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

70 | Spring 2018 Special Issue: Haunting in Short Fiction Guest Editor: Gérald Préher

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1953 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 June 2018 ISBN: 978-2-7335-7425-0 ISSN: 0294-04442

Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 70 | Spring 2018, « Special Issue: Haunting in Short Fiction » [Online], Online since 01 June 2020, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/jsse/1953

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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

Introduction Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès and Gérald Préher

Mirrors of the Self and the Tradition of the “Female Gothic”: Scenes of Hauntings and Apparitions in Victorian and Modernist Short Fiction Anne Besnault-Levita

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Comic Hauntings Sarah Whitehead

“Effy’s Passion for the Mother Who Had Not Loved her was the Supernatural Thing”: Haunting as an expression of attachment in May Sinclair’s “The Intercessor” Leslie de Bont

Virginia Woolf’s Haunted House of Fiction Adèle Cassigneul

Ghostly Desires in Edith Wharton’s “Miss Mary Pask” Thomas Legendre

“Am I my Brother’s Keeper?” or “The Kingdom of Hell is Within Us”: A Spiritual Haunting in Charles Williams’ “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” Suzanne Bray

“Haunted, you said?”: Arthur Machen’s Short Stories as Haunted and Haunting Places Deborah Bridle

“Hovering in the World of Twilight”: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “A Wedding in Brownsville” Ineke Bockting

A Writer’s Ghosts: The Specular and the Spectral in A.S. Byatt’s “The Changeling” Pascale Tollance

“Bathed in an incredible sweetness of light”: A Reading of John McGahern’s “The Wine Breath” Liliane Louvel

Journeys Westward: McGahern, Joyce and Irish Writing Stanley van der Ziel

Loss and Haunting in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Anniversary” and “The Haunting” Tanya Tromble

Haunting and Satire in the Short Fiction of George Saunders Amélie Moisy

Journal of the Short Story in English, 70 | Spring 2018 2

General Foreword

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

1 We are pleased to present the Spring 2018 issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English, which derives from the “Haunting in the Short Story and Its Adaptations” conference held at the University of Angers in November 2015. This event was organized by Michelle Ryan-Sautour (University of Angers), Ailsa Cox (Edge Hill University) and Elke D’hoker (University of Leuven). The papers were peer-reviewed for publication either in the Journal of the Short Story in English or Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Volume 7.2 (2017) of the latter has come out and our special issue will now provide a strong companion piece.

2 The editorial board is especially thankful to Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès for accepting to co-author the introduction to this issue after all the articles had been selected. We would also like to thank our colleague Yannick Le Boulicaut for the photograph featured on the cover that captures the very essence of this issue. We want to acknowledge the help of the CIRPaLL for allowing our devoted Research secretary, Aurélie Reuillon, time to work on articles and make the Journal’s publication possible.

AUTHORS

LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN JSSE Director of Publication

EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS JSSE Editor

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MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Editor

GÉRALD PRÉHER JSSE Associate Editor

FRANÇOIS HUGONNIER JSSE Editorial Assistant

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Introduction

Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès and Gérald Préher

1 In Specters of Marx, Derrida situates the haunting of the specter in the present as much as in the past, since haunting is a form of repetition which always precedes its origin: “this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (xviii). Haunting as a specific mode of appearance and manifestation of being is a presence-absence, an absence made present through its traces or its remains which the ghost embodies in more or less frightening forms. No wonder short stories often represent scenes of haunting: their necessity to conjure up reality by means of a few words only makes them particularly apt to represent the evanescent and short-lived presence-absence that is haunting. Clearly, as John Wain has it, “[t]he best short stories are completely unforgettable” (51); because they are short, they have a lasting impact on readers. The specific condensed temporal mode of the short story, which is owed to the brief format of the genre, also befits the characteristic mode of manifestation of the ghost which fleetingly comes back to haunt texts, memories and places, thus allowing the past to briefly resurface in the present. For haunting is both a repetition and a multiplicity, a singular and remarkable event that is also a recognition, a feeling of déjà-vu (Derrida 10) which tampers with the chronological linearity of time. In a haunted story, time is distorted, because the temporality of haunting is specific: it connects past, present and future as past events or dead characters are depicted as resurfacing in the present and as questioning the course of time towards the future. Owing to its short temporal frame and formal economy, the short story is particularly apt to stage the intrusion of the past into the present that opens up to the possibility of a future. The emergence of revenants in a story is always untimely, shocking, out of place. It signals the haunting presence of the past in the present which interrupts the habitual chronological flow of time. By bringing the course of chronological history to an end, it stages the demise of history itself. It operates what Derrida calls “a hauntology” (Derrida 10) which disjoints time and questions the possibility and unicity of being itself. Thus, “hauntology” works against ontology, as Derrida underlines, by blurring fixed categories the way we know them, starting with those of time, space and history. Ghosts defy our capacities for

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knowledge by challenging our senses. They beggar reason and wisdom, and lead us to question our own perceptions starting with the testimony of our own eyes.

2 Indeed, ghosts are seen as much as they are felt, since it is through their embodiment that they are perceived as a presence-absence. The tension that builds when looking at a haunting specter stems from the challenge it poses to the rational mind. In haunted short stories, the eyes see (the body perceives) what the brain cannot believe in reason, putting mind and body at odds for the greatest discomfort of the character who sees ghosts, and for the reader’s own discomfort as well. However, ghosts do not make themselves manifest to all and sundry and haunting may go unnoticed if its tell-tale signs are ignored. This is because the ghosts that haunt short fiction are not always forms of return of well-known themes and genres. Ghosts can be stereotypical in their appearances as they disclose themselves to us, when they bear tell-tale signs that can easily be decoded. The waft of a draught when there is no wind, a white sheet floating in the air, the clinking of chains, are hackneyed themes signaling a haunting presence. And yet haunting can also occur in the absence of those signs, which no doubt redoubles its uncanny nature. When haunting precedes the appearance of the haunting ghost itself, when it takes place in the absence of any ghost, it becomes sheer repetition without a presence, the repetition of an absence that becomes presence through its repeated occurrence. The affinity between haunting and repetition is to be traced to the temporal specificity of haunting as an iteration of things past. Haunting is indeed a form of return to the past, or rather, a return of the past in the present that orients the present towards future repetitions. It is always untimely, ill-timed and disruptive. It irrupts, disrupts and interrupts the smooth course of reality, leaving the subject who is confronted with the appearance of the ghost devastated.

3 There is therefore a traumatic dimension to haunting that mimics the source of haunting itself, which is often traumatic owing to its affinities with pain, disaster and death, since it is of the essence of the traumatic event to return again and again until it can be accounted for by the subject. Indeed, the traumatic event, because it could not be assimilated at the time of its occurrence, keeps coming back to haunt psyches and narratives alike. The subject’s very impossibility to process the shocking and horrifying nature of the traumatic event transforms it into a haunting phenomenon. The traumatic event then irrupts in the present until it can actually be reinserted by the subject himself/herself into a sequential narrative that makes sense of it. Thus, only such a narrative can interrupt the cycle of repetitions and the very possibility of spelling out this narrative often signals the end of the haunting process, enabling the subject to overcome the traumatic event (Freud). Interestingly enough, the source of trauma may be personal and individual but it can also be rooted in a collective form of experience such as a revolution or a radical transformation of society. Social and political upheavals may thus generate trauma that societies at large and individuals in them suffer from. A case in point is the social and political context of the revival of the medieval gothic in England which, in its literary version, is teeming with ghosts and haunted places. Gothic short fiction in particular constitutes a perfect haunting ground for all kinds of ghouls and ghosts in its capacity to stage the return of personal, collective and historical forms of the repressed. In them, haunting creates an uncanny effect which is the hallmark of the very genre. Gothic short fiction is thus peopled with specters that shake their chains, blow their evil breath in the neck of innocent heroines and take on the stereotypical form of the revenant whose return aims to frighten

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characters and readers alike. The very parodic and ironic modes of those appearances sometimes allow for a more comic turn to haunting. When the return of the past takes on the grotesque appearance of a ghost that will not go away, haunting can be frightening as well as a good springboard for laughter. For haunting can be comical as well as fearsome—repetition being in itself a potent comic device. The return of the ghost can therefore contribute to adding a lighter note to a short story.

4 On a thematic level, haunting has always been a feature of the short story, a source of either comedy or fright. On a metafictional level, it is even more common since the return of an obsession or an image often lies at the roots of the writing of short stories. Since its inception in 1983, the Journal of the Short Story in English has featured numerous interviews with writers reflecting on the art of short story writing, and many of them have mentioned the impact of a particular image that had been haunting them, triggering their imagination into writing. In the interview included in JSSE 67, Ron Rash observes: “My stories start with an image and that image could end up anywhere” (304). The event around which a story revolves does not, according to him, have to be used to introduce the story. Instead, the narrative voice should lead the reader to that central event, which the story originates from, so that what comes before and after its revelation can be fully understood. Rash thus echoes what Elizabeth Spencer explained about her own stories in JSSE 18, that “[t]here’s usually a central incident in my stories” (14). This incident provides the unity of effect famously defined by Edgar Allan Poe whose short fiction often relies on haunting. Is not the black cat in the eponymous story the haunting figure in the tale? Is not the oval portrait, the object that haunts the narrator of the story so much that its tale must be told? Poe, of course, chooses the titles of his stories so that the image they conjure up may haunt the readers and make them as haunted as his narrators and characters—“The Mask of the Red Death” could be told by the only survivor in the story, the mask itself, thus making the tale haunted on numerous levels; “The Tell-Tale Heart,” tells its own story, and leads to the final resolution/revelation by driving the narrator into madness and fear; “The Fall of the House of Usher,” keeps the house standing despite its collapse…

5 Unsurprisingly, short fiction is more apt to create haunting images in the reader’s imagination. In a preface to her ghost stories, Edith Wharton claims that “Ghosts to make themselves manifest, require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity” (9). The silent hours are, according to Wharton, the perfect time for ghosts to appear but she also notes that “the ghost should never be allowed to forget that his only chance of survival is in the tales of those who have encountered him” (10). Telling about ghosts thus keeps them alive and makes it possible for them to perform their haunting: they find souls who are receptive to their message and able to share them. A good example of such ideas can be found in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw—the writer felt that the form had “the small strength […] of perfect homogeneity” (123)—but William Goyen, a 20th century writer from Texas, could also serve to illustrate them. Goyen is indeed particularly interested in depicting characters who are haunted by their past and he frequently explores it to “give a luminous meaning to their lives” (Oates 4). In one of his novels, In a Farther Country (1955), he even has one of his characters, Marietta, echo Wharton’s observation when she says that “Things must be told to another or they die” (39). Joyce Carol Oates, reviewing Goyen’s 1975 Collected Stories, notes that the volume is “an excellent introduction to the haunting, intensely poetic fictional world of William Goyen” (4).

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6 Out of the twenty-six stories featured in Goyen’s volume, “A Shape of Light” is the best illustration of Oates’s statement for, in its very texture, the whole tale is haunted: “The words he wrote down on paper, shaped in long thin skeletal characters, with a bony forefinger maneuvering his pencil, even as though the characters themselves were ghosts of the alphabet, are ghosts of a page—the page is haunted” (100). Boney Benson, the mysterious writer whose name resonates with this quotation, becomes alive once the characters have been assembled into words, once they have filled the page, as is the case in many short stories: “But on this haunted page he comes back to us, his face and his look and all about him; he comes back like an old sad age yellow on the page; bring a light to it: see how the words flare up to light, answering to what put them there. The page is lighted” (100). Life emanates from the paper which has now been found and the message it carries will be brought to light thanks to the narrator. Goyen’s narrators are haunted by the past and telling about it makes it possible for them to externalize its mysteries, its darkness, and eventually bring it to signify and help life become meaningful. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle puts it, “haunting is a subjective experience, it is subjectifying: it transforms the one experiencing it into a subject. […] A haunting is marked by affect” (7, our translation). Following this idea, it is clear that Goyen’s narrators, as Poe’s and many others, are not only affected by the story they are shaping; they are infected by it and the act of telling helps them give shape to words that need light to shine and resonate through the readers.

7 Elizabeth Bowen has shown the importance of making the reader figure out “exactly what happened next (or in some cases what had happened)” (qtd. in Shaw 260), and this is particularly noticeable in “The Demon Lover,” in which, despite his death, a lover means to keep the flame burning: “‘I shall be with you [...] sooner or later. You won’t forget that. You need do nothing but wait’” (663). The reader, just like the loved one in Bowen’s story, is left to expect the return of the dead that is somehow both longed for and feared. In his essay “The Uncanny,” Freud explains that the sense of the uncanny “is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror [...] so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general” (219). For Freud, “the uncanny” originates with “what is familiar and agreeable, and [...] what is concealed and kept out of sight” (224), what is present despite being absent. Short forms rely on ellipsis making this absent presence noticeable in the interstices—the blanks in the text. They certainly create what Freud refers to as the “uncanny effect [that] is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary [i.e., purely hypothetical or speculative] appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full function of the thing it symbolizes” (244).

8 The essays collected in this issue have been organized chronologically and tackle various forms of haunting from the Victorian period to nowadays. Anne Besnault- Levita focuses on the renewed interest in the Gothic that dates back to the 1960s. Her contribution revolves around Victorian and modernist texts that make use of the gothic or uncanny trope of the woman in the looking glass. By reading together heroine-centred narratives by female writers published before and after the 1880s, Besnault-Levita exposes a continuum of preoccupations and anxieties that have to do with history, with the specificities of the short story as genre, and with the literary construction of the female self. Analyzing a more masculine world, that of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Sarah Whitehead considers how the Irish writer continues the well-

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established tradition of the comic gothic initiated by Horace Walpole. She shows that Le Fanu’s use of humor, his call for readerly involvement and critical detachment, creates polyphonic, ambiguous texts in which the absence of a single authoritative narrative voice adds to the haunting nature of the tales themselves. Leslie de Bont’s focus is on May Sinclair’s psychoanalytical rewriting of Kipling’s “They” (1904) in her story “The Intercessor” (1911). She explains that this particular text illustrates Sinclair’s interests in feminine psychoanalysis and that it represents a character’s haunting as the peculiar reenactment of the mother-daughter failed link. Through a displacement of the supernatural onto a child’s longing for her mother, haunting, de Bont contends, becomes a tool for a psychological exploration that incorporates the specificities of feminine psychoanalysis into a Gothic aesthetics. Adèle Cassigneul, then presents a detailed reading of Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House” which, according to Cassigneul, endorses and transgresses the rule of its genre, the ghost story, to become a playful and reflexive modernist text, a haunted intermediary space. She suggests that the short story is haunted by texts and images that make it a site of both inheritance and creative subversion. Illustrating a related point, Thomas Legendre shows that as a “ghost story” which turns out to be not so much of a ghost story, Edith Wharton’s “Miss Mary Pask” invites reading from a confluence of feminist, psychoanalytic, and biographical perspectives. The story’s title, along with its setting in Brittany, presents a character who inhabits a liminal space between life and death where differences are blended and intermixed. Wharton’s story somehow negotiates a ghostly threshold between the articulation and repression of female desire as life and death itself.

9 The next three contributions do not focus on gender in relation to haunting. Suzanne Bray discusses Charles Williams’ only short story, “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” (1935) which she reads as postscript to Williams’ spiritual thriller. She also sees the story as a theological tale in which fear comes from the possibility of eternal damnation, the haunting from the reality of unresolved hatred and the horror from the realization that the kingdom of hell may be within us or very close by. Tackling Arthur Machen’s short stories, Deborah Bridle echoes Derrida’s aforementioned comments and understands haunting as the manifestation of a repetition. She demonstrates how diegetic as well as extratextual repetitions can be seen as haunting processes for the characters as well as the readers. For Bridle, Machen’s stories can be considered as haunting and haunted bodies because the text ends up becoming the ghost it endeavored to conjure up. Ineke Bockting focuses on textual aspects as well in her analysis of “A Wedding in Brownsville” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, which she reads through the prism of narratological tools. Pascale Tollance, for her part, provides a close reading of a particular text, A.S. Byatt’s “The Changeling.” Quoting from an interview that came out after the publication of The Children’s Book, in which Byatt explains that “There is one steady theme of my writing that I don’t understand […] I don’t understand why in my work writing is so dangerous,” Tollance goes on to read “The Changeling” as an illustration of Byatt’s words. For her, the haunting idea that writing relates to murder is at the heart of the text in which the author revisits the ghost story. Haunting, Tollance endeavors to show by using Derrida’s theories, questions the place which is given or denied to the body in the space of the text, and the forms in which it might return.

10 Liliane Louvel and Stanley van der Ziel then take us in John McGahern country. Louvel’s presentation deals with “The White Breath” and the return of memory while van der Ziel focuses on the intertext with James Joyce’s stories and novels. Both essays suggest

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that haunting can be related to a journey—a journey inward (Louvel) or a journey westward (van der Ziel). It appears that there is always a subtext in McGahern’s work that initiates the character’s search for meaning. The last two essays discuss American writers: Tanya Tromble analyses two stories by Joyce Carol Oates while Amélie Moisy ponders on haunting and satire in short fiction by George Saunders. Tromble starts out with quotations from an Oates essay on the short story, making it clear that early in her career, Oates already had an understanding of short fiction that she maintained ever since. Tromble discusses how certain contemporary theories of psychoanalysis and psychology such as spectrality and borderline affective disorders can shed light on Oates’ use of haunting. Moisy considers Saunders’ ghost stories in the light of Derrida’s “hauntology” and the spectral turn, wondering what effect they have as satire. She makes the point that satire, like the specter, is liminal. She thus evokes Derrida’s view of the specter as a force for change in relation to Saunders’s social ghosts and his varied and allusive satire. Saunders’ specters, Moisy contends, show that hubris must be reined in by sophrosyne, and that its virtues are needed for change to bring just action.

11 The thirteen contributions included in this issue demonstrate that haunting can refer to a particular mental state, to the presence-absence of characters that have been marginalized and have eventually taken center stage; it may refer to literary ghosts who lurk in from behind and invite intertextual readings, or to the mad women in the attic whose voices can still be heard…

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Demon Lover.” The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. New York: Vintage, 1982. 661-66. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. 1994. New York: Routledge, “Routledge Classics,” 2006. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. by James Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001. Print.

Goyen, William. The Collected Stories of William Goyen. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Print.

---. In a Farther Country: A Romance. New York: Random House, 1955. Print.

James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. 1898. Eds. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren. New York: Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, 1999. Print.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “Théorie de la hantise.” Tropismes 14, “La Hantise” (2007): 5-31. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “William Goyen’s Life Rhythms.” Rev. of The Collected Stories of William Goyen. New York Review of Books 16 Nov. 1975: 4, 14. Print.

Rash, Ron. “Something Rich and Strange: Ron Rash on the Short Story.” Interview with Frédérique Spill. Journal of the Short Story in English 67 (Autumn 2016): 301-12. Print.

Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. 1983. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

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Spencer, Elizabeth. “An Interview with Elizabeth Spencer.” Interview with Corinne H. Dale, Anne- Marie Girard and J. H. E. Paine. Journal of the Short Story in English 18 (Spring 1992): 13-34. Print.

Wain, John. “Remarks on the Short Story.” Journal of the Short Story in English 2 (January 1984): 49-66. Print.

AUTHORS

ANNE-LAURE FORTIN-TOURNÈS Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès is a Professor of British literature at Le Mans Université. Her field of research is contemporary British literature and art. She has been running research programs on ultra-contemporary literature, the body and the digital for five years. She is the author of several books and articles on contemporary British literature, and of special issues of journals on experimental fiction and the status of the body in digital literature and art: “New Approaches to the Body, Performance, Experimentations,” Angles n°2, 2015, “L’art intempestif,” Polysèmes n°17, 2017; and she has co-edited “Experimental Art,” Angles n°5, 2017 with Brigitte Félix, Stephane Vanderhaeghe and Hélène Lecossois.

GÉRALD PRÉHER Gérald Préher is Professor of American Studies at Lille Catholic University (France) and a member of the CIRPaLL (University of Angers, France). He defended a doctoral dissertation on southern literature and has written essays on various 19th- and 20th-century writers. He co-edited several collections of essays on American literature, is the associate editor of the Journal of the Short Story in English and the general editor of the review Résonances. He has a forthcoming monograph on Elizabeth Spencer and a volume dedicated to Richard Ford in the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series.

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Mirrors of the Self and the Tradition of the “Female Gothic”: Scenes of Hauntings and Apparitions in Victorian and Modernist Short Fiction

Anne Besnault-Levita

1 For about two decades, the literary history of the Gothic has been remapped. A book like Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace’s Gothic Modernisms, published in 2001 and building on the thesis that “the connections between modernism and the Gothic have [long] been overlooked” would probably not have been written in the 1990s (1). Defined as a genre, or a “mode that exceeds genres and categories” (Botting 14), “an aesthetic of anxiety and perplexity” (Lloyd-Smith 18), a specific language, or, lately, in Julian Wolfreys’ introduction to Victorian Hauntings: “a destabilized” and “destabilizing” category always “other than itself” (xvi), the Gothic has infiltrated the fields of Victorian, modernist, and post-modernist studies, often uncovering new literary genealogies and continuities beyond traditional periodization and categories. Critics have ceased to see it as “an aberrant and marginal form” (Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings xvii) or an “outmoded embarrassment” (Williams 4); they have come to consider it as “an area of concern, a broad subject matter crossing the genres,” “a discursive site, a carnivalesque mode for the representation of the fragmented subject” (Miles 4). The search for a unifying concept of the Gothic—a primitive dread, the visualization of the Freudian Uncanny, a Lacanian Other …—is now paralleled by the idea of a continuous transformation and dissemination of the genre—or mode—over the centuries, as if what kept returning in the Gothic no longer depended on the form of its representation.

2 In parallel, the assumption that the Gothic has always been potentially subversive of patriarchal culture continues to fuel feminist approaches to the genre in the wake of Ellen Moers’s 1976 Literary Women, a book in which the author coined the expression

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“female Gothic.” For many feminist critics, the Gothic is still a metaphor for female experience underpinned by a historical and cultural understanding of the reality of women’s position. In Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction, published in 1999, Suzanne Becker explains that “we live again in times that are sensible to gothic forms of emotion and representation. And it is my conviction that one of the secrets of the gothic’s persistent success is gender-related: it is so powerful because it is so feminine” (2). Becker’s statement certainly echoes both traditional and more recent critical discourses on the Gothic, suggesting, among other things, that the Gothic emerged in specific cultural and political contexts, alongside dominant history, while always manifesting counter- cultural claims. It also raises two important questions: first, Becker’s and other feminist critics’ belief in the existence of a “female gothic” can hardly be reconciled with the recent non-historicist and anti-materialist conceptions of the genre. For Victor Sage and Allen Lloyd-Smith, for example, the Gothic is often “an anti-historicizing language, which provides writers with the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into the present” (1). On the other hand, if we uphold the concept of “female Gothic” and its definition as a form of “counter culture,” then we need to return to the historically specific circumstances that it conjures up. The second question has to do with what has already been called the Gothic turn in literary studies: if we cyclically “live in Gothic times,” as Angela Carter suggested in her Afterword to her 1974 novel Fireworks (122), should we still be searching for a unifying myth of the Gothic, or should we rather speak of the Gothic as a constantly deferred or deferring linguistic reference, like the elusive “it-ghost” in Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House”? In short, what happens to the key notions of genre, gender, and history (both as context and self- awareness) when Gothic becomes another word for the liminal, the spectral, the uncanny, each of these notions potentially becoming metaphors for our forever haunted selves?

3 In this essay, I would like to offer a few provisional answers to these questions by reading together heroine-centred narratives by female authors who wrote before and after the 1880s: Elizabeth Gaskell, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen. The short stories under scrutiny—“The Poor Clare,” “The Lady in the Looking- Glass,” “The Little Governess” and “The Demon Lover”—are often anthologized and have been discussed many times. They seem to have little in common in terms of context, plot and narrative technique. However, they all stage haunted female subjects looking at themselves in a mirror; as such, they unveil a continuum of preoccupations and anxieties that challenge traditional periodization and seem to reiterate a similar fearful scenario of imperiled womanhood and self-reflexivity. By doing so, they question the possibility of a “historicist alternative to the psychological, ontological, and symbolic approaches” that, according to Robert Mighall, dominate recent criticism of the Gothic (xix). Something returns in these scenes, inviting us to reassess and problematize the idea of a female tradition of the Gothic and to reach beyond essentializing comments or sheer historicist readings.

- - - - -

4 On first examination, there is little common ground between the mid-Victorian Gaskell and her modernist followers: modernist writers are rarely compared to their mid- Victorian precursors who, contrary to their late-Victorian successors, seem to belong to a pre-modern past. And yet, Gaskell wrote in a period when the Gothic had already

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been “dismembered,” as Julian Wolfreys explains, and “no longer figured […] as an identifiable corpus” (“Promise,” xiii). Although it was still seen as a “paradoxical and even a parasitic phenomenon,” “laughably conventional,” an “anachronism” “belonging to a bygone era” (Schmitt 305), in the 1850s, the Gothic had infiltrated the works of canonical writers as much as the writings of more marginal ones; its spectral settings were being gradually relocated within domestic spaces, and its ghosts anticipated the post-Freudian era of uncanny visions and hallucinations.

5 Like Dickens, Gaskell combined parallel careers as realist novelist and Gothic short story writer. Like Charlotte Brontë, she often inserted Gothic ingredients within the familiar structure of the Victorian Bildungsroman. The lineage of her supernatural tales has its source in the eighteenth-century Gothic tradition: it portrays anxieties surrounding class, race, and gender; it often focuses on the construction of female interiority within a narrative insisting on such themes as isolation, claustrophobia, hysteria, the fear of patriarchal power and the resistance to dominant ideology and morality. But those anxieties are typically relocated home in England, rather than in an exotic setting belonging to a bygone past. In her rather long tales, Gaskell uses a refined repertoire of Gothic tropes and scenarios as mechanisms for entertainment and social critique; she “challenges the bourgeois idealization of home as a haven of virtue” (Styler 38), explores female split personalities, and blurs the frontiers between history and fiction, the psychic and the social, female passivity and male violence.

6 “The Poor Clare,” published in three installments in Dickens’s Christmas number of Household Words (on 13, 20, and 27 December 1856), is a complex tale of curse and redemption in which three generations of eighteenth-century women are shown to suffer the consequences of patriarchal oppression and of the unleashed rage that male violence provokes. Having lost track of her beloved daughter Mary with whom she used to serve at Starkey Manor House, Lancashire, Bridget Fitzgerald, the poor Clare of the story, is leading a wild and isolated life when one day, Squire Gisborne “partly for wantonness, partly to vent his spleen upon some living creature” (58) shoots her dog Mignon, the cherished substitute for her lost daughter. Unaware that the Squire seduced Mary and left her a fallen woman with a child, and suicide as the only outcome, Bridget curses the father of her granddaughter Lucy and triggers off a chain of cause and effects that excludes her from the community. Lucy is thus plagued with an evil dopplegänger whose regular apparitions become her heavy secret, and the reason for her father’s and society’s repudiation. The “sins of the father being visited upon the children” (79; 82), Lucy will only be freed from her curse when her grandmother expiates her sin by doing penance and sacrificing her life, thus redeeming the Squire, herself, and the pure, modest innocent Lucy whom the male narrator has fallen in love with.

7 A first interpretation of the story brings to the fore the traditional female conflict with regards to the subject of passion: to be able to marry, Lucy must erase the traces of desire and sexuality of her maternal inheritance (both her mother and grandmother were beautiful women having married above station), traces that her own father sees in her when, one morning, he unexpectedly catches sight of her evil double in the mirror: [my father] was about to strike me, and I, all in bewildering tears, was ready to take his stripes as great kindness compared to his harder words, when suddenly he stopped his arm mid-way, gasped and staggered, crying out, “The curse—the curse!” I looked up in terror. In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right

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behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged. (76-77)

8 Lucy’s “ghastly resemblance” and its “loathsome demon soul looking out of the gray eyes, that were in turns mocking and voluptuous” (78) is then perceived by the narrator who cannot but acknowledge its supernatural dimension.

9 Gaskell obviously displays here a series of ready-made gothic motifs: an ancestral Manor House, an illegitimate daughter and cursed heroine, a domineering Squire cursed by his Irish-Catholic mother in law, supernatural coincidences, patriarchal violence, the return of a traumatic past notably in the form of Lucy’s ghostly double, and a remarkable Gothic structure of embedded narratives. Virginia Woolf would probably have laughed at this formulaic use of the Gothic that Oscar Wilde already parodied in the 1880s: “we feel a little aggrieved when the writers who are capable of such delicate work [she is referring here to the author of supernatural stories that she is reviewing] resort instead to the methods of a conjuror and ask us to be satisfied with a trick” (“Before Midnight,” 87). And yet, Gaskell’s complex parable of patriarchy is represented here as a climactic moment of apparition that disrupts domestic appearances. As such, it anticipates other scenes of self-exploration within the private sphere, Gothic or uncanny scenes “where woman is examined with a woman’s eye” instead of being objectified by a male standpoint (Moers 109).

10 In the passage, Lucy has become the narrator of her own embedded narrative. Her first- person retrospective story gives us access to her controlled, rational voice explaining the reasons of her overwhelming emotions: Lucy’s Gothic ‘dread’ is not caused by her image in the mirror—since she recognizes it as herself—but by “another wicked, fearful self” that she calls her double, so “similar” to her body and yet so different. In this particular case, this double is observable by Lucy’s objectifying father and other characters in the room; but when it returns in subsequent passages, it does so without a mirror to frame it—probably because the perspective is then that of the male narrator. More striking still is the way Lucy’s double implies a triple image of Lucy: her real self, her mirror self, and the demonic dopplegänger. Later on, Lucy’s double splits into two: its less terrible reflection remains trapped in the mirror, while the more dreadful self seems to have escaped out of the frame, and cannot be clearly located in the space of the room or in the grammar of the text.

11 Although it is clearly Victorian in narrative technique, Gaskell’s scene also displays more modern aspects of the Gothic. First, the mirror does not split Lucy’s image into two entities, but three; as such, it challenges the traditional dichotomies that it is meant to explore, notably between the suffering “arising from the outside,” Victorian society, and a more internal, “psychic” suffering, as Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky have shown in their essay on “The Poor Clare” (88). In these pages, then, Gaskell’s writing stages “woman” as textual position: a female subject projects herself through narration within and without the boundaries of her body and mental space. She also learns to watch and be watched. The mirror becomes a frame, a frontier, and a metafictional device; it refers to the well-known trope of the female perceiving subject. It also triggers off an epiphanic moment of self-alienation and provisional self- knowledge which it renders visual and specular at the same time. The scene implies a series of embedded structures: a confession within a framing narrative, a mirror inside a room, inside a home—spatial motifs that Suzanne Becker associates with a Gothic “excess of formal closure” that unsettles the contentment usually associated with

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popular “escape” literature (34-35). However, as Miranda Anderson explains in her essay on “Early Modern Mirrors,” “like language, the mirror also acts here as a ‘mind tool’ that enables human subjects to stretch beyond [their] brain and body boundaries” (105). The scene, therefore, appears to be in line with the tradition of the “female Gothic,” or “women’s Gothic,” in the wake of Ellen Moers’ seminal work. For Juliann Fleenor, “the Gothic and […] female experiences have a common schizophrenia” (28). In Perils of the Night, Eugenia Delamotte explains that what she calls the Gothic “myth” has to do with “an anxiety about boundaries: those that shut the protagonist off from the world, those that shut the protagonist in, and those that separate the individual self from something that is Other” (19); she also relates the theme of boundaries to women Gothicists’ central issue in the nineteenth century: “the problem of making oneself known to others through language,” the problem of “saying I” (24): as the narrator of her own story of entrapment and self-division, Lucy has access to forms of self- knowledge and expression that many of her predecessors did not have.

12 There are mirrors, but no formulaic Gothic repertoire in Katherine Mansfield’s and Virginia Woolf’s modernist short fictions; no intricate plotting, as in Gaskell, no bravura effect or dramatic intensity. The stories do not deal with the return of a traumatic past, nor do they seem to imply any form of historical awareness. In this respect, it is uncertain whether “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” and “The Little Governess” have anything to do with the Gothic as genre, unless we study them—as some critics have—in the context of a certain “Gothic-ising of theory” (Hogle and Smith 2) which generally understands the Gothic’s transmutations from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in terms of dissemination, psychoanalytical spectrality and “the alterity of subjectivity” (Wolfreys, “Promise” xviii). At any rate, the mirror scenes in their stories tell us about split-identities, apparent passivity, and the diffuse fear related to “what distinguishes the ‘me’ from the ‘not-me’” (Delamotte 23). As such, they recall Lucy Gisborne’s story and character.

13 Published in 1915, “The Little Governess” is a modernist tale of female victim and male victimizer whose plot-line echoes “Little Red Riding Hood”: at first sight, the fairy-tale, more than the Gothic, is the genre that enables Mansfield to perpetuate gender relations and definitions. As the foreign, young and vulnerable protagonist travels at night from France to Germany for a position of governess, she naively accepts the friendship of an old pervert German man whom she takes for a grandfather figure, follows him to his apartment, and discovers that his true motivation is not simply to give her strawberries and show her round Munich. The dark epiphanic moment that follows marks the end of the story and of a rough initiatory journey into the world of adulthood and masculinity. Mansfield’s uncanny mirror scene takes place at the beginning of this journey. The little governess is on board the train to France and falls prey to a porter whom she wishes to tip no more than twenty centimes. Trying to stoically endure his verbal and physical violence as she “fe[els] his sharp eyes pricking her all over,” she “screw[s] herself tight, tight, and put[s] out an icy hand and t[akes] the money—stow[s] it away in her hand,” “trembling with terror.” When the porter disappears into the dark, she is relieved, and stands up, “feel[s] if the dress-basket [is] firm” and catches “sight of herself in the mirror, quite white, with big round eyes. She untie[s] her ‘motor veil’ and unbutton[s] her green cape.” To “the mirror face,” she says “But it’s all over now,” “feeling in some way that it was more frightened than she” (424).

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14 This confrontation of the female character with her image is not dramatized; it is not even a haunting scene. Framed by the mirror, announced by an increase in the tension, the moment does not reveal any evil double or ghostly presence, although the face in the mirror looks autonomous and strangely different. And yet, the story obviously echoes Charlotte Brontë’s famous governess novel Jane Eyre: the same allusions to the social and ideological “invisibility” of heroines’ in-between character can be found in both fictions. The elderly gentleman is no Rochester; there is no attic in his apartment with a trapped wife in it; Munich is a foreign town, not the location of a fearful manor house. Nonetheless, the disseminated traces of the Gothic accumulate in Mansfield’s fiction: the “night” and its perils, the enclosed space of “an evening boat” its “corridors” and “door[s] that should remain lock[ed]” to protect women, from the presence of “people with evil intentions” (422), an inexperienced heroine who “trembl[es] with terror,” a strange atmosphere—the adjective is repeated nine times—a “dark passage” leading to the old man’s flat, an almost Richardsonian struggle “out of his hands” (432), and finally, a scene of attempted rape: “He held against her his hard old body and his twitching knee and though she shook her head from side to side, distracted, kissed her on the mouth” (432).

15 Those traces eventually compose an uncanny backdrop against which the mirror scene can be read differently: as the little governess takes off a “motor veil” that echoes Jane’s wedding veil in Jane Eyre, she tries to control her innermost fears and desires by projecting them onto her pale double in the mirror; in doing so, she becomes a modern version of the traditional female gothic heroine, first empowered by the perspective of leaving home and then made vulnerable by a series of perils and obstacles caused by masculine hegemony. Mansfield is obviously playing here less with Gothic clichés than she is revisiting Gothic scenarios transposed into the modern world: in the mirror, female conflicts between passivity and control, repression and self-expression, confusion and order are revisited. These women’s anxieties are perplexities that lead to the “common schizophrenia” evoked by Juliann Fleenor in The Female Gothic (28): the heroine is here both traveling and entrapped, an object and the agent, in the scene at least, of her own self-examination. In the looking-glass and beyond, something returns that cannot be entirely accounted for: possibly an unspeakable connection with intergenerational violence. In this respect, the governess’s address to herself—“But it’s all over now”—sounds both like a subdued sign of agency and the voice of dramatic irony: the violence visited upon the female body is not over.

16 With Mansfield and Woolf, the Gothic appears to be transformed into the more spiritualized territory of the uncanny. As Vernon Lee explains in her preface to Hauntings—a collection of “four little tales” that are “of no genuine ghosts in the scientific sense”—the new “specters” of the 1880s and their followers cannot be “caught in definite places and made to dictate judicial evidence”; one can only “affirm one thing” about them: that “they haunted certain brains” (xi). Similarly, Virginia Woolf’s conception of modern ghosts, is that, like Henry James’s “phantoms,” they have “their origins within us”: “they are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange” (“Henry James,” 324). In her essays and reviews on Gothic romance, she explains that the modern ghost story should not be about the disinterring of the past but about the “discovery of some […] uncharted territories of the mind” (“Before Midnight,” 87). Her insights into the genre are often mentioned by Modernist or postmodernist scholars

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interested in the Gothic. For David Seed, for example, the supernatural was central to Woolf’s attempts to “relocate the importance of the mind” and “challenge presumptions about the priority of material circumstances in reality” (44; 49); in the same volume, Judith Wilt evokes her “insistent deployment of a vocabulary of the spiritual, paranormal, even ‘psychical’ terminology about character, which always has an element of the ‘apparitional’ about it” (62). In her experimental and highly metaphorical short fictions such as “The Mysterious Case of Miss V” or “A Haunted House,” Woolf does not naturalize the supernatural—as eighteenth-century gothic usually did—instead, she denaturalizes the familiar. In this respect, her definition of the modern spectral, or ghostly—a sense of “the unseen world […] closely related to what goes in this” (“Henry James” 324)—echoes Freud’s definition of the uncanny as the ambivalent apprehension of the foreign and the familiar (394).

17 At first sight, however, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” is a different story: no dramatization, visitation by or apparition of a menacing double. Instead, the text proposes a half-fictional, half-essayistic reflection on the relation of appearances and the act of gazing towards truth. The anonymous narrator of the story is first preoccupied by the scene reflected in the hall mirror and cut off by its “gold rim”: “But outside the looking-glass reflected the hall table, the sun-flowers, the garden path so accurately and so fixedly that they seemed held in their reality unescapably” (221). He or she looks for a stable centre, a “truth” beyond the controlling presence of the mirror; he or she also tries to catch “Mrs. Brown,” here Isabella Tyson, over whom “the looking-glass began to pour […] a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth” (225). But instead of catching “Isabella’s profounder state of being” (224), the mirror exposes her emptiness: “Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing” (225). As Nena Skrbic has already suggested, the mirror is here a dangerous medium of self-revelation, an intrusive device of self-objectification, transforming the framed postman who delivers Isabella’s letters into a “looming black form,” deadening what it circumscribes while suggesting how life outside is chaotic, disquietingly alive. A critique of traditional modes of representation, Woolf’s sketch also reveals the inaccessibility of one’s true self, the danger, for women, to be exposed, and the “violation implicit in [her] objectification” (74-77).

18 Woolf’s mirror scene does not suggest any form of contextualized anxiety; instead, it offers us scattered Gothic “apparitional traces and fragments” (Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings 7), disseminated uncanny figures and tropes: a rich spinster who used to travel a lot around the world and is now living in an empty house, “obscure flushes and darkenings” in her garden (221), rugs, chairs and cabinets that “now lived their obscure lives before one’s eyes” (222), a room that becomes “more shadowy and symbolic” as the reflection on Isabella goes on, a looking-glass that transforms the pictures it frames into something “unrecognisable and irrational and entirely out of focus” (223), a mirror image of Isabella that “made one start” (225). Those uncanny figures and tropes could easily be interpreted as a mere form of cyclical revenance. However, as they did in Mansfield’s “The Little Governess,” those dispersed ominous hints converge towards a similar moment of intensity during which the female character is scrutinized, wishes she could escape and finally remains inscrutable. In this story, Woolf uses the looking- glass, this otherwise differently gendered object, as a kind of male, threatening censoring eye, and if the scene is not exactly one of schizophrenic doubling, notably because “one,” not “she,” is the neutral gazer, it nonetheless displays a continuum of

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female anxieties concerning appearance, control, and containment within power structures. Now and before, the looking-glass cannot be a promise of full knowledge, whether for men or for women, and the moment of illumination will always be deferred: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (Corinthians, I, 12, 13).

19 Strikingly enough, this promise of a long-wished-for access to truth, once the glass of the old brass mirror is polished, gave its title to Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 collection In a Glass Darkly, Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural. The Irish master of Victorian mystery and horror fiction happened to be one of Elizabeth Bowen’s literary inspirations. In The Demon Lover, a volume published in 1945 and written just after the bombing of her house in the Blitz, Bowen explores the uncanniness of wartime life. More than in her novels, the short story genre allows here “for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings” (Bowen, “Preface,” Stories 130). In “The Demon Lover,” the eponymous character resurfaces from the past in the life of Kathleen Drover, a middle-aged married and dutiful woman who comes back to her London house during the blitz. Her journey into a bombed city of “unfamiliar streets,” “broken chimneys and parapets” and empty houses takes her finally to her own property “to look for several things she wanted to take away” with her to the countryside (661). As she wanders around the house and thinks of the past, she finally discovers a letter deposited on the hall table by some unknown person. It is signed “K,” is dated the present day with no address or postage, and finally reminds her of a long repressed memory: twenty-five years earlier, a pledge had been made between her and her lover, but never fulfilled and he was since missing in action. She had pledged to meet her beloved, a young soldier supposed to have been killed during the war, for their anniversary. Filled with remorse, guilt, and feeling “so much change in her own face,” Kathleen Drover drops the letter and goes to her dusty mirror, “polishe[s] a clear patch in it, and look[s] at once urgently and stealthily in”: She was confronted by a woman of forty-four, with eyes starting out under a hat brim that had been rather carelessly pulled down. She had not put on any more powder since she left the shop where she ate her solitary tea. The pearls her husband had given her on their marriage hung loose round her now rather thinner throat, slipping in the V of the pink wool jumper her sister knitted last autumn as they sat round the fire. Mrs. Drover’s most normal expression was one of controlled worry, but of assent. Since the birth of the third of her little boys, attended by a quite serious illness, she had had an intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth, but in spite of this she could always sustain a manner that was at once energetic and calm. Turning from her own face as precipitately as she had gone to meet it, she went to the chest where the things were, unlocked it, threw up the lid, and knelt to search. (662)

20 As Adam Piette convincingly explains, what the character sees in the mirror is not an evil double but “the unflattering likeness of the dowdy, middle-aged society matron she thought she would never become […]. And like the fairytale queen whose honest mirror offended her pride, the awful truth stuns this middle-aged wife and mother, rocks her back on her aristocratic heels” (7).

21 The story nonetheless bears the literary traces of past traditions: in the anonymous popular Scottish ballad “The Daemon Lover” (1882-98), a man seduces a married woman away from her home and family by luring her with promises of riches. His promise of escape and love ends in a ship wreckage and the woman’s death. Bowen’s

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own “Demon Lover” does not get rid of romance, but moves spectrality effects away from the spectacular into the realm of a quotidian haunted by war. As in a traditional gothic tale, the author stages a series of embedded spaces: the city, the house, the room, a locked closet, a mirror and a letter. Trapped within these hollowed confining structures, haunted by the past, Mrs Drover scrutinizes her image in the looking-glass, at first aloof and controlled, then seized by a fit of panic. Before and after she gets into a cab and screams on discovering the identity of the driver, she will remain one among a long tradition of petrified female characters whose passivity and sense of guilt expose them to demonic influence, curses, dopplegängers or nightmares. Something returns here, that the character cannot retrieve: her guilt, her youth, her lost passion and romantic dreams. As to the mirror, it reiterates the metaphor of “women’s fears of entrapment within the domestic sphere and the female body” (Smith and Wallace, “The Female Gothic” 1).

22 Bowen’s version of the gothic is both formulaic—the story is a well-plotted thriller— and modernist in its use of a suspensive ending, free indirect speech, patterns of metaphorical meaning. As Luke Thurston explains, Bowen’s short fiction often resorts to an “uncanny collusion of ultra-modernity and traditional life-worlds” (149). As such, “The Demon Lover” seems to be representative of Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories as analyzed by Emma Liggins in a recent article: “Disrupted temporal sequences, ghosts who never materialise, unspectral settings, and a troubled disjunction between past and future all characterise uncanny modernist short fiction by women, showing how notions of apparitionality have shifted from the Victorian period to reflect anxieties about modernity, suburbia and the frontiers of memory” (47). But in the same brilliant essay, Liggins suggests that “the over-emphasis on the Freudian uncanny and the familiar/unfamiliar distinction in readings of the modernist ghost story has perhaps diverted our attention away from alternative readings of spectrality centred on issues around modernity, nostalgia and the shock of the new” (35).

- - - - -

23 As a matter of fact, whether we read the four mirror scenes evoked in this paper as a recycling of ready-made motifs or as metaphors of a decontextualized female ontology, the risk is to lose sense of historical awareness, cultural context and genre. On the one hand, the interpretation may coincide with a post-modernist retrospective vision of the gothic as centrally psychological and anti-historicizing: in their 1996 preface to Modern Gothic: A Reader, for example, Lloyd-Smith and Sage explain that “reiteration is the modern form of haunting” (4). In this scenario, the female characters in the mirror are mere images, and never subjects in construction. On the other hand, the temptation is to see these images and apparitions as referring to a female essence, whether the associated myth is submission, passivity, masochism, or painful resistance to male norms, to name but a few. I would suggest an investigation beyond this clear-cut dichotomy, that sees the mirror in the stories by Gaskell, Bowen, Mansfield and Woolf, as the place where Gothic connections between history, genre and gender can be reassessed.

24 When Mighall explains that “the spectres which the Gothic conjures up are shaped by historically specific circumstances,” he proposes a critique of the psychoanalytical turn in Gothic Studies. In the case of “The Poor Clare” and “The Demon Lover,” those

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circumstances are easy to retrieve. In the case of Mansfield’s and Woolf’s short fictions, our conception of the Gothic’s historical awareness, I suggest, should be enlarged to the appropriation of cultural contexts and literary genealogies. As the other two, Mansfield’s and Woolf’s stories should be first read against the context of the evolution of the science and philosophies of the self over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, most Gothic scholars know that Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” was inspired by his reading of Hoffman’s 1817 short story “The Sandman,” and see a clear continuity between his “account of fear and desire” in his essay and the theories of nineteenth- century “scientists of mind” such as Johann Herbart, William McDougall or Frederic William Meyers. In other words, the modernist divided self was foreshadowed by romantic and Victorian visions of the unconscious, of desire and transgression: “Psychoanalysis,” Wolfreys explains, “has the aura of the Gothic about it.” In this respect, and in the wake of recent research in Trauma studies, “The Little Governess” should perhaps be examined in the light of its publication date: during the First World War, and twelve days exactly (for the first installment of the story in the Signature) after Mansfield’s brother Leslie Beauchamp was killed in France in a grenade accident. Behind any “mirror scene,” then, lurks the cultural history of mirrors: their magic function in prehistoric times; their scientific and anthropological value in the seventeenth century; their later use in developmental psychology. From primitive fears to more psychological obsessions, “our relation to the mirror as tool” has always been formed in correlation to the technological, sociocultural and psychophysiological context of any particular time and place, as Miranda Anderson explains (105). Last but not least, what these scenes display, is a tribute to past literary history, and as such, a fictional mode of historiography based on continuities and returns: even modernity cannot rid us of the past. Thus, Bowen rewrites the “demon lover” motif of the seventeenth-century Scottish ballad, Woolf’s Lady could be a modernist version of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott condemned to weave images in her loom without looking outside, Mansfield is inspired by Charlotte Brontë.

