of school. He continues whooping, and blustering, and tomahawking, and sniggering, and throwing up his cap for the Chosen Race; and in consequence he cuts a curious figure against the shambles of Amritsar” (7). 2. I am referring here to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s definition of the concept in Provincializing Europe, i.e. the historical moment when ideologies such as modern democracy, but also the promotion of progress, reason and civilisation were formulated in relation to modern European colonialism.

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3. See Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid: “the division between the aestheticist high moderns and the materialist low moderns was not as marked, nor even as secure, as literary culture then (and has since) presumed” (4). 4. Maugham’s short stories were really popular among the general public but not well- considered by literary criticism. Many of his stories were published at the same time as works that became hallmarks of modernist short fiction. Joyce’s Dubliners was published in 1914 and Woolf’s A Haunted House and Other Stories in 1921. 5. cf. for instance the article by Frédéric Regard: “Réalisme, fragmentation et roman de formation: l’épiphanie du sens chez Rudyard Kipling” (1996). 6. My translation: “[ces nouvelles] sont nées du besoin de fixer un vertige, lui-même commandé par un sentiment d’urgence–avec la mort aux trousses.” 7. The reflection on the psyche in Woolf’s works or on primitivism in Lawrence’s highlights the appeal such theories had on modernist authors. 8. See D. H. Lawrence, “Surgery for the Novel–or a Bomb”: “Is the novel on his death-bed, old sinner? Or is he just toddling round his cradle, sweet little thing?” (5). See Katherine Mansfield as well: “What is it about the novel? […] the more I read the more I feel these novels will not do. […] It’s not in the least a question of material or style or plot. I can only think in terms like ‘a change of heart’. I can’t imagine how after the war these men can pick up the old threads as though it had never been” (Murry, Letters of Katherine Mansfield 255). 9. See Edward Said: “a way of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about” (20). 10. In “Je Ne Parle Pas Français” (1923), Raoul Duquette, the hero, explains: “About my family–it really doesn’t matter. I have no family; I don’t want any. I never think about my childhood. I’ve forgotten it” (Mansfield 146). 11. The 1880s was indeed a time of increased colonisation as many European nations decided to share the African continent between them all, what remains known in history as the “scramble for Africa” (Greenberger 32). 12. See Nicholas Dirks: “[Nation as a modern creation] also had its origins in empire. As the nation imagined itself through texts, maps, and consuming desires both for foreign adventures and distant goods, the colonial era began” (15). 13. In “The Head of the District” (1890; 1891) Orde’s wife refers to her husband as “her boy and her darling” (Life’s Handicap 95). 14. In that respect, Maugham’s and Kipling’s works are certainly closer to Jean Rhys’s. Nicole Flynn indicates about Rhys: “While most modernist authors reject the homogenizing force of clock time and fragment their narrative in order to portray an individualized experience of private time, Rhys embraces both these modes” (41). Yet, as Flynn adds, Rhys “is able to harness the new symbolic power of the clock and combine it with modernist techniques in order to present a simultaneously intimate and distant portrait of the modern subject” (42). On the contrary, Kipling and Maugham’s short stories present temporalities–the imperial/official time and the individual experience of time–as irreconcilable.

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ABSTRACTS

L’article propose de réévaluer les propositions de Kipling et de Maugham autour de la nouvelle afin de montrer dans quelle mesure les nouvelles de ces deux auteurs s’articulent au modernisme, de manière respectivement proto- et para-moderniste. Tandis que les tales de Kipling mettent en œuvre des hypothèses stylistiques et poétiques qui ne sont pas sans rappeler les désormais clichés de l’esthétique moderniste – pratique de l’ellipse, de la fragmentation, instabilité de l’instance narrative, etc. – les nouvelles de Maugham s’apparentent davantage à la domestication de thèmes prisés des auteurs traditionnellement étiquetés « modernistes » : les pulsions de l’inconscient, le déclin de l’Occident, l’instabilité sexuelle et identitaire, etc. En revanche, c’est véritablement la représentation de l’exil dans une écriture elle-même déplacée de son lieu d’origine, par le fait colonial, qui conduit à la production de nouvelles représentations de l’espace et du temps, symptomatiques de la valence coloniale qui sous-tend la modernité européenne, à laquelle les modernistes auront à cœur de répondre. En d’autres termes, la duplicité de la modernité, sa spectralité, mais aussi sa diffraction en de multiples lieux et temporalités, auxquelles l’esthétique moderniste s’arrime, ne sont pas moins présentes dans les nouvelles coloniales, ce qui permet de faire de celles-ci un jalon essentiel dans le moment de transition entre ère victorienne et ère moderniste. Le colonial s’apparente en somme à une clé de compréhension de ce moment culturel complexe qui mène à l’écriture moderniste telle qu’on la pense aujourd’hui.

AUTHORS

JAINE CHEMMACHERY Jaine Chemmachery is an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure Lyon and is currently teaching as a PRAG at the University of Paris 1 - Sorbonne. Her PhD dissertation was on R. Kipling and S. Maugham’s short stories on Empire and the relation between colonialism, modernity and the genre of the short story (2013). Her main fields of study are colonial and postcolonial literatures, Postcolonial studies, modernity and modernism, the genre of the short story and the making of the canon.

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“Flying Round Her, Across Her, Towards Her in a Pattern”: Towards a Materialist Historiography of Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction

Amy Bromley

[T]he sullen intermittent thud made her think that the very earth shook with the hoofs of the horse that was galloping towards her (“Ah, I have only to wait!” she sighed), and it seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying round her, across her, towards her in a pattern. […] Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep? Virginia Woolf, “In the Orchard” There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

1 Virginia Woolf’s short story “In the Orchard” was published twice in 1923: in April, T.S. Eliot printed it in The Criterion, and in September it was commissioned by Harold Loeb for the American Dada magazine Broom. It was never printed by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, where she only published one collection of short stories in her lifetime, entitled Monday or Tuesday (1921). Leonard Woolf published a posthumous collection, A Haunted House, in 1944, and although the story was available he chose not to include it in this volume. The story has received very little critical attention,1 but the contexts in which it was originally published are rich with potential readings. This paper therefore takes “In the Orchard” as a case-study through which to begin to re-think the patterns and connections made by Woolf’s short stories, reading it as an artefact in juxtaposition with other texts, and as one which also permeates future moments in Woolf’s writing.

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Contrary to the note in Susan Dick’s Complete Shorter Fiction (302) and the entry in B.J. Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke’s Bibliography of Virginia Woolf (270), which cite it as an unchanged reprint, the story’s form undergoes an important change between publication in The Criterion and Broom. This paper considers the implications of such a typographical and formal change in the contexts of the other pieces in the magazines, and explores its significance in relation to the form of the short story as a “scene making” which is also, for Woolf, a way of writing history.2 Finding a way to talk about the history of this story, and about its place in the history of Woolf’s works (and in terms of the Modernist short story more generally), requires a critical encounter with the idea of the historical moment itself and with historiography. Walter Benjamin writes that: Historicism offers the “eternal” image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. […] Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. It may be that materialist historiography differs in method more clearly from universal history than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its procedure is additive: it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. Materialist historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. (“On the Concept of History” 396)

2 Rather than assume that there is an historical truth, or true shape of the past that can be accessed and told objectively, Benjamin’s materialist historiography pays attention to the fact of the historian’s writing the past; that is, constructing it as narrative. In doing so, the materialist historiographer does not just “fill empty time” with a story or an explanation, but engages with the past as it concretely exists, and builds a narrative by placing these specific moments in constellation with each other. He does not start from a negative position in which the unknown past must be explained (“filled” with “a mass of data”), but rather from a positive encounter with the artefacts of historical moments which are illuminated in light of each other, and of the historian’s own time. In engaging with a writer’s body of work, we are writing it in (and in relation to the concerns of) our own time. Taking Benjamin’s critical engagement with the concept of history as “theoretical armature,” this paper is part of a larger thesis which close-reads the materiality of Woolf’s short stories and probes the historical moments which converge in that materiality.3

3 The publication of Woolf’s short stories in her lifetime alone, and in magazines in particular, brings them into contact with and opens up readings of various modernist moments that are not usually immediately related to Woolf. As will be explored in the case-study of “In the Orchard” (1923), one such juxtaposition is with the Parisian Surrealist avant-garde. This is a connection which has not been made in Woolf Studies and which underpins my larger work-in-progress; Benjamin’s materialist historiography also has particular resonance with Surrealist epistemological and phenomenological enquiries.4 We might thereby take Woolf’s short stories as a case- study in themselves, in order to question what is taken for granted in a linear historicism and canonization of literature, and of the short story in particular. What patterns (concrete and potential) are created by the lines which circumscribe the edges and juxtapositions of these stories? What others could we make, and what would be the effect of reading them in constellation with other modernist moments–for example, with the Surrealist avant-garde? Of course, Benjamin’s materialist historiography also allows for juxtapositions which are not limited to modernism, but for the sake of brevity and beginning somewhere, this paper focuses on unexplored connections

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within modernism. This is of further importance in thinking through the instability of the stories’ generic classification, and carries wider implications for the material history of the (modernist) short story in general.

4 For Benjamin, the actuality of a moment’s historical existence is in fact indistinguishable from its potential to become historical. He writes: Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus among various moments in history. But no state of affairs having causal significance is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. The historian who proceeds from this consideration ceases to tell the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. He grasps the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one. (“On the Concept of History” 397)5

5 To consider the history of Woolf’s short works as moments capable of being read in constellation–with each other and with other, lateral moments, including our own present in which we are reading them–is in keeping with Woolf’s own desire to avoid prescriptive boundaries of genre and form.6 From the vantage point of our “now- time,”7 this would be to reject a reading which places them in a relationship of linear progression, or indeed regression, with regard to experimentalism and which links them solely to her novels. To read Woolf’s short stories as existing always in a state of potentiality is not to remove the stories from their historical situations, but rather to make those contexts permeate them on a number of levels. Benjamin writes that: [The historical materialist] takes cognizance of [the historical object] in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history; thus, he blasts a specific life out of the era, a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method, the lifework is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but tasteless seed. (“On the Concept of History” 396. Italics in original.)

6 This raises the possibility of drawing out specific contexts in specific readings and opens up questions in terms of the ways in which we think about a writer’s oeuvre, and about the pictures and patterns we form in reading them. These approaches are not neutral (there can be no such thing), as Christine Reynier points out: they are “always already critical stances,” with aesthetic and perhaps political implications (7).

7 If “the short story encapsulates the essence of literary modernism, and has an enduring ability to capture the episodic nature of twentieth-century experience” (Head 1), this suggests that modernism itself (so far as we can locate “the essence of literary modernism”) takes the form of the short story. ‘The modernist short story,” then, might be a somewhat tautological categorization. Aside from the difficulty of defining “modernism” and “the modernist short story,” Virginia Woolf’s stories in particular cannot be easily categorised or historicized; nor can they be easily defined in terms of genre. It has been argued convincingly that the term “story” is itself misapplied.8 These difficulties are testified by the fact that there have been, to date, only three book- length studies and a collection of essays on Woolf’s short fiction.9 Jean Guiguet’s 1965 study tackles Woolf’s oeuvre in its entirety, placing the short stories in the context of the other works. He divides the stories into three groups by publication date: 1917-1921 (the most experimental); 1927-1929 (the “Mrs Dalloway” stories, more concerned with character); and 1938-1940 (the more conventionally realist “late style”).10 These configurations prove reductive, presupposing as they do a teleological progression or regression of experimentalism in parallel with Woolf’s novelistic work.11 Recognizing

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the inadequacy of this approach, he discards it in the same chapter, noting that: “If, indeed, they may have served as [experimental] exercises [in relation to her novels], they are something more than that” (331). He re-arranges the stories by formal and thematic properties, which also proves to be inconclusive. Dean R. Baldwin adapts Guiguet’s periodization of the stories for his own study, in which he acknowledges, but exempts himself from addressing, the question of genre. He declaredly works on the basis of Susan Dick’s choices in her 1989 edition of The Complete Shorter Fiction which, as Reynier points out, is not the final word and other texts have since been found (7).

8 There is, then, no single way of completing a project which attempts to categorize Woolf’s short stories; to identify them as such, or to identify a “Woolfian short story.”12 What emerges through these attempts is the opportunity for a material historiography which would “blast open the continuum of history” (Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” 396). These stories can (be made to) link with each other in a multiplicity of ways, and no single act of organization and taking stock is ever going to be conclusive.13 Following Benjamin, a reading of the material specificity of their historical moments would break individual stories out of a narrative which circumscribes them in a certain temporal and artistic place: in Woolf’s oeuvre; in relation to her novels, as more or less experimental; or as part of a particularly British, High Modernist, Bloomsbury aesthetic. They do not lose their historical situations, but those situations become less limited by a linear, causal progression.

Case-Study: “In the Orchard” (1923)

9 Only eighteen stories were published in Woolf’s lifetime, of which the Hogarth Press collection Monday or Tuesday (1921) contained eight.14 Magazine publications therefore account for more than half of the primary publications of Woolf’s short stories. It is important to engage with these publications as material artefacts in our present readings of Woolf, not only in light of their quantitative significance, but in the sense that magazines themselves visibly bring together numerous artists and pieces in a constellatory way, or in “networked collaboration” (Timms, in Brooker and Thacker 1021). As Edward Timms points out, T.S. Eliot’s Criterion was explicitly conceived as “a ‘phalanx’ of the ‘best minds,’ including English, American and European authors.”15 “In the Orchard” was published in The Criterion in April 1923, in the company of pieces including Koteliansky’s translation of “Two unpublished letters of F. Dostoevsky,” Herbert Read’s “The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry,” and Paul Valéry’s “The Serpent.”16 Woolf had been corresponding with Eliot about the story since April 1922, when she writes: I won’t anyhow send you anything now. I’m trying to finish off, and send to the printer, a long story [“Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” published in The Dial in July 1923]; and though I mean to do this in 3 weeks most likely it will take six. If I can, I will try and write something, less than 5,000 words, by Aug. 15th: I should very much like to be edited by you, but you know how ticklish these things are. When one wants to write, one can’t. Anyhow, you will not only have to fix the length–you will have to be sincere, and severe. I can never tell whether I’m good or bad; and I promise I shall respect you all the more for tearing me up and throwing me into the wastepaper basket. When are we to see your poem [The Waste Land]?–and then I can have a fling at you. (Letters II 521)

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10 This specific context and the pieces with which “In the Orchard” is juxtaposed emphasize particular intertextual connections in the story itself: for example, in Criterion, the Biblical resonances of the scene are illuminated in light of the serpentine imagery and the persuasive voice of the snake in Valéry’s poem. Its opening line, “Among the trees, the breeze lulls” (267), could be describing the same setting as Woolf’s story. Before reading any further, it should be made clear that the intention here is not to suggest that the other pieces in the issues are only there to work for Woolf’s story; due to the constraints of this paper and in making “In the Orchard” a case study, there is a danger of projecting a Woolf-centric reading onto the magazines. We have to take our bearings from somewhere, however, and in opening up potential readings of Woolf’s story in this specific context, by implication the same could be done for each piece in the issue, or in the whole run of the magazine, or between other magazines. The idea of the configuration is obviously not supposed to be centred on one piece, but in a paper of this length, it can only begin there. The connections made also need to be analysed in terms of their wider aesthetic and political implications.17

11 That the issue will be read from cover to cover, in the order of the contents page, and in one sitting, is by no means a safe assumption to make; indeed the freedom of readers’ choices and the potential for re-arranging linear models are crucial in a Benjaminian reading: he writes that “each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability” (Arcades Project 463). The order in which the pieces in the issue are read, whether they are all read, and where and when they are read, all play a role in bringing out each specific reading. There are infinite variations, and we can only ever approach, or move towards a materialist historiography that is one of many. The unwritten potentials are, at the same time, somehow implied in the writing of (this) one. A full study of the story in the context of each piece in both Criterion and Broom is far beyond the scope of this article (and perhaps not a desirable task for either reader or writer), so it will be read mainly in the context of one piece from each magazine. In doing so, we can begin to map out potential connections at the same time as actualizing certain readings by mining the finer details of a particular material situation.

12 Paul Valéry’s poem, “The Serpent,” was published at one article’s remove from Woolf’s story in Criterion.18 This was a piece which evidently intrigued Woolf, since she asked Eliot for a copy of the translation before correcting her final proofs, which he sent to her in January 1923: I am sending you herewith a proof of “In the Orchard” […] I am also sending, as I promised, a galley proof of the translation of Valéry’s poem [Le Serpent] which I discussed with you and Leonard. The thing looks perhaps a little preposterous unless one has a French version with which to compare it. I don’t think that the translation has enough strength to stand entirely on its own legs and I should have liked to print the French text in Criterion as well. […] I shall send you in a day or two a copy of the original edition, now out of print. (27)

13 The translation in question is Mark Wardle’s, and although the original French did not appear in Criterion, this letter suggests that Woolf had read both. The question of

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translation is pertinent to “In the Orchard,” which quotes from Pierre Loti’s Ramuntcho (1897), a romantic novel set in the French Basque Country; there was a film adaptation in 1918 by Jacques de Baroncelli, and a theatre production in Paris in 1910, but there is no evidence that Woolf had seen either. Although the question of direct influence is not being raised here, there is a linguistic resonance between the lines that Woolf quotes from Loti and the French text of Le Serpent: Miranda’s dreaming repetition of the lines “le rire des filles… éclate… éclate… éclate…” (150)19 chimes with Valéry’s third and fourth lines “Un sourire, que la dent perce/ Et qu’elle éclaire d’appétits” (177), after which the word “éclatante” also appears on the next page (line 21, 179). In Woolf’s text, in its situation in this particular magazine, Loti’s and Valéry’s texts collide, bringing together two distinct literary and historical moments to be illuminated in a constellatory reading.

14 Following the order of contents, the Edenic note of “In the Orchard” is retrospectively heightened as we read “The Serpent” and begin to reflect on the image of a woman tasting forbidden knowledge in the shade of an apple-tree. Reading “In the Orchard” as a re-telling of the story of Genesis by contact with Valéry’s poem, the Fall that it depicts is both the story of a falling asleep and of an awakening from a dream; the Fall of mankind is also a fall into language and sexual awareness. Eve is seduced by the language of the snake as she is sleeping, and in Woolf’s story Miranda also appears to be under the influence of words: Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple-tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger seemed to point at the sentence “Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde où le rire des filles éclate le mieux…” as if she had fallen asleep just there. (CSF, 149)

15 Is the location of the “just there” the orchard, or is it “the corner of the world where the laughter of girls glitters best”?20 In her story, Woolf presents us with the scene told three times each with different emphasis and perspective: each scene begins with the phrase “Miranda slept in the orchard,” and the reader is then placed in differing degrees of proximity to Miranda by changing linguistic positions. The descriptive instability of this scene (“her finger seemed to point”) is repeated in the subsequent tellings: “Miranda slept in the orchard–or perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved very slightly as if they were saying […]” (150; my italics); “Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep?” (150; my italics). In the Criterion version (reprinted in the collected editions),21 there is a single-line gap between each telling. We might ask what goes on in the spaces, where Woolf appears (as an absent presence) to be shifting focus; beginning each scene with a different tense and from an altered linguistic and narratological position. The gaps which frame each telling both break up and join together this story’s re-writing of the same scene; in fact, we might ask whether these should be read as three tellings of the same scene, or as three different scenes. Can this be called one short story, or is it a triad, or a series? In the version printed in Broom a few months later, however, these gaps do not exist. Whether closed by Woolf or by the editors it is unclear, but this typographical variant changes the stylistic and formal qualities of the entire story. As three separate scenes, the altered linguistic positions are concrete, immediately identifiable changes; as a prolonged piece of prose, the shifts are more slippery. In Broom the closing of the gaps

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is curious, since the spaces create a cinematic effect of cutting and changing of scene which would have been particularly apt in this publication, as we will see. Their absence does, however, bring out another more dreamlike quality to the story’s repetitious form.

16 The uncertainty about states of consciousness, straddling the threshold between the waking world and the reverie, plays into Surrealist epistemological and aesthetic encounters with the world. The Surrealist group around André Breton in Paris were interested in the collision of the dream consciousness and the everyday experience of the world. By destabilising the distinction between the two, they created works under the idea “that whatever might exist destroys at every step whatever does exist” (Breton 20; my italics). This was also an agitative political movement, which hoped that the re- contextualisation of materials by the emancipated imagination would lead to a collective revolution in consciousness and, ultimately, a reconstitution of the material world.22 Philippe Soupault was one of the most prominent Surrealists, who were inspired by Valéry and Apollinaire: all three feature in these issues of Criterion and Broom. Although their presence in these publications presents a strong likelihood that Woolf knew about Surrealism, there is no mention of the word “Surrealism” in any of her letters or diaries, nor references to Breton or any of the Parisian group. In their contents, however, these magazines position Woolf in the company of the Parisian avant-garde; perhaps with an understanding of her as part of the British contingent: Herbert Read, whose essay “On the Nature of Metaphysical Poetry” follows Woolf’s in Criterion, was a figurehead of the Surrealist movement in England during the 1930s, and socialized in the peripheries of Woolf’s circle.23 She was in contact with Read, as well as with Roland Penrose and David Gascoyne who held a Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936.24 Woolf makes no specific mention of this exhibition and would not have attended since she was absent from London altogether, recovering from illness. It is likely that others in the Bloomsbury group did attend, however, and that they would have talked about it. It is also likely that she knew some Surrealist cinema, at the very least through her brother-in-law Clive Bell, who was a “self-proclaimed English expert on the movement.” (Hankins qtd. in Humm 361). The Woolfs also owned books by two of the most (initially) prominent Parisian Surrealists: Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris and René Crevel’s Mon corps et moi, as well as works that the Surrealists themselves were influenced by, including the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les chants de Maldoror and Arthur Rimbaud’s Oeuvres: vers et proses.25 Since I am not positing any direct influence or cross- fertilisation between Woolf and the Surrealists, but rather juxtaposing parallel modernist visions, her awareness of the texts that the Surrealists were reading is in fact more appropriate than would be an overt knowledge of the movement itself: the Surrealist trope of the chance encounter is itself mirrored in a Benjaminian materialist historiography.

17 In superimposing one reality on top of another, the Surrealists’ experiments were both visual and linguistic, and they were interested in the materiality of the signifier in a way that is also present in Woolf’s work. In her shifting narrative positions in “In the Orchard,” Woolf is playing with the specifically linguistic construction of a scene (or scenes). In her memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf writes about her impulse to

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“scene making” as a way of experiencing a particular reality, indeed as the form in which reality is preserved in her historiographical practice: [W]hatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. A scene always comes to the top; arranged; representative. This confirms me in my instinctive notion–it is irrational, it will not stand argument– that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene–for they would not survive entire so many years unless they were made of something permanent; that is a proof of their “reality.” (Moments of Being 145)

18 The idea of reality flooding in is a Surreal image in the sense that it is shows a barrier between the external and subjective worlds being broken down, and the mingling of two realities. These moments where the exterior world intrudes with a shock are particularly able to be manifested and preserved in the form of a scene. Woolf writes that, “the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. […] It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole” (Moments of Being 85). This is particularly fitting to the short story form and to Surrealism. It has to be noted, however, that it does not follow that these are the most profound experiences–the scene is only capable of capturing the superficial or the sensory. Woolf notes that “scenes […] seldom illustrate my relation with Vanessa [Bell, her sister]; it has been too deep for ‘scenes’” (Moments of Being 146). Woolf suggests in this memoir that her historiographical practice, her recording of experience and the past so far as it can be written, expresses itself in the short story form. It is one which, in her hands, often presents nothing more than a scene, and which is particularly able to manifest the Surreal image and experience of the “moment of being.” In the case of “In the Orchard,” it is a scene told three times, in which the practice of writing takes on the simultaneous functions of recording and of manipulation and re-contextualisation.

19 The story shows Woolf editing before the reader’s eyes; testing ways of framing; bringing out certain aspects and diminishing others. Her typographical and grammatical use of brackets performs further parenthetical editing, by which she compresses certain points and re-frames others. In the first telling, she repetitiously describes “the school-children saying the multiplication table in unison, stopped by the teacher, scolded, and beginning to say the multiplication table over again” (CSF, 149). In the second telling, the emphasis shifts to the interiority of the character Miranda: “She smiled and let her body sink all its weight on to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table) (71).” The brackets introduce a break in Miranda’s interior discourse, containing a level of reference back to the first telling and emphasising the re-framing of the narrative focus. This is a technique that Woolf repeats throughout the story, referring back and recalling another frame of reference, but also highlighting the process of syntactical editing that she is performing.

20 The printing of “In the Orchard” in Broom not only focuses the idea of the dream by closing the gaps between tellings, but in the context of the pieces with which it is juxtaposed, also evokes a cinematic language of interpretation; Woolf’s linguistic modifications can be said to mimic shifting focus and camera angles, where the line

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breaks present in Criterion would have marked a cut and new take. Although this is not the case in the Broom version, its place in that magazine still allows us to read it in terms of the cinema (and to project such a reading onto the Criterion one: they become, however, two very different films). The shifting focus becomes more fluid and dreamlike in Broom, perhaps more in the vein of Surrealist cinema. The story is directly preceded by Philippe Soupault’s essay, “The U. S. A. Cinema,” which is also the first piece in the issue, setting the cinematic theme which is then continued by essays such as “Motion Picture Dynamics” by Robert Alden Sanborn.26 Soupault writes about the dawning realisation of the importance of cinema as an art form, and the beginning of its use poetically rather than as “a perfected mechanical toy” (66). This resonates with the closing of the gaps in Woolf’s story, which allows it to flow more naturally rather than foregrounding the mechanics of the writerly manipulation of language. 27

21 The constellations made in Criterion and Broom not only open points of connection out from Woolf’s work, but also take us back into her own oeuvre, making internal connections which are not based on a formalist idea of development towards the more or less experimental. The associated setting of the Garden of Eden in Criterion links “In the Orchard” to the loss of innocence and the Fall into language: in this light, the story also foreshadowingly echoes scenes from Woolf’s 1931 novel, The Waves. The story’s description of setting “compacted by the orchard walls” (CSF, 151) resonates with Bernard’s description of “Elvedon,” where “the lady sits between the two long windows, writing” rather than reading (The Waves, 11): Now we have fallen through the tree-tops to the earth. The air no longer rolls its long, unhappy purple waves over us. We touch earth; we tread ground. […] Now we are in the ringed wood with the wall round it. This is Elvedon. […] Now we wake the sleeping daws who have never seen the human form; now we tread on rotten oak apples, red with age and slippery. (11)

22 This is one of many potential connections that can be made with Woolf’s other works through associations external to her oeuvre, made by juxtaposition with other writers and texts in the context of the magazine. There are also resonances with Orlando: A Biography in the description of Miranda’s dream of the sea, interrupted by the feeling of ecstasy: [H]er fingers relaxed and her lips closed gently as if she were floating on the sea, and then, when the shout of the drunken man sounded overhead, she drew breath with an extraordinary ecstasy, for she thought that she heard life itself crying out. (CSF, 150)

23 The juxtaposition of the story with Valéry’s poem, “The Serpent,” might lead us more quickly to the Hyde Park scene in Orlando by linguistic association: If one looks at the Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon become just as big as the waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from ocean liners. […] “Ecstasy!” she cried. “Ecstasy!” […] And repeating “A toy boat on the Serpentine,” and “Ecstasy,” alternately, for the thoughts were interchangeable and meant exactly the same thing. (Orlando 187-188)

24 This type of association by conflating and condensing ideas through signifiers (including the sound or shape of words) is one of the principles of Sigmund Freud’s structure of the dreamwork, which hugely influenced Surrealist practices.28 The means

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of writing history in this constellatory way, following Benjamin, is also in line with the Surrealist imagination and its shaping of the material realities that it encounters. To point in conclusion to the implications of a Benjaminian, Surrealist, constellatory materialist historiography of the stories as a body of work, we might ask, “How does this play into the future situations of Woolf’s texts in published editions?” Discounting anthologies with other writers for the moment (as potentially infinite configurations), how do we account for layers of history which might only become visible at certain moments, in certain contexts? Benjamin writes that: [T]he historical index of images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding to “legibility” constitutes a critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (Arcades Project 463)

25 What is it about this present moment that allows me to read “In the Orchard” as a Surrealist text? Considering the variety of potential places of publication and patterns of collection, this analysis is of particularly illuminating and exciting significance to critical and theoretical engagement with the short story. In reading the form as a manifestation of the moment of being, as a scene making which absorbs a shock or captures a moment and makes it (become) historical, what happens when we juxtapose these “moments” as historical material artefacts, and what emerges from them when we place them in different patterns of relation? What can we read in them, or what images are released by the light of chance encounters, when “thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions” (Benjamin, Arcades Project 464)? In terms of Woolf’s oeuvre specifically, by rejecting a determined historical path of experimental progress or diminution (as was the prominent critical impetus behind initial studies such as Baldwin’s and Guiguet’s), we might take license to read them in juxtaposition with other, parallel moments of significance–for example with the Surrealist avant-garde–and it is hoped that we might thereby break them out of (and at the same time reinvigorate as moments themselves) Bloomsbury High Modernism, the Hogarth Press and the Modernist market, to mention a few contexts usually invoked in biographical and chronological readings of Woolf’s short stories.29 These have analogues in the study of the short story more generally, and as suggested here, we need to look at those contexts more closely, not in order to establish a “truth” about them, but to raise the possibility of a “unique experience with the past” (Benjamin “On the Subject of History” 396) in the connections that can be made, and the configurations in which we (can) read and write their history.

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NOTES

1. I have found only two articles with the story in their title: See Cavicchioli and Bonadei. 2. See “A Sketch of the Past” (145), below. 3. Other critics have made links between Woolf and Benjamin. Angeliki Spiropoulou’s sustained study of Woolf and historiography posits Benjamin as a critical and theoretical framework for Woolf’s concern with historical narratives. While Spiropoulou mainly focuses on the novels, I would argue that her work lays a crucial foundation on which to build an analysis of the short stories. See Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (2010). See also Pamela Caughie (ed.), Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2000). 4. See Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929; 2006). 5. See also Giorgio Agamben: “at the limit, pure potentiality and pure actuality are indistinguishable” (47). 6. The major studies of Woolf’s short fiction (as they define it) touch on the issue of genre, but as yet there is no sustained analysis of the question. See Reynier, Benzel and Hoberman, Baldwin (1989), Guiguet and Škrbić. For Woolf this unfixed state has a political feminist and socialist point as well as an aesthetic one: see Benzel and Hoberman. The implications of reading Woolf through Benjamin for the politics of her short stories will be a crucial consideration of the larger project. 7. Benjamin continues his section on the constellation with his concept of “messianic time,” with which there is not space to deal fully in this paper, but which is important for the idea of the present as “now-time”: “Thus, [the historical materialist] establishes a conception of the present as now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time” (“On the Concept of History” 397). 8. See Reynier (8-10). 9. This is not to discount the numerous articles on individual stories, but to point out the lack of (the possibility of) a conclusive, systematic study of the short fiction as a body of work. See Note 2 above (excepting Guiguet, which refers to a cursory chapter in a larger work focused mainly on the novels). 10. Guiguet (329-43). On Woolf’s late novelistic style and political aesthetics, see Wood. 11. Guiguet writes: “Although these dates only enable one to give a rough estimate of the time of writing, they correspond too closely to the periods of exploration in Virginia Woolf’s career for the coincidence to be a fortuitous one” (330). 12. See Reynier (7). 13. See Reynier, Guiguet and Baldwin (1989).

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14. Case-studies of Monday or Tuesday (1921), Two Stories (1917) and Kew Gardens (1919) are part of current work in progress. Although published under the auspices of the Hogarth Press, Monday or Tuesday was not actually printed there–it was set by F.T. McDermott and The Prompt Press, albeit with great difficulty due to the woodcuts. The only works of her own that Woolf set the type for were Two Stories, Kew Gardens and On Being Ill (1930). See Rhein and Leonard Woolf. 15. See also Jason Harding, “The Idea of a Literary Review: T. S. Eliot and The Criterion,” (Brooker and Thacker 346-63; and Harding). 16. Full contents: Charles Whibley, “Bolingbroke,” Essay, 203-216. F. M. Dostoevsky, S. S. Koteliansky (translator), “Two Unpublished Letters of F. Dostoevsky,” Letters, 217-226. Julien Benda, “A Preface,” Dialogue, 227-242. Virginia Woolf, “In the Orchard,” Story, 243-245. Herbert Read, “The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry,” Essay, 246-266. Paul Valéry, “The Serpent,” Poem, 267-276. Antonio Marichalar, Mde S. A. Middleton (translator), “Contemporary Spanish Literature,” Essay, 277-292. B. M. Goold-Adams, “The Obsequies,” Story, 293-302. T. S. Eliot, “Dramatis Personæ,” Essay, 303-306. Various, “Foreign Reviews,” Review, 308-313. 17. See note 5, above. 18. The piece separating them was Herbert Read’s “On the Nature of Metaphysical Poetry,” which makes significant references to Milton. 19. For ease of reference and consistency, I have given page numbers from Susan Dick’s edition rather than from the magazines. 20. My translation. 21. See Dick, Kemp and Bradshaw. 22. See also Durozoi. 23. On this matter, see Ray. 24. See Penrose. 25. The digitised catalogue of the Woolfs’ library is available at: The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-title Catalogue, ed. Julia King and Laila Miletic-Vezjovic. 26. Full digitised copy available at: Blue Mountain Project: Historic Avant-Garde Periodicals for Digital Research: Princeton University. See Broom 5.2. 27. The cinematic quality of Woolf’s work in general has been analyzed by many critics. See Hankins (351-375). 28. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and on his influence on the Surrealists see Durozoi. 29. See, for example, Baldwin (Art and Commerce) and Hunter.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article présente une analyse du récit bref “In the Orchard,” de Virginia Woolf, revenant tout d’abord sur ses premières apparitions (dans les revues Criterion et Broom) avant d’étudier sa

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dimension visuelle. En liant le récit de Woolf au mouvement surréaliste, cette contribution propose un point de vue alternatif sur les nouvelles de l’écrivaine, telles qu’elles ont été étudiées jusqu’à présent, et revient plus spécifiquement sur leur appartenance au genre. L’étude se base sur les concepts de Walter Benjamin d’historiographie matérialiste et de constellation – qui ont eux-aussi été influencés par les pratiques et les stratégies esthétiques surréalistes – afin de suggérer la possibilité d’établir de nouveaux rapports entre les textes de Woolf lorsque l’on introduit des cadres historiques et culturels différents pour étudier son œuvre.

AUTHORS

AMY BROMLEY Amy Bromley is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She graduated with First Class Honours from the University of Glasgow in 2012, and with an MLitt (Distinction) in Modernities in 2013. Her thesis explores Virginia Woolf’s use of short forms, particularly the sketch, and the project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has recently published articles on Woolf and Surrealism, Proust, and Walter Benjamin, and is a regular contributor to the Glasgow Review of Books. She is also currently co-editing, with Dr Elsa Högberg (Uppsala University), a collection of essays on Woolf’s Orlando. http:// glasgow.academia.edu/AmyBromley

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The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove

Andrew James

1 The twenty-three stories in the original version of Frederick Philip Grove’s Tales from the Margin comprise a cycle: characters recur and the locale is limited to Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta: the Canadian Prairies. This paper will examine how our perception of Grove’s cycle alters when the stories are viewed as tales. This is the label the author preferred. As he explained in his essay “The Novel,” while the short story deals with characters and incidents “excised” from the “social body” (It Needs to Be Said 120), the tale is concerned with the “border-provinces of human life” or life “on the margin.” Because tales belong to the oral tradition, the style of oration and identity of the teller are also important. Chaucer democratized tales by proving that anyone, irrespective of economic class or educational background, could tell a tale so long as it had sustaining interest to command an audience; Poe used the genre as an invitation to a fantastic, psychologically layered fictional world; and Washington Irving employed narrators who were dramatic figures in their own right, filtering his tales through them (Fallon xvii). These three elements–the levelling of class barriers, psychological penetration, and a subjective narrative style–are relevant to a discussion of Grove’s Tales from the Margin.1 Perhaps a fourth element is incredulity, for when someone says that he or she is telling a tale, we know that the truth is likely to be stretched. This applies to tall tales, many of which Grove told about his own life (Spettigue 21) in pseudo-memoirs, convincing generations of Canadian readers that he had emigrated from Sweden, rather than Germany, and inventing an alternate biography for himself.

2 Several early Canadian short story cycles helped to establish a literary identity for a particular group or geographic area by outlining certain basic characteristics of local inhabitants. Stephen Leacock, Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant all wrote cycles on the people in circumscribed locales which may be compared in this respect with works such as Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. If Grove’s tales had been published earlier they would have joined this group, but a cycle largely concerned with foreigners in the Canadian Midwest was deemed unappealing to Canadian readers in the 1940s (Sellwood 93). The story cycle was mothballed, rather than marginalized, for over forty years, and when it finally did appear its editor Desmond Pacey ignored Grove’s publication instructions. Although the author intended Tales from the Margin as

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a cycle of twenty-three tales to be presented in a particular order, Pacey deleted six and added eight later selections, then shuffled the resulting twenty-five tales. In spite of Pacey’s meddling, the overall message of marginality remains relatively unchanged: Grove’s characters operate on the margins of society, a position with which the author was also familiar.2 As a highly literate, university-educated German immigrant to a rural Canadian Prairie community, he was marked by his accent, erudition, and bookish English. He straddled two worlds, standing neither inside nor outside, and this nebulous position is reflected in the authors listed in Grove’s essay “The Novel” as representative writers of tales, as we shall see. It is also reflected in the tales’ persistent concern for the poor and the forgotten–those who struggle and fail to improve their lot in a harsh environment–and the rogues and scam artists who take advantage of the weak. However Pacey’s editorial interference was not wholly negative. Some of his additions provide further evidence of Grove’s interest in the psychological penetration of his characters while others are revealing of a schism that exists within the author himself.

3 Unlike Tales from the Margin, Grove was not, for most of his writing career, neglected. His story “Snow,” about a poor Prairie farmer who freezes to death in a blizzard, was the first piece of short fiction by any author to be published in the Queen’s Quarterly in 1932, and this opened doors for young writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Lawrence, who would also publish stories in the journal (Bell); it also offered encouragement to western Canadian writers that their voices could be heard in eastern Canada.3 Grove was part of the Canadian literary canon in English up until the 1940s, thanks to seven novels, a collection of essays, and two fictionalized memoirs. As a purveyor of naturalist and socialist ideals, his explorations of pioneer life in the harsh but majestic Canadian west warned of the dangers of mechanization and unchecked capitalism. But there are other extenuating circumstances that affected the reception of Tales from the Margin in the early 1970s, shifting the focus away from the contents and Grove’s message. Around the time of publication, scholar Douglas O. Spettigue was announcing to the critical world that Frederick Philip Grove was not an Anglo-Swedish immigrant born in 1871, but a minor German modernist writer named Felix Paul Greve, born eight years later in 1879. Although many details still remain sketchy, Spettigue had discovered that Grove/Greve, or FPG as he came to be called, attended university in Bonn, settled in Berlin in 1906 or 1907, and authored numerous literary translations, two monographs on Oscar Wilde, a book of poetry, a play, and two novels in German. Living the life of a dandy, he borrowed wildly until, burdened by debt, he was imprisoned for a year for fraud (Spettigue 95-97). A few years after his release he faked his own death by drowning, surfaced in America in 1909, then arrived in Winnipeg in 1912, calling himself Frederick Philip Grove from Sweden. Two years later he married fellow-schoolteacher Catherine Wiens, claiming to be a widower, though he was still married to Frau Else Greve. In the know about the drowning plot, she had moved to New York and was living her own bohemian existence (Pacey and Mahanti 18, 21).

4 These revelations shocked scholars and titillated readers, who thought that they knew all about Grove’s life from his autobiographical novels and memoirs. Spettigue’s 1974 biography of Grove’s German years initiated a renewal and shift in Grove studies, with researchers focusing on the man, and using the fiction to explain his life. There had been little interest in the author sometimes referred to as the Canadian Dreiser (Knonagel 246) for the previous thirty years, since naturalism had fallen out of favour

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and the critical focus had moved to younger, more sophisticated and socially diverse writers. It was also somewhat embarrassing that no one had solved the riddle of Grove’s past sooner since he had called himself “Fred Grove” as a Manitoba school-teacher, been known to his friends as “Phil,” a nickname for “Felix,” used the same three initials throughout his life, and kept the same birthday, February 14 (Pacey and Mahanti 21-22). It has been suggested that Grove had two very good reasons for hiding his identity. First, he arrived in Canada at the height of anti-German sentiment, in 1912 (Spettigue 15), and doubtless thought it would be easier to assimilate if he claimed Swedish heritage. The deception would not have been difficult to pull off since Swedish was one of five languages that Grove spoke fluently. Second, his criminal record in Germany, if it had become known, would have hurt his chances of acquiring Canadian citizenship, which he did in 1920 (Pacey and Mahanti 22).

5 Before discussing the cycle, the reasons for its persistent neglect require some explication. Although it was substantially complete by 1928, publication did not take place until 1971. Konrad Gross has suggested numerous factors that may have contributed to this delay: a preference in the 1920s for experimental American short fiction to Grove’s perceived naturalism; the limited number of Canadian magazines publishing short fiction; the fact that Grove’s stories often read better as short character sketches, which led to their critical dismissal; and the crippling effect of the Depression on the publishing industry (86-7). One of the attendant results of the long gap between composition and publication was that readers were not attuned to look for modernist influence. Because Grove’s German background was still unknown, no one knew that the Anglo-Swedish immigrant schoolteacher Frederick Philip Grove had once been the German dandy and minor modernist writer Felix Paul Greve.

6 In “The Novel” Grove says that the attraction of tales is that they deal with “the unusual” and therefore satisfy “our occasional appetite for the adventurous, the mysterious, or the horrible.” Representative writers of tales include: Hoffmann, De Quincey, Poe, Chesterton, Conrad, and (in some of his works) Hamsun (120). The appeal of each of these authors is different and for the purposes of this paper I will exclude Poe and Chesterton. Poe has exerted sway over almost every writer in the modernist era, and his influence as a master of short fiction does not require exposition; Chesterton’s mysteries, on the other hand, have little to do with Grove’s tales. We know that Grove read voraciously in English in his youth, and Chesterton was doubtless an early influence. But the other four listed writers have important connections to Grove that are revealing of his conception of his short fiction as tales. As an immigrant to Canada, writing in the language of his adopted country, Grove approached his subject with a different eye and this represents a connection to Conrad, though a more significant thematic similarity lies in their shared interest in exploring personal identity. Conrad’s fiction must have appealed to a man who continued to recreate himself in order to obscure his past. In the author’s note to “An Outpost of Progress,” one of the works in Almayer’s Folly and Tales of Unrest, Conrad says, “I fancied myself a new man,” though “It was only later that I perceived that in common with the rest of man nothing could deliver me from my fatal consistency. We cannot escape from ourselves” (Conrad vii). He maintained that his story was “true enough,” having been based largely on his own travel experiences. “The sustained invention of a really telling lie demands a talent which I do not possess” (vii). While Conrad presents his tale as fact, Grove similarly blurred the distinction between experience and imagination by fictionalizing his own life and presenting it as memoir. At the conclusion of A Search for

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America, published just two years before “The Novel” and concurrent with the composition of his tales, Grove explains the central character’s name: Why, so I have been asked, did I choose a pseudonym for my hero? Well, while a pseudonym ostensibly dissociates the author from his creation, it gives him at the same time an opportunity to be even more personal than, in the conditions of our present-day civilization, it would be either safe or comfortable to be were he speaking in the first person, unmasked. (A Search for America 513-4)

7 By writing from a marginal, rather than mainstream, perspective, Grove perhaps felt free to express negative opinions of Canada. After all, it is Phil Branden, not Frederick Philip Grove, who is critical of capitalist greed, the treatment of immigrants, and the laziness of the average North American.

8 It is not Conrad’s technique that is relevant to a discussion of Tales from the Margin, but his deliberate blurring of fact and fiction in tales about foreign lands in order to express the idea of being haunted by the past. In another of Conrad’s tales, “Karain: a Memory,” the titular character and a friend pursue a Dutchman who has eloped with the chief’s beautiful daughter.4 After two years they find the couple, but on impulse Karain shoots his obsessed friend Matara and spares the Dutchman, with whom the woman appears to be happy (38). Thereafter Karain is convinced that Matara’s ghost is haunting him. Similarly, Susan in “The Idiots” puts an end to years of psychological torture by killing her husband, only to find that she cannot escape his ghost. Her solution is to end her own life by jumping into the sea (84).

9 Thomas De Quincey probably made Grove’s list of representative tale tellers by impressing upon him that it was possible to use one’s language skills to write about foreign countries. During Grove’s writing apprenticeship in Germany, from 1900 until 1907, he published translations of De Quincey’s tales (Pacey 1974, 130), several of which are set in Germany, including “Klosterheim, or the Masque” and “The Avenger.” De Quincey also anglicized some German legends. The allure of E.T.A. Hoffmann, on the other hand, lies in his ingenious expression of a schizophrenic personality. In the story “Councillor Krespel,” we are told that “There are some people […] from whom nature, or some special fatality, has drawn away the veil under the concealment of which the rest of us pursue our follies. Their inner workings are visible” (173). This is something that Grove aspired to in some of his psychological tales, as we shall see. Hoffmann lays bare the souls of his characters in order to point to a duality in heart or mind. Sometimes the point is made literally, as in “The Choosing of the Bride,” when the goldsmith changes his face to that of a fox (352). At other times, this duality is borne from the unbridled desire, or mania, for literature, art, wealth, something which we think will please us more than love (411). Thus, when Grove listed representative tellers of tales in “The Novel” he was helping us to understand how he conceived of his own short fiction. His repeated lies, exaggerations, and fabrications about his own life are indeed indicative of “some deep-felt need to fictionalize his background” (Pacey and Mahanti, 19), and when he wrote his tales, he had in mind literary predecessors who had stood outside, writing about other worlds as a means of exploring their own identities. There is a sense in which the term “tale,” more so than “story,” implies an exoticism that goes beyond the realm of everyday experience. Conrad and De Quincey chose to write about foreign lands, and Hoffmann introduced elements of the fantastic to distinguish his fictional world from reality. And for Grove, immigrant life on the Prairies must have seemed fantastic, himself as much of an outsider as Conrad journeying down an African river. Thus, the preference for the term “tale” over “story”

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draws attention to Grove’s position as author in relation to his material that might not otherwise be readily apparent.

10 When Grove’s friend, the scholar Desmond Pacey, unearthed the typescript of Tales from the Margin at the University of Manitoba’s archives, he discovered that on the table of contents page Grove had divided the twenty-three tales into four groups. The first group of nine tales focuses on the arrival of settlers in Prairie communities; the second group of ten looks at the communities after settlement; greed and the obsessive pursuit of material wealth are the themes in the third group of three tales; and the final group is a single tale, a parable that reiterates the message of the previous twenty-two. Grove included the following written directive: “The above arrangement in groups is intentional and should be adhered to by the printer. The author.” Disregarding the directive, Pacey selected and shuffled seventeen of the tales, adding another eight later works, and presenting it under the title: Tales from the Margin: Selected Stories of Frederick Philip Grove. Pacey defended his heavy-handed editing in the introduction. He admitted, “It might be suggested that, in offering this collection of Grove’s short stories to the public, I should have followed his own selection in the typescript version,” (3) but felt that eight other stories, most of which had been written after 1933 and placed in magazines, were of superior quality. Prior publication, he argued, was proof of merit (4). He makes the rather audacious claim that the four stories dropped from the cycle —“Bachelors All,” “The Deserter,” “Foreigners,” and “The Heir”—“are almost certainly early and unrevised stories” since three of the four had only ever been printed in the local Winnipeg Tribune Magazine (4). The downside of Pacey’s meddling was that the integrity of a focused study of the immigrant experience, written during Grove’s first sixteen years in Canada, had been compromised. Some of Pacey’s selections betray a disproportionate interest in Grove’s private life. “The Desert” is about a female teacher who at last agrees to marry, but without surrendering “her own true life” (77). Grove too had married a teaching colleague, Catherine Wiens. While this tale’s locale—the Prairies–fits the cycle, its subject matter does not. Two clear geographic anomalies are “Riders” set during the Depression in Ontario, and “The Boat,” which takes place in Europe before the turn of the century, and explores a young boy’s tangled relations with his parents. From an artistic standpoint, the addition of “Herefords in the Wilderness” is unfortunate since it repeats a scene from another tale in which an old man wearing nothing but an overcoat and trousers gives the storekeeper Kalad four eggs in exchange for tea.

11 While some of Pacey’s editorial additions do detract from the thematic unity of the cycle, two others—“A Poor Defenceless Widow” and “The Spendthrift”—help in understanding Grove’s modernist preoccupation with human psychology. In the former tale, first published in Saturday Night in 1932, Mrs Messinger must pay $4000 in income tax and she is determined to enlist the help of Mr Higginbotham, the mayor of Purlieu, Manitoba (43). The mayor is described as “a prisoner in his office” because the persistent widow refuses to leave until he has met with her and agreed to offer assistance. Neither the setting nor the focus on financial issues is problematic, but the story tells us nothing about homesteaders, immigrants, or life on the land. Peripherally at least, the latter tale, “The Spendthrift,” has to do with life after settlement. Its central character is Norman Walker, a farmer without capital who happily receives a succession of loans without realizing that he is becoming the banker’s “slave” (179). This is one of the better stories not included in the original typescript because of its psychological depth. Once Norman becomes convinced by his older and wiser brother

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John of his impending ruin, he spends with increasing abandon, thinking, “what’s the use?” (180). Norman, John, and the other six Walker children are brought together by a will, and Grove uses the occasion to return to one of his favourite themes: the divisive effect of money on family relations. Grove’s genius emerges in the complexity of Norman’s portrayal. While he makes rash decisions and acts with false bravado, we discover that he secretly longs for the approval of his siblings and has become convinced at the family gathering that he will gain sister Clara’s. When she cannot support his decision to sacrifice a $5000 future payment for $3000 immediate cash, he becomes furious (191).

12 The passive aggression of Norman Walker and Mrs Messinger is fascinating. Although Grove consistently sides with the underdog, we never feel that Norman and the widow are victims; our attention is drawn to their blindness, and the unfortunate fact that they drive others away through their strong desire for empathy and support. In one of the stories in the second grouping of tales, Grove employs the same pattern to enlist the reader’s sympathies. “The Lumberjack” opens with a critique of the feeling of smug superiority that established Canadians have in relation to immigrants. This is reflected in Abe Standish calling his Swedish boss “Petterson,” without “Mr.,” and his eagerness to loaf (88). As the story progresses, Abe’s brother Alph catches typoid and it affects his brain, making him susceptible to fits of lunacy (89-91). Though the boss Lars Petterson has come to hate Abe for his laziness and attitude, after he learns of Alph’s fits and institutionalization his attitude changes. The Standish brothers used to be terrors of a somewhat acceptable laddish sort—drinking, womanizing, full of life but lacking in maturity—but now they are psychologically broken. Lars wonders if this is what the wilds of Canada can do to a man, and his lament concludes the tale: “To make a man out of this boy, another boy had to go insane!” (94). By the end of the tale the reader has forgotten the initial complaints of discrimination against immigrants, but retains the message that nothing short of a personal disaster can make some people change their self-destructive ways.