25 In this perspective, a new, or several new, genealogie(s) of female writers might emerge, a “symbolic community,” to take up Susan Wolstenholme’s idea in Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers—a community characterized not by a position of marginality, […] nor by a common bond of directly accessible experience, but rather by the symbolic exchange among the group itself” (xiii). To understand Gaskell, Mansfield, Woolf, Bowen and others as partaking in the construction of cultural exchanges across periodization and individual differences enables us to understand their work in a way that is neither ahistorical nor essentialist, but combines feminist narratology with a vision of language and writing that is entangled with history. As Angela Carter’s narrator says in “The Flesh and the Mirror”: “Women and mirrors are in complicity with one another to evade the action I/she performs that she/I cannot watch, the action with which I break out of the mirror, with which I assume my appearance” (65).

26 There is apparently no reason for this strange and paradoxical complicity between women and mirrors to be found in short stories only. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are perfect examples. However, my recent, though incomplete, investigations suggest that they are more frequent in short fictions. No mirror scenes in Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, or Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron, but then there were few personal mirrors in homes at the time. No mirror scenes either in Gaskell’s realist novels such as North and South, Cranford and Wives and Daughters, or in the more sensationalist novel Ruth. This might be explained by the well-known

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argument of the position of the short story in the hierarchy of genres, by the other well-known argument of its specificities as a form rooted in the oral tale, the fairy tale and fantasy, a form that has always easily accepted supernatural elements within its confines, contrary to the novel with its “calmer, stricter, more orthodox demands”—to quote from Elizabeth Bowen’s preface to The Faber Book of Modern Stories (158). In his 1988 study of The Short Story: Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen, John Bayley wrote that “Short stories are defined by something withheld and mysterious” (8); more recently, Fred Botting explains, in “Stories, Spectres, Screens,” that “as an interplay between convention and disruption, the modernist short story has much in common with the ghost-story and the uncanny” (103). Besides, as Nena Skrbic explains in her analysis of the less uncanny mirror scene of Woolf’s “The New Dress,” the “mirror’s delimiting frame figures as an image of the short story itself, since, like the mirror, it holds nothing lasting in its frame” (64). This metaphor could obviously be applied to the other texts studied here. In fact, if we accept Robert Miles’s definition of the Gothic as “discourse,” in Foucault’s sense, and not as genre, or style, a discourse that is “disjunctive, fragmentary and inchoate,” and represents “the subject in a state of deracination, […] in a condition of rupture, disjunction, fragmentation” (3), then there must be affinities between the Gothic and modern short fiction in general.

27 More than a metafictional image of evanescence, however, the examined mirror scenes stage moments of intensity steeped in historical awareness. Mirrors used by women have been at the centre of a continuum of anxieties resulting from the cultural impositions that their very frame (echoed here by the constraints of the short story form) symbolizes. Producing petrified images, offering a smooth surface of appearances as they freeze the moment and the subject’s gaze, they can also be conceived, in their more Gothic version, as a counter site: the place where an effraction can take place, where a becoming female subject might appear. Something is entrapped in the framed glass that finally exceeds its structure. In Les Excès du genre, a book on gender, stereotypes and the political use of female nudity, the French feminist philosopher Geneviève Fraisse explains the major difference that she sees between the world of representation, appearances and stereotypes—a world where women are always victims of prejudices—and a world of “apparitions” (in French), meaning the emergence of women as groups and communities in the public sphere, their entering into history and inscription in history books as exceptional, and more ordinary, subjects. I would like to argue that Gaskell’s, Mansfield’s, Woolf’s and Bowen’s mirrors, and many others after these, are the conflicting sites of appearances and “apparitions,” this last term being understood as referring to the moments and places where and when women appear as subjects: haunted by the history of what has prevented them from doing so.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Miranda. “Early Modern Mirrors.” The Book of the Mirror: An Interdisciplinary Collection Exploring the Cultural Story of the Mirror. Ed. M. Anderson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 105-20. Print.

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

Becker, Susanne. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999. Print.

Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.

---. “Stories, Spectres, Screens.” Modernism, Postmodernism and the Short Story in English. Ed. J. Sacido. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 99-124. Print.

Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Demon Lover.” 1941. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. London: Penguin Books, 1983. 661-66. Print.

---. Preface to The Faber Book of Modern Stories. 1937. The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. H. Lee. London: Virago, 1986. 152-58. Print.

---. Preface to Stories by Elizabeth Bowen. 1959. The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. H. Lee. London: Virago, 1986. 126-30. Print.

Carter, Angela. Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces. London: Quartet Books, 1974. Print.

Delamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.

Fleenor, Juliann E. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983. Print.

Fraisse, Geneviève. Les Excès du genre: Concept, image, nudité. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions lignes, 2014. Print.

---. La Raison des Femmes. Paris: Plon, 1992. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 1919. The Collected Papers. Trans. Alix Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1959. 368-407. Print.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. “The Poor Clare.” 1856. Gothic Tales. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. 49-102. Print.

Hogle, Jerrold, Smith A. “Revisiting the Gothic and Theory: An Introduction.” Gothic Studies 11.1 (May 2009): 1-8. Print.

Lawson, K. and Shakinovsky, L. “‘The Sins of the Father’ and the Female Phantom Visitations and Cruelty in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Poor Clare’.” Marked Body, The Domestic Violence in Mid- Nineteenth-Century Literature. Albany: State University of New York, 2002. 85-104. Print.

Lee, Vernon. Hauntings: Fantastic Stories. 1890. London: John Lane, 1906. Print.

Liggins, Emma. “Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity.” British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now. Eds. E. Young and J. Bailey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. 32-49. Print.

Lloyd-Smith, Allan. “Postmodernism / Gothicism.” Modern Gothic: A Reader. Eds. V. Sage and A. Lloyd-Smith. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. 6-19. Print.

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Mansfield, Katherine. ‘The Little Governess.” 1915. The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, Vol. 1. Eds. Katherine Mansfield and Gerri Kimber. 2007. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. 422-32. Print.

Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy. 1992. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Print.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. 1976. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.

Piette, Adam. “War and the Short Story: Elizabeth Bowen.” British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now. Eds. E. Young and J. Bailey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. 66-80. Print.

Sage, V. and A. Lloyd-Smith, eds. Modern Gothic: A Reader. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Print.

Schmitt, Cannon. “The Gothic Romance in the Victorian Period.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Eds. P. Brantlinger and W. Thesing. Malden (MA): Blackwell, 2002. 302-17. Print.

Seed, David. “‘Psychic Cases’: Transformations of the Supernatural in Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair.” Gothic Modernisms. Eds. A. Smith and J. Wallace. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001. 44-61. Print.

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Smith, A. and J. Wallace, eds. Gothic Modernisms. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001. Print.

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Styler, Rebecca. “The Problem of ‘Evil’ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales.” Gothic Studies 12.1 (2010): 33-50. Print.

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Wallace, Diana and Andrew Smith. “Introduction: Defining the Female Gothic.” The Female Gothic: New Directions. Eds. D. Wallace and A. Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1-12. Print.

Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print.

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---. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny, and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Print.

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---. “Gothic Romance.” 1921. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3 (1919-1924). Ed. A. McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1988. 304-07. Print.

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article a pour objet d’interroger le consensus théorique actuel sur l’histoire littéraire du gothique entre les XIXe et XXe siècles à partir d’un corpus de nouvelles victoriennes et modernistes qui mettent en scène, au tournant épiphanique de leur récit, le trope inquiétant et familier de la femme devant son miroir. À partir de cette lecture comparée de scènes d’apparitions et de division du moi provenant de textes écrits avant et après 1880 par Elizabeth Gaskell, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield et Elizabeth Bowen, on mettra ici en évidence la continuité et la persistance des préoccupations et des anxiétés représentées par ces personnages féminins, continuité à la fois ancrée dans un contexte, et liée à la construction du sujet féminin dans la fiction en général et dans la nouvelle en particulier. La récurrence de ces scènes de miroir gothiques dans le roman et la nouvelle des XIXe et XXe siècles soulève non seulement la question du genre — au double sens de « genre » et « gender » — et de ses liens singuliers avec le gothique, mais aussi celle du retour troublant, voire du recyclage, des ingrédients du gothique d’un siècle à l’autre : faut-il voir, dans ce retour, l’expression d’un lien brisé entre le gothique et son rapport à l’histoire — ici l’histoire des femmes et de leur représentation — ou bien, au contraire, la trace d’une généalogie littéraire à retrouver, et d’une mémoire collective à retracer.

AUTHOR

ANNE BESNAULT-LEVITA Anne Besnault-Levita is Senior Lecturer at the University of Rouen where she teaches English literature. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: La voix du Moment (Paris: Messène, 1997), and of many articles on Katherine Mansfield’s, Virginia Woolf’s and Elizabeth Bowen’s short fictions. Her current fields of interest are modernist fiction and criticism, Virginia Woolf as literary critic, Gothic modernisms, and genre and gender studies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. She is currently working on a book on Virginia Woolf's conversations with her nineteenth-century foremothers and on her conception of literary history.

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Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Comic Hauntings

Sarah Whitehead

1 There has been a growing critical acknowledgement of the close relationship between horror and humour in gothic texts over the last few decades (Sage, Wolfreys, Horner and Zlosnik) and as Horner and Zlosnik recognise, it is the gothic’s preoccupation with surface that enables it to so easily embrace the comic as well as the tragic in narratives which operate on alternate levels of terror and humour (“Comic Gothic” 327). This seemingly incongruous mixing was, however, formally identified as early as 1765 by Horace Walpole in the preface to the second edition to what is widely regarded as the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto.1 In his preface he defends the mingling of the tragic and the comic within the same text, citing Shakespeare as a precursive practitioner of the art, and in a later letter to his friend Elie de Beaumont on the subject of his novel he again focuses on the humorous features of his narrative, writing “If I make you laugh ... I shall be content” (Wright 382).

2 The Castle of Otranto is rife with comic excess and melodrama and Williams notes how its farcical plotline sometimes feels more like that of opera libretto than narrative prose fiction (108). Perhaps most memorable is the manner in which the rightful owner of the castle, Prince Alfonso, haunts the current inhabitants—Manfred, his family and their servants—by sending a series of gigantic body parts to spook the residents. The first is not exactly a body part, but the prince’s helmet, which falls from the sky, squashing Manfred’s son on his wedding day. Next to appear are a gigantic foot and a massive hand—both uncannily like those on the much smaller, i.e. lifesize statue of Alfonso which stands in the castle. The excessively theatrical nature of these hauntings, combined with banal mechanisms of revelations of hidden identities suggest a metafictive awareness on Walpole’s part, particularly when one considers his introductory signalling of the humorous intent of his narrative in his preface. This paper considers how, two centuries later, such self-reflexive, bathetic poetics can be found in the ghost stories of the Anglo-Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Furthermore, rather than diminishing the terror in his texts, Le Fanu’s liberal doses of the comic gothic serve to further the underlying, almost modernist, uncertainty of his

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tales and their shadowy horrors. Indeed, as Sullivan puts it, “the most hideous apparitions are also, ineluctably, the funniest” (43).

Green Tea

3 Perhaps the most absurd haunting in the Le Fanu oeuvre is the phantom that haunts Reverend Jennings in his 1869 short story “Green Tea.” Here the spectre of choice is a small black monkey which initially appears to Jennings on an early evening journey back to his London home, on the omnibus. The first things Jennings notes in the shadows of the bus are the animal’s two eyes, which he thinks may be a couple of buttons or glass beads reflecting a reddish light. He leans closer to get a proper look and is greeted by a monkey’s face. Le Fanu writes: I began now to perceive an outline of something black, and I soon saw, with tolerable distinctness, the outline of a small black monkey, pushing its face forward in mimicry to meet mine; those were its eyes, and I now dimly saw its teeth grinning at me. (18-19)

4 Appalled by the animal and its sneering expression, Jennings has a prod at it with his umbrella, only to find it goes straight through the creature. No conventional trappings of a Victorian ghost here, no clanking of Marley’s chains or torturous wails, and the revelation that this is not an escaped pet as Jennings presumed, but a “sulky” (20) phantom is a surprise for both the reader and Jennings alike. Le Fanu’s choice of the ghost of an animal which has been associated with comic mimicry and trickery from classical times is unnerving in its incongruity.2 That the perception of the unexpected, anomalous or inappropriate can prompt laughter was formally recognised as early as the fourth century BC by Aristotle, and the comedy of the incongruous continues to be a dominant theory of humour in philosophy and psychology (Morrell 10). In the case of Le Fanu’s monkey however, the effect of this incongruity is as disturbing as it is amusing. Indeed, as Carroll argues, there is an “overlap” (156) between horror and humour when it comes to the aberrant, and Sage, in his study of Le Fanu’s fiction, notes how the writer’s use of the inappropriate or incongruous creates a comedy which can then “shade over” into something far darker (“Gothic Laughter” 12). Furthermore, whilst the opening description of the monkey’s grin is initially suggestive of a laughing smile, the demonical descriptions that follow “shade” this image, which, as the narrative develops, becomes more like a menacing grimace.

5 The monkey follows Jennings home and proceeds to haunt him intermittently over the next few years. Jennings notes how its “sullen and sick” (21) appearance turns to one of intense malice. This suggestion of devilish intent is furthered by the halo of “red embers” (21) which appears around the creature at night. However its malignant ghostliness is not a traditional one in that it regularly appears during the day, and to Jennings’ horror, even when he is leading the morning service: The thing exhibited an atrocious determination to thwart me. It was with me in the church—in the reading desk—in the pulpit—within the communion rails. At last, it reached this extremity, that while I was reading to the congregation, it would spring upon the open book and squat there, so that I was unable to see the page. (23)

6 There have been various critical readings of this ghostly animal, its simian ancestry linked to caricatures of the Irish that were prevalent at the time, as well as its connections to Darwinism (Ledwon 12, Stoddardt 33), however perhaps the most

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striking quality of this figure is its more common association with laughter and comedy than the supernatural and the mixed effects it evokes. Le Fanu’s ghostly monkey is gruesomely funny and its terrifying presence eventually drives the Reverend to commit suicide. Such a mixture of humour and horror presents a challenge for an illustrator given the lack of scope for ambiguity and multiple effects in a drawing. Indeed, Cuneo’s picture of the Reverend and his monkey on the 1907 cover for the Newnes sixpenny novel edition of the story suggests that the comic gothic nature of the monkey was beyond the artist’s pen.

Cover of Newnes 1907 sixpenny novel edition of ‘Green Tea’, illustrations by Cyrus Cuneo

Permission granted to use image © The British Library Board, 012604.f.1/70

7 In Cuneo’s picture, the readers are presented with the illustrator’s monolithic interpretation of the text: that of a haunted man, who, with his haggard face twisted uncomfortably towards the monkey, his bulging, seemingly possessed eyes and his claw-like hand held up in the air, seems far more malicious than the small black monkey, in a supplicant position with its hand held out as if it were about to be attacked. Cuneo’s reading as depicted in his demonic looking Reverend fails to acknowledge any narrative sympathy for the persecuted “gentle ... kind” Jennings (30) who is the victim in the story and overlooks the malignancy of the spectral monkey. (It is ironic that red is used in both the background and the Reverend’s vestments, yet the little black monkey is bereft of his red eyes.) Most notably, however, there is nothing disturbingly comic or darkly humorous in this picture created for mass production as part of a cheap edition. Cuneo’s reading of the text, as depicted in his illustration, is a writerly version of Le Fanu’s readerly text. Whereas the ambiguities and incongruities in Le Fanu’s text nudge his readers towards filling in the gaps, such as that behind his choice of ghost and how to react to it, Cuneo’s text allows for no such ambiguities,

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particularly in his depiction of the monkey which is not funny, nor frightening, nor remotely ghost-like. Certainly in the case of this edition, it appears that the complexities of this comic gothic figure cannot be reduced to a simple picture.

“An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand”

8 An equally funny, or incongruous, haunting in a short story written eight years earlier is that of a white, fat aristocratic hand. The story itself is presented as a stand-alone chapter in Le Fanu’s 1861 novel The House by the Churchyard, and concerns the ghost of a hand which haunts the well-to-do tenants of the Tiled House. The first to see it is Mrs Prosser, the lady of the house. Le Fanu writes: [She] plainly saw a hand stealthily placed upon the stone window-sill outside, as if by some one beneath the window, at her right side, intending to climb up. There was nothing but the hand, which was rather short but handsomely formed, and white and plump, laid on the edge of the window-sill; and it was not a very young hand, but one aged, somewhere about forty, as she conjectured. (71)

9 Then the servants see it and are aware of its apparent intention to find some way of getting into the house. The cook sees “the same fat, but aristocratic—looking hand” and the maid sees “a white pudgy finger” (72) (obviously not belonging to someone who worked in the fields) pushing its way into an auger hole made in the window frame, in search of a fastening it could open.

10 The hand does finally succeed in coming indoors, leaving fingerprints in the dust of a parlour table and is later spotted in the upstairs bedrooms. The terror reaches its zenith when Mr Prosser discovers the same pale hand lying next to his wife’s face on her pillow. Here Le Fanu narrates the moment with a bathetic comparison between the hand and some sort of awful albino toad: Her face [was] motionless, white, and covered with a cold dew; and on the pillow, close beside her head, and just within the curtains, was, as he first thought, a toad-- but really the same fattish hand, the wrist resting on the pillow, and the fingers extended towards her temple. (75)

11 Certainly the device of a single (disembodied) hand is not new in narratives of horror and precursive examples can be found in Titus Andronicus (1589) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614) as well as later uses of this trope by Maupassant in “The Flayed Hand” (1875), and Jacob in “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902), however, rather than the traditional hand of glory, such as Maupassant’s “dried black hand, with yellow nails, the muscles exposed and traces of old blood on the bones” (864), Le Fanu’s hand is plump and white, and furthermore attached to a body, which is always, “by some crafty accident, hidden from view” (76). Its comic shape and the ingenious or “crafty” way by which its owner eludes detection by hiding behind a curtain, slipping through a door or remaining out of sight next to a window frame, adds a grotesque humour to the image and, like Jennings’ monkey, is an apt example of the writer’s predilection for “mixed effects” (Sage, Le Fanu’s Gothic 3). Le Fanu’s use of the seemingly illogical or nonsensical—why a man would be haunted by a monkey or why a ghost would only show its hand, adds a haunting absurdity to these two tales, where the reader searches for reason behind these comic scenarios.

12 There is a bathetic quality to Le Fanu’s description of the white hand on the pillow—the comparison is certainly to a reptile, but no serpent, just a garden toad with a rather

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unhealthy hue. The reduction of this haunting motif to that of a common amphibian found in local ponds and puddles gives it an everyday quality at odds with both its context of an account of the supernatural and an established narrative tradition of disembodied hands symbolising control beyond the grave, or literally mortmain. Originally referred to as Peri Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, by Alexander Pope, bathos is “a sudden transition from the elevated to the quotidian” (Stott 57) and Le Fanu’s tale appears to hover between these two different modes. The chapter begins in the discourse of ancient folk lore which has been passed down generations, narrated by the servant “Old Sally,” to the young Lilias late at night. Le Fanu opens by describing such stories as the one Sally will tell as “marvels, fabulae, what our ancestors called winter’s tales” and in the same paragraph goes on to heighten the intrigue by having the narrator appeal to the rational listener to find a solution to the mystery, confessing that he “can’t” (70). Much of the focus of the narrative is on the household’s reaction to the haunting hand, and when an unexplained handprint appears in the dust in the little parlour table, the maid’s terror is compared to that of Defoe’s mythologised figure in the comment that “the print of the naked foot in the sea sand did not frighten Robinson Crusoe half as much” (74). This remark both heightens the sense of mental torture and elevates the story by is grandiose comparison to a seminal novel of the previous century. In his study of the genre, Stott goes on to describe bathos as “the puncturing intrusion of reality that deflates” (56) and, having set up this story of folkloric horror, this is exactly what Le Fanu does when he introduces a “white toad” on his wife’s pillow, or refers to the hand at an earlier point as “fattish” or “pudgy”, with the narrator’s risible descriptions creating a bathetic twist to this tale of horror.

“A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter”

13 A more traditionally horrific figure of the dead, and another “grim[ly] absurd” one (Sullivan 37), is Minheer Vanderhausen, who appears in Le Fanu’s 1839 short story “A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter.” Vanderhausen’s bodily condition, his telltale signs of having taken a cure for syphilis—his bluish skin, his black lips, combined with his unblinking eyes, and unmoving chest indicate that he is literally the living dead. His “long discoloured fangs” (128) give a vampiric finishing touch to le Fanu’s theatrical caricature. As well as giving Vanderhausen such an extravagantly grotesque appearance, Le Fanu also uses two distinct comic modes in his description of the character: firstly the conversational, ironic tone in the aside that the peculiarly static nature of Vanderhausen’s chest and eyes “when told may appear trifling” (129), and secondly, pure slapstick in the clumsy way in which Vanderhausen moves, as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to “the management of bodily machinery,” reminding his hosts of an old wooden painted figure that stands in the church of St Laurence in Rotterdam (129).

14 Minheer Vanderhausen has come to the house of the famous painter Gerard Douw in order to ask for the hand of his teenage niece, Rose. Rose is an orphan and has no dowry to offer a suitor, however Vanderhausen is not seeking one, rather he is offering the young woman’s extended family riches beyond their dreams—an offer Douw promptly accepts. Rose is duly married to Vanderhausen and goes to live in Rotterdam with him. She is never heard of again until she appears at her uncle’s house in a terrible state, “wild and haggard, and pale with exhaustion and terror ... [falling] senseless on

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the floor,” apparently having escaped her corpselike husband, now dressed like one herself in a “white woollen wrapper, made close about the neck, and descending to the very ground” (131).

15 The episode which follows her arrival is one of pantomime comedy and pure farce (Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares 43). When the distraught Rose arrives, Douw and his apprentice Schalken attempt to calm her down, giving her food and drink and calling for a minister of God to visit the house immediately. They manage to persuade her to rest a while in her uncle’s bedroom, which she agrees to do on the one condition that she is never to be left alone, not even for a moment, or she will be “lost for ever” (132).

16 This condition, or rather supplication, is made a few times to prepare the reader for what is to follow, as is the delaying cataphoric reference to the importance of the reader “distinctly understand[ing] all the circumstances of the event which we are about imperfectly to describe” and “the relative positions of [all] the parties” concerned in the incident (133). Thus in what I read as another instance of metafictive awareness, not unlike the foregrounding of the apparently “trifling” features of Vanderhausen’s appearance, the audience/reader is set up for the ensuing climatic scene. The priest arrives and talks with Schalken in the anteroom which leads to Douw’s bedroom. Douw at this moment is in the bedroom with his niece and can see the two men talking quietly through the open bedroom door. There is a gust of wind; the candles in the anteroom are blown out and Douw leaves the bedroom for a second with his own candle to bring some light to the men, forgetting Rose’s repeated injunctions. At this very moment the interconnecting door slams shut “as if swung to by a strong blast of wind” (134), and although Rose has already jumped up and darted after her uncle, she is too late and is trapped inside the bedroom. In a pantomime slapstick tradition, where an object plays a central role in the comedy of the moment (Stott 75), the story becomes that of three men versus a closed door. While Schalken, Douw and the priest wrestle with the handle, “shriek after shriek [comes] from the inner chamber with all the piercing loudness of despairing terror” terminating in a cry “so long and piercing and agonised as to be scarcely human” (134). Only after these cries are followed by a death-like silence do the men finally force the door, to find the room empty and the window over the canal open. The reader is not told of the plop Rose must have made as she went into the water, but the sound can almost be heard with the final tableau of the three men looking down at some suspicious ripples which indicate that a heavy mass has recently entered the water.

Comic Failure

17 Douw’s absentmindedness is a moment of comic failure to keep his promise never to leave his niece alone—a promise he has made a few times that evening. Through various cataphoric references to what Douw should not do—Rose’s requests “Do not— do not leave me for a moment” (132), “For God’s sake …do not stir from beside me!” (133) and, just a few paragraphs later, noting her “repeated injunctions” (133), Le Fanu builds up a readerly expectation that this vital appeal will not be met. When she is (seemingly inevitably) left on her own and reclaimed by her husband, the terror of the moment is mixed with a comedy rooted in the slapstick failure to open the door. Laughter as a response to failure involves a certain detachment, or as Bergson argues of comedy in general, it requires a “momentary anaesthesia of the heart” where the

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reader becomes “a disinterested spectator” (118). The reader’s horror at the idea of a girl married to a corpse for money is at odds with the comedy of her uncle’s failure to protect her, with the latter prompting an intellectual rather than emotional response, and a temporary suspension of sympathy for Rose.

18 In a letter to Horace Mann, Walpole argued “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel” (246) and in “Schalken the Painter,” Le Fanu has his reader do both in a narrative which evokes terror, pathos and a certain critical amusement at Douw’s ineptitude at saving his niece in what would have been some form of atonement for having sold her to Vanderhausen, or the living dead. Furthermore Le Fanu’s narrator takes care to discourage a monolithic reading of a typically morbidly gothic tale of female entrapment by explicitly reminding his audience of the humour interwoven into the tale. Midway through the narrative he reflects on the purpose and intended effect of the story in a manner not unlike Walpole’s 1765 preface. He interrupts the narrative to say “I have no sentimental scenes to describe, no cruelty of guardians, or magnanimity of wards, or agonies of lovers. The record I have to make is one of sordidness, levity and interest” (130, my emphasis). Whilst courting the involvement or interest of the reader he also looks for the detached, light-hearted response needed to recognise the humour in the tale and the comedy of Douw’s failure.

19 “Green Tea” is also a story of comic failure. The narrator of the tale uses the notes of a certain Doctor Hesselius, who was approached by Jennings, the latter aware of his deteriorating mental state and growing suicidal tendencies brought on by the irregular but unshakeable presence of this simian spectre. Hesselius, as the narrative evinces, takes down copious notes and promises to investigate the case thoroughly, assuring him that his condition is an illness dependent upon purely physical causes. Such is the doctor’s self-belief, he promises to give a complete diagnosis, and one presumes cure, once he has time to go over the man’s symptoms in detail. In order to complete this study, Hesselius rents lodgings for the night about two miles away, where there would not be “the slightest possibility of intrusion or distraction” (27), even though he has just told Jennings to send for him immediately should the monkey reappear. Whilst Le Fanu does not set up the doctor’s failure as explicitly as that of Douw, Hesselius does explain that the servant who had been sent to get him could not find anyone who could give him an address (28) and as a result, Jennings, alone at the mercy of the spectral monkey, is induced to cut his own throat. This, combined with Hesselius’ admission in the prologue that he has never practised surgery as he had lost two fingers as the result of “a trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife” (3), creates the picture of a man not unfamiliar with mishaps.

20 Rather than an atmosphere of tragedy, there is an overriding sense of Hesselius’ defensive annoyance that he was not able to prove his theory about the dangers of excessive consumption of green tea. The final chapter, entitled “Conclusion,” is in the form of a letter Hesselius sent to Professor Van Loo, defending his record. Hesselius irritatedly opens by reminding him of his past successes in treating such maladies and writes of Van Loo himself having suffered from a similar affliction, asking “Who, under God, cured you?” (31). The mild oath signals his anger and this conclusion of combative apologia suggests that he feels threatened by damage Jennings’ suicide may do to his reputation and perhaps has had his inaction questioned. Hesselius refers to his fifty- seven cases of successfully sealing a patient’s inner eyes and laments Jennings’ case did not become his fifty-eighth (31). Hesselius, a man who carries copies of the minor

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treatise he had printed, Essays on Metaphysical Medicine, to impress any new acquaintances—he unfailingly references it at various points in his account of Jennings’ case despite its obvious inadequacy as a guide to the man’s condition—is comically unaware of how his inflated ego distorts his judgement. Apart from his green-tea diagnosis, Hesselius gives a series of excuses for Jennings’ condition and death. He argues that the man had not formally become his patient when he took his life, absolving himself of any responsibility; that the Reverend’s father had also seen a ghost and these visions were a hereditary tendency; and that Jennings’ own study of pagan metaphysics had made him vulnerable to this type of hallucinatory experience (32). He even adds as a one-line afterthought in the final paragraph that the man suffered from a hereditary suicidal mania, although there is nothing in the text to suggest that this is the case (32). Indeed, as Sullivan notes, if anyone needs therapy here, it is the good doctor himself (28). Whilst Le Fanu does not provide the slapstick comedy of failure found in “Schalken,” there is a wry undercurrent in this portrait of a flawed doctor who fails to save the persecuted Jennings, or recognise his own part in the reverend’s suicide.

21 Horner and Zlosnik note that the gothic’s dialogue with scientific progress has often shown a propensity for the comic turn (“Gothic and Comic Turn,” 17) and “Green Tea” highlights the inadequacies of the medical profession; here Hesselius’ constant references to the triumph of medical research only serve to undercut the reliability of scientific enquiry by associating it with his ineffectual dealing of Jennings’ case. In Le Fanu’s “The Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand,” Mrs Prosser discovers the true source of her baby son’s paroxysms of terror when she sees the white hand sitting by the head of her child as he lies in his cot, debunking the doctors’ diagnosis that this was a case of incipient water on the brain (75). In the same story, Le Fanu also satirises the Victorian reliance on empiricist methodologies and visual evidence, when Mr Prosser, on being told of the fingerprints in the dust of the parlour table, insists that all the members of the household have their fingerprints made in order to identify the culprit. Of course, there is no match. A similar misguided reliance on the corporal, the scientific to deal with spiritual matters can be seen when Prosser opens the front door in response to the incessant knocking by the ghostly hand, armed with a loaded pistol and a strong cane to defend himself (against a ghost).

22 Satire “aims to criticise or censure people and ideas through the use of humour” (Stott 199) and both “Green Tea” and “The Ghost of a Hand” comically challenge the neat epistemological truths modern science appeared to present, particularly in the case of medical science. Le Fanu satirises the Victorians’ reliance on empiricism to explain and live in the world around them with the Horatian tone of a tolerant, amused spectator.3 This is particularly evident when comparing the different narrative treatments of Hesselius and Old Sally who both relate the story of a haunting. Whereas “Green Tea” is framed by a prologue and conclusion which allude to Hesselius’ failure as a surgeon and as Jennings’ last hope, the opening of “The Ghost of a Hand” begins with an indulgence of Old Sally’s belief that the Tiled House could well be haunted. There is a certain respect for Sally, the teller of “fabulae,” which is quite distinct from the presentation of Hesselius and his story of an aborted research case. Whilst Sally and Hesselius are simply characters in two short stories, they are sufficiently representative to indicate a narrative sympathy for a belief in the existence of the supernatural and the

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otherworldly, and to satirise the notion that all such things can be explained and resolved via a scientific approach.

Unreliable Narrators and Multiple Framing

23 The readerly detachment prompted by the competing effects of horror and humour in the three narratives discussed here is furthered by Le Fanu’s telescopic, unreliable narration in each story. In all three cases, the story is told by a heterodiegetic narrator, the tale second or third hand. “Green Tea” is narrated by an editor, who adapts Dr Hesselius’ notes, “omitt[ing] some passages, and shorten[ing] others, and disguise[ing] names” (4) to engage the reader. “A Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand” is the retelling of a story told by a local woman, Sally, who had the story passed down to her, and “A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter” appears in Le Fanu’s 1880 collection The Purcell Papers, a series of stories collected by the Catholic priest Father Purcell, for publication in the Protestant Dublin University Magazine. In the case of the Schalken story, it is told to Father Purcell by a captain Vandael, when the former asked about a picture in the captain’s house. Vandael’s painting is by Schalken, Douw’s apprentice, supposedly of the young Rose Velderkaust and when the men discuss the portrait, Captain Vandael is prompted to tell Father Purcell Rose’s story.

24 Kevin Sullivan remarks on le Fanu’s skill in “distancing his material ... which, while not increasing the sense of the probable, tends to lessen the reader’s concern about the improbable” (12, 15), to which I would add he nudges the reader towards picking up the comedy which lies in the ambiguities and ironies of the text situated between the various diegetic levels of the tale. Hesselius’ intention of scientific explanation is at odds with the aim of the editor, who adapts the story to “amuse or horrify a lay reader” (4). Schalken’s portrait of Rose is his text or testament that she was a real person whom he knew well, but Purcell’s description of Vanderhausen with his stiff movements and “indescribably odd” (122) appearance belong to the fantasy world of slapstick pantomime. Old Sally’s tale of the ghost of a hand is told, on request, one night to lull her young charge, Lilias, to sleep, yet her references to written witness testimonies and the narrator’s own contribution that he had met a cousin of the Prossers’ himself, and was told of how the baby had become a man plagued with “extreme anxiety and horror” (76), suggest that this is a verified account of the disruptive and damaging effects of a haunting, rather than a gentle bedtime story. Such structuring offers paradoxically competing narrative purposes, which, fuelled by the readerly detachment encouraged by Le Fanu’s humour, lend the tales a haunting quality in their “progressively murky” (Sullivan 52) development. Le Fanu’s satire, absurdities, ambiguities and lack of closure create readerly doubt and as Jack Sullivan notes “It is the quality of not knowing that makes us uneasy” (132). Certainly, Le Fanu’s comic hauntings—where “funny” is both humorous and disturbing—and ambiguous narration present a challenge to the neat resolution that one would expect in a Victorian detective, adventure or even horror story. If the reader cannot accept the bumbling Hesselius’ diagnosis of the case, what indeed is the cause of Jennings’ monkey? If Schalken the painter is not about the cruel treatment of Rose—what is it about, and how can the story be one of “levity”? Le Fanu’s mingling of horror and humour reminds us of the ghost story’s function to entertain. The genre’s origins lie in an oral tradition, more often than not part of an evening’s entertainment, and Le Fanu’s ironies, his

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bathos, his metafictive awareness are shared jokes which further the sense of companionable storytelling amongst a group of friends. Although certainly written to terrify and unnerve his readers, Le Fanu’s ghost stories were created to entertain and, rather like Walpole, Le Fanu considered that making his readers/listeners smirk was just as important as making them shudder.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillam, 1913. Print

Carroll, Noël. “Horror and Humour.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999): 145-60. Print.

Cuddon, J. A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1999. Print.

Jacobs, W.W. “The Monkey’s Paw.” The Lady from the Barge. London and New York: Harper, 1906. Print.

Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. “Dead Funny: Gothic, Gender and the Comic Turn.” Anglophonia: French Journal of English Studies 15 (2004): 185-98. Print.

---. Gothic and the Comic Turn. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.

---. “The Comic Gothic.” A New Companion to The Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Hoboken: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012. Print.

Ledwon, Leonora. “Darwin’s Ghosts: The Influence of Darwinism on the Nineteenth-Century Ghost Story.” Proteus 6.2 (1989): 10-16. Print.

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. “A Strange Event in the life of Schalken the Painter.” The Purcell Papers, Vols 1, 2 & 3. 1861. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006. Print.

---. “Chapter Twelve, Some Odd Facts about the Tiled House—Being an Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand” The House by the Churchyard. 1861. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2007. Print.

---. “Green Tea.” In a Glass Darkly. 1839. Ware: Wordsworth, 1995. Print.

Maupassant, Guy de. “The Flayed Hand.” The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant. 1875. Portland: The Floating Press, 2015. Print.

McDermott, William Coffman. “The Ape in Greek Literature.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 66 (1935): 165-76. Print.

---. “The Ape in Roman Literature.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 67 (1936): 148-67. Print.

Morreall, John. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humour. New York: State U of New York P, 1987. Print.

Napier, Elizabeth, R. The Failure of Gothic. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Print.

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Pope, Alexander. Peri Bathous: of the Art of Sinking in Poetry. London: Printed for B. Motte, 1727. Print.

Sage, Victor. “Gothic Laughter: Farce and Horror in Five Texts.” Gothick Origins and Innovations. Eds. Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 190-203. Print.

---. Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. 1594. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Stoddardt, Helen. “‘The Precautions of Nervous People are Infectious’: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Symptomatic Gothic.” The Modern Language Review 86.1 (1991): 19-34. Print.

Stott, Andrew McConnell. Comedy. London: Routledge, 2014. Print.

Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio UP, 1978. Print.

Sullivan, Kevin. “Sheridan Le Fanu: The Purcell Papers, 1838-40.” Irish U Review 2.1 (1972): 5-19. Print.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story. Second Edition. 1769. London: Penguin, 2010. Print.

---. The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford: Including Numerous Letters Now First Published from the Original Manuscripts, Volume I. Ed. J. Wright. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1842. Print.

Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. 1614. London: Methuen Drama, 2013. Print.

Williams, Anne. “Monstrous Pleasures: Horace Walpole, Opera, and the Conception of Gothic.” Gothic Studies 2.1 (2000): 104-18. Print.

Woolf, Ellen. An “Anarchy in the Mind and in the Heart”: Narrating Anglo-Ireland. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006. Print.

Wright, John. ed. The Letters of Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford. London: R. Bentley, 1842. Print.

NOTES

1. Walpole writes “Let me ask if his tragedies of Hamlet and Julius Caesar would not lose a considerable share of their spirit and wonderful beauties, if the humour of the grave-diggers, the fooleries of Polonius, and the clumsy jests of the Roman citizens, were omitted, or vested in heroics?” (11). 2. For a discussion of the ape in Roman and Greek literature see McDermott’s essays. 3. “To simplify the complex development of the genre, we can say that Horace and Juvenal are the two father figures of satire. Horace is the tolerant, urbane and amused spectator of the human scene; Juvenal is bitter, misanthropic and consumed with indignation” (Cuddon 707).

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ABSTRACTS

Pour apprécier le « gothique comique » de certaines nouvelles de Le Fanu, le lecteur déconcerté et déstabilisé par la combinaison d’horreur et d’humour qu’il y trouve doit équilibrer absorption et recul critique. Cet article s’attache à la façon dont le Fanu – afin d’amuser et de terrifier ses lecteurs – recourt à l’incongru et à l’absurde, au sublime et au ridicule et à la comédie de l’échec dans trois de ses nouvelles : “A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter”, “An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand” et “Green Tea”. L’humour, combiné avec des structurations narratives originales, produit des effets mixtes, parfois paradoxaux, qui renforcent la qualité ambiguë de ses nouvelles et viennent déjouer les attentes du lecteur.

AUTHORS

SARAH WHITEHEAD Dr Sarah Whitehead teaches at Kingston University, UK. She has published articles on the short story, Edith Wharton and modernist writing. Her research interests include the history of punctuation, the comic gothic and the modernist short story.

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“Effy’s Passion for the Mother Who Had Not Loved her was the Supernatural Thing”: Haunting as an expression of attachment in May Sinclair’s “The Intercessor”

Leslie de Bont

1 May Sinclair’s (1863-1946) seminal use of the psychological concept of the stream of consciousness in literary criticism should not overshadow the original way she used the liminal, mysticism, or psychoanalytical theory in her fiction. In the early 1910s, she was a fairly successful novelist, who was engaged in the Suffrage Movement (Raitt, May Sinclair 77; Boll, Miss May Sinclair 61-73), but she was also a psychology scholar. In 1913, she contributed to the foundation of the short-lived, yet ground-breaking Medico- Psychological Clinic in London, along with Dr Jessie Murray and Julia Turner, with whom she developed pioneering psychoanalytical research that included innovative reflections on art-therapy, early translations of Freud and Jung, and publications on the sublimation of the Libido1 (Boll, “Clinic” 312-17; Martindale 177-200; Raitt, “Psychoanalysis” 63-85). Interestingly, feminism and clinical psychology are actually two of the main structuring dynamics of “The Intercessor,” one of May Sinclair’s first ghost stories, which tells the tale of Garvin, “a hunter of old things” (114) who encounters a child ghost that returns to his bedroom several nights in a row. The ghost, named Effy Falshaw, was his lodgers’ first born; she was “left by herself night and day” (170) and had drowned three years before Garvin’s arrival. Full of signs, symbols and symptoms, Effy gradually becomes a spectrality, in the Derridean sense (see Derrida 121). As such, she conveys a new type of epistemology inspired by the case-based research initiated by Freud, which sets Garvin on a psychoanalytical quest. With Garvin, we realise that Effy’s haunting is caused by a strained relation with her neglecting mother. Indeed, the child ghost later revisits several of the key places of her difficult relationship with her mother (the bed, the staircase, and the tank in the

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garden). As a result, her haunting appears as a peculiar re-enactment of the failed mother-daughter link.

2 This paper argues that the emphasis on the child ghost’s need for maternal recognition can be read as an anticipation of John Bowlby’s attachment theory (1958). Effy’s haunting is indeed represented as a logical abreaction, while her attachment to her unloving mother is deemed more problematic, as the text provides a thorough anamnesis of Sarah Falshaw’s personal story, in the manner of Freud’s case narratives. Through a displacement of the supernatural onto a child’s longing for her mother, haunting becomes a tool for a psychological exploration that incorporates the specificities of feminine psychoanalysis to a Gothic aesthetics. The story also triggers a reflection on language, on fear, and on being haunted as a peculiar form of intuitive and affective knowledge; it also sketches other experimentations with early modernist metafiction as the text itself seems haunted by several “hypotexts” (Genette 7-14, my translation), among which Kipling’s “They,” Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Haunting Hypotexts and Spectral Intertextuality

3 In the early twentieth century, May Sinclair was a renowned Brontë scholar. She was the author of nearly a dozen introductions to the Everyman’s reedition of the sisters’ novels and even published a full-length essay that revisits the three sisters’ lives and works.2 Such scholarly interest was quickly turned into an intertextual influence. In Sinclair’s “The Intercessor,” the Yorkshire setting and remote farmhouse, the arrival of a lodger who finds a date and the initials of the house’s founders, EF, carved above a wooden entrance door (116) and the child ghost are clearly reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, especially since the initials are also those of Effy Falshaw, the child ghost whose presence is anchored within the very walls of the house she haunts. From the outset, the ghost’s haunting is thus clearly related to family history, temporality and narration.

4 Interestingly, Effy’s spectrality also has a distinctive spatial dimension as it is constantly associated to “the evil of the house” that “knew no sun, only degrees of twilight, dark and clear” (181-82). But Effy’s presence, as the reader realizes, is not the cause or root of evil and rather is the consequence. Sinclair’s depiction of places and locations is always very unsettling: a later novel, Far End, named after the idealised house that the protagonists shortly inhabit revolves around their affective relation to their dwelling place, which (in the characters’ minds and dreams) threatens to “haunt them for the rest of their lives” (94). The novel, by no means a ghost story, suggests a psychoanalytical rereading of E.M. Forster’s Howards End.

5 Intertextuality is omnipresent in Sinclair. The reference to Effy’s favourite tree in the nearby garden, the “ash-tree” will also come to play a central and haunting part in Sinclair’s 1917 war novel, The Tree of Heaven. The name Effy also haunts a later story by Sinclair, “If the Dead Knew” (1923), in which Wilfrid, the protagonist, has to speak to the ghost of his mother in order to be able to marry his fiancé, called Effie. In both stories, the name Effy incarnates, against the characters’ will, the impossibility of future; it also evokes the haunting defeat of language and the overwhelming return of darker forces. More generally, Effy’s presence never fails to transport the text into the realm of the spectral, in which everything (trees, spaces, language and even initials,

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names, and onomastics)3 becomes full of meaning, signs, symbols, and also symptoms. Sinclair’s text thus does not only explore haunting as a phenomenon; it also focuses on its hermeneutics.

6 In “The Intercessor,” a constant play on presence and absence is also used to induce haunting as a spectral motif, with the particular play on the presence and absence of children being the most revealing example. Indeed, Garvin seeks to find peace and quiet in order to write the final version of his historical book on the region and thus specifically mentions that he wishes to have “no children in the house” (115 and 123). However, Mrs Falshaw is pregnant and gives birth to a stillborn baby at the end of Garvin’s stay. In addition, Garvin also cohabits with Onny, Mrs Falshaw’s young adolescent niece, whose undetermined age makes Garvin worry that she may have uttered these child-like cries of terrors. Mrs Falshaw’s pregnancy and Onny’s presence in the house point at the narration’s constant play on words, definitions and borders. Similarly, Effy’s haunting becomes a dense motif that helps uncover traces and infinite ramifications of her own story. As such, “The Intercessor” might also be read as a rewriting of Kipling’s “They,” with a shift from the anonymous plural in Kipling’s story to a detailed anamnesis and medical history in Sinclair’s text. In “The Intercessor,” the haunting child has a full name and a medical record and, despite being called a “it” by several secondary characters, she is referred to as a “she” by Garvin throughout the text, anchoring her existence within the same realm as the other characters. Similarly, all the important figures in her life, her parents, her cousin and even her doctor are asked about her past life so that Garvin can track down, if not restore, her life narrative. By contrast, “they” is the first word of Sinclair’s story, it is capitalized (at least in the first edition) and refers to the anonymous villagers who directed Garvin to the Falshaws.

7 Unlike the anonymous crowd of dead children in Kipling’s story, Sinclair’s text seems to rely on the ghost’s materiality and individual difference, if not on its traces and différance (Derrida 95). In Sinclair’s story, Effy’s presence is first made manifest through sounds (130-32) heard from behind a locked door, but haunting is quickly turned into a visual appearance (137) that gradually initiates interaction (139), and eventually indicates hidden meaning. Like the ghost-children in Kipling’s “They,” Effy is not a scary ghost, at least for the protagonist and for the reader. On page 138, Effy is indeed more frightened than she is frightening, and details like “her little naked feet” (145), especially with the play on rhythm and consonants, rather convey childlike playfulness and vulnerability. Symbolically, the only white sheets we encounter are those used to cover, “shrouded like the dead, … a child’s little chair and a child’s cot” (149), thereby reinstating the white sheet symbolism as that of the physicality of death, rather than being reminiscent of the fantasies, fear, and spookiness associated to Victorian representations of ghosts (Davies 19-23). Haunting, without fear as a barrier, is thus constructed as a tell-tale sign that directly indicates that meaning should be uncovered.

8 According to Garvin, Effy the ghost is almost a character of “flesh and blood” (146 and 160).4 Yet, her presence is mostly depicted through the emotions that she displays and that the other characters experience in her haunting presence. Indeed, Effy’s haunting first seems to depend on her own emotion and suffering: There were degrees in the clearness of the primal manifestation; degrees which as he made it out, corresponded to the intensity of the emotion, the suffering behind it. The child’s form gathered and lost substance. At times it was of an extreme

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tenuity, suggesting nothing tangible. At times it had not only the colour, but the pressure of flesh and blood. (145-46)

9 Then, very quickly, Garvin, who seeks to interact with the ghost, becomes aware of Effy’s reaction to his own feelings: The ghost “had parted with its horror from the moment when he perceived that it was responsive to pity and accessible to his succor” (144-45). Even more interestingly, affective interactions occur (e.g. crying [130 and 138] or cuddling [139]) with Garvin himself whose presence seems to comfort the frightened child ghost.

Fear, Language, and Precognition: Becoming the Intercessor

10 For all the characters in “The Intercessor,” haunting as a motif is thus deeply rooted into both an individual and a social dimension. In the story, Garvin becomes the intercessor because “he [is] not afraid” of Effy (139 and 155), which has several interesting consequences on his relations with the other characters. He is indeed quickly accepted and considered as a man of value (143). Mrs Falshaw’s reluctance in having a lodger/intruder utterly vanishes, as she specifically calls on “Mr Garvin” and eventually sends for him on several occasions (157, 186, 193). Garvin’s supposed fearlessness is clearly associated to a form of intuitive knowledge. Haunted by his new lodging, and haunted by the ghost’s mystery (rather than by its presence), he has indeed a vision of new characters (169), a man and a woman. While he recognizes the man’s spectral appearance as Mr Falshaw, he only later discovers that the woman actually corresponds to Rhoda, Falshaw’s former mistress, and that he had had an intuitive precognition of the events.

11 This relation between fearlessness and precognitive knowledge is actually in keeping with several of Sinclair’s theories. In her 1917 philosophical essay, A Defence of Idealism (and in later novels), she describes the experience of WW1 soldiers as a sublimation of fear, an absolute experience that enabled them to reach ultimate consciousness,5 a perspective that is already at stake in her 1911 story: Things showed solid and distinct. Something seemed to shift in Garvin’s brain with the sudden shifting of his body, and, as he stood there he was aware of something happening before him. He couldn’t say what it was that happened. He only knew that it was bound to happen; it had been foreshadowed by his fear. He knew what that sudden shifting in his brain meant. He had simply gone over the borderland of fear and was in the gripping centre. They were two there, a man and a woman … The terror they evoked surpassed all fear of the intangible … It was monstrous, unintelligible; it lay outside the order of his experience. He seemed, in this shifting of his brain, to have become a creature of vague memory, and appalling possibilities of fear. (162-63. Emphasis mine)

12 Intense fear, experienced for the first time, works here as an indicator (“foreshadowed by his fear” / “possibilities of fear”) that needs to be overcome and explored. The term “borderland” is also interesting as it is the word that Sinclair uses in her 1917 essay whenever she wants to stress her hesitation regarding parapsychology as an alternative means to know and experience the world (Sinclair, Defence 250, 260, 267 or 287).6 With Garvin as an intercessor, borders between the familiar and the unknown can indeed be crossed so as to explore the issues and deconstruct the haunting process.

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13 We can thus rephrase one of the opening remarks of the text that introduces Garvin as a hunter, or rather a haunter of old things (114). In the opening scene, Garvin, a historian, is referred to as a skilful hunter of old stories, which he consciously and intuitively tracks down; yet, in the story he does more than publicising old tales and habits: by contrast with the other characters’ uneasy silence and lack of words, he is determined to try and grasp Effy’s story, by relentlessly putting his own words upon it, analysing and trying to understand both the chain of events and its implications. Effy’s haunting presence, along with Garvin’s haunting of Effy’s story, is reminiscent of the importance and power of language and of self-narration, as Garvin even gives words to other characters whose haunting is, by contrast, “vague and imperfect, discovering nothing” (161).

14 Such emphasis on Garvin’s linguistic abilities does not solely work as a metafictional reminder or as a mere illustration of Sinclair’s interest in the occult. It also harks back to her keen interest in psychoanalysis and in the talking cure, namely in the role played by the patient’s own words and narration in his or her path towards self- analysis, and in the importance of the therapist’s ability to guide, with words, the patient towards breakthroughs and discoveries. Garvin’s fearlessness, his linguistic abilities and his peculiar access to knowledge secure his position as the intercessor between mother and child, between the characters and their experience, and of course between characters and readers in a way that is reminiscent of Freud’s own position in his most famous case histories.7 Indeed, Garvin’s linguistic finesse and persistence are coupled with a peculiar form of empathy, as “he had been made the vehicle of that spirit; he had been possessed, divinely coerced by Effy.” As a result, he has “no doubt that he had shared to some extent the child’s malady” (183). It is thus precisely because Garvin accepts to be haunted by the child, to approach the child’s experience with a form of sublimated fear, that he is capable of haunting her story and of eventually becoming the intercessor.

15 In Kipling’s “They,” the narrator’s interest in the children is not precisely worded until the last part of the story. By contrast, Effy’s character is precisely striking because her ghost condition is known and accepted almost right from the start. In addition, Garvin, like Freud with his patients, actively seeks, and eventually manages, to solve the mystery behind what he sees and hears (in his words: to “construct the child’s history” [147]). The supernatural, as the story tells us, lies not so much in Effy’s actual presence as in the characters’ behaviour: “Effy’s passion for the mother who had not loved her was the Supernatural thing” (183). Other examples of “Supernatural thing[s]” could be found in Garvin’s peculiar abilities, but also in the Falshaws’ “evil consciences” (181), which, as the reader gradually understands, also come to designate a whole series of attitudes and events that are condemned by the text (Mrs Falshaw’s selfishness, hypocrisy and neglect, and Mr Falshaw’s powerlessness and cowardice, among others). On one occasion, Effy also witnessed Mr Falshaw’s encounter with his mistress, which Luke Thurston analyses as a Freudian traumatic “primal scene”8 (121). Interestingly, the child ghost thus appears as the victim of her parents’ misdoings and is haunted by their behaviour.

16 With Effy as a patient, Garvin’s attempt to help her reconstruct her life-story follows some of the principles of a psychoanalytical cure. One of the central tenets of psychoanalysis, laid out by Freud and Breuer’s in their 1895 Study on Hysteria, is the necessary identification of the event or chain of events that caused the disorder.

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Garvin’s role as an intercessor thus articulates functions that both belong to priesthood —spiritual guidance, reassurance—and to psychoanalytical therapy (to the extent that he helps Effy put words on taboos and helps Mrs Falshaw face her contradictions and unconscious fears). As a consequence, Effy’s haunting appears as a quest for a constructed narrative in itself. Her return as a ghost is explained by her dependence, inherent to childhood and infancy, and by an unsolved issue related to the events that preceded her death (which the Falshaws tried to silence). What is at stake is the ghost’s trauma and pain, as much as the surviving relatives’ need for an intercessor to help them come to terms with the events. Like Garvin, Effy haunts and is being haunted.

17 Coping with loss is a recurring theme in Sinclair’s fiction: mourning work often induces a radical change in the characters, as it is often represented as a supernatural event or ability, especially in her shorter fiction. Johnson underlines that in The Tree of Heaven (1917), “Veronica develops a psychic, telepathic power both taking on the suffering of others … and telepathically healing others” (Johnson, “Mourning” 92), which Garvin may have prefigured. Effy’s spectral presence can thus also be read as both a sign of her mother’s “unresolved mourning” (Johnson, “Mourning” 83) and as an anticipation of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915), with the mother and the child combining, or rather challenging, both sides of Freud’s distinction.

Haunting Maternity

18 The question of who is haunting who in “The Intercessor” is not an easy one. Indeed, Mrs Falshaw is not only haunted by her dead child; she is herself represented, first metaphorically, as a haunting figure not only for Effy, but also for her husband and for Garvin who observes that: … portions of her face and body thus appeared superficially illuminated, while the bulk of her became part of the darkness. Garvin was deeply aware of her face and of her eyes, which were fixed on him with an intolerable hunger. (157)

19 As a nearly dislocating pregnant body, she appears as a very ambiguous character whose strangeness might also be perceived as a means of expression or as a mode of being. This is also what the parallel uses of the word “impulse” might suggest: on page 121, the term first describes her tendency to hide in the shade (“the impulse of the pregnant woman to hide herself”), while on page 150, it refers to Garvin’s tendency to make people talk and to research information, suggesting a key difference in character or habit between them. Her “intolerable hunger” for Garvin and for his interceding abilities, as well as for his access to knowledge, clearly associates her to the physical, the immediate and the infra-verbal. It thus stands in sharp contrast with the intercessor’s linguistic, empathetic and precognitive powers.

20 Unlike other maternal figures in Sinclair (see Philips and de Bont, “Être femme” 10), Mrs Falshaw’s pregnancy seems a rather debilitating, if not threatening perspective as she is constantly haunted by the possible death of her foetus. This terrifying event eventually happens as the narrator states, rather ambiguously, that “Mrs Falshaw was delivered of a dead child” (191), with the passive voice that tells a bit more than childbirth. The stillborn baby seems to induce extreme maternal behaviour in Sarah Falshaw: she refuses to let it be buried and stays in bed with the corpse (the text says “it” [194] while interestingly Sarah refers to the new baby as “Effy”). In a rather horrifying scene that might echo Agnes’s inability to breastfeed in Lewis’s The Monk,

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Sarah Falshaw tries to breastfeed her dead child and worries that it “does not want to suck” (195). This short passage contrasts with several earlier and later scenes of breastfeeding in Sinclair. Indeed, even though Sinclair constantly challenges the iconicity of the Madonna and child, The Tysons (78) and Mary Olivier (3-4) clearly represent the physicality and the sensual pleasure induced by breastfeeding in either the infant or the mother.

21 Through such focus, the story also anticipates John Bowlby’s attachment theory, which was developed in the 1950s. While Freud referred to the “tender current” of the sexual drive (which might have opened the way for Bowlby’s investigations), neither psychoanalysis nor Victorian and pre-Freudian psychologies mention attachment at all. 9 Freud’s “object-cathexis” (Freud, “Mourning” 245 and 259) was perhaps slightly closer to contemporary attachment theories, but Bowlby’s focus on the child-caregiver interactions at early ages aimed to depart from psychoanalytical approaches. Instead, Bowlby defined attachment as a crucial and formative bond that serves biological and evolutionary purposes: The child’s tie to his mother [can be] discussed without any reference to sexual or any other sort of social behaviour. Instead, attachment is presented as a system of behaviour having its own form of internal organisation and serving its own function. (Bowlby, Attachment 229)

22 Bowlby added that attachment is characterized by specific behaviours, such as the child’s seeking proximity with the attachment figures when upset or threatened. He also showed that attachment behaviour in adults towards the child includes responding sensitively and appropriately to the child’s needs. In Sinclair’s story, the emphasis on the complex mother-daughter link, through the recurring use of adjectives such as “cruel,” qualifying the mother’s neglect of her child (178-79), clearly suggests that this is where we should search for the reasons of Effy’s haunting. Effy is indeed first seen crying in front of her mother’s closed bedroom door as Garvin observes that “her suffering was somehow connected with the closing of Mrs Falshaw’s door” (147). Haunting is represented as a form of longing for maternal proximity—and then, true to Bowlby’s later theories, for any form of proximity (with other caretaking figures, first Rhoda, and then Garvin). This haunting for contact is presented from the young child’s point of view: It [Effy] advanced, solicitous, adventurous. It put out its hand and, with a touch that must have fallen light as thistle-down, it stroked its mother’s face. Mrs Falshaw shrank slightly and put up her hands to ward it off, and the child slid back again. Garvin cried out. “Don’t send her away—don’t, for God’s sake, send her away.” (190)

23 The adjective “solicitous” as well as the threatening hand, which evokes the hand of a killer, are actually used to introduce her need for cuddling and stroking and not for being cuddled or stroked. Here, Effy appears to actively engage in the contact, as if she were simultaneously the reassuring mother and the child needing reassurance. The child ghost is no longer haunted by her mother’s neglect and the following paragraph lifts the ambiguity: Garvin saw the child approach again fearlessly. It smiled, as with an unearthly pity and comprehension … The look was superhuman. Urged by the persistence of its passion, the child hovered for a moment, divinely coercing, divinely caressing; its touch fell on its mother’s hair, now on her cheeks, now on her lips, and lingered there. And then the woman writhed and flung herself backwards in her chair away from it. Her face was convulsed with a hideous agony of fear. … That night Mrs Falshaw was delivered of a dead child. (190-91)

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24 Effy’s vengeful presence is made perceptible through her gestures and through the term “coercing.” In addition, her power (“superhuman”), and, more importantly, her effect on her mother (“writhed, convulsed with agony” etc.) and on the possible death of her sibling are rather horrific.

25 Like the psychologists and psychoanalysts of her time,10 May Sinclair hardly ever used the term “attachment” (Johnson, “Unresolved Mourning” 86). However, she published rather extensively on C. G. Jung’s theory of individuation through one’s appropriation of the symbolic forces at stake in the fantasy of a return to the mother.11 In her psychoanalytical papers, she described the conflict between child and mother that arises from the child’s need to construct an independent relation to his/her mother. And in “The Way of Sublimation” (1915), she claimed that “the child must win this conflict or remain forever immature” (39). The story offers an interesting variation as Effy must return from the tank she drowned in so as to confront her mother and reach (post-mortem) individuation, namely to find peace and disappear. Because many of the dynamics of the attachment process are sketched in “The Intercessor,” Sinclair appears not as a science-fiction writer, but, as Laurel Forster argues, as a psychic-fiction novelist12 who anticipated and prolonged the psychological research of her time through supernatural scenarios based on her own projections. Effy’s return to the mother also suggests something of the specificity of the mother-daughter relation that also echoes another of C. G. Jung’s theory, first described in his 1912 Psychology of the Unconscious—the Elektra complex, a female version of Oedipus and a secondary concept in Sinclair’s time as well as ours (Jung, “Unconscious” 69-70; Jung, Theory 240 and Freud, On Sexuality 375). The haunting return of the little girl looking for her mother is a typically feminine situation, whose careful depictions are some of the main driving forces in Sinclair’s fiction.

- - - - -

26 “The Intercessor” clearly adopts the point of view of Garvin and, perhaps less clearly, that of Effy; however, it remains a particularly dense and ambiguous text that fully explores the polysemy of the word “haunting,” which becomes a motif and a vehicle for further explorations into the spatial, the linguistic, the unconscious and the affective. In the story, haunting contains infinite ramifications and thus calls for interceding powers that help deconstructing and reconstructing the child ghost’s story. Such reconstruction relies on a careful reconsideration of both the maternal experience and the mother-daughter relation. The emphasis on a child’s point of view, made manifest through the sensuality of breastfeeding or through the difficulty of being separated from the mother’s body, sheds light on central issues in many of Sinclair’s longer texts —issues that will not be examined by psychology until at least a decade following their publication. Sinclair uses horror and the supernatural, and haunting in particular, as an aesthetic and exploratory tool that enables her to raise the unexplored and specific questions of motherhood and of the female experience.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boll, Theophilus. “May Sinclair and the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106.4 (1962): 310-26. Print.

---. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist. Cranbury: Associated UP, 1973. Print.

Bont (de), Leslie. “‘I was the only one who wasn’t quite sane’: Être femme, épouse, mère et artiste dans The Creators de May Sinclair.” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 79 (2014). DOI : 10.4000/cve. 1127

---. “Language, Secrecy and Technique in Ford’s A Call and Sinclair’s Anne Severn.” The Edwardian Ford Madox Ford. Eds. Laura Colombino and Max Saunders. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 171-85. Print

---. “Portrait of the Female Character as a Psychoanalytical Case: The Ambiguous Influence of Freud on May Sinclair’s Novels.” May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds. Eds Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. 59-79. Print.

Bourne Taylor, Jenny and Sally Shuttleworth. Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts (1830-1890). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Print.

Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss Vol. 1: Attachment. 1969. New York: Basic Books, 1982. Print.

---. “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39 (1958): 350-71. Print.

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. London: Penguin, 1965. Print.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1984. Print.

Certeau (de), Michel. “The Freudian Novel: History and Literature.” Humanities and Society 4 (1981): 121-44. Print.

---. Histoire et psychanalyse : entre science et fiction. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Print.

Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2000. Print.

Davies, Owen. The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. 2007. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Print.

---. “Spectrographies.” Echographies of Television. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: UK Polity, 2002. 113-34. Print.

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

Forster, E.M. Howards End. 1910. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. Print.

Forster, Laurel. “The Life of the Mind: Psychic Explorations in the Work of May Sinclair.” PhD thesis. U of Sussex, 2000. Web. 12 Dec. 2017.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” 1915. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 14. Ed & trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth P, 1957. 239-60. Print.

---. On Sexuality. 1931. Ed & trans. by James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1991. Print.

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---. “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” 1895. The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. London: Imago Publishing, 1950. 347-445. Print.

---. Studies on Hysteria. 1895. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1957. Print.

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

Johnson George. “Mourning, the War, and the ‘New Mysticism’ in May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf.” Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts London: Palgrave, 2015. 153-86. Print.

---. “Unresolved Mourning and the War in Sinclair and Woolf.” May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern. Eds. Andrew Kunka and Michelle Troy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2006. 83-98. Print.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido. 1912. New York: Moffat Yard and Company, 1916. Trans. Beatrix Hinkle. Print.

---. The Theory of Psychoanalysis. New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing, 1915. Print.

Kipling, Rudyard. “They.” 1904. Mrs. Bathurst and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991. 42-64. Print.

Kunka, Andrew and Michele Troy, eds. May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern. Farnham: Ashgate, 2006. Print.

Lewis, Matthew. The Monk. 1796. London: Penguin Classics, 2012. Print.

Marcus, Steven. “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History.” Representations. New York: Random House, 1975. Print.

Martindale, Philippa. “‘Against All Hushing and Stamping Down’: The Medico-Psychological Clinic of London and The Novelist May Sinclair.” Psychoanalytical History 62 (2004): 177-200. Print.

Mizuta Lippit, Akira. “Reflections on Spectral Life.” Discourse 30.1 (2008): 242-54. Print.

Philips, Terry. “Battling with the Angels: May Sinclair’s Powerful Mothers.” Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Sarah Sceats. London: Longman, 1996. 129-34. Print.

Raitt, Suzanne. “Early British Psychoanalysis and the Medico-Psychological Clinic.” History Workshop Journal 58 (2004): 63-85. Print.

---. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Seed, David. “‘Psychical’ Cases: Transformations of the Supernatural in Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair.” Gothic Modernisms. Ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace. London: Palgrave, 2001. 62-77. Print.

Sinclair, May. “Clinical Lecture on Symbolism and Sublimation—I.” The Medical Press and Circular 153 (9 August 1916): 118-22. Print.

---. “Clinical Lecture on Symbolism and Sublimation—II.” The Medical Press and Circular 153 (16 August 1916): 142-45. Print.

---. A Defence of Idealism. 1917. Charleston: Bibliolife, 2010. Print.

---. Far End. London: Hutchinson, 1926. Print.

---. “If the Dead Knew.” Uncanny Stories. 1923. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2006. Print.

---. “The Intercessor.” 1911. The Intercessor and Other Stories. 1931. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932. Print.

---. Introduction to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë. London: Dent Everyman Series, 1908. vii-xv. Print.

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---. Introduction to The Professor. Charlotte Brontë. London: Dent Everyman Series, 1910. v-vii. Print.

---. Introduction to Shirley. Charlotte Brontë. London: Dent Everyman Series, 1908. vii-xv. Print.

---. Introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne Brontë. London: Dent Everyman Series, 1914. xii-xv. Print.

---. Introduction to Villette. Charlotte Brontë. London: Dent Everyman Series, 1909. viii-xviii. Print.

---. Introduction to Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë. London: Dent Everyman Series, 1907. vii-xv. Print.

---. Mary Olivier: A Life. 1919. London: Virago Modern Classics, 1980. Print.

---. “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson.” The Egoist 5 (April 1918): 57-59. Reprinted in Gender of Modernism. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 442-48. Print.

---. “Psychological Types.” The English Review 36 (1923): 436-39. Print.

---. The Three Brontës. London: Hutchinson, 1912. Print.

---. The Tysons: Mr and Mrs Nevill Tyson. 1898. Whitewing: Kessinger Publishing, 2009. Print.

---. “The Way of Sublimation.” Circa 1915. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, U of Pennsylvania, Box 23. Print.

Thurston, Luke. Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to the Modernism. London: Routledge, 2012. Print.

NOTES

1. May Sinclair wrote Libido with a capital L. In order to refer to see her understanding of the term and make a clear distinction with Freud’s and Jung’s concepts, her own typography is used here. 2. May Sinclair, The Three Brontës. London: Hutchinson, 1912. Sinclair also wrote introductions to the reeditions of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 3. There would be much to say about the Falshaw (“false-show”) and their social pretence. 4. Mentions of Effy’s “flesh” (for example, p. 139) as means to stress her physical presence are also scattered throughout the text. 5. See for instance: Heroes know them: ... moments when things that we have seen all our lives without truly seeing them, the flowers in the garden, the trees in the field ... change to us in an instant of time, and show the secret and imperishable life they harbour; moments of danger that are sure and perfect happiness, because then the adorable Reality gives itself to our very sight and touch. (379) 6. Sinclair was also very interested in parapsychology. A friend of Evelyn Underhill and a member of the Society for Psychical Research, she wrote a lot about telepathy, post-mortem communication, and pre-cognition in both her essays and her fiction. 7. Several critics have highlighted the literary quality of Freud’s texts. See Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot” and “Fictions of the Wolf Man,” Reading for the Plot (1984); Michel de Certeau, “The Freudian Novel: History and Literature” (1981) and Histoire et psychanalyse : entre science et fiction (1987); Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (2000); Steven Marcus, “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History,” Representations (1975). Sinclair’s interest in Freudian figures and methodology has also been documented, see for instance de Bont.

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8. We can note that the adjective primal is used twice (144 and 145) by Sinclair who, given her sound background in psychoanalysis and her specific focus on Freud’s case narratives, was probably familiar with Freud’s concepts of the Urszene (primal scene) and Nachträgligkeit (afterwardness), according to which: “a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma after the event [nachträglich]” (Freud, “Project” 435). 9. Victorian psychologies do not study attachment, as Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth’s Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts (1830-1890) shows. If Bowlby’s formulation is clearly indebted to Freud, his approach is innovative in that it does not refer to psychoanalytical concepts: “my object appeared a limited one, namely, to discuss the theoretical implications of some observations of how young children respond to temporary loss of mother … My furrows had been started from a corner diametrically opposite to the one at which Freud had entered” (Bowlby, Attachment xxvi). Bowlby’s work thus paved the way for the elaboration of developmental psychology as an independent sub-discipline that focuses on the earliest stages of individual life. 10. Bowlby notes that “both Sigmund and Anna Freud employ the term ‘attachment’” (Bowlby, Attachment 228) but that their understanding of the term is deeply influenced by their Freudian psychoanalytical approach and thus refers to a different concept. 11. See for instance Sinclair’s “The Way of Sublimation” (1915), “Clinical Lecture on Symbolism and Sublimation I and II” (1916) and “Psychological Types.” 12. Laurel Forster uses the expressions “psychic fiction” and “science fiction of the mind” to explain Sinclair’s exploratory interest into psychical research (186).

ABSTRACTS

Cet article propose une généalogie de la hantise dans la nouvelle “The Intercessor” (1911) de May Sinclair et explore la manière dont le texte déplace le fantastique de la présence spectrale à l’absence de lien mère-enfant. En effet, l’enfant fantôme, Effy, semble hantée par un trouble irrésolu qui ne prend fin qu’à l’issue d’une scène de confrontation avec la mère négligente. Outre les hypotextes de Kipling, de Lewis et d’Emily Brontë qui viennent hanter le texte de la nouvelle, “The Intercessor” est aussi habitée par les questionnements que Sinclair développe dans ses essais sur la peur et la précognition, sur la mort et la sublimation, ou encore sur le rôle du langage tel que celui-ci est utilisé par les recherches psychologiques du tournant du siècle. C’est surtout dans la représentation de la maternité et dans son anticipation de la théorisation de l’attachement opérée par John Bowlby à partir des années 1950 que l’exploration sinclairienne des liens entre la hantise et la filiation au féminin se distingue.

AUTHORS

LESLIE DE BONT Leslie de Bont is a professeure agrégée who teaches English at the faculty of psychology in the University of Nantes, France. Her PhD thesis investigated May Sinclair’s dialogic approach to fiction and non-fiction through an examination of the influence of Freud’s case narratives on

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Sinclair’s novels. She has given talks and published articles about May Sinclair and is a member of the May Sinclair Society.

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Virginia Woolf’s Haunted House of Fiction

Adèle Cassigneul

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I would like to thank Tanya Tromble, who generously gave me J. C. Oates’s article on the short story, and Philippe Birgy, whose close proof-readings were of substantial help.

1 Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House” is a very short piece which oneirically depicts two couples sharing the same centenary house: the live one trying to sleep while listening to the eerie other who keeps wandering from room to room to seek “their hidden joy” (117). Spectrality is thus at play as a structural motif but it also bears a reflective dimension as Woolf’s ghost story reflects and refracts archetypal ghostly motifs borrowed from the British grand literary tradition, from Ann Radcliffe to Henry James via the Brontës—an intertextual web which critics hardly ever explore.

2 When Monday or Tuesday was first published by the Hogarth Press, it came with four illustrative woodcuts signed by Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell; images which commentators systematically disregard. Opening the collection, the xylographic print depicts a familiar cosy armchair in an empty drawing room—the comfortable armchair being a motif which symptomatically recurs in Woolf’s photographic albums. I shall consequently consider “A Haunted House” as an image/text, a complex representation device that includes an actual image (the woodcut) and potential virtual ones (a photographic third);1 spectrality playing on both textual and visual levels.

3 The aim of this essay is to see how, between life and death, text and image, Woolf turns her ghost story into an intermediary space, a site of modernist negotiation which, conjoining inheritance and subversion, works its own hauntedness through both intertextuality and intermediality to create an open writerly text; a literary form at work.

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The House of Dream-Memory

4 Between 1912 and 1919, Virginia and Leonard Woolf rented a 19th-century haunted cottage in Asheham (Sussex), a “strange house,” wrote Leonard. [A]t night one often heard extraordinary noises both in the cellars and in the attic. It sounded as if two people were walking from room, opening and shutting doors, sighing, whispering… I have never known a house which had such a strong character, a personality of its own—romantic, gentle, melancholy, lovely, it was Asham and its ghostly footsteps and whisperings which gave Virginia the idea for A Haunted House and I can immediately see, hear, and smell the house when I read the opening words … (37)

5 The ghostliness of this “extraordinary romantic-looking house” (34) strikes as strangely familiar. The emphasis on the personified house’s character conveys a sense of intimacy, friendliness and comfort: “gentle” and “lovely,” the haunted domestic space appears ambivalently heimlich; that is, as Freud reminds us, at once related to “what is familiar and comfortable” and to “what is concealed and kept hidden” (Uncanny, 132). The spectral presence defamiliarizes and, even, “supernaturalizes” (Castle 123) the Woolfs’ home but, because it intrinsically belongs to the place, it gives it its idiosyncratic hearty intimacy. One feels uncannily at home. In Terry Castle’s words, the supernatural has been “diverted—rerouted, so to speak, into the realm of the everyday” (124). And it is this very warm and affectionate quality that is disclosed in the story’s opening sentences: “Whatever hour you woke, there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure— a ghostly couple” (“Haunted House” 116). The joyous binary and ternary rhythms here provide balance and harmony, a sense of dancing unity.

6 Yet, as Woolf wrote in her diary, Asheham could also be “dim & mysterious” (Diary 1, 32), maybe even somewhat disquieting. Gloom and mystery undeniably prevail in “A Haunted House”: the light fades in the empty home, death and its shadowy atmosphere pervades the rooms and the surrounding garden. At the dead of night, the immortal spectres haunt the vacant household of those who cannot sleep. “But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no” (“Haunted House,” 116), says the anonymous character whose lingering nocturnal vigil ties in with Emanuel Levinas’s definition of insomnia: “vigilance without end,” “a situation without beginnings or end, [an] immortality from which one cannot escape” (Time, 48). The living and the dead share a timeless twilight existence akin to the “impersonal existence” characteristic of Levinas’s “there is,” this enduring “existing without existents” (Time, 50), the absence of a determined subject which makes itself intensely felt. In the darkened house, something indeterminate and intangible makes itself felt: “a nothing that is not a nothing, for this nothing is full of murmuring” (Alterity, 99).

7 And indeed, like voices from the void, the ghosts murmur truncated sentences which echo the house’s recurring soft beat—“Safe, safe, safe”—, its jolting and persistent force of existing as well as the sleepers’ muted interjectory remarks. Woolf’s haunted house is thus but a shell2 that enshrines an absence (symbolised by the ghostly couple’s desperate search of the “buried treasure”) which “returns as a presence”; a liminal there is and its enveloping “atmospheric density” (Levinas, Time 46) which unsettles, confronts to the uncanny and otherness, but also prevails as a soothing agent through which life and death coexist.

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8 As Christine Reynier has pointed out, the story’s “mysterious atmosphere, the sort of mist enveloping the characters, the softness of their movements, the evanescence of the ‘treasure,’ the truncated sentences, the waltz of pronouns, the shift of tenses, the shifting identity of the characters and the repetitive pattern of the story” are “typical of dreams” (72). Or rather, to borrow Gaston Bachelard’s phrase, of “poetic reverie” which, “starting with the simplest images,” “always set[s] the waves of imagination radiating” (36).

9 Woolf created her oneiric haunted house out of her Asheham memories to conceive what Bachelard calls “a house of dream-memory”: There is for each of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past. … we are in the unity of image and memory, in the functional composite of imagination and memory (15-16).

10 Woolf’s paratactic prose shapes and is shaped by the narrator’s own dreams. “Our eyes darken,” she says half-awake. This liminal state of consciousness is mirrored in the narrative montage which interlocks the feelings and perceptions of the living and the dead. As with Henry James’s “ghosts of the mind” (Woolf, “Across the Border” 218), it is impossible to know if the spectres are real or figments of the narrator’s imagination. Woolf toys with indeterminacy. And this unclear trance-like state compels the reader to adopt a free-associating, dream-like reading; it incites us to let ourselves be haunted.

11 Freed from any strict plotline and open to the undecidable, Woolf’s unusual ghost story first appeared as a “tiny stor[y] which flash[es] into [the] mind” (Diary 3, 131); a playful and challenging reverie that retains some of Ann Radcliffe’s typical “pensive melancholy” (2) but also strikes one by its daring experimental quality. Coupled with Vanessa Bell’s woodcut, the text’s fragments of sentences, flashing images and shreds of lost reminiscences, its host of repeated questions and exclamations suspended by the aposiopesic yet flowing prose create a reflexive modernist text, a haunted intermediary space which calls upon our “inward eye” (Wordsworth 188) or “transforming eye” (Radcliffe 15). Yet this surprisingly evanescent quality also entails a dense literary lineage, it takes place within the frame of hackneyed ghost stories and blossoms out of the genre’s recognizable traits.

Disembodied Souls

12 Reminiscent of the Radcliffean “mooney trance” Woolf found sublime and “refreshing” (Letters 3, 418), strange unnatural visions emerge and loom behind the window panes: “the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun,” “Moon beams splash from the window” and “the rain slides silver down the glass” (“Haunted House,” 116-17). Woolf’s dense and graphic descriptions summon all-too familiar images, those that haunt Emily Brontë’s poetry and fiction for instance. Indeed, Woolf’s trees, which “stoop and bend this way and that” (“Haunted House,” 117), recall Brontë’s “Spectral trees, that so dolefully / Shake [their] heads in the dreary sky” (Poèmes, 26). Or those “lonely” ones, which “breathe a spell to me; / A dreary thought their dark boughs yield / All waving solemnly” (54). Brontë’s “windy night” (48) echoes Woolf’s own—“The wind roars up the avenue,” “The wind drives straightly” (“Haunted House,” 117). This haunting wuthering wind also calls in the “gusty wind” that wakes Mr Lockwood in the opening chapter of Wuthering Heights: “And what was it that had suggested the tremendous tumult? … Merely, the branch of a fir-tree that touched my lattice, as the blast wailed

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by, and rattled its dry cones against the panes!” (36). Brontëan motifs survive and are revived by Woolf’s atmospheric details. They “break in,” as Georges Didi-Huberman has it: “[What survives] between phantom and symptom designates a reality that forces its way in, however tenuously or even imperceptibly, and for that reason it also designates a spectral reality” [“Entre fantôme et symptôme, [les survivances] désignent une réalité d’effraction, fût-elle ténue, voire insensible, et pour cette raison elles désignent aussi une réalité spectrale.”] (59).

13 The spectral reality of seminal literary tropes is most significantly at play in Woolf’s description of the window as symbolical border between life (embodied by the narrating I) and death (symbolized by the ghosts). But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundred years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the room were darkened. (“Haunted House” 116)

14 The reference to almost mythical bygone days (“hundred years ago”) points at the presence of a powerful intertextual ghost: Catherine Earnshaw’s spooky apparition at the bedroom window. A “most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in—let me in!’ … As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window” (Wuthering Heights, 36). In Brontë’s novel, the cliché frightful ghost is present in the flesh, so to speak. Lockwood touches its hand and later badly hurts its wrist. Whereas in Woolf’s text, even if faces and hands are mentioned, the ghosts’ apparition remains rather elusive; they resemble light “fumbling airs” (Lighthouse, 138) venturing indoors. As the narrator maliciously points out, “we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak” (“Haunted House,” 117).

15 Abiding by (some of) the rules of the ghost story, “A Haunted House” reworks traditional gothic or ghostly motifs—spectres, uncanny atmosphere, spatial enclosure, domesticity—and thus bears witness to what Julian Wolfrey calls the “spectral-gothic,” namely the “spectralization of the gothic” (7). A “ghostifying” (Castle 141) of the genre Woolf acknowledged in her 1921 article, “Gothic Romance,” writing that dismissed Gothic conventions had “flourished subterraneously” (306) all through the 19th century. And in “Across the Border” (1918), she further explained: “Mrs Radcliffe may vanish, but the craving for the supernatural survives” (217).

16 In the wake of the Great War, when spirit photography was suddenly revived in the United Kingdom (see Fischer), Woolf testified to the fact that her “sense of [her] own ghostliness ha[d] much quickened” (Woolf, “Across the Border” 218). And indeed, while exorcizing the traditional ghosts of Woolf’s favourite gothic tales, “A Haunted House” also summons a more modern role model, the “portentous figure looming large and undefined in the consciousness of writers” (Woolf, “Henry James” 346), that will help her subvert and reform commonplace images, emancipate herself from conventions and invent anew: Henry James.

17 In her 1921 review of James’s ghost stories, Woolf underlined the unusual “worldly” character of the master’s ghosts: The beautiful urbane spirits are only not of this world because they are too fine for it. They have taken with them across the border their clothes, their manners, their breeding, their band-boxes, and valets and ladies’ maids. They remain always a little worldly. We may feel clumsy in their presence, but we cannot feel afraid. (“Henry James,” 324)

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18 This congenial and mundane quality of Jamesian specters—of which Sir Edmund Orme’s “positive and sensitive being” (James 86) is a fitting illustration—is clearly reproduced in Woolf’s story. Her ghostly couple wanders through the house chatting unconsciously. They come and politely visit the living, exhibiting some recognizable human features. And conversely, lying eyes closed in their bed, the haunted couple becomes spectralized, insubstantial, unexpectedly less animate and lively than its spooky counterpart. Life and death thus seem deliberately confused, even inverted; they have become indistinguishable.

19 And indeed, at Asheham, Woolf had the impression of floating through nights and days “in a disembodied kind of way” (Letters 2, 270); her own ghostliness being mirrored in the story’s spectres, clear avatars of Radcliffe’s “disembodied spirits” (67) or Charlotte Brontë’s “disembodied souls” (266) which, according to Philippe Ariès, are not bodies made of flesh. They do not abide by the laws of gravity. They are not pure spirits that cannot be heard or seen either. They are sometimes exposed on photographic plates. Even though one has not seen them, one can imagine them as shapes bathed in a luminous halo and gliding through the air. [ne sont pas des corps de chair. Ils n’obéissent pas à la pesanteur. Mais ils ne sont pas non plus de purs esprits qu’on n’entend ni ne voit. Il leur arrivera d'impressionner les plaques photographiques. On les imagine, même quand on ne les a pas vus, comme des formes entourées d'une enveloppe lumineuse, glissant dans airs.] (166)

20 This luminous halo—which, incidentally, is the phrase Woolf uses in “Modern Fiction” to define life3—shrouds the ghosts both literally, as they are carrying a “silver lamp,” and metaphorically, as they possess the spectral aura that spirit photography aimed at capturing. Together with the silver moonshine, the “lantern” is the only source of light which makes the invisible spectres furtively visible. “Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause” (“Haunted House,” 117). Suddenly fixed in the shining trance of light, we glimpse at the “tangible intangibility of [their] fleshless body” (Derrida 27). Their hazy presence has the same blurred and seemingly moving quality as fin-de-siècle composite photographs, 4 the same eerie and oddly nebulous appearance as Julia Margaret Cameron’s Pictorialist portraits of Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson Stephen.5 They are, to borrow James’s words, “a splendid presence” (79).

21 In her memoirs, Virginia Woolf writes about her dead mother’s invisible yet oddly vivid presence, her “supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality” (Derrida 27). Remembering one of her photographic apparitions, she calls her a “vision” (“Sketch,” 87), just as she called her deceased brother Thoby “queer ghost” (Diary 3, 275). In “A Haunted House,” the play on light and darkness, together with the mystifying atmosphere, turn the domestic space into a camera obscura which produces evasive and flickering though compelling images; images which make the whole ghostliness of the haunted place discernible. The house seems somehow endowed with an autonomous visionary power. But they had found it in the drawing-room. Not that one could ever see them. The window-panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing-room, the apple only turned its yellow side. […] The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. (“Haunted House,” 116)

22 In the silent and shadowed drawing-room, images are reflected or projected; ephemeral still lives emerge which participate in the (un)veiling of intermittent

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phantom visions—a phenomenon Woolf takes on again in “Time Passes,” the central section of To the Lighthouse (see Reynier).

23 In The Movement-Image, Deleuze reminds us that the 20th-century “means of communication-expression,” such as printing, photography and cinema—arts of mechanical reproduction to use the Benjaminian terminology—, “summon up phantoms on our route” (100). He calls them “phantom machines” (101), devices that create “phantom creatures” (Baudouin 11). Working on the plastic power of shadows to produce images that conjoin appearance and disappearance, these mechanical art forms are intrinsically related to the spectral (see Gunning); because they entail reproduction, they “inhabit a phantom structure,” says Derrida (Payne and Lewis 61).

24 This brings us back to Vanessa Bell’s shadowy woodcut6 and its strongly contrasted aesthetic which plays on the stark opposition between the ink’s deep dense black and the paper’s pale radiance. Its chiaroscuro brings together opposite forces, conjoins the visible (the house) and the invisible (the ghosts), it figures what cannot be figured, namely the presence-absence of a fleeting past which haunts and permeates the present, enduring love and throbbing unresolved questions.

25 Bell’s emotionally atmospheric woodcut has the poetic presence that Woolf observed in Charlotte Brontë. Like her, the ghost lovers “have only to open the door to make themselves felt” (“Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,” 158). Reading Woolf’s story while contemplating Bell’s woodcut, such a pregnant yet imperceptible presence becomes apparent. In the empty chair, in the empty room, one starts to project imaginary visions. Instead of folding the text up on itself, the image opens it up, prompting our visionary faculties, inviting us to participate in the ghost’s search for “the buried treasure.”

A Vision

26 The cosy armchair is a recurring motif throughout Woolf’s oeuvre: in her fiction and her essays as well as in her photographs, it is closely connected with the act of reading. One thinks of the reading scenes in To the Lighthouse, “Reading” or “The Death of the Moth,” but also of a 1931 snapshot, one among many, which portrays Woolf sitting in one of her Monk’s House armchairs, absorbed, dreamily looking out of a window.7 Between fixity (the sitting chair) and movement (active gaze, lively thoughts), the armchair is the place of creativity which at once offers a comfortable refuge that welcomes and frames the body, and opens up and frees the imagination. It is where reverie and reflexivity are born. Placed at the threshold of the short story, Vanessa Bell’s woodcut pictures an ordinary domestic object—this ordinariness is emphasized by the home-made quality of the print—that provides a first, homely vision of the Woolfian text. Offering a generous sit, the engraving accommodates its readers to better introduce them to what appears to be an ordinary ghost story. Yet, its humble bareness, its odd emptiness suggest a presence looming off-frame. Something undefined and undefinable definitely haunts the edge of the image: the sudden appearance of the unexpected, the startling surge of the new (Lecercle 7).

27 With its spasmodic elliptic prose, its piecemeal quality and its ethereal characters, “A Haunted House” imposes itself as an open and mutable fragment that subverts traditional ghosts narratives while being haunted by them. Hovering between a Gothic

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and Victorian heritage and a modernist desire to create anew, Woolf’s story becomes the locus of 20th-century literary renewal and experimentation. The haunted house is turned into a house of modern creation. The spectral motifs invite speculation, they question, endlessly reviving and obstinately reworking unanswered questions—“What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” (“A Haunted House,” 116)

28 In her essay “The Short Story,” Joyce Carol Oates defines the form as “an absolutely undecipherable fact,” “a dream verbalized” which represents “a desire” (213-14). Between memory, fancy and fantasy, Woolf’s spectres embody such desire: their search, as much as their enduring love, is their desire. “They’re looking for it” (“A Haunted House,” 116). “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your – buried treasure? The light in the heart.” (117)

29 The ghostly couple’s search provides narrative impetus and leaves the story open- ended. Hauntedness becomes a vital force, a powerful pulsating force. Ritually investing the house, the revenants are expected, perpetually coming back, always to come. At once already there (“Here we slept”), figures of the past, and announcing the future (“the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy” [“A Haunted House,” 117]). Spectres, these creatures from beyond, are spirits of the future according to Derrida (71).8

30 Embedding spectrality at the core of the text (literary genre, themes) and letting it seep into the writing itself (indeterminate pronouns and point of view, enigmatic search, fragmented yet fluid prose), Woolf makes of the short story the site of impermanence; she turns it into a flickering image, a vanishing vision. The text escapes. Just as the ghosts escape. Or “life escapes” (“Modern fiction,” 149). Perpetually driven towards what is not yet there but is becoming, towards what is to come. Somebody must have just left Vanessa Bell’s armchair, making the curtain flutter on their way. “Not that one could ever see them” (“Haunted House,” 116).

31 Between text and image, thwarting readerly expectations, Woolf’s unusual tale ends with a suspended question: “Oh, is this your—buried treasure?” (117). Your? But whose?! The living or the dead’s, the character or the reader’s? Under Woolf’s pen, the haunted house becomes the site of a mysterious search, which sets the text into motion and unsettles references—a search which is at once that of the spectres and of their creator and which, ceaselessly, invites speculation and interpretation.

- - - - -

32 All in all, resisting all obvious or fixed meanings, Woolf’s piece draws its suggestive power from its uncertainty, its ambivalent status as a precarious and shifting fragment. Hauntedness triggers unsettledness, the uncertainty of reference. With spectrality, something keeps moving; it moves and shifts just as intermedial and intertextual traces furtively survive and flicker in the text, just as the ghosts move around the house, keep coming and going, here and there (“‘Here we left it,’ she said. And he added, ‘Oh, but there too!’ ‘It’s upstairs,’ she murmured. ‘And in the garden,’ he whispered” [“Haunted House,” 116]). This ever-present and ever-revived movement—a delicate motion, sheer becoming—is closely connected with feeling and affection. Motion triggering emotion.

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“‘Here we slept,’ she says. And he adds, ‘Kisses without number.’ … The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart” (117). Haunting is felt as an affect, affecting body and mind (Lecercle 7). Affecting Woolf’s prose and readerly experience. This is why, we could talk of a movement-text, as Deleuze talks of movement-images: a text that both represents and enacts movement; a text which, performing hauntedness, keeps on moving us.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ariès, Philippe. L’Homme devant la mort 2. La mort ensauvagée. Paris: Seuil, 1985. Print.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Print.

Baudoin, Philippe. “Machines nécrophoniques.” Le Royaume de l’au-delà. Grenoble: Jérôme Million, 2015. 5-84. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” 1936. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Eds. M. W. Jennings et al. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2008. 19-55. Print.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. London: Penguin, 2003, Print.

Brontë, Emily. Poèmes. Trans. M. Leyris. Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 1963. Print.

---. Wuthering Heights. 1847. London: Penguin, 1994, Print.

Cassigneul, Adèle. “Virginia Woolf’s Ruined House, a Literary Complex.” Études Britanniques Contemporaines 43 (2012): 13-26. Print.

Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer. 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. 1983. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Gallilée, 1993. Print.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg. Paris: Minuit, 2002. Print.

Fischer Andreas. “‘The Most Disreputable Camera in the World’: Spirit Photography in the United Kingdom in the Early Twentieth Century.” The Perfect Medium. Photography and the Occult. Eds. Clément Chéroux & al. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. 72-91. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1899. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Dover Publications, 2015. Print.

---. The Uncanny. 1919. Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Gunning, Tom. “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision.” Grey Room 26 (2007): 94-127. Print.

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James, Henry. “Sir Edmund Orme.” Ghost Stories of Henry James. Ed. D. S. Davies. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2001. 67-91. Print.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “Théorie de la hantise.” Tropismes 14 (2007): 5-28. Print.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. Trans. M. B. Smith. London: The Athlone Press, 1999. Print.

---. Time and the Other. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987. Print.

Louvel, Liliane. Le Tiers pictural. Pour une critique intermédiale. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2010. Print.

Nicolson, Nigel, ed. A Change of Perspective. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume 3, 1923-1928. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981. Print.

---. The Question of Things Happening. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume 2, 1912-1922. London: Chatto & Windus, 1980. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Short Story.” Southern Humanities Review 5.3 (1971): 213-14. Print.

Oliver Bell, Ann, ed. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 1, 1915-19. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Print.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 3, 1925-1930. London: Penguin, 1982. Print.

Payne, Andrew and Mark Lewis. “The Ghost Dance. An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Public 2 (1989): 61-66. Print.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. 1794. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Reynier, Christine. “‘A Haunted House’ or the Genesis of To the Lighthouse.” Journal of the Short Story in English 14 (1990): 63-78. Print.

Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings. Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Print.

Wordsworth, William. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” 1807, 1815. Wordsworth & Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems. Ware: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2003. 188. Print.

Woolf, Leonard. An Autobiography. Volume II, 1911-19. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. “Across the Border.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume II, 1912-1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1987. 217-20. Print.

---. “A Haunted House.” A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. London: Vintage, 2003. 116-17. Print.

---. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulking. New York: Harcourt, 1985. 61-160. Print.

---. “Gothic Romance.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume II, 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1988. 304-07. Print.

---. “Haworth, November 1904.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume I, 1904-1912. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1986. 5-9. Print.

---. “Henry James’s Ghost Stories.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume II, 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1988. 319-26. Print.

---. “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.” The Common Reader. First Series. New York: Harcourt, 1984. 155-61. Print.

---. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader. First Series. New York: Harcourt, 1984. 146-54. Print.

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---. To the Lighthouse. 1927. London: Penguin, 2002. Print.