13 A recurring theme in Grove’s cycle is that respect must be earned, and this is a by- product of the author’s interest in personal identity. In Tales from the Margin, respectable characters are, however, in the minority, for Grove’s view remains pessimistic, and perhaps nihilistic: over and over we are shown that, given the chance, the strong will always exploit the weak. Scam artists, salesmen, and heartless businessmen are censured by Grove while the few thrifty, honest, and hard-working characters are singled out for praise. This message reflects his socialist political position–he stood for election for the forerunner of the New Democratic Party, the CCF, in the Ontario election in 1943 (Chen 24)–while also allowing us a glimpse of the author retracing and rejecting his own past. He wanted to leave behind his days as a dandy and spendthrift in Germany, crippled by debts, embarrassed and humbled by a year in prison for fraud, and must have felt that he had surfaced reborn in the Canadian Prairies. While he may have “died out of one culture and into another,” as Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch neatly puts it (70), the past was not completely buried. In his tales he espouses the principles of honesty, thrift, and hard-work with all the fervour of a proselytizing reformed sinner, or an alcoholic warning against the bottle.

14 Characters in two other tales tell us more about the kind of man Grove endeavoured to become in Canada. Dave Chisholm in “The Midwife” has been married to a schoolteacher for six or seven years and he has children. Before he married, Dave and a

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friend, Doyle, had often been to town, “talking, disputing, and chaffing each other, and spending money recklessly” (196). The divergence of their paths is expressed in the town’s lights. “To Dave, the settled farmer, these lights symbolized distance and far- bound traffic,” says the narrator, though for Doyle, who continues to live in “single blessedness” (196), they have different connotations. Dave and his high-spirited friend are representations of Grove and Greve; if Dave sometimes wonders whether he or Doyle is happier, Grove must also have reflected on the difference between a profligate European life full of artistic stimulation and a quiet life in a Canadian cultural backwater.5 Dave Chisholm is a responsible family man who helps his neighbours in times of need and is unfailingly optimistic. When he experiences troubles with his wagon on a muddy road, he says, “While there’s life, there’s hope; and while hope lasts, it isn’t all wrong.” And after the wagon ventures into a watery ditch, leaving him drenched, the narrator enters into this spirit of optimism, referring to him as “freshly washed” (205). The narrator of “The Extra Man,” a Pacey addition from the 1930s set in Ontario, represents another version of Grove. It is only four pages long and written in a direct, conversational tone. The narrator is a farmer and writer (216) who is contrasted with a newly arrived English immigrant whose real name is protected, giving the tale an even stronger sense of verisimilitude. The narrator offers work to “Art,” a good- natured, hapless, lazy Cockney aspiring to be a writer. This does not interest the narrator, and he comments wryly, “I did not exactly ‘see myself’ discussing the principles of composition with my hired man while pitching hay” (216). Art is impressed by the beauty of nature and the narrator admits, “for all I knew he might be a true poet,” but he proves to be useless on the farm. He is unable to distinguish between beans and weeds during hoeing (218) and he replants ripe burs by burying them when he has been asked to uproot and dispose of them (219). The suggestion is that other characteristics besides congeniality are required to succeed in this harsh rural environment. But in calling the immigrant “Art” and emphasizing his dreamy impracticality, we can see Grove justifying his own rejection of bohemianism, or art for its own sake, and the decision to write about his experiences on the land. There is also a degree of wish-fulfilment in Grove’s self-depiction as the knowledgeable and capable farmer. We know that Grove was a schoolteacher who was not endowed with physical strength; while he admired self-sufficiency and the ability to live in harmony with one’s environment, “he was,” according to his brother-in-law, John Wiens, “no farmer” (quoted in Spettigue 197).

15 We can also glimpse Grove in the sometimes awkward phrasings, bookish language, and arcane expressions that occur with just enough frequency to upset his ordinarily lucid, stripped-down prose. The narrator in “The Midwife” refers to immigrants who learn to speak English fluently though “their phrases and idioms had remained German,” and Dave Chisholm’s use of the phrase “It makes me nothing out” is offered as an example. Dave resembles the author in his speech patterns and reading tastes: Tolstoy, Swift, Thoreau, and Hamsun occupy his bookshelf (193). The occasional patches of purple prose and arcane vocabulary in the tales do hint at a language learned through study rather than natural usage. The introduction of the following three phrases would have sent many readers scrambling for dictionaries: “refractory beasts” (30), the “recrudescence of winter” (66) and “the indefeasible power of education” (81). At other times, awkward syntax and word order disrupt the narrative flow, as in the following sentence: “Often and often I longed to go there [...]” (237). Another example of word choice that might have given readers pause is “offal,” a word of Germanic origin used

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to refer to social detritus or cast-offs (126). In this case too the vocabulary item can be directly linked with Grove because the protagonist in “Riders” is down-on-his-luck Reg Gardiner, who formerly taught school in Saskatchewan and submitted stories to magazines. The stories were all rejected and he has drifted to Ontario, without money or prospects, living from one day to the next. These are all facts from Grove’s own experience, accurately reproduced in a jumbled, non-chronological manner.

16 Perhaps the most widely ignored element in Grove’s short fiction is the modernist consciousness of his narrators. In this he owes a debt to Norwegian Knut Hamsun, whose writings Grove greatly admired. Consciousness combines with the art of insinuation to encourage us to read between the lines. In “The Novel” Grove emphasized insinuation as a quality that enables a good novelist to avoid speaking his or her “whole mind”: “He who, having made a survey of what he has to say, says one third of it and scatters the rest between the lines gives a depth and a relief to his utterance which is the most inspiriting thing which I can imagine” (It Needs to Be Said 129). Knut Hamsun was a skilled practitioner of insinuation. In the novel Mysteries (1892), his narrator plants ideas in the reader’s head, encouraging a particular line of interpretation. The primary mystery concerns the identity and ambitions of the flamboyant protagonist Johan Nilsen Nagel, who arrives in a small town unannounced, registers at a hotel, and after his evening meal goes out for a walk. The narrator describes his after dinner movements: He stayed out until long after midnight and didn’t return till a few minutes before the clock struck three. Where had he been? Only later did it become known that he had walked to the next town and back–along the same long road he had been driven over that morning. He must have had some very urgent business there. When Sara [the maid] opened the door for him, he was wet with perspiration, but he smiled at her and seemed to be in excellent spirits. (6)

17 We have no idea where Nagel has been, though the narrator does and chooses not to say. The suggestion that Nagel had “urgent business” in the next town at such a late hour invites disagreement for, if the visit had been urgent, he would surely not have travelled on foot. Hamsun wants us to view Nagel’s movements with suspicion and this change in narrative style during the modernist period has been described by one scholar, in comparing Fontane with Mann, as “an increase in the consciousness portrayed and a corresponding increase in the consciousness of the portrayal” (Stern 425). The author’s refusal to speak his “whole mind,” as Grove characterized insinuation, is therefore a way of telling the reader that there is more going on than meets the eye. Because the consciousness of the characters is portrayed in greater depth, an increase in concentration and engagement on the reader’s part is needed to understand the narrative.

18 Throughout Tales from the Margin there are clues that things are not as they seem, and this is another reason Grove considered them tales: we are told to question the motives of the canvassers, scam artists, and wily businessmen who take advantage of unsophisticated rural residents. Sometimes the transactions are harmless–trinkets are sold at inflated prices–but on occasion bankers and people who might now generously be called entrepreneurs trick settlers out of their farms by enticing them into contracts with crippling conditions. In “Salesmanship,” a team of con artists travels from town to town selling dry goods. The narrator piques our interest, much as Knut Hamsun does in Mysteries, by pretending not to know the identity of the travellers and posing questions that might occur to an uninformed observer:

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The driver was a man; tall as far as one could judge while he was sitting, broad of shoulder, massive, heavy. He was clad in a clean army shirt, drab-coloured breeches of good cut, with polished leather gaiters hugging the calves of his legs and a wide- brimmed sombrero of black felt on his head. He looked the typical American business man who has left factory or office for a vacation. The four women could not possibly constitute his family. More likely he had picked them up on the road to give them a ride? Yet, on that assumption, whence all the baggage? (157)

19 The man is the ringleader, Mr Marston, who instructs his group of saleswomen to set up camp outside a Manitoba town, upon whose residents they will prey. Information is divulged as the scene unfolds before our eyes, the insinuations becoming stronger until the narrator admits to omniscience. On the story’s second page, he tells us that Marston manoeuvred his car “into the underbrush so that a person driving along the road would never have suspected its presence” (157). Soon after Marston orders the women to prepare the tent, then his supper, and as he lights his pipe for a stroll along the river, the narrator remarks: “No one would have thought his mind might be occupied with anything but the enjoyment of the landscape” (159). But of course his mind is occupied by thoughts of future scams.

20 Grove’s tale cycle tends to reinforce natural laws and deny the existence of an overarching ethical system, and this is in essence a variation on Nietzschean philosophy. A prime example is the story “The Agent,” in which a canvasser, or salesman, dupes customers out of their money then spends his profits on high living (113). Bill Orting, the agent, cannot escape the cycle of money easily earned and soon spent; he refuses to do honest labour and is constitutionally unable to save (120). The struggling writer and occasional labourer Gardiner in the story “Riders” aptly summarizes Grove’s philosophy by exchanging Bill Ortung’s circle for a straight line: “We are on the road, and the road has no end; we have no goal; there is nothing waiting for us anywhere. We are the offal of society, cast away, spewed forth into the gutter; and all we can do is to obey gravity, running down, down, down” (126). The parable with which Grove intended to close his cycle, “In Search of Acirema,” is also Pacey’s final selection and it offers a vision of life lived first in the old country then in the new one, elucidating the dreams and ambitions of the settlers (301). In this case, with a certain degree of self-aggrandizement, Grove makes his prophet the marginalized character. The narrator says, Even in the new country, however, a prophet arose who preached that property makes a slave of him who owns it. Unlike the great prophets in the old country, he was neither condemned to take poison nor nailed to the cross nor burned at the stake. He was simply not heard; his countrymen were too busy. (306)

21 It is interesting that Grove’s parable as message was rejected by both the publishing industry and, in the context of the above tale, the inhabitants of Acirema. In his study of the modernist short story, Dominic Head called Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” “a representative modernist short fiction,” citing its ambiguity and subversion of literary convention. According to Head, “the rejection of parable as message, as a parallel to the inscrutability of authority, is itself presented in the form of a parable” (15-16). In Grove’s parable we are struck by his determination to not only transmit a message but inform us that, in the parable itself, it falls on deaf ears.

22 “Acirema” in the title represents America spelled backwards, an indication both of his disillusionment with the commitment to forward progress in his adopted homeland and his own continued identity issues. In A Search for America Grove writes about

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Canada and America as though they are a singular entity and it is not until the end that Grove offers a qualification. He claims to have based the book on a tramping journal kept in the 1910s, in which he noted that the difference between the old and new worlds was that America looks towards the future while Europe is concerned with the past. In a footnote to the 1927 publication, he added: “I have since come to the conclusion that the ideal as I saw and still see it has been abandoned by the U.S.A. That is one reason why I became and remained a Canadian” (499). In light of Grove’s identity issues, many of which feature in Tales from the Margin, this remark is rather ironic. He was obviously bothered by the realization that no matter how often he proclaimed the truth about life in Canada, most people ignored him. Spettigue, perhaps our most reliable and comprehensive scholar on Grove, decided that he was tortured by “emotional stresses and weaknesses” (217); this led to trouble in Germany and the reinvention of himself in Canada: He seems not so much to have turned back to his actual past as to have woven out of its fragments a life that would convey the illusion that this man had known and done everything, had been everywhere, and that the fault for his failure to achieve renown was not, therefore, in himself but in his stars—not even in stars, perhaps, but in a world that would not accept him as he believed himself to be. (Spettigue 218)

23 Grove’s dissatisfaction with capitalism probably has its roots in his own disastrous financial experiences in Germany and the naturalist position he adopted in Canada, but his refusal to offer solutions to the problems he so shrewdly identifies is Nietzschean. We know that Grove had an affinity for this philosopher (Pacey 21) and, like Nietzsche, Grove undercuts the seriousness of modernity and its tendency towards dogmatism (Pippin 112) in stories that display a familiarity with modernism. The following analysis of Thus Spake Zarathustra could also be applied to “In Search of Acirema”: “Nietzsche wants quite deliberately to claim that one of the chief characteristics of the nihilism crisis is that very few people experience the modern situation as any sort of crisis” (Pippin 88). Perhaps it is because most people refuse to recognize a crisis that Nietzsche advised writers to focus on the inner life in anticipation of the modernist agenda of “track[ing] the movement of consciousness and explicat[ing] the mundane” (Sheehan 67).

24 In conclusion, Grove’s stories work as tales when this term is understood to mean psychologically penetrating stories about marginalized people told with a heightened narrative consciousness. While Desmond Pacey’s editing inhibits our appreciation of the tales as a cycle, the very fact that he felt the volume needed to be made more attractive to receive the acceptance of the Canadian reading public verifies the truth of the Acirema parable. Those willing to listen to the prophet’s bleak warnings are few. Today Grove’s admonitions to live the good life and reject materialist greed read as something far different from the complaints of an ungrateful immigrant. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see Grove trying to use his own disreputable past in order to forge a new identity in Canada.

25 And like the prophet in his parable, Grove’s stories have been largely ignored.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Whitney. “Queen’s Quarterly: Fostering Canadian Cultural Identity.” McMaster University Library website. Web. 24 Aug. 2013.

Cavell, Richard. “McLuhan, Glocalism, and Canadian Literature.” Prime: International Peace Research Institute (Journal of Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo) 27 (2008): 123-130. Print.

Chen, John Z. Ming. “Re-reading Grove: The Influence of Socialist Ideology on the Writer and The Master of the Mill.” Canadian Literature 147 (Winter 1995): 25-44. Print.

Conrad, Joseph. Almayer’s Folly and Tales of Unrest. 1895. London: J.M. Dent, 1947. Print.

De Quincey, Thomas. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey. Vol. XII. Tales and Romances. 1890. Ed. David Masson. New York: AMS Press, 1968. Print.

Fallon, Erin. A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English. Ed. R. C. Feddersen et. al. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Print.

Gross, Konrad. “From Old World Aestheticist Immoralist to Prairie Moral Realist: Frederick Philip Grove, ‘Snow’, 1926-1932.” The Canadian Short Story: Interpretations. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. 83-94. Print.

Grove, Frederick Philip. It Needs to Be Said. 1929. Reprint. Ottawa: The Tecumseh Press, 1982. Print.

----. A Search for America. 1927. Reprint. A Project Gutenberg of Australia E-book, 2003. Print.

----. Tales from the Margin: The Selected Short Stories of Frederick Philip Grove. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1971. Print.

Hamsun, Knut. Mysteries. 1892. London: Picador, 1973. Print.

Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. 1992. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.

Hoffmann, E.T.A. Tales of Hoffmann. 1982. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Knonagel, Axel. “The Search for F. P. Greve/Grove: From First Doubts to a Greve Biography.” Connotations 7.2 (1998): 246-253. Print.

Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print.

Kroetsch, Robert. “The Grammar of Silence: Narrative Patterns in Ethnic Writing.” Canadian Literature 106 (Autumn 1985): 65-74. Print.

Matthews, Leigh S. “Grove’s Last Laugh: The Gender of Self-Representation in Frederick Philip Grove’s In Search of Myself.” Canadian Literature 159 (Winter 1998): 114-137. Print.

May, Charles E. The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Pacey, Desmond and J.C. Mahanti. “Frederick Philip Grove: An International Novelist.” The International Fiction Review (1974): 17-26. Print.

Pippin, Robert B. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Print.

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Rosenquist, Rod. Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.

Sellwood, Jane. “Tales from the Margin by Frederick Philip Grove, a Forerunner of Canadian Multicultural Literature.” Hokkai Gakuen University Jinbun Ronshu 18 (2001): 88-122. Print.

Sheehan, Paul. Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.

Spettigue, Douglas. FPG: The European Years. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1973. Print.

Stern, J.P. “The Theme of Consciousness: Thomas Mann.” Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930. 1976. Reprint. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. London: Penguin, 1991. 416-429. Print.

Willmott, Glenn. Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2002. Print.

NOTES

1. See Charles E. May for an examination of Washington Irving’s innovations in short fiction. May calls Irving’s narrators “individualized” (6) and notes as a key to his success his ingenuity in “grounding traditional German folktales in American settings” (24). 2. For a more detailed discussion of modernism and marginality see Chana Kronfeld’s study in which she argues that the true modernists were those with an “affinity for the marginal, the exile, the ‘other’” (2). Ironically, the writers held up as representative modernists tend to be those from the cultural center who wrote in English, French or German. While Kronfeld lobbies for the inclusion of several Hebrew writers as true modernists because of their position on the cultural and linguistic margin, the argument could also be applied to someone like Grove. Because he wrote about the rural residents of the Canadian Prairies, he was labelled a naturalist, detracting attention from the experiments he conducted in point of view and the intriguing questions posed in his books about the nature of authorial identity. Rod Rosenquist makes an interesting case for high modernists as self-promoters, who were often adept in the “manipulation of literary consumerism” (6), influencing the public’s reception of their works through their correspondence and discussions with reviewers. To some extent he echoes Kronfeld in saying that “Those who found themselves marginalized by the establishment of high modernism are the ones who speak most clearly of the nature of the literary field in the modernist period and the sometimes unique problems that arose from it” (18). 3. The theme of duality which is explored in this essay is treated in a different way by Richard Cavell in his brief discussion of “Snow.” Cavell argues that Canada’s status as a country formed through immigration contributes to a feeling of “displacement [that] powerfully haunts one’s sense of national belonging.” He cites Grove’s story (though Over Prairie Trails would seem more relevant) in noting “the displacement of ‘home’” for Grove, who was making long journeys on the winter weekends by sleigh between his school and home. “The effect of the snow is thus to superimpose another landscape on the one Grove is describing,” as his references to Odysseus and the sea make clear. “The new world, in short, must also and at the same time and in the same space become the old world if Grove is to go home, because home is at once in Canada and in Europe” (127). I argue that Grove wrote Tales from the Margin out of a sense of displacement, though it is a far more personal feeling than the one described by Cavell. Grove wanted to efface his previous life in Germany but he was also unable to accept Canada as he found it, and this contributes to the sense of duality, or marginalism, in his tales.

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4. Adrian Hunter gives a different analysis of “Karain: A Memory” in focusing on the “frame- narrator” as a development in Conrad’s art. By placing one story inside another and having characters comment on the different stories, Hunter argues, narrative truth becomes subjective. We as readers must then consider the competing interpretations and draw our own conclusions (27-28). 5. The stark contrast between Greve/Grove has led some critics to explore the sexual schism in Grove. Leigh S. Matthews has argued that it is precisely because the modernist dandy Greve was involved with a world of homosexual literary characters in Europe that the pioneer Grove, in compensation, chose to live in an overtly masculine Canadian Prairie settlement (118-9).

ABSTRACTS

Les vingt-trois histoires qui composent la version originale de Tales from the Margin de Frederick Philip Grove sont articulées selon un cycle. Les personnages sont récurrents et les lieux sont limités aux régions des Prairies canadiennes : le Saskatchewan, le Manitoba et l’Alberta. Cet article se propose de considérer l’évolution de notre perception du cycle de Grove lorsque les histoires sont vues comme des contes. C’est l’étiquette que l’auteur préfère leur donner car il estime que les contes se situent aux « régions-lisières de la vie » ou « à la marge ». Le cycle d’histoires écrites par Grove n’a pas été publié de son vivant et quand il le fut, les instructions laissées par l’auteur quant à sa publication n’ont pas été respectées. Bien qu’il souhaitât que Tales from the Margin soit édité dans un ordre fixé au préalable, l’éditeur a remplacé six des contes par huit histoires publiées ultérieurement et a mélangé l’ordre préétabli pour aboutir à vingt-cinq histoires. Cet article souligne le fait qu’en dépit de problèmes éditoriaux, le message d’ensemble qui traite de la marginalité reste inchangé. Les personnages de Grove se situent en marge de la société, une position familière à l’auteur à la fois en tant qu’émigrant vivant au Canada sous un faux semblant et en tant qu’écrivain incapable d’atteindre la réputation à laquelle il aspirait.

AUTHORS

ANDREW JAMES Andrew James is associate professor in the School of Commerce at Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. His first book, Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience (McGill-Queen’s Press), was published in 2013. He is the recipient of a three-year Japanese government-grant to conduct archival research into Graham Swift at the British Library. He has published several essays on Amis, Swift, and literary criticism in Europe. His most recent essays are a comparative study of two Trinidadian writers in a Cambridge Scholars Press book, Globalization, Appropriation or Hyperdization: English Language and Literature in a Postcolonial Global World, and a study of Graham Swift in the German journal Connotations.

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A Normal Biography Reversed: The Temporalization of Life in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

Michael Basseler

1 In the process of modernity, time has become a crucial category and an increasingly important dimension of human life. It might be a universal, biologically predetermined fact that life unfolds in a temporal sequence: People are born, they grow up, and finally grow old (and eventually die) in all cultures and historical epochs, at least until today. As a consequence, “people throughout the world necessarily have to deal with time as an element of their lives as self-conscious humans,” as Joan Silber succinctly remarks (107). However, the patterns of sequencing, i.e. the ways in which life is structured on a temporal level, are not only culturally and historically variable, but have also tremendously gained in significance in modern society.1 Whereas in traditional societies place was the main factor for maintaining a stable identity as well as social status and security, the processes of mobilization in modernity required a different form of social and individual stability. As sociologist Martin Kohli argues, the social transformation in modernity is therefore essentially the process of a “temporalization of life” (“Gesellschaftszeit” 184).

2 The present article borrows this notion of the temporalization of life in modern society, using it as a starting point and conceptual hinge for the discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” As I will argue, Fitzgerald’s story exemplifies how literature not only reflects processes of social transformation, but also actively partakes in the negotiation of the cultural meaning of temporal structures–and in this particular case, the effects of what sociologists call the institutionalization of the human life course, or simply “normal biography.”

3 To approach “Benjamin Button” from such a perspective also entails, at least to a certain extent, a critical revaluation of this story, which is almost unanimously regarded as one of Fitzgerald’s less compelling achievements in the short story form. In

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contrast to his novels or his more canonized (and maybe more “modernist”) stories (e.g. “The Rich Boy,” “Babylon Revisited,” or some of the other pieces from Tales from the Jazz Age like “May Day”), “Benjamin Button” was quickly dismissed by the critics as a prime example of Fitzgerald’s outdated romanticism as well as his tendency towards the popular, and it has thus received very little critical attention until today.2 Such negative evaluation was probably insinuated by Fitzgerald himself, who outright confessed that he disliked writing short stories and only used them as a financial lifeline (Müller 221). However, as Martin Scofield reminds us, “[o]ne opportunity the short story form gave him was to focus on […] specific aspects of modern life” (151), and it is in this context that Fitzgerald’s short story legacy might require a critical reassessment: namely as a rich site for studying the complex relationship between literature, social performance, and the socio-historical transformation in/of modern America as well as the moral and ethical questions associated with this. The present article therefore takes Bryant Mangum’s advice to “search for undiscovered strengths” in one of Fitzgerald’s neglected stories and to “examine the degree to which Fitzgerald’s short fiction, often through subtext, […] speaks to issues that transcend the modern” (60).

4 By focusing on the temporal dimension of human life as represented in fiction, this article ties in with, and expands, recent approaches in literary life-course studies (cf. the essay collection by Herbe/Coelsch-Foisner), interdisciplinary age studies,3 as well as what Ottmar Ette has called “literary studies as science for living,” i.e. an approach in literary studies which emphasizes the role of literature in the reflection, production, and negotiation of life knowledge or “knowledge for living.” To further elaborate on this, the next section offers some remarks on the relation between fiction and the temporal dimension of life, with a particular focus on the idea of reverse chronology as employed in “Benjamin Button.” The essay will then deal more closely with the concept of the normal biography as developed in the sociology of the life course, before the following section demonstrates how “Benjamin Button” poses a critique of modern chronopolitics. The conclusion, finally, reflects on the status of Fitzgerald’s short fiction in the modernist canon, especially with regard to his time and age consciousness, and closes with some more general thoughts on the relationship between (short) fiction and temporality.

“Benjamin Button”: Fiction, reverse chronology, and the temporal dimension of life

5 Whereas the patterns of our everyday life arguably follow a predominantly chronological principle, allowing at the best a certain degree of variance in terms of how slow or fast time passes, fiction is not obligated to this “realistic” model. This becomes most obvious, perhaps, where the chronological principle is reversed (Sawyer), as for example in Philip K. Dick’s novel Counter-Clock World (1967), Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) or Christopher Nolan’s movie Memento (2000). While in all of these examples, the inversion of chronological time has quite dramatic effects for the protagonists and thus serves as a catalyst for the plot and a means of suspense, it also has another, maybe even more basic function: by highlighting the temporality of stories, time becomes the primary subject of those narratives. They invent what Joan Silber calls “fabulous time,” i.e. alternative time conceptions which don’t need to

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operate on the “usual rules” and laws of time and space (71). Of course, fabulous time can have very different effects and functions in different narratives. As the following reading of Fitzgerald’s story will suggest, the reverse chronology in “Benjamin Button” as a specific form of fabulous time primarily serves to bring to the fore the cultural constructedness as well as the transition of life-course models in modern America.

6 As one of Fitzgerald’s fantastic tales (cf. Buell), the story creates a tension between a realist mode and the older form of romance, a tension that some theorists of the short story have characterized as typical of the genre (May 8-16; 38). Similar to Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” in Fitzgerald’s story a highly aesthetic character–Benjamin Button–enters the world of everyday reality. For example, there are numerous references to the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, Baltimore’s high society in the late nineteenth century, or the American educational system, which firmly ground the story in a socio-historical reality. As Charles May has pointed out with regard to “Bartleby,” this narrative technique involves a blending of the traditions of romance and realism and forces the reader to take the protagonist as a symbolic and an “as-if- real” character at the same time (38).

7 According to Fitzgerald, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was written as a response to a quip by Mark Twain “to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end” (Fitzgerald viii). What is more, as Stefan Willer points out, the title of Fitzgerald’s story already alludes to the genre of the case history, which is frequently found in the medical discourse on theories of rejuvenation around 1900. In these sensationalist narratives, which served the purpose of popularizing rejuvenation therapies, physicians related the successful treatment of patients, following a formulaic before-after scheme (Willer 349).

8 The basic working principle of Fitzgerald’s “case history” is that of reversal: when Benjamin Button enters life in a Baltimore hospital in 1860, he has the physique and mental state of a septuagenarian, much to the annoyance and even terror of the doctors and nurses who fear for the hospital’s reputation. His parents, the Roger Buttons from an honorable family of enviable social and financial status, are equally appalled by the first glimpse at their aged infant. Rather reluctantly, Roger Button4 takes his offspring home and eventually comes to accept his fate, even though he does everything to conceal the physical and psychological age of his son (“But Mr. Button persisted in his unwavering purpose. Benjamin was a baby, and a baby he should remain” [Fitzgerald 184]). As Benjamin “grows up,” it soon transpires that he is turning younger instead of older: at age twenty, he has the looks of a fifty-year-old; at thirty- five he is at the height of his life, a successful business man with a beautiful wife and son. Thus rejuvenating, he finally becomes a playmate for his own grandson, and in the end his world consists only of his crib, his nanny, and the faint smell of milk. In the story’s closing scene, the now seventy-year-old Benjamin Button has become a baby, barely able to perceive anything around him: “Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.” (Fitzgerald 205) In the end, as Henry Alexander notes, it is as if for Benjamin “there had never been any life at all”–his whole existence just fades into nothingness (7).

9 So, the story’s eponymous character is obviously a literary “freak of nature,” but just like other literary freaks, such as Gregor Samsa or Bartleby, he is also more than just that: he serves as an agent for uncovering certain norms and collective notions of “life”

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in a given society and time. Fitzgerald takes what in a Western cultural, Judeo-Christian context is traditionally considered as a lifetime–seventy years5–and imagines what might happen if life started at the other end, if only for one person: in a world of otherwise perfect chronology, Benjamin is the only one living “against the clock.”

10 However, a closer look reveals that the temporal structure of the story is slightly more complex than that. Henry Alexander has distinguished three lines or threads of time/ age in Benjamin’s life, namely a chronological one, a physical one, and a psychological one (2). Chronologically speaking, Benjamin lives his life just like everyone else, turning older each year from his birth in 1860 to his death in 1930. By contrast, his physical age moves in the direct opposite direction, i.e. he “grows” younger and younger. The most complicated temporal thread is his psychological age, which hardly seems to undergo much change, except for his final years when he gradually loses his ability to speak and finally his consciousness. On a psychological level, there is neither a considerable process of maturation nor of regress. The story’s grotesque and ironic effects are produced by the circumstance that these temporal threads–chronological, physiological, and psychological age–are “seldom congruent”: “The theme comes out in cases where we are surprised or shocked by the discrepancies between age and appearance or by changes in appearance or by psychological shifts which strike one as dissonant with one’s own or another age” (Alexander 2). It is only in Benjamin’s middle years that these threads seem to converge, and it is certainly no coincidence that these seem to be his happiest years: he marries his wife Hildegarde, his son Roscoe is born, he successfully runs his own business and returns from war as a decorated veteran.

11 Now, the question is how this fantastic tale responds to the wider social and cultural context of modernism in the United States and what it might implicate in terms of the temporal structures, patterns, sequences, and rhythms of that age. Research in cultural studies has emphasized how to a very high degree, human existence is structured temporally. To examine the temporality of human life from a cultural-studies perspective thus involves an analysis of the ways in which time shapes human action, perception, interpretation, and remembrance. This goes far beyond the traditional concepts of time in literary studies, e.g. the analysis of narrative time in structural narratology (very influentially, for example, in the works of Gérard Genette). The question of how ideas and categories of human time are cultural constructs rather than givens involves, among other aspects, the contingency and ambivalence of time, the idea of “lifetime” as a major structuring principle of human life and experience, the relationship between (and coexistence of) generations, the acceleration (or deceleration) of time, as well as the representation of temporal concepts in literature and other cultural artifacts, for example the notion of an intensified perception of brief, single moments in modernist literature (cf. Assmann 121-48). In other words, one may ask how living always presupposes an (often rather implicit) knowledge of and about the temporality of life, how such knowledge is culturally and historically specific, and how this knowledge is both reflected in and shaped by literature and other media.

12 In his brilliant study Beschleunigung (Acceleration), Hartmut Rosa has persuasively demonstrated how the process of modernization in Western societies should best be understood as a “structurally and culturally highly significant transformation of temporal structures and horizons” (Rosa 24, my translation).6 According to this notion, modernity and modernization not only describe societal processes which unfold in time, but also sustainably alter social time conceptions and perceptions. Taking its cue

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from this observation, this article will contextualize “Benjamin Button” within the temporal transformations of modern America and argue how the seemingly trivial and artless fictional experiment of reversing a human life course actually performs a powerful and surprisingly subtle critique of a temporalization of life. Before, however, a closer look at the sociological study of human life courses shall contribute to the analysis of Fitzgerald’s story in this context.

The institutionalization of the life course and the concept of the “normal biography”

13 In his approach of a sociology of the life course, Martin Kohli (1985) argues that life course and age constitute a discrete socio-structural dimension or category (“‘soziale Tatsache’ eigener Art” 1) similar to those of gender or race, an idea that has also been emphasized by recent works in the emerging field of age studies/cultural gerontology. As a social institution, the life course is not so much a natural, biological fact, but determined and regulated by a set of social rules and practices, a hypothesis which Kohli corroborates by means of a historical analysis that furnishes evidence for the structural transition from one life-course regime to another (2). Analyzing the temporal structures in Western (i.e. European and North American) societies from a diachronic perspective, Kohli7 introduces five major theses (3):

14 1. temporalization: the significance of the life course as a social institution has increased during modernity and has led to a “temporalization of life”; this basically means that the process of aging has become a dominant structural principle, while in traditional or pre-modern societies it was only relevant as a categorical status;

15 2. chronologization: this temporalization of life is to a large extent linked to chronological age as its basic principle, which has led to a chronologically standardized life-course model, the “normal biography”;

16 3. individualization: this temporalization and chronologization of life can be regarded as part of the larger process of individualization, i.e. the liberation of the individual from local (and thus spatial!), corporate or class-based as well as other bonds and restrictions;

17 4. centrality of work: working life has become the center of the normative life course in modern societies, basically following the threefold division into vocational preparation (childhood), activity (adulthood), and retirement (old age);

18 5. regulatory and orienting functions: on the one hand, the life course as social institution regulates the sequential process of life,8 while on the other hand it also serves to structure the Lebenswelt and knowledge that individuals refer to when orienting themselves and planning their actions.

19 For Kohli, the process of modernization therefore basically marks the transition from the pattern of a contingency of life events to the pattern of a predictable and controllable life course. Although this pattern is primarily organized around the working life, it also affects family life and family cycles, which become more standardized as well: following a more or less strict temporal congruency, the typical life events include the leaving of the family of origin, the completion of a formal education, the taking on of an employment activity, marriage and the formation of an own family, and so forth (7). This brief discussion of the institutionalization of the life

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course in modernity may suffice as a basis for the discussion of Fitzgerald’s story as a critical examination of modern United States chronopolitics.

“Benjamin Button” as a critique of the modern life- course regime

20 In their recent collection From the Cradle to the Grave: Life-Course Models in Literary Genres, Sarah Herbe and Sabine Coelsch-Foisner have reminded us that the “[r]epresentations of the human life cycle in literature have varied with time, social conditions, and value systems” and therefore “may be seen as projections of, or deviations from, an ‘ideal life’” (Coelsch-Foisner X). Moreover, an analysis of these literary representations of the human life course centers around “aesthetic time.” It thereby adds an important dimension to current life-course studies, which usually discriminate “between ‘historical time’ and ‘institutional time’” and thus foreground “social, political and economic considerations” (XI). This notion of “aesthetic time” not only allows us to foreground the particularities and privileges of literature in comparison to other discourses. It also invites interdisciplinary research by posing the question of how the “aesthetic time” of a given work corresponds to the historical and institutional time of its production context. By the same token, this allows me to specify my thesis of the cultural work that Fitzgerald’s story performs in a kind of literary thought experiment. By contriving a disconnection of the biological and social dimensions of the human life course, “Benjamin Button” exposes the social administration of human lifetime and particularly the effects of the regulatory system of the “normal biography” and thus can be read as a critique of the modern life-course regime.

21 The discrepancies between his physical, psychological and chronological age have tremendous effects on Benjamin’s identity as well as on his social status: since (at least for a large part of his life) he cannot be subjected to the regulatory system of the normative life course, Benjamin Button is also denied the possibility to become a valuable member of the society. If we are to accept the notion of an increasing chronologization and institutionalization of the life course (as part of modern chronopolitics), then this involves the establishment of certain criteria as well as binding age limits (Kohli, “Die Institutionalisierung” 8): certain actions, behaviors, lifestyles etc. are closely connected to particular life phases, allowing only for small deviations. Unsurprisingly, then, it is mainly in his encounters with social institutions that Benjamin is made into a social outsider. Let me give you three examples to elaborate on this:

22 1. At (chronological) age five, Benjamin is sent to kindergarten. There, however, he not only stands out through his unchildlike and therefore inappropriate behavior. He is also soon “irritated and frightened his young teacher” (Fitzgerald 186) and is therefore removed from the school.

23 2. Although he fulfills all formal requirements, passes his initial examination and becomes a member of the freshmen class at Yale when he is aged eighteen (but looking fifty), he is soon called to the registrar who eventually expels him from the college with the words “Get out of college and get out of town. You are a dangerous lunatic” (188). When Benjamin quietly but persistently insists that he is eighteen, the registrar is even more outraged: “‘The idea!’ he shouted. ‘A man of your age trying to enter here as a freshman. Eighteen years old, are you? Well, I’ll give you eighteen minutes to get out of

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town” (188-89). Again, the rigidity of the regulatory system is primarily based on chronological age as its underlying principle; interestingly enough, the registrar seems more outraged by the fact that a “man of that age” tries to enter as a freshman than he is by Benjamin’s alleged lie.

24 3. It is in this light that we may also interpret the story’s initial sentences: “As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one” (176). Interestingly enough, the first two sentences are primarily concerned with temporal markers (“as long ago as…,” “at present” etc.), thus already highlighting the theme of temporality beyond the usual sequences (also Willer 353) as well as a significant change in the social realm. The institutionalization of the life course here begins with (or actually even before) the individual’s birth, whereas the home birth–still the “proper thing” in 1860– points toward spatial stability (“home”) and appears as something pre-modern and somewhat dated. This echoes with the sociological argument introduced above, namely that the institutionalized fixation of the life course served to guarantee a greater predictability and controllability of individual life courses. To quote Hartmut Rosa once again: “For the individual, this created reliable life-course patterns, which guided them from birth through education through retirement; for the economic development, a stable, long-term basis for calculation as well as expectance securities was established.”9 In the light of such modern chronopolitics, Benjamin Button appears as a recalcitrant character, someone–quite literally–from “another age,” a social misfit. A disruptive factor that even threatens the very foundations of the modern society, he is simply a “dangerous lunatic.”

25 Interestingly enough, however, despite the anomalies of his aging process, Benjamin’s life still resembles to a certain degree a typical upper-middle-class American biography in early modernism. As John Kuehl points out, “[i]f the chronological inversion of Benjamin’s life is ignored, the pattern of events seems normal, for he attends college, finds work, gets married, becomes brigadier general” (29). Hence, Benjamin’s identity is to a high degree based on what sociologists call the institutionalization of the life course: his life is not a succession of random events, but follows a highly conventionalized and pre-structured pattern, the “normal biography.” However, as Benjamin is repeatedly stigmatized as a social outsider and thus denied the possibilities and standardized life-course model that the normal biography usually provides, the story also exposes the alienation of human beings in the modern life-course regime.

26 Regarding the time structure of the story, it is precisely for this reason, then, that it is so crucial that Benjamin is the only character in a world of perfect chronology: this narrative trick renders the social dimension and regulation of the human life course visible. Except for his “middle years” in which he is both professionally successful and a happy family man, Benjamin Button is a burden and a threat to society. And although this is closely related to the convergence of his physical and chronological age, it may also be read as an emphatic critique of the chronologization of life based on economic productivity and rationality; as a response to structural social challenges, the institutionalization of the life course in modernity serves to source out the problems and efforts to previous and subsequent life phases, i.e. childhood and old age (cf. Kohli, “Die Institutionalisierung” 14). Hence, Benjamin’s somewhat disruptive childhood and old age may be read as an exaggeration of a general social tendency, namely the

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valorization of adulthood as the age of economic productivity and the depreciation or at least subordination of its preceding and subsequent life phases.

27 By the same token, the fantastic invention of a character who is born as an old man can also be related to the growing hostility towards old age in the modern American society. Analyzing the changing notions of age in the United States, Thomas Cole has demonstrated that the history of aging in America is characterized by a continual devaluation of old age that lasts well into the recent past. While the notions and values of age have of course significantly varied from the Middle Ages through Puritanism and Victorian America, it was only by the mid-19th century that Americans displayed an increasing “hostility toward old age—suggesting that old people are seen as powerful impediments to progress, unwelcome reminders both of the oppressive weight of the past and of humankind’s inevitable weakness and dependence” (Cole 83). Here, the fact that Benjamin is born in 1860–one year before the outbreak of the Civil War and thus the most powerful rupture in American society–becomes meaningful, as Benjamin symbolically embodies the “oppressive weight of the past” and an “unwelcome reminder” of weakness and dependence and thus a hindrance to the modern United States. In this light, Fitzgerald’s seemingly absurd invention of the infantile septuagenarian is thus closely intertwined with the social and cultural upheavals in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America.10

Conclusion

28 Although F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing and especially “Benjamin Button” may not easily “fit the paradigm of the modernist short story as it has traditionally been constructed” (Curnutt 296), it still offers an intriguing vantage point on the relationship between literature and the social upheaval of modern life. More specifically, one might argue that Fitzgerald’s main contribution to modernist (short) fiction lies in his almost obsessive expression of the many tensions between individual and collective time as well as pre-modern and modern temporal percipience, tying in with modernist literature’s general “uneasiness about bondage to time” (Stevenson 84). Although at a first glance it might seem that Benjamin Button is merely a freak of nature, and therefore his curious case a matter of aberrant biology, the story intriguingly demonstrates how we are “aged by culture,” to borrow Margaret Morganroth’s catchy phrase. Mary Russo has argued that “[t]he dominant fiction of chronological aging […] plots our lives in continually increasing numbers” (25). Read in this light, “Benjamin Button” serves both as a reminder of the cultural construction of this “fiction of chronological aging” and as an unusual yet instructive example of modernist fiction’s new chronologies, characterized by “a conflicting, double awareness; of two separate, even antithetical views of time and life–a double awareness shared by other phases of contemporary culture, and in some ways by the age as a whole” (Stevenson 124). As a fictional experiment in human time, the story exposes the power structures and chronopolitics behind the social regulation of the life course in modern society and especially the processes of temporalization, chronologization, and individualization this involves.

29 It has been pointed out before that aging and the human life course figure prominently as a theme in Fitzgerald’s fiction, both long and short. Many of his works explore what it means (not) to act one’s age, thus problematizing the tension between chronological

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age, social age, and psychological age, e.g. in stories like “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “At Your Age” (1929) or “Babylon Revisited” (1931). Kirk Curnutt notes that “throughout his writing his fixation with youth is a central concern,” and he is right to add that “most critics ignore the cultural background of Fitzgerald’s age consciousness” (28-29). Rather than attributing Fitzgerald’s “age consciousness” merely to a personal foible, it should be contextualized within the “broader conflux of modern attitudes toward the life cycle” (29). These attitudes, of course, include the “invention” of youth and adolescence as a distinct, liminal life phase in the late 19th century (Hall) and the growing hostility towards old age, as well as the specific social performances and life styles emanating from this: “Fitzgerald’s age consciousness was the product of a culture in which aging became synonymous with deterioration and degeneration” (Curnutt 45).

30 Although this age consciousness also finds expression in Fitzgerald’s novels, not least in The Great Gatsby, the short story arguably provided an exceptionally well-equipped form to capture the temporal perception and re-structuring of modern America.11 Paul Ricœur famously claimed that “temporality and narrativity are closely related” and that their structural interrelationship is one of reciprocity: narratives follow a temporal pattern while our very understanding of temporality is based on narrative principles. Stories are always about the passage of time and so “the sequence of any fiction is, by its nature, the path of time evaporating” (Silber 111). The very brevity of the short story condenses and thus emphasizes the interrelation between temporality and narrativity and turns the short story into an exceptionally time-sensitive genre. Forced to handle time in a compressed and efficient manner, short stories are therefore particularly apt to highlight, expose, and subvert our common patterns and sequences of temporality, a quality that arguably contributed to the popularity of the genre among modernist writers. This exposing of normative time patterns and perceptions can be achieved either by focusing on single, decisive moments and episodic movements–maybe the trademark of the modernist short story–or, as in “Benjamin Button,” by narrating a whole lifetime within the limited space of only a few dozens of pages.

31 Some critics have claimed that because of its tendency toward fragmentariness, the short story cannot depict the “length and complexity of the life course” (Malcolm 101). What it can certainly do, however, and what it probably can do better than any other genre, is to make us aware of how much our lives are plotted by the fiction of the life course. As I hope to have shown, it is through their distinct temporal setup that short stories have a special potential to reveal and reflect upon the temporality of life itself, i.e. the many time patterns, structures, models, etc. which underlie our lives. In real life, these patterns and structures usually go unnoticed. Short fiction does not only imagine for us “a stopping point from which life can be seen as intelligible” (Silber 8). It can also raise our awareness of life as a “temporal project,” including the dynamic processes of synchronization of everyday-time, lifetime, and historical or social time.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Henry. “Reflections on Benjamin Button.” Philosophy and Literature 33.1 (2009): 1-17. Print.

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. 1991. London: Vintage, 2003. Print.

Assmann, Aleida. Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft: Grundbegriffe, Themen, Fragestellungen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006. Print.

Bridgeman, Teresa. “Time and Space.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 52-65. Print.

Baum, Rosalie. “Work, Contentment, and Identity in Aging Women in Literature.” Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective. Ed. Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker. Westport/ London: Praeger, 1999. 89-101. Print.

Chialant, Maria Teresa and Marina Lops, eds. Time and the Short Story. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Print.

Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine. “Introduction: Life-Course Models in Literary Narratives.” From the Cradle to the Grave: Life-Course Models in Literary Genres. Eds. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner & Sarah Herbe. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011. ix-xvii. Print.

Cole, Thomas R. The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America. 1992. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.

Curnutt, Kirk. “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Age Consciousness, and the Rise of American Youth Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Ruth Prigozy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 28-47. Print.

Dick, Philip K. Counter-Clock World. 1967. Boston: Gregg, 1979. Print.

Ette, Ottmar. “Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living.” PMLA 125.4 (2010): 977-93. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tales of the Jazz Age. 1922. New York: Vintage, 2010. Print.

Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence. Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1904. Print.

Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print.

Kohli, Martin. “Die Institutionalisierung des Lebenslaufs: Historische Befunde und theoretische Argumente.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 1 (1985): 1-29. Print.

----. “Gesellschaftszeit und Lebenszeit.” Soziale Welt 4 (1986): 183-208. Print.

Kuehl, John R. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Short Fiction. Ann Arbor, MI: Twayne, 1991. Print.

Malcolm, David. “The Short or the Long of It: How Can Short Stories Do Human Life?” Coelsch- Foisner and Herbe 97-105. Print.

Mangum, Bryant. “The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Ruth Prigozy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 57-78. Print.

May, Charles. The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Memento. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Summit Entertainment, 2000. Film.

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Morganroth Gullette, Margaret. Aged By Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004. Print.

Müller, Kurt. “Short Stories of the 1920s and 1930s between Tradition and Innovation: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘May Day’ and Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’” A History of the American Short Story. Genres–Developments–Model Interpretations. Ed. Michael Basseler and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2011. 219-38. Print.

Poulet, Georges. Studies in Human Time. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956. Print.

Ricœur, Paul. “Narrative Time.” Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Ed. Brian Richardson. Athens: Ohio State University Press, 2000. 35-46. Print.

Rosa, Hartmut. Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005. Print.

Sawyer, Andrew. “‘Backward, Turn Backward’: Narratives of Reversed Time in Science Fiction.” Worlds Enough and Time: Explorations of Time in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Gary Westfahl et al. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2002. 49-64. Print.

Silber, Joan. The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as it Takes. Saint Paul, MI: Graywolf Press, 2008. Print.

Scofield, Martin. The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story. Cambridge: CUP, 2006. Print.

Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Print.

NOTES

1. See Georges Poulet’s classic Studies in Human Time (1956), especially the introduction, for an informative account of the changing conceptions of time from the Middle Ages through Renaissance and late modernity. 2. The story has been delivered from obscurity by David Fincher’s only partly successful 2008 movie adaptation that has, however, rather solidified “Benjamin Button’s” status as a somewhat lame and predictable story. 3. Cf. Willer for an informed reading of Fitzgerald’s story in the context of contemporary rejuvenation theories and anti-aging practices. 4. Strangely enough, the story not once mentions Benjamin’s mother. For Willer, this emphasizes the symbolical level of the age-reversal, since only the paternal genealogy, expressed in the handing down of the name, is thematized (351-52). 5. See Psalms 90 (“God’s Eternity and Man’s Transitoriness”): “The days of our years are threescore years and ten;/ and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years.” 6. In the original: “eine strukturell und kulturell höchst bedeutsame Transformation der Temporalstrukturen und –horizonte.” 7. While his major focus is on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Kohli’s analysis encompasses the time between 1840 and 1980, allowing Kohli to draw his conclusions on the transitions of different life-course regimes. 8. E.g. in form of chronologically stratified governmental authorization systems (“chronologisch geschichtet[e] staatlich[e] Berechtigungssysteme,” [Kohli, Die Institutionalisierung des Lebenslaufs 10]) in the fields of law, social security, education, etc. 9. The German original reads: “Für die Individuen entstanden so verlässliche Lebens-Lauf- Bahnen, die sie von der Geburt durch die Ausbildung bis zur Rente leiteten, und für die

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wirtschaftliche Entwicklung wurden stabile, langfristige Berechnungsgrundlagen und Erwartungssicherheiten geschaffen” (Rosa 156). 10. In this regard, the story serves as a good example for the role of literature in reflecting and producing images of age, acting as a “mirror to culturally accepted views of aging and to the underlying assumptions of those views,” but also “testing new concepts of aging [and…] inventing different paradigms for meaningful living in the last stages of life,” as Rosalie Baum reminds us (89). 11. Cf. the volume by Chialant and Lops for a general discussion of the treatment of time in the short story.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article propose une lecture de “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” de F. Scott Fitzgerald, une nouvelle qui est souvent considérée comme un écrit commercial aux mérites esthétiques moindres. En effet, le texte de Fitzgerald illustre la manière dont la littérature reflète non seulement les processus de transformation sociale mais participe aussi activement à la négociation de la signification culturelle des structures temporelles – et dans ce cas particulier, des effets de ce que les sociologues appellent « l’institutionnalisation du cours humain de la vie », ou plus simplement, la « biographie normale ». Une nouvelle marginale est donc réexaminée au prisme d’une contextualisation qui prend en compte les bouleversements sociaux et les effets aliénants du régime de la vie moderne.

AUTHORS

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Theorizing the Queer Modernist Short Story: From Failures of Socialty to Negative Affects

Bart Eeckhout

1 The following essay seeks to contribute to the development of methodological tools for analyzing non-normative sexualities in cultural products from recent history, applied here to a sample of modernist short stories. I come to this topic from the angle of a literary scholar who is currently collaborating with colleagues outside of literature departments in an attempt to recalibrate the notion of sexual scripts that was first developed by the social scientists John Gagnon and William Simon in the early seventies. The concept of sexual scripts launched in Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality seems to us worth reactivating because it involves a distinction among three levels: the cultural, the interpersonal, and the intrapsychic. To study human sexuality in cultural products, this division seems to us a good point of departure: it does not limit the analysis to either a close reading of individual symptoms or a sociological analysis of interactions, but combines the two with an emphasis on cultural structures, which allows us to be attentive also to regimes of patriarchal and heteronormative discourse.

2 While this larger project is meant to serve the analysis of a variety of cultural data, it has obvious relevance for literary studies. To bring the concept of sexual scripts up to date, however, we should take on board additional tools of more recent vintage and with a more specific disciplinary focus. These are to be found most prominently, I would argue, in writings inspired by what is called the affective turn in queer theory–a critical development associated with figures such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (in her later work), Ann Cvetkovich, José Esteban Muñoz, and Sara Ahmed, in publications from the late 1990s and early 2000s. One of the more recent contributions to this field– one that is firmly focused on the study of literary modernism that concerns us here–is a study by Heather Love entitled Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Love makes a case for revisiting literary texts about sexually non-normative characters and

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themes from before the age of sexual emancipation–the period we tend to sum up as “pre-Stonewall.” This is how she opens her introduction: A central paradox of any transformative criticism is that its dreams for the future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma, and violence. Oppositional criticism opposes not only existing structures of power but also the very history that gives it meaning. Insofar as the losses of the past motivate us and give meaning to our current experience, we are bound to memorialize them (“We will never forget”). But we are equally bound to overcome the past, to escape its legacy (“We will never go back”). (1)

3 Noting that “[t]he history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of gender and sexual deviants,” Love deplores how these characters more often than not seem to have died in vain. “Many contemporary critics,” she claims, “dismiss negative or dark representations entirely, arguing that the depiction of same-sex love as impossible, tragic, and doomed to failure is purely ideological” (1). This may be something of a straw target when it comes to academic literary criticism with an interest in historical representations of non-normative sexualities (Love provides no examples of the dismissive critics). But it does arguably reflect the responses of a good many ordinary LGBT readers and book reviewers, as well as students in classrooms, who are inclined to reject the association between well-integrated LGBTs today and pre-emancipatory images of a depressing–and depressingly consistent–negativity. And the objections formulated by Love may also account for the relative paucity of queer- theoretical work about such negative images from modernist literature.