NOTES

1. I here adapt Liliane Louvel’s intermedial concept, “pictorial third,” to the photographic medium. 2. Woolf uses the motif of the shell to talk about the Brontë sisters’ Haworth home—“they fit like a snail to its shell”—which she visited in 1904. In her Haworth essay, she connects the home to hauntedness: “… in this place I should often feel inclined to exorcise the three famous ghosts” (“Haworth,” 5, 9). 3. “[L]ife is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (150). 4. Practised by the British Francis Galton and the French Arthur Batut in the 1880s, compound or composite portraiture superimposed multiple photographic portraits of individuals’ faces to create an average face. Blurred and seemingly moving, they created a disturbing portrait at once definite and oddly defamiliarized. Woolf mentions “composite photography” in “Gothic Romance” (306). Note that in his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud also appropriates the trope to define dream images: But here the dream image is prepared in still another manner. I have not united features peculiar to the one with features of the other, and thereby abridged the remembered image of each by certain features, but I have adopted the method employed by Galton in producing family portraits, but which he projects both pictures upon one another, whereupon the common features stand out in stronger relief, while those which do not coincide neutralize one another and become obscure in the picture. (247) 5. One thinks of the 1874 portrait, “She Walks in Beauty,” which pictures wan Julia Jackson just after the death of her first husband, Herbert Duckworth. But also of the 1894 photograph that Leslie Stephen collected in his family album, “Julia Stephen outside Talland house,” which shows a sad-looking and spent woman sitting in her home garden, haunted by her own death. One may connect these little known photographs to the character of Mrs Ramsay, who, in the first part of To the Lighthouse, is described as “shabby and worn out” (48), “gliding like a ghost” (95) among friends and family (see Cassigneul). 6. Engraving is a primitive means of image production and reproduction which preceded photography and developed in parallel with it. It is part of what Walter Benjamin calls “manual reproduction,” prior to “mechanical reproduction.” 7. Monk’s House Album 3 (M-H 3), Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Mass). MS Thr 560. 8. While writing To the Lightouse, Woolf notes in her diary: “time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past” (Diary 3, 118).

ABSTRACTS

“A Haunted House” de Virginia Woolf déjoue toutes attentes lectorielles. La nouvelle à la fois reprend et transgresse les lois de son genre, la ghost story ; elle s’impose comme un texte

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moderniste ludique et réflexif, véritable espace intermédiaire de hantise. Cet article analyse en quoi la nouvelle est hantée par des textes comme par des images ce qui en fait le site d’un héritage autant qu’un espace créatif de subversion, le lieu d’expression d’un geste expérimental émancipateur et d’une littérature qui, au début du XXe siècle, est en crise.

AUTHORS

ADÈLE CASSIGNEUL Professeure agrégée at Bordeaux University, Adèle Cassigneul has recently completed a PhD on Virginia Woolf’s relationship with photography and cinema which has recently been published by the Presses Universitaires du Midi under the title Voir, observer, penser - Virginia Woolf et la photo-cinématographie. She has published several articles on the subject both in France and in England and she is organising the next SEW conference entitled Virginia Woolf and Images: Becoming Photographic.

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Ghostly Desires in Edith Wharton’s “Miss Mary Pask”

Thomas Legendre

...it is in the warm darkness of the prenatal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing. Wharton, Preface to Ghosts Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex. That’s because they need femininity to be associated with death; it’s the jitters that gives them a hard- on! for themselves! They need to be afraid of us. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

1 In her Preface to Ghosts, Edith Wharton not only dismisses the question “Do you believe in ghosts?” as “pointless” (875) but also subverts it entirely in her story “Miss Mary Pask.” As a tale of the (para)normal, a ghost story that isn’t a ghost story, “Miss Mary Pask” has received little attention within a niche of Wharton’s work which itself has been treated largely as a collection of New Critical artefacts. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, for example, devotes scarce commentary to Wharton’s ghost stories except to note that as a group they tend to centre on the theme of either “the spectral double,” who reveals aspects of a haunted protagonist, or “the interloper” spirit, who disrupts the relationship of a happily married couple (300). Annette Zilversmit shows a more nuanced interest in Wharton’s writing of the genre “as a metaphor of internal fears” (296), however her reading is concerned less with situating the works in a larger context than with describing the general psychological features of its protagonists. A notable exception is Jenni Dyman’s thorough and critically comprehensive study of Wharton’s ghost stories in which the broad contours of Wharton’s personal life serve as points of reference for impulses running through the tales as a whole, though her analysis often reverts to self-contained readings of individual stories. More to the point, the fixation on literal ghosts in these works comes at the expense of “Miss Mary

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Pask” as the most quietly uncanny haunting of them all—and, as such, it invites an interpretation from a confluence of feminist, psychoanalytic, and biographical perspectives in which none is sufficient without the others and none holds a dominant position.

2 This invitation begins, in fact, with the story’s title. While the prefix “Miss” calls attention to Mary’s status as an unmarried woman or spinster—an “old maid” as the narrator repeatedly calls her in the first few pages—her first name may be understood as an allusion to the Virgin Mary, whose apparently sexless condition is evoked by numerous references to her white garments as well as an old villager’s description of her as “the American lady who always used to dress in white” (375). The most suggestive component of her name, however, is “Pask,” which finds a homonym in “Pasch,” the word for Passover or Easter, hinting at her “resurrection” when the narrator visits her. Her surname also finds correspondence in the pasqueflower or pasquefleur, a plant which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “blossom[s] in April, with bell-shaped purple flowers clothed with silky hairs,” and according to Webster’s New World Dictionary is “of early spring” with flowers that are “bluish” and “solitary.” As a woman who sleeps in the corner of the garden and returns to life in an “early spring” of her own, Mary may indeed be likened to this plant, whose “bluish” and “solitary” flowers are not unlike the finger tips the narrator describes as “blue under the yellowing nails” (378).

3 While both “Pasch” and pasqueflower have a common lineage in the Old French “pasche” (from which the modern French word for Easter, “Pâques,” is derived), an etymology that specifically connects Mary with the country in which she lives, she is also a resident of Brittany, where the predominant language, particularly during Wharton’s lifetime, was Breton rather than French. Although this distinction is unmentioned in “Miss Mary Pask,” Wharton makes conspicuous use of it in “Kerfol,” a story in which the narrator’s friend advises him to avoid asking peasants for directions to the estate because “[t]hey don’t understand French, and they would pretend they did and mix you up” (282). In this sense, the setting is removed both linguistically and geographically from the mainstream of society, suggesting that certain patriarchical assumptions about language and culture are no longer valid. Here Mary can invite the narrator to interact with her on her own terms.

4 Mary becomes, in fact, increasingly identified with—and, in some ways, indistinguishable from—this region whose landscape borders the ocean, which itself is a traditional female symbol, near the “Baie des Trépassés” or “Bay of the Dead.” Her house at Morgat—or Morgue—is discovered in the midst of an “uncertain autumn weather, one day all blue and silver, the next shrieking gales or driving fog” (373), signaling a blurring of boundaries, a breaking down of solid definition realized in Mary herself, who, like the weather, embodies a subversion of binaries in which differences or opposites are blended and intermixed. In this story that turns out to be not a ghost story, the narrator’s terror arises from his inability to define and classify Mary, whom he later describes as having “unnaturally red cheeks” (179) even as he is convinced of her ghostliness—this woman who is dead and not dead—along with a “cracked twittering voice which was at one moment like an old woman’s quaver, at another like a boy’s falsetto” (377-78). In fact, she troubles the narrator’s dualistic, either/or mode of consciousness from the outset of the story: he believes Mary has refused to join Grace in the United States, for example, because either she dislikes Horace or she likes

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him too much. As he approaches Mary’s house he is further confounded by an increasing blindness, an obscuring of vision that forces him to notice the “endless modulations of the ocean’s voice, so familiar in every corner of the Breton land that one gets to measure distances by them rather than by visual means” (375). While the oceanic/female voice presages Mary’s later speech, his decidedly male gaze is rendered useless in a darkness and mist that descends “[a]s suddenly as a pair of hands clapped over one’s eyes” (374). He becomes anxious as he is “enveloped” in “the densest night” and a “veil” of sea fog, forced to confront, in a telling phrase, “a wet blackness impenetrable” (375).

5 Janet Beer and Avril Horner emphasize the parodic effect of these details, associating the exaggerated descriptions and Gothic tropes with moments “when the sexual appetite of women is at the heart of Wharton’s concern in the narrative” (270). They go on to establish specific links between “Miss Mary Pask” and Wuthering Heights, culminating in what they describe as a “challenge [to] the grand récit of gender difference, transforming the stuff of Gothic nightmare into fictions that offer a wry critique of conventional attitudes to desire” (274). Parody aside, the story’s language becomes especially revealing in light of Jane Gallop’s discussion of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, most particularly in The Daughter’s Seduction as she examines the relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis by bringing them into a “provocative contact [that] opens each to what is not encompassed by the limits of its identity” (xii). In doing so Gallop rearticulates Luce Irigaray’s notion that psychoanalysis privileges solids over fluids and that the predominant theory of sexuality is “phallic.” This “phallic sexual theory, [or] male sexual science,” Gallop writes, is homosexual, a sexuality of sames, of identities, excluding otherness. Heterosexuality, once it is exposed as an exchange of women between men, reveals itself as a mediated form of homosexuality. All penetration, considered to be sadistic penetration of the body’s defensive envelope, is thought according to the model of anal penetration. The dry anus suffers pain; the penetrated is a humiliated man. But the vagina (unknown in the phallic phase, says Freud) has a juicy receptivity which makes penetration not painful, but a free-flowing exchange, leaving no solid borders to be violated. The vagina flows before penetration. It does not wait for man to break its seal, but hospitably prepares a welcome for his entry. (84)

6 The narrator becomes a participant in this system of “exchange of women between men” when he reveals his acquaintance with Mary Pask through her sister, whom he knows through his friend Horace. “Even Grace would not have interested me particularly,” he remarks, “if she hadn’t happened to marry one of my oldest friends…” (374). This system of exchange (i.e., marriage) has placed the two sisters on separate continents and prevented them from being together since Grace’s wedding day. Furthermore, by describing the Breton setting—and, by extension, Mary herself—as “impenetrable,” the narrator exhibits the sort of homosexual impulse Gallop describes, in which interaction is a probing, a forcing open of a rigidly-defined identity. He is unable to recognize the mist and darkness as precursors to the “juicy receptivity” of Mary’s desire for the type of “free-flowing exchange” which characterizes female sexual experience. In such an encounter both parties must be active participants; “dominance” no longer applies.

7 Hélène Cixous also addresses this tendency to project male sexual standards onto all aspects of human interaction in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” arguing that the male

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point of view conceptualizes interaction as a “power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a ‘dark continent’ to penetrate and to ‘pacify.’” After “[c]onquering her,” she adds, the male agent makes “haste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body” (877). As an incorporeal ghost, Mary has literally “no solid borders to be violated” (a confluent phrase from both Gallop and Cixous), making it increasingly difficult for the narrator to imagine himself as conqueror. As Cixous remarks, “[o]ne can understand how man [the narrator], confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, might feel resentment and fear of being ‘taken’ by the woman, of being lost in her, absorbed, or alone” (877). She begins to envelop him in the very moment she becomes impossible to penetrate, and his subsequent panic at becoming “absorbed” in her causes him to bolt.

8 Beer and Horner recognize a fairly broad biographical context for Wharton’s parodic urges in her ghost stories, noting generally that she “most exercises the parodic strain in her later work” (279) and, further, “Wharton chose to use parody at this late stage of her career to raise subversive questions about the sexual politics of early twentieth- century Europe and America” (274), acknowledging in addition that this phase of Wharton’s writing coincided with the upheaval of the First World War and its subsequent disillusionment with Victorian value systems. They neglect to note, however, sharper personal concerns such as her unhappy marriage to Teddy Wharton, the conclusion of her affair with Morton Fullerton, and indeed the deeper matrix of her upbringing. In A Feast of Words, Cynthia Griffin Wolff studies Wharton’s fiction as a therapeutic activity in which she attempts to erase the “solid borders” between herself and the emotions that her society—and her mother—had taught her to deny. At a young age, in fact, Wharton was socialized to become a paragon of “niceness,” taught to fear the intensity of longings considered contrary to the cool composure expected of young ladies of her station. Wolff associates this fear with the “formless” horror Wharton describes in the original manuscript version of A Backward Glance (published, appropriately enough, as “An Autobiographical Postscript” in The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton), a fear which manifested itself most strongly at the end of her daily walks: During the last few yards, and while I waited on the door-step for the door to be opened, I could feel it behind me, upon me; and if there was any delay in the opening of the door I was seized by a choking agony of terror. It did not matter who was with me, for no one could protect me; but, oh, the rapture of relief if my companion had a latch-key, and we could get in at once, before It caught me! (276)

9 Wolff reads this episode as evidence of the psychological conflict generated by Wharton’s upbringing; the house, she argues, represented for Wharton “Mother’s realm,” while the outside world stood for “freedom and independence.” Pausing on the threshold allowed Wharton to sense the tension between these two regions because “being away from Mother offered the chance to feel freely and to grow self-sufficient; nevertheless, being away from Mother’s control opened her to the risk of some terrible danger—being thrown to the Wolf or to some fate even worse” (39). “The Wolf” was the potential (and forbidden) outbreak of unrestrained emotion which, at least in Wharton’s mind, threatened to devour her if it was allowed to rear its ugly head. The Wolf had to be held in check.

10 Mary Pask commits the social taboo of letting the Wolf escape from her when the narrator signals his intention to leave. She begins to cry and, in a climactic monologue, begs him to stay with her, confessing that she is

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“Lonely, lonely! If you knew how lonely! It was a lie when I told you I wasn’t. And now you come, and your face looks friendly… and you say you’re going to leave me! No-no-no—you shan’t! Or else, why did you come? It’s cruel…” (380-81).

11 Unlike Wharton, who is caught only momentarily (and terrifyingly) in limbo before she evades the Wolf and reenters her mother’s regimented world, Mary quickly dispenses with her “coquetry” for unmediated emotion, exhibiting a fluidity, an immediacy and insatiability echoed in “the sea whose hungry voice I heard asking and asking…” (376). It is exactly this “wet” voice that, issuing from Mary herself, paralyzes the narrator’s phallic pleasure and renders him incapable of speaking in her presence.

12 The act of speaking may be understood further in the context of Wharton’s childhood when, according to Wolff, her imagination began a lifelong association of her emotions with the ability to communicate. Wharton believed that words, even “the sound of words apart from their meaning,” [could] offer the promise of an escape from loneliness and helplessness. The will to survive, to take what Mother would not give, becomes in very little girlhood identical with the compulsion to manipulate language. Language is the link to other human beings, human beings more responsive than Mother; language allows for the articulation of demands and thus for a mastery over the inarticulate passivity of earliest childhood. (25-26)

13 It is exactly this “articulation of demands,” this profusion of words and emotion, that constitutes the climax of the story. “Oh, stay with me, stay with me,” Mary cries, “just tonight … It’s so sweet and quiet here … No one need know … no one will ever come and trouble us” (381). The aloof narrator, fittingly enough, is silenced; his one line to Mary during his entire visit, “You live here alone?” (379) simply confirms Mary’s status as an autonomous and self-sufficient human being. Not only is each of his subsequent attempts at speech aborted (“I stammered something inarticulate,” etc.), but he also finds himself unable to write a letter informing Grace about his experience afterward despite the apparent safety and distance such a medium would provide.

14 The act of writing, in fact, haunts this story in other ways as well. Though Wolff carefully analyses the horror that assailed Wharton at the end of her daily walks, she neglects the broader context in which these episodes occurred. Wharton had recently recovered from an illness, during which time she had been reading a great deal—in particular a “super-natural tale” which she singles out as “perilous reading” (275). Allyson Stack emphasizes this element of Wharton’s experience, particularly as the tale triggered a relapse, such was the affective power of it (63-64). Stack goes on to discuss the role of Laplanche’s enigmatic signifier—i.e., a message which “signifies to” someone without necessarily “signifying of” anything in particular—in order to reformulate the act of interpretation as an opportunity for psychic development, primarily because “these communication situations have the power to reactivate the primal scene” (66-67). In this respect, Wharton’s work as an author may be understood as a productive response to the enigmatic signifiers of her own psyche, no longer tormented by them as “formless horrors” but instead, according to her memoir, A Backward Glance, shaping them into characters to suit her fiction (202).

15 Cixous devotes much of her effort in “The Laugh of the Medusa” to describing—and enacting—writing of this type as an expression of female power, “writing through [her] body” to explode the rationality and detached “objectivity” of male discourse. Her most vivid metaphor is, of course, the Medusa, who as an embodiment of female sexual power cannot be held directly by the male gaze. She must be decapitated; she must be

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severed from her body. As a Medusa-figure herself, Cixous articulates the “waves,” the “floods,” the “luminous torrents” of passion that went unspoken in her youth because she “was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a […] divine composure” (876). For Cixous, writing (which includes verbal articulation) is the necessary act, the praxis that allows female desire to exist as a palpable condition of human relationships. And like Cixous, Wharton also came to writing later in her lifetime and used it to reinscribe within herself her own feelings from which she was separated (in a typical Medusa-like “beheading”) at an early age. As a “nice” girl Wharton was as inarticulate, as mute—as alienated from her own feelings—as the narrator reveals himself to be. “And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing,” Cixous declares as if she were comparing her youth with Wharton’s. “I didn’t open my mouth” (876). Mary, however, does open her mouth, her status as a “ghost” allowing her to cry out to the narrator “the unuttered loneliness of a lifetime, to express at last what the living woman had always had to keep dumb and hidden.” Only when the narrator is a safe distance away from Mary does he contemplate the depth of her sadness, unconsciously identifying with her and confessing that “[t]he thought [of her loneliness] moved me curiously—in my weakness I lay and wept over it” (382). In the one moment he allows himself to shed tears (to make water) as Mary did he finds it “curious” and attributes it to his “weakness.”

16 When he attempts to regain his former composure, however, the narrator relapses into the fever he contracted during his travels, mimicking Wharton’s response to her “perilous reading” as a child. It also parallels some of the ailments Wharton suffered during the first twelve years of her marriage, for which by all accounts she was entirely unprepared. Hermione Lee sums up the prevailing view amongst Wharton’s biographers that her “psychosomatic reaction” to the marriage included “asthma, hay fever, frequent heavy colds and flu, bronchitis and lung-congestion […]. She also suffered from exhaustion, persistent nausea, and anaemia” (77-78). Wolff similarly notes that almost immediately after her wedding Wharton began to suffer from neurasthenia accompanied by episodes of intense nausea—Wharton’s way of “talking with her body” (an unhealthy talk, Cixous might add, occasioned by repression). By discouraging her from taking the nourishment that would assuage her “hunger,” Wharton’s nausea physically enacted her self-denial: “I want too much; I will annihilate everyone I care about; I will be consumed by my own appetites; I will be alone and starving” (52-53). Along similar lines, the narrator comes down with a self-censoring “fever”—the heat, the passion he represses in his daily life—from which he can recover only by avoiding further contact with the woman who has exposed him to the power of his own emotions. We discover at the end of the story that illness has played an integral role in Mary’s character as well; her fervent condition has been occasioned by a cataleptic trance, an ailment which causes its sufferer to experience a total loss of consciousness and feeling. It seems that she has awakened from this seizure (not unlike the cultural “trance” which held Wharton and Cixous) to a new consciousness, and for the first time—at least to the narrator’s knowledge—Mary expresses her desire. She has recovered from the silence and inhibition of her own passion; but her “cure” disturbs the narrator’s modus operandi.

17 Immediately after their encounter the narrator dwells upon the “dead Mary Pask who was so much more real to me than ever the living one had been” (382) and resolves to return to Morgat at a later date. Although his impulse suggests a possible recognition of Mary as a subject and perhaps a movement towards reconnecting himself with his own

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emotions and thereby erasing the borders that define his stolid personality, the terms of his resolution reveal an urge to hold her at the distance afforded by her apparent death. “I made up my mind,” he states, “when I was up again, to drive back to the place (in broad daylight, this time), to hunt out the grave in the garden” (382, emphasis added). He plans to return in the rational daylight that he knows will prevent her from reappearing, seeking not her but her grave in order to “appease the poor ghost with some flowers” (382). Comfortable only at the site of her dead body, he intends to offer her a trivialized symbol (pasqueflowers, perhaps) of her own emotional vivacity rather than a gesture that might constitute the beginnings of a genuine relationship.

18 The narrator’s unwillingness to reach out to Mary or even acknowledge her advances calls attention to a recurrent theme in Wharton’s fiction: the inability to interact with another living being. This motif figures prominently in works such as “Kerfol,” in which another nameless male narrator becomes fascinated with a dead woman named Anne de Cornault. This story, which also takes place during a Breton autumn, shows a “solitary-minded” and “unsociable” narrator inclined to express more feeling for Anne than for either of his living friends (282). Like many male characters inhabiting Wharton’s fiction, he prefers a woman who has been silenced and quite literally made into an object of his amusement rather than the troublesome reality of a thinking and feeling individual. Perhaps the most significant indicator of the narrator’s character is the behavior of Anne’s ghostly dogs at the beginning of the story (284-86). Though previously they have manifested her passion by killing her husband, they now reflect the narrator’s condition by remaining silent and keeping their distance from him. They are as determined to avoid contact with him as they were to kill the man who tormented Anne, impassively “observing” him much in the way he does the human characters in the story (286).

19 Other works such as The House of Mirth contain characters like Selden, who finds it impossible to break from his role as an outside observer, preferring to remain aloof from people in the New York society to which he feels superior. His fear of participating in a physically intimate and committed relationship with Lily Bart is one of the most significant factors contributing to her death. Like the narrator of “Miss Mary Pask” who resolves to meet Mary only through the mediated distance of her grave, Selden kneels by Lily’s dead body with the feeling that “the real Lily was still there, close to him, yet invisible and inaccessible; and the tenuity of the barrier between them mocked him with a sense of helplessness” (314). Selden can relate to Lily only when the “barrier between them” is intact; the border of death allows him to be physically close to her while at the same time preventing her from violating his idealization of her. He is comfortable with Lily only through the objectification of death. Unlike Mary’s brief demise, however, Lily’s death (as her name suggests) is quite permanent; she is not resurrected.

20 When the narrator of “Miss Mary Pask” discovers that Mary is, in fact, alive, he reacts as Selden or the narrator in “Kerfol” probably would do, stating (with the ghost of a double-entendre) that “I couldn’t get up any real interest in what [Grace] said [about Mary]. I felt I should never again be interested in Mary Pask, or in anything concerning her” (384). He loses interest (“He loses his hard-on!” Cixous would say) precisely because she has made irrelevant the boundaries of the grave and passed into a realm in which she can make emotional demands of him in return. He refuses to consider the possibility of meeting with her again—this woman who does not conform to his

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culture’s standards of “niceness”—and re-asserts his detachment from his own emotions, slipping back into the callous attitude that has kept Mary isolated from—and “dead” to—society. Although Mary and the narrator may be posed as single counterparts for, respectively, Wharton’s emotional needs and her social (or authorial) persona, such a correspondence neglects Wharton’s writing as precisely the activity capable of bringing together these two aspects of herself into a confluence and free- flowing exchange in which one may not exist without the other.

21 Beer and Horner describe the story as “a portrait of the older woman who has taken charge of her own space and her own language in order finally to realize her autonomy” (284). More crucially, we see that in “Miss Mary Pask,” as in much of her fiction, Wharton inscribes (or transcribes) her internal struggles—her struggles which become, through text, internal and external. The unnamed narrator of “Miss Mary Pask” relapses into a fever, much as Wharton herself did, after encountering an enigmatic signifier in the form of Mary herself. For him it is a disruptive event which becomes more, rather than less, disturbing after it receives a natural explanation. Unable or perhaps unwilling to write about it, he remains haunted. Wharton, however, responds ultimately with an enigmatic signifier of her own, recasting her textual encounter in the “flesh” of an affective character who enables a meaningful transformation. In her efforts to reintegrate the woman cast solid and splintered by those who would use her for their own interests, she does, as Cixous might say, the “not-nice,” the forbidden. She writes herself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beer, Janet and Avril Horner. “‘This Isn’t Exactly a Ghost Story’: Edith Wharton and Parodic Gothic.” Journal of American Studies 37.2 (2003): 269-85. Print.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-93. Print.

Dyman, Jenni. Lurking Feminism: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1996. Print.

Gallop, Jane. The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Print.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Chatto & Windus, 2007. Print.

Stack, Allyson. “Culture, Cognition and Jean Laplanche’s Enigmatic Signifier.” Theory, Culture & Society 22.3 (2005): 63-80. Print.

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: Scribners, 1934. Print.

---. “An Autobiographical Postscript.” The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribners, 1973. 275-76. Print.

---. The House of Mirth. 1905. New York: Bantam, 1984. Print.

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---. “Kerfol.” 1916. The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Ed. R.W.B. Lewis, vol. 2. New York: Scribners, 1968. 282-300. Print.

---. “Miss Mary Pask.” 1925. The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Ed. R.W.B. Lewis, vol. 2. New York: Scribners, 1968. 373-84. Print.

---. Preface to Ghosts. 1937. The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Ed. R.W.B. Lewis, vol. 2. New York: Scribners, 1968. 375-78. Print.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.

Zilversmit, Annette. “Edith Wharton’s Last Ghosts.” College Literature 14.1 (1987): 296-309. Print.

ABSTRACTS

« Miss Mary Pask » d’Edith Wharton est une histoire de fantômes qui ne correspond pas aux attentes du lecteur — ce n’est pas véritablement une histoire de fantômes. La nouvelle invite à la lecture d’une confluence de perspectives féministes, psychanalytiques et biographiques. Le personnage éponyme occupe le seuil entre la vie et la mort, mélangeant diverses oppositions tout en illustrant ce que Jane Gallop appelle la « réceptivité juteuse qui rend la pénétration indolore et en fait un échange fluide ». Cela provoque la peur du narrateur et, surtout, son incapacité à parler en présence de Mary. La matrice biographique établie par Cynthia Griffin Wolf permet de mieux comprendre l’histoire comme la reconnexion thérapeutique de Wharton avec les émotions que sa société — et sa mère — lui avaient appris à nier, en commençant par associer ces émotions enfouies à la capacité de communiquer. Wharton a commencé à comprendre « les mots, même "le son des mots en dehors de leur signification" comme une "promesse d’échapper à la solitude et à l’impuissance" ». Bien que la profusion de mots de Miss Mary Pask — sa profusion d’émotions — pousse le narrateur dans ses retranchements, il finit par accepter son échec à rencontrer Mary selon ses propres termes en la tenant à la distance confortable qu’offre son apparente mort. Ce n’est que lorsqu’il découvre qu’elle est en vie, qu’il confesse qu’il ne s’intéressera plus jamais à elle, ni à quoi que ce soit qui la concerne. Wharton négocie un seuil fantomatique entre l’articulation et la répression du désir féminin, en s’écrivant elle-même dans le processus.

AUTHOR

THOMAS LEGENDRE Thomas Legendre is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of The Burning (a novel), multiple short stories, and some critical and creative essays. He has also written Half Life, a play performed as part of NVA’s art installation in conjunction with The National Theatre of Scotland, and a radio drama entitled ‘Dream Repair’, broadcast on BBC 4.

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“Am I my Brother’s Keeper?” or “The Kingdom of Hell is Within Us”: A Spiritual Haunting in Charles Williams’ “Et in Sempiternum Pereant”

Suzanne Bray

1 Charles Williams (1883-1945) wrote only one short story, “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” (1935), which, in English, is a curse meaning “And May They Perish Everlastingly.” It recounts the retired Lord Arglay’s mysterious encounter with an “emaciated, self-consuming grotesque” (Boyer and Zahorski 166) in a haunted house where time stands still. As Charles Franklyn Beach has accurately noted, readers are frequently “puzzled about what actually takes place” (459) in the house. Although the story became well-known on account of its inclusion in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986), several critics deny that the emaciated figure which haunts the protagonist actually is a ghost, but they do not agree as to what it represents. Even the most eminent Williams scholars disagree about what happens in the final two paragraphs of the story and one expert, Professor Glen Cavaliero, has publicly changed his mind on the issue.

2 In order to resolve these questions, it is essential to see “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” in the context of Williams’ other writings and of the works he cites in the story. It is both a postscript to Williams’ second published novel Many Dimensions (1931) and also a theological tale where the fear comes from the possibility of eternal damnation, the haunting from the reality of persistent hatred in the protagonist’s soul, and the horror from the realization that hell may be within us as well as just around the corner.

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3 Charles Williams is not very well-known nowadays, but during his lifetime had quite a reputation as a writer of poetry, fiction, theology, literary criticism and biography. His most popular works were his seven “spiritual thrillers” (Watkins 234), stories of supernatural invasions into the everyday world. T.S. Eliot particularly admired these and the way Williams combined elements of fantasy with tales of “quite ordinary human beings, with their struggles among the shadows, their weaknesses and self- deceptions, their occasional moments of understanding” (xvii). Williams’ sole short story strongly resembles these novels in theme and style. Although “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” was originally published in The London Mercury in December 1935, very little was written about it until it appeared in two collections in the 1980s: Robert Boyer and Kenneth Zahorski’s Visions of Wonder: An Anthology of Christian Fantasy (1981) and Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert’s The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. While Glen Cavaliero considers that it differs “in style and content from most of its companions” (“Novels of Charles Williams”) in the Cox and Gilbert’s collection, the action actually takes place in one of their ideal locations for a ghost story, somewhere “gloomy and isolated: in ruinous or long-empty houses, on lonely roads” (xv), and to this extent Williams’ haunted house may be considered as almost stereotypical in its setting. Equally, Williams’ tale fits many of the criteria identified by M. R. James in his introduction to V.H. Collins’ anthology as “valuable in the concocting of a ghost story.” It has “a definite time and place and […] plenty of clear-cut and matter-of-fact detail.” The protagonist’s desire to both catch a bus and not be late for his appointment gives a somewhat prosaic credibility to the action. It has “atmosphere and a nicely managed crescendo,” with a satisfyingly scary climax. It could also, as James recommended in the introduction to one of his own collections, easily cause the reader to say to himself: “If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!” At the same time, “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” corresponds to Dorothy L. Sayers’ descriptions of the successful ghost or horror story in the post-Freudian world, found in the introductions to her famous anthologies. It thrives on “uneasy emotions” (“Third Omnibus,” 1), it explores “the lonely horror of the dark places of the soul” (“Great Stories,” 45) and makes the reader realize that “the kingdom of hell is,” potentially at least, “within us” (“Third Omnibus,” 7) and not only in the evil world outside us.

4 And yet, critics disagree about the nature of the setting, the identity of the haunting agent and about what actually happens at the end of the story. For Boyer and Zahorski, it is above all a fictional rewriting of “Canto 34, the conclusion of Dante’s Inferno” (165) and the action takes place in “hell in an isolated country house” (166). Glen Cavaliero, the first critic to write about the story in any detail, saw the action as taking place not in hell itself, but at “an opening onto the Pit [of Hell],” which is also “a place from which ascent is made into heaven” (“Poet of Theology,” 78). At this point, in 1983, he supposed the emaciated figure to be “a lost soul hastening to its own destruction” (78), and concluded that, in the final paragraphs, Lord Arglay “intercedes for it and saves it” (78).

5 Two scholars presented their view of the story in 1991. For Stuart Kenny, the emaciated creature is Arglay “himself in eternity. That self-consuming hate, burning in the fires of damnation” (44). Therefore, at the conclusion of the tale, Arglay saves himself and manages to escape from hell. For Charles Franklyn Beach, on the other hand, “Williams is not portraying hell in this story” (460), although he agrees that the gateway to hell is present in the abandoned house. Equally, Beach affirms categorically that “the

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emaciated man is not a ghost […] but is instead a man who repeatedly chooses self-love over courtesy” (463), and, as such, a living soul whose eternal destination is not yet fixed. He explicitly states that, in his opinion, “Glen Cavaliero incorrectly asserts that Arglay saves the emaciated man” (465).

6 However, by 1996, Cavaliero had changed his mind and come closer to Kenny’s interpretation. In an article on Charles Williams and the art of the ghost story, he asserts that “the entire story happens not to Lord Arglay, but in him” (“Metaphysical Epiphany,” 98). He therefore assumes that “the ghost does not invade this world; rather the consciousness of the this-worldly protagonist expands into the world of the spirit” (99). Cavaliero may, however, have changed his mind again, as in a 2001 article, he refers to the emaciated figure as “a troubled spirit on its way to hell.” One final possibility is presented by Barbara Kowalik in 2010. She follows several of the other critics in concluding that “the lifeless house turns out to be the mouth of hell” (77), rather than hell itself, but provides an element of originality in her estimation that the emaciated figure represents the “materialized hate of [Arglay’s] former brother-in- law” (77), who has recently died.

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7 In order to examine these theories, it is essential to look at Williams’ other writings which may shed light on his short story. The most obvious place to start is his 1931 novel Many Dimensions, in which the protagonist of “Et in Sempiternum Pereant,” Lord Arglay, first appears. As Beach points out, “the allusion to the novel” in the shorter work “suggests that one might carry certain ideas about the character into the short story” (459). It is even possible to see it as a postscript to the longer work, tying up a spiritual loose end at the end of the novel. The first thing to note is that, in Many Dimensions, the previously agnostic lawyer, Christopher Arglay, and his secretary, Chloe Burnett, make the conscious decision to believe in God and “set [them]selves against the world, the flesh and the devil” (129). The short story indicates that Arglay has continued on this path. He reads “the Christian Schoolmen” (167), such as Abelard, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. He has developed a “habit of devotion” (172) and he prays. He deliberately resists temptation and refuses evil thoughts. However, it is clear in both works that he has to fight against one particular obstacle in his spiritual pilgrimage—his brother-in-law, the learned crook Sir Giles Tumulty, who remains nameless in the short story, although his identity is obvious for anyone who has already read the novel.

8 Williams makes it clear in both novels where Sir Giles appears (Descent into Hell and Many Dimensions) that he is a most unpleasant person and that those who dislike him, including Lord Arglay, have, humanly speaking, every excuse for their antipathy. Grevel Lindrop, Williams’ most recent biographer, refers to Sir Giles as ‘‘utter cynical, magnificently foul-mouthed and totally devoid of human decency” (165). Arglay’s first mention of his relative in Many Dimensions clearly indicates his opinion of the man: Sir Giles is “one of the most cantankerously crooked birds [Arglay] ha[s] ever known” and “the first authority in the world on certain subjects, and the first authority in hell on one or two more” (21). Sir Giles is clearly, for Arglay, both associated with hell and the powers of darkness and an impediment to belief in a benevolent deity. When Chloe first declares that she believes in God, the lawyer replies: “In spite of the fact that Giles

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Tumulty exists, so do I” (130). Later on, when Arglay learns that someone is trying to harm Chloe, he immediately, and justifiably, suspects Sir Giles and goes on to contemplate murdering him (202). This temptation does not just go away, as several pages later Arglay is “still in two minds about going off to Ealing and quite simply killing Sir Giles” (210). Although he manages to resist these temptations, Arglay, at the end of the novel, still detests his brother-in-law and holds him at least partly responsible for Chloe’s death. The fact that Sir Giles himself has also died seems to Arglay, and the reader, to be largely his own fault, as Sir Giles is portrayed throughout the novel as cruel, inconsiderate and short-tempered; his last recorded words, addressed to the sleeping, saintly Chloe, being “O go to hell” (244).

9 “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” appears to take place several months after the end of the novel. Lord Arglay has had time to publish the book he was in the process of finishing in Many Dimensions. All the loose ends from the longer work appear to have been tied up, except that Arglay’s feelings for Sir Giles have not really changed. He knows that, during Sir Giles’ lifetime, he came near to hating him, “hating with a fury of selfish rage and detestation” (171), and even though the man is now dead he still almost desires “to follow, to be with him, to provoke and torment him” (172). In his 1941 essay “The Way of Exchange,” Charles Williams refers to the frequently experienced “feeling of outrage that we should be intimately interrelated, physically and spiritually, with those who have offended our pride or our principles” (153), which accurately describes Arglay’s feelings about Sir Giles. However, Williams makes it clear that Christian doctrine carries with it an obligation to resist this feeling and to offer both service and solidarity to all “our friends and neighbours, whether we like our neighbours or not” (153). As he understands the relationships between God, each individual and all other people, living or dead, “pardon as a disposition of the soul is a necessity” (“Redeemed City,” 109), however great the offence committed and however immoral the person concerned. Each person may, in the end, insist on remaining separate from the rest of humanity, but ultimately, for Williams, “this is hell” (“Way of Exchange,” 154), or more precisely, such insistence on separation from other human souls will lead to the divine life in that person gradually dying and his drawing “nearer to the ‘perishing everlastingly,’ which will one day be hell” (154). The fact that Williams mentions here the concept of “perishing everlastingly,” which was part of the title of his short story, indicates a connection between the messages of the two works.

10 In “Et in Sempiternum Pereant,” Lord Arglay appears to be aware that his feelings are unacceptable and contrary to the faith he professes. He therefore fights against them, committing himself to God until the temptation leaves him. And yet he remains aware that “his greedy loves and greedy hates […] the cloud of the sin of his life” (175) are still there in his subconscious, ready to trip him up.

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11 Some clues as to what happens may also be found in the works to which Williams alludes in “Et in Sempiternum Pereant”: Dante’s Inferno, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the Bible. The final quotation of the short story, “E quindi uscimmo […] a riveder le stele”—We came forth to look once more upon the stars (Sayers, Hell 289)—from Canto XXXIV of Dante’s Inferno, gives one clue as to where to look for the imagery of hell used in Williams’ tale. However, it is difficult to agree with Boyer and Zahorski that the story

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“interprets fictionally Canto 34” (165) and that the self-consumption of the emaciated figure in the isolated house is to be equated with “the very pit of hell where Satan is devouring Judas, Brutus and Cassius” (166). This is particularly because Satan’s cannibalistic devouring of the three great traitors is unlike Williams’ unhappy creature’s desperate gnawing away at his own flesh. A closer parallel may be found in Canto VIII where the Florentine Filippo Argenti is found in the Circle of the Wrathful having “turned on himself, biting with his teeth and mauling” (118), as an image of the eternal anger constantly consuming him. Dorothy L. Sayers’ description of Dante’s Wrathful as those who have, on account of their anger, “rejected pity and chosen cruelty” (120) in this world, certainly corresponds more closely to Lord Arglay’s temptation with regard to his brother-in-law, or even to Sir Giles’ own attitudes in life, than the ultimate treason of the traitors in Dante’s final Canto. It may therefore be assumed that Lord Arglay, like Dante himself, has been offered a vision of hell which, as Sayers points out, “is remedial, is the soul’s self-knowledge in all its evil potentialities— the revelation of the nature of impenitent sin” (Hell 68). The aim of this vision would be to lead Lord Arglay to repent once and for all of the hatred, anger and unforgiveness in his soul and reject them for ever.

12 References to The Pilgrim’s Progress provide further enlightenment as to what is actually happening to Lord Arglay. As he approaches the house, the narrator explains that those who came this way carried their burdens on their shoulders (170), like Bunyan’s pilgrims, implying that Lord Arglay may be carrying one too: the burden of his hatred. The house is also described as being tangentially off the narrow way Arglay had previously been walking on, as all the places of temptation in The Pilgrim’s Progress are off the straight and narrow road to the Celestial City. However, the clearest parallel comes when Arglay, in the heat of his spiritual crisis, sees two doors and remembers that “from every gate of hell there was a way to heaven, yes, and in every way to heaven there was a gate to deeper hell” (176). This is a transparent allusion to the final paragraph of Bunyan’s work where the narrator sees that “there was a way to Hell, even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction” (133). Williams’ more encouraging doubling of the door seems to indicate that Arglay, and the emaciated figure, are here faced with two possible destinations, even if, until this point, Arglay has been on the road to heaven and the ghostly figure on the road to hell. The lonely house would thus be a kind of ante-chamber, rather than hell itself. It is also worth noting that Bunyan’s Christian, shortly before he enters the Celestial City is haunted by “apparitions of Hob-goblins and Evil Spirits” and is also “much in troublesome thoughts of the sins that he had committed, both since and before he had become to be a Pilgrim” (128). In Christian’s case, as Hopeful explains, these are “sent to try you, whether you will call to mind that which heretofore you have received of [God’s] goodness, and live upon him in your distresses” (129). Lord Arglay’s reaction to the temptations which assail him is, in the first case, to commit himself to “the Omnipotence” (172) and, on the second occasion, to remember his own salvation, offer salvation to the emaciated figure, and then declare the glory of God. It is therefore possible to assume that Arglay, like Christian, is tried and passes the test.

13 Two verses in the New Testament also provide assistance in interpreting Williams’ story. One of the most telling images in “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” is the smoke without fire coming out of the house’s chimney, giving the impression that the laws of cause and effect somehow do not apply here. In two of his later works, Williams alludes

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to the passage in the biblical book of Revelation where an angel declares to John that those who have worshipped the Beast and received his mark will be tormented with burning sulphur and that “the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever” (Rev. 14: 11). In Descent into Hell, the novel Williams was working on at the same time as he was writing his short story (Lindop 176-77), the author describes the wanderings of a man who has recently committed suicide and who makes his way through the places he had once known until the two heroines show him the way to salvation. The suicide imagines the disappointment of those who have persecuted him when they realise he is dead, and Williams compares this to the same verse in Revelation and John the Divine’s vision of “where disappointed Hell is spread and smokes before the Lamb” (Descent 115). He would later evoke, more precisely, “the smoke of the torment going up for ever and ever before the Lamb and his angels” (Forgiveness of Sins 183) as something co-existing with the joy of heaven. The ever-rising smoke is thus a sign of hell and judgement, of unrepentant rebellion against the ways of God. However, the fact that, in Descent into Hell, Williams relates it to the fate of the recently dead suicide, who will avoid hell and find salvation after leaving this life, indicates that Williams thought this kind of second chance was possible. For this reason, it seems safe to conclude that the emaciated figure in the short story could be either alive or recently dead, and if dead, in Williams’ world view, could still be saved in the place outside time.

14 The second Bible verse alluded to has to be assumed from Lord Arglay’s crying out, “defying infinity, ‘Now!’” (176), in order to save himself from the burning smoke and the hateful images of Sir Giles which are tormenting him. As Stuart Kenny observes, this is certainly a reference to “St Paul’s statement about now being the day of salvation” (43) in 2 Corinthians 6:2. As time has stood still in the mysterious house, Lord Arglay has entered the timelessness of the eternal now and he has to react and consciously quit this mortal lethargy in order to experience a new beginning, where time can start again. Whether the day of salvation reached with his cry of “Now!” is just for Lord Arglay himself or also for the figure he aims to help is more difficult to discern.

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15 With these things in mind, it is now possible to examine the final paragraphs of “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” in order to try and work out what actually happens in the abandoned house. Lord Arglay, in the timeless state, has been confronted by the emaciated figure who tries to eat its own flesh. Arglay’s first, horrified, reaction is to try and prevent it from doing so, but he does not succeed. However, as he gets close enough to the figure to touch it, he gets sucked into the heat and smoke, emerging from what appears to be the gateway to hell. In this stifling atmosphere, Arglay feels “the reality of his hate” (175) and sees “images of the man he hated swept in a thick cloud of burning smoke” (175). He is, at this point, only aware of the emaciated figure as “a wasted flicker of pallid movement” (175), like the background to a dream. Arglay himself feels “starving in the smoke” (175), like the figure. Refusing the evil around him, he cries out “Now!” and sees the two doors out of the smoke, presumably one to heaven and one to hell. Then, Arglay hesitates. The text says that “there was no sign of the phenomenon by which he had discerned the passage of that other spirit” (176). The use of the term “that other spirit,” seems to indicate that the emaciated figure is not Arglay himself, but some other person, living or recently dead. This conclusion is

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supported by the facts that Arglay moves his head “as if to seek his neighbour” (176), and that he believes this neighbour has “the nature of the lost” (176), having refused to learn from his mistakes and become so self-centred that his whole existence is centred in his “undying and perishing” (176), thus everlastingly perishing, self. Although there is, in the text, no clear indication of the identity of the figure, its presence brings to Lord Arglay’s consciousness images of his hated brother-in-law. This, and the way the figure behaves, like one of Dante’s Wrathful, full of anger and without pity, make it at least possible that it represents the deceased Sir Giles.

16 At this point, Lord Arglay, moved by compassion, desires “to offer himself” to the emaciated figure, “to make a ladder of himself” (176), whereby the figure could leave the road to hell and find the gateway to heaven. Similar acts of intercession are found in various places in Williams’ fiction1 and it is clear from all his writings that Williams believed such a transaction to be possible. Anne Ridler opines that Williams merely saw them as the logical outworking of the Christian doctrine of intercessory prayer, in which “by our own intention of good will we may make ourselves a channel for God’s grace to flow towards another soul” (xlix). In any case, in the final sections of The Descent of the Dove (1939), often taken to be a description of the foundations of Williams’ Order of the Co-inherence, the author refers to Christ’s atoning death on the cross as “restoring substitution and co-inherence everywhere,” with the result that “up and down the ladder of that great substitution all our lesser substitutions run” (147). Williams’ use of the word co-inherence, usually used in theology to describe the relationship of complete solidarity between the persons of the Trinity, shows that he believes that a similar connection exists, or may potentially exist, between members of Christ’s body, the Church. Even, in some circumstances, Williams shows co-inherence as possible for unbelievers who agree to form such a spiritual relationship with a believer.

17 After making his offer of help, of substitution, Arglay feels something come up behind him: “It leapt through him; he was seized in it and loosed from it. The torrent of its fiery passage struck the darkening hollow in the walls” (176). No more detail is given. No statement is made as to whether the intercession has been successful or not, whether the emaciated figure has been able to reach salvation by passing through the lawyer’s body. The only clue may be found in the faint sound Arglay hears, “the weak wail of multitudes of the lost” (176). This sound may indicate that the figure has joined the lost in the pit of hell or, on the other hand, the lost souls may be moaning in disappointment that another soul has escaped them. The only similar sound to be found elsewhere in Williams’ work occurs towards the end of Descent into Hell, where the Lilith figure tries to tempt the heroine, Pauline, into wanting the empty pleasures of hell. Pauline refuses and laughs with joy, at which a thin wail is heard, which Williams describes as “the wail of all those dead who cannot endure joy” (Descent 209). The lost, or “all the immortal who are sick for ever” (209), join in the plaintive wail, lamenting Pauline’s joyful refusal, which undermines hell’s influence on earth. This parallel makes it more likely that the lost in “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” are also wailing out of disappointment. In the short story, as soon as he hears the wail, Lord Arglay runs from the house declaring the glory of God, returns to the world of time and jumps on a bus.

18 In spite of the clearly theological implications of Williams’ short story, it is not a fictional sermon. The author is showing a spiritual possibility and not preaching. As

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T.S. Eliot explains, Williams’ aim “is to make you partake of a kind of experience that he has had, rather than make you accept some dogmatic belief” (xiv). Reading “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” is therefore closer to reading a short story by Arthur Machen or Sheridan Le Fanu than one by the explicitly Christian G.K. Chesterton or George MacDonald.

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19 As Dorothy L. Sayers has pointed out, a ghost or horror story “must always leave us guessing” (Third Omnibus 5) and “plain unvarnished statement will not do, because the whole virtue of the story lies in the power of suggestion” (3). As indicated above, this is certainly true of Williams’ sole short story. It is clear that the haunting occurs because Lord Arglay has allowed his feelings of hatred and unforgiveness towards his brother- in-law to remain in him, even after Sir Giles’ death. Such a frightening encounter could therefore, presumably, happen to anyone who refuses to forgive, who insists on continuing to hate. For Glen Cavaliero, “not until it is over does the story have the power to frighten: it gains its effects through implication” (“Novels of Charles Williams”), the implication that it is scarily easy for any one of us to lay ourselves open to such a horrific experience. And yet, in spite of the doom-laden title, the uneasy atmosphere, which for some becomes “more eerie with each reading” (“Metaphysical Epiphany,” 102), the slowly built-up climax and the horror of the self-consuming emaciated figure and the suffocating smoke, “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” may be read as a story of hope. Lord Arglay approaches the gate of hell, arguably saves, and certainly seeks to save, a lost soul, and then comes out of the experience “with some communion of peace at heart” (177), to look upon the stars. He has been tested and

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alighieri, Dante. Hell. Translated and with an Introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1949. Print.

Beach, Charles Franklyn. “A Place Where One Lives without Learning.” Studies in Short Fiction 28.4 (1991): 459-466. Print.

Boyer, Robert H. and Kenneth J. Zahorski, eds. Visions of Wonder: An Anthology of Christian Fantasy. New York: Avon Books, 1981. Print.

Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. 1678. Oxford: Oxford UP, World’s Classics, 1984. Print.

Cavaliero, Glen. “A Metaphysical Epiphany: Charles Williams and the Art of the Ghost Story.” The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams. Eds. Charles Huttar and Peter J. Schakel. Mississauga, Canada: Associated UP, 1996. 90-102. Print.

---. Charles Williams: Poet of Theology. 1983. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007. Print.

---. “The Novels of Charles Williams.” The Lost Club Journal 1.2 (2001). Web.

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Cox, Michael and R.A. Gilbert, eds. The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986). Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

Eliot, T.S. “Introduction” to Charles Williams, All Hallows Eve. 1945. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1981. ix-xviii. Print.

James, M.R. Collected Ghost Stories. 1924. Adelaide University ebooks, 1931.

---. “Introduction.” Ghosts and Marvels. 1924. Ed. V.H. Collins. Oxford UP. Web.

Kenny, Stuart. “The Now of Salvation: Thoughts of Charles Williams’ ‘Et in Sempiternum Pereant.’” Mythlore 66 (Summer 1991): 43-44. Print.

Kowalik, Barbara. “Inklings of Afterlife: Images of Hell in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and Charles Williams’s ‘Et in Sempiternum Pereant’.” Thise Stories Beren Witnesse: the Landscape of the Afterlife in Medieval and Post-Medieval Imagination. Ed. In Liliana Sikorska. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010. 77-91. Print.

Lindop, Grevel. The Third Inkling. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Print.

Ridler, Anne. “Introduction.” The Image of the City and Other Essays. 1958. Berkeley CA: Apocryphile Press, 2007. i-lxxii. Print.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Great Stories of Mystery, Detection and Horror. 1928. London: Gollancz, 1946. Print.

---. “Introduction.” The Third Omnibus of Crime of Crime. New York: Coward-McCann, 1942. 11-26. Print.

Watkins, Gwen. “Charles Williams and R.H. Benson.” Charles Williams: A Celebration. Ed. Brian Horne. Leominster: Gracewing, 1995. 218-34. Print.

Williams, Charles. Descent into Hell. 1937. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1966. Print.

---. “Et in Sempiternum Pereant.” 1935. Visions of Wonder: An Anthology of Christian Fantasy. Eds. Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski. New York: Avon Books, 1981. 167-77. Print.

---. He Came Down from Heaven (1938) and The Forgiveness of Sins (1949). London: Faber and Faber, 1950. Print.

---. Many Dimensions. 1931. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990. Print.

---. “The Order of the Co-inherence.” 1939. Essential Writings in Spirituality and Theology. Ed. Charles Hefling. Boston, MA: Cowley Publications, 1993. 146-50. Print.

---. “The Redeemed City.” 1941. The Image of the City and Other Essays. Ed. Anne Ridler. 1958. Berkeley CA: Apocryphile Press, 2007. 102-09. Print.

---. “The Way of Exchange.” 1941. The Image of the City and Other Essays. Ed. Anne Ridler. 1958. Berkeley CA: Apocryphile Press, 2007. 147-53. Print.

NOTES

1. Lester’s substitution for Betty in All Hallows’ Eve (1945) comes to mind, as does the Archdeacon’s for Pattison in War in Heaven (1930).

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ABSTRACTS

Charles Williams (1883-1945) n’a écrit qu’une nouvelle, « Et in Sempiternum Pereant » (1935), qui raconte la mystérieuse rencontre que fait le jeune retraité Lord Arglay dans une maison hantée hors du temps. Comme l’affirme Charles Franklyn Beach, les lecteurs de cette nouvelle ont souvent « du mal à comprendre exactement ce qui se passe » dans la maison. Même si la nouvelle est devenue très connue grâce à sa place dans l’Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986), plusieurs critiques nient que le personnage décharné qui hante le protagoniste est réellement un fantôme. En revanche, ils ne sont pas du tout d’accord sur sa véritable identité. Même les experts les plus éminents de l’œuvre de Williams n’arrivent pas à s’accorder sur les événements des deux derniers paragraphes du récit et un universitaire a publiquement changé d’avis à ce sujet. Bien que tout le monde accepte que Williams ait subi l’influence de Dante et de Bunyan, la nature précise de sa dette envers eux reste floue. Afin de résoudre ces énigmes, il est essentiel de comprendre « Et in Sempiternum Pereant » à la fois comme un postscript au roman de suspens spirituel Many Dimensions (1931) et comme une conte théologique où l’ambiance de crainte vient de la possibilité de perdition éternelle, où la hantise est provoquée par la réalité d’une haine inassouvie et où l’horreur de la compréhension que le royaume de l’enfer n’est peut-être pas seulement à l’autre bout de la rue mais aussi en nous.

AUTHORS

SUZANNE BRAY Suzanne Bray is professor of British Literature and Civilisation at Lille Catholic University in the north of France. She specialises in the history of religious ideas in 20th-century Britain and the interaction between theology, literature and popular culture. She has published extensively in English and French on C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton and several other bestselling Christian literary figures.

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“Haunted, you said?”: Arthur Machen’s Short Stories as Haunted and Haunting Places

Deborah Bridle

1 When we hear the word “haunting,” our mind presumably pictures the spirit of a dead person lingering in a particular place, ideally an old mansion, and haunting, namely visiting and scaring, the living beings present in said place. In the realm of literature, famous ghosts such as Hamlet’s father or Scrooge’s partner Marley come to mind while the gothic and supernatural fiction of authors like Poe, Le Fanu, Henry James or M. R. James gave ghosts a prominent role in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arthur Machen is associated to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries trend of supernatural horror fiction alongside authors such as Lord Dunsany or Ambrose Bierce. However, as editor Philip Van Doren Stern wrote in an introduction to a 1948 Machen anthology, “Machen did not write a single ghost story. He was never interested in the unhappy revenant that lingers around ancestral houses to plague a new generation for the sins of the old” (163). Therefore, why talk of haunting regarding Machen’s fiction and how relevant can the concept be for a critical reading? The OED offers among others the following definition for the noun “haunting”: “Customary resort; frequenting; visitation by fears, suspicions, imaginary beings, spirits, etc.,” while the various definitions of the verb “haunt” feature the adverb “frequently.” “Haunting” thus seems to be determined by its recurrent character as well as its intangibility. In that sense, Machen’s short stories offer a wide range of hauntings which, albeit not performed by ghosts per se, cause a recurrent feeling of dread and fear in the characters. Through phenomena of demonic possession, magic rituals and the resurgence of god-like figures from the past, Machen’s short stories are indeed visited by “fears, suspicions, imaginary beings, spirits.” Max Duperray’s analysis of what he calls the spectral mode would tend to confirm this conception of the haunting process: in his article “En guise d’introduction du spectral,” he defines the spectral mode as a spectre-free supernatural mode where repetition replaces the usual ghosts by producing a series of echoes and recurrences.

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2 The purpose of this article is to show how the diegetic hauntings are actually a mere manifestation of a broader and more significant form of haunting. The text itself is the haunting agent and can be seen as an organic body that can haunt as much as be haunted. My first part shall thus analyse Machen’s stories as haunted and haunting texts on a diegetic as well as an extratextual level. I will then use the motif of repetition and recurrence as a means to decipher the meaning of the haunting process.

Haunted/Haunting Texts

3 Machen’s stories are stories of dread and horror in which the setting is often pervaded with an oppressive and ominous atmosphere while the characters are thrown in the path of terrifying phenomena that are bound to haunt them for life. In “The Great God Pan,” after seeing the evil things that his wife is capable of, Charles Herbert says to his friend “you would pass the rest of your life as I pass mine, a haunted man, a man who has seen hell” (27). In “The Inmost Light,” Dyson catches a glimpse of a demonic figure at a window and is haunted by this vision night and day. The customary haunted location is also given some prominence, with the examples of the age-old scene of gruesome murders that people have shunned for centuries (“Novel of the Black Valley”) and the typically Gothic abandoned haunted house that leaves a dreadful feeling in its visitors.1

4 However, those types of rather classical hauntings in which the characters are disturbed by their own unmediated experience are far less numerous than indirect forms of hauntings. Most of Machen’s short stories are built on an embedded structure in which the heroes are only acquainted with horror through an account they have heard or read from a third party. In that sense, the received account, or text, becomes the haunting agent. Here are a few of the innumerable examples: in “The Great God Pan” Charles Herbert tells of his evil and demonic wife to Villiers, who then becomes haunted by the tale and repeats it to his friend Austin; in the same story, Clarke reads “for the tenth time” the story of Helen’s childhood written by Dr. Phillips; in “The Inmost Light” Dyson reads about the mysterious death of Mrs Black and is so obsessed by it that he decides to investigate the case himself, and the reader’s knowledge of this obsession is obtained via Dyson’s admission of it to his friend Salisbury. He will eventually get to the truth of the mystery thanks to a notebook left by Dr. Black.

5 The text as haunting agent can take on different shapes in addition to its textual and narrative form, as shown by the evil-imbued portrait of Helen discovered by Villiers in “The Great God Pan,” or by the crumpled note that Salisbury finds in a dark passageway in “The Inmost Light” and which “got into his head. […] It became a positive pain, like the foolish burden of a music-hall song, everlastingly quoted, and sung at all hours of the day and night” (24).

6 The advantage offered by the text compared to the actual experience is that it can be cast away (although only momentarily since its haunting quality will always make it re- emerge in some form or other). Sophie Mantrant underlines the dimension of contamination that portraits and written accounts have in “The Great God Pan”: “Machen’s novella particularly emphasizes the phenomenon of contamination by the text or, more generally, by representation. One finds in ‘The Great God Pan,’ just as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the motif of the disease-transmitting contagious portrait or text” (298, my translation). She illustrates her point with Clarke’s injunction to Villiers

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to burn Helen’s portrait and his brutal rejection of Dr Phillips’s account through the violent shutting of the notebook containing it. According to Mantrant, those reactions are part of the physical and emotional process of rejection that horror (as opposed to terror) entails in the subject. However, we can add to this analysis that the repulsion that horror prompts in the characters does not prevent them from seeking its contact time and again. No matter how appalling Dr Phillips’s account is, Clarke reads it for the tenth time.

7 If we consider that horror is a key element of the haunting process in Machen’s stories and that this process mostly occurs through the bodies of various texts, we have to acknowledge the willingness of the reader to get haunted by those horrific texts. As a result, the actual readers that we are are also willing victims of this textual haunting. The stories can be read on a metafictional level as the representation of our desire to read supernatural and horror fiction, a recurring desire that can be considered as a form of haunting. In this mise en abyme, the intradiegetic haunting presence of the textual bodies (be they spoken accounts, diaries, letters, portraits, etc.) mirrors the extratextual haunting presence of the primary textual body. The plots are scattered with references to literature, and more particularly to fantasy, further reinforcing the self-referential character of Machen’s fiction. Many of Machen’s main protagonists are aspiring writers (possible spectral representations of the author himself) who like to discourse on the virtues and flaws of the use of imagination in fiction. Dyson in particular is prone to expatiate on this topic in the four stories in which he is featured and he never misses an opportunity to praise the marvellous, the odd, the wonderful. Fantasy becomes a prism that enables him to read reality as if it were a tale and therefore to accept the supernatural as plausible and to seek it like a ghost hunter. His friend Russell, another would-be writer, is struck by the sight of a house which gives him a vision of the ideal plot: on the door “the red stain of blood, and behind a window two shadows, blackened and faded on the blind, as they swayed on tightened cords— the shadows of a man and a woman hanging in a vulgar gas lit parlour” (The Three Impostors, “The Recluse of Bayswater,” 195). Dyson and Russell are haunted by the desire to read reality through the fascinating lens of horror.

8 This haunting desire can be paralleled with the actual reader’s thirst for horror, which is simultaneously exacerbated and quenched by the specificities of the short story. A critical anthology on nineteenth-century supernatural fiction states that this particular genre often took the form of the short story and thus better achieved the effect of horror by avoiding the “loosely constructed plots and subplots” and “stock characters” of its predecessor, the Gothic novel. In addition, the growing popularity and availability of magazines “increased the proliferation of supernatural tales” (Kepos 207) and made the success of penny dreadfuls and their likes. Benjamin F. Fisher IV gives the example of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine as the publisher of some of the best brief horror tales of the mid-nineteenth century. Needless to say that Poe’s concept of the unity of effect is particularly suited to tales of horror: those texts offer a more direct approach to the action of the plot than longer novels, and therefore sustain a more even atmosphere of dread.

9 In order to emphasise the unity of effect produced by the short story of horror, Machen heavily relied on the technique of omission. Many critics have underlined this particular feature of Machen’s style, a recurring and haunting process in his fiction: the horror is generally too terrible and nauseating to be repeated or described. Denying the

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reader and the characters access to the complete information adds to its potential horror: by letting our imagination run wild, our thoughts often paint a more terrifying picture. The missing elements form part of a dialectics of presence/absence (just like a ghost) which reinforces the haunting quality of the text. Discussing Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, Max Duperray analyses the absence of certain ghosts as a means to re- establish their strength and their visibility: “it is the denial of spectres that reinforces the spectral: through the presence of absence” (16, my translation). This perfectly describes the phenomenon of haunting itself as a pervading but elusive presence. In Machen’s stories, this absent presence is mostly justified by its unbearably horrific character: the descriptions are either interrupted by the witness who refuses to inflict upon his listener or reader the horrific shock of what he saw, or by the recipient of the tale who does not want to hear more (two examples among many are sufficient to illustrate those two aspects): I cannot write down what I witnessed that night; I cannot bear to recall what went on in those secret rooms fast shuttered and curtained so that no light should escape into the quiet street. (The Three Impostors, “Strange Occurrence in Clerkenwell,” 225) Austin took the manuscript but never read it. Opening the neat pages at haphazard his eye was caught by a word and a phrase that followed it; and, sick at heart, with white lips and a cold sweat pouring like water from his temples, he flung the paper down. “Take it away, Villiers; never speak of this again. […] I will not read it; I should never sleep again.” (“The Great God Pan,” 57)

10 This elusive presence of the horrific text can be further complicated by the narrators who help and hinder at the same time the spreading of the text. For instance, at the end of “The Great God Pan,” the manuscript of Dr Matheson which recounts the death of Helen Vaughan is interrupted in several parts because it is illegible, thus making the spectre of the text more evasive and transient for the character reading it as well as for the actual reader of the short story. Some characters resort to denial when the horror is too great, like Vaughn who, in “The Shining Pyramid,” tries to convince himself that the terrible pagan ritual he has witnessed was an illusion, or the narrator of “The White People” who doubts the reality of what she has witnessed in the woods with her nurse. But the haunting is stronger and always recurs. For us readers as well as for the characters who strive to understand the events in spite of their horrific quality, this spectral body that the text constitutes is an object of desire, the Lacanian “objet a,” that we seek while it remains unattainable. In “The White People,” we know that the fabulous places visited by the narrator are places of evil power and we would like to know more, but “the secret wood must not be described” and it is condemned to remain a half-complete textual representation, a haunting presence/absence.

11 As powerful a means for horror as it is, the text as haunting and haunted body has further significance in Machen’s fiction. As J. T. Owen explains, “Machen tried to suggest a level of evil which transcends words—admittedly a difficult task for a writer. Machen’s point is that there are forces in the world which go so far beyond human comprehension that language does not exist with which to describe them. Man must rely on mysterious symbols and signs” (192). The written text, partial and elusive as it may be, is like the coded message found by Salisbury in “The Inmost Light” and which becomes for Dyson “an attraction, and now and again he took it up and scanned thoughtfully what [was] written. […] It was a token, a symbol, he decided, and not a cipher” (33).

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Repetition and Recurrence: Deciphering Haunting

12 If haunting is the phenomenon of repetitive visitation, it is then undeniable that Machen’s stories are haunted by a series of recurring ghosts. The most obvious one is a ghost named “plot.” Let us take for example the initial event in “The Great God Pan” and in “The Inmost Light”: in both stories, a physician versed in the occult conducts an experiment on the brain of a vulnerable female subject in order to gain access to mysterious and forbidden knowledge of the world beyond. Several stories use the disappearance of a young country girl to prove the existence of ancient evil people in the wilderness, a resurgence of the fairies from Celtic folklore. We can see them or their malevolent pagan rituals in “The Shining Pyramid,” “The Red Hand,” “Novel of the Black Seal” (The Three Impostors) and “The White People.”

13 Another diegetic element that was dear to Machen was the motif of degeneration: at the end of “The Great God Pan,” Helen follows a degenerative process that takes her down the evolution chain and only leaves behind a “substance like to jelly” (62); the same misfortune happens to Francis Leicester in “Novel of the White Powder” (The Three Impostors), in which the young man “was a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes” (209); and in “Novel of the Black Seal” (The Three Impostors), Jervase—a young country boy who happens to be the fruit of the union between a woman and the ancient god Pan, just like Helen in “The Great God Pan”—is the victim of a fit during which “something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy wavering tentacle, across the room” (172).

14 All those very similar elements of the diegesis are accompanied by objects, props, or sub-elements of plot that are also recurrent in the stories: one can find numerous references to old flints and arrowheads (“The Shining Pyramid,” “The Red Hand,” and in The Three Impostors “The Gold Tiberius” and “Adventure of the Missing Brother”), black stones covered in ancient and enigmatic carvings (“Novel of the Black Seal,” “The Red Hand”), the wine of the Sabbath and references to Sabbatical rituals (“The White People,” and in The Three Impostors “Novel of the White Powder” and “History of the Young Man With Spectacles”), the figure of the snake, the goat or the faun as the representative of primal evil (“The Great God Pan,” “The Shining Pyramid,” “The Gold Tiberius,” “History of the Young Man With Spectacles,” “Novel of the Black Seal”), and the presence of Roman ruins in the West countryside (“The Great God Pan,” “Novel of the Back Seal,” “The White People”). The characters themselves can be seen as spectres visiting the various stories. Indeed, Machen often uses the same names although not for the same characters: Helen Vaughan, the evil heroine of “The Great God Pan,” lends her first name to a woman in “Novel of the White Powder,” and her last name to the detective’s sidekick in “The Shining Pyramid.” The name Meyrick is used in “The Great God Pan” but also in a later story, ‘”The Children of the Pool,” and in one of Machen’s novels. Sophie Mantrant makes an interesting observation on the similarity between Helen’s name Vaughan and “faun” and highlights her fluctuating nature all through the story as the character travels the world and keeps changing names to protect her identity. Her protean nature shows her self-division into various repetitions, or ghosts, of her original self.

15 Generally speaking, Machen’s characters also seem to be rather flat or stock characters. The main protagonists of his stories are amateur detectives thrown into investigations

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on sordid and mysterious events, they often go through a period of poverty before seeing their fortunes turned thanks to an unforeseen inheritance, and most of them are would-be writers as well. J. T. Owens associates those protagonists with the eighteen- nineties’ flâneurs because they all love to walk through London’s “byways and obscure quarters” (193) with no particular design in mind, a feature that establishes Machen’s kinship with the decadent writers according to the critic. At all events, London is given much more emphasis and depth than the characters roaming its streets, showing another recurrent element in Machen’s stories: the settings are always given much more prominence than the protagonists. As Philip Van Doren Stern explains, “[Machen] was sensitive to physical surroundings, so sensitive that his atmospheric backgrounds sometimes dwarf the human figures in his stories. This hardly matters, for his characters are not real people but symbolic representations of creatures in an eternal chase” (166).

16 As a result, the landscapes, whether they be urban London or the rural British West— another ghost that recurs through most of the stories—are stylistically much more interesting than the characters. But even though their stylistic treatment is a lot more satisfactory, those landscapes do seem to be spectral repetitions of the same original landscape, just as the characters can be seen as the repetitions of stock figures. A selection of examples shows the similarity of treatment by the author by demonstrating his romantic vein as well as the fantastic dimension that he imparts to the visual images: It was a dark and heavy night, the sky was thick with clouds, and the valley full of mist, and all the way they seemed to walk in a world of shadow and gloom, hardly speaking, and afraid to break the haunted silence. They came out at last on the steep hill-side, and instead of the oppression of the wood there was the long, dim sweep of the turf, and higher, the fantastic limestone rocks hinted horror through the darkness, and the wind sighed as it passed across the mountain to the sea, and in its passage beat chill about their hearts. (“The Shining Pyramid,” 56) I looked down and saw the pure white mist tracking the outline of the river like a shroud, and a vague and shadowy country; imaginations and fantasy of swelling hills and hanging woods, and half-shaped outlines of hills beyond, and in the distance the glare of the furnace fire on the mountain, glowing by turns a pillar of shining flame and fading to a dull point of red. (“Novel of the Black Seal,” The Three Impostors, 143) […] the sky began to flush and shine, […] and in the gap between two dark masses that were houses an awful pageantry of flame appeared—lurid whorls of writhed cloud, and utter depths burning, grey masses like the fume blown from a smoking city, and an evil glory blazing far above shot with tongues of more ardent fire, and below as if there were a deep pool of blood. (“Novel of the White Powder,” The Three Impostors, 201) (My emphasis in all three quotations)

17 However, the discrepancy between the treatment of plot and characters and the stylistic verve deployed in the description of landscapes and settings has often been pointed to as a weakness detrimental to the effects of horror. One can wonder if that lack of balance associated with an effect of recurrence that verges on excess might cause the reader to withdraw from the work, emotionally and intellectually speaking.

18 Repetition may definitely have a positive value in terms of the reader’s reception insofar as it helps maintain what Terry Heller calls the aesthetic distance between the actual reader and the work. In his book The Delights of Terror, Heller uses critical concepts developed by Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden to analyse the aesthetic distance as being that which separates the actual reader and the whole work. The smaller the distance is without ever disappearing, the better the reader’s involvement.

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This ideal ratio is of uttermost importance in literature of terror and horror because the reader should never feel threatened in reality but he should feel sufficiently involved emotionally (i.e. scared or horrified) to sustain his interest in the work.

19 By making the process of repetition so apparent, Machen reinforces the status of the written text as artificial production and therefore keeps the aesthetic distance perceivable. The frequent use of the embedded structure is also a narrative technique which is part of the recurrence effect and which increases the aesthetic distance by moving the actual reader and the diegetic readers or listeners further away from the original plot. Heller notes that “aesthetic distance is extended when a frame interposes one or more personae between the implied reader and the work, requiring that the real reader construct not only an implied reader but also various tellers of and listeners to the story as well” (Introduction to The Delights of Terror). But many critics argue that we therefore run the risk of seeing a dilution of the original emotion and effect through the multiple layers established by the narrative.

20 Another problem that arises with the process of repetition and recurrence is that of illusion and likeness. Repetition is meant to be an identical reproduction of some element, but none of the repetitions offered by Machen are exactly identical. The plots look alike but there are enough differing details to make them their own. Some characters bear the same name but they are different individuals. Even the use of repetition through recurrent embedded structures is dubious: the question of the reliability of the narrator is all the more important when hardly an event is a first-hand account or a direct description in Machen’s stories. Indeed, the parts of the plot are discovered through chance encounters, random confessions, found manuscripts which sometimes contain more accounts. Most of the dialogues are actually reconstructions told by one character to another, making the reader question the validity of those dialogues: the direct speech form used thus becomes highly dubious.

21 Finally, what are we to make of the various accounts that we find in the collection of stories The Three Impostors, at the end of which we discover that most of the stories were lies told by three characters in order to find their prey? This prey haunts the whole collection, appearing and vanishing all through the fake stories, only referred to as “the young man with spectacles.” But as the reader understands at the end, none of those references reflects the true events and the young man with spectacles remains an elusive ghost, each of his appearances a lie until his real self is finally made present, tortured to death by his pursuers.

22 If we consider that repetition is what makes the haunting quality of Machen’s stories, are we to conclude that the imperfect quality of the recurrences, in terms of similarity, dilutes the haunting effect? Is a ghost only scary because it is determined by its status of repetitive immutability, a perfectly identical recurrence of itself? Or can we consider that any repetition is essentially the creation of a difference because the same can only be an imperfect copy of the original self? Is not a ghost by definition the trace of an original being but never the exact same person, primarily because of the dichotomy between materiality and immateriality?

23 My point here is that those questions, although highly relevant, may not actually matter for our present discussion. Even through their imperfection and flaws, the various elements of repetition and recurrence making the texts haunted and haunting bodies actually support the emergence of the one true ghost in Machen’s fiction: the past.

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24 The West, locus of history and magic, is filled with Roman ruins and artefacts, while the key objects of the various plots mostly come from time immemorial and bear the traces of a past that man has forgotten (for example, various stories involve the deciphering of a strange language written in unknown characters). Pieces of stone, a marking on a wall, an arrowhead, are imbued with the haunting permanence of the past which clings to and seeps into the present. Writing about the past, about the legends of Celtic lore and Roman myths, allows the author to develop the theme of evil as an ancestral force that lurks about everywhere.

25 A. D. Douglas wrote that his stories “quiver with enigmatic gestures and a whisper of doubtful dread. They point toward something horrible outside the picture that never gets into the picture. They hint at nameless unremembered things which continue to be nameless and unremembered” (158). Just like some of his characters who scornfully reject ghost stories, Machen is not interested in your usual haunted houses and cheap thrills. His horror is more in tune with the psychological dimension that pervaded supernatural literature from the mid-nineteenth century. Yet the implications of that psychological dimension are more transcendental and go beyond the characters’ inner turmoil and dread.

26 As J. T. Owens suggested, Pan and more generally the faun, a recurring figure in Machen’s stories, is the embodiment of transcendental evil. The introduction to the story “The White People” presents a discussion between two characters, one of whom explains to the other how our usual understanding of good and evil is based on a misconception because we fail to see the existence of primeval good and evil that have nothing to do with how we behave in our daily lives. Most of the horrific events that Machen’s characters go through are the result of their encounter with this transcendental evil. According to J. W. Krutch, there is only one theme in Machen: “the mystic vision”; and only one plot: “the rending of the veil” (259). Like Prometheus, characters who overstep their marks to see beyond the veil of our world are generally punished with pain and suffering. However, Machen’s stories cannot be read as cautionary tales. As much as he insists on the dangers of that lurking evil, there is no clear way to avoid it. When the little people abduct young girls and perform their awful rituals on them, there is nothing the protagonists can do to thwart them.

27 The past can therefore be seen as a lingering ghost, a haunting force that cannot be exorcised and that needs to be acknowledged. As a fierce opponent to materialism and rationalism, Machen thought that his world was losing touch with its old mystical dimension. The past could then be read as the spiritual remnant of a dead era that our times are trying to cast off but which remains like a stubborn ghost.

- - - - -

28 Speaking about the ghosts of ghost-less stories might seem like a paradoxical task, but Machen’s short stories undeniably have a haunting quality in spite of the absence of real ghosts. Characters are haunted by the horrific events they get to witness or are told about; places are haunted by evil and horror, and the reader is haunted by the stories themselves and by the impression of déjà-vu which lingers around the texts. The effect of repetition and recurrence that shapes and structures the bodies of the texts on the intradiegetic and extratextual levels shows the metafictionality of the stories, which leads me to conclude on one particular short story, “The White People.”

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29 The main narrative consists of the diary of a young girl who writes about her introduction to strange rituals evoking witchcraft. While the story uses the same devices Machen always uses (strong and evocative landscapes, Celtic folklore, the West countryside, the Sabbath, Roman ruins, etc.), the ingenuous narrative of the young girl offers us a much more direct and yet still cryptic description of the events. Indeed, T. E. D. Klein highlights the “stream-of-consciousness” style of the diary which “lends a spellbinding immediacy to the narrative.” For Klein, it does not “merely describe encounters with dark primeval forces inimical to man,” but it “seems an actual product of such an encounter, an authentic pagan artefact” (186). The text therefore gains a performative value and, in the context of my understanding of Machen’s stories as haunting and haunted bodies, actualises its own haunting quality.

30 Nowhere are we nearer the first-hand experience of the ultimate mystery than when we read “The White People,” which is probably what made Lovecraft consider this short story “the subtlest, […] undoubtedly the greatest, even though it hasn’t the tangible, visible terrors of ‘The Great God Pan’ or ‘Novel of the White Powder’” (72). Indeed, we are faced with an interesting paradox: “The Great God Pan” and “Novel of the White Powder” show horrific processes of dissolution and degeneration through multiple layers of embedded narrative threads, offering a reported and yet very vivid graphic representation of the transformations. “The White People” uses a new and different perspective: the girl’s diary is the account of her first-hand experience, an unfiltered innocent report giving us the impression we can almost touch and see the strange creatures and events she writes about. And yet, they could not be more elusive, evading our grasp and comprehension when we are just on the verge of seizing them. With “The White People,” Machen might just have achieved the most perfect ghost-less ghost story.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary sources

Machen, Arthur. “The Great God Pan.” The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams. Minneola, New York: Dover Publications, 2006. Print.

---. “The Inmost Light.” The Dyson Chronicles. Greenville, Ohio: Coachwhip Publications, 2014. Print.

---. “The Red Hand.” The Dyson Chronicles. Greenville, Ohio: Coachwhip Publications, 2014. Print.

---. “The Shining Pyramid.” The Dyson Chronicles. Greenville, Ohio: Coachwhip Publications, 2014. Print.

---. The Three Impostors. The Dyson Chronicles. Greenville, Ohio: Coachwhip Publications, 2014. Print.

---. “The White People.” Web. 16 August 2015.

Secondary sources

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Douglas, A. Donald. Rev. of “The Shining Pyramid.” The New Republic 8 August 1923: 300. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism 20 (1996): 157-58. Print.

Duperray, Max. “En guise d’introduction du spectral.” Les Mystères de Mrs Radcliffe: nouveaux essais sur Les Mystères d’Udolphe (1794): The Mysteries of Udolpho revisited. Ed. Max Duperray. Aix-en- Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1999. 9-18. Print.

Fisher, Benjamin F., IV. “The Residual Gothic Impulse: 1824-1873.” Horror Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide. Ed. Marshall B. Tymn. 176-220. Rpt. in Supernatural Fiction in the Nineteenth Century, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism 32 (1991): 208-15. Print.

Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror. 2nd ed. 2002. Web. 13 July 2015.

Klein, Theodore Eibon Donald. “Arthur Machen: The House of Souls.” Horror: 100 Best Books. Eds. Stephen Jones and Kim Newman. 1988. 64-67. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism 20 (1996): 185-86. Print.

Krutch, J. W. “Tales of a Mystic.” The Nation 13 September 1922. 258-59. Print.

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. Letter to Robert E. Howard. A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard: 1930-1932. Eds. S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz and Rusty Burke. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2009. 72-73. Print.

Mantrant, Sophie. “A mourir de peur/rire: ‘The Great God Pan’ d’Arthur Machen (1894).” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 67 (2008): 291-304. Print.

Owens, Jill Tedford. “Arthur Machen’s Supernaturalism: The Decadent Variety.” The University of Mississippi Studies in English 8 (1990): 117-26. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism 20 (1996): 190-93. Print.

Van Doren Stern, Philip. Introduction. Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen. Ed. Alfred A. Knopf. 1948. v-xvi. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism, 20 (1996): 163-67. Print.

NOTES

1. “I noticed a queer, heavy feeling about the air of the house […] it seemed to stop the breath […]. The room was full of horror; I felt my teeth grinding as I put my hand on the door, and when I went in I thought I should have fallen fainting to the floor” (“The Great God Pan,” 34).

ABSTRACTS

Cet article emploie les concepts de la hantise et de la spectralité dans le cadre d’une analyse des nouvelles de l’auteur gallois Arthur Machen. Si l’on entend la hantise comme la manifestation d’une répétition, il est alors possible de voir les répétitions à la fois diégétiques et extratextuelles comme des processus qui hantent les personnages tout comme les lecteurs. En observant de près les techniques narratives mises en place par Machen ainsi que les manifestations du surnaturel en relation avec la forme de la nouvelle, on souhaite ici démontrer comment les nouvelles de Machen peuvent être considérées comme des agents de la hantise mais également comme des entités hantées dans lesquelles le texte lui-même devient fantôme.

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AUTHOR

DEBORAH BRIDLE Deborah Bridle currently teaches English at the Université Côte d’Azur in France while continuing her research work in literature. Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century fiction dealing with the fantastic–from weird fiction and supernatural horror to fairy tales. She is currently working on authors like Lewis Carroll, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti.

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“Hovering in the World of Twilight”: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “A Wedding in Brownsville”

Ineke Bockting

1 For those who do not know Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “A Wedding in Brownsville,” it is a story that is extremely easy to summarize. Indeed, a Jewish doctor, Dr Solomon Margolin, goes to a wedding party in a remote area of New York and meets a woman he thought had been killed by the Nazis years before. This could either be a story of misplaced identity or a “simple” ghost story, where a man meets the phantom of his former lover. Yet the story is at the same time more real and more unreal, as a close analysis of its diverse narrative situations will show. The ways in which an external narrator presents the consciousness of the protagonist can be said to stand for a larger historical context.

2 As Valerie Shaw observes it in The Short Story: A Critical Introduction, even if he stays largely invisible, a narrator must participate somehow in the story’s action, or in the unfolding of meaning; he cannot be a completely transparent lens, but must have a fictional identity of his own, even if what he is offering us is no more than sketches of other people in his story. In order to care about those other people at all, we must become involved with the person who is telling us about them. (115)

3 This observation is especially true for the story “A Wedding in Brownsville” and becomes even more so if one focusses closely on how its narrator moves between—or into and out of—different narratological modes during different phases of the story. These techniques have been studied very closely and effectively by Dorrit Cohn, in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness. Cohn, distinguishes as two different ways of narrating consciousness two different types of psycho-narration: one that is “dominated by a prominent narrator who, even as he focuses intently on an individual psyche, remains emphatically distanced from the consciousness he narrates,” which she calls dissonant, and one that is, on the other hand, “mediated by a

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narrator who remains effaced and who readily fuses with the consciousness he narrates,” which she calls consonant (26).

4 The first type—dissonant psycho-narration—characterizes itself by the narrator’s explanatory comments, thus signaling his “superior knowledge of the character’s inner life” and his “superior ability to present it and assess it.” This “cognitive privilege,” as Cohn calls it, obviously enables a narrator to expose what the protagonist is “unwilling or unable to betray.” Two “dimensions of a fictional character” are, according to Cohn, especially important here: “psychic depth” and “ethical worth” (29). In the story “A Wedding in Brownsville,” one readily recognizes these dimensions in the form of the historical context imposing itself on the protagonist this particular day of the wedding in Brownsville, and from which he had tried in vain to take his distance: Usually after breakfast on Sunday, he and his wife took a walk in Central Park, or, when the weather was mild, went to the Palisades. But today Solomon Margolin lingered in bed. During the years, he had stopped attending the functions of the Senciminer Society; meanwhile the town of Sencimin had been destroyed. His family there had been tortured, burned, gassed. (278)

5 Naturally, this type of dissonant narration will often give way to an added truth judgment—or epistemic evaluation—by the narrator, and we therefore expect specific attributive clauses that convey this. In “A Wedding in Brownsville,” the doctor’s wife, Gretl, for instance, had warned her husband, as soon as they had received the invitation, not to go to the wedding, and she had refused to go with him so that he had finally decided he would have to go by himself. One finds here the sentence: “Dr. Margolin admitted to himself that his wife was right” (277). That the attributive verb admit includes a comment—in this case an implicit truth judgment by the third-person narrator—becomes clear if we make this judgment explicit. Of the following two sentences that can be used to do so, the first one sounds redundant and the second paradoxical, showing that the verb admit includes a positive truth judgment; indeed, “He admitted to himself that that his wife was right, and he was correct about it,” clearly sounds redundant and “He admitted to himself that that his wife was right, but he was wrong about it,” equally clearly sounds paradoxical. This shows that positive speaker judgment forms an integrate part of the meaning of the verb admit. Of course, the narrator might as well have wanted to include a negative truth judgment, such as in the following—hypothetical—sentence: “He fooled himself into thinking that his wife was right.” Again, by making the implicit truth judgment explicit, we can show that the attributive verb phrase used here, fool himself into, includes a negative truth judgment by the narrator; indeed, “He fooled himself into thinking that his wife was right, and he was wrong about her” is now clearly redundant and “He fooled himself into thinking that his wife was right, but he was right about her” is now clearly paradoxical. Truth judgment may, of course, also be avoided by the narrator. This happens a little bit further into the story, where the narrator reports that the doctor tries to get a taxi to take him to the wedding and we find the following sentence: “He was afraid [that] the driver might refuse to go as far as Brownsville” (281). Now the possibilities are: “He was afraid [that] the driver might refuse to go as far as Brownsville, and he was right to be” and “He was afraid [that] the driver might refuse to go as far as Brownsville, but he was wrong to be.” It is clear that neither one of these two sentences sound either redundant or paradoxical, showing that the verb be afraid (or fear), like other common mental activity verbs such as feel, believe and think, among others, is neutral as far as truth judgment is concerned. It can be concluded that we have, in these last sentences, come

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to a situation where the narrator, in Cohn’s words, remains rather “effaced,” more or less “readily fuse[d] with the consciousness he narrates” (26).

6 One should add, here, that in an attributive clause not only the attributive verb plays a role, but also the form of its complement.1 Indeed, in addition to the that-clauses we have been looking at—“he admitted to himself that”; “he was afraid [that]”—the third paragraph of “A Wedding in Brownsville” contains a combination of three parallel how- clauses—one explicit and two implicit ones—in which the doctor muses on the attitude he expects of his fellow guests at the wedding: He knew how they would pester him, [how they would] reproach him for growing aloof, [how they would] drop hints that he was a snob. (278)

7 The how-clause, half-way between cognition and perception signals that the protagonist bases himself not on more abstract, independently existing evidence—as the that-clause does—but on procedural evidence, that is to say, on concrete prior experience. In this case, the experience is, in addition, projected into the future as habitual, as the modal would shows, and thus involves both memory and anticipation of repeated affect. The verb know allows the narrator to add a truth judgment with which he vouches for the correctness of this memory (again, “He knew how they would pester him, and he was right” would be redundant and “He knew how they would pester him, but he was wrong” would be paradoxical). Indeed, the protagonist is not imagining this; he felt before, will feel again and even feels already, the spiritual and bodily effects of this pestering and these reproaches. This foregrounds once more the historical context of the story and the depth of the protagonist’s moral dilemma: how by having immigrated to the United States in time he had avoided the fate of his family and friends in Poland and how he had lost touch with those of their children who survived and had come as immigrants after the war. Even if, in Cohn’s scheme, the phrase “he knew how” has the attributive form of more dissonant psycho-narration, we feel how close the narrator moves to the protagonist, or to use Cohn’s terms, how consonant the psycho-narration has become.

8 This second type of narrative stance, Cohn’s “consonance,” indeed, seems to become increasingly important in the story. In it, one finds no implicit or explicit explanatory or judgmental comments. Cohn signals in such constructions “the absence of subordination of the ‘he thought (felt, knew) that’ variety,” showing “the discretion of the narrating voice, how it yields to the figural thoughts and feelings even as it reports them” (31). This, as we just saw, is not totally correct, because the that-clause with an epistemically neutral verb such as fear, see, feel, believe and others, as well as the how- clause, even with an epistemically loaded verb such as know, actually are (more) consonant, showing that in-between the two narrative stances—dissonance and consonance—there is a whole range of possibilities. Indeed, what one finds in psycho- narration is a scale of narrating going from totally dissonant—with attributive verbs such as know and a that-clause complement—to very consonant, a mode in which one may find attributive verbs such as feel, think and believe. Another example of this is formed by the sentence “But secretly Solomon Margolin had always felt that he was a failure” (279). This instance of relatively consonant psycho-narration occurs when the doctor is getting dressed for the wedding, and it indicates a clear step in the progressive giving up of the narrator’s critical stance. Interestingly, it is within this context—the doctor’s various memories of failure and the narrator’s abandonment of dissonance, or increasing consonance, in narrating them—that the name of the doctor’s former lover

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first appears: “Nor had he had any luck with his one great love, Raizel, the daughter of Melekh the watchmaker. Raizel had married someone else and later had been shot by the Nazis” (279). In the consonant psycho-narration that introduces this passage, the narrator clearly gives up Cohn’s “cognitive privilege,” showing what Leo Spitzer termed, in a different context, “stylistic contagion.” When such “stylistic contagion” is strongest, Cohn argues, psycho-narration “verges on the narrated monologue, marking a kind of midpoint between the two techniques where a reporting syntax is maintained, but where the idiom is strongly affected (or infected) with the mental idiom of the mind it renders” (33).

9 Notwithstanding the interest of these different forms of psycho-narration for the story “A Wedding in Brownsville,” it is not its major narrative mode. A large part of the text is, in fact, taken up by narrated monologue. Cohn defines this form as: “a transformation of figural thought-language into the narrative language of third-person fiction,” in other words, as “the technique for rendering a character’s thought in his own idiom while maintaining the third-person reference and the basic tense of narration” (100).2 The stylist Michael Toolan, in The Stylistics of Fiction: a Literary-Linguistic Approach, speaks in this respect of “mind-and-soul portraits,” which, he argues, “are not removed, analytical descriptions of states, as if from the outside,” but rather “a vivid contrivance of entering into those minds and souls, so that the minds themselves appear to share to a substantial degree in the articulation of their own states and processes” (74). As Cohn explains, narrated monologue appears “as a kind of mask, from behind which sounds the voice of a figural mind,” meanwhile “cast[ing] a peculiarly penumbral light on the figural consciousness, suspending it on the threshold of verbalization in a manner that cannot be achieved by direct quotation” (103). It is interesting that Cohn chooses the liminal imagery of “penumbral light”—shadowy and indefinite—to talk about one of the pervasive narrative modes in a story. Equally interesting is the image of the “threshold” that she uses here, as it is, in fact, the archetypal image of liminality—the Latin word for threshold being limen—and the suspension on it, together with the penumbral light that characterizes the in-between of light and dark, of night and day, one of the typical tropes of the Gothic.

10 Different forms of liminality can, in any case, be seen to play a large role in the story. Singer himself can be said to have been a liminal person, an immigrant forever suspended between love and hate of his adoptive country, as “his relationship with America was complex and contradictory.” Indeed, as the author of the introduction to the story in Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing puts it: [Singer’s] views often shifted depending on the forum in which he expressed himself. In interviews and lectures he would adopt a persona of kindly Old World sage and praise the United States by comparing it with the barbarism that had given rise to the Nazi genocide in Europe, but in his fiction [...] he could be far more caustic. (276)

11 Perhaps it is useful, at this moment, to be reminded briefly of Arnold Van Gennep’s usage of the term liminal in his work Les rites de passage. He presents it in terms of the three phases of coming-of-age rituals: separation, liminal period proper and re- assimilation. This threefold conceptualization of liminality in its turn forms the basis of Victor Turner’s classic chapter “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” which argues that this in-between period is one of uncertainty and fear but also of new possibilities. Becoming a novelist may just be one of these new possibilities. In any case, Singer’s story can, like the classical immigration novel, be seen as one long

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rite de passage, where the subject never really reaches the other side of the divide. Much of American literature places itself within this space of transition, in which the individual or group is suspended—hovers, as it were—on the threshold of a “new world,” alienated both from its original and from its adopted culture. American literature, then, can be seen as an evolving collection of immigrant literatures and the great American theme, as many critics have argued, is alienation. And “A Wedding in Brownsville” clearly places itself within this tradition.

12 In fact, one finds this alienation as a characteristic the narrated monologue itself, in that it reveals, in Cohn’s words, the protagonist’s mind “suspended in an instant present, between a remembered past and an anticipated future” (126). This temporal suspension, or fluidity of consciousness, is another characteristic of the Gothic, and it is emphasized by adverbs of time as well as by tenses. While adverbs of time take on the “temporal orientation of the figurative consciousness,” Cohn argues, pluperfect and conditional tenses will render memory and anticipation respectively, and if the return to the past is extensive, the pluperfect will eventually be replaced by the simple past or the past progressive tense, without losing the character of the passage (127). A passage from “A Wedding in Brownsville” that shows this clearly is the following: Dr. Margolin treated rabbis, refugees, and Jewish writers without charge, supplying them with medicines and, if necessary, a hospital bed. There had been a time when he had gone regularly to the meetings of the Senciminer Society, had accepted positions in their ranks, and had attended all the parties. Now Abraham Mekheles was marrying off his youngest daughter, Sylvia. (277)

13 This passage, which is the end of the story’s opening paragraph, begins with simple narration in the narrative preterite, moving along to several cases of pluperfect —“there had been a time”; “he had gone”; “[he] had accepted”; “[he] had attended.” After these pluperfects, before they typically turn into simple past tenses, we find a case of an adverb used as temporal deictic, “now.”

14 This adverb of time is a good example of a specific type of “stylistic contagion” known as “deictic projection” (Lyons 579). Deictics, as we know, normally point to things in the world from the position of the speaker, the narrator in this case. This position is called the “deictic center” (Levinson 664), the point to which all deictics are “anchored,” so that the deictic now indicates simultaneity of event and utterance, and the deictics earlier and later, for instance, signal anteriority and posteriority of the event respectively.3 So, if we say that language is egocentric in nature, it means that, normally speaking, all phenomena in the world are automatically related to the position of the language user, the deictic center. In the case of deictic projection, then, the narrative voice moves, or projects itself, into the deictic center of the protagonist, here more specifically, Dr. Margolin’s temporal space, his present moment. Only now does the text move to past tense, in this case the past continuous form “was marrying off.” It then continues with a simple past (“arrived”) and another pluperfect (“had announced”), followed again by simple past tenses (“was”; “wanted”; “was”): The minute the invitation arrived, Gretl had announced her decision: she was not going to let herself be carted off to a wedding somewhere out in the wilds of Brownsville. If he, Solomon, wanted to go and gorge himself on all kinds of greasy food, coming home at three o’clock in the morning, that was his prerogative. (Singer 277)

15 This time the pluperfects of the doctor’s memories do not turn into simple past—as Cohn shows it to happen often—but, rather, they move into the deictic space of the

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doctor’s estranged wife. Indeed, what we have here, with the simple past tenses at the end of the passage, is Gretl Margolin’s discourse—“I am not going to let myself be carted off to a wedding somewhere out in the wilds of Brownsville”; “if you want to go and gorge yourself on all kinds of greasy foods, coming home at three o’clock in the morning, that is your prerogative”—embedded in Dr. Margolin’s internal monologue, and narrated by the external narrator. This curious superposition of narrated monologues will later show itself to have been a prolepsis into a situation in which the narrator moves closer and closer to—and finally completely into—the protagonist’s consciousness.

16 The final category of techniques for narrating consciousness that Cohn mentions is that of the quoted monologue. Normally indicated as such by its attributive clause and its punctuation—comma, colon and quotation marks—it conveys the conscious thoughts of a character verbatim. But in “A Wedding in Brownsville,” transitions into and out of quoted monologue are difficult to isolate, as most of the time there is no attributive clause such as “he thought,” just as there are no conventional punctuation marks. Indeed, this is what happens when the doctor is in the taxi that will bring him to Brownsville: “After a while, Dr. Margolin leaned back, shut his eyes, and retreated into his own warmth. His destination was a wedding. Wasn’t the world, like this taxi, plunging away somewhere into the unknown towards a cosmic destination? Maybe a cosmic Brownsville, a cosmic wedding?” (281). In this passage, which retrospectively sounds like the doctor is getting closer to his destiny rather than to his destination, the narration moves smoothly from external description inward to narrated monologue and further inwards still to quoted monologue without quotation marks but with the characteristic question marks of the narrative mode.