4 As Love goes on to argue, The emphasis on damage in queer studies exists in a state of tension with a related and contrary tendency–the need to resist damage and to affirm queer existence. This tension is evident in discussions of the “progress” of gays and lesbians across the twentieth century. Although many queer critics take exception to the idea of a linear, triumphalist view of history, we are in practice deeply committed to the notion of progress [...]. Critics find themselves in an odd position: we are not sure if we should explore the link between homosexuality and loss, or set about proving that it does not exist. (3)

5 Undeterred by this quandary, Love returns to the negativity of early twentieth-century queer representations, even as she concedes that “[i]t is not clear how such dark representations from the past will lead toward a brighter future for queers” (4). She is interested, nevertheless, in investigating what she calls, in a term borrowed from Cvetkovich, “a crucial ‘archive of feeling,’ an account of the corporeal and psychic costs of homophobia.” This forces her to “pay particular attention to feelings such as nostalgia, regret, shame, despair, ressentiment, passivity, escapism, self-hatred, withdrawal, bitterness, defeatism, and loneliness.” By focusing on such feelings, she argues, we gain insight into “what it is like to bear a ‘disqualified’ identity” (4). This in turn contributes to our understanding both of modernity and modernism, for it helps us grasp the reliance of the concept of modernity on excluded, denigrated, or superseded others [...]. If modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century aimed to move humanity forward, it did so in part by perfecting techniques for mapping and disciplining subjects considered to be lagging behind [...]. Aesthetic modernism is marked by a similar temporal splitting. While the commitment to novelty is undoubtedly a dominant feature of modernism, no account of the movement is complete without attention to the place of the nonmodern in the movement–whether in primitivism, in the concern with tradition, in widely

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circulating rhetorics of decadence and decline, or in the melancholia that suffuses so many modernist artworks. (5-6)

6 Presenting her work as part of the affective turn in queer theory, Love defines this critical development as an investment in “the relation between emotion and politics” that shows theorists trying to “bring together traditionally polarized terms such as the psychic and the social, subject and structure, politics and loss, affect and law, and love and history” (10). A crucial source of inspiration in this regard is Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling,” which, according to Love, “might have special relevance to literature in that literature accounts for experience at the juncture of the psychic and the social” (12).

7 As Love draws actively on the philosophical reflections of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, it may be useful to establish a theoretical link here between her critical enterprise and a recent essay by Benjamin Kohlmann in PMLA, entitled “Awkward Moments: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Politics of Affect.” Kohlmann opens his discussion in a way that, even as it speaks to all students of modernism, is particularly provocative for those who study sexuality under the regime of modernity. He returns to Adorno’s writings on Hegel as follows: Just because we have the “dubious good fortune to live later,” Adorno notes, we are not entitled “sovereignty” to “assign the dead person his place” or to “elevat[e]” ourselves “above him.” Much will be gained, he argues, if the question of appreciation is reversed. Instead of posing the “loathsome question” whether past modes of thinking and feeling have “any meaning for the present,” we should ask “what the present means in the face of [the past]” [...]. This dialectical inversion would enable us to think of history not as a teleological progression from a closed- off past to a present that can freely choose from the knowledge of earlier generations but as a process whereby the present is reconfigured in terms that may seem anachronistic and alien to it. (337)

8 It is of considerable critical value, from this perspective, to allow cultural manifestations from the past to set up diverse forms of resistance to hegemonic thinking in the present, thereby forcing us to grapple with both past and present. This is the case also when we confront the dogged negativity of the “bad” feelings Love puts center-stage in her book. “As queer readers,” Love writes, “we tend to see ourselves as reaching back toward isolated figures in the queer past in order to rescue or save them. It is hard to know what to do with texts that resist our advances. Texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present” (8).

9 These few introductory remarks have to suffice as a preamble to the corpus of case studies I have compiled for the occasion and that I now wish to test against Love’s critical argument. For reasons that are both obvious and significant, I was unable to focus on an individually authored short story collection that revolves entirely around LGBT and queer themes, since to my knowledge no such book has emerged from Anglophone modernist fiction (unless it were the symptomatically posthumous collection by E. M. Forster, The Life to Come). I had to settle, rather, for individual stories by different writers. Fortunately, the resulting heterogeneity may be turned into an advantage when we wish to detect recurrent patterns that apply across a sufficiently diverse range of literary scripts. In accordance with the editors’ request that

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contributors focus their investigations on the period 1900-1940, I decided to aim at a balanced selection by picking three stories from The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories and three from The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, two anthologies published in the early nineties. My respective materials are “Leves Amores” by Katherine Mansfield (1907), “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” by Gertrude Stein (1922), “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” by Radclyffe Hall (1926), “A Poem of Friendship” by D. H. Lawrence (1911), “Arthur Snatchfold” by E. M. Forster (1928), and the opening story of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, “Hands” (1916).

10 Importantly, none of these stories are the object of analysis in Heather Love’s book, and they were selected before I had been able to acquaint myself with that book’s contents. Thus, my primary interest in studying them has been to assess to what extent and how precisely failures of sociality and negative affects prove to be just as central to them as they are to the case studies gathered by Love. This implies that my working methodology has been geared toward the analysis of selective textual moments and compositional features that allow for the identification of recurrent patterns. It is good to remind ourselves from the start, though, that such patterns have but limited validity in terms of their representativeness and should not be allowed to culminate in the establishment of a monolithic historical scenario that may be supposed to apply across the board to all queer literary representations from Anglophone modernism. My hope is, rather, that detecting a number of patterns will heighten our awareness of the cultural power of certain hegemonic social discourses during the early half of the twentieth century, and that this will deepen our analytical understanding whenever we grapple with queer literary representations from roughly a century ago.

11 So I find it remarkable and of critical importance that, without the six stories having been selected so as to support Love’s argument (this in obvious contrast to her own sample of texts), the kind of failures of sociality and negative affects she unfolds appear to be abundantly on display in five of the six stories–with Stein’s language experiment as a fascinating exception I am keeping for the end. To begin with, in all three “gay” stories (and I will need to keep up the scare quotes around “gay” not only to avoid historical back-formations of identities that are anachronistic, but for additional reasons that will become clear toward the end), we encounter scenarios that contain a conspicuous displacement of homoerotic desire outside of community life and into a realm of public invisibility. This adds evidence to the central argument in one of the foundational works of queer theory, Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, which investigates the crisis of secrecy attending the emergence of the homo/hetero binary both in the modern thinking on sexuality at large and in its concrete enactments in literature.

12 Lawrence’s “A Poem of Friendship” evokes a brief spell between two teenage boys in the English countryside (the local village is called Nethermere, perhaps distantly echoing the melancholic “Nevermore” of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”). The failure of sociality is registered here by the way the first-person narrator is able to be intimate with another farming boy, George, only when the two are away from the public realm (and public acknowledgment) of the village, while working the land or taking a swim in the pond. And even then the intimacy is of a heavily interior, psychological kind that must face multiple obstacles. Among other things, the boys’ closeness is sometimes experienced across a physical gap that keeps the two apart: “we worked, with a wide field between us, yet very near in the sense of intimacy” (2). Sometimes erotic desire is

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acted out indirectly, by proxy: at the pond, once again physically separated from the object of his desire, the narrator enjoys the spectacle of George’s dog pleasuring his undressed master “with little caressing licks” and George reciprocating by “play[ing] with the dog” (5). Immediately after this scene, social awareness forces the two boys to discipline the frolicking on which they have finally started when they are interrupted by a girl. Having just become “sensible of nothing but the vigorous poetry of action” and put his hand on George’s shoulder, the narrator freezes because of “a laughter from the bank. It was Emily” (5).

13 In “Hands,” the participant-observer around whom Anderson’s cycle of stories is organized, George Willard, derives momentary and partial insight into the tragedy of a local man’s homoerotic desires and the subsequent punishment of ostracism meted out to him by befriending a nervous character called Wing Biddlebaum. In a series of obvious spatial metaphors that introduce the story, this character is to be found “[u]pon the half-decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio” (160). Striking his precarious balance there on the edge of complete social rejection and even extinction, “Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard [...] he had formed something like a friendship” (160).

14 Forster’s “Arthur Snatchfold,” too, presents a case of problematical sociality, though it is more complex. Here the story centers on the single sexual encounter between the elderly upper-class protagonist Sir Richard Conway and the young working-class milkman who lends his name to the title–an encounter that occurs away from the public realm again, this time in the bushes of a generically depicted country estate visited by Conway. In this case, contrary to the previous two, we get an instance of sexual consummation and apparent satisfaction. Yet, private and invisible as it might have seemed at the time, the encounter returns like a boomerang after Conway finds out, much later, that Snatchfold got arrested mere seconds after their sexual dallying and was condemned to a six-month prison sentence as a result. In Forster’s story, the social counterforces are made explicit: the local community’s moral crusaders have made it their mission to crack down on all attempts at homosexual bonding. As Conway’s countryside host, Trevor Donaldson, reports without realizing that his guest was the other half of the sexual encounter, “oh, you remember our Chairman, Ernest Dray, you met him at my little place. He’s determined to stamp this sort of thing out, once and for all” (21). Forster gives a bittersweet twist to the ending when he turns Snatchfold into an unsung hero who has been remarkably loyal to his one-time sexual partner: although the milkman was given the chance to escape imprisonment on condition that he identify his older partner (who was obviously of higher standing), Donaldson reports how the young man obstinately forwent the opportunity. A kind of enduring sociality is thus created between Conway and Snatchfold, but it is a retroactive, politically sterile, publicly invisible, and paradoxical one for which the less powerful partner has been severely punished. And it is further complicated by the fact that Forster wrote this sexual fantasy for private delectation only. As in the case of his better-known novel Maurice, he did not feel he could publish such a story of surreptitious same-sex bonding during his lifetime.

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15 Here it is worth returning to another observation made by Love–one that plays a key role in the resistance many queer modernist representations set up to LGBT readers’ desire to place non-normative predecessors on an axis of inevitable social progress. Love notes that “[w]hile contemporary gay, lesbian, and queer critics tend to see queer subjects during [the early twentieth century] as isolated and longing for a future community,” the narratives in her corpus actually “turn their backs on the future: they choose isolation, turn toward the past, or choose to live in a present disconnected from any larger historical continuum” (8). Her analysis reveals a whole set of characters and images that do not look forward to a more promising future, but unhelpfully and self- destructively back with regret, shame, or despair. Like Walter Benjamin’s famous figure of the “angel of history” (in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”), they serve as “emblem[s] of resistance to the forward march of progress” (Love 147). Once again, this turns out to be a striking staple of all three “gay” stories I have selected.

16 Looking through the lens offered by Love, we notice more easily how Lawrence’s text, for example, is not focused simply on the present of its narrated story, but is explicitly set up from a distant future in which time has mercilessly eroded the ephemeral teenage romance. As a shrewd early-modernist writer, Lawrence shows himself alert to the formal possibilities this temporal gap offers. On one very brief and fleeting occasion that is yet of importance in underwriting the genre designation in the title (“A Poem”), he allows his narrator to register the force of his backward feelings within his very grammar. In a telling recollection, the narrator shifts from the past to the present tense to describe George’s handling of the horse-driven plow: “he flung himself against the plough and, leaning well in, brought it round with a sweep: a click, and they are off uphill again. There is a great rustle as the birds sweep round after him and follow up the new-turned furrow” (3). This image of the object of same-sex desire turning his back on the desiring protagonist and moving away–a typical image of loss as investigated by Love–is apparently etched in the narrator’s mind in a perennial here and now to which he returns in a gesture that queer theorists such as Judith Butler have sought to define by engaging with the Freudian notion of melancholia (Butler 73-84).

17 A similar narrative organization may be found in Anderson’s story, which is set up to culminate in an extended look backwards at Biddlebaum’s traumatic past. As a twenty- year-old schoolmaster living in another town (somewhere in Pennsylvania) and under his birth name (Adolph Myers), Biddlebaum was betrayed by his involuntary habit of caressing the boys under his charge. The habit led to his being falsely accused of sexual harassment by a “half-witted boy” who “became enamored of the young master” and reported his nocturnal sexual fantasies back to the townsmen as facts (164). Ever since that traumatic episode, in which the young schoolmaster barely escaped getting lynched, Biddlebaum has suffered from a radically “disqualified” or “spoiled” identity, living as a self-chosen outcast in Ohio under a new name, preternaturally aging (although “but forty” he “looked sixty-five” [164]), and continuously haunted by his fluttering hands, which forever threaten to give away what the rest of his body and mind work so hard to repress.

18 Forster’s Conway presents a third variation on the experience of feeling backward rather than forward. In his case, the feeling is reflected metaphorically when at the end of the story he catches his own mirror image and suddenly realizes the extent to which he, too, has radically aged: “They had reached the top of the club staircase. Conway saw

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the reflection of his face once more in a mirror, and it was the face of an old man. He pushed Trevor Donaldson off abruptly, and went back to sit down by his liqueur-glass. He was safe, safe, he could go forward with his career as planned. But waves of shame came over him” (22). Conway is overcome by shame both at the young milkman’s sacrifice for him and at his own cowardice that keeps him from standing up for the prisoner. He is undone by the unproductiveness of his own lucky escape, the impossibility to grieve publicly despite the waves of feeling washing over him, and the certain promise of continuing guilt.

19 Considering the huge differences in plot, setting, and character among the three “gay” stories in my corpus, it is all the more remarkable, finally, that we can identify yet another thread of unproductive negativity binding my sample together. Love notes that many of the queer figures she analyzes “are characterized by damaged or refused agency” (147), and she includes passivity and withdrawal in her list of negative affects. This pattern, too, returns in multiple guises in all three narratives. On several occasions, for instance, the intimacy between the narrator and George in Lawrence’s story is characterized by speechlessness and a lack of interaction. In addition, we must read the narrator’s wistfully remembered desire through a number of heavily affective projections onto nature in a kind of metonymical chain that Jacques Lacan has made central to our understanding of the workings of desire: I ran with my heavy clogs and my heart heavy with vague longing, down to the mill, while the wind blanched the sycamores, and pushed the sullen pines rudely, for the pines were sulking because their million creamy sprites could not fly wet-winged. The horse-chestnuts bravely kept their white candles erect in the socket of every bough, though no sun came to light them. Drearily a cold swan swept up the water, trailing its black feet, clacking its great hollow wings, rocking the frightened water hens, and insulting the staid black-necked geese. What did I want that I turned thus from one thing to another? (4, my emphasis)

20 In this passage (another obvious attempt at poeticizing the story), a whole libidinal psychodrama is compressed into the chain of images that runs from rude pushing to sulking, the inability to fly, candles that are being kept erect, the sun failing to arrive, the sense of dreariness, the clacking of hollow wings, and frightened feelings. When later in the story George does wind up taking the narrator in a firm grip, moreover, the latter surrenders to him in a heavily gendered manner that puts him resolutely in a position of passivity: “He saw I had forgotten to continue my rubbing, and laughing he took hold of me and began to rub me briskly, as if I were a child, or rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands” (6).

21 Anderson’s story ends with the image of a socially withdrawn Biddlebaum, all by himself inside his kitchen and self-absorbed, engaging in an involuntary ritual that may in turn be interpreted as a hypertrophied symptom of damaged agency. From the externally focalized position in which we are invited to watch the ritual, it seems like a form of private erotic prayer: Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum washed the few dishes soiled by his simple meal and, setting up a folding cot by the screen door that led to the porch, prepared to undress for the night. A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in

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and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary. (165)

22 Conway in Forster’s story appears to be even worse off than Biddlebaum, for he is simply unable to find a correlative for prayer: “Oh for prayer!–but whom had he to pray to, and what about? He saw that little things can turn into great ones, and he did not want greatness. He was not up to it” (22). The only action Conway is able to undertake, in the story’s concluding lines, is to write down “the name of his lover, yes, his lover who was going to prison to save him, in order that he might not forget it. Arthur Snatchfold. He had only heard the name once, and he would never hear it again” (23).

23 Turning to the “lesbian” stories in my corpus, we cannot be surprised to notice how several of the patterns already described seem to exert a recurrent appeal. Both Katherine Mansfield’s and Radclyffe Hall’s stories add grist to Love’s analytical mill. Mansfield does so perhaps most ambiguously and in a decidedly more experimental form. Her extremely brief, less-than-two-page story contrasts two images of the female protagonist–who, as with Lawrence, is an unnamed first-person narrator recollecting a memory of great erotic and affective significance (“I can never forget [...]” [24])–and another, equally anonymous woman in a hotel room. The first image is all about the darker affects stereotypically associated with feeling backward: here the heavily metonymical description revolves around “the dreary room” with a single “filthy window” giving out onto “the choked, dust-grimed window of a wash-house opposite” (24). This description builds up a sense of the hotel room as a space of abjection by adding how “revolting” the curtains seemed to the narrator, that the wardrobe contained a “cracked mirror” and “the wallpaper hurt [the narrator] physically” (24-25). The descriptions issue in a deep psychological conviction: “I felt within me a certainty that nothing beautiful could ever happen in that room, and for her I felt contempt, a little tolerance, a very little pity” (25). The whole scene also “accentuate[s] the thin tawdriness of her clothes, the squalor of her life,” and makes the woman look “dull and grey and tired.” All this comes to underwrite the narrator’s loss of passion as a result of aging: “I sat on the bed, and thought: ‘Come, this Old Age. I have forgotten passion, I have been left behind in the beautiful golden procession of Youth. Now I am seeing life in the dressing-room of the theatre’” (25).

24 The second image sets against this depressing prelude an even shorter, lyrically blossoming evocation of one brief sexual encounter between the two women that fleetingly restores passion to the narrator. It reads more like a masturbatory fantasy, however, than a believable adventure: She told me as we walked along the corridor to her room that she was glad the night had come. I did not ask why. I was glad, too. It seemed a secret between us. So I went with her into her room to undo those troublesome hooks. She lit a little candle on an enamel bracket. The light filled the room with darkness. Like a sleepy child she slipped out of her frock and then, suddenly, turned to me and flung her arms around my neck. Every bird upon the bulging frieze broke into song. Every rose upon the tattered paper budded and formed into blossom. Yes, even the green vine upon the bed curtains wreathed itself into strange chaplets and garlands, twined round us in a leafy embrace, held us with a thousand clinging tendrils. And Youth was not dead. (25)

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25 Here again, despite the apparent ecstasy, we do not find any sustained sociality: the intimacy takes place in the privacy of the hotel room (with the lit candle paradoxically increasing the darkness), and the two images pitted against each other in the story do not build a plot: they fail to contain the temporal, spatial, and social conditions needed for flowering into a real narrative. Youth may be declared reborn in the final line, but the sense of delivery at the end of the story arrives in a social bubble; it is not earned through any act of moral daring or public agency, and has no way to convince us of its sustainability into a social future.

26 Hall’s much longer and more conventionally plotted story about Miss Ogilvy “find[ing] herself” (as the title has it) is perhaps the most archetypical part of my corpus–as we might expect from a narrative written shortly before the author made up her mind to write The Well of Loneliness, a central case study in Love’s Feeling Backward. Here the failed sociality, sense of loss and regret, choosing of isolation, looking to the past, damaged agency, and passivity from previous examples all return with a vengeance. In less than twenty pages, we come across every one of these negative affects and conditions during the bird’s-eye view we get of Miss Ogilvy’s sadly unfulfilled life.

27 The telescoped biography starts, typically again, in a backward manner and under the aegis of loss. We find Miss Ogilvy at the outset of the story standing “on the quay at Calais,” where she “survey[s] the disbanding of her Unit, the Unit that together with the coming of war had completely altered the complexion of her life, at all events for three years” (84). Her physiognomy betrays that she is an emblem of the masculine kind of woman whose condition Hall conceived of as “congenital sexual inversion” (84): Miss Ogilvy is described as having a “tall, awkward body” with a “queer look of strength,” a “broad, flat bosom and thick legs and ankles” (85). More important than these outward features, though, is the woman’s inner turmoil: “She was standing firm under fire at that moment, the fire of a desperate regret.” The cause of this violent affect is to see the war ended, with Miss Ogilvy being forced to surrender life at the front–the kind of life that had allowed her to rise to a figure of heroic stature, “possessed of so dauntless a courage and of so insistent a vitality that it vitalized the whole Unit” (85).

28 Backward feelings and the sense of loss multiply when we encounter Miss Ogilvy in the next scene on the train from Dover to London, full of “frustration” and convinced that her future is as “small” as the English landscape passing her by (86). She starts to recollect her life, beginning with the “queer little girl” that showed all the markers of someone we would now call a tomboy but who in her own day and age was compelled to grow up with mounting “bitterness” at the fact that “the world has no wish to understand those who cannot conform to its stereotyped pattern” (86-87). Much later, after the death of her parents and with two equally unmarried sisters on her hands who “looked upon her as a brother” (88), Miss Ogilvy purchased a little estate in Surrey and concluded that “at fifty-five she had grown rather dour, as is often the way with shy, lonely people” (89). The outbreak of the First World War transformed her overnight and gave her an opportunity to experience a three-year spell of psychological liberation while working as a nurse on the battlefields, a period during which she could convince herself that continued acknowledgment of her “courage and hardship and high endeavor” was possible, and that she could afford to “forg[e]t the bad joke that Nature seemed to have played on her” (90).

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29 From these recollections we fast-forward through the remaining years of Miss Ogilvy’s life–years of “growing irritation” during which she is occasionally overcome by a sense of “complete desolation” (92). Her disaffection is only augmented by her antipathy for growing old, which “she resented most bitterly, so that she became the prey of self- pity, and of other undesirable states in which the body will torment the mind, and the mind, in its turn, the body” (93). As a result, and on an impulse, Miss Ogilvy eventually decides to pack and leave everything behind. We are half-way through the story and find Hall suddenly switching genres in accordance with her “forenote” announcing “a brief excursion into the realms of the fantastic” (84). “Near the south coast of Devon,” the narrator tells us, “there exists a small island that is still very little known to the world, but which, nevertheless, can boast an hotel; the only building upon it” (93). To this fantasticated space Miss Ogilvy retreats “with a sense of adventure” (93).

30 Apparently wishing to anchor her protagonist’s “congenital” gender identity and/or sexuality far back in human history, Hall allows Miss Ogilvy to recall suddenly how on the south-west side of the island that she has never visited before “there was once a cave–a very large cave” (94). When her hostess at the hotel shows her some local archeological findings being kept in her scullery, including a man’s skull and thighbone, Miss Ogilvy is filled with “outrage” because “she knew how such men had been buried [...]. They had buried such men in deep, well-dug pits surmounted by four stout stones at their corners–four stout stones there had been and a covering stone. And all this Miss Ogilvy knew as by instinct, having no concrete knowledge on which to draw” (96). The violent feeling segues into another dark affect when she is swept by “a terrible unassuageable grief, without hope, without respite, without palliation, so that with something akin to despair she touched the long gash in the skull. Then her eyes, that had never wept since her childhood, filled slowly with large, hot, difficult tears” (96).

31 Exhausted and back in her room, Miss Ogilvy undergoes a remarkable transformation: she forgets all about who she is and starts to relive a scene she considers to be “very familiar,” in which all her actions feel “perfectly natural” (97). She imagines herself walking outside on the island, in the sunset, as an antediluvian hypermasculine warrior with a young girl by his side. An extended fantasy of loving interaction and faux- primitive dialogue unfolds between the two, culminating in a retreat to the local cave, where the warrior deflowers his trembling companion. The morning after this entranced fantasy/recollection, the elderly Miss Ogilvy is found “sitting at the mouth of the cave. She was dead, with her hands thrust deep into her pockets” (103). Once again, then, we have been reading a story that has been looking backward for most of the time while the arrow of time inexorably moved forward, until the failed sociality, lack of future, and damaged agency of Miss Ogilvy’s life seemed to necessitate the construction of a primeval pipedream. In this pipedream, the many negative affects that had dominated the woman’s life as a result of the mismatch between her gender/ sexuality and the sexism/ heteronormativity of her surroundings could be shed at long last and replaced by an imaginary world in which Miss Ogilvy was finally able to surrender to her deepest desires–and depart from this world.

32 Hall’s story is hardly subtle, and although it engages in a mild form of genre-mixing by switching from realism to fantasy, it is also hardly modernist. Yet the thematic materials are resolutely modern, so that the story offers an early example of the literary experimentation with sexual scripts that would come to enable the figuration

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of lesbian and transgender identities under the regime of modernity. The hopeless and fateful backwardness of this script sits uneasily with the would-be forwardness of modernist art-making, which is why Hall’s story does not welcome a twenty-first- century revisit the same way as my final story does. Gertrude Stein’s tricky and ambiguous evocation of the life of Miss Furr and Miss Skeene (the title immediately sets up a couple instead of the single Miss Ogilvy) is the one story in my corpus that arguably fits comfortably on queer reading lists today. Instead of forcing readers to engage with discouraging scripts of feeling backward, Stein’s story posits different, more positive pedagogical challenges–the challenge, for instance, of becoming sensitive to the precise history of modern sexuality (what are we to make of women who are so insistently labeled “gay” in the 1920s?); the challenge of avoiding an understanding of sexualities as solidified into clear-cut categories and identities (there seem to be so many ways in which the two women manage to be gay, and so many remain unspecified); but also the challenge of retroactively applying Butler’s notion of gender performativity (the women’s social identity seems to be the effect of an endless repetition of discourses that are explicitly marked as regulatory) as well as David Halperin’s more recent reflections in his book on How to Be Gay (in particular his insistence on understanding homosexuality as a cultural practice that requires the establishment of distinctions from mainstream society). This is not the place to untie that complex analytical knot in any detail; instead, an excerpt will suffice to illustrate the queer-friendly close-reading problems posed by Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene being “gay”: They did then learn many ways to be gay and they were then being gay quite regular in being gay, being gay and they were learning little things, little things in ways of being gay, they were very regular then, they were learning very many little things in ways of being gay, they were being gay and using these little things they were learning to have to be gay with regularly gay with then and they were gay the same amount they had been gay. They were quite gay, they were quite regular, they were learning little things, gay little things, they were gay inside them and the same amount they had been gay, they were gay the same length of time they had been gay every day. (38)

33 Stein’s witty spin on language allows me to bring my reading of queer short stories round to one of the central points Heather Love wishes to make. To her, Williams’ thinking “offers a crucial link between cognition and affect and, in doing so, advances an argument against [...] the ‘expressive hypothesis’–the idea that feeling flows naturally from the subject and expresses the truth of that subject” (11). Writers of fiction are more than usually aware of the treacherousness of expressive truth-claims, suggesting that we instead consider the complexity of indirect scripts that are able to dramatize and perform for us how cognition and affect mutually shape each other in dynamic discourses. In Williams’ terms, such indissolubly cognitive-affective stories serve to present “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought [...]. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, [...] a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private” (11). A reconsideration of queer sexual scripts from the modernist era is still of value in helping us understand the nature and workings of these “structures of feeling,” even as they strenuously resist recuperation and put question marks behind our most positive political projects. If this also means that as readers we are constantly on the verge of losing touch with strangely backward-

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feeling stories, we might ponder for a moment the possibility offered by Love–that “the art of losing” is “a particularly queer art” (24).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Sherwood. “Hands.” 1916. Leavitt and Mitchell 160-65. Print.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Forster, E. M. “Arthur Snatchfold.” 1928. Leavitt and Mitchell 9-23. Print.

Gagnon, John H., and William Simon. Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality. 1973. New Brunswick: Aldine, 2005. Print.

Hall, Radclyffe. “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself.” 1926. Reynolds 84-103. Print.

Halperin, David M. How to Be Gay. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Print.

Kohlmann, Benjamin. “Awkward Moments: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Politics of Affect.” PMLA 128.2 (2013): 337-52. Print.

Lawrence, D. H. “A Poem of Friendship.” 1911. Leavitt and Mitchell 1-8. Print.

Leavitt, David, and Mark Mitchell, eds. The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. Print.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Print.

Mansfield, Katherine. “Leves Amores.” 1907. Reynolds 24-25. Print.

Reynolds, Margaret, ed. The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories. 1993. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. 1990. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. Print.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article se propose d’analyser l’expression des sexualités non normatives dans une sélection de nouvelles modernistes anglophones. L’étude part du concept de « scénarios » sexuels (sexual scripts), emprunté aux sciences sociales, qui est adapté par le biais d’instruments théoriques récents centrés sur les axes littéraires et critiques. On trouve un apport intéressant dans les écrits inspirés par le récent « tournant affectif » (affective turn) des études LGBT, en particulier dans Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History d’Heather Love, qui propose une relecture de textes littéraires publiés avant l’ère de l’émancipation sexuelle. Love examine ce qu’elle appelle, avec un terme emprunté à Anne Cvetkovich, « des ‘archives de l’affect’ cruciales, un récit des dommages corporels et psychiques de l’homophobie ». Cet article a pour objet de confirmer les arguments de Love sur un plan culturel plus large, en étudiant trois nouvelles tirées du Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories et trois tirées du Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories :

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“Leves Amores” de Katherine Mansfield (1907), “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” de Gertrude Stein (1922), “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” de Radclyffe Hall (1926), “A Poem of Friendship” de D. H. Lawrence (1911), “Arthur Snatchfold” de E. M. Forster (1928), et la nouvelle qui ouvre Winesburg, Ohio, de Sherwood Anderson, “Hands” (1916). Une micro-lecture de certains passages montre que les échecs sociaux et les affects négatifs occupent une position aussi centrale dans cinq des nouvelles que dans les cas étudiés par Love. La seule exception est l’expérimentation linguistique de Stein, qui pourrait presque figurer sur une liste de lecture “queer” d’aujourd’hui.

AUTHOR

BART EECKHOUT Bart Eeckhout is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal and has published widely on this poet, including Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (University of Missouri Press, 2002), Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (edited with Edward Ragg; Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism (edited with Lisa Goldfarb; Routledge, 2012). He is currently preparing another coedited volume, Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, for Bloomsbury Academic and compiling the entry on Stevens for Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature. His other longstanding interest is in LGBT studies and queer theory: besides supervising doctoral dissertations in the field, he has published in Journal of Homosexuality and contributed to the essay collection Queer in Europe. He has taught courses on short stories at four universities in Belgium and the US.

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Theorizing the Modernist Short Story with Woolf (and Agamben) as an Art of Empowering “Poverty”

Christine Reynier

1 Although she is a canonical modernist novelist, Woolf appears to some readers, like William Boyd, as a disabled short story writer,1 which may account for the fact that few book-length studies of her short stories have been published so far.2 What may be unsettling to some readers—and challenging to others—is that Woolf provides a theory of the short story within her own practice of the genre. Going beyond metafictional games, she provides the means of conceptualizing the modernist short story along lines which are neither those formalist critics will follow nor those the supporters of the Great Divide will defend.3 When read closely, her short stories point at the way Modernism is deeply indebted to and embedded within Victorian and Edwardian fiction, which leads us to revise some assumptions about Modernism. Building upon my previous work on Virginia Woolf’s short stories, I propose to come back to one of her short stories and suggest, in the light of Agamben’s recent work, some further ways of understanding her conception of the genre, which may illuminate the modernist short story at large as an art of empowering “poverty.”

Capturing the elusive form of Woolf’s short story

2 What is most striking for a reader of Woolf’s short stories is their great variety: they offer tales of love and passion (“Kew Gardens,” “Moments of Being”) as well as tales of failed marriages and adultery (“Lappin and Lapinova,” “The Legacy”); tales of inequality (“A Society”) and tales of violence, rape and wounded selves (the Dalloway stories).4 They give glimpses of the lives of “mysterious figures” (“An Unwritten Novel” 121), their ephemeral joy at remembering a kiss (as Eleanor does in “Kew Gardens”), their contentment at sleeping under an apple-tree (as Miranda does in “In the Orchard”) or their relief at finding out a supposedly dead friend is alive (“Sympathy”); a few words are overheard in a garden (“Kew Gardens”) or in the watering place in the

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story of the same name; silent voices mainly are overheard by an eavesdropping narrator: unprepossessing moments of human experience are highlighted briefly the sooner to dissolve into nothingness.

3 If Woolf’s short stories display a great variety of themes, they also resort to a great variety of literary genres, turning from the ghost story in “A Haunted House” to the thriller in “The Mysterious Case of Miss V.,” the journal in “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” memoirs in “Memoirs of a Novelist,” the letter in “The Symbol,” the fable in “Solid Objects,” the children’s story in “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain” or “The Widow and the Parrot” and portraits and caricatures in “Portraits” or “The Man who Loved his Kind”.

4 A variety of methods can also be found in Woolf’s short stories that now come in a cycle as the Dalloway stories do or in isolated units, as it is the case for all the others; they range from the impressionist style of a reverie on a mark on a wall or a picture in blue and green (“Blue and Green”), from the impressions of a music lover during a concert (“The String Quartet”), of a snail in a flower-bed (“Kew Gardens”) or of a heron flying over a town (“Monday or Tuesday”) to the metafictional reflections of “The Lady in the Looking-Glass.” Such variety makes it difficult to map out and categorise Woolf’s short stories. It also makes them difficult to grasp. They keep eluding the reader, all the more so since they stage “evanescent figures,” dissolving or disintegrating figures that have a hallucinatory quality.

5 If Woolf’s short stories are of an essentially elusive nature, it is also because of their ambivalence. They combine a taste for minute detail and for metaphor, as exemplified in “Kew Gardens,” with a taste for secrecy and ellipses, as can be seen in “The Legacy” or “The Mark on the Wall.” They can capture the Victorian world through Porchester Terrace in “Lappin and Lapinova” and the dying Edwardian one in “The Shooting Party” while they are firmly grounded in the world of modernity through their evocation of the changing of gear of the motor omnibuses, the experiments in spiritualism and the traumatic aftermath of the First World war in “Kew Gardens,” for instance.5 They have rhythm, vivacity and life: they are unquestionably modern and rebellious, in tune with the arts that were developing at the time and the new pace of life, but their exacerbated modernity and taste for experimentation definitely relies on Victorian and Edwardian models. As such, they seem to me significant of the modernist short story at large. All the more so since they flaunt their differences and plurality, their desire to escape all models, all forms of standardization: these “wild outbursts of freedom”6 are understandably impossible to capture. The reader can only marvel at their multi-faceted nature and value the absence of all fixed meaning. Their very elusiveness makes re-reading a constantly renewed pleasure and experience.

6 But how can we think of this great variety of texts as a unique literary genre? Bringing together Woolf’s essays on short story writers and her own short stories, I suggested in my previous work that Woolf defines the short story as an impersonal art of proportion and emotion, setting it within a space characterized by circulation, incompletion and inconclusiveness, a fundamentally ethical space of encounter, where conversation (in the form of spoken or more often silent words between characters, writer and reader, various genres, modes, texts or art forms) appears to be the form of the encounter as well as the locus of emotion. “Dialogue on Mount Pentelicus” exemplifies the art of conversation Woolf practices and its strong ethical component. I would like to come back to this specific short story and analyse it in a different but complementary light,

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with the help of Agamben’s work. “Dialogue on Mount Pentelicus” will come out as providing a theory of the short story as an empowering art of poverty which reverberates through Woolf’s own short stories and those of her contemporaries.

Woolf’s short story as an art of “poverty”

7 “Dialogue on Mount Pentelicus” is an early short story which was probably written at the end of 1906, soon after Woolf’s return from Greece, but remained unpublished until 1987.7 It is a very biting criticism of education in Cambridge and men’s privileges. Set on the slopes of Mount Pentelicus, it deals with a group of young English men travelling in Greece and coming face to face with a monk. Although the monk appears at the very end of the narrative, he is, to my mind, central to the understanding of the short story. 8

“Poverty” as bareness

8 A “great brown form” (67), dressed very plainly, the monk has clearly renounced all material possessions and comes out as a figure of poverty. As such, he first serves as a foil to the pretentiousness of the young English students straight out of Harrow and Cambridge, and becomes the vehicle of the satire of their elitism, their spite and their fake vision of Greece. Indeed, the narrative mainly consists of a dialogue between these English students who, for most of them, admire Plato and Sophocles and are disappointed with the modern Greeks, whom they call “barbarians,” and consider they are themselves the true heirs of the Ancient Greeks. One of them, though, disagrees and explains that what they call the Greeks is but a utopian construction referring to “all that we do not know and […] all that we dream and desire” (66). And the narrator suggests in-between the lines that when the young men talk of the Ancient Greeks as “fix[ing] their minds upon the beautiful and the good” (65), they are not talking about the Ancient Greeks but about G.E. Moore’s ethics. Towards the end of the narrative, they are confronted with a monk, an impressive but simple figure who addresses them all in plain words which, by contrast with their haughty attitude, sound like words of openness and generosity, signs of a truly ethical disposition. In a youthful and vengeful text, Woolf exposes and derides the academic world to which she has not been given access, a theme she will develop in A Room of One’s Own.

9 The figure of the monk is somewhat unexpected in the work of a writer who has had no religious education and has no religious faith; it consequently tends to strike the reader as ironic. However, what Woolf insists on in the short story is not at all the religious belief of the monk, but his simplicity: his plain brown gown, evocative of the Franciscan Friars Minor’s outfit, his plain words, at odds with the young Englishmen’s endless discourse which, by contrast, sounds empty and meaningless, and his humble way of life (he is gathering dry wood). The monk’s poverty, here defined as simplicity, bareness and humbleness, stands out as a positive value.

10 The monk’s choice of a life deprived of all material possessions first reads as a criticism of the society the writer herself was living in, a materialist and capitalist society. The figure of the monk may thus be seen as articulating within the short story the economic and political criticism Woolf would phrase in later essays such as “Mr

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Bennett and Mrs Brown” where Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells are famously taken to task for their materialism, a form of writing which, according to Woolf, amounts to condoning capitalism.

11 Concomitantly, the figure of the monk appears to reflect on the nature of the text in which it features. His choice of a bare life devoid of all superfluity reflects Woolf’s own choice in her essays on short story writers. There, Woolf repeatedly admires the simplicity and bareness of style of Chekhov and Hemingway’s short stories while lamenting Hemingway’s excessive and superfluous dialogue. When, at the end of “Dialogue on Mount Pentelicus,” the monk meets the young Englishmen, he utters one single and simple word, “good evening” (68), thus exemplifying Woolf’s desire for as few words as possible in a short story and especially, as little dialogue as possible: And probably it is this superfluity of dialogue [in Hemingway’s short stories] which leads to that other fault which is always lying in wait for the writer of short stories: the lack of proportion. A paragraph in excess will make these little craft lopsided and will bring about that blurred effect which, when one is out for clarity and point, so baffles the reader. (Essays IV: 455)

12 Lack of adornment and artifice, bareness and simplicity go together with beauty in this figure who “had the nose and brow of a Greek statue” (67) and an intense light in his eyes, as is repeatedly made clear (67-68). In that respect, the monk embodies the bareness, power of concentration and intensity the short story should aim at.

13 The humble tasks the monk performs, the simple way in which he meets and greets the English students also highlight the simple stuff the short story should be made of: ordinary situations, ordinary characters and ordinary words. The value of the ordinary is emphasised through this figure as well as that of humanness. Woolf thus defines the economy and brevity of the short story in terms of poverty: she borrows from economics a term which usually refers to what is downgraded in the economic world and which consequently carries negative connotations, she retrieves it and turns it into a literary asset.

14 Furthermore, for the monk, renouncing material goods goes together with renouncing his own identity: he has no name, he is simply the monk, the very symbol of the narrator’s impersonality Woolf yearns for in a short story. He is also the voice of the past, the inheritor of the Ancient Greeks. But whereas the students think of the Ancient Greeks as philosophers and thinkers, the narrator suggests at the outset of the short story, that the Ancient Greeks are the stone masons and the innumerable slaves who “wore out their lives” (63) on the slopes of Mount Pentelicus, the site of the quarries for the Parthenon, usually only connected with the name of sculptor Phidias who oversaw its construction. Like the stone masons, the slaves and the peasants, the monk belongs to this long line of anonymous figures and is their spokesperson. He is the voice of the humble people. The gown the monk wears may also be said to give the monk a somewhat sexless appearance in keeping with the genderlessness Woolf advocates and wishes Hemingway or D.H. Lawrence had been able to respect, regretting “their display of self-conscious virility” in their short stories (Essays IV, 454). The monk thus embodies Woolf’s ideal of an impersonal personality, which is exemplified in her short stories through a narrator who now resorts to the first person plural, “we,” now to the singular “I,” trying not to betray his or her sex.

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An enabling “poverty”

15 The monk, who is deeply rooted in time and can connect the past with the present, appears to be the voice of simplicity as well as a timeless mediating voice. His poverty may be material as well as spiritual and intellectual, since he is probably illiterate; however, it is an enabling poverty: “Such a flame as that in the monk’s eye […] will burn on still in the head of monk or peasant when more ages are passed than the brain can number” (68). His piercing gaze is not evoked as contemplating a form of divine transcendence but simply as a “power which survives trees” (67) and as tracing a “solid and continuous avenue from one end of time to the other” (68). Through the pun on “eye” and “I,” the “clarified” light in his “eye” also suggests that contemplation for Woolf is turned inwards towards the self, in other words towards the human subject (and mundane matters) (67). If with a pinch of salt as it is often the case with Woolf, the monk becomes a figure of the short story writer as humble craftsman, dealing with human experience, an ordinary form of beauty.

16 Through the figure of the monk, Woolf turns poverty into a concept which reflects both on the short story and the short story writer. What Woolf calls in her essays proportion, emotion and impersonality is here encompassed by the notion of poverty, usually defined in terms of economic lack, but endowed here with positive overtones and equated with bareness, intensity and anonymity.

17 Furthermore, the figure of the monk may well be doubly ironic, not only because it is a miraculous apparition that, like Moses, comes out of a bush, but also because it helps, as we have seen, to satirise the English students; his piercing eye is also the eye of the satirist who can see through these youths and their pretention at knowledge. More exactly, it derides students modeled on Woolf’s own brothers, Thoby and Adrian,9 who were fascinated by G.E. Moore’s philosophy, a philosophy shaped, in spite of its author, by Moore’s evangelical background, the same background Leslie Stephen had been brought up in, before he rejected it.10 Choosing the figure of a monk, probably a Franciscan one (hence, a Catholic one), as an image of the writer, is a way for Woolf to assert her difference from her family and friends and her marginal position. Adopting a figure of poverty also means claiming as her own the poor economic condition women in general,11 and women writers in particular, 12 had long been condemned to. Woolf thus turns the social disability that marginalisation and poverty can be, into a creative ability.13 However, through the almost sexless figure of the monk, she is careful not to turn poverty into a necessarily gendered quality.

18 The short story, usually regarded as the poorer of the literary genres, coming second only after the novel, is here claimed as an art of poverty and as valuable: it is thus placed center stage and given pride of place.

“Poverty” as use

19 The concept of poverty as redefined by Woolf seems to articulate another important characteristic of the short story. In “Dialogue on Mount Pentelicus,” we see the monk gathering dry wood on the slopes of the mountain, out of his monastery, on grounds belonging to others. This is the form of highest poverty Giorgio Agamben analyses in The Highest Poverty. Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, focusing on Franciscan monks and

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poverty as usus. Agamben shows that for the Franciscan monks, the claim of poverty “does not represent an ascetic or mortifying practice to obtain salvation as it did in the monastic tradition, but it is now an inseparable and constitutive part of the ‘apostolic’ or ‘holy’ life, which they profess to practice in perfect joy” (92). Although Woolf does not say which order the monk belongs to, that she should have dressed him in brown rather than the black clerical dress of the Greek Orthodox monks, may be significant of her choice of the Franciscan order of Friars Minor and what is interesting here is that the monk comes to exemplify “poverty as use,” as making use of what belongs to others.

20 By resorting to the figure of the monk, Woolf seems to point at her own literary choice: the choice of poverty, of making use of what belongs to others without appropriating it. The figure of the monk enables Woolf to account for her method: divesting herself of her own identity (and possibly, of her own gender), she adopts a posture of poverty which enables her to use the property of other writers and artists, hence, to use various literary genres and other art forms. She enters the territory of Shakespeare in “Phyllis and Rosamond,” of John Ruskin in “Kew Gardens,” of Charles Dickens or Leonard Woolf and uses their property. Two examples will suffice to show how she proceeds.

21 In “A Haunted House,” Woolf “uses” Charles Dickens’s title of his cycle of short stories, The Haunted House (1859). In this Christmas book, Dickens’s narrator settles in a dark haunted house, “the avoided house”, soon identifies the so-called ghost as a young stable-boy but nevertheless, gathers a whole group of friends so as to chase the ghost and humour the villagers who so readily believe in it. Each friend, that is Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and other Victorian writers, tells his own story in turn and alternately tries to find the ghost in the clock room, the double room, the picture room, the cupboard, and so on. In these stories, the ghost appears to be now a childhood memory (in Charles Dickens’s “The Ghost in Master B’s Room”), now a traumatic event (in Wilkie Collins’s “The Ghost in the Cupboard Room”), now a dream (in George Augustus Sala’s “The Ghost in the Double Room”) or a ghost named desire (in Hesba Stretton’s “the Ghost in the Clock Room”) or guilt (in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Ghost in the Garden Room”). The whole cycle aims at deflating with humour and scepticism, the frightening power of gothic ghost stories and emptying ghosts of their supernatural meaning to locate them within the human psyche.14 Woolf’s “A Haunted House” takes its cue from Dickens but transforms the multiple narrators into an ungendered rainbow-like narrator who is now singular (“I”) now plural (“we”), and who, like Dickens, locates the ghost in the human subconscious mind while endowing it with an evanescent quality, thus privileging openness and indeterminacy. The title chosen by Woolf emphasises this very indeterminacy through the shift from the article “the” to the indeterminate “a,” an article which turns Dickens’s haunted house into any house, everyone’s house, thus locating the ghost into everyone’s consciousness and giving it a universal quality. By using, almost plagiarising Dickens’s title without acknowledging her debt, Woolf takes his own modern parody of gothic ghost stories into the sphere of indeterminacy, the very hallmark of modernism.

22 My second example will be “The Duchess and the Jeweller,” a short story which is, according to David Bradshaw, Woolf’s “most controversial piece of work, largely inexcusable” because of “its offensive subject matter” (xxxi). Only Hermione Lee seems to have defended it, claiming that in this story, “Woolf separates herself off from the habitual, half-conscious anti-Semitism of her circle. She spells out her complicity in

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bigotry and offensiveness by way of self-accusation and social critique […]” (680, qtd. in Bradshaw xxxi). My contention is that this short story, written in 1932 and published in 1938,15 only makes sense when read along with Leonard Woolf’s “Three Jews,” first published in 1917 by the Hogarth Press with Virginia’s “The Mark on the Wall.” In his short story, Leonard Woolf stages three characters who are apparently very different: a narrator who does not care much for his Jewishness, a second one who is indifferent to his faith while he recognises he still belongs to Palestine, and a third one, a grave- keeper, who is Jewish to the backbone but refuses his son’s marriage, not on the grounds that the girl he married is a Christian believer, but that she is a servant. This story illustrates the difficulties of getting rid of one’s Jewishness even when it has become a meaningless religion and set of traditions. It mainly points at the Jews’ dilemma, their being torn between England and Palestine, their sense of belonging and not belonging, their being both insiders and outsiders. The second character is, for instance, both able to see the other Jews as an Englishman of the time does, through stereotypical physical features, that is, from a distance and as an outsider; at the same time, he can recognise the narrator is a Jew and discuss Jewishness with him as an insider. Similarly, the grave-keeper is as class-conscious as any Englishman could be while being a Jew. The characters are shown to conform to stereotypes while evading them. Leonard Woolf exemplifies in this semi-autobiographical story the duality and dilemma Jewish people like him experienced.

23 As for Virginia Woolf, she stages a Jewish character, the richest jeweller in England. One of the sentences which have been said to be the most offensive in her story, beyond the character’s name, is the description of his nose, “like an elephant’s trunk” (78). This is in fact a quotation from Leonard’s story in which he also emphasises the stereotypical nose of the Jews (7). What Virginia is interested in in this story, is the duality of her character, how this successful jeweller often “dismantles” and becomes again the poor boy in a back alley that he was in his youth. She stages the same duality as Leonard does, exposing the man’s vulnerability under the cliché. Leonard Woolf describes three Jews who seem to fit the cliché, with their dark hair, long noses and loose arms, and unveils the Englishman under the Jew. Indeed, the narrator goes to Kew Gardens on the first Spring Sunday, has tea under the apple-blossom, where the second character joins him; the grave-keeper refuses his son’s marriage not because he married a Christian woman but out of class-consciousness and prejudice. Leonard and Virginia Woolf stage the same duality in their characters, how they both fit and evade clichés. In those two comparable ways, the two writers dismantle the clichés and point at their emptiness and offensiveness.

24 In a reflection on what it means to be a Jew, especially when there is no more faith, Leonard Woolf shows how Jewishness is both connected to history and Palestine and is also in the gaze of the other, in the other’s perception of physical difference, a perception shaped by prejudice that has been instrumental in constructing stereotypes. The insidiousness of stereotypes is suggested since it is shown to shape even the Jewish characters’ own perception of themselves. Similarly in Virginia Woolf’s story, the jeweller has come to fit the stereotype of the rich shrewd money-loving Jew or more exactly, has become a prisoner of the stereotype. Both Leonard and Virginia Woolf point at the dilemma of their Jewish characters: how they struggle between on the one hand, their inherited Jewishness, complicated by the superimposed stereotypical perception the others have of their Jewishness (and have led them to have of themselves), and on the other hand, their Englishness (their love of Spring, flowers, tea:

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another set of stereotypes; their class-consciousness), their humaneness and vulnerability. Through this controversial example, we see how Virginia enters Leonard’s territory, uses his text or “property,” highlighting and extending its meaning. The concept of poverty as “use” suggests another way of reading what might also be analyzed in terms of intertextuality, haunting, spectrality or inhabiting the other’s texts.

25 The concept of poverty seems to be more encompassing since, still according to Agamben, poverty as “use” is a form of abdicatio iuris. For the Franciscans, abdicatio iuris is the “abdication of every right […], that is, the possibility of human existence beyond the law” (110). They “never tire of confirming […],” Agamben writes, “the lawfulness […], of making use of goods without having any right to them” (110). They have the simple de facto use of these goods. “Poverty” for them, is defined both as abdicatio iuris and as “the claim of use against the right of ownership” (125). If using the things of others is a form of trespassing and occupying a territory which is beyond the law, in Woolf’s short story, poverty as use becomes a way to account for this literary genre’s transgressive nature: its constant trespassing of the laws or conventions regulating the short story genre (what Benzel and Hoberman16 have analyzed in their collection of essays as “ambitious and self-conscious attempts to challenge generic boundaries, undercutting traditional differences between short fiction and the novel, between experimental and popular fiction, between fiction and nonfiction” [2]), but also its trespassing of the boundaries of various art forms (cinema, photography, sculpture, etc.).17

26 In his analysis of poverty as “use,” Agamben points out that the concept of “use” is usually defined negatively in opposition to law. He claims that the concept of use could instead be thought as being synonymous with habitus (140). Indeed, if you think of use in opposition to law, you “break with the monastic tradition that privileged the establishment of habitus and (with an obvious reference to the Aristotelian doctrine of use as energeia) seem to conceive the life of the Friars Minor as a series of acts that are never constituted in a habit or custom—that is, a form of life” (140). The Highest Poverty is, according to him, based on use, usus here no longer meaning “the pure and simple renunciation of the law, but that which establishes this renunciation as a form and a way of life” (142). With use, what is usually permitted only in case of extreme necessity becomes a habit, a right of using (114). In other words, “the Friars Minor work a reversal and at the same time an absolutization of the state of exception […] What for others is normal thus becomes the exception for them; what for others is an exception becomes for them a form of life” (115). Agamben’s conclusion seems to me particularly relevant in Woolf’s case. “Poverty,” using the territory of the other and trespassing (a word Woolf will adopt with great alacrity in A Room of One’s Own) becomes a way of being, a way of writing.18

27 It could be objected that this form of poverty, poverty as use, is not specific to the short story and can be found in Woolf’s fiction at large. However, what is particularly interesting in “Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus” is that the figure of the monk brings together two forms of poverty, poverty as use and poverty as bareness, which is specific to the short story. There, the concept of poverty, as defined by Agamben, becomes fully operative. It comes to encapsulate both the formal attempts of Woolf’s short story at bareness, conciseness or “proportion,” its empowering impersonality and its joint attempts at intertextuality, interarticity, intergenericity or intermediality.

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Furthermore, the figure of the monk as a figure of poverty appears to be a way to connect the theory of the short story and its praxis. In that respect, Woolf’s short stories can be said to be an art of “poverty.”

The concept of “poverty” reconsidered: Woolf vs. Agamben

28 Poverty as “use” is a concept that raises questions: indeed, we may wonder whether using the property of others is ethical or not. Use may well rhyme with abuse. Using the other’s property may be synonymous with colonising it, appropriating it or expropriating the other. In Woolf’s case, we have seen that her use of Dickens’s or Leonard Woolf’s short stories ends up in highlighting their meaning, taking their scope further and their attempts at modernity forward: her use of their ideas transmutes them, renews them and makes them live on. Using the territory of the others, for Woolf, is not exactly a form of sharing but a way of being with the other or more exactly, of being with and against the other since the author can both feel with the other, expose their vulnerability and claim redress, as in “The Duchess and the Jeweller” or “The Shooting Party,” but also parody the other, as in “Ode Written Partly in Prose…,” and satirise the other, as in “The Shooting Party” or “Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus.” For Woolf, use seems to be a way of being “together and apart,” as one of her short stories suggests.

29 Woolf’s desire to use territories that have already been used rather than colonise new ones may also read as a recycling move as well as a political anti-imperialist stance. The writer as humble user of the material of others is thus on the one hand deprived of authority and authorship (but also inevitably and ambiguously, empowered by use) and, on the other hand, placed within tradition, the nineteenth-century tradition of craftsmen William Morris (and ironically enough, Arnold Bennett19) defended,20 rather than against it. Literature itself comes out as a common ground21 or more exactly as a “common pool” from which each writer can draw in turn, as is suggested in “The Fascination of the Pool” (226). If the idea of literature as a common pool suggests that using the property of others is nothing else than using common property and ultimately defends a socialist ideal, using the property of others is mainly synonymous with abdicating the law, as Agamben explains, and adopting perhaps an anarchist position, at least a marginal one, which goes together with the position of the poor that Woolf defends here.22 Poverty in the end, both as bareness and as use, encompasses the “poverty” or bareness of the “poor,” “minor” literary genre of the short story as well as the position of the short story writer and claims them as valuable. With this concept, Woolf provides a theory of the short story within her own praxis, a method that tells us much about her own conception of theory as woven within her own practice of the short story rather than divorced from it, which is in keeping with her whole outlook on literature as displaying circulation rather than hierarchy.

30 “Mount Pentelicus” was written in 1906, at a time when Joyce was completing Dubliners (except for “The Dead”), five years before May Sinclair published her first uncanny ghost story,23 thirteen years before Dorothy Richardson published her first open-ended enigmatic short story,24 at a time when Katherine Mansfield was just beginning to try her hand at writing and when neither Joyce nor Woolf herself had written any novel. However, in that early story, she captures one of the main tenets of what would be

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Modernism, the posture of the writer as using his predecessors’ texts, the writer’s reliance on intertextuality and tradition but gives a different appraisal of tradition than the one that will prevail from 1919 onwards with T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual talent.” She mainly captures, through the figure of poverty she creates, the main characteristics of the modernist short story: its bareness, impersonality and intensity which bring it closer to poetry and drama than to the novel while pointing at what the modernist novel, divorced from narrativity and steeped in the ordinary, will be. In other words, the concept of poverty as redefined by Woolf brings together the main characteristics of the modernist short story while turning this humble genre into an emblem of modernist writing, which necessarily throws another light on Modernism, long defined as elitist.

31 Woolf’s theory could easily be extended beyond her own praxis to her own contemporaries. Indeed, many modernist short stories could be analysed along Woolf’s precepts: poverty as bareness may well be another name for Joyce’s “scrupulous meanness,” his “ascetic prose style” (Hunter 50). It is interesting that both Woolf and Joyce should resort to concepts with religious connotations, the monk or the epiphany, and redefine them with a secular intent. Poverty as use could also help to conceptualise Joyce’s intertextual method in Dubliners25 or Mansfield’s close connections with Chekhov that were sometimes interpreted as plagiarism,26 and more generally, the modernists’ relations with their predecessors in terms of connection rather than break from them. Poverty as bareness is finally a way to let the reader go on with the short story and speculate about its meaning, as Mansfield, for instance, also suggests when she remarks that “What the writer does is not so much to solve the question but to put the question.”27 Woolf thus provides the means of conceptualizing the modernist short story.

Woolf vs. Benjamin

32 Poverty is a concept that Walter Benjamin will more famously take up nearly thirty years later in his 1933 essay on “Experience and Poverty.” There, he first seems to lament the loss in experience the First World War meant and the loss of value experience underwent at the time. But he then proceeds to show that this loss turned out to be a liberating force and form of poverty that became the very condition of creation and modernity. Renouncing experience became the condition of renewal. Freeing oneself from experience enabled man to foreground and value his own external and internal poverty. In a similar way, Woolf advocates through the figure of the monk a form of renunciation of the experience the short story may have acquired throughout the nineteenth century, a form of renunciation that liberates the short story from its burden of conventions and turns it into a “poor” bare genre, divested of all superfluous trappings. However, just as Benjamin qualifies his ideas and writes that the loss of experience is not synonymous with a tabula rasa philosophy, Woolf connects the short story with tradition, through poverty as “use.”

33 If Woolf and Benjamin resort to the same concept, their ways part when the concept is brought to bear on the short story. Indeed, Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay on the storyteller, defines the short story as the very opposite of the oral epic tale since, according to him, it does not allow for the superimposition of various layers of narrative and repeated narrations. If the oral tale is presented as connected with

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memory, tradition and atemporality, consequently and implicitly, the short story appears for Benjamin as the product of modernity and its fast pace, the outcome of a period when “man does not value what cannot be shortened,” in the words of poet Paul Valéry.28

34 Woolf, like Benjamin, grants the short story a fast pace: by acknowledging in terms of poverty its bareness, she implicitly presents the short story as keeping with the pace of modernity, the accelerated rhythm of modern life, but also the accelerated rhythm of production in the capitalist society she criticises, the accelerated rhythm of publication and circulation of the little magazines in which the short stories appear. But, unlike Benjamin, Woolf concomitantly conceives of the short story as the creation of a storyteller who is both an anonymous craftsman and the connecting link with the literature of the past, similar to Benjamin’s teller of oral tales. In the end, by bringing together what Benjamin will separate, Woolf comes to define the short story as a genre which is the joint outcome of tradition and modernity. For Woolf, the concept of poverty brings together the two contradictory components of the short story and turns the genre into a space of tension, a paradoxical and dynamic space. It also appears as a powerful concept that is found, when tested out, to match up with those of more famous theorists. Poverty redefined by Woolf enables us to think of the modernist short story not as a disabled art practiced by disabled writers, but as an art of empowering “poverty.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty. Monastic Rules and Form-of-life. Trans. Adam Kotsko. 2011. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Print.

Annan, Noel. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1984. Print.

Baldwin, Dean R. Virginia Woolf. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “Experience and Poverty.” Selected Writings. Vol. 2. 1927-34. Trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. 731-736. Print.

----. “The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolaï Leskov.” Selected Writings. Vol. 3. 1935-38. eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. 143-66. Print.

Bennett, Arnold. Anna of the Five Towns. 1902. London: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Benzel, Kathryn N. and Ruth Hoberman, eds. Trespassing Boundaries. Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Boyd, William. “A Short History of the Short Story.” Prospect. 10 July 2006. Web. 9 August 2013.

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Bradshaw, David. Introduction. The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction. By Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xi-xxxi. Print.

Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors. The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber, 1977. Print.

Dick, Susan, ed. Virginia Woolf. The Complete Shorter Fiction. Notes and Appendices. London: Triad/ Grafton Books, 1989. 293-367. Print.

Dickens, Charles. The Haunted House. Foreword by Peter Ackroyd. London: Hesperus Press, 2002. Print.

Drewery, Claire. Modernist Short Fiction by Women. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Print.

Hanson, Claire. “Katherine Mansfield.” The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 288-305. Print.

Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Print.

Levy, Heather. The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Print.

Mansfield, Katherine. Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Eds. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984-96. Print.

Reynier, Christine. Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009. Print.

Richardson, Dorothy. Journey to Paradise. London: Virago Press, 1989. Print.

Sinclair, May. Uncanny Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2006. Print.

Skrbic, Nena. Wild Outbursts of Freedom. Reading Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. Westport, Connecticut; London: Praeger, 2004. Print.

Woolf, Leonard. “Three Jews.” Virginia Woolf Bulletin 5 (Sept. 2000): 4-12. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Triad/Grafton Books, 1989. Print.

----. “Henry James’s Ghost Stories.” 1921. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1988: 319-26. Print.

----. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. London: Granada, 1977. Print.

NOTES

1. “Virginia Woolf was not a particularly accomplished writer of short stories” (Boyd). 2. So far, four monographs (Baldwin, Levy, Reynier, Skrbic) and a collection of essays (Benzel and Hoberman) have been published. 3. Huyssen developed the idea of Modernism as the Great Divide between elitist and popular culture. 4. All short stories by Virginia Woolf quoted in this article are from Virginia Woolf. The Complete Shorter Fiction and will be referred to by title and page number. 5. On this subject, see Bradshaw, XXIV. He suggests there is a spiritualist and a man suffering from shell-shock in “Kew Gardens.”

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6. This is the title Nena Skrbic chose for her book on Woolf’s short stories. 7. It was published for the first time in TLS (11-17 September 1987): 979. 8. This will extend my previous analysis, which focused on the encounter between the various characters. 9. On that subject, see Dick 297. 10. On that subject, see Noel Annan, especially chapter V. 11. For instance, Victorian married women’s property had been absorbed by their husband until the Married Women’s Property Law was passed in 1882. 12. Such a figure of poverty appears in Woolf’s fiction, especially in Flush where Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh is mentioned, the figure of the poet who renounced marriage and wealth in favour of freedom, the freedom to write, and its corollary poverty. 13. Claire Hanson, in her study of short fiction, confirms this when she writes that short fiction tends “toward the expression of that which is marginal or ex-centric to society” (300). 14. As Julia Briggs has argued, after the peak of the ghost stories’ popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century, they began to focus upon threats from within rather than beyond the human psyche. Woolf herself wrote an essay in 1921 on Henry James where she praises his ghosts because they “have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts […]. They have their origin within us” (“Henry James’s Ghost Stories” 324). 15. See Dick 314-315. 16. See also Drewery on that subject. 17. There is no space here to develop this, but if we could, we would analyze “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” and its connection to sculpture, “Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus” and its relation to photography or “The Shooting Party” and its debt to cinema, etc. 18. This ties in with my previous conclusions, where conversation came out as being the basis of Woolf’s way of writing and ethics, since conversation, as Agamben reminds us, means “conduct, way of life” (104). 19. In Anna of the Five Towns, Arnold Bennett clearly yearns for the time when pottery was a craft, a metafictional image of writing as craft. See chapter 8, 114-116. 20. See his News from Nowhere. 21. This is the title of Gillian Beer’s book in which she argues that in “‘The Leaning Tower,’ common land and literature become equal expressions of freedom” (13) and in her fiction, Woolf “works through what is communal: architecture, clouds, cows, street scenes” (96). 22. By defending this, Woolf implicitly suggests that her own short stories are also common ground for future use by other writers or artists, something French Situationist Guy Debord, referring to his strategy of “détournement,” adopted as a motto in the 1960s: “Plagiarism is necessary.” 23. May Sinclair’s “The Intercessor” was published in 1911. Now in Uncanny Stories. 24. Dorothy Richardson’s “Sunday” was first published in 1919 in Art and Letters. Now in Journey to Paradise. 25. Adrian Hunter writes: “While Dubliners may not be as obviously allusive and referential a text as Ulysses, it is important to notice that every story in it contains some reference to another text or texts” (61). 26. Adrian Hunter reminds us that “The question of Mansfield’s indebtedness to Chekhov has had a long and at times controversial history, not least because of the accusation, first leveled in 1935, that her story ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ plagiarized Chekhov’s ‘Sleepyhead’” (72). 27. Letter to Virginia Woolf, 27 May 1919 (Mansfield 320. Also qtd. in Hunter 72). 28. My translation. Valéry writes: “l’homme ne cultive point ce qui ne peut point s’abréger” (qtd. in Benjamin 731).

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ABSTRACTS

A partir d’une lecture de “Dialogue on Mount Pentelicus”, cet article explore, à la lumière des écrits de Giorgio Agamben, le concept de pauvreté que Virginia Woolf met en œuvre dans cette nouvelle. L’objectif est de montrer que si ce concept de « pauvreté » fait référence à la « pauvreté » ou au dénuement du genre de la nouvelle, il permet aussi de penser, en relation à « l’usage », la nature intertextuelle (et intermédiale) du texte bref tout en prenant en compte sa composante éthique et politique. Ce concept forgé par Woolf, comparable et comparé ici à celui de Walter Benjamin, permet de lire différemment les nouvelles de l’auteur ainsi que la nouvelle moderniste dans son ensemble et jette un éclairage nouveau sur le modernisme.

AUTHORS

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Afterword: Modernism, Formalism, and the “Edwardian Bypass”

Adrian Hunter

1 In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf makes a disquieting prediction about women’s writing: I do not want, and I am sure that you do not want me, to broach that very dismal subject, the future of fiction, so that I will only pause here one moment to draw your attention to the great part which must be played in that future so far as women are concerned by physical conditions. The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men and women, and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must find out what treatment suits them. (117)

2 It is, as the critic Mary Eagleton points out, a statement at once attractive and repellent: attractive because it offers to “recognise women’s social experience in our culture and where that may take them in their writing”; repellent because of its suggestion that short stories might be “about all that women can manage,” given the twin burdens of unstable temperament and maladaptive physiology Woolf thinks they carry (66). The question Eagleton asks is whether it is possible to conceive of a relationship between gender and the short story genre that escapes this kind of essentialism.

3 It is a good question, but one that short story scholarship has shown surprisingly little interest in answering in the quarter-century since Eagleton posed it. While the “cultural turn” in literary studies may have transformed understanding of the novel in the intervening years, the short story has, for the most part, remained captive to a strangely unregenerate formalism. By and large, the standard works of criticism are still those of the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties: Charles E. May’s New Short Story Theories (1994); Susan Lohafer’s Coming to Terms with the Short Story (1983) and Short Story Theory at a Crossroads (1989); John Gerlach’s Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story (1985); Clare Hanson’s Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980

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(1985); and Dominic Head’s The Modernist Short Story: a study in theory and practice (1992). There are encouraging signs that this situation is beginning to alter—one thinks of Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-Russell’s The Postcolonial Short Story (2013), for example, or Ann-Marie Einhaus’s The Short Story and the First World War (2013); yet it remains the case that short story criticism has registered only a fitful engagement with Feminism, Marxism, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, Ecocriticism, Book History, and other theories of note. A recent collection of essays (Patea) is representative of the concerns still largely animating the discipline: pragmatism, defining the short story, the relationship to the novel, closure, cognitive approaches to “storyness,” Poe and his legacy, metafictionality and postmodern experimentation, reader response theory. Taken singly, many of the individual chapters in Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First Century Perspective are exemplary works of critical close reading; but taken as a field, they suggest stasis and a curious self-circumscription on the part of scholars.

4 If this is true of short story criticism in general, it is particularly so in respect of studies addressing the modernist period. In his landmark book The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (1992), Dominic Head describes the short story as the “distilled essence” (6) of modernist narrative theory and practice, a claim that has enjoyed widespread acceptance since, and which has served to maintain the attention of critics on a fairly narrow repertoire of formal characteristics—closure, the epiphany, free indirect discourse, and point of view principal among them. Modernism and the short story are unproblematically and unquestioningly aligned with one another: modernism is defined in terms of an experimental, self-conscious formalism, and so, straightforwardly enough, is the short story. The result has been a continuing focus on a small handful of writers—Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Hemingway—whose sole qualification for inclusion is that their work is taken to be definitionally modernist in the formalist sense. Wider questions of the sort Janet Beer raises about Virginia Woolf go largely unremarked, despite the fact that Woolf is everywhere discussed in connection with the modernist short story.

5 One of the virtues of the so-called “new modernist studies” as exemplified by the likes of Ann Ardis, John Xiros Cooper, Nicholas Daly, Rita Felski, Aaron Jaffe, Sean Latham, and Mark Wollaeger, is that it draws attention to the peculiar distortions that formalism places on our view of early twentieth century literature. More precisely, it invites us to recognise how the privileging of form conspires in the belief that modernism was somehow “the aesthetic of modernity” (Ardis 115, emphasis in the original), the superordinate cultural, aesthetic, and ideological response to the experience of the modern. Ann Ardis dates the inauguration of the “new modernist studies” to the first meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, in October, 1999, and notes that the phrase was coined to characterize recent revisionist work that consciously departed from “New Criticism’s more purely celebratory presentation of modernism” (13). The reference to New Criticism is significant, since one of the priorities of the “new modernist studies” has been to attack the idea of an autonomous and formally discrete modernist text. In many instances, this has meant uncovering the extent of modernism’s complicity with the very conditions and phenomena it proposes to transcend—the market, for example, or popular cultural forms of mass mediation; but the “new modernist studies” is also willing to challenge the broader historicist biases of institutional literary criticism by showing how these give rise to a peculiarly, even naively, modernist-centric view of the period.

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6 This interanimation of history, form, and critical practice is neatly exemplified by Nicholas Daly’s Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle (1999), a book which, though historicist in intention, is inevitably drawn to discussing formalism as the principal means by which the record of early twentieth century writing has been shaped in modernism’s image. Daly’s study explores the many continuities that exist between, on the one hand, popular romance fiction and sensational literature of the 1890s, and, on the other, canonical works of high modernism (Eliot and Hemingway are among the writers he considers). The thrust of Daly’s argument is that these continuities have been suppressed in the effort to establish modernism as the defining and superlative aesthetic of modernity. That the modernists themselves were eager to cast turn-of-the- century writers like Marie Corelli or Rider Haggard in the role of a phantasmagoric mass cultural “other” is no surprise; what is more telling for Daly is that subsequent literary criticism has perpetuated that belief. That it has done so reflects, Daly suggests, a literary-critical practice in thrall to ideas about modernity bequeathed by modernism itself. Scholars of the period suffer, he argues, from being too close to their subject, the disciplinary apparatus they deploy having been, to a large degree, made by that subject —bequeathed by modernism to an institutional practice it helped to create. The result has been the substitution of a “modernist literary history” for a “literary history of modernism” (122), a subtle but important distinction that points to the ways in which criticism has taken the protagonists of modernism at their own self-affirming word. Not for the sake of convenience, merely, did Hugh Kenner called it “the Pound Era”: Pound would have called it that, too.

7 Ann Ardis makes an analogous case in respect of fin de siècle radical writing, arguing that modernists like Woolf reflexively denigrated and misrepresented the achievements of the earlier, 1890s avant-garde in order to carry off the myth of their own exceptionalism. Modernist self-definition, that is to say, arose not only in contra- distinction to the mass popular “other” (Daly’s thesis), but by contrast with the preceding generation of experimental writers, whose achievements were systematically occluded, rejected, or, to use the term Ardis favors, “exiled.” It is an argument that prompts us to ask fundamental questions about our own critical practice, and Ardis names some of them: how did modernism come to be perceived as the aesthetic of modernity? What other aesthetic or political agendas were either erased from cultural memory or thoroughly discredited as the literary avant-garde achieved cultural legitimacy and English studies charged itself with disciplinary credibility? How are the edges, the margins, and even the limitations of modernism revealed once we start paying attention to the ways this literary movement intersects with, borrows from, and reacts against other cultural enterprises? (7)

8 As Ardis explains, modernism’s “most basic categories of analysis were stitched into the very fabric of English studies as a discipline as the latter established its professional credibility in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s” (79). Formalism supplied the instruction manual, as it were, to the modernist text, and was the principal means by which modernism’s standing as the aesthetic of modernity came to be assured, and by which it has been perpetuated. While much has obviously changed in the discipline of English studies in the intervening decades, it remains the case, Ardis says, quoting Raymond Williams, that a “machinery of selective tradition” continues to operate through an “apparatus of reviews, academic endorsements, curricular revision, etc., that enables a ‘highly selected version of the modern’ to stand in for ‘the whole of modernity’” (79).

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We might add that if this is true of modernism as a whole, it is especially so of the short story.

9 The “new modernist studies” proposes to enlarge the territory, chronology, and even the very concept of modernism; at the same time, it draws attention to the institutional practices that define the field of study. In both these respects, it has the capacity to reinvigorate short story criticism, I suggest. To illustrate how (and in the interests of providing a forward-looking rather than retrospective “afterword” to this volume), I want to examine some aspects of the short story in the years immediately preceding the high tide of modernism, in what is referred to (in British history, at least), as the Edwardian era. While demonstrably a period of great productivity and inventiveness in short fiction, the years 1901-1910 lie largely buried in histories of the short story. If they serve a purpose at all, it is to support, by means of contrast, claims for modernist artistic and cultural pre-eminence. That is the use to which Virginia Woolf famously put the Edwardians in her essays “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” and “Modern Fiction,” and a view from which subsequent generations of critics have seen little reason to depart. The relative invisibility of Edwardian short fiction has a great deal to tell us, I think, about the enthrallment of short story criticism to the modernist-formalist dyad, and so is a good place to begin a reflection on how scholarship might move forward from this point.

10 According to the Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction, approximately eight hundred British and Irish writers published work of some note in the first decade of the twentieth century (Kemp ix); yet, for most students and many established scholars, those years, 1901-1910, remain terra incognito. Where Edwardianism is represented at all on course syllabi, it tends to be in the guise of E.M. Forster or, at a stretch, Ford Madox Ford. Arnold Bennett, meanwhile, though hugely influential in his day as a novelist and critic, is better known as the object of Virginia Woolf’s belittlement than for anything he wrote. As David Trotter points out, such willful oversight is remarkable when we consider how much scholarly effort has gone into narrating the history of the period more broadly conceived, and, moreover, how much the social and cultural happenings of the Edwardian decade have to offer to the literary critic: The Edwardian period would seem to have quite a lot going for it, as a period. However it is defined, it is short, and not lacking in political and socio-economic excitements: National Insurance, suffragettes, an armaments race, the strange death of Liberal England. What more could one possibly want? And yet the feeling persists that, as far as the evolution of British culture is concerned, the Edwardian period was something of an interregnum, or pause for breath. Historiographically, a bypass connects the theme-park of fin de siècle decadence and renovation to the Modernist metropolis, and few commentators spare as much as a glance for the unprepossessing market town it carries them around […]. Writers on Edwardian literary culture, in particular, often give the impression of having bitten off rather less than they can chew. (12)

11 As Trotter points out, so habitual has it become to take the “Edwardian bypass” that even a revisionist critic like Nicholas Daly is prepared to argue for a connection between popular romance writing of the 1890s and the later achievements of Eliot and Hemingway that proceeds as though there were nothing in between. Nor does Daly apparently see any contradiction in attacking modernist hegemony while implicitly

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accepting the modernist view of the Edwardians as so many snobs, hacks, and materialists. Where the Edwardians are concerned, it seems that no amount of critical neglect is worth bothering about.

12 How to go about supplying this critical deficit? One way would be to argue for the inclusion of the Edwardians in the roster of early twentieth-century literary radicalism. Jefferson Hunter, in his excellent book on the period, suggests something of the sort in respect of the short story, which, he argues, was the scene of significant formal experimentation during the Edwardian years. Hunter’s case in point is the so-called frame-tale, in which the reader is invited to “overhear” a story as it is told to a defined group of listeners by an identifiable speaker. Essentially an elaboration of the dramatic monologue, the form was widely utilized by Edwardian writers, and examples of it are to be found in mainstream as well as high-brow literary magazines of the day. According to Hunter, the attraction of the frame-tale lay in its amenability to psychological focalization, and in the general air of relativism that hung about it. As he explains, the frame-tale suited the Edwardian taste “for assimilating and perfecting the techniques of the past” while at the same time allowing them to “acknowledge, perhaps even to mourn, the passing of a particular kind of human simplicity” (28). It was a form that expressed scepticism and a “Paterian disinclination to take a cosmic or comprehensive view of things,” as Wendell Harris elsewhere puts it (188), and as such it signalled a retreat from the simple authority of the storyteller into a complicated world of intersubjectivity. The Edwardians had “lost faith in wisdom as their fathers had lost faith in God,” Hunter asserts, and with that hermeneutics of suspicion came a favoring of artistic forms capable of registering “ironies or psychological nuances” (29).

13 Hunter’s reading chimes with the work of other scholars, myself included, who have identified proto-modernist stirrings in chronologically pre-modernist texts of the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Yet, there is a danger here in seeking to narrativize the achievements of the Edwardians by reference to the ideas of their modernist successors. To value the frame-tale largely because of its family resemblance to the higher emanations of modernist fictional practice is to risk further reinforcing the belief that modernism is the superordinate cultural discourse of modernity. Modernism, once again, stands as the measure by which we judge the worth of all writing. It is possible to start from a different, less biased and less defensive position, I think, by rejecting the idea of modernism as the yardstick, as “the canonical form of early twentieth-century literature” (Pykett 10) by which all else can be made to account. Doing so means setting aside the lenses modernism fashions for us and refusing the standards of evaluation it proposes. To stay with the frame-tale for a moment, instead of seeking to couple it to the canonical modernist text, we might instead consider its interest in orality and verbal performance as signifying a quite different, but nonetheless equally telling, response to the conditions of modernity. Furthermore, the sheer heterogeneity of uses to which the frame-tale is put in the Edwardian period—part of what has been called Edwardian “generic promiscuity” (Kemp et al. xvii)—can be thought of, not as a marker of frivolousness and superfluity, as modernism would have it, but as an expression of resistance to increasingly sclerotic and instrumentalist forms of literary realism.

14 Jefferson Hunter actually points us in this direction when he mentions Walter Benjamin’s classic 1936 essay “The Storyteller.” Hunter accepts the mournful implications of Benjamin’s thesis, which are that print culture and the advent of

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modern technological society have broken the link between storytelling and what Benjamin calls “imaginative wisdom”: We have witnessed the evolution of the “short story,” which has removed itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings. (92)

15 Benjamin sees the characteristically modernist short story—elliptical, abbreviated, interrogative—as an aesthetic accommodation to the privations of technological modernity: it is the literary form appropriate to the time-harried commuters and impassive hoards swarming over London Bridge in T.S. Eliot’s poem, a disaffected citizenry whose atomism takes textual form in the abandonment of “living speech” (86) and the slow, accretive communality of tale-telling. Benjamin is interested in those writers who respond to the scene of the modern in other ways, specifically through the recovery of what Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-Russell, citing the passage above, term “trace elements of the oral tradition” (1). The frame-tale, with its emphasis on orality, layering, and the intrigues of “living speech,” can be seen as participating in the work of this alternative body of writing. Indeed, one of Benjamin’s favored authors, Rudyard Kipling, was among the principal exponents of the frame-tale during the Edwardian period. Crucially, the function of orality in the work of these writers is not nostalgic or backward looking: modernism may want us to view it that way, of course (which is one reason why there is rarely any room at the modernist salon for Kipling), but Benjamin implies that access to orality might bespeak an alternative, oppressed, resistant strain of cultural expression that does not regard as either inevitable or triumphant the seemingly inevitable triumph of reason and capital. That is to say, rather than regarding the frame-tale’s staging of voice as symptomatic of an emergent modernism (Jefferson Hunter’s thesis), it becomes possible to trace the preoccupation with “living speech,” framing, and the speaking subject to oral and folkloric roots, and, as Frederic Jameson would have it, to a rejection of the “threefold imperatives” of realist (and thus modernist) narration, viz. “depersonalization, unity of point of view, and restriction to scenic representation” (Jameson 90-91).

16 Benjamin’s essay hints at how we might release the framed, “speakerly” narrative from the grip of modernist formalism, as a first step to taking Edwardian short fiction on its own terms rather than modernism’s. As often with Benjamin, there is little empirical evidence to support the claims he makes, and for that reason “The Storyteller” does not offer a particularly robust ground on which to mount an historical and methodological revision of the sort I am proposing here. It is necessary to look elsewhere—to Frederic Jameson’s account of the Romance aesthetic in his book The Political Unconscious, I suggest. While Jameson does not consider the frame-tale per se, or examine orality as part of his argument, his analysis of the “romance aesthetic” at the turn of the twentieth century provides a useful analogue to our discussion of the forms and functions of the frame-tale, and to the wider question of Edwardian “generic promiscuity” in the short story, to which I alluded earlier.

17 Jameson develops his definition of romance from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. Romance for Frye is, as Jameson explains, “a wish-fulfilment, or Utopian fantasy which aims at the transfiguration of the world of everyday life in such a way as to restore the conditions of some lost Eden, or to anticipate a future realm from which the old mortality and imperfections will have been effaced” (96). There is, note, no detachment

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from the real in Frye’s understanding of the romance; rather, romance is lodged in the real, from where it sets about “transforming ordinary reality” (97). This matters to Jameson because it suggests that romance, far from fantasizing an escape from the world, seeks the exchange of an earthly reality for an earthly paradise; and it is this grounding in the here and now that gives the romance its covert political function. The representational forms that romance typically takes—oral tales, fairy tales, adventure stories, comic writing, melodramas—are all charged with this Utopian aspiration: they contain, as Jameson says, “the irrepressible voice and expression of the underclasses of the great systems of domination” (91).

18 Turning to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Jameson suggests that the reappearance of romance (his principal subject is Conrad, a prolific writer of frame- tales, of course) can be understood as a reaction against the “containment” or “reification” of realism by the irrepressible logic of late capitalism. He argues that where realism begins as an exhilarating and liberating mode of expression, it is, by the end of the nineteenth century, so reified (that is, systematized and subjected to reproduction) that it becomes part of the oppressive entailment of reason and capital to which it was once so potent a foil. Under these conditions, Jameson proposes, romance re-emerges to take up the call of Utopian desire and enact the symbolic transformation of everyday life: Let Scott, Balzac, and Dreiser serve as the non-chronological markers of the emergence of realism in its modern form; these first great realisms are characterized by a fundamental and exhilarating heterogeneity in their raw materials and by a corresponding versatility in their narrative apparatus. In such moments, a generic confinement to the existent has a paradoxically liberating effect on the registers of the text, and releases a set of heterogeneous historical perspectives—the past for Scott, the future for Balzac, the process of commodification for Dreiser—normally felt to be inconsistent with a focus on the historical present. Indeed, this multiple temporality tends to be sealed off and recontained again in “high” realism and naturalism, where a perfected narrative apparatus […] begins to confer on the “realistic” option the appearance of an asphyxiating, self-imposed penance. It is in the context of the gradual reification of realism in late capitalism that romance once again comes to be felt as the place of narrative heterogeneity and of freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage. Romance now again seems to offer the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or Utopian transformations of a real now unshakeably set in place. (90-91)

19 More concretely than Benjamin, Jameson gives us a way of thinking about the “generic promiscuity” of Edwardian short fiction, its fondness for fairy tale, orality, Utopian fantasy, and so on. Where realism has grown sclerotic and “asphyxiating,” bound as it is to the reality principle, romance becomes the scene and source of “narrative heterogeneity” and imaginative possibility. At a stroke, Jameson dispatches the idea— very much a product of modernism’s self-constructions—of romance as a nostalgic back-formation or recrudescence of antiquated cultural forms. Nor is it mere escapism. Rather, its very heterogeneity expresses a wish to transform, rather than succumb to, the relentless reification of the real entailed in the high-realist project. Modernism will, if anything, extend the work of reification in the form of a “perfected poetic apparatus” to match the “perfected narrative apparatus” of nineteenth century realism (280), though it will also present Utopian compensations of its own. The point to note, however, is the structural equivalence between the romance and modernism as Jameson presents them: they are both the symbolic expressions of particular moments

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in the long process by which the subject is “culturally and psychologically retrained for life in the market system” (236). Crucially, modernism has no superior or prior claim to represent the experience of the modern, in Jameson’s estimation; it is one phase, one aesthetic among others, and so is romance.

20 Returning to the particular case of the short story, Jameson’s work can help us to revise our understanding of texts that the modernist-formalist paradigm would place outside of serious reckoning or any claim to significant modernity: texts like, for example, Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), or its sequel, Rewards and Fairies (1910), two sequences of fantasy stories that are presented in the form of frame-tales. Key to restoring such work to our account of early twentieth century short fiction would be, first of all, to reconsider the properties that the modernist-formalist view finds unacceptable in them; because, as Jameson shows, what is incommensurable to the dominant aesthetic discourses of modernism may be, in fact, precisely the things that make a text significantly modern—supposing, that is, that we are able to release our notion of the “modern” from modernism’s grip. If we can do that, then what are customarily considered deficits in Edwardian conceptions of the novel and short story may come to be seen instead as the entailments of a different sort of response to the conditions of modernity, and perhaps, even, an active form of resistance to an emergent, proto- modernist aesthetic fetishization of fragmentation and alienation.

21 The same goes for the view that Edwardian “generic promiscuity” reflects a fundamental lack of seriousness or intellectual coherence. If we broaden our view and become scholars of this period rather than modernism’s apologists, then we can see this heterogeneity as participating in a much larger process by which, just to isolate a couple of aspects, there is a fragmentation of markets and readerships, and the very category of “literature” itself is coming unstuck. Modernism participates in that process too, of course, but often in a reactionary way, as it attempts to stabilize the “literary” by artificially sharpening the differences between highbrow and lowbrow, for example. In the short stories of Kipling, Netta Syrett, Hugh Walpole, Charles Marriott, L.T. Meade, Edgar Wallace, and many others one could name, we see, by contrast, a remarkable degree of invention and stylistic playfulness—a heterogeneity that bespeaks vitality, if only we can move beyond the “dominant critical paradigms of literary value” (Ardis 123) that modernism imposes on the period.

22 Even if, at the end of the day, modernism remains central to our considerations, our account of it can be enlarged and enriched by our address to the Edwardian writers. Most students of the short story can find something to say about Joyce’s Dubliners; what is less well known is that Joyce composed most of the stories in his collection between 1904 and 1907, well before the high tide of modernism. And what of Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension, a text whose Edwardian trappings are a cause of some embarrassment to her modernist-minded readers? What, even, of Virginia Woolf, with whom we began? Very little has been written about her “generic promiscuity” as it was displayed in the stories she wrote for mass-market American magazines in the nineteen-thirties.

23 None of which is to suggest that there are not important and telling differences between the literary legacies of Edwardianism and modernism that we ought to be concerned to study. We can go further than that, in fact, and concede to Woolf’s claim that the Edwardians were, unlike their modernist successors, largely content to recycle the conventions of the classic realist Victorian novel; that they published countless

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exercises in the sub-Dickensian and sub-Hardyesque modes; and that Bennett and Galsworthy did indeed, as Jefferson Hunter puts it, “deliberately limit themselves to proven methods” (23). These matters we can agree to put beyond dispute, because what interests us instead is tackling the modernist insistence, which is then written into literary history, that such traits inevitably signify an anti-modern, reactionary, nostalgic, conservative, or, to use Woolf’s word, materialist world view.

24 What we want to question, ultimately, is the assumption that it was the modernists who “did” modernity, while the Edwardians, and others, were doing something else, something less, something un-modern or even anti-modern. If we can do that, I suggest, then we will have gone some way to advancing the cause of a “new short story studies.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ardis, Ann L. Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.

Awadalla, Maggie, and Paul March-Russell, eds. The Postcolonial Short Story: Contemporary Essays. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. 2nd edn. London: Fontana, 1992. 83-107. Print.

Cooper, John Xiros. Modernism and the Culture of Market Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.

Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance and the fin de siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print.

Eagleton, Mary. “Gender and Genre.” Re-Reading the Short Story. Ed. Clare Hanson. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. 55-68. Print.

Einhaus, Ann-Marie. The Short Story and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print.

Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print.

Gerlach, John. Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Print.

Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985. Print.

Harris, Wendell V. “Vision and Form: The English Novel and the Emergence of the Short Story.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994. 182-91. Print.

Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print.

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Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Hunter, Jefferson. Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982. Print.

Kemp, Sandra, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter, eds. The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

Jaffe, Aaron. Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Latham, Sean. “Am I A Snob?” Modernism and the Novel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Print.

Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Print.

----, and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Print.

May, Charles E., ed. The New Short Story Theories. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994. Print.

Patea, Veronica, ed. Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First Century Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Print.

Pykett, Lyn. Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Print.

Trotter, David. “Mummies’ Boys.” Times Literary Supplement 19 Jan. 2001: 12. Print.

“Wollaeger, Mark. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print.

ABSTRACTS

Au cours des deux dernières décennies, les « nouvelles études modernistes » ont transformé notre compréhension de la littérature du début du XXe siècle. En dépit de cela, la nouvelle continue d'être envisagée en des termes largement formalistes, à travers des concepts critiques qui, dans certains cas, remontent aux années 1970 et 1980. Les descriptions contextuelles et historiques du genre restent rares, à l'instar des explications qui reflètent les tendances récentes de la théorie critique et culturelle. Cet article envisage un avenir alternatif à la critique de la nouvelle. En s'inspirant du récit de Fredric Jameson, « Romance », au tournant du XXe siècle, il plaide pour un élargissement chronologique et conceptuel de notre compréhension de la nouvelle au cours de cette période, et montre comment une « nouvelle façon d'étudier la nouvelle » pourrait commencer à s'écarter du formalisme.

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AUTHOR

ADRIAN HUNTER Adrian Hunter is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Stirling, UK. He has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century English, Scottish, and American literature, and is currently co-editing (with Paul Delaney) the Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English.

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The Modernist Short Story: A Bibliography

Mathijs Duyck

1 The preparation of a list of bibliographical references on the modernist short story raises a number of questions and implies certain choices, which I intend to address in this brief introductory note.

2 A first important observation to be made is that the short story as a genre remains largely neglected in the greater part of book-length studies on literary modernism, even in the more recent ones.1 The scholarly interest in the modernist short story– which continues to be relatively small, especially when considering the quantity and quality of short stories in the modernist period, as well as the crucial role of the modernist short story in the development of both literary modernism and the short narrative genre–seems to move almost exclusively from short story studies. Hence, the present bibliography not only intends to be a useful tool for students and scholars, but by its very limits it hopes to raise awareness of the need for more (diverse) theoretical reflection on the modernist short story.

3 A second problem this bibliography has to deal with, is the partial overlapping of the notions “modernist” and “modern” in the context of short story studies. Given the fact that an important number of textual characteristics experimented and matured during the modernist period have retrospectively been defined as distinctive traits of the “modern” (i.e. 20th- and 21st-century) short story, it is a quite arduous task to distinguish the studies on the modernist short story from general theoretical reflections on the short story as a genre. These theoretical articles on the short story have been included in the reference list only insofar as they focus on (or are related to) the development of the form in the modernist period.

4 On the matter of the categorical problems raised by the notion of “modernism” itself, the bibliography engages with the difficult exercise of this special section, which questions the centrality of “high modernism” and seeks to contextualize this specific literary movement in the broader modernist period (roughly 1900-1940). As the articles of this issue demonstrate, this wider perspective is by no means a generalization of

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“modernist” to “modern.” It rather reveals a renewed awareness of the specific interactions between numerous agents involved in the cultural development in a particular historical era, of which canonical high-modernist writers represent only one part. For these reasons, I have also included relevant studies on magazine and print culture in the first decades of the twentieth century.

5 The reference list below comprises four parts. The first part collects all book-length studies that in some way treat the modernist short story from a theoretical perspective. Given the observations above, studies such as Head’s The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice are rather scarse, and a great deal of the included monographs only partly discuss the specific problems posed by the short story in the modernist period. The second part contains all theoretical articles on the modernist short story, while the third part comprises relevant special journal issues.

6 The fourth and final part of the reference list includes monographs and articles dealing with short fiction by a specific modernist author, as well as by authors on the margins of high modernism treated in the articles of this journal issue (such as Kipling and Somerset Maugham). I want to stress that the selection of authors is arbitrary and necessarily incomplete. In my opinion, more work needs to be done on the interaction between “the” modernist short story and its margins (be they temporal, geographical or aesthetic), before such a list can be expanded. The mere adding of short story writers orbiting around the canonical centre, without a thorough reflection on their relation to that centre, would mean depriving this bibliography of its specificity.2 Furthermore, the list of studies on each author is not exhaustive, but should be seen as a selection of core studies dedicated to their short fiction.

7 Keeping in mind the usefulness of this bibliography as a tool, I’ve excluded all monographs on modernist authors that do not specifically treat short fiction (all kinds of Readers, Companions and Introductions–though in some cases I have included relevant chapters contained within these works), all monographs limited to narrow thematic issues that do not study the short story in the context of the modernist period, all articles on single modernist short stories that lack a theoretical focus and all studies on the short story cycle, which is a literary form in its own right and therefore deserves a separate bibliography.

General works: monographs

8 Abraham, Taisha. Women’s Writings In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries: Short Stories. New Delhi: PHI, 2013. Print.

9 Allen, Walter. The Short Story in English. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Print.

10 Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Print.

11 Aycock, Wendell M. The Teller and the Tale: Aspects of the Short Story. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1982. Print.

12 Baldwin, Dean R. Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880-1950. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Print.

13 Basseler, Michael, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. A History of the American Short Story. Genres–Developments–Model Interpretations. Trier: WVT, 2011. Print.

14 Bates, H.E. The Modern Short Story. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1941. Print.

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15 Bayley, John. The Short Story: Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988. Print.

16 Beachcroft, T.O. The Modest Art. Oxford: Oxord University Press, 1968. Print.

17 Bendixen, Alfred and James Nagel. A Companion to the American Short Story. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print.

18 Berger, Roger A. Telling Stories: Transformations of the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. Diss. University of Wisconsin, 1984. Print.

19 Brooker, Peter et al., eds. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009-2013. Print.

20 Brosch, Renate. Short Story: Textsorte und Leseerfahrung. Trier: WVT, 2007. Print.

21 Bruck, Peter. The Black American Short Story in the 20th Century: A Collection of Critical Essays. Amsterdam: B.R. Gruner, 1977. Print.

22 Buchholz, Sabine. Narrative Innovationen in der modernistischen britischen Short Story. Trier: WVT, 2003. Print.

23 Chan, Winnie. The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007. Print.

24 Chialant, Maria Teresa and Marina Lops, eds. Time and the Short Story. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Print.

25 Childs, Peter. Modernism. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

26 Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance and the fin de siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print.

27 Davies, Alistair. An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Modernism. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982. Print.

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

29 Dvorák, Marta, and W.H. New. Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writings in Context. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2007. Print.

30 Einhaus, Ann-Marie. The Short Story and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print.

31 Ellmann, Maud. The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.

32 Entin, Joseph B. Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America. Wilmington: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Print.

33 Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

34 Fallon, Erin et al. A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Print.

35 Flora, Joseph M. The English Short Story, 1880-1945. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Print.

36 Gelfant, Blanche H., and Lawrence Graver. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth- Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Print.

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37 Gillies, Mary Ann, and Aurelea Denise Mahood. Modernist Literature: an Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Print.

38 Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985. Print.

39 Harrington, Ellen Burton. Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form. Approaches by American & British Women Writers. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Print.

40 Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print.

41 Hill, Colin. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Print.

42 Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to The Short Story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

43 Hunter, Jefferson. Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982. Print.

44 Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Print.

45 Ingman, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print.

46 Korte, Barbara. The Short Story in Britain: A Historical Sketch and Anthology. Tübingen: A. Francke, 2003. Print.

47 Levy, Andrew. The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Print.

48 Liggins, Emma, Andrew Maunder, and Ruth Robbins. The British Short Story. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

49 Lynch, Gerald, and Angela Arnold Robbeson, eds. Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999. Print.

50 Magill, Frank N. Critical Survey of Short Fiction: Authors A-Z. Ipswich: Salem Press, 1981. Print.

51 Malcolm, David and Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, eds. A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Print.

52 Malcolm, David. The British and Irish Short Story Handbook. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Print. Print.

53 March-Russell, Paul. The Short Story: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Print.

54 Maunder, Andrew. Companion to Literature: Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story. New York: Facts on File, 2007. Print.

55 May, Charles E., ed. The New Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994. Print.

56 ----, ed. Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976. Print.

57 ----. The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. New York: Twayne, 1995. Print.

58 McLoughlin, Kate. The Modernist Party. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Print.

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59 Myszor, Frank. The Modern Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.

60 O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. 1963. Hoboken: Melville House Publishing, 2004. Print.

61 Qi, Ye. Megashift from Plot to Character In American Short Fiction (1900-1941): A Critical Study. Connecticut: WingsAsClouds Press, 2013. Print.

62 Rogers, John Headley. British Short-Fiction Writers, 1915-1945. Farmington Hills: Gale Research, 1996. Print.

63 Sacido, Jorge, ed. Modernism, Postmodernism and the Short Story in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Print.

64 Scofield, Martin. The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.

65 Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. London: Longman, 1983. Print.

66 Shen, Dan. Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

67 Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Print.

68 Stevick, Philip, ed. The American Short Story: 1900-1945. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Print.

69 Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Print.

70 Thompson, Richard J. Everlasting Voices: Aspects of the Modern Irish Short Story. Troy, NY: Whitston Pub., 1989. Print.

71 Werlock, Abby H.P, ed. Companion to Literature: Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story. 2000. New York: Facts on File, 2010. Print.

72 West, James L. III. American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Print.

73 Willison, Ian Roy, Gould, Warwick, and Warren Lewis Chernaik, eds. Modernist Writers and the Market Place. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. Print.

74 Zacks, Aaron. Publishing Short Stories: British Modernist Fiction and the Literary Marketplace. Diss. University of Texas, 2012. Print.

General works: articles

75 Bader, A. L. “The Structure of the Modern Short Story.” Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. 107-15. Print.

76 Baldeshweiler, Eileen. “The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History.” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Summer 1969): 443-453. Print.

77 ----. “Katherine Mansfield’s Theory of Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 7 (1970): 421-32. Print.

78 Bentz, Joseph. “The Influence of Modernist Structure on the Short Fiction of Thomas Wolfe.” Studies in Short Fiction 31.2 (1994): 149-61. Print.

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79 Besnault-Levita, Anne. “The dramaturgy of voice in five modernist short fictions: Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Canary,’ ‘The Lady’s Maid’ and ‘Late at Night,’ Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Oh! Madam…’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Evening Party.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 51 ( Autumn 2008): 81-96. Print.

80 Buchholz, Sabine. “Short Stories of Female Intuition 1910-1940.” Tale, Novella, Short Story. Currents in Short Fiction. Eds. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein. Tübingen: Stauffenberger Verlag, 2004. 91-102. Print.

81 Burgan, Mary. “The ‘Feminine’ Short Story: Recuperating the Moment.” Style 27.3 (1993): 380-386. Print.

82 Ellmann, Maud. “Drawing the blind: Gide, Joyce, Larsen, and the Modernist Short Story.” Oxford Literary Review 26 (2004): 31-61. Print.

83 Ferguson, Sarah. “Defining the Short Story: Impressionism and Form.” Modern Fiction Studies 28. 1 (Spring 1982): 13-24. Print.

84 Gable, Craig. “Preface.” Ebony Rising: Short Fiction in the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Craig Gable. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. xi-xix. Print.

85 Goldberg, Michael E. “The Synchronic Series as the Origin of the Modernist Short Story.” Studies in Short Fiction 33.4 (Fall 1996): 515-27. Print.

86 Hunter, Adrian. “Constance Garnett’s Chekhov and the Modernist Short Story.” Translation and Literature 12.1 (2003): 69-87. Print.

87 ----. “The Short Story and the Difficulty of Modernism.” Modernism, Postmodernism and the Short Story in English. Sacido 29-46. Print.

88 Huyssen, Andreas. “Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces.” PMLA 122.1 (January 2007): 27-42. Print.

89 Martin, Peter A. “The Short Story in England: 1930s Fiction Magazines.” Studies in Short Fiction 14.3 (1977): 233-240. Print.

90 McDonald, Ronan. “Strategies of Silence: Colonial Strains in Short Stories of the Troubles.” Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005): 249-263. Print.

91 Musser, Judith. “African American Women’s Short Stories in the Harlem Renaissance: Bridging a Tradition.” MELUS 23.2 (Summer, 1998): 27-47. Print.

92 Nischik, Reingard M. “The Modernist English-Canadian Short Story.” History of Literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. 194-206. Print.

93 Peden, William. “The American Short Story during the Twenties.” Studies in Short Fiction 10.4 (1973): 367-371. Print.

94 Tibi, Pierre. “Pour une poétique de l’épiphanie.” Cahiers de l’Université de Perpignan 18 (1995): 183-236. Print.

95 Trotter, David. “Dis-enablement: subject and method in the modernist short story.” Critical Quarterly 52.2 (2010): 4-13. Print.

96 Whalan, Mark. 2010. “The Short Story.” A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction. Ed. David Seed. New York: Blackwell, 72-83. Print.

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Special journal issues on (authors of) modernist short fiction

97 Dubliners. Spec. issue of Studies in Short Fiction 32.3 (Summer 1995). Print.

98 Ernest Hemingway. Spec. issue of Journal of The Short Story in English 49 (Autumn 2007). Web. 7 May 2015.

99 The Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Spec. issue of Journal of The Short Story in English 58 (Spring 2012). Web. 7 May 2015.

100 Virginia Woolf. Spec. issue of Journal of The Short Story in English 50 (Spring 2008). Web. 7 May 2015.

Studies on the short fiction of a specific author of the modernist period

Sherwood Anderson

101 Dunne, Robert. A New Book of the Grotesques: Contemporary Approaches to Sherwood Anderson’s Early Fiction. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2005. Print.

102 Kirk, Gene Conrad. The Short Fiction of Sherwood Anderson. Diss. Western Illinois University, 1966. Print.

103 Small, Judy Jo. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson. New York: G.K. Hall, 1994. Print.

104 Papinchak, Robert Allen. Sherwood Anderson. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1992. Print.

Djuna Barnes

105 Broe, Mary Lynn, ed. Silence and Power. A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Print.

106 Caselli, Daniela. Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Print.

107 Ferguson, Suzanne. “Djuna Barnes’s Short Stories: An Estrangement of the Heart.” Southern Review 5 (Winter 1969): 26-41. Print.