17 This sliding movement of the narration—from outer to inner—contradicts in a spectacular way the spatial movement from inner to outer, that is, from the intimate inner world of the taxi to the impersonal outer world, with its triple repetition of the word cosmic, an intimation, perhaps, of the dangers that warm intimacy may represent for someone with the doctor’s psychic preoccupations. And it brings the doctor to the hardest questions of all: “Yes. But why did God—or whatever anyone wanted to call Him —create a Hitler, a Stalin? Why did He need world wars? Why heart attacks, cancers?” (281). In the following passage we find a similar move towards and into the protagonist’s consciousness. Indeed, the narrator first seems to describe the route objectively: “The taxi turned onto the bridge across the East River…” Then, in the rest of the sentence, focalization shifts to the doctor: “and for the first time Dr. Margolin was able to see the sky.” After this, the passage continues with single focalization on the doctor’s sense perceptions, presented through vivid visual, tactile and olfactory imagery: It sagged low, heavy, red as glowing metal. Higher up, a violet glare suffused the vault of the heavens. Snow was sifting down gently, bringing a winter peace to the world, just as it had in the past—forty years ago, a thousand years ago, and perhaps a million years ago. Fiery pillars appeared to glow beneath the East River; on its surface, through black waves jagged as rocks, a tugboat was hauling a string of barges loaded with cars. A front window in the cab was open and icy gusts of wind blew in, smelling of gasoline and the sea. (281)

18 As Cohn argues, the transition between plain narrator’s text and quoted monologue often occurs right after a reference to the protagonist’s eyes—“the sensory borderline and link between outer and inner world” (72)—but this passage shows that other sense

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organs, or a combination of several, can have this function as well. Indeed, with these forceful, often threatening, visual, tactile and olfactory images—like Hell opening up or like the nightly glow and smell of the Nazi extermination camps that the doctor had been forced to imagine—quoted monologue takes over, and, again without attributive clauses or quotation marks, the narrator’s voice is fully incorporated into the character’s consciousness: “Suppose the weather never changed again? Who then would ever be able to imagine a summer day, a moonlit night, spring? But how much imagination—for what it’s worth—does a man actually have?” (Singer 281). The passage that follows shows a curious sort of pas de deux of narrator and protagonist, which rests on the continuity of tense: On Eastern Parkway the taxi was jolted and screeched suddenly to a stop. Some traffic accident, apparently. The siren on a police car shrieked. A wailing ambulance drew nearer. Dr. Margolin grimaced. Another victim. Someone makes a false turn of the wheel and all a man’s plans in this world are reduced to nothing. A wounded man was carried to the ambulance on a stretcher. Above a dark suit and blood- splattered shirt and bow tie the face had a chalky pallor; one eye was closed, the other one partly open and glazed. Perhaps he, too, had been going to a wedding, Dr Margolin thought. He might even have been going to the same wedding as I. … (282)

19 The first part of this central passage strikes one with its adjectives: screeched, shrieked and wailed, forming extremely forceful auditory imagery that supplements the hellish visual, tactile and olfactory extermination camp imagery of the previous passage. It, again, is the point where narrator and protagonist merge, on the threshold between inner and outer world. The narrator’s text that presents the doctor’s non-verbal reaction—“he grimaced”—introduces the next part of this passage, where narrator’s text and quoted monologue are indistinguishable, until finally the attributive clause “Dr. Margolin thought” appears—the attributive verb think, a neutral one, thus refraining from any narratorial truth judgment. Indeed, even if there is the graphological division of the comma between quotation and attributive clause, there still are no quotation marks, so that the deictics “he” and “I” seem to be suspended between two positions. This is made all the more forceful by the suspension points. The atmosphere, here, has become truly uncanny, an atmosphere that, as Valerie Shaw argues, “is made all the more chilling when it is shown emanating from purely physical sources, a principle which can be observed in many short stories which aim to unnerve the reader” (39).

20 After this scene, the area that the doctor is driven through becomes more and more otherworldly, even if it remains somehow realistic, with “Negroes, strangely black” who stand about on the sidewalks, “staring ahead, their great dark eyes full of a gloomy hopelessness” and people at the bar of a tavern who seem “to have something unearthly about them, as if they were being punished here for sins committed in another incarnation” (282). In fact, the doctor had almost begun “to suspect that the driver, who had remained stubbornly silent the whole time, had gotten lost or else was deliberately taking him out of his way” (282). In accordance with the degree of effacement, or consonance, that the narrative voice has reached by now, the attributive verb used in the that-clause here—suspect—does not include an implicit truth-judgment: “He began to suspect and he was right” and “He began to suspect but he was wrong” are equally grammatical. Within the pervasive narrative consonance that the story has reached by now, the taxi driver’s silence, not only in the that-clause above but also in the pure description at the end of the passage—“Dr. Margolin gave the driver a dollar tip and the man took it without uttering a word”—the lack of sound, after the hellish

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screeching, shrieking and wailing encountered before, adds to the otherworldliness of the scene.

21 Dr. Margolin's arrival at the wedding hall creates a forceful contrast with these images of silence and seems to confirm the fear of intimacy intimated before. Indeed, even if “the intimacy of the Senciminers” that he encounters as soon as he enters the lobby is described as “comfortable,” the doctor feels “engulfed” by it (282). The pure text of the narrator, here, presents a chaotic mixture of fragments of the other guests’ discourse, but no reaction of the doctor’s except for a nod of the head is recorded. And while the names of those that address him are “swallowed up in the tumult,” as the narrator reports it, the doctor keeps hearing “the same words over and over again: died, shot, burned” (284). After reluctantly joining in a dance, however, he sees a special woman and everything changes: A man grabbed Margolin and for a while he danced in the frantic whirl. Then, tearing himself loose, he stood apart. Who was that woman? He found his eye caught by her familiar form. He knew her! She beckoned to him. He stood baffled. She looked neither young nor old. Where had he known her—that narrow face, those dark eyes, that girlish smile? (285)

22 The pas de deux of narrator and protagonist takes over again here. Two sentences of simple narration from the point of view of the character, with their kinaesthetic imagery and sudden ending—dancing in a “frantic whirl,” then suddenly “tearing himself loose”—follow. These kinaesthetic images, once more, form a threshold between outer and inner world, the liminal space in which the protagonist unexpectedly finds himself. This, then, moves the text into narrated monologue, again with its characteristic question mark: “Who was that woman?”

23 Another reference to eyes now stretches this “hovering on the threshold” still further, this time into narrated monologue—“He knew her!”—its characteristic exclamation mark again signaling the emerging into consciousness of preconscious material. In the next sentence—“She beckoned to him”—narrator and protagonist are totally indistinguishable, after which three words of narrated text—“He stood baffled”— introduce a further stretch of narrated monologue: “Where had he known her—that narrow face, those dark eyes, that girlish smile?” (285). As the passage is totally without attributive clauses, the impression is created that the narrator is completely silenced, mesmerized, as it were, by what happens. The text then moves into a stretch of direct discourse—a rapid succession of questions and answers between the two speech partners in which it becomes clear that the woman is the long-dead Raizel—and from there into psycho-narration. Two attributive that-clauses are found in close proximity here: one with the attributive verb know, which thus includes narrator consent—“he knew [that] his love had returned with full force”—and one with the attributive verb think used as a passive form—“The thought came to him that by Jewish law he was not married” (Singer 287), in which the narrator refrains from any epistemic evaluation and the protagonist is put in the role of helpless receiver. This helplessness, finally, leads to the climax of the story, which presents itself when the doctor reaches a point where he must find an explanation. Starting with the hesitation expressed in psycho- narration, in the form of the consonant that-clause “Suddenly it occurred to him that this could not be his Raizel” (288), the text deepens the trance by moving, after two sentences of narrated text, once more into narrated monologue:

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Suddenly he remembered the traffic collision he had witnessed on Eastern Parkway. An eerie suspicion came over him: Perhaps he had been more than a witness? Perhaps he himself had been the victim of that accident! (Singer 288).

24 Again, the question mark and the exclamation point signal the bubbling up into of consciousness of pre-conscious material. What happens after this is also typical: the voicing of this material in direct quotes, first softly and addressed to Dr. Margolin himself—“It can’t be, it can’t be, he murmured. Can one die without knowing it?” (288) —and subsequently loudly and addressed to Raizel—each existence seeking to prove the other unreal, while being, itself, the lack of the other. “You’re not the same Raizel.” “No? Then who am I?” “They shot Raizel.” “Shot her. Who told you that?” (Singer 288)

25 In a suddenly objective way, the narrator next presents the reaction of each of the speech partners: “She seemed both frightened and perplexed. Silently she lowered her head like someone receiving the shock of bad news. Dr Mangolin continued to ponder” (Singer 288). But in this last verb—ponder—narrator and protagonist just as suddenly join each other again and the text continues in narrated monologue: Apparently Raizel didn’t realize her own condition. He had heard of such a state— what was it called? Hovering in the World of Twilight. The Astral Body wandering in semi-consciousness, detached from the flesh, without being able to reach its destination, clinging to the illusions and vanities of the past. But could there be any truth to all this superstition? No, as far as he was concerned, it was nothing but wishful thinking. Besides, this kind of survival would be less than oblivion; “I am most probably in a drunken stupor,” Dr. Margolin decided. “All this may be one long hallucination, perhaps a result of food poisoning.” (289)

26 Interestingly, this passage terminates in two sentences of perfectly normal quoted monologue, complete with an attributive clause, comma and quotation marks, showing how narrated monologue—an ensemble of pre-conscious material, suspended, to use Cohn’s words, “on the threshold of verbalization” (103) and brought to light with the help of the narrator—can culminate in perfectly conscious material, in this case, a negation.

- - - - -

27 As Freud said, it is in its negation that an unacceptable truth finds expression, or as Wilfried Ver Eecke expresses it in his book Denial, Negation and the Forces of the Negative, “a denial correctly labels the repressed phenomenon, even though a denial denies the correctness of the labeling” (10; italics in the text). Here there are suspension points at the end of the passage, which somehow seem to negate the negation. This impression is confirmed when the doctor tells Raizel: “What’s the difference? As long as we’re together” (289), and so the couple apparently stay to attend the wedding ceremony together. Thus we are left with the impression that Dr. Margolin finally joins the people he left behind when he came to America, that now he and his Raizel are both in a liminal world between life and death. And because the narrator will not, or cannot, escape his consonance, so is he. Indeed, the respective “hauntedness” of narrator and character turns out to be as good as indistinguishable at this crucial point, as before, in a liminal space, between life and death. And so it is that the story ends in terms of a gothic preoccupation with borderline states that these Jewish-American New Yorkers—

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character, narrator and writer—share, as well as the particular “condition” that haunts them, now making them all “hover” together “in the World of Twilight” (Singer 288).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bockting, Ineke. “The Importance of Deixis and Attributive Style for the study of Theory of Mind: The Example of William Faulkner’s Disturbed Characters.” Theory of Mind and Literature. Eds. Paula Leverage et al. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2011. 175-86. Print.

---. Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner: A Study in Psychostylistics. Lanham, New York and London: UP of America, 1995. Print.

Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1983. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX. Ed. and trans. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. Print.

Gennep, Arnold van. Les Rites de Passage. Paris: Nourry, 1909. Print.

Joyce, James. “A Painful Case.” Dubliners. 1914. London: Granada, 1985. Print.

Leek, Frederike C. van der. “Significant Syntax: The Case of Exceptional Passives.” DWPELL 27 (1992): 1-28. Print.

Levinson, Stephen C. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Print.

Lyons, John. Semantics, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Print.

Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Longman, 1983. Print.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis. “A Wedding in Brownsville.” 1964. Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. Ed. Ilan Stavans. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2009. Print.

Spitzer, Leo. “Sprachmengung als Stilmittel und als Ausdruck der Klangphantasie.” Stilstudien II (1922): 84-124. Print.

Stavans, Ilan, ed. Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2009. Print.

Toolan, Michael. The Stylistics of Fiction: A Literary-Linguistic Approach. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1967. 93-112. Print.

Ver Eecke, Wilfried. Denial, Negation and the Forces of the Negative. New York: CUNY Press, 2006. Print.

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NOTES

1. The attributive clause, a clause with which a narrator attributes mental activity to a protagonist, consists of an attributive verb (such as know, conclude, admit, think, believe, hope, regret, fear, feel etc.) and a complement. This complement can have different forms—that of a so- called that-clause, a how-clause, a to-infinitive clause or a small clause, which, in this order, change the attributive verb it occurs with from cognition verb to pure perception verb. Adapting a sentence from James Joyce’s “A Painful Case,” in Dubliners, this is shown by the following hypothetical sentences: “He felt that his moral nature was falling to pieces” (that-clause complement); “He felt how his moral nature was falling to pieces” (how-clause complement); “He felt his moral nature to be falling to pieces” (to-infinitive clause complement) and, finally, “He felt his moral nature falling to pieces” (small-clause complement: the form actually found in Joyce’s text p. 100). Indeed, as a result of the different forms of complement used in this series of sentences, the cognition aspect of the activity depicted gradually decreases in favor of its perception aspect, showing that between cognition and perception there exists a sliding scale of possibilities, and thus it would be a “futile exercise,” to use Cohn’s words, to “delimit psycho- narration sharply from the narration of sensations that impinge on a character’s mind, from within or from without” (49). See van der Leek and Bockting for a discussion of the different forms of attributive clauses. 2. The often-used terms for this narrative mode—free indirect discourse, style indirect libre (in French) and erlebte rede (in German)—are considered too broad by Cohn, who uses narrated monologue strictly as a term for rendering consciousness, figural thought—in French, pensée avec (111)—not the broader subject of discourse (109f.). 3. Other deictics include spatial ones and personal ones. Spatial deictics, such as the adverbs here (close to the deictic center) and there (further away from the deictic center), as well as the demonstratives this and that, and these and those (close to the deictic center versus further away from the deictic center). The spatial deictics may also indicate emotional stance. By using the deictic this, for instance, a speaker may not only evoke spatial proximity but also emotional nearness, which John Lyons calls “emphatic deixis” (677). Certain motion verbs, in addition, have built-in deictic aspects, such as come and go and bring and take, indicating directions or destinations towards and away from the deictic center. Personal deictics include, first of all, the first person pronouns I and we (and their derivatives me, us, mine and ours), which create and sustain the deictic center itself; the pronoun you (as well as your and yours), which relate the deictic center to a speech partner, or speech partners, and the pronouns he, she, it and they (and his, her, its, their and theirs), which posit a subject or subjects as outsider or outsiders with regard to the language event. For a more complete discussion of the various types of deictics and deictic projection, see Bockting.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article porte sur une nouvelle du XXe siècle dans laquelle le gothique joue un rôle prépondérant. “A Wedding in Brownsville”, écrite par le célèbre romancier Isaac Bashevis Singer, est un bon exemple de ces textes à la troisième personne dans lesquels un narrateur externe ou extra-diégétique est si proche du personnage que leurs « hantises » respectives en deviennent presque indissociables. Cette consonance est ici étudiée à partir des diverses techniques

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narratologiques utilisées pour représenter la conscience et l’inconscient que Dorrit Cohn analyse dans son ouvrage séminal Transparent Minds.

AUTHORS

INEKE BOCKTING Ineke Bockting holds doctoral degrees from the Universities of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Montpellier, France (“Habilitation à diriger des recherches”). She has taught at Universities in The Netherlands, Norway and France, and she is now Professor emerita at the Catholic University of Paris. Her publications include works on various aspects of the American South, William Faulkner, ethnic literatures, travel-narrative, autobiography, literary stylistics and pragmatics, and cognitive science and literature. She is a member of the Unité de Recherche “Religion, Culture et Société” of the Catholic University of Paris.

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A Writer’s Ghosts: The Specular and the Spectral in A.S. Byatt’s “The Changeling”

Pascale Tollance

1 Sugar and Other Stories, A.S. Byatt’s first collection of short stories is a book which has a spectral feel, and which, by the author’s own admission, played a key part in a process of personal mourning (Byatt, Passion 21). Published after the death of Byatt’s mother and father, it includes some ghostly children whom it is difficult not to associate with the son the author lost (he was eleven), some fifteen years before the publication of the collection. Sugar and Other Stories also happens to be heavily metafictional: it is not just an attempt to conjure up or exorcise the dead but a reflection on the power of writing when coming face to face with their ghosts or, conversely, failing to do so. Judging by the author’s comments, metafiction can prove as double-edged as fiction in “dealing” with the dead. In an essay entitled “Sugar” where she looks back on the story which gives its name to the collection, Byatt confesses her guilt at the idea she might have turned the death of her parents into material for a meta-critical exercise: … I found that I had used [my father’s] dying—and secretly, my mother’s later death also—in order to think about the nature of truth and writing. And that was something I had been brought up to think was wrong. (Byatt, Passions 21)

2 The image of the author as predator or murderer is a running theme in Byatt’s fiction— it is at the heart of The Children’s Book—and it is something in front of which Byatt expresses her bewilderment and readily accepts that she remains clueless.1 Sugar and Other Stories suggests that “using” the dead is no less tormenting than feeding off the living and that self-awareness does not make it better, but instead adds to the crime that comes to haunt the writer. Beyond Byatt’s own predicament and what could be seen as a singular propensity for guilt, the stories invite us to think about the ghosts that fiction and metafiction give rise to, as their power to kill or for that matter to kill a second time is tested. Spectrality undermines specularity: it points out its limits, emphasizing the power of self-examination to unleash what it was trying to pacify and safely put into a box; it causes the emergence of a blind spot in the most controlled

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experiments in so-called “narcissistic” examination. As it turns out, this blind spot is also what prevents the text from folding upon itself, what keeps it open, what keeps it going.

3 In focusing on “The Changeling,” the eighth story in the collection, I propose to examine how Byatt presents a writer’s lethal power at its starkest, and her failure to “welcome” the ghost, as Derrida would have it (Specters, 216), when she is presented with what looks like a double or a flesh and blood version of one of her fictional characters. I would like to address by contrast the more ambivalent choice on Byatt’s part to replicate her character’s attempt at framing the ghost, while allowing it to multiply and gain a life of its own within the tight space of the short story.

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4 The main character in “The Changeling” is Josephine, a lone female writer, who also happens to offer board and lodging to some pupils from her friend Max McKinley’s school. In the “cosy attics” (149) of her large house, she accommodates those whom she calls “the Lost Boys” (148), boys who are orphaned or live too far away from home to go back to their families during holidays. Josephine can pride herself on her caring and sensitive approach until she is entrusted with a pale-looking boy called Henry Smee who turns out to bear an uncanny resemblance to a fictional character of hers called Simon Vowle. Her friend Max, in asking once more for her help, is extremely clear from the start: “I think—you’ll see—I think Henry Smee is Simon Vowle in The Boiler-Room. It is quite striking” (147-48). Josephine takes up “the challenge” (“a real challenge” [147], in the words of her friend Max), but little by little the boy starts taking up too much room, roams the house at night and, to crown it all, starts reading and telling her about the book she has written about that other “thin and pale” (150) boy called Simon Vowle. At that moment, for the first time in her life, Josephine develops a writer’s block. One night, as she comes back from a dinner-party, she discovers Henry Smee in her bedroom doing nothing wrong or “nothing very fearful” (158) but looking at his face and then at her own screaming face in her mirror. She orders the boy to get out and to go away, which he does the next day. A couple of months later Josephine learns that Henry Smee has died, which she declares “terrible” (160), but her writer’s block goes and little by little, the ink starts flowing again.

5 In many respects “The Changeling” can be read as a neat little tale about the sacrifices that writing involves, its inhuman demands, and the guilt that it may generate, especially if the writer is a woman. Byatt draws from fairy-tale and folklore not with the effect of taming them but, on the contrary, in order to bring out the violence of the seemingly gentle and civilised world of the headmaster and the writer. Josephine appears at the beginning as a fairy godmother who presides over the fate of unhappy children as she plots with the man who talks in a fatherly way about “his boys” (147). The end of story suggests that the writer’s gleaming kitchen may just be the domain of a witch or an ogress rather than the cosy and homely haven it appears to be. The place where Josephine used to take refuge as a child in order to write was no ivory tower but the boiler-room of her school. The title of the story, “The Changeling,” which refers to a popular belief that children sometimes get stolen and swapped for creatures which are the offspring of a fairy, troll, or elf also sheds an ironic light on the tale. Here it seems that it is the mother who is nothing but a fairy in disguise, or, that the mother

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prefers a fairy’s child, a fictional, made-up creature, to the real thing, a child of flesh and blood. The idea that art somehow excludes life is made all the clearer by the twist Byatt introduces: the paper child pre-exists the human child and is threatened by him, rather than the other way round. The simplicity of the tale nevertheless gets blurred from the moment both Henry Smee and Simon Vowle appear as potential substitutes or replacements for someone else and as the question of who came first, who comes first gains complexity. More than a mere double, the human child turns into a strange creature who undermines all form of certainty: as it happens, Smee does not stick to the attic where Josephine has put him, he starts asking questions and begging more and more answers from Josephine, but also from the reader.

6 If Henry Smee is described as ghostly in appearance and behaviour, if his presence is felt to be increasingly creepy by Josephine, he is not, unlike the ghost in “The July Ghost,” an apparition (at least until the climactic episode of the mirror) but a ghost largely by metaphor. Equally we could say that he is the ghost that unleashes and unsettles metaphor—causing meaning to proliferate but also boring holes into what might have been a straightforward allegorical tale. The title, through the reference it makes to folklore, introduces the motif of substitution but also extends it and questions it as it becomes clear little by little that what takes place is no simple swap. When she sets eyes on Henry Smee for the first time, Josephine sees someone familiar, someone who has come straight out of her book, and she has no trouble describing him considering she has already described him before: You could have used, Josephine could have used the same little groups of words indifferently to describe either [Henry or Simon]. He was excessively thin and pale, with lank, colourless hair, moon-glasses and a long fragile head on hunched shoulders, the sharp bones standing out on cheek and chin. (150)

7 And yet Henry Smee “[does]—and equally [does] not look like Simon Vowle” (149). “The words would have fitted, had been written by Josephine, but the image did not” (150). The boy who seems to have walked out of her book not only shows the first signs that he might run loose but threatens to revert the order of things by retrospectively giving his face to the boy of whom he was supposed to be the shadow: “It came to Josephine that Max, whenever he thought of Simon Vowle, now saw this face, as she herself had to struggle, thinking of Philip Marlowe, not to see Humphrey Bogart” (150).

8 If Josephine looks upon Henry Smee as an impostor, the rest of the story shows that he may only be silently raising the relevant question of who started taking the place of whom in Josephine’s carefully constructed little world. As it shapes itself, the story also divides itself. The simple equation which is given at the start “Henry Smee is Simon Vowle” cannot be considered without another equation which emerges little by little: Simon Vowle is Josephine. Is, and, “equally” is not. Henry Smee shatters Josephine’s safe world by replacing ontology by “hauntology” (Specters, 63) / “hantologie” (Spectres, 89), in Derrida’s words. Simon Vowle is in fact already a ghost, the shadow of the pale fearful child that Josephine herself used to be and that she tried to exorcise by writing it into fiction. As the ghost of a ghost, Henry Smee threatens the solidity of Josephine’s fictional edifice in various ways. He shows it to be a hall of mirrors and endless reflections by awakening the ghosts of all of Josephine’s former selves. We are told little by little that Simon is in fact only one character among many, a character made to fit a type: “Her characteristic form was the long novella: her characteristic hero a boy, anywhere between infancy and late adolescence, threatened and in retreat” (151). Before Simon, we learn that there were others, that she already wrote as a child

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“clumsy tales of justified terror, of bounding packs of girls who accidentally squeezed the last breath out of their pathetic prey” (154). And we are told that the fearful girl who produced these doubles already had a double in her phobic mother: When Josephine was five or six her overwrapped mother would take her overwrapped daughter as far as the local school and had been known to go as far as the public library. By the time Josephine was fourteen, at boarding school Josephine’s mother rarely ventured outside her bedroom, and became giddy even in the back garden. (153)

9 If writing in itself is meant to be an exorcism, Josephine specializes in second death, so to speak, as she makes sure she kills the fictional characters she creates: The Boiler Room and Simon Vowle have “a macabre end: Josephine did not let her characters off” (152).

10 Josephine’s world can be described as a world of endless substitutions but equally as a world where substitution fails as she has to write and kill again and again. Henry Smee, the changeling, is yet another instance of this and at the same time the one who points out the limits of such a process. As he cannot be completely contained by the words that describe him, he appears as a remainder that writing cannot eliminate or transform—a resurgence of the past that Josephine fails to eradicate, unless it is something even more disturbing. As Jacques Derrida underlines at the beginning of Specters of Marx, the spectral introduces a temporal disruption: “The time is out of joint” (Specters, 20). Henry Smee becomes truly dangerous to Josephine when he threatens to take her own place as a writer —and not just the place of her character—or more interestingly when he sits in the place of the reader, who, as it turns out, makes it clear that he co-writes the text he is reading: She felt above all threatened by his reading of Simon Wowle. Simon Vowle was herself, was Josephine Piper; there was no room for another. Writers are commonly asked what readers they imagine. There are writers, believe it, and Josephine Piper was one of them, who can only function by imagining no reader. (156)

11 Josephine develops a writer’s block from the moment her vision of herself as sole maker of her text is jeopardized: “Josephine had made herself, with an effort of will, in opposition to her mother’s fear, and what that might have made of her” (156). The ghost displaces the notion of origin by reminding Josephine of what she was before she mothered or “made herself,” but it shatters it even more by transforming that origin into something produced by the text rather than producing it. Again Derrida’s words feel relevant: “… a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back” (Specters, 11). Henry Smee is not so much a shadow of her former pale self, as the other which writing generates and which Josephine forecloses in her world of doubles “where there was no room for another.” He is a third which has to go in the same way as all thirds have had to go before to make room for a purely dual relation—the fast disappearance of Josephine’s husband which leaves her alone with her son is one example of that. As such, Henry Smee opens a gap, a space of disjunction (“disjointure,” Derrida, Spectres 42) where things do not “fit,” do not match, become unpredictable and undecidable. Having rejected the hazards of life for the sanctuary of fiction, Josephine has failed to see that there may be no safety in writing.

12 The disruption of set places which the ghost causes manifests itself in the way Henry Smee starts to roam the house at all hours of night and day, to sit in Josephine’s kitchen in the middle of the night when she tries to confine him to her attic where she is said to have always “put [her boys] to sleep” (149). The boy lives in the house without being

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able to settle down, or to quote Derrida, “he engineers a habitation without proper inhabiting, call it a haunting” (Specters, 20) / “il s’ingénie à habiter sans proprement habiter, soit à hanter” (Spectres, 42). The remainder or the excess for which Josephine “has no room” (156), which she finds impossible to domesticate and, in the end, to accommodate, imposes itself as a bodily presence which she compares to “a field-force” (152). This something otherworldly and the disturbance it creates evokes that something of a “non-world” to quote Bernard Bass which is embodied and yet deprived of substance in Lacan’s object a—otherness as a disruption not just at the level of the Symbolic but at the level of the Real (Baas 55). We might remember Max’s words: “This time I have a real challenge.” This “real” can be given a particular emphasis, at the same time as the “challenge,” so close phonetically to “changeling,” proves to be more than a swap of names. The function of the ghost can be also likened to that of object a as castoff or left-over of the signifying process: in his very quiet voice, Henry Smee “offers” Josephine what she describes as the “flotsam and jetsam of his thoughts” (153). We can find in Henry Smee’s strange physical presence an echo of the paradox that characterises object a: an object which is impossible to place (“objet inassignable,” Baas 82), “a floating object” (Dolar 73), which is both corporeal and detached from the body. Although he seems to be made of thin air and to have no substance, pale Henry imposes his clinging, stifling presence. Although he appears nervous and restless and keeps coming and going in the house, he is said to have an unnerving “habit of stasis” (150). Or, as Sarah Gooderson puts it, “malleable” Smee is in fact “slippery and moves into the realms of being an unreadable text beyond Josephine’s interpretative domain.” But the disruption the ghost introduces into Josephine’s world manifests itself in a paroxysmal manner as a disturbance in the image reflected by the mirror.

13 From the start, Henry Smee marks his difference from Simon Vowle by an image, the image that does not fit, even as the words do. In the climactic episode which provokes the eviction of the pale boy, Josephine finds herself face to face with that image again but this time she finds herself gazed at rather than gazing, stared at by a pair of eyeless eyes: She went up, sighed, closed herself into her small room and began to scream. He was doing nothing very fearful: simply studying his own face, sitting on the end of her bed, in her square of mirror, in the light given by the street lamp. As she came in what she in fact saw was his reflected image staring at her out of the square of dark glass, lit up oddly by the light from the landing, through the door over her own shoulder […] His moon-face in the glass was distraught and glittering, eyeless because his glasses reflected reflection. (158-59)

14 The reflected reflection that obliterates the eyes can be seen as an example of what Derrida calls “the visor effect”: This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us. (Specters, 6)

15 The idea that the mirror should become a place of disjunction is also what we find in Lacan’s description of object a as an elusive or vanishing “point of being” (“un point d’être évanouissant,” Lacan 79), as what cannot be reflected (“un objet non spécularisable,” Baas 75) and hollows the image out. Here the “eyeless moon-face” finds an echo in Josephine’s screaming face, the hole in the image is redoubled and intensified by the piercing cry. That the acme and the turning-point in the story should take place in front of a mirror brings out the limits of Josephine’s attempt to see her

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world simply as what she makes of it and to see herself as the woman she has “made herself.” More than ever the spectral challenges the dual. This last face to face is in fact the culmination of a process of invasion and disintegration: the ghost that comes back to haunt her with a vengeance not only works his way into the house to end up sitting on her bed, but causes all barriers to crumble by introducing contagion with the “infectious fear” (153) he brings in, even if he does “nothing very fearful” (158). From the moment Josephine stops to be able to invent her safe doubles and falls under the influence of Henry Smee, we can say that contiguity takes over resemblance, or that unbridled metonymy replaces metaphor, unless, precisely, her endless substitutions have little to do with metaphor, are but a process of cloning in which the gap and the play that the poetic gesture involves is denied.

16 Although the lost boy that Josephine cannot accommodate ends up framed, he shatters that frame by becoming a blind spot in her field of vision. But the story does not fold upon itself there. For there is another blind spot and another lost boy in the story, someone who is outside that final frame and remains peripheral or off-centre in the story, when he is perhaps its punctum (Barthes). We are told about Josephine’s son, Peter, the son whom she does not “see” (157) any more, at two points in the story. First, we learn that he used to help Josephine with the welfare of the lost boys but then disappeared, “inexplicably” (149), leaving an empty room at the heart of the house which Josephine never filled. Just before the face to face in the mirror, Peter is mentioned a second time, almost in passing: we are told that he dropped out of school to help drop-outs, became a tramp living among the tramps. Peter who will later find his double in Tom in The Children’s Book, is perhaps from the start a shadow, a child doomed never to grow up because he is the shadow of Peter Pan. At the same time, he is the child that Josephine fails to turn into a double of herself although once her husband goes, she makes him her indispensable partner in the care of the lost boys. Peter the tramp will not stand still, will not be accommodated, will not be “explained” and turned into fiction by his mother: his room stands empty and the short story which is so explicit in many respects builds a strange space of silence around him. In the initial equation which seems to account for the title of the story “Henry Smee is Simon Vowle,” Peter is yet another third, another other who challenges the world of doubles— another spectre from which spectral Smee himself diverts our attention. Together they nevertheless happen to point in the direction of a hazy area that surrounds fatherly and apparently benevolent Max: whilst Peter is said to have “inexplicably cooled” (149) about Max, Henry Smee only “twists his useless hands in his dressing-gown” (155) when Josephine tells him that one can only be happy at St Edmund’s school “with people like Max.” Although the matter is barely touched upon, it raises yet another spectre in the text which contributes to blurring its contours further.

17 If we take Peter into account, a new twist is given to the twist given to the traditional motif of the changeling—what appeared as the simple inversion of a simple swap (a “real” child had taken the place of a fairy’s creature rather than the other way round) can be inverted again. Once upon a time there was a real child in Josephine’s house and he was her own son, but he has been removed or something has caused him to remove himself and he has never been replaced: the child’s bed is empty and will remain empty. This twist marks the limit of the process of substitution—which does not mean its end. The real “ghost story” in “The Changeling” may be the story that does not get told, the story that is excluded yet inseparable from the stories that do get told. The

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spectral manifests itself in places where the narrative stalls but it also lines it through and through. What haunts the text also challenges our reading of the story as plain allegory. Although the conclusion of the tale indicates that everything has gone back to normal, there is something Josephine has not quite got rid of and that might come back to haunt her: But the writing-block went. The next day she was able to start again with nothing and no one between her and the present Simon Vowle, a writer at work, making a separate world, with no inconvenient reader or importunate character in the house. The ghost of those limp yet skilful hands, just that, attached itself to the form of the present Simon (whose name was in fact James) but not so that anyone would have noticed. (160)

18 The writer has regained control and feels confident that the surgery she has performed in grafting Henry Smee’s hands on her new character will remain invisible. But might there not be something that she fails to see? Jane L. Campbell emphasises Josephine’s gesture of appropriation at the close of the story: “All that is left of Henry is the ghost of his hands, which she appropriates for the new Simon” (116). Yet, as Josephine invites the ghost’s hands into her book, who is to say that they will remain in place, that they will not gain a life of their own? Who is to say that the end is not the beginning of another ghost story—or merely the continuation of the one we have been reading? As Campbell puts it, Byatt “knows that the finishing off is never final” (106).

19 More than a running theme, haunting is intimately connected with the need to write and the process of writing in Byatt’s fiction. In an interview with Jean-Louis Chevalier where she was asked about her predilection for “the weird, or the strange, the unusual, the eerie, the extraordinary,” Byatt’s answer was the following: “I think again I took up writing in order to accommodate the strange. I think … the human consciousness is completely preoccupied with what is not seen, with what haunts.” The house where Josephine “accommodates” her “lost children” is not simply the refuge of a neurotic writer suffering from pathological fear. It can be seen as the site of a confrontation that writing always involves in one way or another. As Julian Wolfreys argues in his Preface to Victorian Hauntings, “all forms of narrative, are, in one way or another, haunted” (3). Byatt specialises in neat, carefully constructed tales: the uncanny invites itself inside the solid walls of a tidy house where everything seems to have its place: “The spectral effect … needs structure, within which its efficacy assumes maximum disruption. The act of haunting is effective because it displaces us in those places where we feel most secure, mostly notably in our homes, in the domestic scene,” as Wolfreys points out (5). The strength of Byatt’s fiction lies in that fact that something remains awry even when the ghost seems to have gone, when order has been restored and the door of the house safely closed again. The “iterable supplement” (Derrida) that haunting involves cannot be contained by fiction, nor can it be framed by metafiction. Awareness and self- reflexion cannot do away with the blind spot in the mirror. If that mars the task of the writer who tries to shut out anything coming from the outside, it also leaves a window open for the reader.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baas, Bernard. De la Chose à l’objet: Jacques Lacan et la traversée de la phénoménologie. Louvain: Peeters, 1998. Print.

Barthes, Roland. La Chambre claire. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, Gallimard Seuil, 1980. Print.

Byatt, A.S. “A.S. Byatt - b. 1936.” Interview with Jean-Louis Chevalier. Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (Autumn 2003): Web. 4 Nov. 2017.

--- “The Changeling.” Sugar & Other Stories. 1987. London: Vintage, 1995. Print.

---. The Children’s Book. 2009. London: Vintage, 2010. Print.

---. “The July Ghost.” Sugar & Other Stories. 1987. London: Vintage, 1995. Print.

---. “Sugar” / “Le Sucre.” Passions of the Mind. 1991. London: Vintage, 1993. Print.

---. “Writing in Terms of Pleasure.” Interview Sam Leith. The Guardian, 25 April 2009. Web. 30 Nov. 2017.

Campbell, Jane L. “Confecting Sugar: Narrative Theory and Practice in A.S. Byatt’s Short Stories.” Critique 38.2 (Winter 1997): 105-21. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

---. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Print.

Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press, 2006. Print.

Gooderson, Sarah. “Writing a Tale.” The Guardian, 22 September 2005. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, livre XI, Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Print.

NOTES

1. In an interview to The Guardian which followed the publication of The Children’s Book, we read: “The book touches, too, on what Byatt calls ‘one of the steady themes of my writing that I don’t understand—as opposed to several that I do. I don’t understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.’”

ABSTRACTS

Dans la nouvelle intitulée « The Changeling » (Sugar and Other Stories), Byatt revisite l’histoire de fantômes et la met au service d’une réflexion métafictionnelle. L’idée que l’art tue la vie, dont Byatt admet qu’elle constitue une de ses hantises, subit ici une torsion car c’est lorsque le personnage de papier menace d’être supplanté par un être de chair que les spectres se

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déchaînent. La nouvelle se voit placée sous le signe de la duplication et de la substitution, mais aussi d’un trouble qui laisse place à l’indécidable. L’excès que le spectral introduit relève du corps, un corps que l’hôtesse/auteure, Joséphine, tente en vain de domestiquer. L’enfant qui se met à hanter la maison échappe à l’emprise de celle qui l’avait recueilli, et c’est lors d’une apparition insoutenable dans le miroir que la nouvelle culmine et bascule. Le spectral fait alors surgir un point aveugle, un trou dans l’image qui a le pouvoir d’ébranler tout l’édifice spéculaire du texte.

AUTHORS

PASCALE TOLLANCE Pascale Tollance is Professor of English at Université Lumière–Lyon 2 (France). She has written extensively on Malcolm Lowry, as well as on British contemporary authors such as Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson and Rachel Seiffert. She is the author of a book on Graham Swift (Graham Swift: La Scène de la voix. Villeneuve d'Ascq : PU du Septentrion, 2011) which focuses on the staging of voice in Swift’s fiction. Together with Chantal Delourme and Isabelle Gadoin she is in charge of the online journal L’Atelier, has co- edited vol. 5.1 (Survivance) and vol. 6.2. (La Transmission) and is on the editorial board of the online journal Polysèmes. Her interests include post-colonial literatures (she has written recently on the fiction Janet Frame, J.M. Coetzee and Alice Munro).

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“Bathed in an incredible sweetness of light”: A Reading of John McGahern’s “The Wine Breath”

Liliane Louvel

1 No one would think straightaway of associating the writings of John McGahern with any kind of supernatural element, ghost stories or haunted places. His is deemed a “realistic” (whatever it may mean) kind of writing, deeply inscribed in the Ireland of the fifties and onwards with its precise detailing of life in Dublin or on a farm with its rural background and cooped-up families caught up in complex family relationships. Yet, rereading his stories, I realized that haunting as the coming back of past scenes, the workings of memories, the resurgence of past events indeed stands at the core of his work. The power of memory—he was a great admirer of Proust and often wrote inspired by the intricate workings of involuntary memory—is one of the red threads running through his novels (The Barracks, The Leavetaking, Amongst Women for instance) and his short stories. His last piece, Memoir, literally going up memory lane, recalling “when I was three years old I used to walk a lane like these lanes to Lisacarn School with my mother” (3), is a tribute to his mother but also to his childhood. The book- cover features personal pictures of himself and his family.

2 Yet even ghost stories may be a subject for his writing. This is what I found reading “The Wine Breath” (from The Collected Stories) a multi-layered story the complexity of which can only be grasped after at least a fourth or a fifth careful reading. It is always surprising to realize to what extent the compression achieved by short stories needs time to develop and for them to take on their full dimension. It reminds me of those Japanese paper flowers which only bloom to their full once plunged in water. “The Wine Breath,” which purports to be the description of a moment in the life of an ageing priest, turns out to be a profound meditation on life and death as well as a tribute to W.B.Yeats, all this rolled into one. I also discovered that the meditation adopts the shape of an old aesthetic form of visual art, the Memento mori, as I will try to show.

3 For “The Wine Breath” is a very visual story, that of a vision, that of memory, as well as metaphysical experience and the calling to mind of the beauty of some of the words

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John McGahern used to love when they were put into a fluid rhythmic shape, that of poetry, that of poetic prose. Now, as he stood at the gate, there was no awe or terror, only the coffin moving slowly towards the dark trees on the hill, the long line of the mourners, and everywhere the blinding white light, among the half-buried thorn bushes and beyond Killeelan, on the covered waste of Gloria Bog, on the sides of Slieve an Iarainn. (CS 179)

4 A Memento mori is a painting which is associated with the ancient enunciation of the reminder to a victorious Roman general of his nature as a human being by a slave placed behind him close to his ear, during his triumphant march through Rome. Memento mori, “Remember Death,” often translated as “Remember you will die” does not place too much stake on mortal glory and possessions. As Benjamin Delmotte shows, the Memento mori can be qualified by its power and the forces it captures (to follow Deleuze on Bacon), the strength of its unveiling of a/the truth, the sudden stopping of all human activity and movement when one is confronted with the truth it reveals to the eye. It is a moment when one stands in silent awe, a moment which puts everything at a standstill, triggering contemplation and reflexion. The human being is seized and captivated, in a moment of rapture which completely takes hold of him/her. These characteristics are exactly what appear in McGahern’s story of that afternoon in the life of the priest whose name we do not know. He remains “he,” “the priest,” all along the story, although some of the minor characters, Gillespie, Michael Bruen, Peter Joyce (no comment) bear a name. Thus the priest acquires a universal quality.

5 The story begins with a conundrum: If I were to die, I’d miss most the mornings and the evenings, he thought as he walked the narrow dirt-track by the lake in the late evening, and then wondered if his mind was failing, for how could anybody think anything so stupid: being a man he had no choice, he was doomed to die; and being dead he’d miss nothing, being nothing. It went against everything in his life as a priest. (CS 178, my emphasis)

6 The priest does not need a slave to remind him of his doomed condition as a man in the selfsame terms of the Memento mori, pointing to his end and future state of nothingness, “le rien,” which is one of the revelations of the Memento mori, plunging the being in a state of awe, stopping him in his tracks.

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7 The story tells of a late October afternoon when the priest goes to see a parishioner, Mr Gillespie, who is busy sawing beech, to tell him a bed will be available for his wife in hospital soon. But when the priest reaches the farm and lays his hand on the gate, he is stopped in his movement by a sudden trick of light which renders visible not only the white chips of beech but also the long-forgotten snowflakes of a day in his childhood. The priest put a hand to the black gate, bolted to the first of the alders, and was at once arrested by showery sunlight falling down the avenue. It lit up one boot holding the length of beech in place, it lit the arms moving the blade slowly up and down as it tore through the beech, white chips milling out on the chain. Suddenly, as he was about to rattle the gate loudly to see if this would penetrate the sawing, he felt himself (bathed as in a dream) in an incredible sweetness of light. It was the evening light on snow. The gate on which he had his hand vanished, the alders, Gillespie’s formidable bulk, the roaring of the saw. He was in another day, the lost

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day of Michael Bruen’s funeral nearly thirty years before. All was silent and still there. (CS 178, my emphasis)

8 The subtle writing seams the two times together so that the reader has to unravel the two moments which are thus superimposed. The same tense, the preterite, is used and past and present flow one into the other: “he felt himself (bathed as in a dream) in an incredible sweetness of light. It was the evening light on snow.” The conditions of seeing the scene are comparable to the conditions of viewing a painting, a Memento mori in particular: the viewer stops in his tracks, “arrested” by the onrush of light (“showery sunlight,” so typical of Ireland to compare sunshine to a shower!). The sudden lighting effect reifies Gillespie, reduced to a boot and arms. Then the “incredible sweetness of light” acts as an invigorating baptismal bath (“bathed as in a dream”), the light of which carries the viewer back in time, to a snowy day: “It was the evening light on snow.” Only after the confusing time sequence and sentence is the reader given the “vanishing acts” of the gate, the alders and Gillespie’s formidable bulk and roaring saw.

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9 John McGahern is very good at this kind of spilling over of memory into the present. This is something which happens in “A Slip-up,” the story about a man forgotten by his wife in front of Tesco’s in England; he is left reminiscing about a day he spent walking to school with his mother in his native Ireland. In “The Wine Breath” the past is again recreated in a vivid scene: it is the long file of mourners going up a hill to the church yard on the snowy day of the burial of Michael Bruen. The event is still very vivid in the priest’s mind because it coincides with a memorable event: the incredible fall of so much heavy snow―“eight or ten feet deep over the whole countryside” (CS 178)―in this part of Ireland that it entailed the cutting of a pathway in the huge masses of snow. As a child, he used to visit the big farmhouse of Michael Bruen, running errands for his father, and was entertained there. The contrast between the roaring fires, the generosity and good humour of the farmer who gave him food and tea (“Empty bags can’t stand” [CS 181], the activity and warm life of the place, and the sudden death of this “lovely man,” whose coffin will be borne by men through the white landscape up to the church, is poignant. The scene is so vivid that its vision is shared both by the reader and by its retro-spectator. The description even takes on the characteristics of a fairy tale and reminds us of the kitchen in Wuthering Heights: Within the house, away from the yard, was the enormous cave of a kitchen, the long table down its centre, the fireplace at its end, the plates and pots and presses along the walls, sides of bacon wrapped in gauze hanging from hooks in the ceiling, the whole room full of the excitement and bustle of women. […] “Give this man something,” Michael had led him. “Something solid that’ll warm the life back into him.” (CS 181)

10 And then: Michael came with him to the gate when he left. […] Before the last flakes had stopped falling, when old people were searching back to the “great snows when Count Plunkett was elected” to find another such fall, Michael Bruen had died, and his life was already another such watermark of memory. (CS 182)

11 The kitchen is also reminiscent of a Vanity I recently saw in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The Well-Stocked Kitchen by Joachim Beuckelaer (ca. 1533-1575), Antwerpen 1566, profusedly displays in the foreground all kinds of victuals―venison, vegetables,

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fruit, meat, poultry―and pots and pans, whereas in the background, a small embedded architectural blueish frame (like Velazquez’s bodegon The Servant) depicts the famous visit of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary. The meaning of this painting being, according to the theological thought of the time, “Do not give in to earthly temptations.” A warning echoing the Ecclesiastes' end “Vanity….” But this painting is not a Memento mori but a Vanity, with a moral teaching different from “remember death!”

12 The conditions of viewing I alluded to before: the sudden “showery sunlight falling down the avenue” lighting up Gillespie’s boot, his arms and the white chips and “[Gillespie’s] overalled bulk framed in the short avenue of alders” (CS 178, my emphasis) light up the scene and frame it like in a painting or a vision. The visual was of importance to McGahern who wrote about “the Image” in one of his rare critical pieces: When I reflect on the image two things from which it cannot be separated come: the rhythm and the vision. The vision, that still and private world which each of us possesses and which others cannot see, is brought to life in rhythm—rhythm being little more than the instinctive movements of the vision as it comes to life and begins its search in a kind of grave, grave of the images of dead passions and their days. (12)

13 This reflection perfectly applies to “The Wine Breath” and to the way the vision gives rise to, or better, excavates “the images of dead passions and their days” out of their graves. It also finds an echo in the contemplation of the graveyard scene towards the end of the short story.