Elizabeth Bowen

108 Corcoran, Neil. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

109 Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Print.

Kay Boyle

110 Bell, Elizabeth S. Kay Boyle. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1992. Print.

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Mary Butts

111 Clukey, Amy. “Enchanting Modernism: Mary Butts, Decadence, and the Ethics of Occultism.” Modern Fiction Studies 60.1 (2014): 78-107. Print.

Joseph Conrad

112 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. “‘Signifying Nothing’: Conrad’s Idiots and the Anxiety of Modernism.” Studies in Short Fiction 33.2 (1996): 185-95. Print.

113 ----. The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Writing, Culture, and Subjectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print.

114 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna, Allan H. Simmons, and J. H. Stape. Joseph Conrad: The Short Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Print.

115 Graver, Lawrence. Conrad’s Short Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Print.

116 Wollaeger, Mark A. Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Print.

William Faulkner

117 Abadie, Ann J., ed. Faulkner and The Short Story: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Print.

118 Cantrell, William Frank. Faulkner’s Late Short Fiction. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1970. Print.

119 Carothers, James B. William Faulkner’s Short Stories. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. Print.

120 da-Luz-Moreira, Paulo. Regionalism and Modernism in the Short Stories of William Faulkner, João Guimarães Rosa, and Juan Rulfo. Diss. University of California, 2007. Print.

121 Ferguson, James. Faulkner’s Short Fiction. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Print.

122 Jones, Diane Brown. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of William Faulkner. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1994. Print.

123 Kartiganer, Donald M. 1998. “Modernism as Gesture: Faulkner’s Missing Facts.” Renaissance and Modern Studies 48 (1998): 13-28. Print.

124 Meriwether, James B. Essays on the Short Fiction of William Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1968. Print.

125 Moreland, Richard C. “Faulkner and Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Ed. Philip Weinstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 17- 30. Print.

126 Skei, Hans H. Reading Faulkner’s Best Short Stories. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Print.

127 ----. William Faulkner, The Novelist as Short Story Writer: A Study of William Faulkner’s Short Fiction. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1985. Print.

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128 ----, ed. William Faulkner’s Short Fiction: An International Symposium. Oslo: Solum Verlag, 1997. Print.

129 ----. William Faulkner, the Short Story Career. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1981. Print.

130 Volpe, Edmond. L. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner: The Short Stories. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004. Print.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

131 Bronson, Dan E. Vision and Revision: A Genetic Study of Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction with Some Excursions Into His Novels. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Print.

132 Bryer, Jackson R. New Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Neglected Stories. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Print.

133 ----. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Print.

134 Kuehl, John Richard. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Print.

135 Mangum, Bryant. “The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Ruth Prigozy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 57-78. Print.

136 Petry, Alice Hall. Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories, 1920-1935. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. Print.

Ernest Hemingway

137 Beegel, Susan F., ed. Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. Print.

138 Benson, Jackson J., ed. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. Print.

139 Dimri, Jaiwanti. Ernest Hemingway: A Critical Study Of His Short Stories And Non-Fiction. New Delhi: Anmol Publications Pvt. Limited, 1994. Print.

140 Flora, Joseph M. Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Print.

141 Jain, S.P. Hemingway, a Study of His Short Stories. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann Publishers, 1985. Print.

142 Johnston, Kenneth G. The Tip of the Iceberg: Hemingway and the Short Story. Greenwood: Penkevill Publishing Company, 1987. Print.

143 Lamb, Robert Paul. Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Print.

144 ----. The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Print.

145 Meyers, Jeffrey. “Kipling and Hemingway: The Lesson of the Master.” American Literature 56.1 (March 1984): 88-99. Print.

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146 Pfeiffer, Gerhard, and Martina. Konig. “Epiphany and its Function in Hemingway’s Short-Story ‘Cross-Country Snow.’” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 46.1 (1996): 108-110. Print.

147 Smith, Paul, ed. New Essays on Hemingway’s Short Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.

148 Stewart, Matthew. Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time: A Guide for Students and Readers. Rochester: Camden House, 2001. Print.

Langston Hughes

149 Ostrom, Hans A. Langston Hughes. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1993. Print.

Zora Neale Hurston

150 King, Lavalerie. “Short Stories.” The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 96-104. Print.

James Joyce

151 Blayac, Alain. “‘After the Race’: A Study in Epiphanies.” Journal of the Short Story in English 2 (1984): 115-27. Print.

152 Bowen, Zack. “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept: A New Approach.” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981): 103-14. Print.

153 Brunsdale, Mitzi. James Joyce. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1993. Print.

154 Hart, Clive. James Joyce’s Dubliners: Critical Essays. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Print.

155 Hendry, Irene. “Joyce’s Epiphanies.” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 449-67. Print.

156 Ingersoll, Earl G. Engendered Trope in Joyce's Dubliners. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. Print.

157 Leonard, Garry M. Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse: Syracusa University Press, 1993. Print.

158 Lindholm, Howard. “Perhaps She Had Not Told Him All the Story: The Disnarrated in James Joyce’s Dubliners.” The Postmodern Short Story. Forms and Issues. Eds. Farhat Iftekharrudin, Joseph Boyden, Mary Rohrberger and Jaie Claudet. Westport: Praeger, 2003. 207-220. Print.

159 Norris, Margot. Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Print.

160 Power, Mary and Ulrich Schneider, eds. New Perspectives on Dubliners. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. Print.

161 Rafroidi, Patrick. James Joyce: Dubliners. Harlow: Longman, 1982. Print.

162 Scholes, Robert. “The Epiphanies of Joyce.” PMLA 82 (1967): 152-54. Print.

163 Thacker, Andrew, ed. Dubliners: A New Casebook. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

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Rudyard Kipling

164 Kamra, Sukeshi. Kipling’s vision: A Study in his Short Stories. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1989. Print.

165 Nagai, Kaori and Caroline Rooney, eds. Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

166 Raine, Craig. “Kipling’s Stories.” Grand Street 5.4 (Summer 1986): 138-176. Print.

167 Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. Print.

D. H. Lawrence

168 Bauer, Helen Pike. D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1994. Print.

169 Black Michael H. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Print.

170 Grmelová, Anna. The Worlds of D. H. Lawrence's Short Fiction (1907-1923). Prague: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Nakladatelství Karolinum, 2001. Print.

171 Harris, Janice Hubbard. The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Print.

172 Kearney Martin F. The Major Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence: A Handbook. New York: Taylor & Francis Group 1998. Print.

173 Thornton, Weldon. D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1993. Print.

Wyndham Lewis

174 Jameson, Fredric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Print.

175 Materer, Timothy. “The Short Stories of Wyndam Lewis.” Studies in Short Fiction 7.4 (1970): 615-24. Print.

Katherine Mansfield

176 Dunbar, Pamela. Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1997. Print.

177 Casertano, Renata. “Katherine Mansfield: Distance, Irony and the Vertigo Perception.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 18-19 (2002): 100-113. Print.

178 Hankin, C.A. “Fantasy and the Sense of an Ending in the Work of Katherine Mansfield.” Modern Fiction Studies 24 (1978): 465-74. Print.

179 ----. Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Print.

180 Kaplan, Sydney Janet. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Print.

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181 Kobler, Jasper Fred. Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Print.

182 Magalaner, Marvin. The fiction of Katherine Mansfield. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Print.

183 McDonnell, Jenny. Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Market-Place: at the Mercy of the Public. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

184 Morrow, Patrick D. Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1993. Print.

185 Murty, A. S. Anand. Short-Stories of Katherine Mansfield: Development of Technique. New Delhi: Anamika Publishers, 2007. Print.

186 New, W.H. Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form. Québec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Print.

187 Van Gunsteren, Julia. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. Print.

Dorothy Parker

188 Pettit, Rhonda S. ed. The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker. Cranbury: Associated University Press, 2005. Print.

189 ---- A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction. Cranbury, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press. 2000. Print.

Katherine Anne Porter

190 Bloom, Harold. Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Facts on File, 2001. Print.

191 Crowder, Elizabeth Guifoile. Image, Metaphor, and Symbol in Katherine Anne Porter’s Short Fiction. Diss. New York University, 1974. Print.

192 Horner, Janice. The Short Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter. Diss. University of Maine, 1968. Print.

193 Manglinong, Mindy. Coming of Age in the Short Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter: A Woman’s Opaque Reality. Diss. Concordia University, 2005. Print.

194 Titus, Mary. The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Print.

195 Unrue, Darlene Harbour. Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction. 1985. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Print.

Jean Rhys

196 Malcolm, David and Cheryl Alexander Malcolm. Jean Rhys: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1996. Print.

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William Somerset Maugham

197 Archer, Stanley. W. Somerset Maugham: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1993. Print.

198 Barker, Debra Kay Stoner. Ironic Designs in the Exotic Short Fiction of W. Somerset Maugham. Diss. Ball State University, 1989. Print.

199 Curtis, Anthony, and John Whitehead, eds. W. Somerset Maugham. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 1987. Print.

200 Jafri, S.A. W. Somerset Maugham: The Short Story Writer With a Singular Aim to Please; A Review of His Craft and Characterization in Relation to His Own Critical Views about Fiction and the Short Stories. New Delhi: M. R. Publications, 2004. Print.

Gertrude Stein

201 Watts, Linda S. Gertrude Stein: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1999. Print.

William Carlos Williams

202 Dunham, William H. Short Fiction in the Poetic Career of William Carlos Williams. 1969. Print.

203 Gish, Robert F. William Carlos Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Print.

Edith Wharton

204 Peel, Robin. Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction Before World War I. Cranbury: Associated University Press, 2005. Print.

205 White, Barbara Ann. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Print.

Virginia Woolf

206 Baldwin, Dean R. Virginia Woolf. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Print.

207 Benzel, Kathryn N. and Ruth Hoberman, eds. Trespassing Boundaries. Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

208 Fleishman, Avrom. “Forms of the Woolfian Short Story.” Virginia Woolf : Reevaluation and Continuity. Ed. Ralph Freedman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Print.

209 Hunter, Adrian. “The ‘Custom’ of Fiction: Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the Modernist Short Story.” English 56 (2007): 147-169. Print.

210 Levy, Heather. The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Print.

211 Reynier, Christine. “The Short Story According to Woolf.” Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (2003): 55-67. Print.

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212 ----. Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

213 Skrbic, Nena. Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Print.

Anzia Yezierska

214 Hefner, Brooks. E. “‘Slipping Back into the Vernacular’: Anzia Yezierska’s Vernacular Modernism.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 36.3 (Fall 2011): 187-211. Print.

NOTES

1. Among many examples, let me cite Rachel Potter’s Modernist Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (eds. Bradshaw and Dettmar. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). 2. Apart from the authors listed, no specific (theoretical) studies were found on the short fiction by E.M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, T.F. Powys, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Nathaniel West.

AUTHOR

MATHIJS DUYCK Mathijs Duyck obtained his PhD. in literary studies at the University of Ghent in 2014, with a thesis on Italian modernist C.E. Gadda's early short story collections. He is currently engaged in post-doctoral research at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna, where he has been granted an Early Stage Research Fellowship. His research interests include modernism, narratology, and the theory and practice of the short story and the collection.

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General Section: Varia

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What Time is “The Next Time”? Writing, Gender and Temporality in Some Short Stories by Henry James

Bryony Randall

1 Henrietta Stackpole, the “reporter in petticoats” of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is surely one of Henry James’s most provocative and lively creations (Portrait 137), and, it seems, one of the most perplexing to her creator. In his 1908 preface to the New York edition of the novel, James voices what he assumes will be a question on the lips of his readers: “why [...] in the present fiction, I have suffered Henrietta (of whom we have indubitably too much) so officiously, so strangely, so almost inexplicably, to pervade” (53). The explanation he offers some time later is that Henrietta exemplifies “in her superabundance, not an element of my plan, but only an excess of my zeal,” so that Henrietta “must have been at that time a part of my wonderful notion of the lively” (55; my emphasis). With this hedged conclusion, the impression remains at the end of the preface that Henrietta—the character, we might recall, who is given literally the last word of dialogue in the novel—remains something of a mystery to the Master.1

2 The Portrait of a Lady is, however, only one of a number of fictions by James featuring a professional woman writer. A significant minority of James’s many “little ‘literary’ tales” (Complete Notebooks 154) focus on women writers, and a cluster of four such tales were written, as Kristin King notes “during his relatively brief but tumultuous theater years, when he abandoned novel-writing for a more popular and, he hoped, lucrative market” (18). While all four of these tales—“Greville Fane” (1892), “The Death of the Lion” (1894), “The Next Time” (1895) and “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896)—will be discussed in the course of this essay, the focus is on the temporal complexities of “The Next Time.” As its title indicates, this story foregrounds temporality, both structurally and thematically. This essay suggests an imbrication of the text’s temporal aspects with its depiction of the relationship between gender and writing, embodied in the woman writer. While the text attempts to impose a hierarchical gendered distinction between different temporal models, its narrative structure exposes the instability of these distinctions such that the story ends up confirming, even despite itself, the potency of

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the woman writer. Like Henrietta in The Portrait of a Lady, the woman writer in “The Next Time” is also “suffered” to “pervade.”

3 Before embarking on this investigation of temporality in “The Next Time,” it is worth placing it in the context of contemporary discourse about women writers. Anxiety about the significant increase in the numbers of women in the literary marketplace, usually articulated in terms of women’s lack of genuine literary talent and thus their deleterious effect on literature in general, was ubiquitous at the turn of the last century. As writing became increasingly professionalised around this time, debates about the social, cultural and economic role of the professional writer became bound up with larger concerns about gender roles, as the New Woman became an established figure for ridicule and fear, as well as aspiration and admiration.2 James himself made direct contributions to discussions about the role of the professional writer, most famously in his combative response to Walter Besant’s “The Art of Fiction” in an essay of the same name, published in 1884. Numerous novels and stories centrally concerned with the question of writerly identity, and often explicitly engaging the question of gender, appeared around this time on both sides of the Atlantic—including, of course, this group of stories by James.

4 Nor are the stories unusual in their treatment of women writers. In a useful summary of some of the key elements of this group of stories, Hugh Stevens states that: Henry James’s fin-de-siècle tales of writers and the marketplace trenchantly portray the 1880s and 1890s reading public as voracious consumers of money-making trash. Contrasts between the “low” and the “high”, the “popular” and the “select”, “voluminous” and “artistic” writers, between the vulgar commercial success (usually written by a woman) and the “exquisite failure” (penned by a man) are humorously explored in Henry James’s 1895 tale, “The Next Time” in which contempt is shown for le gros public. (Stevens 3)

5 It is worth qualifying this “contempt” somewhat. These texts were written at a time when, as has been widely noted, James had attempted something more “popular and […] lucrative” (King 18), in turning to the theatre; as has also been widely noted his attempt failed miserably, so the contempt expressed in these stories for the public taste might legitimately be seen as intermixed with a small helping of sour grapes.3 But whatever the motivation for James’s focussing on this particular topic, the alignment of women writers with lowbrow, commercial success is evident, and critical attention to “The Next Time” to date, such as it is, has largely focussed on its reflection of James’s frustration with the literary marketplace in parallel with his disparagement of “successful” women writers. This essay adds two elements to the current critical landscape: consideration of the role of temporality, both thematic and structural, in these texts’ gender politics; and reflections on the intersection of the role of temporality in the text with its depiction of writing as material and intellectual process.

“The Next Time”

6 In common with the three other stories in this cluster, “The Next Time” is a first person narrative delivered by an unnamed narrator, himself a writer. The narrative begins with one Mrs Highmore, a successful—that is, vulgarly commercial—novelist, and friend of the narrator’s, approaching him to ask if he would review her latest novel, in which she has tried to produce “something artistic, something as to which she

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was prepared not to care a rap whether or no it should sell” (186). She has modelled this attempt on the work of her brother-in-law, Ralph Limbert, who, conversely, had no commercial success, but a great “reputation.” He was what she now longed to be (though, tellingly, she wants this “only once,” of which more later) —“an exquisite failure” (186). We are also told in the first paragraph that the narrator’s “acquaintance with him [Limbert] had begun, eighteen years ago, with [Mrs Highmore] having come in precisely as she came in this morning to bespeak my charity for him” (185). Thus, as the narrator explicitly notes from the outset, it is these two visits which set out the temporal frame of his own narrative: “this romance at any rate is bracketed by her early and her late appeal” (185).

7 The story is then structured as one large analepsis. It moves eighteen years back in time and focuses on Ralph Limbert’s literary struggles—his attempts to make a career from writing, constantly thwarted by his apparent inability to write anything other than “exquisite failures.” When Limbert first meets the narrator, he is engaged to Mrs Highmore’s sister, and has written a few novels which brought him no money, but only “tributes that took up his time” (192). Limbert is eventually permitted to marry when one of his novels is serialised thanks to the intervention of Mrs Highmore with her publisher, thus guaranteeing a fixed income for a while at least. Thereafter, Limbert continues to produce novels which achieve critical but never commercial success— despite his stated desire to “cultivate the market” and “be popular” in order to support his wife and children. Limbert and his growing family eventually have to move out of London, living in increasingly straitened circumstances, until finally, inevitably, he dies of rheumatic fever.

8 The first section of the story begins “this morning” with Mrs Highmore’s visit and ends in the present tense, with the narrator contemplating her manuscript—her attempt at an “artistic” novel. The section peters out into a series of rhetorical questions, both petulant and patronising: What is she thinking of, poor dear, and what has put it into her head that “quality” has descended upon her? Why does she suppose that she has been “artistic”? She hasn’t been anything whatever, I surmise, that she hasn’t inveterately been. What does she imagine she has left out? What does she conceive she has put in? She has neither left out nor put in anything. I shall have to write her an embarrassed note. The book doesn’t exist, and there’s nothing in life to say about it. How can there be anything but the same old faithful rush for it? (189)

9 This summarizes the narrator’s attitude to both Mrs Highmore’s work and to the literary marketplace: the book cannot fail to succeed, precisely because it is just as inartistic, and lacking in quality, as all her previous successes. The narrator puts it this strongly: “the book doesn’t exist.” What Mrs Highmore produces is so vacuous as to have no substance at all, as literature. What’s more, it is identical—a precise repetition —of all her previous work, with nothing left out, and nothing put in.

10 The striking use of the present tense makes for a complex temporal relationship between Mrs Highmore’s text and the composition of the narrator’s tale. The reader can reconstruct the main events of the story (the histoire) as having taken place in this order: Ralph becomes engaged to Maud Stannace; Mrs Highmore, his sister-in-law-to- be, asks the narrator to review Ralph’s novel (the “early appeal” marking the narrator’s entry into the diegesis); then there are the ups and (mainly) downs of Ralph’s literary career; and his eventual death. Then comes the day of Mrs Highmore’s “late appeal” to the narrator (which happens “this morning,” narrated first), after which the narrator

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states that he takes “a private vow” to tell the story of Ralph Limbert. But it is only the first section of his narrative which ends in the present tense. The story as a whole finishes in the standard past perfect of fictional narrative. Thus the story must in fact have been completed by the narrator after the moment which is signalled by the use of the present tense in the first section—unless, of course, he returned to this first section to revise it after having written the rest of the narrative out. These speculations on the composition habits of a fictional narrator may seem somewhat spurious, were it not for the fact that the reader is explicitly invited to imagine the narrator crafting the tale: “as I cipher up with a pen that stumbles and stops the figured column of my reminiscences” (185). The opening paragraph presents the narrator in the physical act of writing which is intensified with the shift to the present tense at the end of this first section.

11 What this points to is the attempt on the narrator’s part to assert control over Mrs Highmore, control that she eludes both in terms of form and content. She is the more powerful in terms of her financial success in the literary sphere, and her heft in the publishing industry (although these are not successes the narrator claims to admire, they are undeniable).4 What is more, as the narrator explicitly acknowledges, “this romance at any rate is bracketed by [Mrs Highmore’s] early and late appeal” (185); the tale is structurally defined by this repeated action. The narrator produces, then, his own version of Limbert’s literary career as a counternarrative to the one framed and controlled by Mrs Highmore and all she represents. This is reinforced structurally by the narrator’s apparently making his own story escape the frame—to write it after the visit from Mrs Highmore. But if, as the narrator says, the story is thus “rounded by those two occasions,” then it is necessarily contained by Mrs Highmore’s temporal frame. In addition, the temporal loop created by the emphatic use of the present tense —not used thus in James’s other tales in this cluster (and used infrequently throughout his oeuvre)—serves to undermine his attempt to escape Mrs Highmore’s frame. Her name should perhaps have been a clue—not only “high” but also “more,” this woman appears textually insurmountable. The reader remains in possession of this vivid image: of the narrator sitting, pen in hand, supposedly focussing on the narrative of his friend’s tragic genius but in fact distracted into agonized knots by the question of how to respond to Mrs Highmore’s non-book.

Time: The A and B Series

12 The terms “early and late” can now be used to engage Mark Currie’s recent observations about the capacity of fiction to challenge what philosophers and physicists often posit as a rigid separation between two models of temporality; namely, the difference between what are called the A- and B-series conceptions of time. As Currie explains: The A-series represents a view of a sequence in terms of the past, the present and the future, while the B-series represents the time of a sequence as a block, in which the relations between events are understood as a series of times and dates in which events relate to each other in terms of before and after. […] A-theory gives time properties (the properties of being present, past or future) while B-theory views time in terms of relations (of being earlier or later than). (17, 142)

13 Currie gives a meticulous account of the operations of these two series, the differences between theories of narrative fiction which take one or the other view of temporality,

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and ultimately suggests that “it is one of the great achievements of narrative fiction that it can act as a kind of warning to philosophy against the simplicities of distinctions such as that between the tensed [A-series] and untensed [B-series] conceptions of time” (18).

14 The intersection of temporal terminology and narrative structure in “The Next Time” offers a specific example of what Currie might have in mind here: namely, the lack of a rigorous distinction between the A- and B-series. In the A-series, events of the past and the future are “tensed in relation to the present, to now, which is thought of as having special ontological properties” (142). By contrast, in the B-series time is “a sequence of events all of which are equally real, and between which the only relations are those of earlier than and later than” (142). The narrative of “The Next Time” seems to be caught between these positions. As argued above, the text appears unable finally to escape the framework of Mrs Highmore’s early and late appeal. This framework looks as if it is modelled on what might be called a B-series conception of time, presenting time in terms of relations. Yet the terms “early” and “late” can only be understood as earlier or later than something else, and as soon as one event is identified as “earlier than” another, then the event it is placed in relation to is implicitly marked as primary, the place from which the other “earlier” event is measured. They have hierarchical implications not present in the neutral terms “before” and “after.” Thus these deictic markers can be read as attempts on the part of the narrator to re-locate Mrs Highmore’s interventions in relation to the event(s) of Limbert’s career, which is on the face of it the valued, primary concern of the narrator. And yet, as demonstrated above, it still remains framed by Mrs Highmore’s interventions; in a kind of temporal loop or Möbius strip, Limbert’s career is narratively contained by the temporal markers for which it in turn purports to provide the foundational temporal reference-point or origin. The ontological privileging of the present in the A-series conception of time is also evident in the text’s emphasis on the present moment, in that passage which invites the reader into the same temporal location as the narrator in the act of writing. But that present moment is, of course, not that of contemplating Limbert or his work, but one which rather, and despite itself, focuses on Mrs Highmore’s latest production. The supposed focus of the overt content of the work—Limbert’s tragedy—is again undermined, and emphasized here by the striking and unusual use of the present tense. 5 So the narrator’s attempts to assert the A-series conception of time, with its insistence on the ontological primacy of the present is, paradoxically, destabilised precisely by the use of the narrative tense which would normally be assumed to assert this primacy. It is in this sense that “The Next Time” offers—despite itself, perhaps—a challenge to the supposedly rigorous distinction between the A- and B-series.

Relationality

15 While the narrative structure of “The Next Time” implies that there is no simple distinction between the A- and B-series conceptions of time, the vocabulary of the text (and of other texts in this group) continues to imply a contrast between these two models of time, and a significantly gendered one at that. For example, the description of Mrs Highmore’s “appeals” as “early and late” can be read as an attempt to put her in a position of prematurity or belatedness in relation to Limbert, mapping on to the gender politics of the text which aim to underline the supposed inferiority of the

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woman writer. Indeed, there is another instance of these terms in the story and one which is explicitly connected to gender. Limbert’s wife, the narrator observes, recognised and appreciated his (Limbert’s) literary talents, “an assertion I make even while remembering to how many clever women, early and late, his work had been dear” (198). This seems a strange locution. It can presumably be read as meaning simply “from early in his career” and “from late in his career,” or in the distant past, and the not-so-distant past. But the fact that the women, clever though they be, are “early and late” again implies a kind of relationality which places these women in positions of prematurity or belatedness, rather than in the privileged position of absolute contemporaneity with the idolised Limbert.6

16 A similar, though not precisely identical, set of terms appear in the first story in this cluster, “Greville Fane” (1892), which offers James’s most fully developed, and sympathetic (relatively speaking), portrait of a woman writer. This story also opens with a series of events which happen early and late—indeed early and “too late”—in relation to, in this case, the death of the woman writer: Coming in to dress for dinner, I found a telegram: “Mrs. Stormer dying; can you give us half a column for to-morrow evening? Let her off easy, but not too easy.” I was late; I was in a hurry; I had very little time to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply: “Will do what I can.” It was not till I had dressed and was rolling away to dinner that, in the hansom, I bethought myself of the difficulty of the condition attached. [...] I came away early, for the express purpose of driving to ask about her. The journey took time, for she lived in the north-west district, in the neighbourhood of Primrose Hill. My apprehension that I should be too late was justified in a fuller sense than I had attached to it—I had only feared that the house would be shut up. There were lights in the windows, and the temperate tinkle of my bell brought a servant immediately to the door, but poor Mrs. Stormer had passed into a state in which the resonance of no earthly knocker was to be feared. A lady, in the hall, hovering behind the servant, came forward when she heard my voice. I recognised Lady Luard, but she had mistaken me for the doctor. “Excuse my appearing at such an hour,” I said; “it was the first possible moment after I heard.” “It’s all over,” Lady Luard replied. “Dearest mamma!” (433-434, my emphases)

17 The very beginning of this story is marked by play with temporal markers. That is to say, the very first paragraph states that the narrator is coming in “late”; he then comes away “early” from the dinner engagement for which he had arrived home “late” to dress, but despite this “early” departure, he fears he will arrive “too late.” The instability of the terms “early” and “late” is evident here; or rather their significance only in relation to a time already implicitly established as the right time—that is, the correspondence of the event with the moment expected for it. What is more, the narrator disingenuously identifies a “first possible moment” which is not, in fact, such a moment; it is almost certainly several hours after the “moment” at which he heard that Mrs Stormer was dying. Even the description of Mrs Stormer as “dying” raises questions about temporality, since it is normally understood that one is either alive, or dead, and cannot be both, but the term “dying” implies a liminal, ambiguous state.7 The B-series conception of time is to the fore here, since the temporal markers are primarily ones of relationality (early, late), and the first-ness of a “first moment” is undermined. The demands of the present moment—given ontological primacy, of course, in the A-series—do not here appear able to coincide with the moment itself.

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18 It seems, then, that women in these “women writer” short stories are associated with a relational model of temporality—the B-series—against which male narrators pit their A-series conception. Take, for example, the first few lines of the narrator’s description of Greville Fane: “she was more than a dozen years older than I, but she was a person who always acknowledged her relativity. It was not so very long ago, but in London, amid the big waves of the present, even a near horizon gets hidden” (436, my emphases). The first sentence implies that Greville Fane did not assert her superiority over the narrator because of her age (or on any grounds at all), while the second sentence appears to be referring to something quite different, namely the difficulty the narrator has in remembering events of only a few years previously. But the fact that both sentences use the vocabulary of temporality foregrounds the distinction between the temporal models they evoke. Once again, relationality is aligned with the female, and the ontological primacy of the present with the male—to the extent that “even a near horizon gets hidden.”

Frequency, Iteration, Repetition

19 The ontological privileging of the present would imply a series of related, thus valued, temporal concepts, including the unique, the one-off, and the unrepeatable. The title “The Next Time” indicates, on the contrary, repetition. It signals Limbert’s attempts and constant failures to succeed “The Next Time” (where “succeed” here is—in Limbert’s own terms, eventually—to make money from writing). But—and indeed to risk further repeating—the whole text is structured by a repetition; the repetition of the scene of Mrs Highmore appealing to the narrator to write a review. Furthermore, the text which Mrs Highmore places before the narrator at her “late,” second, appeal is a precise repetition of all her previous works, with nothing added and nothing taken away.

20 This description of Mrs Highmore’s product as a precise repetition of what has come before resonates with the presentation of her literary productivity in terms of physical reproduction; a familiar trope, certainly, but one given particular emphasis here. Mrs Highmore’s literary productivity is connected to her failure actually to reproduce: “as if her books had been babies (they remained her only ones) [she] had waited till after marriage to show what she could do, and now bade fair to surround her satisfied spouse […] with a little family, in sets of triplets” (190). The books-as-babies metaphor continues throughout the story, not only in relation to Mrs Highmore but, in an explicitly gendered way, also to Limbert: “Poor Limbert, in this long business, always figured to me an undiscourageable parent to whom only girls kept being born. A bouncing boy, a son and heir, was devoutly prayed for [but] The Hidden Heart proved, so to speak, but another female child” (228). The fact that Limbert does produce actual children, and a number of them, serves to reinforce the implied relationship between Mrs Highmore’s commercial success and her maternal impotence—the inverse of Limbert’s position—and evokes long-familiar theories, which were reaching a peak around that time, about the malign effect of work, writing, and the work of writing, on women’s reproductive systems. The vulgarity of Mrs Highmore’s iterations is also expressed in a subsequent deployment of the reproductive metaphor, where her husband is described as having “warmed his rear with good conscience at the neat bookcase in which the generations of triplets were chronologically arranged” (199).

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This sentence, drawing attention to a taboo part of human anatomy, emphasises squeamishness about the body in general and, by implication, the female reproductive body in particular, imbricated as it is with distaste for iteration, repetition and frequency.8

21 There are other indications in the text of the lack of regard in which iteration is held, and Mrs Highmore is not always the perpetrator of this crime—indeed, sometimes it is she who detects it. For example, the narrator comes to the realisation that the main reason Limbert has lost his position as editor of a “high-class monthly” is because of his, the narrator’s, own column of “Occasional Remarks” (216). It appears that it is the high tone of these remarks to which the proprietor of the paper has objected—given “in too stiff doses” (216).9 But Mrs Highmore, who delivers the news of Limbert’s sacking to the narrator, observes that “‘Your “Remarks” are called “Occasional,” but nothing could be more deadly regular: you’re there month after month and you’re never anywhere else’” (217). It is the iteration, as much as the content, of the narrator’s column, which is the problem.

22 Mrs Highmore appears to agree that aesthetic value is attached to the singular, but this can be qualified. Describing her “late appeal” (which is where the narrative begins), the narrator explains that she yearned to be, like Limbert, but of course only once, an exquisite failure. There was something a failure was, a failure in the market, that a success somehow wasn’t. A success was as prosaic as a good dinner: there was nothing more to be said about it than that you had had it. […] A failure, now, could make—oh, with the aid of immense talent of course, for there were failures and failures—such a reputation! (186).

23 “Of course” Mrs Highmore only wants the failure once, because of the value of the singular, perhaps; but also, presumably, because of the financial implications of repeated failures. Mrs Highmore does not value a transformed literary reputation so highly that she wants to leave her money-spinning days entirely behind her. By contrast, Limbert increasingly develops a reputation among editors as a man “it was well to have the first time: he created obscure apprehensions as to what might happen the second” (198). Obscure they certainly are, since no sense is given of what it is about Limbert’s offerings that might generate this apprehension. The text simply states that they are something it is well to have “first,” and since there can, in the world of ordinary temporality at least, only be one first, then Limbert is a man it was well to have only once. Again, repetition or frequency of any kind is represented as anathema to Limbert’s literary genius. Depending on how one reads it, then, it is either ironic, or on the contrary inevitable, that the final part of the story describes Limbert’s painfully prolonged downfall through the production of a series of texts each of which precisely reproduces the last in being total commercial failures—all “girls.”

Anticipation and Retrospect

24 The title “The Next Time” implies repetition; it also implies anticipation. However, as already noted, this is an anticipation permanently thwarted. The title both orientates the reader towards an event in the future, and implies that this is an event (or a “time”) which will never actually arrive. The phrase does not appear in the text itself until towards the end of the penultimate section when, finally, the narrator helpfully summarizes what is meant by it. It is, notably, Mrs Highmore who in fact coins the

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phrase, saying that Limbert will “try again, with that determination of his: he’ll build his hopes on the next time.” But as the narrator goes on to observe: “On what else has he built them from the very first? It’s never the present for him that bears the fruit; that’s always postponed and for somebody else: there has always to be another try. […] the next time will disappoint him as each last time has done—and then the next and the next and the next!” (219-20). This “attachment” of Limbert’s to the future is, thus, strangely fatal to his progress; rather than ever reaching a time in which his achievements coincide with his aims, his “next times” will, as is clear from the narrator’s final iterations—“the next and the next and the next”—always fail to be any different from any of the previous “times.”

25 The final section of the story is, then, peculiarly protracted, and offers another instance of repetition. In many ways, nothing is added to our knowledge of the story after the end of the penultimate section. The narrator, having asserted that “the next time will disappoint him as each last time has done,” goes on to offer confirmation of this prediction in the final section. The delineation of Limbert’s gradual decline in this final section, including its repeated descriptions of the failures of his novels—apparently different from each other only in the titles—is all already implied in that phrase “the next and the next and the next.” Thus the detailed description of each instance appears somewhat ghoulish, even sadistic. It does not matter if Limbert produces one or a hundred new novels, and thus dwelling on the details of his life (which kind of cottage he lives in, whether his mother-in-law is living with him or not, and so on) appears somewhat superfluous. And in the terms of the text, regularity is, as Mrs Highmore herself put it, “deadly.” The effective temporal stasis of the narrative from this point on is emphasized by the fact that the narrator says, “I see it all foreshortened, his wonderful remainder—see it from the end backward, with the direction widening towards me as if on a level with the eye” (222). The end is already in place, and the text moves from a mode of anticipation to one of retrospect. Once again, it appears that Limbert’s story has been entirely consumed by the B-series conception of time, explicitly now viewed from the narrator’s “vantage point from which the discourse can be seen as a whole, not as a series of nows strung out in time, but as a structural unity in which all parts have an equivalent ontological status” (Currie 147). And yet, to return as inevitably as the text itself does to Mrs Highmore, the position from which the narrator sees it is one fixed by Mrs Highmore’s interventions. In this final “level” vision of the dying days of Limbert’s career, all hierarchy has disappeared: repetition, sameness, and equivalence become the governing temporal figures.

The Time of Writing

26 There are some further points of contact between “The Next Time” and other short stories in the cluster, discussion of which will enable a broader consideration of the temporality of writing. A close reading of the temporal terminology of these stories has shown James placing women in what we, following Currie, might call the B-series conception of time—early/late, relative; to limit their “ontological privilege” (143) or connection with the urgent, unique present. There is, however, a contrasting matrix of language about time in these stories which conversely associates male writers with being out-of-time, and locates female writers on the contrary firmly in the present. For example, Greville Fane is described as “not a belated producer of the old fashionable

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novel, she had a cleverness and a modernness of her own” (437). Thus when the narrator later admits that he had “long since ceased to ‘keep up’ with Greville Fane,” the overt implication that he has simply not continued to read her books sits alongside an image of the narrator, himself also a writer, trying and failing to match her pace. Similarly, Ralph Limbert in “The Next Time” is unable to “temporise” (216), that is to hold back and “[t]o adapt oneself or conform to the time and circumstances” (OED); and thus when he attempts to catch the wave of literary fashion (or, in the terminology used here, identify which way the “cat [is] going to jump” (216)), being unable to hold back, he “jump[s] too far ahead” (216). Paraday, the tragic genius of “the Death of the Lion” whose very name implies an out-of-time-ness (para-day; beyond the temporality of the daily) complains that “time isn’t what I’ve lacked hitherto: the question hasn’t been to find it, but to use it” (83). The problem is not the availability of time, but being able to inhabit time productively. Similarly, Limbert himself experiences no pecuniary benefit from his work, only “tributes that took up his time” (192). These male writers are unable to participate effectively in the present moment, despite the constant assertion of the ontological primacy of their texts.

27 As King comments, James’s narrators in these short stories find that “it was too late for [...] resistance. Women were in the market to stay” (33, my emphasis). Just as Henry James cannot, apparently, fully explain the “mystery” of his foremost professional woman writer, even giving the excessive Henrietta Stackpole the last word in the novel in which she appears, so his narratives cannot prevent the participation of texts, and the process of writing, in multiple temporalities, including that of the dynamic literary marketplace. Gertrude Stein (once a pupil of James’s brother William and a great admirer of Henry himself) evokes these multiple temporalities in a phrase which offers her usual combination of opacity and precision: “the time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain” (497). The phrase “natural phenomena” is one with which sits uncomfortably with critical discourse, but certainly there are many times of a composition—the period of time it describes, the temporal structure it explicitly proposes in its vocabulary, and the temporalities it implicitly evokes or engages in its narrative structure. There is also the time in which a text is written, and that in which it is read, either by another or by the writer him or herself who is always, inevitably, a reader of his or her own texts. As Paul de Man reminds us, “the ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretative process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide” (152). The temporal complexity inherent in the very process of writing confirms the impossibility of the temporal identity of writing to itself. Thus these texts’ attempts to assert control over their narratives is already compromised, not least by their privileging of the scene of writing. The temporal layering of the scene of writing is explicitly identified in “The Figure in the Carpet,” the last in this cluster of stories: “pen in hand,” says the narrator “this way, I live the time over” (303). Neither relationality, nor repetition, can be excluded even from the supposedly hermetic, ontologically privileged scene of the writer alone with his pen. Writing takes place in time, and times proliferate in writing.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Álvarez-Amorós, José Antonio. “Relativism and the Expression of Value Judgements in Henry James’s ‘The Next Time.’” Studies in Short Fiction 34.3 (1997): 271-287. Print.

Bell, Millicent. “James, the Audience of the Nineties, and ‘The Spoils of Poynton.’” The Henry James Review 20.3 (1999): 217-226. Print.

Coulson, Victoria. Henry James, Women and Realism. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Print.

Currie, Mark. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Print.

---. The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Print. de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Print.

Diebel, Anne. “‘The Dreary Duty’: Henry James, The Yellow Book, and Literary Personality.” The Henry James Review 32.1 (2011): 45-59. Print.

Gorra, Michael. Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2012. Print.

Habegger, Alfred. Henry James and the “Woman Business.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898. Print.

King, Kristin. “‘Lost Among the Genders’: Male Narrators and Female Writers in James’s Literary Tales, 1892-1896.” The Henry James Review 16.1 (1995): 18-35. Print.

James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Longman’s Magazine 4.23 (1884): 502-521.

---. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

---. “The Death of the Lion.” The Complete Tales of Henry James vol. 9. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964. 77-118. Print.

---. “The Figure in the Carpet.” The Complete Tales of Henry James vol. 9. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964. 273-315. Print.

---. “Greville Fane.” The Complete Tales of Henry James vol. 8. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart- Davis, 1963. 433-452. Print.

---. “The Next Time.” The Complete Tales of Henry James vol. 9. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart- Davis, 1964. 185-229. Print.

---. The Portrait of a Lady. London: Penguin, 1984. Print.

Mathews, Carolyn. “The Fishwife in James’ Historical Stream: Henrietta Stackpole Gets the Last Word.” American Literary Realism 33.3 (2001): 189-208. Print.

Miller, Elise. “The Marriages of Henry James and Henrietta Stackpole.” The Henry James Review 10.1 (1989): 15-31. Print.

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Poole, Adrian. “Introduction.” The Aspern Papers and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. vii-xxvv. Print.

Randall, Bryony. “‘Everything depend[s] on the fashion of narration’: Women Writing Women Writers in Short Stories of the Fin-de-Siècle.” Cross-Gendered Literary Voices: Appropriating, Resisting, Embracing. Eds. Rina Kim and Claire Westall. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 36-53. Print.

Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” A Gertrude Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993. 493-503. Print.

Stevens, Hugh. “Introduction.” Modernist Sexualities. Eds. Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 1-12. Print.

“temporize, v.” OED Online. Oxford University press, September 2014. Web. 4 December 2014.

Vicinus, Martha. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850-1920. London: Virago, 1985. Print.

NOTES

1. For further discussion of Henrietta Stackpole and her role in the novel, see Mathews and Miller. Mathews notes that not only did James “suffer” Henrietta to “pervade,” he actually “revised the novel to make her influence even more pervasive” (190). Miller goes so far as to suggest that in her disruption of normative categories of gender, and by implication “all the other categories of distinction,” Henrietta is no less than “James’s sexual counterpart, his altered ego” (210). Miller’s reading of the novel therefore has more in common with Victoria Coulson’s understanding of James’s attitude to women than Alfred Habegger’s. While Habegger ultimately concludes that “Behind James’s narratives there is found the ancient theory that women are weaker than men” (26), Coulson paints a more ambivalent picture, emphasising James’s “uneasiness toward dominant patterns of gender identity” and, indeed, his “long imaginative affiliation with women” (8). Despite the persuasiveness of Coulson’s reading in relation to James’s oeuvre as a whole, the texts discussed in this essay exhibit an undeniable sexism, if not misogyny, in their depiction of women writers. 2. For an overview of this context, see Randall (37-38); for extended discussions, see Cross, especially chapter 5, and Vicinus, passim. 3. One might turn to almost any biographical account of James for a description of James’s theatrical failure; for the most recent, see Gorra (289-292). 4. On the shifting definition of “success” and “failure” and other cognate binaries in this text, see Álvarez-Amorós, and Diebel (54-56). 5. This constant swerving away from the ostensible focus of the narrative—Limbert’s exceptional literary ability—is also noted by Diebel: “the writers’ allegedly brilliant words are never described, much less reproduced on the page, and so their content and style remain a mystery” (56). 6. The terms “relational” and “relationality” are preferable here to “relative” and “relativity” for obvious reasons; while in philosophical and scientific discussion of the topic the Special Theory of Relativity is often adduced to support the B theory of time, the use of the terms in this essay should not be read as invoking the wider implications of relativity in its scientific sense. Interestingly, one of the very few published scholarly essays focussing solely on “The Next Time” focuses on “relativism”, though in a quite different sense—that is, it employs a Bakhtinian model of literary relativism to explore the “lexical resemanticisation” that occurs when reading the

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story through the alternative frames of literary quality and literary pragmatism (Álvarez-Amorós 271, 274). 7. This is an issue explored at greater length and in more complex ways in James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove. 8. It is nevertheless worth recognising that elsewhere James’s work reflects a more nuanced attitude to the female reproductive body, and even a critique of the taboos surrounding it—in, for example, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl (1904), and perhaps particularly in What Maisie Knew (1897). 9. Critics such as Alvárez-Amorós (275) and Bell (217-218) have noted a possible autobiographical source for this scenario in James’s own dealings with the editor of The New York Tribune, who apparently dismissed James for making insufficiently populist contributions. James summarised the predicament thus: “you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse” (quoted in Bell 218).

ABSTRACTS

Un nombre infime mais significatif parmi les nombreux « petits contes littéraires » de Henry James porte sur des femmes écrivains et quatre d’entre eux ont été écrits à quelques années d’intervalle au milieu des années 1890. Tout en faisant état des quatre nouvelles, cet article s’intéresse plus particulièrement aux complexités temporelles que présente « The Next Time » (1895). Comme son titre l’indique, la temporalité se place au premier plan que ce soit de manière structurelle ou thématique. Cette lecture montre l’imbrication des aspects temporels et des liens entre genre et écriture qui définissent la femme écrivain. Tandis que le texte s’efforce d’imposer une distinction hiérarchique genrée entre différents modèles temporels, sa structure narrative laisse entrevoir l’instabilité de cet ordre puisque la nouvelle finit par confirmer, et ce malgré elle, la valeur de la femme écrivain.

AUTHORS

BRYONY RANDALL Dr Bryony Randall is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her first book, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life was published by Cambridge University Press, and her other publications include essays on Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, New Woman short stories, H.D., and Gertrude Stein. She is currently working on a co-edited new edition of Virginia Woolf’s collected short fiction for Cambridge University Press. She also has ongoing research interests in the working woman writer 1880-1920, and the one-day novel from 1900 to the present.

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“Like Following a Mirage”: Memory and Empowerment in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

Robert Lecker

1 Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is a study of grief, loss, betrayal, and above all, female agency. The story, originally published in a double issue of The New Yorker (December 27, 1999 and January 3, 2000), has sparked interest from fellow writers—most notably Jonathan Franzen—who describes it as one of Munro’s most accomplished works. It has also been turned into a film entitled Away from Her, directed by Sarah Polley and released in 2006. In its book form, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is the final story in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001). This placement suggests that Munro saw it as the closing statement in a collection that focuses intently on the lives of women and the strategies they engage in to navigate complex emotional landscapes that resist easy description. The importance of the story is also suggested by the fact that when Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, The New Yorker chose to reprint it in its entirety in a single issue, a dedication of space that is highly unusual for a magazine of its stature. The editors could have chosen one of the many stories Munro had published in The New Yorker since 1977, but their selection of “Bear” lends further credence to the idea that it is a pivotal work, one that breaks new ground in its depiction of male-female relations, and in capturing Munro’s understanding of what it means to get old, or what it means to get even.

2 On one level, the story presents the tragic account of Fiona—a seventy-year-old woman apparently caught in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. For me, that word “apparently” is key to the story’s double-edged power. Through subtle suggestion, Munro demonstrates that Fiona’s act of withdrawing from the world is a deliberate act that she engineers in order to avenge Grant, her philandering husband. I propose that Fiona fakes her disease in order to empower herself and to facilitate an escape from her husband’s hypocritical love. In this way, the story becomes one of the most powerful expressions of Alice Munro’s desire to depict women in their day-to-day circumstances, and to explore the means by which those circumstances can be creatively transformed

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through the deliberate invention of an altered identity. This kind of transformation appears in many of the stories Munro has published throughout her later career. One thinks of stories such as “White Dump,” “The Albanian Virgin,” and “A Wilderness Station.” In “Bear,” however, Munro’s exploration of the ways in which identity and memory can be intentionally altered in order to transform agency reaches into new territory, for in this story she begins to link identity with performativity, and to show that agency can be achieved through deliberately constructed enactments of remembering and forgetting.

3 Although this powerful story has gained popular recognition, there are few studies of the way it depicts the relation between memory and agency. Héliane Ventura reads the story as an exploration of “the ambiguities of the uses and misuses of language on two levels, that of a Nonsense charade and that of the parodic re-writing of mythology to demonstrate that, through the enduring power of poetic language, senile dementia is momentarily deferred and, if not defeated, at least challenged.” Although Ventura’s words suggest that the depiction of dementia may be “deferred,” “defeated,” and “challenged,” she comes to the conclusion that “the elderly heroine is undeniably in the grip of Alzheimer’s,” even though she notes that the story favors “a playful, distanced, and ironic approach to the ravages of aging” that foregrounds a “blurring of difference between sanity and dementia.” The vacillation I detect here in Ventura’s description—between the assertion that Fiona’s disease is real and the recognition that its reality is open to challenge—is not developed in Ventura’s article. In what follows I propose that Fiona’s dementia is deliberately constructed, and that it is Fiona herself who engineers her dementia in order to regain the agency she has lost through her marriage to Grant.

4 I was first attracted to “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Franzen’s review in The New York Times. He points out that: More than any writer since Chekhov, Munro strives for and achieves, in each of her stories, a gestaltlike completeness in the representation of a life. She always had a genius for developing and unpacking moments of epiphany. But it’s in the three collections since “Selected Stories” (1996) that she’s taken the really big, world- class leap and become a master of suspense. The moments she’s pursuing now aren’t moments of realization; they’re moments of fateful, irrevocable, dramatic action. And what this means for the reader is you can’t even begin to guess at a story’s meaning until you’ve followed every twist; it’s always the last page or two that switches all lights on.

5 Franzen notes that “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is a prime example of the way in which a Munro story can be reconfigured at the very moment of its ending. So what kind of lights go on when we get to the end of this tale?

6 The story seems simple enough: Fiona and Grant have enjoyed a relatively stable marriage for close to fifty years, despite the fact that as a university professor Grant has proven himself to be a philanderer, constantly chasing after his female students. The sub-story concerning Grant’s various affairs and how they compromised his career are crucial to the narrative. Grant specialized in Norse mythology, and his students tended to be hippie-style women who were open to a fling or older women returning to university. In Munro’s text, Grant’s recollections of how his affairs affected his career adversely are central to the narrative line. The story’s narrator clearly feels a lot of contempt towards Grant, the way he treats women, and his ongoing deception of Fiona. In contrast, the narrator often seems amused by Fiona’s antics, and repeatedly draws

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our attention to her interest in games, mischief-making, and role-playing. The most frequently repeated word in “Bear” (21 times) is “seemed,” a repetition that emphasizes the ways in which this story is focalized on deception.

7 During his various affairs Grant experiences “a gigantic increase in well-being” (306). When one of his liaisons threatens to compromise his department, Grant saves himself the embarrassment of a public reprimand (and perhaps a firing) by retiring early. He reasons that “the feminists and perhaps the sad silly girl herself and his cowardly so-called friends had pushed him out just in time” (291). He doesn’t feel any shame about pursuing his students. Rather, “the shame he felt” after being challenged by one of them “was the shame of being duped, of not having noticed the change that was going on” in women’s values (289). The narrator reminds us that Grant remains largely unselfconscious and unable to grasp the implications of his own philandering. Instead of feeling any sense of guilt, we learn that “nowhere was there any acknowledgment that the life of a philanderer (if that was what Grant had to call himself—he who had not had half as many conquests or complications as the man who had reproached him in his dream) involved acts of kindness and generosity and even sacrifice” (290). The narrator repeatedly draws our attention to Grant’s self-serving nature. Even after his deception is revealed, Grant never thinks of leaving Fiona. He rationalizes his deception as a form of generosity: “He had never stopped making love to Fiona in spite of disturbing demands elsewhere” (290). Now, years later, Grant and Fiona would be living a relatively quiet life except for one problem: Fiona is starting to forget things, and the couple has gradually come to the conclusion that she would be better in a special care facility—Meadowlake. In fact, it is Fiona who tells Grant that “You’re going to have to put me in that place” (283). But even when she names “that place” associated with her illness, she can’t quite resist having fun with its name: “‘Shallowlake, Shillylake,’ she said, as if they were engaged in a playful competition. ‘Sillylake. Sillylake it is’” (283).

8 Over the course of the story we see Fiona make the transition from the domestic life she has known with Grant to a new life where she is surrounded by people with various mental and physical afflictions. It’s there that she meets Aubrey, a man she says she knew “years and years ago” (294). From the beginning, their relationship was also based on playing, or as she explains to Grant: “He and I were always kidding around” (294). Aubrey’s own problems are apparently caused by a virus that left him partially incapacitated. But there is that word again—“apparently”—for no one really knows what Aubrey is suffering from. Later in the story, his wife draws our attention to the questionable status of his illness, arguing that “I don’t mean exactly that he got sick on purpose” (320), which of course makes us wonder whether that is exactly what he did. What becomes clear to Grant, the more he visits Fiona, is that she has fallen in love with Aubrey and that their time together is dependent upon their so-called illness, for only by remaining ill can they justify their presence at Meadowlake. We see the story develop primarily through Grant’s eyes, but also from the perspective of the narrator, who stands back and judges him. In one sense, it is a tragic story about love, loss, and aging. At another level, it is an intricate story about the effects of adultery. But at yet another level, it is about how Fiona takes revenge on the husband who has repeatedly deceived her.