14 The details of the description of the embedding scene―the evening of the visit to Gillespie sawing the beech―not only give the scene a realistic quality but also endow it with an unheimlich turn. All of a sudden the gaze switches to a vision of the mourners slowly carrying the coffin: “slow” is repeated seven times; the movement, hampered by the snow, is similar to that of a slow-motion camera and gives the scene an eerie flavour. The then young boy realizes the mystery of life and its cruelty when a man full of strength and life is brutally removed from this world and put under the earth: Slow feet crunched on the snow. Ahead, at the foot of the hill, the coffin rode slowly forward on shoulders, its brown varnish and metal trappings dull in the glittering snow, riding just below the long waste of snow eight or ten feet deep over the whole countryside. The long dark line of mourners following the coffin stretched away towards Oakport Wood in the pathway cut through the snow. High on Killeelan Hill the graveyard evergreens rose out of the snow. The graveyard wall was covered, the narrow path cut up the side of the hill stopping at the little gate deep in the snow. The coffin climbed with painful slowness, as if it might never reach the gate, often pausing for the bearers to be changed; and someone started to pray, the prayer travelling down the whole mile-long line of the mourners as they shuffled behind the coffin in the narrow tunnel cut in the snow. (CS 178-79, my emphasis)

15 The markers of slowness and the long line of mourners (note the alliterations and assonances) impart the ghostly vision with the ceremonial and ritualistic quality of a community’s shared grief and solidarity. They also impart it with particular rhythm, that of an image dug up from “the grave of dead passions and their days.” The hypallage “painful slowness” also reveals the careful writing of the scene that is enhanced by the use of “as if” which gives it an eerie feel, the comparative “as” pointing to the real and “if” to the unreality of the hypothetical.

16 The vision of this strange scene prevents the priest from going forward and accomplishing his task: “He was about to rattle the gate again, feeling a washed-out

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parody of a child or old man on what was after all nothing more than a poor errand: to tell the Gillespies that a bed had at long last been made available […] when his eyes were caught again by the quality of the light” (CS 179). He stops in his tracks, does not open the gate and turns back, overwhelmed by the strength of the revelation, a reaction typical of a Memento mori too, according to Benjamin Delmotte: The Memento mori abruptly stops quietness and produces intense motionlessness. This intensity essentially works in the confrontation or the superimposition of two incompossible elements : what is and what will be” (44, my translation). As an inner “voice,” which cannot be ascribed to anyone but is rendered visible, the Memento mori blocks any action and may thus be understood as a strange moral imperative, a “voice of conscience” creating a disassociation unhinging experience in its immobile disquietude. [… it consists] in arresting any action. (45, my translation)

17 For it is his own death the priest has just remembered and witnessed, an intimation of his mortality. “Before leaving he stole a last look at the dull white ground about the saw-horse. The most difficult things always seem to lie closest to us, to lie around our feet” (CS 180).

18 The priest goes back to his house behind the church, choosing to walk by safe places the details of which―colours, tree names―he can isolate and number: Safe on the wide main road he let his mind go back to the beech chips. They rested there around Gillespie’s large bulk, and paler still was the line of mourners following the coffin through the snow, a picture you could believe or disbelieve but not be in. In idle exasperation he began to count the trees in the hedge along the road as he walked: ash, green oak, whitehorn, ash; the last leaves a vivid yellow on the wild cherry, empty October fields in dull wet light behind the hedges. (CS 180, my emphasis)

19 The whole mourning scene is remembered in terms of a picture one “could believe or disbelieve but not be in,” as a vision, an apparition, linked to a kind of faith. The priest then seeks solitude, avoiding the sexton, going by a circular road. Once home he makes some tea and remininisces about his meetings with Michael Bruen and his much mourned burial after an exceptional snow storm. His mind relentlessly goes back to the scene the beech chips conjured up and to the truth it holds, alluding to one of Yeats’ poems, “The Vision,” that revolves around the occult. So doing: “the knowledge of reality is a secret knowledge, it is a kind of death” (CS 183) which might be a subtle evocation of Yeats. The burial truly is an unburial of an awesome truth he is confronted with: Never before though had he noticed anything like the beech chips. There was the joy of holding what had eluded him for so long, in its amazing simplicity: but mastered knowledge was no longer knowledge unless it opened, became part of a greater knowledge, and what did the beech chips do but turn back to his own death? (CS 183)

20 Then the ghost of his mother comes to haunt him. A major figure in his life, “His mother had the vocation for him.” Perhaps she had, perhaps all the mothers of the country had, it had so passed into the speech of the country, in all the forms of both beatification and derision; but it was out of fear of death he became a priest, which became in time the fear of life. Wasn’t it natural to turn back to the mother in this fear? (CS 183). [After his father’s death] “his mother sold the land to ‘Horse’ McLaughlin and came to live with him and was happy. She attended all the Masses and Devotions, took messages, and she sewed, though she had no longer any need, linen for the altar,

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soutanes and surplices, his shirts and all her own clothes. […] The fences on the past and future were secure” (CS 183-84).

21 The short story is replete with references to gates, fences, barriers protecting the self. When they collapse, like in the experience of the confrontation with a Memento mori, times collapse and leak one into the other, in a dangerous revelatory way.

22 On the death of his mother who “must have been the mainspring of his days,” the priest was left bewildered and rudderless: “Now that the mainspring was broken, the hands were weakly falling here and falling there. Today there had been the sudden light on the bits of white beech.” (CS 180). The priest found himself plunged in solitude and repeatedly “stumbled” onto the presence of “lost days” (CS 185). The phrase echoes Proust’s In Search of Lost Days, of course, and the repeated use of “stumble” in relation to the sudden involuntary reminiscence of a memory1 is telltale for it illustrates the fact that the priest is falling, falling into lost days, out of time. “Lost” or “dead”―and not past―stresses the subjectivity of his appreciation of these recurrent days, lost and then recuperated, fallen into oblivion but ready to emerge and suddenly erupt at an unexpected time, as visible in the previous quote: “Once, crushed mint in the garden had given him back a day he’d spent with her at the sea in such reality that he had been frightened, as if he’d suddenly fallen through time, it was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as the world of the living”(CS 180).

23 His mother used to sew for the church and her son. He found her one day bewildered, standing in the midst of clothing she had just torn into rags. A powerful image of impending senility, it also recalls one of the myths of ancient Greece, that of the Fates/ Moira2 (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, often associated with past, present, future too). The three sisters used to spin, measure, and cut the thread of man’s life. They were often represented at work on a tapestry too. And the priest’s mother was a seamstress (“He could still see the needle flashing in her strong hands, that single needle-flash composed of thousands of hours” [CS 183]) who had just cut up what she had made, like Atropos. The victim of a loss of memory, she will have to go to a home to be taken care of before her impending death, leaving the priest confused and disoriented.

24 Then McGahern’s short story verges on the Gothic when he gives us the thrill of the feared presence of dead priests erring at night in the graveyard in Gothic fashion. For the priest’s mother used to believe and fear ghosts: He went to draw the curtain. She had made the red curtain too with its pale lining but hadn’t torn it. How often must she have watched the moonlight on the still headstones beyond the laurel as it lay evenly on them this night. She had been afraid of ghosts: old priests who had lived in this house, who through whiskey or some other ill had neglected to say some Mass for the dead and because of the neglect the soul for whom the Mass should have been offered was forced to linger beyond its time in Purgatory, and the priest guilty of the omission could himself not be released until the living priest had said the Mass, and was forced to come at midnight to the house in all his bondage until the Mass was said. (CS 185)

25 Although the priest used to soothe his mother, on this, one of the last days of October close to All Soul’s Night and All Saints’ Day, a day on which the tightly closed barriers between the dead and the living are more permeable, “He would be glad of a ghost tonight, be glad of any visitation from beyond the walls of sense” (CS 185). Haunted by memories of his past, the solitary priest is also haunted by the ancient folklore of his country. And one more visitation from the past will return from “the grave of dead days.”

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26 The narrative mainly takes place in his mind and there is little dialogue. It is made up of major scenes: the burial scene, the visiting of Michael Bruen’s farm and kitchen when a boy, the mother’s presence and her first attack, and lastly a scene between the priest and one of his friends, Peter Joyce who became a Bishop and whom he no longer sees. Once, while on vacation by the Atlantic, they had a “truculent argument,” the subject of which was the disappearance of Latin to say Mass, a fact the priest lamented. His friend upbraided him for his inconsistency: “‘Complaining about the Mass in the vernacular. When you prefer the common names of flowers to their proper names’” (CS 186). But the priest thought that flower names were much more beautiful when in the vernacular (“Dog rose, wild woodbine, buttercup”).

27 In the scene, the language of the sacred has disappeared and the two spaces, the sacred and the mundane, run one into the other, like the dead and the living. No more hedges or gates, the presence of which runs through the story. The tired priest is left musing, deeply feeling the aridity of his life and his utter loneliness. Then comes the last haunting scene, confirming the utmost revelation and unveiling of truth, in accordance with the Memento mori injunction (“Remember death”): “Then, quietly, he saw that he had a ghost all right, one that he had been walking around with for a long time, a ghost he had not wanted to recognize―his own death. He might as well get to know him well. It would never leave now and had no mortal shape. Absence does not cast a shadow” (187).

28 As if to go back to the beginning, and ending the story on a more optimistic vision, the last paragraph echoes a former sentence: “Everything in that remembered day was so pure and perfect that he felt purged of all tiredness, was, for a moment, eager to begin life again” (CS 180). A new scene comes to his mind, that of a young man “not unlike he had once been,” ringing at the door of a woman, with a present of a bottle of wine in his hand. In typical McGahern way, like in this seminal story of his, “Wheels,” which points to the importance of circular patterns of structure, echoing “Like All Other Men”: “In my end is my beginning, he recalled. In my beginning is my end, his and hers, mine and thine” (CS 280), quoting T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “East Coker” (his native place), and the 1965 inscription on Eliot’s memorial plaque, “in my beginning is my end…in my end is my beginning,” echoing the Bible. The last paragraph works on this circular effect too: its ending words “[the young man] feeling himself immersed in time without end” form a chiasmus with the words at the beginning of the story: “outside this room that was an end, he knew that a young man…” (CS 187). But it is also a beginning, for the young double figure of the priest is on the point of spending a pleasant evening which will verge on the endless eternal, leaving the lonely aged priest doomed in time and immersed in mortality.

29 The story also conjures up literary ghosts. That of Proust and his “petite madeleine” together with the recapturing of past/lost days though the senses. The story delicately points to the five senses in the true allegorical way painting used when pointing to an allegory of life and death. References to smelling, feeling, hearing, tasting and of course seeing, are scattered here and there and put to good use. The smell of crushed mint evokes a day at the sea with his mother (see above). The memory of Michael Bruen is conjured up by the vision of the white chips and then the priest vividly remembers his visits replete with emotions and the satisfaction of the senses: “It was hard to concentrate on Michael’s questions about his father, so delicious was the smell of frying. The mug of steaming tea was put by his side. The butter melted on the fresh

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bread on the plate. There were sausages, liver, bacon, a slice of black-pudding and sweetest grisceens” (CS 181-82).

30 If the name of priest’s friend evokes Joyce and his influence on McGahern’s writing— the end has been compared to “The Dead” too—it is the overwhelming presence of Yeats and in particular of “All Souls Night,”3 which has to be quoted here: […] A ghost may come; For it is a ghost’s right, His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine […]

31 In his poem, Yeats used “the wine breath” to designate a kind of fine ethereal use of the senses which only belongs to pure souls or creatures unreal. Yeats is also famous for his taste of the ethereal and the supernatural which dominate his long poem, “A Vision,” first published in 1925, then revised in 1937. The wine breath is the emanation of a body, a mere essence or bodyless vapour. “L’âme du vin,”4 the soul of wine, as one speaks of “l’âme d’un violon,” “l’âme d’un terroir” or “the angel’s share.”

32 In the story, the priest, far from being addicted to “spirits,” as some critics thought, is the one who could only enjoy a whiff of life, its breath and not the wine, the real full- bodied stuff being out of his reach. And to tell the truth, wine was still a rarity in the Ireland of the fifties and sixties, and was reserved for Mass; beer or whiskey were the staple of Irish people. The priest’s double, the young man described in the last paragraph, will enjoy the white wine contained in the bottle he is carrying as a present to share with his woman friend, something the priest wistfully thinks of, the only lasting―and permitted―feminine presence in his life having been his mother, “the mainspring” of his life.

33 This short story is a reflection on the power of memory to conjure up the ghosts of our own inner life which return and are often more powerful than the physical presences we encounter and live with. It is a metaphysical reflection on the confrontation between life and death and the silent shock it can provoke. It is also deeply indebted to the ghost fathers of Irish literature McGahern used to love and quote, in particular W.B. Yeats with whom he shared the same landscapes and places. Yeats is buried in Drumcliffe5 at the foot of Queen Maeve’s seat very close to Sligo, where John McGahern and his family would go on holiday when he was a small boy, a fact he describes in another short story, “Strandhill the Sea.” The placenames are very precise in the story and serve to anchor it both in a reality John McGahern knew very well—they are in County Leitrim where he used to live (Killeelan Hill, the sides of Slieve an Iarainn, Gloria Bog)— and in the reality of a literary tradition.

34 The story is modelled on the shape of an old pictorial genre itself resting on an enunciation, that is language, the Memento mori which is the confrontation of a living person with death. The characteristics of the aesthetic of anguish are so cleverly interwoven with the tenets of this story that they provide its structure in an amazing way, as I have tried to show. This approach shows the depth and wealth of what seemed to be the simple story of an old man unable to perform the errand he came to run. The story is also a phenomenological and metaphysical experience carried out in its most discreet form, making the reader follow its different stages which comply with the effects of a Memento mori: the rising of a vision, the feeling of in-betweenness, the

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repetition of the vision, the backing away from the world, the becoming an outsider (standing at the gate), the state of stupefaction, and the unveiling of an experience and of a deathly truth under “the flimsy tissue of everyday life.” This story about a remembered burial is also the story and experience of an unburying, the involuntary digging up of lost days.

35 The homely/unhomely elements which unravel in the poetic prose typical of McGahern’s writing, is not one of the least fascinations under which McGahern holds us. The “Wine Breath,” which could also find an equivalent in “the angel’s share” of whisky Ken Loach referred to in one of his recent films, makes us share the feel of an evanescent vapour, rising out of a glass of wine only transparent ghosts could enjoy. It is the essence of life (wine standing for blood, which is part of the sacrament of Holy Communion when the believers are sharing the blood of Christ). This subtle “spirit” is the substance of possible enjoyment without really being it. And last but not least, it stands for what it takes to live and have a soul (whatever one may understand as such) : that is a mere precious breath or vapour.

36 The sense of “Mystery” the young boy experienced on this particular day, confronted with the vision he had: “Never before or since [that day in February 1947] had he experienced the Mystery in such awesomeness” (CS 179), was a revelation to him. “The Mystery” being a subtle mixture of the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the immanent, rolled into a strong awe-inspiring religious feeling. John McGahern once said that religion gave him the sense of mystery he would never have had to that extent otherwise.

37 “The Wine Breath” thus turns out to be a story about the discrepancy between the eternal and the finite, the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the immanent. Food for thought and drink for those doomed to die.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du mal. 1857. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964. Print.

Cardin, Bertrand. “‘Absence does not Cast a Shadow’: Yeats’s Shadowy Presence in McGahern’s ‘The Wine Breath.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 53 (Autumn 2009): 111-25. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Logique de la sensation. Paris: Le Seuil, 2002. Print.

Delmotte, Benjamin. Esthétique de l’angoisse. Le Memento mori comme thème esthétique. Paris: P.U.F., 2010. Print.

McGahern, John. “The Image.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 17.1, Special Issue on John McGahern. Ed. Denis Sampson (July 1991): 12. Print.

---. The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Print.

---. Memoir. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print.

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Yeats, William Butler. “A Vision.” The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Volume XIV, The Revised 1937 Edition. Eds. Catherine Paul and Margaret Mills Harper. New York: Simon and Shuster, 2015. Print.

APPENDIXES

Charles BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867) , Les Fleurs du mal L’âme du vin Un soir, l’âme du vin chantait dans les bouteilles : « Homme, vers toi je pousse, ô cher déshérité, Sous ma prison de verre et mes cires vermeilles, Un chant plein de lumière et de fraternité ! Je sais combien il faut, sur la colline en flamme, De peine, de sueur et de soleil cuisant Pour engendrer ma vie et pour me donner l’âme ; Mais je ne serai point ingrat ni malfaisant, Car j’éprouve une joie immense quand je tombe Dans le gosier d’un homme usé par ses travaux, Et sa chaude poitrine est une douce tombe Où je me plais bien mieux que dans mes froids caveaux. Entends-tu retentir les refrains des dimanches Et l’espoir qui gazouille en mon sein palpitant ? Les coudes sur la table et retroussant tes manches, Tu me glorifieras et tu seras content ; J’allumerai les yeux de ta femme ravie ; À ton fils je rendrai sa force et ses couleurs Et serai pour ce frêle athlète de la vie L’huile qui raffermit les muscles des lutteurs. En toi je tomberai, végétale ambroisie, Grain précieux jeté par l’éternel Semeur, Pour que de notre amour naisse la poésie Qui jaillira vers Dieu comme une rare fleur ! »

NOTES

1. “Ever since his mother’s death he found himself stumbling into these dead days. Once, crushed mint in the garden had given him back a day he’d spent with her at the sea in such reality that he had been frightened, as if he’d suddenly fallen through time, it was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as the world of the living” (CS 180, my emphasis). “The priest hadn’t thought of the day for years or of Michael Bruen till he had stumbled into it without warning by way of the sudden light on the beech chips” (CS 182, my emphasis). 2. Moira also is a common name in Scotland for Mary. 3. Bertrand Cardin pointed out this presence in his 2009 article.

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4. Also the title of a poem by Charles Baudelaire, printed below. 5. Close to Drumcliffe is the site of the big house of Lissadell where Yeats spent some time in 1894 invited by the Gore-Booth family who owned the estate. Later on, he wrote the famous “Lissadell” poem there starting with: “Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle,” which John McGahern recited to me once when he took me to Drumcliffe. He knew Yeats’s (but not only Yeats’s) poems by heart. See for more information and pictures http:// www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlsli/lissadell.html, consulted 13th October 2015.

ABSTRACTS

Les écrits de John McGahern, ancrés dans la société irlandaise rurale qui se développe à partir des années 1950, n’ont a priori rien de fantastique, rien d’une expérience de lieux fantomatiques. Cependant, une forme de hantise s’attache à certaines nouvelles, comme c'est le cas de « The Wine Breath ». Cette simple histoire d’un vieil homme qui renonce au dernier moment à effectuer la course pour laquelle il s’est rendu chez un voisin, est l’occasion de montrer comment, par la grâce d’une vision qui tout à coup fait rejaillir de sa mémoire un souvenir ancien, le vieux prêtre est hanté par son passé. À cette occasion, l’écrivain dépeint une expérience métaphysique et phénoménologique qui amène le lecteur à suivre la récurrence du souvenir revenant trouer de sa vérité mortelle « le tissu fragile de la vie quotidienne ». L’histoire est celle du désenfouissement d’un jour de l’enfance, perdu et brusquement revécu dans la blanche vision éblouissante qui rejoue la neige d’une journée particulière.

AUTHORS

LILIANE LOUVEL Liliane Louvel is Professor emerita of British literature at the University of Poitiers and specializes in contemporary British literature and word/image relationship. She has published five books on the relation between word and image: L'œil du texte (PUM, 1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double miroir de l'art (Ellipses, 2000), Texte/image, images à lire et textes à voir (PUR, 2002), Le Tiers pictural (PUR, 2010; translated by Angeliki Tseti, Routledge, 2018), and Poetics of the Iconotext (translated by Laurence Petit, edited by Karen Jacobs, Ashgate, 2011). She has edited several collections of essays on the word/image relationship: Like Painting (La Licorne, Poitiers); the proceedings of the Cerisy conference: Texte/image, nouveaux problèmes with Henri Scepi (PUR); Actes du colloque Photographie et littérature with J.-P. Montier and D. Meaux and P. Ortel (PUR); Around Stieglitz with J.-P. Montier and Jay Brookner (PUR); Intermedial Arts with Leena Leilitta and Sabine Kim (Media Cambridge Scholars P, 2012); Musing in the Museum, with Laurence Petit and Karen Brown (Taylor and Francis, 2015). She is the current president of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE). She is also the president of IAWIS/IAERTI, the International Society of Word & Image Studies.

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Journeys Westward: McGahern, Joyce and Irish Writing

Stanley van der Ziel

1 James Joyce was a constant touchstone in the fiction of John McGahern, and many echoes of Joyce’s fiction can be traced throughout his career. Following in the wake of Denis Sampson’s pioneering Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern (1993), criticism of McGahern’s work has identified a rich variety of themes, techniques, settings and plot elements from works spanning the length of Joyce’s career—from “The Sisters” to Finnegans Wake—that can be found in his fiction. But these debts to Joyce are not normally signalled overtly. Instead, McGahern was a writer who sought to occlude all evidence of his many literary debts in his fiction.

2 Only on three occasions did McGahern overtly engage with Joyce’s work—twice in the conventional form of academic literary criticism, and once in a more unusual format. Between 1979 and 1990, he wrote two pieces of non-fictional prose about Joyce’s legacy, both of which championed the Dubliners stories and the early episodes of Ulysses, in which “his imagination returns again and again to his first characters, his original material,” above Joyce’s later work (Love of the World, 207 and 185-87). But before the publication of either of these, he had already been commissioned in the early 1970s by the BBC and TimeLife to adapt “The Sisters,” the opening story of Dubliners, into a television screenplay.1 All adaptations are acts of interpretation, and this is perhaps particularly true when an adaptation is carried out by a fellow-practitioner, whose most astute readings of their predecessors can often take the form of original works of fiction, as I have argued in my recent monograph on McGahern’s fiction and its relationships with literary “traditions” (van der Ziel, John McGahern 9 and passim). It is clear from this 1973 screenplay adaptation of “The Sisters” that McGahern not only found in Joyce themes and ideas that could be adapted in his own literary endeavours, but equally that he projected certain key ideas and obsessions of his own early work onto the youthful protagonist of Joyce’s story. Because while McGahern’s screenplay adaptation generally remains faithful to Joyce’s original story, some material extraneous to Joyce’s vision is introduced into the narrative. What is more, antecedents for this non-autochthonous narrative material in McGahern’s version of “The Sisters”

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can be found in novels like The Dark (1965) and The Leavetaking (1974)—the latter written around the same time as his dramatisation of “The Sisters.”

3 The twofold nature of the symbiosis that existed between McGahern’s vision and its Joycean source is clear, for example, from the original story’s and the adaptation’s respective attitudes to the religious vocation and the Roman Catholic Church. On the one hand, the powerful idea from the conclusion of “The Sisters,” of a priest who has lost his religious belief, remained part of McGahern’s storehouse of images and ideas all his life. It eventually made its way into his fiction when Moran in Amongst Women remarked on the unsettling paradox of priests who fear death despite the things they preach, because, he says, “If they believed in what they preach they shouldn’t be afraid. Who knows anyhow? Who cares?” (179). On the other hand, McGahern’s screenplay adaptation projected a number of idiosyncratic McGahernesque elements onto Joyce’s story. For in some respects his adaptation of “The Sisters” is as much a chapter in the “moral history” of McGahern’s Ireland in the third quarter of the twentieth century as it is of Joyce’s at the turn of the century.2 Thus, in McGahern’s screenplay Father Flynn contrasts the Irish College in Rome where he has studied as a young man with domestic centres of religious training, and witheringly dismisses “the places here” as “not fit places, football seminaries ...” (McGahern, Rockingham 164). And when the same elderly priest reminisces about the dreams of a religious life he had once planned for the boy Stephen (“I was thinking too before I nodded what a great solace to me now is the thought that one day you may say Mass for me, that you may lift the chalice in anointed hands to God to ask him to have mercy on my poor soul” [McGahern, Rockingham 163]), that dialogue does not have a direct equivalent in the Joycean original. Instead, the idea is highly reminiscent of the various boy-protagonists’ memories of promises to their respective dead mothers to become a priest and say Mass for them in early McGahern novels like The Dark and The Leavetaking, as well as of McGahern’s own recollections in Memoir of dreams of a religious vocation he had once shared with his mother.

4 McGahern returned to stylistic and thematic aspects of “The Sisters” throughout his career.3 But other stories from the same collection were equally influential on his art, as a multitude of critics have shown.4 This essay does not pretend to be an exhaustive survey of McGahern’s uses of Joyce, or even of Dubliners, in his short stories; this would be an exercise of considerable magnitude far beyond the scope afforded by a single essay. Instead, it will concentrate on the way McGahern’s imagination was haunted in particular by his reading of one of Joyce’s stories, “The Dead.” I will argue how McGahern’s reading of that story informed his ideas on a different set of topics. This argument will be made in two stages. The first part of the essay will trace the continuing presence of “The Dead” in McGahern’s fiction. It will pay particular attention to the idea of the “journey westward” that must be undertaken by the hero, Gabriel Conroy, at the end of Joyce’s story, and to the multiple connotations in Irish literary and cultural discourse of the ideas of journeying westward and eastward with which both Joyce and McGahern deal. The second part of the essay will argue how the “original” Joyce of “The Dead” and the early episodes of Ulysses favoured by McGahern (Love of the World, 207) haunts one of his short stories, “Swallows.” It is my contention that this story from the 1970s is a clever re-writing of Joyce’s “The Dead”; like Joyce’s story, “Swallows” is interested in the apparent binary opposition between looking to the east and to the west, and in the possibility for breaking down such binary ways of thinking following an imaginative journey westward modelled on that of Joyce’s

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Gabriel Conroy at the end of “The Dead.” The wider thesis that will emerge is that both “The Dead” and “Swallows” are not only short stories in their own right, but also programme statements for the future directions of Irish writing.

“Journey westward”

5 One of the central concerns of “The Dead,” indeed of much of Joyce’s writing of the period around the turn of the 1910s, is what in the final paragraph of “The Dead” he calls the “journey westward” (Dubliners, 225). The preoccupation with journeys westward in “The Dead” and in Stephen’s diary entries at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a manifestation of Joyce’s effort to situate himself as an Irish writer in relation to the conventions of the Irish Literary Revival—a preoccupation that persisted into Ulysses, and even Finnegans Wake.5 More than half a century later, McGahern, too, knew that his attitude towards “the west” and its culture and customs and language would partly determine what kind of Irish writer he would be. And like Joyce, he regularly returned, often in self-conscious and ironic ways, to the “journey westward” motif.

6 In the final paragraph of “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy’s imagination in its movement “farther westward” crosses the “dark mutinous Shannon” (Dubliners, 225). McGahern begins the first story in his first short-story collection with a journey across the same alluvial frontier, as the protagonist of “Wheels” is acutely aware of the momentousness of crossing the river Shannon on the train. Crossing the Shannon is like a passing between two worlds that can seem as final and momentous as crossing the river Styx. It is so momentous, in fact, that the narrator feels how the passage across the Shannon can make time itself slow down (Nightlines, 13). The movement of McGahern’s imagination has sometimes been defined by critics of his work as one that moves “inland,” into the dark recesses of tribal affiliation (See for example O’Brien) but, on many occasions, the compass-direction of the move westward is just as significant. Like Joyce, McGahern was acutely aware of the enduring significance, even in the age of mass-transit and mass-emigration, of the trope of journeying westward—and indeed the trope of journeying eastward as well. There is a telling detail in the story “Why We’re Here” when, in response to hearing the sound of the 9.20 diesel train rattling westward towards Sligo, one of the characters elliptically remarks: “Empty, I suppose” (Nightlines, 27). The implication of that remark is clear: it is obvious to both protagonists that only the trains moving eastward carrying émigrés out of the emptying countryside towards Dublin and across the Irish Sea are full.

7 Versions of the archetypal Revivalist “journey westward” away from urban and suburban Dublin appear in a number of McGahern’s Dublin fictions. In a novel like The Pornographer (1979), these can be grossly satirical in their inversion of the conventional cultural-nationalist trope of the moral and sexual purity that is supposed to demark the indigenous west from the Anglicized east. We shall turn our attention to such satirical examples later in this essay, and begin here by looking at a journey westward in the same text that is more palatable and conventional. When the pornographer-narrator relates how he and his lover had driven their borrowed VW Beetle out of Dublin for a weekend break, he remarks on how: We drove in the stream of traffic out of the city the next weekend. It didn’t build any speed till it got past Lucan, and even there we found ourselves continually shut

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in behind slow trucks and milk tankers. [. . .] After Kinnegad the road emptied and we drove steadily and fast. Outside Longford a great walled estate with old woods stretched away to the left and children from a tinker encampment threw a stone that grazed the windscreen. In the distance, between rows of poplars, the steel strip of the Shannon started to flash. (The Pornographer, 82)6

8 A similar journeying westward away from the city and into the rural centre of supposed Irish authenticity is enacted at the start of the late story “The Country Funeral,” a story centrally concerned with the relative merits of the escape from and the return to the ancestral traditions of the countryside in the Irish west.7 As the three brothers, Philly, Fonsie and John, make their way out of Dublin in a hired Mercedes, the journey is clearly one of symbolic import: The big Mercedes grew silent as it gathered speed through Fairview and the North Strand, crossing the Liffey at the Custom House, and turned into the one-way flow of traffic out along the south bank of the river. Not until they got past Leixlip, and fields and trees and hedges started to be scattered between the new raw estates, did they begin to talk, and all their talk circled about the man they were going to bury, their mother’s brother, their Uncle Peter McDermott. (Collected Stories, 379)

9 Both of these motorised journeys out into the country represent modernised versions of a familiar trope of nineteenth-century novels and Anglo-Irish travel narratives—one that, moreover, is also recalled in a modernised, motorised version by Joyce in the opening paragraph of “After the Race,” in which the “wealth and industry” of an entire continent speeds homeward through the “channel of poverty and inaction” west of Dublin (Dubliners, 35).

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10 All of these, however, are literal journeys westward, interesting variations on an old trope that had also been one of Joyce’s sources. Much more interesting are the journeys westward that take place in the imagination. Many of McGahern’s characters, particularly in the short stories, are prone to travel westward in the mind rather than in the flesh. It is here that the significance of “The Dead” becomes paramount.

11 Readers of “The Dead” are privy throughout to Gabriel Conroy’s thoughts, including those about his wife’s romantic past in Galway with a boy called Michael Furey, whom she says “died for me” (Dubliners, 221), a piece of information that haunts Gabriel’s thoughts near the conclusion of the story.8 The story concludes with the nocturnal reverie in the Conroys’ room in the Gresham Hotel in which Gabriel finally journeys westward in his imagination across the Bog of Allen, the “dark mutinous Shannon” and the central plain to the cemetery in Galway where Michael Furey’s body is buried. It is clear that this “journey westward” in the imagination is in some way a source of healing, or at the very least a turning over of a new page, one as white and virginal as the pure snow that falls symbolically all over Ireland in the story’s famous final paragraphs.

12 It is clear that McGahern noted this element of Joyce. In fact, the redemptive “journey[s] westward” in the imagination that can be found in McGahern’s novels and stories are on more than one occasion inflected by his reading of Joyce’s story. One need go no further than The Pornographer to locate the Joycean echo. That novel critically engages with a number of aspects of going westward. First of all, and perhaps most obviously, it introduces two satires of the conventional Revivalist trope of the

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journey westward into territories supposedly unspoilt by corrupting English influences —such as may be found in the type of stories about “beautiful, pure faithful, Connacht girls and lithe, broad-shouldered open-faced young Connacht men” which Joyce ridiculed in one of his letters to his brother Stanislaus (Selected Letters, 134). The moral and sexual purity associated with the indigenous, Irish-speaking west in cultural- nationalist discourse is deliberately inverted first of all in the pornographer’s journey westward on a dirty weekend with his lover on a boat on the Shannon. Yet it is particularly savagely satirised later in the same novel in “Mavis and the Colonel Take a Trip on the Shannon,” the smutty story-within-a-novel based on that trip which the titular pornographer submits to Maloney’s pornographic magazine. The pornographer’s sensational pornographic romp to the west of Ireland not only satirizes bad writing; it also viciously targets, as Brian Merriman and Patrick Kavanagh had done before him in two texts that McGahern explicitly and obliquely references, conventional romantic notions about the moral purity of the peasant from the unspoilt west.9

13 But The Pornographer also contains a couple of variations on Gabriel Conroy’s spiritual or imaginative “journey westward,” both of which contrast starkly in intention and tone with the shambolic holidays on the Shannon in both the protagonist’s real life and in his fictional pornographic rendition of that trip. One of these symbolically healing or redemptive “journey[s] westward” takes the form of the protagonist’s terminally ill aunt’s patrols of the imagination from her Dublin hospital bed to a stretch of abandoned railway line, which for her is an earthly paradise (The Pornographer, 121). More directly reminiscent of Joyce’s example, however, is the novel’s conclusion. The narrative reaches a form of closure once the titular hero—or anti-hero—articulates a private resolve very close to that of Gabriel Conroy at the end of “The Dead” as he, too, gives in to a desire to “set out on his journey westward” (Dubliners, 225). Near the end of the novel, the pornographer decides to leave the city and: “[. . .] to go inland, in the solitude that is both pain and joy, and there make our own truth” (The Pornographer, 203). His real, physical retreat to the farm in the midlands that he has inherited is finally important, then, not because he intends to act out some vague Revivalist fantasy of living in a smoky cabin and taking up beekeeping, but because it betokens a genuine intellectual move in the pursuit of “truth.” Going “inland” here signifies at once a geographical journey westward to an unspoilt rural domain associated by generations of romantic nationalists with authentic national experience, as well as a metaphorical journey into his own troubled heart of darkness. The pornographer’s articulate resolve to look for such “truth” in a journey westward is reminiscent of that of Gabriel Conroy, who begins his reverie in the final paragraph of “The Dead” by making an equally momentous decision, reported in free indirect speech: The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. [. . .] His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Dubliners, 225)

14 Metaphorical journeys westward of precisely this kind occur not only here but in a number of McGahern’s urban fictions. Versions of the same motif can also be found in a number of the Getting Through stories of the 1970s. In “A Slip-Up,” for example, an elderly Irishman living in London passes away stretches of boredom waiting for his wife outside Tesco by restoring the run-down, overgrown farm in the west of Ireland that they have left task-by-task in his imagination (see Getting Through, 31-33). “Swallows,”

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too, is centrally preoccupied with imaginative journeys both eastward and westward, as the next section of this essay shall discuss in more detail.10 Perhaps one other story from the same collection is particularly notable for the number and variety of apparently overt references to “The Dead.” “The Wine Breath” concludes with the priest’s imagination following a young man about to enter “a pleasant and uncomplicated evening” (Getting Through, 106)—a version, perhaps, of Gabriel Conroy’s sterile imagination haunting the imagined sexual past of Gretta and Michael Furey in “The Dead.” Still, there are more obvious echoes of the same story. As Denis Sampson and others have noted, the sight of white beech chips on the ground that triggers the protagonist’s memory of snow in the graveyard on the day of Michael Bruen’s funeral thirty years before (McGahern, Getting Through 95-96) cannot but suggest a comparison with the final paragraph of “The Dead” (Sampson, Outstaring 175). In addition, there is also a verbal echo that has hitherto gone unnoticed. The realisation which follows the priest’s involuntary memory of Michael Bruen’s funeral in the snow—that these experiences are like “suddenly fall[ing] through time; it was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as the world of the living” (Getting Through, 97: emphasis added)— almost certainly echoes the famous last sentence of “The Dead” about the snow “faintly falling [...] upon all the living and the dead.” What McGahern’s story has appropriated from Joyce’s is its sense of narrative and ontological fluidity. Like “The Dead,” “The Wine Breath” is about the interminable presence of the lives of the dead in the lives of the living, and this awareness is reflected in the shape of the narrative, which moves fluidly between the narrative present and a number of real and imagined pasts when those who are now dead were still living.

15 A similar “journey westward” is also a key subject at the conclusion of “The Country Funeral,” a story first published at the end of McGahern’s Collected Stories (1992). There, the mother’s imagined journey westward to attend her brother’s funeral is more lovingly attentive to detail—more real!—than the perception of the same event of some of those who had actually been there. McGahern’s decision to end this particular short story, and with it his Collected Stories, with the imagined (re)construction of a funeral by one who is unable to attend and who follows it instead on the clock probably does go back, as I have suggested elsewhere, to his own early experience of being denied to attend his mother’s funeral when he was nine or ten years old, and piecing together a version of that event from memory and imagination instead as he watched a rusty old alarm clock in the rushes near the barracks—a scene later recalled in The Leavetaking and in Memoir (see van der Ziel, “Learning to Read” 28). Nevertheless, the conclusion of that story may also simultaneously be a throwback or homage to Gabriel’s westbound reverie at the conclusion of Dubliners, in which an imagined journey to a site connected with dead people and dead days can potentially be a more fruitful source of understanding and reconciliation with the past than one actually undertaken in person. The mother in “The Country Funeral” establishes an infinitely more meaningful connection with an event she has of necessity only imagined than her sons, who have participated in it, just as Gabriel learns by the end of “The Dead” to attain a more convincing “truth” about his own life and that of others as a result of his purely imaginary “journey westward” than the superficial connection that Miss Ivors is likely to make on her pious nationalist jaunts to the Aran Islands.

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Joyce and “Swallows”

16 McGahern was well aware that “The Dead” is not just about the “journey westward” but also about the journey eastward, and about the necessary co-existence of real and imagined journeys to those two opposite points of the compass, each with their own contrasting connotations in Irish cultural discourse. At the start of his 2004 essay “What Is My Language?” McGahern quoted the famous exchange from “The Dead” in which Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors discuss the different cultural traditions to which Irish artists and intellectuals might look: — And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land? — Well, said Gabriel, it’s partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change. — And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with—Irish? asked Miss Ivors. — Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language. (Dubliners, 189; qtd in McGahern, Love of the World 260)

17 McGahern’s gloss on this passage of dialogue from “The Dead” is also worth noting. He remarked that: What Miss Ivors is reflecting is Irish cultural nationalism, a movement fashioned by many hands throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. [. . .] What Gabriel Conroy is probably reflecting is a version of Joyce’s own position at the time. If Irish was not his language, neither, it would appear, was English fully his language, his eyes turned to Europe. (Love of the World, 260)

18 On one level, “The Dead” can be read, then, as Joyce’s programme statement for his own fiction, and for modern Irish writing more generally. Through his espousal of Gabriel’s point of view, and his implicit dismissal of the foolish narrow-mindedness of Miss Ivors and her ilk, Joyce defends the Irish writer’s right to look east to continental Europe for artistic examples. Yet he does not, in pitching himself against the dogmatism of this type of narrow-minded cultural nationalism, throw out the baby of authentic Irish experience with the Revivalist bathwater and disavow the relevance of the west altogether. On the contrary, in the privacy of his own memory and imagination during the course of the latter half of the story, Gabriel discovers, or perhaps re-discovers, the importance of native experiences connected with the West. What Joyce condemns in “The Dead,” then, is the absoluteness of the two characters’ denials of one or the other cultural realm (Miss Ivors’ of Europe and Gabriel’s of the west of Ireland), while he seconds with equal force their respective endorsements of eastern (British, European) and western (indigenous Irish) cultural traditions.

19 Ultimately then, “The Dead” is about the Janus-faced nature of the best modern Irish writing, which must look eastward to Europe for artistic tools even as the story materials are wholly indigenous to the “scraggy isthmus” (Joyce, Finnegans Wake 3) on the extreme western fringe of Europe—an idea that is borne out not just by the example of Joyce, who was influenced in his adoption of technical innovations like the “stream of consciousness” by late-nineteenth-century French writers like Édouard Dujardin (See for example Kern 27-29), but also that of Synge and Yeats, who turned to genres like Classical Greek tragedy and French symbolist poetry and fused what those forms taught them with subject matter found much closer to home in the Irish countryside.

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McGahern’s gloss to the Gabriel Conroy-Miss Ivors exchange in “What Is My Language?” strongly suggests that he was aware of this way to read the story.

20 These same dichotomies at the heart of the Joycean attempt at defining the nature of modern Irish writing—east versus west, native-Irish versus European, tradition versus cosmopolitanism—are revisited in McGahern’s story “Swallows.” In many respects, that story from the early 1970s is a rewriting of “The Dead.” The rest of this essay will demonstrate how certain key elements of “Swallows,” in which an alcoholic Garda sergeant brings a young state surveyor with a passion for the violin back to the barracks on a rainy afternoon to talk about European holidays and the life and work of Paganini, can be read as a rewriting of some key passages from Joyce—particularly from “The Dead,” although it may also contain some elements from Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A Joycean reference may even account for the title. It has vexed many readers that the titular “swallows” play no role in the story. One solution to this conundrum is that their significance—like that of the seagulls that “whish” in and out of The Leavetaking—originates in Joyce’s bestiary,11 as McGahern’s title references a key passage in chapter 5 of A Portrait where Stephen regards the swallows he sees outside the National Library as an “augury” for his destiny of escape and exile: “What birds were they? He thought that they must be swallows who had come back from the south. Then he was to go away for they were birds ever going and coming, building ever an unlasting home under the eaves of men’s houses and ever leaving the homes they had built to wander” (243-35). This is certainly an appropriate intertext in a story concerned with the contrast between staying at home or venturing abroad. In developing such allusions to and parallels with Joyce, McGahern is both positioning himself in a certain literary tradition, and developing ideas which he found in Joyce but which still applied to his own cultural moment and his own ideas about the nature and purpose of literature, and particularly about its relationship to national movements.

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21 The action of “Swallows” plays out against the backdrop of not one but two tragic young deaths. The most obvious of these is the young bicyclist who was hit by a car on his way to get a haircut in the town who is discussed by the sergeant and the surveyor in the exchange with which the story opens. Yet there is also the story of the daughter of the street musician in the faraway city of Avignon who, while her father plays his violin between café tables, lies “dying of consumption.” That tragic young death of an innocent youth with a musical connection is made as vivid as Michael Furey’s in “The Dead” in the paragraph of free indirect thought (it is not clear whether it is the sergeant’s or the surveyor’s) that breaks in on the surveyor’s account of how he came to buy a beautiful old violin: Streets of Avignon, white walls of the royal popes in the sun, glasses of red wine and the old Italian musician playing between the café tables in the evening, a girl dying of consumption, and the sweeping rain hammering on the windscreen. (Getting Through, 123)12

22 Like “The Dead,” and like “The Wine Breath,” a story with which it has much in common, “Swallows” is fundamentally a story about regret, concerned with the question of what might have been, and with how an individual’s life and personality might, given different circumstances, have developed differently from how they did. The drama of what might have been is in both stories concentrated in the figures of the

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middle-aged men who are the respective protagonists. In “The Dead,” the practical Gabriel Conroy had imagined what it must be like “if he were a painter” (Dubliners, 211); he is seized by “A vague terror” when Gretta tells him that “I think he [Michael Furey] died for me” (211); and later, alone in the room beside his sleeping wife, he considers how it would be “Better [to] pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age” (223). The Sergeant in “Swallows” shares in a similar sort of regret, much of which is connected with his lost musical vocation. If Gabriel, who fantasises about being a painter, is jealous of Michael Furey, then the sergeant is jealous of the surveyor who, although he chose the security of a civil service career over a career in music, has managed to hold on to the artistic passions of his youth and still plays the violin. This in stark contrast with how the sergeant’s own life has turned out: unlike his younger companion, the sergeant has let his opportunities for happiness pass and neglected the musical talent that is so tied up with his youth in the story, turning instead to whiskey “to hurry the time” (Getting Through, 128). And if Gretta’s passionate romantic past is encapsulated by her memory of “this delicate boy” with big dark eyes singing a tragic ballad, “The Lass of Aughrim” (Dubliners, 220), then the sergeant’s lost youth is equally poignantly captured by a single image that haunts his imagination: Going back with the fellows over the fields in the morning as the cold day came up, he remembered; and life was as full of promise as the smile the girl with cloth fuchsia bells in her dark hair threw him as she danced past where he played on the planks. The Surveyor looked from the whiskey bottle to the regret on the sunken face [. . .] (Getting Through, 128-29)

23 The memory of the smile of “the girl with the cloth fuchsia bells in her dark hair” is one of the “images,” so Proustian in nature, about which McGahern had written in his 1968 essay “The Image”—one of the “lost” images, as he wrote in that essay, “that gave our lives expression, [...] that would completely express it again in this bewilderment between our beginning and end” (Love of the World, 5-6).13 Her smile, as it is called up from a ghostly past decades later, is like an apparition from beyond the grave haunting his life, an emblem of lost opportunities and the road not taken. The sergeant’s eager choice of “Danny Boy” for a song-request (Getting Through, 129) is as significant, then, as Joyce’s choice of “The Lass of Aughrim” was for Gretta Conroy: both are tragic ballads of lost love addressed to a doomed youth.14

24 The contrast between journeys eastward and journeys westward that is a recurring theme in a number of McGahern’s other works is also significant in “Swallows.” What is more, in this story it has particularly Joycean overtones, as Gabriel Conroy’s complex relationship with Europe and the west of Ireland is revisited in the sergeant’s meeting with the surveyor and its aftermath. In “The Dead,” the contrast is between cycling holidays in France and Belgium on the one hand, and visiting the west of Ireland in order to keep in touch with the “native” language and culture on the other.15 While Gabriel initially prefers the former, disavowing in the process the authenticity of the Irish language as a means of self-expression for the majority of the modern Irish nation in the twentieth century, he is by the end of the story drawn to “journey westward” in his imagination across the central plain and the “dark mutinous Shannon” to Galway— a journey he undertakes, in the afterglow of a disappointing Christmas party, in a darkened room in the Gresham Hotel in the presence of his sleeping wife Gretta, whose erstwhile passion he envies, and whose sleep renders her, for the duration of his nocturnal reverie, both present and absent from his company.

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25 All these elements are repeated in “Swallows.” Let us begin with the role of the deaf housekeeper Biddy. Her deafness makes her both present and absent from the sergeant’s company as he sits alone with his thoughts after the surveyor has left the barracks. Structurally, therefore, Biddy stands in for Gretta Conroy’s present-absent form. As a realist character who fulfils a certain social or cultural function in the story, however, she is also reminiscent of another passage elsewhere in Joyce. For if Biddy the deaf housekeeper is not only a character in her own right but also a cipher, an almost symbolic representation of a traditional class of Irish womanhood in positions of domestic drudgery that exists in novels and stories, then she is partly mandated by a Joycean intertext that appears to have existed in McGahern’s imagination. In one of his 1987 Evening Herald book reviews, McGahern contrasts the kind of “bad writing [that] is its own situation” with the realism of Ulysses when he remarks that “long before the end [of Isabel Allende’s Of Love and Shadows] I wanted Joyce’s woman with her saucepan to enter and declare, ‘I cooked good Irish stew’” (Love of the World, 338). The quote is from Bloom’s speculations on the erstwhile occupations of the inmates of the graveyard in the Hades episode of Ulysses (143).