9 As the story unfolds, Grant seems to understand that Fiona is truly in love with Aubrey, and that her happiness and wellbeing are in many ways dependent on him. When Fiona

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finds out that Aubrey has left Meadowlake, she begins to go downhill fast. Grant realizes that the only thing that will save Fiona is to bring Aubrey back, so he pays a visit to Aubrey’s wife, Marian. Their meeting is charged. While their surface discussion appears to be about Fiona and Aubrey, we understand that Grant is repeating an old pattern: he is attracted to Marian and she is attracted to him. Munro suggests that this is another marital betrayal in the making. As the narrator puts it: “It gave him a satisfaction—why deny it?—to have brought that out in her. To have roused something like a shimmer, a blurring, on the surface of her personality” (324). Grant’s ego is stoked by the idea that Marian might see him as an eligible single man—“just the realization that he was a possibility, a man on his own” (324)—so long as he can keep Fiona in Meadowlake. Grant’s selfishness and self-deception know no bounds. He thinks: “It would be a challenge. A challenge and a creditable feat. Also a joke that could never be confided to anybody—to think that by his bad behaviour he’d be doing good for Fiona” (324). And then he starts thinking that “he’d have to figure out what would become of him and Marian, after he’d delivered Aubrey to Fiona” (324).

10 It is this kind of scheming that makes the ending of the story so richly ambiguous. Grant is back at Meadowlake, visiting Fiona. She seems happy. She seems to realize that he could have abandoned her: “You could have just driven away,” she says. “Forsooken me. Forsaken.” Grant’s final words provide the mysterious turning point. He embraces Fiona, and whispers, “Not a chance” (327).

11 What exactly happens at the end of this story? Does Grant realize that he came close to abandoning Fiona, and that he owes her his support and understanding? Does he finally discover some kind of morality? Is he finally going to do the right thing and stand by Fiona? When he says “Not a chance,” does he mean that there is no chance that he will forsake her? That would be the positive view of his actions. Grant finally gets insight, supports Fiona, and becomes a better man. But this would make for a banal ending. After all, the narrator has made it clear to us that Grant cannot be trusted, and that throughout his marriage to Fiona he has been prepared to betray her at every turn.

12 I’d like to propose a different reading. Perhaps Grant has convinced Marian to bring Aubrey back to Meadowlake to assuage his conscience. He and Marian can then go on to pursue the sexual relations they no longer have with their legitimate partners. Here’s how the narrator puts it: “Anything was possible. Was that true—was anything possible? For instance, if he wanted to, would he be able to break her down, get her to the point where she might listen to him about taking Aubrey back to Fiona? And not just for visits, but for the rest of Aubrey’s life” (324). Here we find the narrator listening in on Grant’s thoughts, and what we hear demonstrates just how completely Grant has failed to transcend his interest in other women.

13 Some critics have argued that Grant altruistically rises above himself at the end of the story in order to facilitate Fiona’s love for Aubrey. For example, Ventura says that “because he loves his wife with the utmost selflessness, he sacrifices his honour and his pride in order to arrange for Aubrey to return to the nursing home and live close to Fiona. He ambiguously rescues his wife by making possible her lover’s return to her.” Robert McGill also sees Grant’s final actions in a positive light: “Grant seeks out Marian and implores her to allow Aubrey to visit Fiona, thus proving his own fidelity to Fiona by facilitating her ‘infidelity’ to him.” But does Grant actually do this out of generosity? I don’t think so. Grant defines generosity in this way: “Many times he had catered to a woman’s pride, to her fragility, by offering more affection—or a rougher passion—than

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anything he really felt” (290). His final act of “generosity” in “Bear” is truly horrific. He abandons Fiona to another man so that he can take up with that man’s wife. Dreaming of Marian, he imagines how he might “break her down” at will (“if he wanted to”) by exploiting her loneliness and frustrated sexuality so that he can experience “the practical sensuality of her cat’s tongue” and “her cleavage, which would be deep, crepey-skinned, odorous and hot” (326). In truth, what most interests Grant in his pursuit of Marian is “finding the stone of blameless self-interest inside her robust pulp” (324). This is consistent with his life as a philanderer. We could just leave the story on that very disturbing note, and condemn Grant for his callousness and scheming. However, it isn’t that easy.

14 The final irony of this story might be that Grant isn’t the one who has set up Fiona, but quite the reverse. Fiona might be sick and tired of Grant and want desperately to escape him. She might have been secretly in love with Aubrey all along, and has finally found a way to cement their relationship. In other words, Fiona might fake her illness just so she can get into Meadowlake to be with Aubrey and leave Grant behind. Once there, she might engineer things so that Grant will finally take off, leaving her with her real lover while forcing Grant to pay for her room and board. Such revenge would be sweet. Throughout the story, Munro slowly but deliberately introduces clues that allow us to see Fiona as the true mastermind here. How much more of a mastermind could you be than to fake Alzheimer’s convincingly and to use that deception as a means of getting to the lover you really want? What follows is a brief discussion of some of those suggestive clues as they are presented to us from the beginning of the story.

15 The story’s title itself is mysterious. It is taken from the well-known North American folk song, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”: The bear went over the mountain, The bear went over the mountain, The bear went over the mountain, To see what he could see. And what do you think he saw? And what do you think he saw? The other side of the mountain, The other side of the mountain, The other side of the mountain, Was all that he could see.

16 As Ventura points out, the song “reads like a morphological pun, a self-parodic play on words, which relies on the opening up of expectations only to frustrate curiosity with the platitude of a tautological closure.” The bear goes over the mountain but nothing changes. Movement results in stasis. The status quo is preserved. In this sense, the title suggests that nothing changes in the story—the ending reflects its beginning. If that is true and the central motif of “Bear” is circularity, then what we see at the end of the story is what we saw in the beginning: Fiona demonstrating her individuality and precociousness.

17 In the opening section of “Bear” we are introduced to Fiona, her parents, and their house. The emphasis is on Fiona’s youth, and on how much of her youth was involved with play and mischief. She liked to put “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph when visitors arrived: “if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous” (279). She also liked to tease her various suitors: “She made fun of them all and of Grant as well” (279) and even when she proposes to him (a sign of her ability to

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control her relationships) Grant “thought maybe she was joking.” And perhaps, at a certain level, she was joking, because she asks Grant, twice, “Do you think it would be fun if we got married?” (280). Throughout the story, Fiona is shown to be a woman drawn to play, whether it be in her parents’ house, or with Grant, or at the card table in Meadowlake. Once, she forgot that she had stored her fur coat for the winter, and when Grant reminded her about it she insisted that her forgetfulness was “unintentionally on purpose” because forgetting the coat “was like a sin she was leaving behind” (282), much like the way she leaves Grant and his sins behind once she enters Meadowlake. Even when Grant tries to explain the symptoms of Fiona’s memory loss to her doctor, he has to admit that “She’s always been a bit like this” (282), as if her game-playing and memory lapses had always been a part of her personality. The reader is led to wonder how serious her current disease can be if she had always been “a bit like this.”

18 If the opening section of the story links Fiona’s playfulness with agency, the rest of the story presents us with so many direct references to this playfulness—and the art of deception—that they cannot be ignored. After all, Fiona’s marriage to Grant—the central relationship in the story—is itself framed in terms of deception, both Grant’s and Fiona’s. When that deception is initiated by Fiona, it is usually tied to her sense of empowerment. Almost fifty years after Fiona proposes to Grant, when they are setting out for Meadowlake, she refers again to the theatricality of her life to come: “I guess I’ll be dressed up all the time,” she says. “Or semi dressed up. It’ll be sort of like in a hotel” (280). To set the stage for her departure, Fiona rehearses the effects of memory loss. She walks into town and calls Grant from a phone booth “to ask him how to drive home” (281). But then she returns by following a country fence line because “she’d counted on fences always taking you somewhere” (281). The narrator tells us that “It was hard to figure out. She said that about fences as if it was a joke” and notes that Fiona “had remembered the phone number without any trouble” (281), prompting us not to take the incidents connected with her memory loss at face value. The narrator also reminds us that Fiona’s most normal appearance and dress is in fact a disguise, a costume she chooses to alter from day to day, sometimes even going so far as to dress up as herself: “She looked just like herself on this day—direct and vague as in fact she was, sweet and ironic” (281).

19 When Grant worries about Fiona’s memory lapses, the narrator begins to wonder about her motives: “Fiona’s surprise and apologies about all this seemed somehow like routine courtesy, not quite concealing a private amusement. As if she’d stumbled on some adventure that she had not been expecting. Or was she playing a game that she hoped he would catch on to” (282). After all, we learn, “they had always had their games—nonsense dialects, characters they invented.” We also discover that “some of Fiona’s made-up voices . . . had mimicked uncannily the voices of women of his that she had never met or known about” (282), an eerie indication of her ability to play multiple roles and even to assume the voices of Grant’s various lovers. And their favourite TV show, it turns out, is a British comedy about life in a department store in which “actors who died in real life or went off to other jobs” were “born again” when they returned after many episodes, a clear foreshadowing of Fiona’s own acting, and her own impending rebirth (287).

20 When they are on the road to Meadowlake—it’s a cold January morning—Grant and Fiona drive through a swampy hollow surrounded by fields where they had once gone skiing. Fiona remembers it perfectly, and Grant finds himself thinking, “So if she could

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remember that so vividly and correctly, could there really be that much the matter with her” (284). He observes that all the little yellow notes stuck all over the house might not be signs of increasing forgetfulness because Fiona’s note-making was “not entirely new. She’d always written things down—the title of a book she’d heard mentioned on the radio or the jobs she wanted to make sure she did that day.” He senses that “the new notes were different” (281), but he still can’t quite decide whether that difference is a true sign of advancing disease. Grant realizes that “Trying to figure out Fiona had always been frustrating. It could be like following a mirage. No—like living in a mirage” (322).

21 Once they arrive at Meadowlake, Fiona settles in, and soon Grant is wondering whether she is actually ill. He reflects: “She could have been playing a joke. It would not be unlike her” (295). Besides, “some of the others treated the whole thing as a joke” (297) and even the nurse, Kristy, tells Grant that “I wonder whether she isn’t putting on some kind of charade” (298). Later, Kristy describes Fiona as “a real lady” in a way that makes Grant picture Fiona “in one of her long eyelet-trimmed blue-ribboned nightgowns, teasingly lifting the covers of an old man’s bed” (298). Try as he might, Grant will not find out whether Fiona is faking it, especially if he attempts to obtain that information from the medical staff at Meadowlake. Kristy is the only staff member who puts up with him. In fact, one of the other nurses (a “tough old stick”) “laughed in his face. ‘That Aubrey and Fiona? They’ve really got it bad, haven’t they?’” (297). The joke is on Grant.

22 Kristy seems fixated on Fiona’s potential charade (even though she claims not to understand the word “charade”). She is drawn to the element of collusive play that seems to define Fiona’s relationship with Aubrey. Fiona’s empowering deceptions even make Grant doubt whether she still recognizes him. She talks to him “as if she thought perhaps he was a new resident. If that was what she was pretending” (295). Through her apparent memory lapses, Fiona has taken control: [Grant] could not demand of her whether she did nor did not remember him as her husband of nearly fifty years. He got the impression that she would be embarrassed by such a question—embarrassed not for herself but for him. She would have laughed in a fluttery way and mortified him with her politeness and bewilderment, and somehow she would have ended up saying either yes or no. Or she would have said either one in a way that gave not the least satisfaction. (296-97)

23 So who is acting, and what is real? Grant asks Kristy, “Does she even know who I am?” (295). Kristy tries to reassure him by noting that Fiona gets distracted when she is playing cards with Aubrey, but her words provide little relief: Kristy said, “You just caught her at a bad moment. Involved in the game.” “She’s not even playing,” he said. “Well, but her friend’s playing. Aubrey.” (296)

24 At one point, Grant gets lost in the maze of corridors at Meadowlake and ends up in the lecture theatre, where he lapses into a dream of his former life as a professor, speaking to a hall full of students. In this dream, he imagines Fiona sitting in the front row, “holding out there against the tide, with some people who were like herself, as if the dramas that were being played out in other corners, in bedrooms and on the dark verandah, were nothing but childish comedy” (289). Grant’s dream, prompted by his wrong turn into the theatre, draws our attention to the theatricality that surrounds him and makes us aware, yet again, that reality and artifice at Meadowlake are always intertwined. This is why Grant has to “haul himself out of the dream” so that he can “set about separating what was real from what was not” (289).

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25 When Grant calls to check on Fiona every day, Kristy “seemed a little amused at his constancy” (286). Why would she seem amused? Why is it that she only “seemed” amused? Fiona catches a cold and is put on antibiotics. When she was off the antibiotics “she didn’t seem as confused as she had been when she came in” (286), as if the medication had somehow cured her memory problems, or as if those problems had never existed in the first place. As Kristy muses, “She was definitely coming out of her shell” (287). The narrator can’t really say anything factual about Fiona’s state of mind: “she seemed to enjoy sitting in the sunroom. She seemed to enjoy watching television” (286).

26 Life at Meadowlake is deceptive. The narrator reminds us that many aspects of what goes on there are confusing or duplicitous, as if the residents might just be acting or “living a busy life in their heads” that is not available to outsiders. The residents seem to switch clothing, almost as if they were changing costumes, or, as Grant speculates, “the fact must be that they didn’t bother to sort out the wardrobes of the women who were roughly the same size” (303). Meadowlake is like a theatrical set that changes with each of Grant’s visits. Its shifting scenery and props disorient Grant and make him question his own sanity: The more he explored this place, the more corridors and seating spaces and ramps he discovered, and in his wanderings he was still apt to get lost. He would take a certain picture or chair as a landmark, and the next week whatever he had chosen seemed to have been placed somewhere else. He didn’t like to mention this to Kristy, lest she think he was suffering some mental dislocations of his own. He supposed this constant change and the rearranging might be for the sake of the residents—to make their daily exercise more interesting. (302)

27 Grant’s meetings with Fiona are similarly disorienting. Sometimes when he visits, Grant sees a woman at a distance “that he thought was Fiona, but then thought it couldn’t be, because of the clothes the woman was wearing” (303). He’s simply not used to seeing Fiona in one of her new costumes. She torments Grant by prompting him to wonder “if it was a pretense” (296). Grant still doesn’t understand. He thinks Fiona is too nice to torment him in that way. He reasons: “would she not have run after him and laughed at him then, once the joke was over? She would not just have gone back to the game, surely, and pretended to forget about him. That would have been too cruel” (296). What most troubles Grant is Fiona’s dedication to Aubrey, who is repeatedly cast as her new lover. Now, the tables have turned. We see Grant “stalking and prowling” the corridors at Meadowlake “like a mulish boy conducting a hopeless courtship” (300), and eventually it is his own sanity that he is forced to question: “every once in a while it came to him how foolish and pathetic and perhaps unhinged he must look, trailing around after Fiona and Aubrey” (300). Their real or imagined love affair torments him. Every sighting of Fiona and Aubrey drives him to deeper and deeper self-doubt. He watches them in the conservatory at Meadowlake: The pair found themselves a seat among the most lush and thick and tropical- looking plants—a bower, if you like—which Grant had just enough self-control to keep from penetrating. Mixed in with the rustle of leaves and the sound of splashing water was Fiona’s soft talk and her laughter. Then some sort of chortle. Which of them could it be? Perhaps neither—perhaps it came from one of the impudent flashy-looking birds who inhabited the corner cages. Aubrey could talk, though his voice probably didn’t sound the way it used to. He seemed to say something now—a couple of thick syllables. Take care. He’s here. My love. (299)

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28 Does Grant imagine these conspiratorial phrases? Or is Aubrey truly in league with Fiona, protecting her from Grant’s possessive gaze? The truth is that Fiona is no longer the person Grant thinks he knows. She has a new lover and a new look. She has reinvented her identity, restyled herself. Or as the narrator tells us when Fiona chooses a new hairstyle: “They had cut away her angelic halo” (303).

29 Right to the end of the story, Munro shows us that Grant is not only self-deluded but also emotionally impoverished. He persuades Marian to sell her house in order to pay for putting Aubrey back into the retirement home. But when Grant wheels Aubrey to Fiona’s door and walks into her room, Fiona is alert, present, and reading a book. Meanwhile, Grant is so preoccupied with seducing Marian that he completely overlooks the way he has been played by Fiona. She understands the depths of his betrayal and knows that no matter how much she hints at her own deception, he will never understand exactly what she has done. She even tells him that “The people staying here are not necessarily honest” (326-27) and that “they’ve got the clothes mixed up,” confirming that Meadowlake is a kind of costume room and its inhabitants the performers on a shifting stage. I think that’s why Jonathan Franzen talks about how the last page of this story switches all the lights on. They are stage lights. Through her performances from the very beginning of “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” Fiona demonstrates that her freedom and well-being depend upon her self-invention, a liberating act of deception that she has rehearsed for years. By the time we get to “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the rehearsal is over, and the play is on.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Franzen, Jonathan. “‘Runaway’: Alice’s Wonderland.” The New York Times Sunday Book Review. 14 Nov. 2004. Web. Accessed Dec. 15, 2014.

McGill, Robert. “No Nation but Adaptation: ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain,’ Away from Her, and ‘What It Means To Be Faithful.’” Canadian Literature 197 (2008): 98-111, 200. Web. Accessed Dec. 15, 2014.

Munro, Alice. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Toronto: Penguin, 2001.

Thacker, Robert. Letter to the author. 12 Dec. 2013.

Ventura, Héliane. “The Skald and the Goddess: Reading ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ by Alice Munro.” Journal of the Short Story in English 55 (2010). Web. Nov. 1, 2014.

ABSTRACTS

La nouvelle “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” d’Alice Munro est une étude sur la douleur, la perte, la trahison et, en premier lieu, une réflexion sur le principe féminin. La nouvelle a attiré l’attention d’autres écrivains – en particulier celle de Jonathan Franzen qui la classe parmi les

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plus belles réussites de Munro ; ou Sarah Polly qui a réalisé Away from Her, l’adaptation d’un texte fort ambigu. Le présent article souhaite revenir sur cette ambigüité. À première vue, la nouvelle décrit la tragédie d’une femme qui sombre peu à peu dans la maladie d’Alzheimer : Fiona doit apprendre à vivre avec ses défaillances mémorielles et accepter de quitter son foyer. Munro ne se satisfait jamais de présenter le point de vue limité d’un personnage. Elle laisse entrevoir, par le biais de subtiles suggestions, que le choix de Fiona de s’écarter du monde social relève d’un désir de se venger de mari volage. En d’autres termes, cet article suggère que Fiona joue la malade pour reprendre sa vie en main et ainsi échapper à l’amour hypocrite de son époux. De cette manière, la nouvelle devient l’une des illustrations récentes les plus fortes de l’ambition de Munro de décrire les femmes dans leur vie de tous les jours et d’explorer les moyens mis en œuvre pour en améliorer les conditions.

AUTHORS

ROBERT LECKER Robert Lecker is Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University, where he specializes in Canadian literature. He is the author of numerous books and articles, and the editor of several monographs and anthologies.

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Narrative, Itineraries, and the Negotiation of “Domestic” Space in Cherie Jones’s The Burning Bush Women

Andrew Armstrong

1 In his study of “spatial stories” in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau, in his association of stories with the Greek term for mass transportation—metaphorai— states: “Every day, they [stories] traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories […] Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice” (115). I am taking the Greek metaphorai as metaphor in English and linking it to the use of language as a vehicle to convey meanings and interpretation. The story then becomes a vehicle for creating space, especially if we point to de Certeau’s use of space as associated with “vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables […] composed of intersections of mobile elements” (117). Thus, as de Certeau concludes, “space is a practiced place” (117). Stories are thus involved in the transformation of place into space and vice versa (de Certeau 118). If I understand de Certeau correctly then, creating stories is closely linked to mapping and crafting itineraries. Therefore stories as spatial practice are crucial to our understanding of human relations and social structures. We may view the story or narrative as one such social structure; one that “set[s] in place” (de Certeau 124) or narrates human conduct. The story functions then, within certain borders, even as it marks out its own boundaries; this is what we may call, following LeFebvre, the production of space. Concomitantly, the short story, my focus in this paper, in its compressed poetics, occupies an enclosed space, as Andrew Levy points out when he states that “[a]mong prose genres, it is most like an enclosed space, most concentrated in form. Among all genres, it is most ‘locked,’ requiring the synthetic closure of an impact-filled beginning and a dramatic conclusion” (65). Although the latter phrase is not true of all short stories, Levy’s statement may be taken to represent the general trajectory and itinerary of the short story.

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2 A collection of short stories by Barbadian writer Cherie Jones, The Burning Bush Women (2004) thematizes “home” and “away”—migration, identity formation, travel and exile —as dominant themes and is structured to bear out a concern with space as a category for the exploration of gender relations, place and the social lives of Caribbean women at home and abroad. The collection demonstrates the idea of the story as vehicle or spatial practice and its counterhegemonic potential in creating other spaces for the enactment of female subjectivity. Jones’s sixteen stories are written in two sections entitled “Homes” and “Aways” containing nine and seven stories respectively. In my reading of the construction of the physical and psychological spaces of the female protagonists, I prioritize spatiality over temporality and demonstrate thereby short fiction’s capacity to engage in a poetics of space that emphasizes the layering of the text (text and subtext) or what may be called “‘the architexture’ (structure and texture)” (Gretlund 151) of the short story. The formal organization of the collection moreover, with its “homes” and “aways” emphasizes not only the plurality of both home and away but also this architexture and illustrates the importance of journeys and itineraries as central to the stories. I mention journeys and itineraries because, in a sense, reading “follows a route and unfolds in time” (Psarra 67); so that narrative is central not only to the ways in which the object is described, but also to the form of the narrative itself (Psarra 67). Thus, in the design of the short story collection, like the architectural design, we may speak of “spatial drama and heighten suspense” (Psarra 67). This is the case in the reading experience of the collection studied here; a collection that utilizes (and thematizes) rooms, streets and other “domestic” spaces. We may therefore see the short story collection as “an unfolding world that is experienced in sequence, piece by piece” (Psarra 68), and at the end, as a complete reading experience. Thus, we understand the role of such paratextual devices as the table of contents as locating each part, each compartment, and justifying the placing of the parts in a specific order (which may not however, be read in this order). Reading may therefore be construed as a “structuring experience” (Psarra 68); for stories, like buildings, “contain and influence human knowledge and culture” (Psarra 89).

3 It is my contention here that the architectural motifs seem more suited to short story cycles and collections than to the novel form. In the collection or cycle, each story may be viewed as a compartment of the whole, separate, yet connected. In the cycle we have the frame, the main areas, nooks, alveoli and so on: there are pre-texts, texts, intertexts, paratexts, where the writer, and perhaps the editor as well, may be seen as a kind of architect, one who designs texts. This may be what Alice Munro is pointing towards in her foreword to her own short story cycle, The View from Castle Rock (2006), in mentioning two “facts” about some of her short story collections. Firstly, the “making” of stories—taking material and shaping it according to the writer’s purpose; secondly, the “fact” about writing stories as “exploring a life […] but not in an austere or rigorously factual way” (x), the need to write searchingly about the self. Hence, in these brief remarks, Munro discloses two important features about the short story; one, that it can be made, thus employing the metaphors of architecture or the creation of space; and two, the story may be developed as a journey, following an itinerary. These may be linked, as Munro states, to “two streams” (x), which more often than not, can come together in a single collection, sometimes in a single story. The matter of design here may thus be seen as “a mental activity concerned with arranging forms, spaces, programmes, material” (Psarra 67), linked to the whole matter of formal organization.

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The collection’s formal organization is governed by a dominant theme and the delineation of a particular community.

4 The structure of Jones’s Burning Bush Women “indicate[s] an organizing concept that acquires depth and resonance as the collection unfold[s]” (Kennedy ix). As James Nagel points out in his study of the contemporary American short story cycle, “it is this central idea of coherence, of narrative congruence, that presents greater complexity in the short-story cycle than in the novel” (106). Thus, in analyzing stories in a cycle or collection, any discussion of form is vital to an understanding of the stories both as individual stories and as parts of a collection or cycle. This is central to understanding the relationships between the various characters and the spaces they inhabit within these stories’ fictive worlds. All the stories in Jones’s collection stress the negotiation of place as they write the itineraries and journeys of their protagonists in their construction of the homes, houses, gardens, offices, workplaces, churches and streets, the relationships between spaces and between humans in their various activities. The collection also demonstrates the ways that space is produced through human activity.

5 In the stories in the section titled “Homes,” the narrators articulate the various ways that home is experienced by the women while at the same time highlighting the varied and shifting registers of female subjectivity. These stories demonstrate that being at home can be sometimes an alienating and painful experience, as is the case with Josie in “Child of a Lesser God,” Jane in “Stranger in my Garden,” the unnamed young wife in “The Illusion of Raiment,” the returning daughter in “My Mother Through a Window, Smiling,” the abused fifty-year-old mother of four, Ethelene Elvira Ransom in “A Day of Deliverance,” and “a mad English professor in love with a car-washing rasta man” (86) in “Luther.” In the section, “Aways,” the stories are connected by the central idea of finding place and creating a space for expression and productive living. The stories here dramatize the many ways that one can be “away”: away from a familiar place as in “Blind;” from intimate relationships as in “The Doll;” or from oneself as in “Anonymous.”

6 Although each story in the collection could stand on its own, each attains additional meaning through its interaction with others in the collection. The stories all revolve around the title story with its poetic, mythic, even mystical threads. In an email interview held with the author, Jones bore this latter point out when she commented that: In terms of the story [“The Burning Bush Women”], I had an image in my mind of a community of women who shared a number of physical characteristics and magical or spiritual powers related to their hair … the women in my mind were linked by flaming red, unruly hair, which was simultaneously the source and the evidence of their mystical or magical powers. (Jones 2014)

7 It is this idea of a community of women that is dramatized in the many thematic concerns in the collection, such as mothering/motherhood, female sexuality, madness (especially as a discursive strategy). This is reinforced further in the interview when she states her interest “not only in how we identify ourselves as women, and by our apparent collective understanding of what it means to be a woman but how we as women and as part of a wider society observe, impose and project those characteristics in and on ourselves and others” (Jones 2014). There thus seems to be a more global outlook, or more global itineraries in this collection than a concern only with the lives/ issues of Caribbean women. This is illustrated in the various “aways” in the second part of the collection. In addition, all the stories problematize easy identification with

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specific locations or settings thus drawing attention away from mere parochial readings to more open, productive ones.

8 In terms of individual stories however, “Bride” is probably the most intense of the stories and derives its force not only from its brevity, but from its style of the mother as “word-bearer” giving marital prescriptions to her daughter. Thus, there is a discursive note that derives from the mother’s voice as law-giver in her litany of do nots. The collection fittingly ends in “Anonymous” with Dolores, a surviving Josie perhaps, breaking away from the prescriptive world, smashing the tablets, the thou shalt nots, of the law-givers and divesting herself of old names and old identities.

9 In “Child of a Lesser God,” the story of Josie Melon (the almost eighteen-year-old child- woman), told in a spare, fragmented prose, the young woman is stifled (ultimately) to death by the over-protectiveness of her church-going mother. She is an outsider both in and outside of the church. Here, home is constructed as a prison-like, stultifying place, where the exterior vistas that would give the young girl a sense of freedom, are denied her, or rather, she is told to keep away from them. Josie is figured as a mere spectre, a ghost-like figure among the other inhabitants of the village. When we first “meet” her, she is a spectator to the life going on on the outside as she peeps “from between two curtains so light she don’t even feel them touch her face” (11). Imprisoned in her world and in her buried self, she watches a foreign world as a mere shadow of a self, distant and separate. The young woman looking out the window construes a sense of loss, an absence of involvement, coexistence and intimacy, longing for participation in human interaction. As a child of a lesser god, Josie lives in a monotonous world of speechlessness and deafness, a world of non-sense, symbolized by the Dick and Jane basal reading pattern which both begins and ends the story: See Josie. See Josie watch. See Josie watch the men. See Josie watch the men come home. See her watch them from between two curtains so light she don’t even feel them touch her face when she peep. (Jones 11) See Josie. See Josie watch. See Josie watch the men. See Josie watch the men come home. […] Hear her singing. A whispered melody as soft as the wind through a window. A little song of hope and freedom. (19)

10 This monotonous pattern at both beginning and ending of the story depicts a world in which Josie is trapped—trapped within a cycle of nursery images and non-sense. But these repetitive patterns also act as a framing device for the story, and delineate a world of entrapment, that smothers the young woman to death. The invitation to “[s]ee Josie” and “see Josie watch” encapsulates the idea of framing as involving both being observed and observing. Thus as Kim Dovey observes “‘Framing’ implies both the construction of a world and of a way of seeing ourselves in it—at once picture and mirror” (1). Here, the ambiguities of framing are demonstrated. And as Dovey continues: “The ambiguities of ‘framing’ reflect those [power relations] of the nexus between place and practices of power” (1). Josie looks out on the world of the men and the other young women, some of whom are carrying their young babies in their arms. In a real sense, she internalizes this “outside,” bringing it into the interior. But Josie is

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literally infans, speechless and without her own concept of the world. She lives, as the Dick and Jane readings are meant to convey, in a pre-verbal world of childish observation, with her mother functioning as word-bearer,1 the bringer of language, and law, and ultimately in the mother’s excessive use of her power. This theme is also demonstrated in “Bride” and to a lesser extent, “My Mother Through a Window, Smiling.” As Piera Aulagnier (1975) points out, “every subject is born into a ‘speaking space’” (71) which is designed to “offer the I a habitat suitable for its needs” (71). Within her habitat, Josie is denied subjecthood, the opportunity to speak. She functions as object throughout the story; never taking on the subject position. Even while at the window “seeing,” she does so as object and objectified. Thus, the home, the physical house, is not the space in which Josie “can come about” (Aulagnier 73) or realize her self-actualization; instead, she is stifled.

11 In “Child of a Lesser God,” the Dick and Jane primer also functions as a kind of master narrative that pre-scripts the life narrative of Josie. The ideological script of this master narrative is seen in Jones’s collection in the other “girlhood” stories, “Stranger in my Garden” in the Carol Sanders’s “Every Girl’s Garden” book and in the mother’s prescriptive advice to her daughter on her wedding day in “Bride” where the mother in both cases functions as “word-bearer” (Aulagnier 72). The mother in “Child of a Lesser God,” instead of producing an intimate, “felicitous" space within the home, according to Gaston Bachelard, instead, through the over-protective policing of her daughter creates or produces a carceral, dangerous space that ultimately results in death. In “Child of a Lesser God,” home is reduced to the prison-like space of the “child,” linked to an oppressive religion and domestic culture, where the mother discourages any meaningful interaction with the outside. In this childish world there is no real room for growth unless the young woman breaks out of it. In this enclosed world Josie is a kind of erased figure, whose tangible presence is constantly being ghosted. Hence, we notice that windows and curtains are effective images in the narrative; the window becomes the place of the specular (and the spectral), of watching and being watched, yet not participating. In the same way that the Dick and Jane readings frame the story, the small space of the window frames the body and person of Josie. Thus framed, Josie is partially represented; presented in miniature. Here, her existence or exist-stance (that sense of having being within a space conceived as either spiritual or physical) is minimalized by the law of the mother. When Josie finally does break out of her confinement, the price for doing so is her life. She becomes pregnant by Primus Parris, the young unicycle rider who “wore his tight, stonewashed jeans [and] blue polyester shirt starched and pressed and open almost to his waist” (12), and brings disgrace to her strict, church-going mother, and a sense of gratification to the other church women: “When the truth about Josie came out with her belly, the good married women of the community, whose cotton girdles guarded their virtue, felt a guilty gratification. Her mother had rejected the longings of their brothers and uncles (and husbands)— without even a twist of her tongue to show a little ‘perhaps’” (17). The reaction of Mary Melon, Josie’s mother, to the revelation of her daughter’s pregnancy is also the moment of the story’s disclosure and climax: It was a rainy Lenten Friday. […] at some point during the service Miss Melon recognized that Josie was gone; that she left before the end of the sermon, eyes furtively checking each pew on her way out to try to locate her daughter […] it was only when she reached her gate and saw her daughter kissing a man, whose feet pedaled back and forth on a unicycle to keep him at her lips, that she realized that

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there was a peculiar rosiness about her daughter’s cheeks, a familiar roundness about her belly that had nothing to do with spiritual rapture. (18)

12 This revelation of the young girl’s pregnancy, ironically on a Good Friday, leads to the death of both mother and daughter in mysterious circumstances: “The two bedrooms were charred, the bodies burnt beyond recognition. The rest of the house was virtually untouched” (19). But we notice a glimmer of hope in the story’s parting image, where, in the closing basal reading, the verb changes from “see” to “hear” (19). Josie has now become the spectre or spirit that she was portrayed as in the earlier part of the story. We are invited now to “hear her singing. A whispered melody […] a little song of hope and freedom” (19). The change from the ocular to the aural may be seen as one from distance/separation to interrelation, coexistence, even intimacy. This of course, underscores the role that the senses play in the quest for freedom.

13 This theme of the quest for freedom for the growing young woman is repeated in the next story “Stranger in My Garden” where two leitmotifs are employed to useful effect to dramatize the narrative’s concerns: the garden and the book. The garden functions in this story positively as a symbol of the outside, exterior space; a world of creativeness and education. But there is another symbol of education in this story; the book—“Every Girl’s Garden by Carol Sanders” (20); a book of rules or guidelines for the young teen’s behavior—another master narrative, where Carol Sanders functions as a word-bearer in the sense given above. Unlike Josie however, Jane, the protagonist and narrative voice of this story is no mere elusive shadow, but a vivid and compelling character who is fully in control of her retrospective narrative (the story is actually told in retrospect by an adult voice looking back on the year she turned thirteen). Unlike Josie also, the thirteen-year-old Jane participates in the story as both narrator and principal character. She has the positive guidance of Chasseyman, the unconventional mother figure to move her away from the entrapment of Carol Sander’s prescriptive, hegemonic text, the cool indifference of her mother, and the brokenness in her home. For example, Jane notices that Chasseyman does not observe Carol’s “four cardinal rules of make-up for girls” (22) and she does not wear a bra. Jane’s response to the latter observation is: “My mother says no decent woman should be without a bra, even under lots of clothes” (23). Jones constantly dramatizes the ways that women’s/ girls’ behavior is circumscribed and policed by the many laws/texts of these prohibitive spaces; Jane lives in a world of “Carol says” or “my mother says” (22, 23). This is why stories like “Luther,” “Warress,” “The Burning Bush Women” and “Anonymous” which either foreground varied forms of madness as a theme and structuring device or use a mythical prose, are so important to the construction of female resistance and the negotiation of space in this collection. Jones here employs the architectural images of “inside” and “outside” to great effect in underscoring the importance of space and its effect on human relationships. Inside the house, the young Jane is confronted by the fragmenting world of her parent’s relationship; the once happy household is falling apart and the young woman, Jane, is caught in the dangerous middle. However, on the outside, in the garden, where she encounters Chasseyman, she is in a place of freedom with the potential to grow.

14 In “Stranger in My Garden,” “the white psychology major” (26), English born mother, of the young narrator, Jane, decides to leave her West Indian doctor husband, the once “dashing young black medical student” (26) in this small Caribbean island and return home to England, ostensibly to finish her studies, but in reality to return to a life with which she is more comfortable. Reflecting on life with her mother and father before the

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break-up, Jane remembers a world in which she felt “cocooned in the warm spot they created for me” (25), and cannot understand why her mother needs to leave her: “In those times it never occurred to me that my mother was anything but happy just being what she was” (26). However, the mother’s abandoning of the young girl does not mean the end of the mothering process for Jane; from then on Chasseyman, the young woman who comes to tend the garden among other things, plays the role of mother. In the absence of the birth mother, Chasseyman, the young woman who does not look or act like a “woman,” mothers Jane until Jane leaves to join her mother in England. Jones thus investigates the many aspects of mothering, and the various ways, in Caribbean society, that women have mothered (and fathered) their children. In this story, as in “My Mother Through a Window, Smiling,” “Blind,” “The Undoing,” and “The Burning Bush Women,” Jones dramatizes the various attitudes to mothering (and motherhood) by constructing mothers and daughters who are less than perfect in their relationships with each other. She refuses to deify motherhood and mothering as the essential features of what it means to be a woman and in so doing refuses to construct the house, the domestic sphere, or any other designated feminine or feminized space as the determining place for the exercise of female subjectivity.

15 In the construction of place in “My Mother through a Window, Smiling” the collection dramatizes, through an ironic mode, the house as “the focal point of [the] narrative in order to comment on gendered social relations and on relations between humans and landscapes” (Castor 139). The “failed” daughter returning from study abroad, where she went to study “Voice ... training” (67), is met, on her approach to the house, by a scene of unfamiliarity: “The fallen branches of every tree I have watched grow for the first eighteen years of my life die at my feet as I walk my baby home” (64). The familiar world of her childhood is made strange by the “murder of the garden” (67). Within the story’s spatial poetics the cutting of the trees and shrubs, the altering of the familiar landscape, symbolizes the severing of roots, perhaps even routes, for the return “home” is to a non-place, a place of unbelonging. Added to this is the hostile reception of the mother, whose first words to her returning daughter (an aside from the telephone conversation she is carrying on at the time of the arrival) are: “Well, I see you are not dead” (65); making the title an ironic one. For within the story’s narrative itinerary, the daughter’s return home is really to an “away”—away from the comfort and welcome of a “smiling” home. Home is after all, in the LeFebvrian sense, a produced space, it must be made.

16 But there is another disturbing aspect in the story of the returning daughter—that of the mother’s demeaning narrative that seeks to make the daughter’s stay abroad irrelevant. This is best dramatized in the nonsense song that the mother sings to her grandson in an attempt to put him to sleep: Big rat had a spree L’il rat went to see Big rat take up l’il rat And throw him in the sea ... (66)

17 What we have here in the mother’s nonsense song is an example of symbolic demeaning where we have less the loss of meaning than the occlusion of obvious meaning or interpretation. The mother’s song, although on the surface a nonsense song sung to her grandson, can be read as a not too subtle jibe at her daughter’s failure in returning “home” with a baby boy instead of the degree she went to pursue. But in a story that foregrounds irony as its chief mode of narrativity, the song may function to

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demonstrate, in the Derridean sense, the “tremors, effects and ruptures well beyond social intent and recognition” (Colebrook 123). In the use of dramatic irony within the story, the daughter, while she can find an image for “Big Rat”—“My mother says Big Rat like it is someone that she knows. It could be a neighbor. A friend. It could be she herself” (66)—cannot impute meaning to the mother’s use of L’il Rat: “[N]o image presents itself for L’il Rat” (66). However, when the reader links this part of the short story to a later section where the mother tells her daughter: “Your old friend Mellie has gone to Cuba ... on scholarship to study Doctor-work” (68), the song’s possible meaning may be seen. For to this statement the daughter imputes the meaning: “Loosely translated it would read something like, ‘Mellie is making something of her life and learning something people can use’” (68). Thus, while the daughter cannot recognize the meaning of the song, the reader can, however, link the song to the mother’s attitude towards her failed daughter. Within the mother’s demeaning narrative it is not too far a stretch of the imagination to see the daughter’s failed academic sojourn overseas as “L’il rat” being present at “Big rat ... spree.”

18 While the predominant literary mode of this collection is realism, stressing the importance of the urgency in telling stories easily accessible to their readers, there is some “magical” prose that emphasizes Jones’s stylistic/artistic range. While in her realist stories Jones’s portrayal of women as mothers is largely negative, in her magical writing, the image of the mother is more positive. As Amy Levin says on mothering and the metaphor of maternity, “this touch of the supernatural indicates that the [author’s] aesthetic interests are not limited to depicting the ‘depressing’ nature” (Levin 87) of life for these women. But why are the women more positively represented in the non- realist narratives than in the realist ones? One possible answer could be that Jones wishes to link mothering to a more indigenous frame of reference that has its roots/ routes in an African cultural past. But even these stories are shot through with realist strands that ground them referentially within an identifiable locale with believable characters. Moreover, in all the stories studied here the various female voices combine to produce a collective enunciation of women’s place, space and subjectivities. By this I mean that stories such as “Warress” and “The Burning Bush Women” dramatize recognizable issues which have affected Caribbean women in their struggles for recognition and autonomy within their societies: issues such as respect in the home and workplace, freedom of self-expression, and reproductive rights among others.

19 In the magical prose of both “Warress” and “The Burning Bush Women” Jones plumbs the depths of Caribbean oral and hybrid storytelling traditions to once again dramatize the struggle of women against the norms of patriarchy and social violence, whether physical, psychological or linguistic. It is here that we encounter what Kamau Brathwaite, in his introduction to the collection calls “mathemagical” prose—an “ambush” (vi) against the ways that we think about women and writing. In these stories, Jones explores the “true” magical zones of Caribbean textuality. In “Warress” the refrain “My Nanan says” underscores not only the oral nature of the story but also its deep mythological, mythic and fabulist roots/routes. The story is both an act of telling and of recitation - reciting, re-siting; as the narrative voices place the story elsewhere (or away), someplace outside of the conventional frame of storytelling—as Jones foregrounds the alternative knowledge of the subterranean roots/routes of her ancestry:

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For an inattentive lover use two drops of rose oil and one of the sap of love grass slow-cooked over a red candle with three strands of your lover’s hair and a special prayer. For an inattentive parent there is no cure. (55) To make a loved one return to you, draw their face in the dust, then take the dust home and put it in a jar facing East. After three days take the jar to a four-cross junction and face West and call the person’s name and turn around and throw the dust over your left shoulder. (60)

20 In both “Warress” and “The Burning Bush Women,” Jones’s magical narratives move towards a reclaiming of this alternative knowledge—located in the folklore and folk rhythms of the community. In these stories, and in the collection as a whole, this reappropriation of alternative knowledge stresses the need on the part of these women to remember and reclaim their “ancient properties” (Levin 87). We see this also in the story of Dolores in the final story in the collection, “Anonymous,” where Jones embraces the discourse of madness to interrogate the facile/docile subjectivity of women as merely objects of male fantasies. As Cathy Helen Wardle posits, “madness serves as a powerful metaphor for the symptoms or the result of the exclusion of chaos and of the universalisation of logos; it is a refusal to accept the identity that the logarchy of our culture assigns to us” (41). But instead of reading madness as strictly limited to the feminine, it should be read rather as “a chaotic discourse, a protest against the rigid structures of logos, a voice for the amourante and those who bear the burden of chaos” (44). In Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women, Evelyn O’Callaghan, citing Marie-Denise Shelton, points out that “this condition [of madness] is a result of the characters’ inability to find a place in their societies” (37). Quoting directly from Shelton, she highlights “the contradictions and tensions characteristic of feminine existence in the Caribbean” (qtd. in O’Callaghan 37). While not glorifying or exceptionalizing madness as an existential condition, we may see it in fiction as a powerful trope of creativity, flexibility and freedom.

21 In “Anonymous,” for example, Dolores sheds the burden of her former selves in an act of “decolonization” to finally become Mapusa Tiye, “Queen of the Sahara Nomad Tiyes of the tribe of Pasi-Pasi […] of the broad forehead and the tiny lower lip, the big bones and feet, child of Africa and sister of the quiet left hand, proud mother of modern civilization” (158). In a story of shifting narrative perspectives, oscillating between first and third person points of view, our protagonist moves from Isabelle, the stripper with the trademark “feather bikini” who “went to war every night on top of a bar table in her painted mask and a wide red smile” (154) to Dolores, the fat, docile typist, the “privately weepy bonafide do-gooder of the self-deprecating variety. Miss frumpy-full- of-ordinary-days” (152), and finally to the “mad,” assertive and independent Mapusa. Mapusa, the chaotic one, disrupts the order of the repressive logarchy that had earlier included Isabelle as exotic object and Dolores as supine thing (thus excluding even as it included).

22 In fact, in “Anonymous” and the other story that foregrounds madness, “Luther,” through her characterization of her two protagonists, Jones’s narrative may perhaps be seen as embracing the Celtic notion of “awayness” in relation to the self. For the Irish, the person who is “away” is, as Jane Urquhart points out, “someone who has been touched by the supernatural world” and cannot come back (qtd. in Letissier 10). This is

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the creation of another space—a larger space caused by the break out of a restricted world. Here, break is closely linked to the whole business of psychic break/down experienced by both Dolores and the unnamed “mad English professor in love with a car-washing rasta man” (86), within their male-centred, male-dominated worlds. Jones constructs many of her women and girls in dangerous, stifling, at times deathly, spaces to show not only a social reality, but also the need for newer, wider, more open spaces for the exercise of female subjectivity—a place where these women can “come about.”

23 According to Amy Levin on Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, there is a valuing of independence for women “rather than their being controlled by men” (87). This is important in the context of this paper when we remember that, even when headed by women, the house rules are decidedly patriarchal and aimed at maintaining control over the female body; creating a logarchy that produces the abusive behavior of Carson in “A Day of Deliverance,” Harry, the child molester in “The Undoing,” the uncaring father in “The Doll” and the indifferent husband Arlen in “The Promised Land.” In these stories, the women’s struggle for self-repossession, which sometimes leads to death as in “The Undoing,” means confronting or escaping the confining and oppressive logos of the father as figure of authority. This latter observation is dramatized in Odetta’s story in “The Promised Land,” where Odetta, a fifty something year old wife and mother of six sneaks away from her husband to have an abortion. This valuing of women’s independence is at the root of all the stories in Jones’s collection. Hence, as Levin points out, there is a privileging of women’s solidarity as crucial to the building and strengthening of families as a key to the survival of women and their families. The finest example of this is of course the title story where Jones constructs a community of women around the image of the red hair that grounds them not only within community but also to a genealogy that stretches back to an ancient past. It is not fortuitous either, that in Jones’s stories, her women are all represented within families and structures that necessitate negotiation and decision making.

24 It is this matter of negotiation that draws attention to the idea of the itinerary or agenda as a plan or layout for a journey, be it physical or psychological. Thus, I return in my conclusion to the idea of the story as a spatial practice; especially in the ways that Jones’s collection de-emphasizes the notion of both “home” and “away” as essential physical locations, and instead locates both “home” and “away” within a paradoxical space that is both limiting and liberating, and at times, more of one than the other. In this, the need and ability to tell stories is paramount.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aulagnier, Piera. The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement. 1975. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Sussex: Brunner-Routledge, 2001. Print.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Print.

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Brathwaite, Kamau. “Introduction.” The Burning Bush Women by Cherie Jones. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2004. v—vi. Print.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

Colebrook, Claire. Irony. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Dovey, Kim. Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Gretlund, Jan Nordby. “Architexture in Short Stories by Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty.” The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis. Ed. Per Winther, Jakob Lothe and Hans H. Skei. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004. 151-161. Print.

Jones, Cherie. The Burning Bush Women. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2004. Print.

---. E-Mail Interview. 1 April, 2014.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Introduction: The American Short Story Sequence—Definitions and Implications.” Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Ed J. Gerald Hennedy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. vii—xv. Print.

LeFebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print.

Letissier, Georges. “Away: the sense of place and the voices of the self” in Journal of the Short Story in English. 29 (1997). Web 13 Jun 2014.

Levin, Amy K. “Metaphor and Maternity in Mama Day.” Gloria Naylor’s Early Novels. Ed. Margot Anne Kelley. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1999. Print.

Levy, Andrew. The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print.

Munro, Alice. “Foreword.” The View from Castle Rock. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006. ix—x. Print

Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. Print.

O’Callaghan, Evelyn. Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women. London, MacMillan, 1993. Print.

Psarra, Sophia. Architecture and Narrative: The Formation of Space and Cultural Meaning. London: Routledge, 2009. Print.

Urquhart, Jane. Away. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993. Print.

Wardle, Cathy Helen. Beyond Écriture Féminine: Repetition and Transformation in the Prose Writing of Jeanne Hyvrard. London: MHRA, 2007.

NOTES

1. As Aulagnier states, the term word-bearer “defines the function given to the mother’s discourse in the structuring of the psyche” (71).

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ABSTRACTS

Le recueil de nouvelles publiées par l’écrivaine barbadienne Cherie Jones, The Burning Bush Women (2004), donne à l’« ici » et l’« ailleurs » — migration, formation identitaire, voyage et exil — une place dominante. Le volume est structuré de sorte à faire de l’espace une catégorie pour explorer les relations entre les genres, les lieux et la vie sociale des femmes caribéennes chez elles et à l’étranger. Dans ce recueil, le récit est un véhicule ou une pratique spatiale et son potentiel contre-hégémonique crée d’autres espaces pour que se révèle la subjectivité féminine. Dans cette lecture de la construction des espaces physiques et psychologiques des protagonistes féminins, l’accent est placé en priorité sur la spatialité plutôt que sur la temporalité pour souligner la capacité de la fiction brève à élaborer une poétique de l’espace à partir de l’articulation du texte (texte et sous-texte) ou ce qui peut être appelé « l’architexture (structure et texture) » (Gretlund 151) de la nouvelle. De plus, l’organisation formelle du recueil avec ses « ici » et « ailleurs » insiste non seulement sur la pluralité de l’ici et de l’ailleurs mais aussi sur l’architexture, démontrant l’importance des voyages et des itinéraires dans les récits.

AUTHORS

ANDREW ARMSTRONG Andrew Armstrong is a lecturer in literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. His PhD research and thesis were devoted to contemporary African Literature and Film (1980s to 2000). His research interests include the contemporary African novel; Black Atlanticism; the history of the novel and the Caribbean short story. He may be reached at [email protected], or [email protected].

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Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner Stories, or the Recreation of Virginia as the Biblical Promised Land with Abner as its Prophet

Suzanne Bray

1 On June 3rd 1911, The Saturday Evening Post published the first of Melville Davisson Post’s most successful series of stories. This tale, entitled “The Broken Stirrup-Leather” (now known as “The Angel of the Lord”), was the first to feature the unique cattle-trading and Bible-quoting detective from the foothills of the Appalachians, Uncle Abner. A further seventeen mysteries followed in the same magazine until 1918, when they were all published in the collected volume Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries. In 1927 and 1928 The Country Gentleman published four more Uncle Abner tales to complete the collection.

2 The Uncle Abner series was amazingly successful. The Saturday Evening Post at the time had circulation figures which “inched upwards towards the two million figure” (Norton 37) and Post would receive $1000 per story (Hayden 6). The author and critic Willard Huntingdon Wright esteemed the stories highly, considering that Uncle Abner was “one of the very few detectives deserving to be ranked with that immortal triumvirate, Dupin, Lecoq and Holmes” (55) and, although Julian Symons believes that “the attraction the stories have for Americans simply does not exist for others” (90), this is hardly borne out by the facts. “The Wrong Hand” was one of the very few American stories chosen by Dorothy L. Sayers for her Third Omnibus of Crime, while John Dickson Carr considered “The Doomdorf Mystery” “one of the most brilliant short detective stories in the history of detective fiction” (281), an opinion shared by the American critics Blanche Colton Williams (302) and Grant Overton (41).

3 This paper will take the view that the success of the Uncle Abner series is based not so much on the detective plots, as on the atmosphere and setting of the tales told. In fact, the Abner corpus corresponds to both types of short story series identified by J.F. Benedetto: “the single character series” and also “the common setting series.”

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Everything revolves round Abner and yet, the location, ethos and other recurring characters all play an important part in the mysteries. Forrest Ingram, in his 1971 innovative study of the short story cycle, claims that “the elements of the cycle [themes, leitmotifs, settings and characters] tend to form together, a composite myth” (21). In this series, the “composite myth” is that of the still undivided Virginia as a parallel country to the biblical Promised Land in which Uncle Abner, like an Old Testament prophet, dispenses divinely inspired wisdom to a people for whom the law is often a distant and intangible reality. Post creates this myth not only through his descriptions, situations and characters, but equally through the language of his stories. After a general overview of how Abner’s world is presented to the reader, the first story in Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries, “The Doomdorf Mystery,” will be taken as an example to point out the resemblances between its atmosphere and worldview and those of the narrative parts of the Hebrew Scriptures.

4 Seeing connections between the United States of America and Israel in the Old Testament was hardly new in 1911. According to Elizabeth Stephens, from the very beginning of the founding era the early pilgrims “thought of America as biblical prophecy come to life” (9) and knew their Scriptures in detail. Samuel Langdon’s election sermon in New Hampshire in 1788 presented “The Republic of the Israelites as an example to the American States” (Sandoz ch. 32), while, five years earlier, the president of Yale University had hailed the new nation as “God’s American Israel” (King 207). In fact, in colonial America, the population “constantly drew parallels between themselves and the people of Israel and Judah” (Kirk 46). Well over a century later, just as Post was writing his first story, President Woodrow Wilson could still explicitly declare that knowledge of the Bible was a source of progress in freedom and democratic ideals, and claim, with no fear of contradiction, that “nothing makes America great except … her acceptance of those standards of judgement which are written large upon the pages of revelation” within it (5).

5 Melville Davisson Post believed that he was living in “the great age of the short story,” which was to the American people of his day “what the drama was to the Greeks,” a way to “reach the whole people” (Post, “Mystery Story” 22). In his attempts to do this, he could rely on having “a biblically literate readership” (Bottum 1), accustomed to hearing their own nation likened to the people of the Old Testament, for whom the world of Uncle Abner would appear almost nostalgic, similar to the land of their grandparents.

6 The setting for the stories is the remote, western lands of Virginia during the middle years of the 19th century, before the civil war. The reader is told that “the government of Virginia was over the Alleghenies” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 148) and that “its arm was short and feeble” (8), leaving these more isolated areas very much to themselves. The people who had settled there “held the lands west of the mountains against the savages” and “were efficient and expeditious” (8). Post describes them as “iron men” (148) keeping the peace in their immense, fertile country. The law is known to exist, but could not always be relied upon to act fast enough or to prevent injustice. Post even anchors his fictional communities in his own family history. Old Nathaniel Davisson, who plays an important part in “Naboth’s Vineyard” was “a real-world great-

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granduncle of Post” (Nevins 199), while Doomdorf’s peach trees and illicit distillery are situated “between the Crown’s grant to Daniel Davisson and a Washington survey” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 7). This context is, in fact, not dissimilar to the biblical colonisation of Canaan when “the Israelites struck roots in their new home as settlers and farmers, in continuous fighting with their neighbours and feuds among themselves” (Keller 170), as each tribe took over a section of the land.

7 Biblical archaeologist Werner Keller explains: “Real pioneer work was done by the Israelites in the mountains. Uninhabitable areas, districts without springs or streams were opened up” (170). All this sounds not unlike the settlers in the Appalachians. Politically too, there were similarities. In the time of the biblical Judges, “the tribes functioned as a loose confederation of states, with strong central leadership arising only when the nation was threatened by an external enemy” (Spiro), a situation not unfamiliar to the inhabitants of Virginia in the early years. Another resemblance may be found in the religious context. Although the Hebrew pioneers believed more or less in the God of Israel, many pagan Canaanite cults remained in the land and, during the period of the monarchy, even the rich and powerful were tempted by the worship of Baal and other divinities who offered them power or fertility. Others did not believe in anything at all. In the same way, the remote west of Post’s Virginia, while theoretically Christian, contains people, like Evlyn Byrd in “The Mystery of Chance” or Gaul in “The Wrong Hand,” who reject the scriptural faith and others, like Cyrus Mansfield with his “pagan notions” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 197) or Dix’s wife who “tapped on wood to appease the witches” (307), who stick to the never fully abolished superstitions and occult practices known to their European ancestors.

8 Within this still quite primitive community, living off the land and close to Nature, everything echoes the Old Testament world. The titles of the stories: “Naboth’s Vineyard,” “The Tenth Commandment,” “The Angel of the Lord,” all help to create a certain atmosphere. The good people the reader meets have, for the most part, “stern Scriptural beliefs” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 50) and even the baddies, like the murderous Dix (44) or the lustful Vespatian Flornoy (215), use biblical allusions to justify or conceal their crimes. The narrator too, usually Abner’s nephew Martin, is at home in this world. For him, the profligate Blackford died a sudden death like “a vengeance of God in the Book of Kings” (50), while the local people looked into the village hall as if they had been “before the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite” (51), where, as most of Post’s first readers would have known, the Angel of the Lord stopped spreading the plague throughout Israel and King David built an altar in thanksgiving (New International Version Bible, 2 Samuel 24). The central character in this peculiar world is Abner, whose name in Hebrew means “Father of Light” and whose role is to shed light on the mysteries which confront the community. It is generally supposed that the model for Abner was the author’s father, Ira Carper Post, to whom Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries was dedicated and who has been described as “a man upright in his relationships with others ... one of shrewdness and good intelligence ... Deeply religious... [gaining] considerable respect for his extensive biblical knowledge” (Norton 9).

9 Joseph Bottum has described Abner as an “American archetype.” He is a man “of huge personality” (Roberge), described in the text as “one of those austere, deeply religious men who were the product of the Reformation” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 33). His nephew portrays him as having “a big iron frame, a grizzled beard and features forged

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out by a smith” (148). But Abner’s most notable characteristics are that he has “the thundering voice of an Old Testament prophet” (Grosset) and that he himself “relies heavily on the Old Testament” (Norton 117). In fact, all the stories contain “a sort of biblical parallelism, in which either the crime or the detection reproduces a precedent or principle from the Bible” (Bottum). This is particularly explicit in the last four stories where the narrator informs us that Abner “used to illustrate the mystery in events with example cases taken from the Scriptures” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 237) and that he understood literally the beginning of the Book of Job, where Satan is described as “going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it” (Job 1.7, qtd in Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 237), fearing that he might meet “the ancient Enemy with his bag of Tares, sowing the land” (237). Although this sentence contains a reference to Christ’s words (Matthew 13.25), such New Testament allusions are rare. In fact, Abner clearly indicates his preference for the Old Testament worldview in a speech to the villain Smallwood: “I have read St. Paul’s epistle on charity,” he said, “and, after long reflection, I am persuaded that there exists a greater thing than charity—a thing of more value to the human family. Like charity, it rejoiceth not in iniquity, but it does not bear all things or believe all things, or endure all things; and, unlike charity, it seeketh its own... Do you know what thing I mean, Smallwood? I will tell you. It is Justice.” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 80)

10 Abner’s God is therefore, as his nephew explains, “the God of the Tishbite [the prophet Elijah], who numbered his followers by the companies who drew the sword” (148), “an exacting Overlord,” whose “requisitions were to be met with equanimity” and who “did not go halves with thieves and issued no letters of marque” (74). Abner himself considers that he “belong[s] to the church militant” (33) in the most literal sense of the word. When the crowd in Roy’s Tavern makes fun of him for reading the Bible in public, he fights them and wins. After the fight, nephew Martin informs the reader that “Abner paid Roy eighteen silver dollars for the broken chairs and table, and he was the only man in the tavern who could ride a horse” (33), so it may be assumed that the others were too badly injured. And yet, Abner’s use of violence is rare, his usual weapons being words.

11 However, if the aura around Abner is indeed, as Francis Nevins has stated, “thunderously prophetic” (195), he is by no means the only prophet in the country. In “Naboth’s Vineyard,” “Bronson, who preached Calvin, and Adam Rider, who travelled a Methodist circuit” both join Abner and Father Donovan “who had a little flock beyond the river valley and was as poor and almost as humble as his Master” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 231) in standing up for justice. In “The God of the Hills,” the prophet Adam Bird is, according to Philip Grosset, “quick to denounce the ungodly with even more zeal than Abner.” Bird explicitly claims that “the Word of the Lord came to [him]” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 259) as he cried out to God for justice for the dispossessed orphan. But the role of the prophets, Abner included, is above all to call God’s and Man’s attention to the injustices of this world, which they do with confidence, for they all believe in the Providence of God.

12 Most critics of the Uncle Abner tales state with confidence that “the central theme of all the stories is the Providence of God” (Grosset), which may be defined, according to Evangelical theologian Walter Elwell, as “the sovereign, divine superintendence of all things, guiding them toward their divinely predetermined end in a way that is consistent with their created nature, all to the glory and praise of God” (Elwell). Elwell

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(as would the clearly Calvinist Uncle Abner) explains: “this benevolent control of all things by God is the underlying premise of everything that is taught in the Scriptures” (Elwell). In practice this means that in Abner’s Virginia: “wrong may triumph over man-made laws … but right must win under the timeless Providence of God” (Williams 301). It also means that all things in creation are made in such a way that justice will eventually be done and that evil will receive the punishment it deserves. This principle is illustrated in most of the stories. The profligate Blackford who “had been predestined to an evil end by every good housewife in the hills” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 50) was knifed by the father of the woman he had seduced and abandoned. Equally, ill fortune was guaranteed to any man who tried to “gather every head of wheat” (135) and neither left anything for the gleaners nor offered the first fruits to God. This is the “hidden law” of the story which bears that name and which is explained by Abner to the avaricious Betts: This is a mysterious world. It is hedged about and steeped in mystery. Listen to me! The Patriarchs were directed to make an offering to the Lord of a portion of the increase in their herds. Why? Because the Lord had need of sheep and heifers? Surely not, for the whole earth and its increase were His. There was some other reason, Betts. I do not understand what it was, but I do understand that no man can use the earth and keep every tithe of the increase for himself. They did not try it, but you did! (142)

13 A similar hidden law works so that Judge Bensen, who covets and steals lands to which he has no right, like Ahab and Jezebel in the Old Testament, is not only denounced but his blood is, like Jezebel’s, licked up by dogs in what Abner sees as “the fulfilling of prophecy” (275).

14 A kind of dramatic irony comes into play for those who mock God’s Providence, like Vespatian Flornoy. Confident that he will succeed in turning his dead brother’s adopted daughter into his slave mistress, Flornoy taunts Abner, jesting that the girl had been sold into slavery in childhood “by a sardonic fate” and then saved by “the ever watchful Providence of God,” who had arranged for his brother to adopt her and provide for her (215). The girl is once again in trouble after her benefactor’s death and Flornoy likens Abner to “the Providence of God” who comes to try and save her “by the interposition of the will of heaven” (217). The irony comes from the fact that Flornoy’s taunting turns into reality, as Abner is enabled to understand how Flornoy killed his brother and thus to set the girl free.

15 Abner’s complete confidence in the Providence of God in fact determines all his opinions and courses of action. The falsely accused man should not fear to come to trial, the victim of a crime should not take the law into his own hands, as God is sovereign and right will prevail. More controversially, Abner also has this attitude to the abolition of slavery—God can be trusted to sort out the problems of the South at the right time as long as men do not start taking the law into their own hands: “The situation in this republic,” he said, “is grave, and I am full of fear. In God’s hands the thing would finally adjust itself. In God's slow, devious way it would finally come out all right. But neither you, Mansfield, nor the abolitionist, will leave the thing to God. You will rush in and settle it with violence. You will find a short cut of your own through God's deliberate way, and I tremble before the horror of blood that you would plunge us into.” (203)

16 In addition to these theological themes, Post also creates his Old Testament atmosphere through his use of style and language. As Grant Overton has observed, “the prose style, by its brevity and by a somewhat biblical diction, does its part to induce in the reader a

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sense of impending justice, of a divine retribution on the evildoer” (44). There is no doubt that this form of diction is produced on purpose, not least because Post’s style in his other short stories is completely different. Moreover, Post often referred to “the great example of the King James translation of the Hebrew Scriptures”—by which we understand the Old Testament, since the New Testament was originally written in Greek—as showing “how literature can always be simple, noble and of the highest order and yet plain to everybody” (Post, “The Blight” 26). It seems clear, therefore, that Post did consciously copy this style, both in his “economical sentence structure” (Norton 119) and also in his use of a slightly archaic vocabulary. C.S. Lewis has noted that William Tyndale’s literary qualities, which later marked the King James version, were “economy … lucidity and … rhythmical vitality” (132), all of which are evident in the Abner corpus, as are numerous biblical expressions. For example, in this short passage from “The Angel of the Lord,” we can both note the compact phraseology and identify numerous allusions: “Twice,” said Abner, “the Angel of the Lord stood before me and I did not know it; but the third time I knew it. It is not in the cry of the wind, nor in the voice of many waters that His presence is made known to us. That man in Israel had only the sign that the beast under him would not go on.” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 46)

17 First of all, the expression “the Angel of the Lord,” rather than just “an angel” or “a messenger,” is found many times in the Old Testament. The Angel of Lord appears to Hagar, Abraham, Moses, Balaam, Gideon, Manoah and even to the whole people of Israel. Abner is specifically referring to the Balaam story (Numbers 22.22-38) and comparing himself to the prophet, referred to here as “the man in Israel,” as can be seen by his identification of “sign that the beast under him would not go on.” Balaam’s ass refused to continue along the road because the Angel of Lord was blocking it and he could not pass. In addition, Abner claims that it is not in “the cry of the wind” nor “the voice of many waters” that the Angel’s, or the Lord’s, presence can be discerned. The first reference here is to the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings 19, standing on the mountain and listening for God. Elijah discovers that God was not in the cry of the wind or the roar of the earthquake, but rather in the “still small voice” that followed them. The “voice of many waters,” on the other hand, comes from the New Testament in the Book of Revelation where God’s voice is described in this way as He announces the coming judgement (Revelation 1.15 and 14.2). Although, for these last two examples, the context in which the words appear in the Bible is completely different from that of the Abner stories, the use of such easily recognisable expressions helps create the biblical atmosphere.

18 The first story in Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries, “The Doomdorf Mystery,” provides an excellent example of how Post works in the whole series. Although it is not the first chronologically, Post chose to place it first in his volume as it enables the reader to get to know, right from the start, not only Abner, but also other frequently recurring characters like the less astute Squire Randolph and Abner’s nephew Martin, who acts as narrator. This tale of a bootlegger’s bloody demise is also one of the best-known of the stories and one which contains most of the main themes to be found in the series. In 1924, Grant Overton considered that no one who had read it when it first came out in 1914 could possibly have forgotten it (41). Blanche Colton Williams went as far as to say that “for unity, strength and integration of detail no better story has been written” (302). The scene is set in the usual isolated area: “the government of Virginia was remote” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 8), and the hardy inhabitants, confronted with any

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form of evil, “had long patience, but when that failed they went up from their fields and drove the thing before them out of the land, like a scourge of God” (8).

19 Into this pleasant, rural community comes the outsider, Doomdorf, who has “no Southern blood in him” (7). He plants peach trees and distils an illicit peach liquor, which has “the odours of Eden and the impulses of the devil in it” (8). Like the snake in the original Eden, he causes chaos and destroys the harmony which previously existed, leading many into drunken and disorderly behaviour and some even to death. Bronson, a local prophet, “who preached the invective of Isaiah as though he were the mouthpiece of a militant and avenging overlord; as though the government of Virginia were the awful theocracy of the Book of Kings” (9), denounces Doomdorf and prays that God will send “fire from heaven to destroy him” (13). For Bronson, a precedent exists in the Old Testament when “Elijah killed the captains of Ahaziah and their fifties” with fire from heaven (2 Kings 1.9-15). Impatient on account of God’s apparent lack of response, Bronson decides to take action himself and “cut down [the] groves of Baal and to empty out th[e] abomination”—his use of the term “cut down [the] groves of Baal” indicating most probably that he saw himself in the role of Gideon in the Book of Judges (Judges 6.25), or even possibly that he thought he was obeying the Lord’s command to the Children of Israel as they entered the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 7.5). Bronson therefore makes his way towards Doomdorf’s property at exactly the same time as Squire Randolph, the local justice of the peace, who, accompanied by Uncle Abner, plans to take legal action against the offending Doomdorf. Bronson arrives first. Doomdorf’s slave mistress informs him that her master has not left the room where he had gone to sleep after lunch and the elderly prophet knows, by divine inspiration, that “the Lord has heard [his] prayer and visited his wrath upon Doomdorf” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 13), and therefore that Doomdorf is dead.

20 When Randolph and Abner arrive and ask where Doomdorf is, Bronson replies: “Surely… he covereth his feet in the summer chamber” (9). As Joseph Bottum has pointed out: “even for the biblically literate readership of Post’s time, this is a rather cryptic way of announcing that Doomdorf is dead,” and yet it accentuates the Old Testament atmosphere of the tale. The reference is to the story of the assassination of Eglon, King of Moab, by the courageous Judge Ehud in the Book of Judges (Judges 3.24). Eglon’s servants see that the door is locked, (for Ehud had locked it before taking flight), and say to themselves “Surely he covereth his feet in the summer chamber,” a Hebrew euphemism for emptying his bladder, which would explain the locked door. However, Randolph and Abner are faced with a dilemma, as it is not against the law to pray for someone to be destroyed, neither is it illegal to stick pins into a voodoo doll of Doomdorf, as his mistress has done. The corpse is inside a locked room with no possible access through door or window, and no one seems to have killed the man. Once again, it is Abner’s belief in the Bible and in the “mysterious justice of God” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 19) which provides the solution. Abner remembers the Bible verse: “He that killeth by the sword must be killed by the sword” (Revelation 13.10), once again from the Book of Revelation, and applies it to the mystery. Abner extracts from this verse a general principle: “It is the weapon in our own hands that finally destroys us” (Post, Uncle Abner Mysteries 12), claiming that, through the Providence of God, this is “a mandatory law” beside which “there is no room … for the vicissitudes of chance or fortune” (12). Doomdorf had killed others with his peach liquor; it would therefore be the source of his own destruction. This was in fact the case, as the sun shining in

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through the window onto Doomdorf’s bottle of liquor focuses the light onto the trigger of Doomdorf’s own gun, which shoots him dead.

21 For Joseph Bottum, “The Doomdorf Mystery” is “a story about getting God wrong.” In his opinion: Randolph disbelieves in divine influence on events, the circuit rider Bronson—“who preached the invective of Isaiah as though… the government of Virginia were the awful theocracy of the Book of Kings”—considers prayer a weapon of vengeance, and Doomdorf’s mistress pathetically attempts to conjure the divine with sympathetic magic. Only Abner sees the right role of God’s providence in human affairs.

22 However, this does not entirely fit the text. When Randolph exclaims: “The thing is impossible!... Men are not killed today in Virginia and by black art or a curse of God” (18), Abner replies: “By black art, no … but by the curse of God, yes, I think they are” (18). The Providence of God is such, in Abner’s world, that the prophet Bronson’s prayer for justice may be heard, bringing God to intervene in the affairs of men and restore harmony to the community. The childlike mistress’s final words that, with Doomdorf dead, “the good God will be everywhere now” (17), are not intended to be entirely false.

23 The narrator in “The Doomdorf Mystery” declares that “it is a law of the story-teller’s art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli” (15). This concept is similar to that of Ingram’s “composite myth,” where the elements provided enable the reader to imagine a fictional world in which the, sometimes incredible, events of the stories have their own reality. Melville Davisson Post always insisted that “the short story is a work of art. It is not a segment of human experience. It is a finished product of a certain sort of skilled labourer” (Post, “Mystery Story” 21). This study has attempted to demonstrate how Post, using cultural and biblical allusions, which would be familiar to his readers, and writing in a language they would associate with the King James Bible, evokes the fictional world of a community in the rural west of Virginia in the middle of the 19th century, a world readers will have heard of and therefore one they can easily construct in their imaginations. In this context, Abner, the bringer of light is enabled to raise questions of truth and justice and of the very nature of God, Man and the real world. And yet, Abner is not Post. Very far from the life and experience of the rural cattle- breeder, Melville Davisson Post was a sophisticated, educated and well-travelled lawyer who, according to his biographer, “from the Christian teachings gathered in his youth … as a young man turned to consider agnosticism and paganism, then myth and mysticism in the early years of his writing career … and finally returned to a detached but serious consideration of Christianity” (Norton 45).

24 However, there is a connection between the Providence of God as Abner understood it and the epitaph Post composed for himself: “The universe toils in some tremendous purpose. Be not disheartened because the understanding of that purpose is denied you … go forward with a high face. The mysterious energies of God labour to some divine perfection” (Norton 62). In the Uncle Abner stories, readers enter a biblical and yet American world, governed by the Providence of God, which Abner and other prophetic figures interpret for them and for the other characters. For Post, if a short story,

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primarily designed to entertain the reader, is sufficiently well written as to become a work of art, “it also ennobles him” (Post, “The Blight” 21). Abner’s world was most certainly designed to do so.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benedetto, J.F. “Writing the Short Story Series.” Calliope 134 (Winter 2012). Web. 15 April 2013.

The Bible. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984. New International Version. Print.

Bottum, Joseph. “America’s Greatest Mystery Writer.” The Weekly Standard 43.5 (2000). Web. 23 April 2015.

Carr, John Dickson. “The Locked-Room Lecture.” The Art of the Mystery Story. 1946. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992. 273-286. Print.

Elwell, Walter A. “Providence of God.” Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology (1996): Web. 23 April 2015.

Grosset, Philip. “Uncle Abner.” Clerical Detectives. Web. 23 April 2015.

Hayden, Kelley. William Faulkner’s “Knight’s Gambit”: A Study. PhD. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, April 1983. Print.

Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Print.

Keller, Werner. The Bible as History. 1955. London: Book Club Associates, 1980. Print.

King, David W. The Bible in History: How the Texts Have Shaped the Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.

Kirk, Russell. The Roots of American Order. Chicago: Open Court, 1974. Print.

Lewis, C.S. “The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version.” Selected Literary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. 126-145. Print.

Mixon, Victoria. “Four Reasons to Love Melville Davisson Post.” 17 September 2012. Web. 23 April 2015.

Nevins, Francis M. “From Darwinian to Biblical Lawyering: The Stories of Melville Davisson Post.” Legal Studies Forum 18.2 (1994): 177-202. Print.

Norton, Charles A. Melville Davisson Post: Man of Many Mysteries. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973. Print.

Overton, Grant. “The Art of Melville Davisson Post.” Cargoes for Crusoes. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1924. 41-59. Print.

Post, Melville Davisson. “The Blight.” The Saturday Evening Post 26 December 1914. 21, 25-26. Print.

---. “The Mystery Story.” The Saturday Evening Post 27 February 1915. 21-23. Print.

--- The Uncle Abner Mysteries. Landisville PA: Coachwhip Publications, 2010. Print.

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Roberge, Paul. “Mysteries Great and Small.” 12 June 2011. Web. 23 April 2015.

Sandoz, Ellis. Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730-1805. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998. Print.

Sayers, Dorothy L., ed. The Third Omnibus of Crime. 1935. New York: Coward McCann, 1942. Print.

Spiro, Rabbi Ken. “History Crash Course #15: The Time of the Judges.” Judaism 101, Aish.com. March 3rd 2007. Web. 23 April 2015.

Stephens, Elizabeth. United States Policy toward Israel. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2006. Print.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. Print.

Williams, Blanche Colton. Our Short Story Writers. New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1920. Print.

Wilson, Woodrow. The Bible and Progress. Denver, CO: May 7, 1911. Print.

Wright, Willard Huntingdon. “The Great Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story. 1946. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992. 33-70. Print.

ABSTRACTS

La série Uncle Abner de Melville Davisson Post est un des recueils de nouvelles américaines les plus appréciés et ayant eu le plus de succès durant la première moitié du XXe siècle. Cet article montre que le succès de cette série n’est pas tant dû aux intrigues policières qu’à l’atmosphère et au cadre dans lesquels les histoires se déroulent. Post présente la Virginie—encore indivisée— comme un pays semblable à la Terre Promise dans lequel Uncle Abner, tel un prophète de l’Ancien Testament, délivre des conseils d’inspiration divine à un peuple pour qui la loi est souvent une réalité distante et immatérielle. Post crée ce territoire mythique non seulement grâce à ses descriptions, situations et personnages, mais également grâce au langage qu’il utilise. Après une introduction générale de la manière dont le monde d’Abner est présenté au lecteur, la première nouvelle d’Uncle Abner : Master of Mysteries, intitulée « The Doomdorf Mystery » sera analysée et mettra en avant les similitudes entre l’ambiance, le discours et la vision du monde de cette nouvelle et des parties narratives des Écritures hébraïques.

AUTHORS

SUZANNE BRAY Suzanne Bray is Professor of British Literature and Civilisation at Lille Catholic University. She specialises in the study of literature and theology, and in the history of religious ideas in Britain in the 20th century. She has published extensively in English and in French on C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams and their literary heirs. She is currently working on a series of studies of the American, Anglican author Madeleine L’Engle.

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Charles Baxter’s “Gryphon”: A Postmodernist Substitute in a Traditional Classroom

Quan Manh Ha and Jonathan Mark Hoyer

1 Postmodernists reject the proposition that a universal understanding of objective reality, or of what is out there in the world beyond the observer, actually exists. According to postmodernists, each person’s understanding of reality differs—as everyone’s subjective experience of the world differs—from that of everyone else. Philosophically, this perspective began to enter into general intellectual discussion after Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) published his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. In that work, Kant asserted that human beings never actually know objects that they perceive in the world as objects in-and-of-themselves; they know only what their limited senses give them of the objects in the world. Therefore, their perception of reality ultimately is a subjective reality and not an absolute reality. The reception to Kant’s insights has gone through several phases: it helped to give a philosophical grounding to the subjectivism found in the Romantics; it helped to produce the concepts of space and time, or spacetime, that fascinated many of the modernists (including the arch- modernist Albert Einstein); and it led eventually to the preoccupation of the postmodernists with the surface and nature of texts. One approach to reality that developed out of Kant’s enlightened philosophy is referred to as relativism. There also developed the idea that an understanding of the world is relative to the perspective of the observer, which became an important tenet of postmodernism.

2 The short story “Gryphon,” by the American author Charles Baxter, illustrates the distinction between two world views that have exerted strong influence upon educational theory: that of postmodern relativism and that of earlier scientific realism or positivism, founded by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), which affirms that universally valid, scientific knowledge of the objective world can come through the senses. In other words, Baxter’s story presents a situation in which the postmodernist notion that “the objective world is ultimately subjective” confronts the positivist notion that the objective world is ultimately objective and knowable through sense data (Gallant and

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Kleinman 3). The positivists further assert that their scientific approach to reality is equally valid in logic, epistemology, and ethics, without reference to theology or metaphysics or other mystical disciplines (Positivism). Thus, Baxter’s “Gryphon” questions the tenets of scientific realism, which seeks to find logic, coherence, and universality behind the apparent chaos of the objective world, and it questions the system of education that affirms the propositions of positivism. At the same time, the story also brings into question some of the more extreme applications of postmodernist practice.

“Gryphon” and Baxter’s Theory of Creative Fiction

3 Before discussing the postmodernist elements in “Gryphon,” it is important to address how this story reflects its author’s perspective and the common interpretation of the text. In an interview with Kevin Breen, Baxter states that many people fabricate stories and make false statements to elementary students without ever getting caught. Baxter then compares this situation to the way the American public in the 1960s and early 1970s was deceived by politicians, especially Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, about U.S. foreign affairs (Breen 64). In the Preface to his book Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, Baxter once again reminds us: “We often pretend, these days, that public lying by politicians has no effect on the stories we tell each other, but it does” (xi; emphasis added). Although “Gryphon” is apolitical, it does address the issue of authority, and Baxter’s writing of this story was inspired by his perception of untrustworthy American political agendas. This is reflected in his calling the substitute teacher in “Gryphon,” Miss Ferenczi, a “half-miracle, half-monster” figure (Breen 64).

4 In her article “Bigger Than We Think: The World Revealed in Charles Baxter’s Fiction,” Molly Winans notes that Baxter often depicts a world that is much bigger than our assumptions about it and presents middle-class fictional characters who “mess up a lot” and struggle to “believe in all sorts of things.” Winans further adds that Baxter’s fictional characters illustrate Flannery O’Connor’s concept of “[s]trangeness of behavior,” which, in O’Connor’s view, is the foundation of the short story (12). According to Winans’s analysis, Miss Ferenczi “manipulates the children’s minds.” Elaborating on Baxter’s referral to Miss Ferenczi as “half-miracle, half-monster,” Winans explains: We understand the miracle part of the equation through the story’s unnamed narrator, who finds joy in the substitute teacher’s hyper-reality and defends her against detractors; Miss Ferenczi’s world, where facts of science are mysterious enough to keep good company with zany inanities like angels in the aisles of concert halls, is a miracle. (13)

5 Mystery is both miraculous and “monstrous” because, according to Baxter, “the unexpected is seldom beautiful” (13). The monstrosity in “Gryphon” occurs when Miss Ferenczi apprises a student named Wayne of his approaching demise, because the Tarot’s prophecy is, indeed, “a moment of shocking cruelty” (13). Winans further adds that Miss Ferenczi is “a mystic, a charlatan, a woman who determined to be weird,” and that her students, after learning about contradictory facts and truths from her, “fall from innocence”—a concept that “Americans romanticize so fervently” (14).

6 Winans’s interpretation of “Gryphon” is valid, as it reflects the theory of creative fiction that Baxter discusses in depth in his book Burning Down the House: Essays on

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Fiction. Baxter observes that the United States is always intrigued by “a certain variety of the isolated thinker,” who could be either a sage, an eccentric individual, or “a weird mixture of the two.” The philosophies presented by the isolated thinker are based on his or her “cranky insights” rather than on commonly shared ideas or knowledge. The loss of innocence happens when people realize that appearance does not truthfully define substance and that “there are depths to things,” that the surface becomes illusory, and that “the illusion has been designed that way by fools or malefactors” (60-61). Thus, it is clear why Winans calls Miss Ferenczi a “charlatan” who “manipulates” her students’ minds. Baxter also criticizes the American obsession with innocence: “We would rather be innocent than worldly and unshockable. Innocence is continually shocked and disarmed” (Burning 21).

7 To understand how Baxter constructs the character of Miss Ferenczi as a teacher who makes mistakes but acknowledges no responsibility, we can consider his advice for writers: writers should engage in a dialogue with their characters and “persuade them to do what they’ve only imagined doing” by gently pushing them into situations in which they should be held accountable for their own mistakes. He adds, “When we allow our characters to make mistakes, we release them from the grip of our own authorial narcissism,” and this narrative approach will create a “wonderful” story (Burning 15). Baxter warns that fictional characters who are admirable and noble are boring and soon will be forgotten; only characters who do not have to be good and who “only have to be interesting” are remembered (32). In “Gryphon,” the students definitely will never forget Miss Ferenczi and her lessons because she deviates from the standard image of a traditional teacher, and her lessons evoke active discussion, fear, and bewilderment. She represents the concept of defamiliarization, which Baxter defines as “a technique for finding a certain kind of detail that resists the fitting of the object into a silhouette, that is, into a ready-made symbolization” (42).

A Reader-Response Interpretation of “Gryphon”

8 In the article entitled “Interpreting the Variorum,” Stanley Fish argues that literary interpretation is circumscribed culturally and politically, that is, by the practices and assumptions of an institution, rather than linguistically, by the coded/prescribed meaning of words. He coins the term interpretive communities to refer to a group of textual analysts “who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions.” Thus, these strategies destabilize the reader’s active role in the creation of meaning and “determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around” (207). However, “Gryphon” could be interpreted through a different critical lens without relying on the author’s intentions and his theory of creative writing. A reader-response approach helps shed some new light on the story’s underlying themes and issues as the reader and the printed text interact, and it is the reader, not the author, who exercises total control over the text to produce meaning.

9 In “Gryphon,” one controversial topic in the confrontation of relativism and positivism is that of mathematical truths. Are mathematical facts absolute, or are they, in some ways at least, relative? On the morning of her first day as a substitute teacher in a fourth-grade classroom in Michigan, befuddled by the lesson plan that the regular teacher has laid out, Miss Ferenczi, asks a student, John Wazny, to stand up at his seat

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and recite the multiplication tables for six. When John mistakenly states that six times eleven equals sixty-eight, a classmate frantically alerts Miss Ferenczi: “John said that six times eleven is sixty-eight and you said he was right!” (Baxter 626). Miss Ferenczi then explains that “[i]n higher mathematics, which you children do not yet understand, six times eleven can be considered to be sixty-eight [...]. In higher mathematics numbers are ... more fluid. The only thing a number does is contain a certain amount of something. Think of water. A cup is not the only way to measure a certain amount of water, is it?” (626). In order to avoid further detailed, and possibly confusing, discussion that might involve such topics as non-Euclidian geometry (in which triangles do have more than the conventional 180 degrees), Miss Ferenczi states simply that she is the “substitute teacher” and that six-times-eleven as sixty-eight is “a substitute fact” (626). In this way, Baxter establishes the theme of substitute, or relative, realities that Miss Ferenczi presents to her students. She could be considered a “deconstructionist” who believes in “multiple meanings” (Parker, How 87), or a postmodernist who, in Daryl B. Harris’s words, “reject[s] all notions of epistemological, ontological, and methodological certainty as expressed in the varied discourses of European modernity ranging from the arts to the sciences” (212).

10 In this instance, Miss Ferenczi’s substitute fact has at least two connotations: first, it is a substitution for a conventionally understood mathematical and memorizable fact; second, it is a substitution from the perspective of one observer to another, an alternative frame of reference. Miss Ferenczi finally asks her students, with care: “Do you think [...] that anyone is going to be hurt by a substitute fact? [...] Will the plants on the windowsill be hurt?” (Baxter 626). Apart from the disconnect between the effect of substitute facts upon the human mind versus their effect upon potted plants, this carefully raised question is addressed more to positivism itself, with all its assumptions, than to the elementary school students, with their limited experience. Germ theory, for example, was a substitute fact in medicine when it originated, but eventually it became a mainstream tenet (a fact) in medical practice. The idea that witchcraft is superstition was a substitute fact in ethics and law when it originated, but today accusations of witchcraft no longer are taken seriously (as fact) in the American legal system.

11 In the afternoon of that first day, while discussing the Egyptians during a unit on geography, Miss Ferenczi mentions the creature that gives Baxter’s story its title, a gryphon, which she describes as “a monster, half bird and half lion” (629) while writing the word on the blackboard for the students. The narrator, Tommy, who earlier had experienced difficulty in spelling balcony (trying first balconie, then balconey, and finally balkony), spent five minutes looking up the word in a dictionary at home. It took him five minutes because gryphon is given as a “variant spelling of griffin” (630). In his title, Baxter uses the substitute teacher’s alternative spelling for the name of “a fabulous beast with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion” (630). Thus, the title of the story itself derives from a substitute spelling, which, according to the dictionary consulted by the narrator, also is valid. The young narrator, a student who wants to understand Miss Ferenczi’s lessons as valid, “shouted in triumph” when he found the definition (630), because he realized that his teacher had not been inventing that information. Nevertheless, during her instruction, Miss Ferenczi sometimes does become oddly extreme in some of her assertions, even as her introduction of alternative approaches to reality stimulates questioning and investigative interest, at least in the narrator.

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12 We get a glimpse into the Kantian influence in Baxter’s story when we consult a footnote in the Preface to the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason (1781): Our age [that of the European Enlightenment] is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from examination of this tribunal. But, if they are exempted, they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination. (2)

13 Kant returns to this important observation at the conclusion of his Critique of Pure Reason: “Method is procedure according to principles. [...] As regards those who wish to pursue a scientific method, they have now the choice of following either the dogmatical or the sceptical [sic], while they are bound never to desert the systematic mode of procedure” (249). According to Kant, constant questioning of facts is necessary in acquiring non-mathematical synthetic knowledge. In Baxter’s story, Mr. Hibler and his colleagues, the regular teachers at the grade school, tend to follow the dogmatic approach in their instruction. This is a problem inherent among followers of positivism: a fact, once determined, is considered to be a fact universally, without regard to the varying perspectives of other observers. After a few days, Miss Ferenczi is dismissed from her duties as substitute instructor, and the students are returned to the positivist approach to education taken by a regular instructor: “On lined white pieces of paper we made lists of insects we might actually see, then a list of insects too small to be clearly visible, such as fleas; Mrs. Mantei said that our assignment would be to memorize these lists for the next day, when Mr. Hibler would certainly return and test us on our knowledge” (Baxter 634-35).

14 Returning briefly to the topic of Miss Ferenczi’s substitution in arithmetic, relativists would note that, to most observers, six times eleven always is sixty-six, but to an observer with a different frame of reference, six times eleven may equal sixty-eight. This shift in frame of reference is called a “language game” by Chris Snipp-Walmsley, who explicates Jean-François Lyotard’s report on knowledge in The Postmodern Condition. Snipp-Walmsley notes that this term “can be best understood as the system of rules and conventions which frame and govern a particular discourse” (407). Understanding how difficult and complex this concept must be for her young students to grasp, Miss Ferenczi finishes her discussion on that matter by saying, with a note of resignation: “When your teacher, Mr. Hibler, returns, six times eleven will be sixty-six again, you can rest assured. And it will be that for the rest of your lives in Five Oaks. Too bad, eh?” (Baxter 626). Her deep disappointment is made apparent by her rhetoric: the majority of the students will be bound henceforth by dogmatic teachers to unquestioning, unwavering faith in facts, and there is a possibility that, with the exception of their days with her, they will never again open their minds to critical, skeptical thinking about what constitutes knowledge. Like Kant, Miss Ferenczi assumes that skepticism and critical thinking are desirable, and for her they are desirable even at an early age. The morning event in which the substitute teacher attempts to make her students aware of substitute mathematical facts is the first in which she insinuates her relativistic view into the regular curricular material. She will be granted only a few days to continue.

15 The discussion on arithmetic and some spelling work conclude the morning period, and Miss Ferenczi eats her lunch in the classroom with the youngsters. When a student asks her why she chooses to eat lunch with them, she replies, “I talked to the other teachers

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before class this morning [...]. There was a great tattling of words for the fewness of the ideas. I didn’t care for their brand of hilarity. I don’t like ditto-machine jokes” (627). By referring to the verbal interaction among the other teachers in this way, she indicates her attitude toward the monotony that her colleagues share in their intellectual lives. Like their instruction, their conversation is a repetitive regurgitation of thoughts and phrases (“ditto-machine jokes”); they do not make productive use of their time in the lounge, but Miss Ferenczi can enjoy a productive hour with the fourth-graders, some of whom (probably including the narrator) may have the potential to become critical thinkers. She considers her time spent attempting to instill a skeptical spirit among her students, even in matters of diet—the stuffed fig and smoked sturgeon that she had packed as her lunch in contrast to their sloppy joes and peaches in heavy syrup supplied by the school—to be a valid substitute for an hour of exchanging platitudes with colleagues.

16 After lunch, Miss Ferenczi offers her students a substitute unit on the Egyptians. Instead of discussing the Egyptians’ hand-operated irrigation system, she opens her discussion with the topic of the pyramids and Egyptian slave labor. Eventually, she began to talk about the movement of souls in Egyptian religion. [...] She said that the Egyptians believed that people act the way they do because of magnetism produced by tidal forces in the solar system, forces produced by the sun and by its “planetary ally,” Jupiter. Jupiter, she said, was a planet, as we had been told, but had “certain properties of stars.” (629)

17 It is in this unit of instruction that she mentions the eponymous gryphon and says that “an old man in Egypt who worked for a circus had personally shown her [a gryphon] in a cage” (629). It is in such instances as this that Miss Ferenczi perhaps stretches the credibility of her substitute facts to the breaking point. Nevertheless, Tommy is delighted after school when he finds the word gryphon in the dictionary. Miss Ferenczi has sparked at least his imagination, and prompted him to think about and to seek verification of a fact. William A. Reinsmith, in his article “‘Gryphon’: Taming the Fabulous Beast,” notes that the story is disturbing because it addresses a common problem in education: memorization, rote learning, and testing are standard pedagogical practices, and teachers fail to “ignite students’ imaginations, to enliven their sense of wonders” (140). Miss Ferenczi’s teaching methods should be celebrated because she imbues her students with the idea that “learning could take place with enthusiasm—even passion,” and that test scores should not be used as the only means to assess the outcomes of learning (143). Reinsmith concludes that Miss Ferenczi represents the “true teacher” who acts as “a catalyst for change, an agent of transformation” (146).

18 Joe Harkin, in his essay “In Defence of the Modernist Project in Education,” notes that postmodernist educators (such as Miss Ferenczi) view the modernist status quo in education “as oppressive and to be subverted by constant questioning in the interest of uncovering and highlighting difference” (429). Miss Ferenczi’s agenda, indeed, is to subvert the status quo of instruction in the grade school classroom. Her subversive action has its desired effect at least upon Tommy’s young mind. In the opening sentence of Harkin’s article, he states, “Modernism takes as axiomatic that human beings have agency and, through the application of reason, may work to improve themselves and the world” (428). This is the positive side of modernism’s agenda, which Harkin is defending. When Tommy tries to tell his mother about the topics discussed by Miss Ferenczi in his classroom, her response is simple: “It’s very interesting [...] and we

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can talk about it later when your father gets home. But right now you have some work to do” (Baxter 630). The mother’s dismissal of her son’s narrative about the substitute teacher’s instruction represents a general lack of interest in how knowledge is imparted or acquired in the town’s grade school. Her indifference to what her son is enthusiastic to discuss reflects her blind acceptance that what is taught dogmatically or unquestioningly by the local educational authorities is universal truth, and blind acceptance of the probability that the instruction follows the axiomatic plan of the modernist education that Harkin defends. Baxter’s story suggests, however, that even Middle America should question the way in which knowledge is conveyed, because the blind acceptance of dogmatically imparted knowledge often is, as Kant implied in the concluding paragraph of his Critique of Pure Reason, a hindrance to the development of new ideas: “The critical path alone is still open” (Kant 250).

19 In his article on “postmodernist ideas” in higher education, an advocate for postmodernist approaches, Harland G. Bloland (attributing the positivist’s position almost exclusively to modernism, an attribution that too often, and mistakenly, occurs) states: “higher education is so deeply immersed in modernist sensibilities and so dependent upon modernist foundations that erosion of our faith in the modernist project calls into question higher education’s legitimacy, its purpose, its activities.” Bloland continues: “In attacking modernism, postmodernism presents a hostile interpretation of much of what higher education believes it is doing and what it stands for” (522). However, because the shift from modernism to postmodernism occurred at a time during which relativity theory (influencing modernists) was competing with quantum theory (influencing postmodernists), the period of modernism in education concurred with the period in which positivism prevailed in education, because educational theory lagged behind the science that was influencing the new intellectual developments of the day. Nevertheless, as Miss Ferenczi’s instruction implies, the sooner children are presented with alternative (postmodernist) possibilities in various areas of knowledge, the more prepared they will become to move the sciences forward. The positivistic approach to education affirmed that all knowledge is verifiable and therefore scientific, even after Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle had begun to shake the general faith in positivism’s tenets. Children who were taught in grades K-12 under positivism’s premise that knowledge is based in absolute fact would later be faced in college, if they had the opportunity to pursue higher education, with the unsettling realization they should have been questioning the absolute value of the very facts that they earlier had been required to memorize. The skepticism recommended by Kant in 1781 was set aside by scientific realism and by positivism, but it was being recovered as the insights of postmodernism prevailed over those of positivism.

20 In his essay, Joe Harkin does state, critically, that postmodernists construct a paradigm of critical thinking, and the status quo in education then admits “spaces for resistance and students’ experience” (429). He goes on to quote Richard Edwards and Robin Usher’s observation on “the different and shifting knowledges through which the social formation is constituted” (157). The final result of the implementation of the critical agenda in education implied already by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason remains unrealized even today, but perhaps it would include a redesign of the power structure inherent in the delivery of an education, making learning more accessible and impartial to discrimination. While Harkin acknowledges that a postmodernist approach to instruction “is valuable, [...] it does not follow that the modernist project of humanistic progress should be abandoned because that endeavor has been misdirected,

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or carried out in bad faith” (430). He does not advocate reactionism in education; he advocates rather that the modernist project in instruction can lead to progress in the development of knowledge if it is redirected appropriately.

21 While relativism acknowledges that each person’s experience of reality is different, it still reaffirms that a body of scientific knowledge does exist. Therefore, inherent in the argument of a relativist is the acceptance of the idea that even relativism cannot establish itself as a universal truth. For this reason, the assumption, until proven otherwise, is that analytic and synthetic knowledge should be taught as knowledge in grade school, but perhaps tempered by the insights of relativism, as relativism offers an approach to instruction that expands critical thinking and opens possibilities for creative endeavors. In mathematics, on the one hand, people can solve problems and arrive at the same result. In the humanities, on the other hand, and especially in literary and cultural studies, people arrive at multiple interpretations and derive multiple meanings from observing a single object of study (Parker, Critical 3). It is for this reason that even synthetically developed mathematics was placed by Kant among the transcendent elements of mind (universal truths) while other areas of synthetic knowledge were not (subjective truths). Traditional mathematics and higher mathematics coexist and lead to valid formulations. In the humanities, interpretation is an ongoing process by which one does not arrive at absolute conclusions, and there is never one universally acceptable formulation. Nevertheless, postmodernist approaches to education can enhance all fields of study. As Deborah J. Haynes states: “Because postmodern ideas and critics are throughout culture, [...] interests in science, anthropology, literature, philosophy, religion, and the visual arts [are] constantly stimulated” (249). Even so, it should be remembered that, even in the sciences, validity does not imply absolute truth value.

22 In “Gryphon,” Miss Ferenczi applies postmodernist, relativistic views to several academic disciplines in an effort to destabilize educational complacency and cause her students to question what their school presents as absolute knowledge. Even she goes too far, however, when she implies that there is truth value in at least one of her more extravagant assertions. While introducing the students to Tarot readings, she walks over to Wayne Razmer: He picked his five cards, and I could see that the Death card was one of them. “What’s your name?” Miss Ferenczi asked. “Wayne.” “Well, Wayne,” she said, “you will undergo a great metamorphosis, a change, before you become an adult. Your earthly element will no doubt leap higher, because you seem to be a sweet boy. This card, this nine of swords, tells me of suffering and desolation. And this ten of wands, well, that’s a heavy load.” “What about this one?” Wayne pointed to the Death card. “It means, my sweet, that you will die soon.” She gathered up the cards. We were all looking at Wayne. “But do not fear,” she said. It is not really death. Just change. Out of your earthly shape.” She put the card on Mr. Hibler’s desk, “and now, let’s do some arithmetic.” (633-634)

23 After Wayne Razmer reports the incident to the principal, the narrator defends Miss Ferenczi: “You told,” I shouted at him. “She was just kidding.” “She shouldn’t have,” he shouted back. “We were supposed to be doing arithmetic.” “She just scared you,” I said. “You’re a chicken. You’re a chicken, Wayne. You are. Scared of a little card,” I sing-songed.” (634)

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24 In the afternoon, Miss Ferenczi is gone, and the students are back to memorizing lists of data. Perhaps she crossed a pedagogical demarcation in presenting a Tarot prediction as a foregone certainty, but the narrator’s statement in her defense also is valid. The grounds for her dismissal would be justified, in all probability, by the age- group of the authority figure’s audience.

25 John G. Parks, in his commentary on Baxter’s story, notes that human beings must constantly negotiate “their way through a complex and often confusing world” (623). This is possibly why Baxter names the substitute teacher Miss Ferenczi, which sounds suspiciously similar to the word frenzy, a word that, as postmodernists do, emphasizes that meaning remains forever unstable, and that the post-World War II environment in which we live is characterized by chaos, fragmentation, absurdity, distrust, and skepticism. In the story “Gryphon,” Miss Ferenczi applies the principles of postmodernist educational theory in an effort to make her students critical thinkers, and simultaneously the author causes his readers to question what often is considered to be factual knowledge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1997. Print.

---. “Gryphon.” American Short Stories Since 1945. Ed. John G. Parks. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 623-35. Print.

Bloland, Harland G. “Postmodernism and Higher Education.” The Journal of Higher Education 66.5 (1995): 521-59. Print.

Breen, Kevin. “An Interview with Charles Baxter.” Poets & Writers Magazine 22 (Sept/Oct 1994). 60-69. Print.

Edwards, Richard, and Robin Usher. Postmodernism and Education: Different Voices, Different Worlds. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the Variorum.” Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. K. M. Newton. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 203-09. Print.

Gallant, Mary J., and Sherryl Kleinman. “Symbolic Interactionism vs. Ethnomethodology.” Symbolic Interaction 6.1 (1983): 1-18. Print.

Harkin, Joe. “In Defence of the Modernist Project in Education.” British Journal of Educational Studies 46.4 (1998): 428-39. Print.

Harris, Daryl B. “Postmodernist Diversions in African-American Thought.” Journal of Black Studies 36.2 (2005): 209-28. Print.

Haynes, Deborah J. “Teaching Postmodernism.” Art Education: The Lifeworld of the Teacher of Art 48.5 (1995): 23-24 + 45-50. Print.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Thomas Kingsmill. Kant: Great Books of the Western World, vol. 42. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1986. Print.

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Parker, Robert D. Introduction. Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. 1-5. Print.

---. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

Parks, John G., ed. American Short Stories Since 1945. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

Reinsmith, William H. “‘Gryphon’: Taming the Fabulous Beast.” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 5.1 (2004): 140-46. Print.

Snipp-Walmsley. “Postmodernism.” Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Patricia Waugh. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2006. 405-26. Print.

Winans, Molly. “Bigger Than We Think: The World Revealed in Charles Baxter’s Fiction.” Commonweal 124 (7 Nov. 1997): 12-16. Print.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article étudie la nouvelle « Gryphon » de Charles Baxter en la plaçant dans le cadre de l’histoire intellectuelle et pédagogique allant de l’âge des Lumières en Europe au développement du postmodernisme. Le subjectivisme d’Emmanuel Kant est perçu comme le début d’une transition de l’absolu vers le relatif, en ce qui concerne l’évaluation de ce que l’on présente en classe comme des « faits ». Traditionnellement, cette transition kantienne se manifeste bien plus tard, au moment de l’émergence des idées postmodernistes issues de l’échec des théories positivistes, et c’est précisément cette transition qui est au centre des évènements qui constituent le récit. Dans le but d’illustrer la façon dont Baxter se sert de la situation en classe pour décrire une confrontation de perspectives philosophiques et pédagogiques, on s’appuiera ici sur la théorie de la réception. L’histoire de Baxter ne peut être réduite à de simples oppositions de type « noir ou blanc », car l’auteur tente de refléter l’importante subtilité des complexités que l’on rencontre dans les « vraies » classes.

AUTHORS

QUAN MANH HA Quan Manh Ha, PhD., teaches American Literature and Ethnic Studies at the University of Montana.

JONATHAN MARK HOYER Jonathan Mark Hoyer graduated with a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in English from the University of Montana in 2013, and he was professor Ha’s research assistant.

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Another Kind of Hell: Fundamentals of the Dystopian Short Story

Charles Holdefer

1 Dystopian literature has a long history and a secure place in the literary canon. Novels by Swift, Orwell, Huxley, Atwood and others have famously created elaborate taxonomies of imaginary worlds which are grotesquely compromised by their pursuit of an ideal. Confronted with such descriptions, readers are likely to react in the manner of Huckleberry Finn who, after hearing Miss Watson’s description of heaven, concludes that he certainly does not want to go there. He even says he’d rather go to the “bad place” (12). This focus on a particular “there,” this emphasis on an alternative place, is central to dystopian writing in longer forms.

2 The dystopian short story, however, operates according to a different economy. A form that places a premium on brevity does not have the luxury of an elaborate taxonomy of place. Topos is figured differently. The critic Wendell Harris, attempting to sketch out some basic differences between the nineteenth century novel and the rise of the short story, emphasized how the novel explores the relationship between individuals and a historical continuum, whereas the short story, comparatively speaking, tends to detach the individual from elaborate social and historical grounding in order to privilege a more inward focus (189-90). Because of this interiority, Charles May has referred to the short story as an inheritor of “the original religious nature of narrative” (New Short Story xxvi). Although one can qualify such descriptions or find exceptions, these generic outlines generally hold true for dystopian literature, too, while posing specific problems. If place counts for much in the dystopian novel, how is the transition to another type of emphasis—a crossing into a more allusive aesthetic territory— accomplished? How is an external world effectively internalized? Or, to put it familiarly, what happens when a tale relies less on the look of a place than on its “feel?”

3 Although this discussion cannot pretend to be exhaustive, I have purposely chosen a very eclectic range of short stories in order to illustrate an underlying commonality of the genre, a family resemblance that will tell us something about the form.1 These stories are Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), a widely-anthologized fable about a ritual murder by stoning in a modern New England town; Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison

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Bergeron” (1961), a science fiction tale set in America in 2081 where universal equality is enforced by handicapping anyone who is above average; George Saunders’ “Jon” (2003), a piece of speculative fiction about a luxury concentration camp where teenagers are experimental subjects for advertising research; and Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” (2012), a futuristic techno-thriller about a Jane Bondish character on a top secret mission in a very unfriendly environment.2 These stories are all very different from one another in style, sub-genre and tone, as well as in the specific dystopian territories that they imagine. They arise out of markedly different historical and cultural contexts: Jackson relies on a neo-Puritanical ruralism; Vonnegut evinces a post-Orwellian Cold War sensibility; Saunders reflects on an era of hyper-consumerism while Egan offers a meditation on the globalized “War on Terror.” In spite of these differences, however, it is possible to see how these stories share qualities of a particular kind of hell. I would like to begin by explaining what version of hell I am talking about, in light of some general theoretical observations about the short story genre, and then I will explore several of its more salient features which, in the course of dystopian satire, are often interrelated: namely, ritualized assaults in the name of a “positive” ideal which result in separating individuals not only from their autonomous selves, but also from one another.

Hell

4 “Hell” means many things, and its pertinence here is literary, not theological, though the former is conceptually indebted to the latter. Charles May’s observation about the short story’s connection to the religious inheritance of narrative is worth exploring, as are a few observations about traditional representations and understandings of this terrible place.

5 In I Am Your Brother, May points to two foundational myths from Genesis—the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden, and Cain slaying his brother Abel—and their influence on Romantic literature, which in turn provided the impetus for the short story. In the narrative about Adam and Eve, humanity is separated from God and left to its own devices, to struggle and yearn for a lost wholeness that is now out of reach; in the narrative of Cain and Abel, we find a primal example of humans separated from each other, in an isolation so severe that it is possible to kill one’s brother. With reference to the psychologist Jean Piaget and the philosopher Martin Buber, May theorizes that this anxiety of separation is a legacy of both infancy and culture, and that the short story, in its various manifestations, frequently enacts these myths, these ancient sources of anguish. “The central focus of the short story as a genre is the primordial story that constitutes human beings existentially—their basic sense of aloneness and their yearning for union” (I Am Your Brother). What is more, generic brevity is a constitutive element of how the story is experienced. The novel, for its length, tends to offer a narrative that naturalizes experience by appealing to a framework of time and reason, and in this sense reconciles the reader to some version of an imagined post-Genesis world; whereas the short story remains closer to source myths, fairy stories and folk tales, which are atemporal and share a space with dreams and whose allusiveness can leave the reader in an unreconciled state (May, New Short Story xxvi). In another context, Terry Eagleton has suggested that the commonly realistic mode of the novel is largely based on a “cognitive form [which is] concerned to

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map the causal processes underlying events and resolve them into some intelligible pattern. The short story, by contrast, can yield us some single bizarre occurrence or epiphany of terror, whose impact would merely be blunted by lengthy realist elaboration” (196).

6 Such observations about genre are not a prescription for how a short story “should be” or, even less, an attempt to put forward an essentialist claim about what a short story “is.” Rather, they are simply a general description of how the genre has frequently been practiced. To this description, I would like to add a few of my own observations about how these precedents play out in dystopian narratives, with specific reference to competing hellish visions.

7 The dystopian novel typically offers a sustained description of a place and its inhabitants; think, for example, of the complex organization of Dante’s Inferno, whose critical editions usually include a map of nine concentric rings of hell, which helps the reader to visualize the place of torment. A considerable amount of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale is devoted to explaining and locating the social organization, institutions and ideologies of the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Oceania or the Republic of Gilead. They map out their own versions of Dante’s hellish underworld.

8 The dystopian short story, however, because of the generic particularities described above, reflects another kind of hell, whose theological parallel refers to a conceptualization which is less available to being mapped. Instead of a place, this hell is a state. While rooted in a long tradition going back to Egyptian, Classical, Hebrew and early Christian teachings,3 this idea grew more widespread in the nineteenth century— notably, at around the same time as the rise of romanticism and the short story. This hell constitutes a “self-exclusion from communion with God,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 1033). This sort of spatialization is of a different order from the belief (which still persists among some Protestant fundamentalists) in hell as a real place resembling depictions in the art of Hieronymus Bosch or in the fifth century theological arguments of St. Augustine of Hippo, who wrote about an underground lake of fire, brimstone and devils (City of God 21.10). In imagining hell less materially as a problem of “self-exclusion,” we have crossed into a different kind of territory.4

9 My purpose here is not to promulgate a particular version of religious orthodoxy but to point out that this sense of exclusion or separation parallels Charles May’s speculation about the short story genre, and that the dystopian short story could arguably represent an extreme example for which the term “hell” is a useful metaphor. According to Alice K. Turner, “The landscape of Hell is the largest shared construction project in imaginative history, and its chief architects have been creative giants— Homer, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Bosch, Michelangelo, Milton, Goethe, Blake, and more” (3). The dystopian short story, I would argue, participates in this project, and recognizing the hellish dimension is part of giving the genre its due.

10 In the secular configurations of hell that I am describing, the individual is separated not from God but from the possibility, both physically and mentally, of an autonomous self. The fight to overcome “self-exclusion” often provides the necessary conflict in short story plots where characters struggle against a system that abuses them as they try to recover or defend their beleaguered selves. Thus the more general topographical (and novelistic) mode that construes hell as a place, or the metaphysical emphasis on a

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supernatural being, gives way to another mode, a personal focus, a more intimate locus. Fictional settings (for instance, the village in “The Lottery,” the living room in “Harrison Bergeron,” the market research center in “Jon” and the Mediterranean backdrop of “Black Box”) are only cursorily described, in keeping with short story technique; but the physical and mental ruptures from autonomous selves experienced by Tessie Hutchinson, George and Hazel Bergeron, the teenager Jon and the unnamed secret agent in “Black Box” share a similar kind of misery, an experience of a dire state in regard to which, if one can paraphrase Huckleberry Finn in a more contemporary idiom, “you don’t want to go there.”

Ritualized Assault

11 Violence is subject to many representations in literature but my emphasis here will be specifically on ritualized violence in service of a calculated, impersonal ideal. The system or ideal does not have to be explained—indeed, in a short story, it might be explained only a little or not at all, and this element of mystery can make it all the more terrible or even flirt with the sublime5—but the dystopian short story makes it nonetheless clear that the violence is not by accident but rather by a design. Going back to Thomas More’s original version, Northrop Frye has identified descriptions of rituals as one of the main literary qualities of constructing a utopia (206), and the same technique holds true for its ugly evil twin, dystopia. The recurrent performance of a ritual helps to normalize a practice: in this case, customs of physical and mental assault.

12 “The Lottery” effectively dramatizes this aspect with a plot structured around an annual community social event whose sinister purpose emerges only gradually. The inhabitants of a village gather for a drawing to determine which of the citizens will be stoned to death. A precise protocol is observed, conducted by village elders and revolving around a black box of symbolic sobriety. The eternal cycle of seasons is evoked by a character named Old Man Warner who recalls the folk proverb: “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” (297). He defends the tradition and forms of the ritual while worrying about other villages abandoning the custom. Tessie Hutchinson “wins” the drawing (if such a term can be used) whereupon the entire community, from children with pebbles to adults with large stones, converge upon her. Although Tessie protests that “it isn’t fair” (302) when the stones rain down on her, the disturbing truth about this place is that she is, actually, quite wrong. The rules of the lottery were scrupulously observed and she was a willing participant in the ritual, surrendering her autonomy over her body to take on this risk—even running to the public square for fear of arriving late.

13 In “Harrison Bergeron,” the dark fable becomes farce as the “Handicapper General” imposes equality on all bodies, for instance requiring ballerinas to wear masks and to be “burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot” (8), lest they appear too pretty and graceful and make someone else feel inferior. George Bergeron has a canvas bag weighing forty-seven pounds padlocked around his neck, and his wife Hazel remarks that he has been acting a bit tired lately. George does not want to think about it, though, or rather, he cannot think about it, since his intelligence is way above normal so he is obliged to wear a radio transmitter in his ear at all times: “Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like

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George from taking unfair advantage of their brains” (7). In the course of the story while George sits in the living room and converses with his wife, his head is variously blasted with noises like “someone hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer” (8); “a twenty-one gun salute” (9); “a siren” (9) and “a rivetting gun” (13). The repetition of this equalizing technique amounts to a constant assault, and it blurs the distinction between autonomy over his physical self (George’s pain is such that he is regularly wincing or is “white and trembling […] tears on the rims of his red eyes” [9]) and his mental self. The two are intimately connected. Despite his misery, though, George does not want to take measures that might provide relief; he excludes himself from the option, telling Hazel that he does not mind living with the canvas bag padlocked around his neck: “It’s just a part of me” (9). He defends his condition in the name of a higher principle: “If I tried to get away with it […] then other people’d get away with it —and pretty soon we’d be right back in the dark ages again” (9). The ritualized assault on his person is done in the name of progress.

14 The measures in “Harrison Bergeron” are decidedly low-tech, whereas later short stories like “Jon” and “Black Box” rely on more sophisticated and intrusive devices. In George Saunders’ “Jon,” a select group of teenagers incarcerated at a marketing research center are fitted with “gargadisks” in their necks and their minds are conditioned with “Location Indicators” to provide them a worldview expressed entirely in advertising slogans and scenarios from brand-name commercials. The central conflict of the story arises when one of these teenagers, Jon, falls in love with another teenager, Carolyn and, in short order, she becomes pregnant. This very old-fashioned kind of trouble has no place at the forward-looking center, where the youths are supposed to be testing new products for the rest of the world and are themselves marketed as “TrendSetters & Tastemakers” (132). When a rift develops between the young couple about whether they should try to leave the center—again, the sort of problem which is not supposed to exist—one of the means for Jon to deal with the stress is by taking generous doses of a drug called Aurobon: And the Aurabon® would make things better, as Aurabon® always makes things better, although soon what I found was, when you are hooking in like eight or nine times a day, you are always so happy, and yet it is a kind of happy like chewing on tinfoil, and once you are living for that sort of happy, you soon cannot be happy enough, even when you are very very happy and are even near tears due to the beauty of the round metal hooks used to hang your facility curtains, you feel this intense wish to be even happier, so you tear yourself away from the beautiful curtain hooks, and with shaking happy hands fill out another Work-Affecting Mood-Problem Notification, and then, […] nothing in your facility is beautiful enough to look at with your new level of happiness […] until finally one day Mr. Dove comes over and says, Randy, Jon, whatever you are calling yourself these days —a couple of items. First, it seems to us that you are in some private space not helpful to you, and so we are cutting back your Aurabon® to twice a day. (146-47)

15 Such social management by pharmaceuticals recalls the “soma-holidays” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but there is a difference. Here it is not only a matter of controlling individuals by chemical means and keeping them too placid for rebellion; there is also the question of work. Although Jon lives in a cossetted environment surrounded by the latest in fashionable products, he has a job to do, providing his superiors with valuable consumer data about his immature tastes. His mind and body are not only controlled but also instrumentalized. When Mr. Dove euphemistically refers to a “some private space not helpful to you,” of course he is really expressing his

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disapproval that Jon can occupy a private space that is not useful to him—and thus, by his reckoning, has no reason to exist.

16 In Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box,” the measures are even more intrusive. The tweets that comprise the narration function as a sort of instruction manual, written in the second person, in which the reader learns that “A microphone has been implanted just beyond the first turn of your right ear canal” (87) or that you can “Reach between your right fourth and pinky toes (if right-handed) and remove the Data Plug from your Universal Port” (94). Such gadgetry as well as other devices turn the “citizen agent” into an object that, as the critic Bruce Stone has observed, “will be downloaded like a flash drive.” This is instrumentalization to the utmost, and other tweets explain the meaning of the story’s title: “Your physical person is our Black Box; without it, we have no record of what has happened on your mission” (95); and “Remember that, should you die, your body will yield a crucial trove of information” (97).

17 In order to facilitate this physical strain, violence to an autonomous mental self is a necessary condition. In the service of her mission, which is vaguely defined as fighting terrorism and “to perpetuate American life as you know it” (92), her personal memories can be dislodged or deleted. The most extreme example, however, concerns the interplay between physical and mental autonomy as dramatized by the “dissociation technique” (86). This technique, likened early in the story to a parachute, is reserved for moments in which the agent must bail out—not from an airplane, but from her conscious awareness, in times of great trauma. For instance, in the line of “duty,” she is raped, not once, but twice—the repetition ritualizes or “normalizes” the performance. The “Dissociation Technique” allows for a kind of extreme detachment that is supposed to help her get through it—or, at least, not let any sense of an autonomous self distract her from her mission. As Bruce Stone has remarked: “This brand of heroism is not just self-effacing, but self-extinguishing.”

18 The different cultural contexts of these stories are manifest. Jackson’s ritualized assault is, literally, a ritual, while Vonnegut, Saunders and Egan rely variously on mechanization, pharmaceutics and digitalization for iterative effect. Despite these differences, both in kind and degree, there is nonetheless a common target, which remains unchanged across several generations of writers: the autonomous self.

Separation from Others

19 So far I have focussed on separation as a largely self-reflexive affair, but by now it should be clear that this is not a narcissistic manoeuvre, even if, in this version of hell, the human individual stands in for God. On another level, the damning separation is also enacted in relation to others, echoing Charles May’s allusion to the foundational story of Cain and Abel. This schism provides an added source of torment.

20 In “The Lottery,” Tessie Hutchinson chooses to give up her individual autonomy to participate in the village ritual and meld with the group. As mentioned earlier, it is only when the results turn out badly that she protests. It is too late to recover what she has lost, and she pays the highest price. But she has not only betrayed herself: significantly, in joining the community, she also can no longer relate to them as “others” whose difference would logically confer on her an alternative status and, conceivably, a different outcome. The entire category of “others” disappears and

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becomes imperceptible in a totalizing norm. As a consequence, Tessie inadvertently separates herself from a saving possibility. Her smothering proximity to the group is paradoxically alienating—such is the harsh experience of the besieged individual—who, the closer she comes, the farther she moves from a hopeful resolution. There is no suggestion in “The Lottery” that her family is wilfully against her, but the winnowing process of the drawing situates them structurally as necessary participants in her doom.

21 In “Harrison Bergeron,” this distancing is all the more stark for taking place in the bland atmosphere of an American living room where a middle-aged couple watches bad TV. George and Hazel’s personal autonomy is under assault, certainly, in intimately painful ways. The Handicapper General, a Big Sister caricature named Diana Moon Glampers, has imposed her levelling discipline on their bodies and minds. But the plot turns on the amazing appearance of the Bergerons’ son, Harrison, on the TV screen, whose physical and mental superiority bursts forth in a moment of revolutionary transgression. Harrison is shockingly under-handicapped, “a genius and an athlete […] regarded as extremely dangerous” (10). His parents recognize him (“My God—” said George, “that must be Harrison!” [11]) and mayhem ensues as Harrison declares himself emperor and claims a beautiful ballerina as his empress, whereupon they dance in an “explosion of joy and grace […] neutralizing gravity with love and pure will” (13) until the Handicapper General herself, Diana Moon Glampers, takes charge of the situation and cuts them down with “a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun” (13). These would seem to be extraordinary events for George and Hazel to witness on a routine evening in their living room, except, the reader learns near the end of the story, George missed much of the action because he had stepped out to the kitchen to get himself a can of beer. That is, he lives in a state of being so disconnected from his son that he cannot bother to wait and see what will happen to him next. Upon returning to the living room, he asks Hazel why she is crying, and she cannot quite remember. It was just “something real sad” (13) she saw on TV, and George counsels her to forget it. Hyper- violence finishes as a deadpan joke, which is nonetheless serious, too, in that it dramatizes the distance of these individuals from each other, and how much their separation leaves them utterly alone and defenseless.

22 In “Jon,” separation is foregrounded by language. The narrator is a comically inarticulate young man whose problem is anything but funny. He and Carolyn are in love, but when she break frees of the testing center in order to give her baby a different kind of life, communication becomes a cruel test. Carolyn’s workaday “gargadisk” has been removed and, as a consequence, her previously imposed “Location Indicators” no longer function as before. There is no longer a shared frame of reference. Jon finds Carolyn’s letter unreadable and “sloppenly” (149), and her dialogue in a later scene is partly nonsensical. A conversation with another character who has tried to function without the Location Indicators describes the predicament of his thought processes as follows: “there are […] places where things used to be when I went looking for them, brainwise, but now, when I go there, nothing is there, it is like I have the shelving but not the cans of corn” (138). Shortly after saying this, he becomes so frustrated that he flees the room, hitting himself hard in the face. The irony, though, is that people like Carolyn and the man missing his “cans of corn” are the ones that Jon, in his hellish isolation, eventually must try to emulate. Near the end of the story he concludes that his Location Indicators are the barrier to his ever reconnecting with Carolyn and he must give them up. It is not exactly a happy ending but “Jon” is the only one of these

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dystopian satires that offers a glimmer of hope, of the possibility of characters escaping their state.

23 “Black Box” teases out further ambiguities, for example about how desire can be constructed and manipulated by the dystopian forces. Some tweets to the citizen agent sound like standard agitprop sloganeering: “In the new heroism, the goal is to transcend individual life, with its petty pains and losses, in favor of the dazzling collective” (97); or, “In the new heroism, the goal is to merge with something larger than yourself” (89, 91). But this agent is a more complicated character, with a past and a future which cannot be reduced to slogans. The unacknowledged offspring of a celebrity, she feels like a “fatherless girl” (88) and a central motivation for her actions is not at the service of the “dazzling collective” but is something more personal: a desire to prove to her oblivious father that she is a hero. She wants to reconnect with her past. As for her future, her African husband figures in her hopes; he is described as a successful immigrant who has embraced the American way of life and who now works for the security services. The “citizen agent” wants to be reunited with him and to have children. Again, this is the expression of a personal agenda. Yet the spatial representations of these two men complicate the picture. Her father seems as distant as the moon (“Fatherless girls may invest the moon with a certain paternal promise” [88-89]) while her husband, in his role with the government, might actively be putting her into peril and thereby reinforcing her hellish situation. Consider these tweets: “Your whereabouts will never be a mystery; you will be visible at all times as a dot of light on the screens of those watching over you” (89); and “Because your husband is a visionary in the realm of national security, he occasionally has access to that screen” (91). By the end of the story, lying bloodied and broken in the bottom of a boat, waiting uncertainly to be rescued, it is unclear whether she can ever recover or, if she survives, how much of her former self will be left to recover.

Conclusion

24 When Thomas More published Utopia in 1516 it was, according to his translator Robert Adams, partly a joke (vii). The title itself is a pun, meaning both “good place” and “no place.” More’s beliefs, notably his theological convictions about human nature, made it a foregone conclusion that heaven or something like it was not going to be found on this earth. Although their sensibilities are decidedly different from Thomas More’s, the authors of the dystopian short stories that I have discussed here reinforce that fundamental point, with a vengeance. Their depictions are, in a sense, admonitory. As Diane Johnson has observed, “Maybe there are people who read dystopian tales for self- improvement the way people used to read sermons” (24).

25 Despite their particularities of style, sub-genre and tone, these stories share a common view of a besieged self, which, once deprived of autonomy on its own behalf and in relation to others, enters a metaphorically hellish state. Hell is an extreme metaphor and, because of its theological roots, perhaps unfashionable; still, it captures features that more conventional narrative or psychological descriptions strain to address. Space limitations have restricted this discussion to a selection of American writers, but future study of dystopian short fiction could benefit from further and more detailed appropriations of this metaphor in a transnational context. Not only does the concept of hell serve as a comment on the particular society or system depicted by the authors,

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it also puts into relief, in a very stark fashion, some of the signature qualities of the short story genre, with its allusive, dreamlike appropriation of the human problem of being at home in the world. It takes a core quality, and enacts it fiercely.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Vintage, 1996. Print.

Augustine of Hippo. “Whether the Fire of Hell, If It Be Material Fire, Can Burn the Wicked Spirits, that is to Say, Devils, Who are Immaterial.” City of God. Trans. Marcus Dods. Web. 4 March 2015.

Burke, Edmund. On the Sublime and Beautiful, Vol. XXIV, Part 2. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14. Bartleby.com. 2001. Web. 4 March 2015.

Catechism of the Catholic Church. “IV Hell: 1033.” Web. 4 March 2015.

Dante Alighieri. Inferno. Ed. and Trans. Robin Kirkpatrick. London: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. London: Verso, 1995. Print.

Egan, Jennifer. “Black Box.” The New Yorker. 4 June 2012. 84-97. Print.

Frye, Northrop. “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” Utopia by Thomas More. Ed. and Trans. Robert M. Adams. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975. 205-211. Print.

Harris, Wendell V. “Vision and Form: The English Novel and the Emergence of the Short Story.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles May. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1994. 182-194. Print.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Vintage, 1997. Print.

Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery.” The Lottery and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. 291-302. Print.

Johnson, Diane. “Let’s Go to Dystopia.” Rev. of On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee. New York Review of Books. 5-18 June (LXI:10), 2014. 22-24. Print.

May, Charles. I Am Your Brother. Create Space, 2013. Print.

---, ed. The New Short Story Theories. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1994. Print.

More, Thomas. Utopia. Ed. and Trans. Robert M. Adams. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975. Print.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. London: Penguin, 2013. Print.

Saunders, George. “Jon.” The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and In Persuasion Nation. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Print.

Stone, Bruce. “Black Boxes: On Reading Jennifer Egan’s Twitter Story.” Numéro Cinq Magazine. June 2012. Web. 5 March 2015. Print.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

Turner, Alice K. The History of Hell. New York: Mariner, 1995. Print.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Signet, 1959. Print.

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Vonnegut, Kurt. “Harrison Bergeron.” Welcome to the Monkey House and Palm Sunday. London: Vintage, 1994. 7-13. Print.

NOTES

1. Charles May has brought Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblance” to literary genre studies. See New Short Stories Theories xvii-xviii. 2. Egan’s story first appeared on Twitter over a period of ten days in an experiment sponsored by The New Yorker, and it was written not in paragraphs but in a series of tweets of fewer than 140 characters. This article refers to a version of the story which was later published in conventional print form but which preserves the tweets’ fragmented, lapidary presentation. 3. See Alice K. Turner’s The History of Hell (1995). Although space limitations do not allow me to go into more detail, Turner shows continuities between the Roman Catholic version described here and earlier descriptions from other traditions. 4. Elsewhere in the Catechism, however, one can still find references to “Gehenna” and “eternal fire” (1034, 1035). 5. “To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary” (Burke).

ABSTRACTS

Les romans dystopiques décrivent en général un monde imaginaire qui a mal tourné ; la nouvelle dystopique opère bien différemment car elle se construit sur une échelle réduite. Le texte bref ne peut s’autoriser le luxe d’une description détaillée des lieux et le topos s’y élabore autrement, illustrant l’idée de Charles May selon laquelle la forme de la nouvelle s’apparente au mythe. À partir de textes de Shirley Jackson, Kurt Vonnegut, Jennifer Egan et George Saunders, cet article a pour objet d’explorer quelques-unes des particularités de la nouvelle dystopique notamment dans sa présentation d’un « état » infernal qui affecte l’autonomie individuelle et les relations humaines. Ce type d’enfer permet non seulement aux auteurs d’émettre une critique sur une société donnée, il met également en relief, de façon saillante, quelques-uns des traits emblématiques du genre bref.

AUTHOR

CHARLES HOLDEFER Charles Holdefer teaches at the University of Poitiers. His essays have appeared in the Journal of the Short Story in English, New England Review, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Antioch Review and elsewhere. His short fiction has been published in the North American Review, Los Angeles Review and Slice, and he has also published four novels, most recently Back in the Game (2012).

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“The Hurt Mind”: A Paleo- postmodern Reading of Tom Mac Intyre’s Short Prose

Catriona Ryan

1 There has been very little research into Tom Mac Intyre’s short stories to date. One of the most significant references to his approach to experimentation in short prose is from Seamus Heaney who states, “in the context of this writer’s later work, we can also see, twenty years and a wilderness of short stories later, why his name figures in the very short list of Irish writers who have set out to make it new” (8). A recurrent topic in Mac Intyre’s prose and drama is the theme of “the hurt mind” which refers to the trauma associated with colonialism in Ireland and how this pain is historically manifested in Irish political identities. In his work Mac Intyre tends to traverse this complex history associated with Irish selfhood by focusing on the tragic nature of his characters who, in a revivalist sense, despite their many efforts, remain alienated from the fulfilment of their desire for a pre-colonial Ur-Irish identification.

2 Mac Intyre has published four collections of short stories. In terms of experimentation the most significant is The Harper’s Turn, published by Gallery Press in 1982. Seamus Heaney wrote the introduction for the collection and provides an interesting insight into Mac Intyre’s disruptive prose: “I have not grasped the full import and inner logic of all the stories in this book and cannot, indeed, be sure that ‘stories’ is the word to use about all of them. […] Language left to play so autonomously is reaching for the condition of ‘poetry’” (8-9). The complexity of Mac Intyre’s experimental prose style resides in his refusal to tell a story, as he instead creates a vast array of multivalent images which are thematically connected.

3 In Border States in the Work of Tom Mac Intyre: A Paleo-Postmodern Perspective (2012), which addresses Mac Intyre’s experimental short prose and drama, I explored the complexity of Mac Intyre’s aesthetics in terms of paleo-postmodernism. My concept of paleo- postmodernism helps theorize the uniqueness of Mac Intyre’s aesthetics, as it conjoins a Yeatsian revivalist romantic vision with postmodern deconstruction.1 Paleo- postmodernism has two aspects:

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4 1. Yeats’s paleo-modernism which deals with Yeats’s early modernist revivalist interest in the past, particularly Celtic history and mythology. Frank Kermode first coined the term paleo-modernism in the sixties to describe early modernism. In the late nineteenth century this was characterized by “formal desperation and an apocalyptic vision” (2). Yeats’s paleo-modernist vision in the late nineteenth century reflected the wider European fin de siècle anxieties about man’s existence. His interest in Irish history and mythology is a major influence on Mac Intyre’s work.

5 2. Jung and Lacan are central to the paleo-postmodern analysis of Mac Intyre’s short story. Though Lacan’s theories are different to Jung, the former offers a way of studying Mac Intyre’s use of Jungian imagery through the Real and the Symbolic, which provides a better understanding of how Mac Intyre combines deconstruction with an archetypal sublime Yeatsian desire for a pre-colonial identity. Jacques Lacan’s concept of language is relevant to Mac Intyre’s work as it provides a useful framework for understanding the writer’s deconstruction of language and how that relates to the psychological motives of his protagonists. Lacan’s concept of the Real, the imaginary and the Symbolic aspects of language is based on Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex. Mac Intyre was never influenced by Lacan, but the incorporation of the theorist’s ideas is useful in a paleo-postmodern reading of Mac Intyre’s prose in order to explore the complexity of the Irish author’s language deconstruction. According to Lacan, it is the construct of Symbolic language that structures a subject’s identity, and in Mac Intyre’s short prose, the Lacanian Symbolic may be seen as a metaphor for the alienated Irish subject whose identity is bound up in the colonially-imposed language of English. The Lacanian Real in Mac Intyre’s story can be read as a representation of the mystical unconscious archetypal feminine domain of the Irish language.

6 The main attribute of the Lacanian Real is its link to the subject’s unconscious desire for the maternal body. In Jungian terms the Real shares similar characteristics to the anima. Both are unconscious drives that have a gendered feminine attribute. According to Jung the unconscious is made up of archetypal male and female qualities known as the animus and the anima. The animus is stereotyped masculinity characterized as the subject’s dominant and rational side. The anima is essentialized as a feminine archetypal form (Jung 168). In Jung’s view the goal of individuation is the subject’s integration of both the anima and animus. Mac Intyre’s story concerns the male protagonists over-identification with their animus natures. The Jungian anima in the story is symbolized by an inaccessible unconscious mythopoetic maternal force which is rooted in an idealized representation of Irish identity; the Lacanian Symbolic language of English is represented by the animus.

7 The analysis of Jung in this paper is also Yeatsian, as Yeats’s paleo-modernist association of the Irish mythological past is based on the archetypal world of the anima mundi or, in Jungian terms, the mythopoetic imagination. Therefore, in this context the Yeatsian dimension to the mystical ideology associated with the eternal feminine is rooted in the revivalist fascination with ancient Irish mythology and the Irish language. The significant link between Jung and Lacan in this analysis of “The Hurt Mind” is rooted in the representations of the archetypal eternal feminine and its association with the maternal space of the Lacanian Real.

8 This story is one of the most elliptical pieces in The Harper’s Turn. The concept of the hurt mind runs through all of Mac Intyre’s work as it is “a metaphor for a whole range of conflicting psychological states, suppressed sexuality, pain, joy, fear, bitterness,

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aggression, jealousy, regret, the ‘hurt mind’ epitomises the masculine self, damaged by centuries of hostility, repression and war” (Kelly 149). Dermot Healy reiterates this idea in his assessment of Mac Intyre’s aesthetics where “there seems to be something irreparable in the Irish psyche” (9). The structure of the story in “The Hurt Mind” is non-linear. The language is like a cryptic crossword where the author refuses to develop a narrative and the reader is forced to work hard to decipher its meaning. Diverse images are strewn throughout the story, which provides clues to various interpretations: The boys who beat the black and tans the boys from County Cork–not quite true, not quite true, what about Lord what about Lord Doneraile and his bucks and his blades? I read books, what about the rights of the Big House? […] and all join in now please and thank-you, we’re a musical nation, a-a-a-nd The Boys Who Beat The Black And Tans Was The Boys From The County Cork! (25-6)

9 This excerpt is the beginning and end of a very short prose piece. It opens (and closes) with the name of an Irish folksong consisting of references to the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. There are images of the “Big House,” the reference to the aristocrat Lord Doneraile whose lands were based in Cork, and the quintessentially English portrayal of a foxhunt. There is no narrative development, only the uncontrolled rhythmic spatiality of sentences. Phrases such as “black and tans” and “big house” in the above quotation identify different historical periods in Ireland.2 At the beginning of the story the narrator expresses a point through the musical rhythm of an old folk song. He states the Catholic “boys from County Cork” were not the only representatives of the Irish nationalism; some sectors of the Protestant community in the south would have been part of the Irish nationalist protest. The central concern in “The Hurt Mind” is the conceptualization of Irish identity as represented by the Irish nationalist rebel song. The “hurt mind” is the author’s reference to the traumatised Irish psyche that has endured colonialism and the consequent postcolonial struggle for identity both north and south of the Irish border.

10 As an Irish Protestant writer, Mac Intyre has stated that his aesthetic approach is to always take the “adversarial stance.”3 The concept of the “adversarial stance” in his work translates aesthetically through experimentation, as a subversion of conventional political notions of Irish identity. Such disruption manifests an attempt to articulate an archetypal unconscious Ur-Irish identity that transcends political boundaries. According to Lacan, a subject is structured by Symbolic language, and Mac Intyre’s Irish characters are often portrayed as individuals who are isolated within the language of English. This alienation in “The Hurt Mind” may be read from the perspective of a southern Irish Protestant. By incorporating images such as the “Big House” and references to aristocrats on a fox hunting expedition, the Protestant subject is portrayed in colonial terms. Mac Intyre frames this stereotype within the musical score of the rebel song. Though this song uses the English language, it is a language that has been absorbed into a Hiberno-musical rhythm and language. According to George Denis Zimmerman, there were two nationalist traditions of Irish folk song at the turn of the twentieth century: one was pioneered by the vision of George Moore, which tended towards a revivalist interest in Celtic mythology. The other was the kind of Irish nationalist rebel songs advocated by the young Catholic Irish men, which were published in the Irish nationalist paper, The Nation, and focused on the British Empire as the enemy (60). The song, “The Boys who Beat the Black and Tans,” conveys the subjective voice of Irish Catholic nationalism.

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11 In a Lacanian sense the Symbolic construct of the Protestant subject is caricature which is due, firstly, to the musical rhythm of the rebel folk song that reinforces the stereotyped representation of a Protestant subject as being void of subjectivity. Secondly, Mac Intyre is highlighting how an Irish folk song in Hiberno-English language alienates the Protestant subject in two ways: 1. He can’t fully identify with the colonial English language dimension of Hiberno-English because of his Irish heritage. 2. He is alienated from his Irish cultural dimension of Hiberno-English due to his Protestantism that is historically associated with British colonialism. Therefore he is trapped. The caricature of the Irish Protestant represents the author’s first reference to the tragic status of his protagonist’s unfulfilled desire for an Ur-Irish identity. He is a hyper-masculinised caricature whose animus nature lacks subjectivity due to the absence of the anima or the maternal space of the Real. As the story progresses, the author’s exploration of alienation intensifies in a gendered mythopoetic context.

12 The key part of “The Hurt Mind” is when the fox chase escalates: The Lord and Captain Buck and Major Blade, now they’re lifting their croobs, now they’re flying, now whose tongue’s hanging out? Listen to the beagles, where’s the fresh young slip?, lying low by the river is the fresh young slip, Listen to your beagles Two to one The Captain Evens The Major they’re neck and neck in the straight, where’s the fresh young slip?, she’s in there hooped in the stink and the sweat and she’s all thump-a-thump Come on the Captain Tight Lines Major…The Captain’s down! He’s down, The Major’s away, wins pullin’ up, not pullin’ up either, he’s ploughing through the scrub, wait, wait, Major gone to ground, n’er a sound n’er a sound Ate up Major stop licking your chops and all join in now please and thank-you, we’re a musical nation, a-a-a-a-nd The Boys Who Beat The Black And Tans Was The Boys From The County Cork! (25-26).

13 The point of chaos in this excerpt occurs when the pursuers lift their “croobs.” The intensity of the chase causes them to fall and the Major undergoes a theriomorphic transformation into a beagle. The word “croob” means “mountain of the hoof” and has a number of different connotations.4 It is a Hiberno phonetic English interpretation of the Irish word “Crúibé.” This word has an explosive effect on the whole prose piece revealing the heart of “The Hurt Mind” which is rooted in the conflict between the languages of Irish and English.

14 The implied reference to the “mountain of the hoof” relates to the feet of the characters, but on a metaphorical level it reveals how the linguistic burden of Irish history is part of their identities. The image of the foot has often been used as a metaphor for Irish culture in terms of the mythological significance of Achilles’ heel. In his essay, “The Irish Language Revival: Achilles’s Heel,” Liam O’Sé laments the disappearance of the Irish language, the Achilles heel being the general lack of interest in its revival (26-49). The Irish mythical figure, Cuchulainn, has been associated with the Greek hero Achilles, as Cuchulainn’s weakness was similarly exploited by his enemies who destroyed him (Nutt 1-52). Cuchulainn is linked to the use of the early written form of the Irish language known as Ogham (Monaghan 108). All of these hermeneutical associations with the word “croob” highlight the status of the Protestant “other” as an outsider in an Irish cultural narrative. This multivalent approach is typical of Mac Intyre’s style where a linear narrative is replaced by complex images that place an onus on the reader to work hard at finding coherence. In

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much of his work Mac Intyre uses the presence of the Irish language as a strategic deconstructive force to defamiliarize the language of English. According to Mac Intyre: Well, the world around me was alive with performers, with the extravagances of language, especially in east Cavan, with our strange version of English which was riddled with Gaeilge. I mean the Irish just have to be writing plays. I would argue that one strange result of the English taking our language from us was to set up a fiercely competitive revenge campaign, directed towards achieving more eloquence than Standard English will ever achieve. (Keating)

15 Generally Mac Intyre’s “revenge campaign” has been to subvert the language of English, using the Irish language, in order to reveal some semblance of the unconscious Ur-Irish nature of his characters (Ryan 18). This is evidenced by his use of Hiberno- English in “The Hurt Mind.” Hiberno-English is a form of the English language that has undergone a cultural change due to the influence of the Irish language. The subversive impact of the hidden presence of the Irish language through the word “croob” may be seen as a disruptive literary device which has a domino effect on the language of English throughout Mac Intyre’s experimental narrative. Terry Eagleton identifies a similar strategy in James Joyce: “Joyce’s writing is the non-Irish-speaking Irish writer’s way of being unintelligible to the British. By subverting the very forms of their language, he struck a blow for all his gagged and humiliated fellow country people” (24). Mac Intyre has often noted that his literary lineage is derived from Yeats and not Joyce (Ryan 221-22). But the evidence in this assessment shows that Mac Intyre (through his experimentation) is as much a Joycean as he is a neo-Yeatsian revivalist.

16 In “The Hurt Mind,” the object of pursuit symbolises what is common to all of Mac Intyre’s fictional characters, namely the search for a feminine Ur-Irish identity. This is obvious when the Lord Doneraile and his companions are chasing a fox: “now The Lord, now Captain Buck and Major Blade, the beagles sniffin’, there’s sight for you-three scents for the beagle, hare, red herrin’, aniseed oil-they’ve picked her scent, they’ve a trail, we’re away, north with her, south with her, east with her, west with her, wasting her time and she knows it” (25). The fox is portrayed as having the smell of the hare. The hare is a Yeatsian paleo-modernist vision of that boundary between life and death. In another story, “Mother Silence,” Mac Intyre describes the hare as being part of the primal Irish mythological self associated with the search for maternal oneness (144-47). The hare is a Yeatsian mythological symbol which, in poems like The Wanderings of Oisín, is portrayed as a magical being that exists on the border between two worlds: The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness; Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness (Yeats 318).

17 In this part of the poem Oisín decides to leave the Celtic underworld of Tír na nÓg where he lived a hundred years in order to return to the mortal world.

18 In Mac Intyre’s work the unconscious Celtic archetypal maternal feminine force is bound up in a mythical Ur-Irish identity, the attainment of which is the sole motivation of most of his characters. In “The Hurt Mind,” the fox, with its hare smell, carries these attributes. She is an externalization of the revivalist Protestant desire for an Irish identity that transcends political boundaries. It is a desire for a primal identitarian union which may be seen in terms of the Jungian anima. Mac Intyre is very influenced by Jung’s ideas on the archetypal nature of the unconscious and his concept of the anima. In Aspects of the Feminine, Jung defines the anima:

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Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or “archetype” of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. [...] since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion. I have called this image the “anima.” (50)

19 The core of Mac Intyre’s aesthetics is this search for his anima nature: The truth we’re talking about for me brought up in Gestapo Ireland of the thirties and forties where you were told you had no permission to think. […] And women don’t exist by the way. […] The Catholic Church was leading the Gestapo attack. […] If you are interested in quality story-telling you have to […] shed everything you have and follow the star that is your star and you will come back to the Goddess; […] the aisling figure; or put it another way to the conversation with the form interior. […] But if I say what I just said to you, to most of my male colleagues of my generation, they say, spare us really. (Mac Intyre, “Interview”)

20 The anima, in “The Hurt Mind,” represents the feminine side of the male characters; their search for transcendant Ur-Irish unconscious identity which is always elusive. In a Jungian sense such an attainment would represent individuation. But the tragedy lies in the impossibility of fulfilling the protagonist’s desire for this goal. As already noted, Lacan’s version of the anima is the pre-linguistic maternal space of the Real. The Lacanian Real is where the subject as an infant totally identifies with its mother and, through the maturation process, is continually trying to return to that original union. The term “croob.” as a combined representation of the Irish language and the symbol of the Achilles heel, is significant here as, according to Clare Buck, the idea of the Achilles heel may also refer to Achilles’ unconscious sexual desire for his mother (136). Since the Real is a pre-linguistic space that transcends the language conflict represented by the term “croob,” it becomes part of that primal oedipal desire which the Protestant characters subconsciously seek in their pursuit of the female fox who is always elusive. Hence the tragic nature of the Protestant sense of alienation and failure to achieve a fulfilled Ur-Irish identity (despite their attempts to create such a union through the metaphorical fox chase) is further accentuated through metaphorical associations with the Jungian anima and the Lacanian Real; both illustrate unconscious mystical dimensions of the eternal feminine and their anagogical links to a pre-colonial Irish language which remains inaccessible.

21 The representation of Protestantism in this story symbolizes the motives of the Irish literary revival whose members, led by Yeats, were mainly from the Protestant tradition. In the late-nineteenth century Protestantism in Ireland was a minority culture. Irish identity was monopolized by a Catholic culture that regarded Protestantism as being part of British colonialism. The literary revival was a cultural response to this isolationism by the Anglo-Irish community, which also sought to anchor its marginalized sense of identity within an Irish heritage. Mac Intyre was very influenced by Yeats; but where Yeats and Mac Intyre hold the same aesthetic aspirations, Mac Intyre uses postmodern deconstruction to convey the tragic unfulfilled desires of his protagonists.

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22 In Mac Intyre’s “The Hurt Mind” the deconstruction of form reflects the defamiliarization of the fictional characters who, as caricatures, are trapped (through Hiberno-English language folksongs), and furthermore caught in the repetition of that essentialist ascendant trope: “seed and breed of the carriage-and-four staring from the ditches at the carriage and four as the carriage-and-four swept by” (25). The lyrical nature of the musical folk rhythm heightens the Catholic nationalist communal presence which erases the possibility of Protestant subjectivity, the construction of which has been deconstructed through stereotyped repetition.

23 Gerard Dawe, in his essay entitled “The Bleak Inspiration of the Protestant Imagination,” makes the point that a mark of Protestant subjectivity in Irish literature is “having to think of one’s cultural position, of being literally self-conscious” (22). Dawe explores the work of Samuel Beckett in this context. In Mac Intyre’s work such self-reflexivity is evident, and it manifests itself in experimental terms. Mac Intyre’s experimental structure in his stories reveals a Beckettian postmodern non-linear approach to plot. Unlike Beckett’s nihilism, Mac Intyre’s paleo-postmodern work represents his protagonist’s revivalist sense of waiting for an authentic identity of an Ur-Irish self which is rooted in Irish language and myth but is tragically elusive.

24 As shown above, Lacan’s concept of language is a useful lens for analysing Mac Intyre’s paleo-postmodern deconstruction. In a Lacanian sense, the maturation process for a child from the space of the Real is literally signified by the imposition of a patriarchal Symbolic language which, in “The Hurt Mind,” is the language of English. This alienates the Irish subjects from the object of their desire; the maternal space of Ur-Irish identification. The English language in Mac Intyre’s work is often deconstructed due to the author’s strategic placement of an Irish linguistic or mythical source. Literary subversion is commonplace in Irish literary history. Stephen Dedalus, in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, highlights the Irish writer’s sense of being marginalized using the language of English (189). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Gaelic poets used subversion to attack the dominant colonial regime as they grieved for their lost culture: “coded into every one of their lyrics, was the memory of a Gaelic order which they hoped to see restored” (Kiberd x). In the twentieth century, Irish writers are the “most politically subversive when they deal with the matter of literature itself, that is, form, genre and language” (Ross 6). Seamus Deane describes the language conflict experienced by Irish writers: We’ve got essentially a colonial heritage that’s had some very deep effects on the language. We write English, but we write it haunted by the ghost of a lost language. When you write in English or in Irish, you are, in fact, involving yourself in some kind of political statement. The linkage between language and politics is more incestuously close in such a situation than it is in a more settled society. (29-30)

25 Mac Intyre often refers to the “haunted” nature of his writing that represents the autochthonous unfolding of his ancient Celtic heritage. The “ghost of a lost language” refers to the Irish language and in Mac Intyre’s work its presence is central to his work: “Irish has given me a bed to play in, it’s a wilder bed, it’s a more essential bed, it is an infinitely more haunted bed” (Ryan 225).

26 The tragedy for all of Mac Intyre’s characters in that they always fail to fulfil their unconscious desire for an Ur-Irish identity. This is the paleo-postmodern dimension to Mac Intyre’s work where he incorporates a Yeatsian paleo-modernist vision through linguistic deconstruction. The revivalist paleo-modern archetypal romantic desire is

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always present with his characters, but a postmodern fragmentation takes place where the desire becomes unfulfilled and the tragic destiny of the protagonists fulfils its vision. After the word “croob” is used in “The Hurt Mind,” the characters disintegrate and one actually transforms into a beagle. The term “beagle” refers to a breed of dog which is part of the Protestant stereotype of the colonial hunter. The theriomorphic transformation simply re-essentializes rather than liberates the Protestant caricatures who are eventually all erased through the musical nationalist refrain, the “Boys Who Beat the Black and Tans Were the Boys from County Cork!”

27 To conclude, in “The Hurt Mind” Mac Intyre portrays alienated Irish Protestant characters who seek an Irish identity which is rooted in a Jungian/Yeatsian archetypal feminine Irish trope. Their sense of entrapment is vivid within the English language play where their subjectivity is lost. The Lacanian poststructuralist theoretical framework helps to mirror that alienation which is linked to unconscious drives. Mac Intyre’s experimental short prose defies the idea of a traditional short story form with a beginning, middle and end. His experimentation is unusual in the Irish literary canon where literary disruption is normally associated with a Beckettian rejection of revivalist idealism. Mac Intyre’s paleo-postmodern vision is very unique in Irish literature, as he combines postmodern rupture with a Yeatsian romantic vision. As in all his work, the tragedy for his characters is the inaccessibility of that vision of a fulfilled identity. Paleo-postmodernism, in Mac Intyre’s work, identifies desires that are impossible to realize within the space of the English language, and it is in this context that most of his work may be regarded as tragic. The author’s unique experimentation with language indicates that he really is one of those innovative Irish writers who “set out to make it new.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buck, Clare. “H.D., Irigaray and Maternal Origin.” Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice Ed. Susan Sellers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. 135-45. Print.

Dawe, Gerard. “The Bleak Inspiration of the Protestant Imagination.” Fortnight 203 (1984): 22. Print.

Deane, Seamus. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern literature, 1880-1980. NC: Wake Forest UP, 1987. Print.

Eagleton, Terry. “Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel.” Búllan: Journal of Irish Studies 1 (1994): 17-26. Print.

Genet, Jacqueline. The Big House in Ireland: Reality and Representation. Kerry: Brandon Books, 1991. Print.

Healy, Dermot. “Review: Let the Hare Sit.” Theatre Ireland 11 (1985): 9. Print.

Heaney, Seamus. “Introduction.” The Harper’s Turn by Tom Mac Intyre. Dublin: Gallery Press, 1982. 8-9. Print.

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Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist. 1905. London: Wordsworth Classics, 1992. Print.

Jung, Carl. Aspects of the Feminine. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Print.

Keating, Sarah. “Born With Storytelling in His Blood.” Irish Times Online. 25 April 2009. Web. 10 Feb. 2011.

Kelly, Marie. “New Dimensions: Spaces for Play in Rise up Lovely Sweeney.” The Theatre of Tom Mac Intyre: “Strays From the Ether.” Ed. Bernadette Sweeney and Marie Kelly. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2010. 145-64. Print.

Kermode, Frank. Continuities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. Print.

Kiberd, Declan. “Foreword.” Sub-Versions: Trans-National Readings of Modern Irish Literature. Ed. Ciaran Ross. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V, 2010. ix-x. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 447-61. Print.

Mac Intyre, Tom. “The Hurt Mind.” The Harper’s Turn. Dublin: Gallery Press, 1982, 25-26. Print.

---. “Mother Silence.” Find the Lady. Dublin: New Island Books, 2008. 144-147. Print.

---. Personal Interview. 10 September 2005.

Monaghan, Patricia. The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2004. Print.

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O Sé, Liam. “The Irish Language Revival: Achilles Heel.” Eire-Ireland 1.1 (1966): 26-49. Print.

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NOTES

1. This monograph was the end-product of my PhD research into the prose and drama of Tom Mac Intyre. See Ryan. 2. The “black and tans” were English ex-army recruits who were sent to Ireland to combat the IRA in the south of Ireland in 1920. The “black and tans” committed terrible atrocities, one of the most famous being the random killing of fourteen people at a football match at Croke Park in Dublin (Plowright 28). The term the “big house” is a popular trope in Irish literature that refers to the nineteenth century ascendancy (Genet 15-18).

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3. In a personal interview Mac Intyre stated that the “adversarial stance” in his experimental work represents an aesthetics of revolt against mainstream Irish literature and it also symbolizes his sense of alienation as a Protestant writer in the Republic of Ireland (Ryan 69). 4. The word “croob” comes from Slieve Croob which is the anglicized translation of the Irish name Slaibh Crúibe which is a mountain in County Down in Northern Ireland. See Mountain Views.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article est une analyse paléo-postmoderne de la nouvelle de Tom Mac Intyre, “The Hurt Mind”. Le « paléo-postmodernisme » décrit la nature idiosyncratique de l’esthétique de Mac Intyre qui articule la déconstruction postmoderne à la vision yeatsienne paléo-moderniste du Revival. “The Hurt Mind” est typique de la prose de Mac Intyre. Cette nouvelle présente des personnages tragiques à la recherche d’une identité irlandaise insaisissable. Elle est lue ici selon une perspective lacanienne. Lacan considère que le sujet est structuré par le langage. Or, dans la nouvelle de Mac Intyre, les personnages sont aliénés par une langue hiberno-anglaise qui ne parvient pas à créer une identité irlandaise accomplie. La déconstruction du langage devient alors la base d’un examen paléo-postmoderne de l’identité irlandaise.

AUTHORS

CATRIONA RYAN Dr Catriona Ryan is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, Swansea. She lectures in creative writing, theory and creative thinking. In 2012 she published a monograph on the prose and theatre of Tom Mac Intyre entitled, Border States in the Work of Tom Mac Intyre: A Paleo-Postmodern Perspective (Cambridge Scholars 2012) which has received critical acclaim. Dr Ryan is a world authority on the writings of Tom Mac Intyre. She has had numerous poems anthologised in Ireland. She has recently edited a collection of essays which examines the Irish experimental short story entitled, Writing from the Margins: The Aesthetics of Disruption in the Irish Short Story (Cambridge Scholars).

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