26 It is doubtful, though, that this is the passage McGahern was thinking of when he wished for the entrance of a character whose lively realistic speech might alleviate the boredom of a bad, formulaic novel. For one thing, the woman who “cooked good Irish stew” cannot “enter” any room for the simple reason that she is dead. Perhaps, then, McGahern’s memory conflated a line from one episode of Ulysses with a character from another. The most likely contender is the passage in the Telemachus episode in which an old milkwoman visits the Martello Tower (Ulysses, 15). The conversation between Stephen, Mulligan, Haines and the old milkwoman from the opening chapter of Ulysses reprises themes and ideas in which McGahern was interested. These include the status of the Irish language which is also a subject in the famous Miss Ivors exchange in “The Dead,” as well as a broader concern with conventional Revivalist representations—or misrepresentations—of “authentic” Irish being. As one of Ulysses’ earliest critics emphasized, Stephen Dedalus may incorporate familiar poetic tropes describing Ireland as a beautiful woman in his description of the milkwoman, but like Joyce himself he “refuses [...] to exploit the sentimentalism in favour with the Dublin literary group” (Gilbert 96).

27 Despite all of Joyce’s misgivings about the sentimental conventions of the Irish Literary Revival, and his merciless lampooning of those conventions in this episode and elsewhere,16 the milkwoman in the Telemachus episode of Ulysses certainly does represent a desirable, authentic facet of Irish life that contrasts with the bustle and confusion of modernity (the “ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” conjured in Stephen’s vision of Blake’s urban apocalypse in the Nestor episode [28]). More importantly, it is very clear how Joyce’s quarrel in this section of the Telemachus episode is not with simple rural dwellers like the milkwoman, but rather with professionalised folklorists like the Englishman Haines who do not hesitate to invest any small item of speech they consider “folk” with “ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum” (Ulysses, 14). The inclusion of the milkwoman in the opening episode of Ulysses, far from being a malicious attack on simple country people, is actually Joyce’s defence of such people’s way of thinking and expression against the onslaught of the pious nationalist sentimentality of the Revival industry.17

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28 Like Joyce and his milkwoman, then, McGahern does not mean to ridicule the unsophisticated voice of the socially marginalised. Biddy’s noisy bursting-in on the sergeant and surveyor’s talk of music when she re-enters following her return from the local shop (Getting Through, 129),18 like the milkwoman’s interruption of the dry academic talk of Stephen, Mulligan and Haines in Ulysses, fulfils exactly McGahern’s own wish in that book review written a decade later for something similarly ordinary and spontaneous to happen in Isabel Allende’s lacklustre fictional world. Sometimes, works of fiction can be in danger of turning into academic or sociological tracts, in which abstract ideas dominate too much. It is obvious from a 1960 letter to Michael McLaverty that McGahern was alert to this danger from the very beginning of his career. In that letter, the aspiring young author articulated his awareness of the danger of overly theoretical fiction with perfect clarity in response to Sean O’Faolain’s 1936 novel Bird Alone: I couldn’t like it. I found it difficult to distinguish anything through the fog of rhetoric. Characters, emotions, even simple situations blurred in this exceedingly skilful manipulation of words—and this quickly became for me a drone of a bore. He said one very good thing about friendship and even this was spoiled for me by appearing too neatly parcelled—all wrapped in shiny blue ribbon. I wished that somebody would nail a grocer’s calendar on the wall and say something ordinary, instead of all these beautiful turned phrases melting into one another like clouds. (9 March 1960, Killen 20)

29 That verdict is perfectly consistent with his complaint about what he would describe as Isabel Allende’s “poor account of Chilean life” a quarter of a century later (Love of the World, 337-38). It is apparent from both of his essays on Joyce that McGahern preferred to think of his illustrious compatriot not as an experimental Modernist but rather as a great realist (see Love of the World, 185-87, 200-07), and it is no more than consistent with that evaluation that the two women who enter to offer food in Ulysses—like the hypothetical man whom McGahern wished would come in, nail up a calendar and say something ordinary during certain passages of Bird Alone—seem to have been elevated in McGahern’s imagination into talismanic figures in the pursuit of narrative realism. As a fictional descendant of Joyce’s milkwoman—or indeed of the woman who “made good Irish stew”—one of Biddy’s functions in “Swallows” is as a safeguard of the integrity of narrative realism at a moment when the two male protagonists’ lengthy discussions of “the old church history” (Getting Through, 123) and the biography of Paganini are in danger of becoming too abstract and academic to continue to support the essential elements of fiction: those summed up in his letter to McLaverty as “Character, emotions [and] simple situations” (Killen 20).

30 Finally, Biddy may also serve yet a third function in “Swallows”—one that we may term thematic. Undoubtedly, many readers have been puzzled to know why “Swallows” should conclude with a description of Biddy knitting a sock on her machine: Biddy did not look up. She had turned the heel and would not have to adjust the needles again till she had to start narrowing the sock close to the toe. Her body swayed happily on the chair as she turned and turned the handle, for she knew it would be all plain sailing till she got close to the toe. (Getting Through, 133)

31 The answer may lie in the fact that Biddy represents many of the qualities of the artist that the frustrated-violinist–sergeant lacks. Absorbed in her work, hers is the kind of reverie that the sergeant lacks in all areas of his life except for when he is fishing, when (as he tells the surveyor at the beginning of the story) “Time runs like lightning” (Getting Through, 124). Both these descriptions are reminiscent of McGahern’s

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description in his essay “The Solitary Reader” of the “complete absorption when all sense of time is lost” that can occur to the artist in the acts of reading and writing (Love of the World, 90). In fact, Biddy’s sock-knitting is compared with the sergeant’s fishing in one other key respect that can also be linked to one of McGahern’s recurring ideas about the artist. The sergeant does not much like to eat fish and gives most of what he catches away, just as Biddy knits “More to pass the time than for the few pence it brings her” (Getting Through, 124). Both are totally non-utilitarian activities. This links both the sergeant and Biddy with the various Moroneys’ and Sinclairs’ and Kirkwoods’ pursuits, in a number of works of fiction and non-fiction from the 1980s and 1990s, of things like gardening, beekeeping and astronomy—all activities that are regarded by their drudging neighbours as aristocratic foibles, things guaranteed to be “perfectly useless” (“Eddie Mac,” High Ground, 73). In contrast, those who—like the boy in the story “Oldfashioned” who can appreciate the way Colonel Sinclair’s wife has arranged apples in a basket (High Ground, 41), or like the young McGahern in the autobiographical essay “The Solitary Reader” or Memoir—show an interest in activities that have no utilitarian purpose, in doing things for the beauty or the pleasure of the thing in itself, are regarded as possessing a sensibility that would enable them to be artists.19

32 If the deaf housekeeper Biddy in “Swallows” stands in for the sleeping Gretta to the sergeant’s westward-looking Gabriel, then her key structural function in the story is to emphasise the loneliness of the sergeant’s nocturnal wanderings, even in company. What is more, the direction of the sergeant’s solitary nocturnal wanderings, especially in relation to that of his diurnal thoughts in conversation with the surveyor, is vital too, because the tension between the two reprises the Ireland-versus-Europe, west- versus-east theme of “The Dead.” “Swallows” is, after all, as much concerned with that contrast as “The Dead,” and it sets up the contrast in a remarkably similar way. The sergeant may not encounter an antagonistic voice like that of Miss Ivors, finding himself in conversation instead with the Europhile surveyor; but the subject of their conversation, and the east-west contrast it introduces, is identical to that of “The Dead.” Miss Ivors had criticised what she considers Gabriel’s West-Brittonism, his total lack of interest in his own country and his own language in favour of that of the imperial conqueror and the alien cultures of other European potentates (even if one of these is that of Ireland’s traditional Catholic ally, France). Her critique, narrow-minded as it may sound to twenty-first-century readers, articulated the opinions of a substantial proportion of Dublin’s nationalist middle-class Catholic establishment in the early 1900s. McGahern’s version of the same subject in a story first published in the Evening Herald in December 1971,20 on the other hand, belongs not to that of the heyday of Irish cultural nationalism, but to that of the early days of Irish consumer-capitalism in the burgeoning European common market, and they are articulated by a committed Europhile who is a not unrepresentative member of the community that voted for Ireland to enter the EEC in the referendum of 10 May 1972.21 Speaking of his favourite holiday destination in the South of France, the surveyor tells the sergeant: The papal palaces are still there. Avignon is wonderful. You must go there. Some of those wonderful Joe Walsh Specials put it within all our reaches. The very sound of the name makes me long for summer. (Getting Through, 123)22

33 The surveyor talks of his European holidays, and of the life of Paganini, his favourite composer. The surveyor, like James Joyce and Gabriel Conroy before him, may be courting a native of Galway—the hotel manageress Eileen O’Neill, the off-stage figure who, with her “delicate” features and potent western sexual allure, is very much a

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stand-in for Joyce’s Michael Furey—but the waking thoughts of the two men are of Europe, and of the lofty cultural models that may be found in the east.

34 What is of real interest, though, is what happens at the conclusion of the story, in the time between day and night, waking and dreaming—that time when, as Joyce had demonstrated so vividly in “The Dead” and in the final, late-night episodes of Ulysses, we are most susceptible to melancholy visitations from the past. At the end of the story, the importance of looking both east and west is introduced in a way very much reminiscent of the conclusion of “The Dead.” At the conclusion of “Swallows,” the sergeant, alone in the room but for deaf Biddy, who is as oblivious to his presence as Gretta is to that of Gabriel in Joyce’s story, experiences a reverie very much like that experienced by Gabriel Conroy in his room in the Gresham Hotel. Following their waking conversation about European art and culture, the sergeant’s imagination is now free to wander. As it does so in this nocturnal reverie, his imagination finally makes the “journey westward” as he imagines the surveyor’s drive to his rendezvous in Galway, the city where, in Joyce’s story, Michael Furey had courted Gretta and died: Tonight in Galway, in a long dress of burgundy velvet, satin in her hair, the delicate white hands of Eileen O’Neill would flicker on the white keyboard as the Surveyor played, while Mrs Kilboy would say to him at the C.W.A., “Something will have to be done about Jackson’s thieving ass, Sergeant, it’ll take the law to bring him to his senses, nothing less [...].” (Getting Through, 132)

35 Following the example of “The Dead,” it is, finally, the journey westward made in the imagination that is really important. In Michael O’Connell’s sensitive film adaptation of “Swallows,” the connection between the endings of the two stories is reinforced by the decision to set the ending in a snowy white landscape (an effect that is further emphasized by the use of black and white), and by partially overlaying the sergeant’s solitary rehearsal of the monologue he intends to deliver to Mrs Kilboy at the CWA meeting that evening with a shot of the surveyor driving westward through the snow. Thus, again, adaptation can function as literary criticism—in this case with the purpose of highlighting, whether deliberately or not, a dormant or potential intertextual connection.

36 One of the ways in which the compatibility of these two apparently opposing cultural traditions—one belonging to the Irish west and one to the European east; one folksy and indigenous, one foreign and cosmopolitan—is signalled in McGahern’s story is, as it is in “The Dead,” through its choice of musical cues. “Swallows” is unique among McGahern’s fictions for its emphasis on musical compositions. Generally, McGahern was little interested in such things. He often said that his imagination was primarily visual, and he has commented in essays and interviews on his favourite painters but not on his favourite musicians or composers; what is more, he was in fact tone-deaf like another one of his heroes, the poet W.B. Yeats. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that the reason why he so prominently included a musical frame of reference in this story was almost certainly as a homage to Joyce, whose musical sensibility far outstripped his own. Both male protagonists in “Swallows” have a passion for the violin, just as in “The Dead” everyone has a passion for singing. If “The Dead” and “Swallows” are both about the competing attraction of two cultures, one looking eastward and one westward, and each with their own language and culture, then it is only in the act of listening to music that characters from different cultural-political persuasions can meet. “Swallows,” no less than “The Dead,” reflects the eclectic musical tastes of James Joyce. If in “The Dead,” English and Italian operas rub shoulders

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at the Misses Morkans’ Christmas party with sentimental nationalist ballads like “The Lass of Aughrim,” then so, in McGahern’s story, do Paganini, “Danny Boy” and what the protagonists describe as “the old tunes.” The latter refers to traditional jigs and reels like “The Kerry Dances” which the sergeant remembers playing in his youth—when, as he poignantly considers, “life was as full of promise as the smile the girl with cloth fuchsia bells in her dark hair threw him as she danced past where he played on the planks”—and which the surveyor can play still (Getting Through, 128-30).

37 In “Swallows,” as in “The Dead,” the point of referencing this eclectic mix of musical tastes and genres is to reinforce the idea that the modern Irish imagination can—and must—look eastward as well as westward, to indigenous traditions as well as European ones. It is that lesson from Joyce’s story which McGahern would stress many years later when he opened his essay “What Is My Language?” with a discussion of the Gabriel Conroy-Miss Ivors discussion; but he had already engaged with the same aspect of the same Joycean intertext in this story from the early 1970s. With its imaginative flight to Europe, its characters’ lengthy regurgitation of the history of European art and culture, and its emphasis on musical culture, “Swallows” remains a unique story within the McGahern oeuvre. Its proximity to “The Dead” may well account for much of this individuality. Long before he discussed Joyce’s story in an academic essay, therefore, short stories like “The Wine Breath” and “Swallows” were among McGahern’s original intellectual engagements with the themes and ideas that fascinated him most in “The Dead.” In such stories he first managed to “lighten[ ] and deepen[ ],” as the narrator of one of his last stories puts it (Creatures, 323), his appreciation of things he had first read in Joyce.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bataillard, Pascal. “Love and Solitary Enjoyment in ‘My Love, My Umbrella’: Some of John McGahern’s Uses of Dubliners.” Journal of the short story in English 53 (Autumn 2009): 79-89. Web. 25 Oct. 2017.

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. “Ireland and the EU: A History.” Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. 1930. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1963. Print.

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---. Ulysses. 1922. Annotated students’ edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Print.

Kenny, Anthony. A New History of Western Philosophy. 4 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004-2007. Print.

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994. Print.

Killeen, Terence. “Versions of Exile: A Reading of The Leavetaking.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 17.1 (July 1991): 69-78. Print.

Killen, John, ed. Dear Mr McLaverty: The Literary Correspondence of John McGahern and Michael McLaverty 1959-1980. Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 2006. Print.

McGahern, John. Amongst Women. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. Print.

---. The Collected Stories. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. Print.

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---. High Ground and Other Stories. London: Faber & Faber, 1985. Print.

---. Love of the World: Essays. Ed. Stanley van der Ziel. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Print.

---. Nightlines. London: Faber & Faber, 1970. Print.

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---. That They May Face the Rising Sun. London: Faber & Faber, 2002. Print.

McKeon, Belinda. “‘Robins Feeding with the Sparrows’: The Protestant ‘Big House’ in the Fiction of John McGahern.” Irish University Review 35.1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 72-89. Print.

O’Brien, George. “Going Inland.” Rev. of Memoir, by John McGahern. Dublin Review 22 (Spring 2006): 36-46. Print.

O’Connell, Michael, dir. Swallows. Boy Named Sue Productions / Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, 2000. Film.

Price, Graham. “Impure and Complicated Truth: Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and John McGahern’s ‘The Country Funeral’.” New Hibernia Review 16.4 (Winter 2012): 95-109. Print.

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Shovlin, Frank. Journey Westward: Joyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012. Print.

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NOTES

1. McGahern’s adaptation of Joyce’s “The Sisters” was directed by Stephen Frears, and broadcast on BBC 2 on 17 February 1973. 2. McGahern quoted the famous letter to Grant Richards in which Joyce describes his “intention [...] to write a chapter of the moral history of my country” in his 1990 essay on Dubliners. See McGahern, Love of the World 201; Joyce, Selected Letters 83. 3. For examples of some of the ways in which the presence of “The Sisters” can be traced in works from The Barracks to Amongst Women, see van der Ziel, John McGahern 124, 188-89. 4. Critical discussions of McGahern’s debts to the early Joyce have ranged from Sampson’s and others’ remarks about the debt to Dubliners in those Nightlines stories which “recall a past experience, the pivot of which is initiation or disillusionment” (Sampson, Outstaring 87; van der Ziel, “Nightlines” 492-94), to detailed analyses of intertextual debts to particular works by Joyce. Certain stories, or pairings of stories, have repeatedly attracted the attention of critics. Sampson (Outstaring, 87), van der Ziel (John McGahern, 118, 159; “Nightlines,” 494) and Robinson (68-73) have all commented on what the latter describes as the “quare pair: [McGahern’s] ‘Lavin’ and [Joyce’s] ‘An Encounter’” (Robinson 68)—and their respective arguments about the overlaps between these two stories all make reference to such distinct issues as the position of the “queer old josser” encountered by the hero and the changing relationship with his childhood companion which this finally brings about, the lyrical epiphanic sentences that conclude both respective stories, and the emphasis on the escapism of boyhood reading (the “escape” which the “chronicles of disorder [from Joe Dillon’s little library] alone seemed to offer” (Dubliners, 12) which is replicated in a number of early McGahern stories). Another Nightlines story, “My Love, My Umbrella,” has also been the subject of repeated scrutiny. As Terence Killeen first pointed out, that story takes its title from the last line of Giacomo Joyce (Killeen 74), and a number of readings have sought to establish connections both with that early autobiographical piece of Joyce’s and with several of the Dubliners stories. These include “Two Gallants” (the ironic “gallantry” of Corley in that story is linked by Sampson (Outstaring, 100) and Robinson (81) with the mock-heroic tone of McGahern’s story), and “A Painful Case.” The latter connection is the subject of an essay by Pascal Bataillard, who links McGahern’s protagonist’s desire for the female body and his eventual retreat from a promising physical attachment with that of Mr Duffy in “A Painful Case” (§ 19-25). 5. On Joyce’s relationship to the Irish Literary Revival, see Shovlin. 6. The exact same description is repeated in the protagonist’s pornographic “Mavis and the Colonel” story that is based on their trip: see The Pornographer, 153, 155. 7. On Philly and Fonsie’s competing ways (one romantic, one hostile and cynical) of seeing the nature of their childhood experiences in the countryside, see Price 105. 8. That plot element is ironically recalled in a later McGahern story, “Parachutes,” in which Gabriel Conroy’s wistful self-reproach is replaced by the harsh, unattractive cynicism of McGahern’s narrator, who prosaically concludes about the role of his beloved’s erstwhile lover that “I used to be jealous of Willie Moran but by now even that had been burned away. I just thought him a fool for not marrying her, wished that I’d been he” (High Ground, 19). 9. In the pornographer’s story, Mavis and the Colonel end up seducing and humiliating a sex- starved native—one who suffers from the kind of advanced sexual depravity and repression that

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is the subject of earlier major Irish satirical texts like Merriman’s The Midnight Court or Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger. See also van der Ziel, John McGahern 64. 10. One could even argue that the Moran sisters’ return to the west of Ireland from Dublin and London that is described on the first page of his novel Amongst Women can be read as a version of the same trope. Another westward retreat, like that of the pornographer, into the “solitude” of Great Meadow that entails “both pain and joy” (The Pornographer, 203), their homecomings to the ancestral west of Ireland are a source of personal and familial vindication that allows them to achieve a sense of metaphysical “completed[ness]” lacking in their urban lives (Amongst Women, 1-2). 11. See also Haas 33. On the Joycean seagulls in The Leavetaking, see van der Ziel, John McGahern 207. 12. Note, in that paragraph, how the actual day of the narrative present (“the sweeping rain hammering on the windscreen”) intrudes into the images conjured from the recent and distant past. McGahern elaborates on that sensation in much detail in “The Wine Breath,” published in the same Getting Through collection. 13. On McGahern’s use of Proustian “images” and “involuntary memories,” see Sampson, Outstaring 13-17, 174-76; and van der Ziel, John McGahern 99-102, 170-74. 14. The reference in “Danny Boy” to a valley “hushed and white with snow” is reminiscent of the imagery in the final paragraphs of “The Dead,” a fact that may also have had a hand in McGahern’s decision to choose it as the sergeant’s song-request. 15. That practice lived on, of course, for the rest of the century as a reminder of the ongoing project of language revival, as McGahern was well aware. In a brilliant little satirical moment in The Pornographer, the protagonist asks one of the girls in Maloney’s entourage where she intends to go on her summer holidays, only to find himself faced with “tepid talk about the Aran Islands” (76). That conventional locus of Irish-speaking moral purity is seemingly still a popular holiday destination even for pornographers and others whose nature is not compatible with traditional Revivalist notions of innocence and purity—a satiric point that Brian Friel had also made at greater length in the ironically titled The Gentle Island (1971), in which two visitors from Dublin awaken forms of sexual deviancy that already existed under the surface in the inhabitants of a remote Irish-speaking island off the west coast of Ireland. 16. In his important essay on the invention of the figure of the Irish peasant during the Revival period, Edward Hirsch has commented on how, in works from Stephen Hero to Ulysses, “[Joyce] found it necessary to project and dismantle the central figure of the Irish peasant.” He draws attention, for example, to how “the Cyclops episode of Ulysses permanently and mercilessly set out to expose the racism and provincialism of the Citizen’s patriotic idea of a Gaelic-speaking peasantry that he knew nothing about” (Hirsch 1127). 17. This is not the only occasion on which McGahern enlists the help of Joyce in his attempts to undermine sentimental, grossly simplified renditions of the past. When he gave Jamesie in That They May Face the Rising Sun the irreverent idea that the solemnity with which the War of Independence is commemorated may be broken by hiding a tape recorder in the war monument near his house in Leitrim (243-44), McGahern may have taken his cue from a passage in the Hades episode of Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom had proposed a similar scheme for placing “a gramophone in every grave” so that the voices of the dead may not be irrevocably lost (144). 18. In Biddy’s return from the shop McGahern deviates from the picture of wholesomeness in which Joyce’s milkwoman follows the Revivalist convention. In fact, if the comparison between Biddy and the milkwoman is intentional then it is certainly an ironic one. Because where Ulysses’ milkwoman is significant as a bringer of “good food” in a “country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts” (Ulysses, 15-16), McGahern is concerned in “Swallows” with the less wholesome rural reality of the gombeen-shopkeeper’s attempts to pass off “crawling” ham on the sergeant’s deaf housekeeper (Getting Through, 129).

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19. See van der Ziel, “Medusa’s Mirror” 237-38; Whyte 55-56; McKeon 74-77. McGahern may have taken his cue for this distinction which is so central to these stories from the 1980s from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, which proposes how “Animals enjoy pleasure, but only humans appreciate beauty. [...] To point the difference, Kant remarks that while we can distinguish between what is good in itself and what is good only as a means, we do not make any parallel distinction between what is beautiful as a means and what is beautiful as an end” (Kenny, vol.4, 251). 20. For original publication details of McGahern’s short stories I rely on Sampson, “John McGahern: A Preliminary Checklist.” 21. See Department of Foreign Affairs, “Ireland and the EU” 15. 22. Established in 1961, Joe Walsh Tours are a travel agency especially noted for Pilgrimage Tours to places of religious devotion in Europe and beyond.

ABSTRACTS

Les nouvelles et romans de James Joyce parcourent, voire hantent, la fiction de John McGahern. Dans cet article, il sera question du dialogue que cette fiction engage avec la nouvelle de Joyce « The Dead », revisitée à maintes reprises par McGahern, y compris à la toute fin de sa carrière dans l’essai « What Is My Language? » Cette étude se construit ainsi en deux parties : la première retrace quelques variations sur le « voyage vers l'ouest ». Ce trope qui sillonne l’ensemble de l’œuvre de McGahern a été initialement introduit par Joyce dans « The Dead ». Dans un deuxième temps, pour mieux l’étudier, ce trope sera ancré dans la nouvelle de McGahern « Swallows ». « Swallows » et « The Dead », qui traitent des voyages propres et métaphoriques vers l'est et l'ouest, se font écho. Il s’avère d’ailleurs que la première nouvelle est une réécriture de la seconde. En tant que réécriture de « The Dead », « Swallows » se lit comme une réflexion métafictionnelle sur la nature de l’écriture irlandaise qui commente quelques aspects persistants du « réalisme » de Joyce, et rend hommage à son amour pour la musique – sujet que McGahern n’a pratiquement jamais abordé dans ses autres écrits. Hanté également par Ulysses, « Swallows » permet enfin à McGahern d’affirmer que pour lui, comme pour Joyce, l’écriture irlandaise constitue une tradition moins « insulaire » qu’internationale.

AUTHORS

STANLEY VAN DER ZIEL Stanley van der Ziel is a Lecturer in English at Maynooth University. He has published on various aspects of modern and contemporary Irish literature, from Yeats to Joseph O’Neill. He is the author of John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition (2016) and the editor of two Faber & Faber editions of McGahern’s works, Love of the World: Essays (2009) and The Rockingham Shoot and Other Dramatic Writings (2018). A co-edited collection (with Nicholas Taylor-Collins) on Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in late 2018.

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Loss and Haunting in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Anniversary” and “The Haunting”

Tanya Tromble

1 As a young author, Joyce Carol Oates elaborated an understanding of short fiction that she has largely maintained throughout her career. In a 1966 essay, she writes that “quality stories usually refine action onto a psychological level. There is ‘action’−movement−but it takes place in a person’s mind or in a conversation” (12). In 1971, The short story is a dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a sympathetic audience (and not, as the world really is, a busy and indifferent crowd): the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery. (214)

2 This conception of the short story as fiction that conveys the psychological realm and speaks to the unconscious has resulted in a body of stories that illustrate the existence of a fluctuating liminal realm between unconscious and conscious experiences. This interest in differing mental realities is paralleled by a similar pendulum-like swing in subject matter which the author explains as follows: My interest swings between a realism which is actually very exciting if you are writing about a dense realistic political social world. That’s actually very engrossing and then the world that’s more dream-like and surreal and you kind of go back and cross between the two. (Interview with Susana Araújo, 101)

3 Through the back-and-forth movement of her interests and the various mental realities of her frequently haunted characters, a psychologically realistic portrait of her characters emerges. As the family is “the deepest mystery,” according to one early Oates character (Oates, “You” 329), and as it is also the system through which identity is formed, both genetically and through the formation of one’s personality, Oates’s characters often have identity problems explicitly associated with mystery or loss of familial origins. More specifically, when faced with a major, misunderstood loss of a close family member, Oates’s characters are often haunted, taking on a spectral quality

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revealing a disconnection with their present. After first outlining the critical framework, this article will examine cases of haunting in two Oates short stories. In “The Haunting,” disturbing cries emanating from empty rabbit cages in the cellar embody the trauma of a father’s loss. In “Anniversary,” a recently-widowed woman longs for an apparition of her deceased husband while at the same time expressing surprise upon discovering that her inmate students all believe in ghosts.

Textualizing Liminality

4 The fragmented way in which Oates depicts her characters’ existences calls to mind Marc Guillaume and Jean Baudrillard’s psychoanalytical notion of spectrality. In the chapter entitled “La spectralité comme élision de l’autre” (Spectrality as elision of the other), Guillaume discusses the ellipse of the other and how it affects the way in which we approach and understand otherness. Guillaume uses Georg Simmel’s early twentieth century analysis of the stranger as background to introduce his concept of artificial strangeness. Simmel analyzes the stranger as someone who is at once both close and distant (distant not in a geographical sense, rather in the sense of being on the other side of a cultural barrier). The stranger’s social distance allows him to be an impartial judge and observer in conflict situations because they do not directly concern him: Therefore, this distance allows him a certain proximity, allowing him to be called on to judge and, even more frequently, to occupy the position of confessor. One confides more easily in a stranger than in one’s family and friends. It is therefore an especially unique relationship because the more distant is also the closest. (21, my translation)

5 Guillaume observes that our contemporary urban societies have multiplied instances of what he calls “artificial strangeness,” an operation that is performed through an elision of the other. Changing social sensibilities have thus led to the generalization of a new mode of being and communicating that he qualifies as spectral (23). Guillaume opposes the notions of traditional communication and mediatized, spectral communication, explaining that the latter occurs when the actors can dispense with the traditionally requisite procedures of control and identification such as the establishment of a veritable identity. Technological advancements in mediatized forms of communication have encouraged the recourse to anonymity in response to the daily challenge of reconciling the exterior, social world with the interior, intimate world: It is the challenge of every individual to understand these two worlds, though this is an impossible task because these two worlds are incommensurable. They are not only far removed from each other, they are completely unrelated. This is a daily challenge that we have developed the habit of avoiding rather than facing. (31, my translation)

6 To this end we have multiplied instances of “strangers” in our lives, enabling the illusion that the difficulties of life are being confronted, whereas in reality the subject is only being more and more dispersed. In other words, we elide the other through contemporary forms of communication that enable us to remain anonymously masked behind a technological screen, a computer for example. This is the situation Guillaume refers to as artificial strangeness, a situation characterized by spectral communication.

7 The concept of spectrality as outlined by Marc Guillaume comprises both the meaning of ghost or spectre, the fading away of one’s corporeal presence, and the meaning of spectrum of light, composed as it is of different dispersed components. Thus, according

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to Guillaume, “to be spectral is to have several faces and to engage only one at a time in any given communicational interface.” The consequence in terms of identity is that “the attribution of a single identity is to a certain extent avoided and eventually moved aside” (34, my translation). Guillaume concludes that “spectrality is neither the destruction nor the disappearance of the subject, rather it is its dispersal” (36, my translation). Guillaume develops his theory of spectrality in relation to contemporary interactions with new media. However, the notion of the dispersed subject is equally useful in a discussion of Oates’s characters as her formal techniques do much to emphasize the multi-faceted nature of their personalities. The trope of haunting in Oates’s work can be considered a sub-set within a larger framework of strategies emphasizing spectrality and adds complexity to the understanding of Guillaume’s concept by showing that psychological dispersal can come about through other means. In the stories to be discussed, the spectral quality of the characters is emphasized through a temporal phenomenon of haunting that renders the characters less “present.” Indeed, their hauntings are the direct result of their spectrality, that is to say their inability to reconcile exterior and interior worlds.

8 Specifically, one of the facets of the dispersed subject as manifested in Oates’s fiction has to do with lingering enigmatic aspects of the past and the corresponding inability to project oneself satisfactorily into the future. In his “Théorie de la hantise” (Theory of Haunting), Jean-Jacques Lecercle defines le spectre in terms of its opposition to a related concept, la hantise. The spectre is a ghost, something from the past that haunts the subject in the present. The hantise is a much more difficult term to translate into English, even, it turns out, to conceptualize in French where the tendency is to use it in only a few specific expressions. The dictionary definition “obsessive fear” is unsatisfactory to Lecercle who understands hantise as a process rather than an object. Spectre and hantise1 are thus opposed not only by their semantic definitions, but also by their opposite modes of existence; one is an object, the other a process: The spectre exists in space as well as in time which is normal given its status as object. The hantise, however, as is normal for a process, exists only in time. But the two do not share the same time periods. The spectre belongs to the past, whereas the hantise belongs to the future. (7, my translation)

9 When the present is intruded upon by either spectre or hantise, it is as if a fold in time has occurred. The standard chronological progression is no longer operative. As Marc Amfreville explains, “the past is no longer the past when it haunts us. It becomes the double of the present, sliding in to occupy the space between the cracks” (149, my translation). The process concerning the future works differently, however, it, too, alters chronological temporality by halting the progression altogether. By privileging the space of past memory, one can attempt to hide from the future. Thus, though the two are distinctly different phenomena, as Lecercle aptly illustrates, they often work together, creating a subject who is trapped in a confused present where past, present and future merge, obscuring the path that could lead to an effective resolution of the subject’s trauma. Amfreville distinguishes between “reminiscence” and “trauma,” explaining that the former is the activity of voluntary memory, whereas the latter is the space of memory that has been erased by the violence of an emotional shock (145). However, there is a third domain of memory, the space of memory that has not been erased but that is called up involuntarily through present allusions to a subject’s past. This third manifestation of memory is that of the spectre.

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10 The confusion of Oates’s subjects is quite frequently associated with past family issues. Unresolved feelings upon the loss of a loved one or problematic understanding of identity due to lingering family secrets are almost always at the root of the characters’ malaise. “The Haunting” and “Anniversary” present two different examples of ways in which Oates’s characters can be haunted by loss. Though the losses are the results of quite different processes, the patterns they provoke are very similar. In each case, the loss creates a void in the character’s interior world. The character is plunged into a diminished state of dispersed spectrality. No longer whole, they are pulled towards death, becoming more and more liminal. Haunting is thus the trope that allows the author to textually represent the characters’ psychological void.

“The Haunting”

11 “The Haunting”2 is the story of a six-year-old girl’s struggle with loss: the loss of her father and the loss of bearings now that her mother has moved the family. On top of this, Marybeth experiences confusion generated by the conspiring world of adults. “There’s nothing! You hear nothing. It’s the wind. It’s your dream.” This remembered admonition by Marybeth’s mother begins the story. Coming directly after the title, it introduces the nature of “the haunting”: a child is disturbed by a sound in the night. The sound is quickly revealed to be that of “rabbits crying in the cellar in their cages begging to be freed” (95). As the story continues, we learn that though there are old rabbit hutches in the cellar and back yard of the family’s newly rented row house, they are no longer in use. A passage in which Marybeth describes finding the hutches full of suffering rabbits, cuts holes in the wire mesh of the cage doors, and leaves the outside door open so that they might escape, is revealed in the morning to have been a dream when Marybeth discovers “The door to the outside is shut tight. Shut and covered in cobwebs like before” (109).

12 The rabbit cries are revealed to be a metaphorical representation of entrapment and suffering. The story of Marybeth’s father’s death runs parallel to that of Marybeth’s haunting and serves as an explanation for the latter phenomenon. Following her father’s death, Marybeth has moved with her ten-year-old brother, Calvin, and her mother to a new house in a big city where her mother hopes no one will know them. The deceased father, violent and abusive in life, continues in death to exert a sinister control over his family. The mother, who seems to have murdered her husband in revenge for a severe beating received at his hand, begins to take up his habits. She plays his old music that she used to hate, drinks his brand of whisky, takes up his guitar, and starts to frighten her children with her newfound unpredictability. The son reproduces the same pattern of behavior as his father and is sometimes verbally and physically abusive towards his sister. Marybeth, due to her young age, is shielded from the horrible circumstances of her father’s death. This gap creates a “phantom” that haunts her in the form of distressed rabbit cries. Marybeth’s experience can be understood in terms of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s notion of the “phantom” as a phenomenon which objectifies the gap that the concealment of some part of a loved one’s life produced in us. The phantom is, therefore, also a metapsychological fact. Consequently, what haunts is not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others. (Hoeveler 366)

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13 The complex spectre haunting Marybeth is generated by two related but distinct sources. Loss and loneliness, on the one hand. The terror of horrible suffering, on the other. At her young age, Marybeth struggles to comprehend the notion of death: “At first I was worried: how would Daddy know where we were if he wanted to come back to us?” This confusion regarding the epistemological status of her absent father leads Marybeth to wonder whether her father might not be the source of the disturbing sounds: “I ask Calvin is it Daddy? Is it Daddy wanting to come back?” (96). A second aspect of Marybeth’s haunting is related to the nature of her father’s death. It is unclear to the reader how much Marybeth knows at the various timeframes throughout the story. We do know that adults tried to keep the circumstances of her father’s death from her. We also know she eventually finds out as she reports in the final pages that he was “burned alive in his bed” (109). However, this knowledge seems more likely associated with the adult narrator Marybeth. In any event, these two elements coalesce in Marybeth’s unconscious to create the process of hantise through the rabbit cries: The cellar! Wish I didn’t think about it so much. In the night when the rabbits cry for help, it’s because they are trapped in the cages and it’s like they know I can hear them; I am the only one to hear them. Help us! Help us we don’t want to die! (100)

14 The metaphorical nature of the cages is confirmed by the closing paragraph of the story in which Marybeth confesses to continuing to hear the sound even once the cages have been removed from the property. Indeed, Marybeth informs us that the sound will continue to haunt her throughout her life.

15 Not only do the rabbit cries follow Marybeth, they also begin to physically inhabit her. Marybeth loses sleep and has difficulty concentrating at school. She undergoes physical changes that serve as indicators of her dispersed mental state. When Marybeth’s teacher asks her if everything is okay at home, Marybeth thinks: “My teacher can’t bring herself to say Every morning you look so haunted, for this is not anything you would say to a little girl whose father has gone to hell to dwell with his own cruel kin.” The teacher chooses instead to describe her as “hollow-eyed” and leads her to the infirmary so she can sleep. With this incident, the haunting comes full circle as Marybeth imagines herself to be one of the caged rabbits in a simile that identifies her with the symbolic spectre rather than as a young schoolgirl engaged in the educational process: “I’m so cold. I hold myself tight against sleep like one of the rabbits hunched in his cage” (104).

16 In addition to Marybeth’s “spectral” quality, mentally dispersed between past and present, the description of a young girl permanently on the margins calls to mind the theory of borderline personality disorders put forward by some psychoanalysts in which family issues are blamed for the subject’s mental distress. Judith Feher-Gurewich explains how the psychic disorder “borderline” developed out of the theory of self psychology that came to prominence in the United States in the 1970s. A comparison of the terms “subject” and “self” makes clearer what they exactly mean: On the French side of the Atlantic it is the subject—understood as the subject of the unconscious—that defines the field of psychoanalysis, whereas on the other side of the ocean it is the self—perceived as a conglomerate of both conscious and unconscious—that dominates the different tendencies of contemporary American psychoanalysis. (10, my translation)

17 In addition to the importance of both the conscious and the unconscious, another important basic concept of this self psychology is the notion that the self is created

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through the relationship that exists between the individual, the self, and society, the other. In the theory of self psychology, the healthy self is an intersubjective structure molded by the loving gaze of the other. It is the recognition and the confirmation of the other which allows the subject’s creative potential to blossom. […] Modern alienation is simply the result of an emotionally deficient parental environment. (21-22, my translation)

18 As shown above, an emotionally deficient parental environment is directly linked to Marybeth’s experiences in “The Haunting.”

19 As for the symptoms, this deficient family background creates in the individual, Feher- Gurewich explains This tragic being is far from professionally incompetent or socially inept. […] But behind his normal or sometimes very sophisticated exterior, the “borderline” patient suffers from uncontrollable rage, feelings of emptiness, lack of self-esteem and is quite often incapable of creating lasting emotional relationships. (29-30, my translation)

20 All of these symptoms are connected to the unstable self-image of the borderline personality: The analysis of “borderline” patients reveals a childhood marked by a lack of gratifying responses and the paucity of useful ideals. Their aspirations and needs were ignored by a parental gaze which was indifferent or even cruel. As a result, they are incapable of interiorizing a sufficiently stable image of themselves that would allow them to make a commitment to their existence. (30, my translation)

21 This description corresponds well with the remarks that have been made about Marybeth.

22 The cure for borderline patients lies in reestablishing the social ties that were broken by the individual’s deficient upbringing. These social ties can only be restored “if the empathy the subject lacked during its formative years can be restored” (21-22, my translation). The nature of the short story form which presents only a short episode of Marybeth’s life prevents the lengthy development needed to show whether or not Marybeth is able to fully work through her borderline state to restore empathetic social ties that allow her to engage in meaningful exchanges with others. However, the fact that the story closes on her confession to being haunted in adulthood by the sound from her girlhood suggests that she still exists at the margins of past and present. Marybeth’s story is another example of Oates fiction that clearly identifies the family as a source of affective personality disorder in the individual and points to the importance of borderline identity disorders in the author’s aesthetic of the enigmatic. Such disorders generate a certain type of individual loss, the psychological ramifications of which Oates has often chosen to render through haunting phenomena. Deficient upbringings are not the only causes for spectral disorders amongst Oates’s characters. “Anniversary” reveals another recurrent theme, the loss of a cherished spouse.

“Anniversary”

23 “Anniversary”3 is the story of a recently widowed professor’s first teaching experience as a prison volunteer. This thirty-page story has a grounded, practical side to it: it offers a glimpse into prison life and the conditions involving various actors—prisoners, guards and volunteers. Oates experienced prison volunteering firsthand when she taught writing workshops at San Quentin Maximum Security Facility for Men in

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California in the Spring of 2011. A series of work published since this time—the stories “San Quentin,” “Anniversary” and “High”; the novel Carthage; and the edited story collection of fiction by inmates Prison Noir—combine to create testimonies to prison life in the United States and raise questions about the nature of the incarceration system. An equally important facet of the story, however, and the one which concerns us here, has to do with the fragile mental state of the protagonist, Vivianne, which is dealt with through the thematic of haunting in an appropriately gothic decor.

24 The short three-line opening paragraph is set apart typographically as its own section. It reads like classic advice for a character in a horror story: “‘Never be alone in the facility—even in the ‘safety zone.’ Always be in the company of at least one other person.’ Never be alone. This was wise advice” (241). As a literary device, this cautionary passage sets an ominous tone and alerts the reader to events to come: the teaching duo will inevitably separate and something unfortunate will happen. As early as the second page, a descriptive passage of the facility sets up the prison as a gothic structure in a traditional gothic decor that calls to mind the scenery of such classic texts as Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. “The weatherworn prison wall topped with cruel- glinting razor-wire” of the “Hudson Fork Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men” (242) is firmly anchored in another era, “originally built in 1891.” The adjective “old” is repeatedly used in its description, as well as “fossilized” (243).

25 Not surprisingly, given the gothic context of the passage and its persistent references to the past, the story’s first mention of ghosts occurs when the teachers’ guide mentions prisoner talk of the subject. That Vivianne is particularly susceptible to suggestions regarding the spirit realm is introduced two paragraphs later when “Vivianne was surprised to see an older man, in his sixties at least, wispy-bearded as a figure out of mythology, walking with a cane” (243). Later, Vivianne describes her proximity to inmates who ignore her as “eerie” (245). And when they are finally escorted to their classroom, the volunteers are met with “a smell of something, dark, melancholy like the stirring of rotted leaves” (251). The past is thus tangibly present and the scene is set for the eventuality of ontological boundary crossing.

26 The story is narrated in the third-person with Vivianne as focalizer. The language employed in conjunction with Vivianne indicates from early on that she occupies a liminal realm described as “this late phase of her life,” “what time in her life it had become” (244), “a season in her life” (245), “the ‘twilight’ of her career” (252). Previously, in the midst of the gothic description of the site, we had learned that Vivianne recently experienced a loss when reference was made to “her old, lost life,” a phrase repeated verbatim at least three times throughout the text, becoming a sort of refrain conveying both self-pity and detachment from the present (243, 249, 262). After nearly twenty pages, it will be revealed that Vivianne has lost her husband (258). He has been gone for two years and the very day with which the story is concerned would have been their fiftieth anniversary (264). It is the presence of his absence that haunts Vivianne and ties her to a liminal dimension. As with a handful of other widow characters depicted by Oates since the loss of her own husband (see Tromble), Vivianne suffers from survivor’s guilt, from the feeling that it is somehow wrong to continue living normally when her husband cannot: “she saw herself as arrogant, indifferent to her husband’s memory. She was making her way in the world as if he had not died—as if he had not lived” (264). The story’s title highlights the temporal dispersal from which Vivianne suffers as the word “anniversary” simultaneously evokes past celebrations

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with a living spouse (spectre) and the recurrent nature of dates that continue to occur regardless of life changes (hantise).

27 Vivianne is further tied to a liminal in-between life-and-death state through the reductive nature of the language used to characterize her. She finds it a relief “that no one knew her here!” She is “no more and no less” than any other volunteer. She is living “a remnant of a life,” “or maybe not a life” at all (247), her life “had become ridiculous as a weathered old wind sock whipping in the wind” (248). “She’d become a quiet woman, a brooding woman, one who half-listens” (249). The frequent recourse to the past perfect tense further emphasizes the irreconcilable rupture that has occurred between her whole past self and present diminished one. Like Marybeth in “The Haunting,” loss plunges her into a state of dispersed spectrality in which she is no longer entirely “present” in the world.

28 Throughout the story, Vivianne struggles with two competing impulses: the rational impulse rooted in her lengthy career as university professor and administrator to dismiss her students’ talk of ghosts, and the competing impulse to believe in the beyond nurtured by profound feelings of loss. Passages interspersed throughout the text indicate that Vivianne is searching for someone: “This was a season in her life when often helplessly she glanced at strangers—felt a premonitory kick in her heart— and looked quickly away. / Of course you won’t see him. How could you hope to see him” (245). Revelations occur gradually, however, so that upon first reading, it is still possible to wonder whether the “he” of such passages that occur several times throughout the text is not an actual inmate she has been close to in some way (248, 254). Vivianne tries to react rationally to the irrational impulse to seek out her husband: Telling herself You must stop. This is absurd. He will not . . . this is not . . . / She understood: it was the logic of dreams. In a dream you have no comprehension of time, or plausibility; anything, all things, can happen in a dream. And you have no volition, you can’t save yourself from the folly of hopeless wishes. (256)

29 Yet, this attempt at rational self-correction ultimately fails. Indeed, perhaps inevitably so. The word “dream” is a lexical indication to the reader that boundaries are blurring. Frequently in Oates stories (see “Why Don’t You Come Live With Me It’s Time”), once dream states are evoked, it can be difficult to distinguish “real” events from “dream” ones in what follows.

30 The facility itself seems to play an active role in encouraging this pull towards the irrational by emotionally destabilizing the visitors: “yet in Hudson Fork Correctional Facility she seemed to have forgotten, or mislaid, her composure. / She could not determine why: she knew there was no danger to her, physically” (245). Vivianne’s young co-instructor, Cal Healy, is similarly affected. In this context, the advice to volunteers to “never rely upon ‘common sense’ inside the prison” takes on new meaning, opening up the possibility that the prison realm might make some other mode of connection possible: “Vivianne had lost all faith in her own judgment and she could not believe that ‘common sense’ had any relevance to the world she’d come to know” (250).

31 Vivianne’s confusion and disconnection from the physical activity of teaching with which she is engaged increases as the text continues, so much so that she “was distracted by a roaring in her ears” (265). This is one of Oates’s metaphors of predilection that reoccurs regularly throughout her fiction. A roaring sound experienced inside a character’s head generally coincides with states of confusion,

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disconnection from the outside world and mental retreat inside one’s head. Vivianne’s roaring coincides with the moment of her misspeaking to the class, followed quickly by the classroom discussion of ghosts. When asked by the students about her motives for volunteering to teach their prison class, Vivianne had blurted out: “‘Today is my fiftieth wedding anniversary. My husband has been dead for two years—so anywhere I am, on this day, is like any other’” (264). She is still ruminating about the gaff, through the roaring in her ears, when the discussion of ghosts begins: What did you say! Oh what did you say! To strangers. Somehow, the subject of ghosts came up. (265)

32 The proximity of these two one-line paragraphs serves to establish a clear link between Vivianne’s misspeaking about her dead husband and ghosts. Her placating response to the believer students—“Vivianne said, with a strange little smile, ‘On the subject of ‘ghosts’—through the millennia—thousands of years—all the evidence is not yet in ...’” (267)—seems to indicate a desire on her part to believe.

33 This possibility is presented as uniquely tied to the place with the prison wall serving as the boundary between two ontological belief systems: “Outside the prison, you could speak dismissively of ghosts; in the prison, evidently, you had better take ghosts seriously. Vivianne understood” (266). Modal expressions of Vivianne’s uncertainty communicated through the adverbs “maybe” and “possibly” pepper the text from this point on, leading up to the climactic assault which occurs when she is left alone in the facility: “Ma’am! Howdy.” She turned. She felt a touch on her shoulder. Another touch, a lover’s caress. A face loomed beside hers, pitying, with a look of sorrow, but revulsion too, disgust, for the woman had insulted his manhood with her condescension; with her ridiculous female vanity, that had taken root in grief; between his fingers the little razor was gripped tight, drawn against Vivianne’s throat, beneath her chin, a quick slash, the blink of an eye, the intake of a breath, mercy—for here was the angel of mercy, clad in blue. (273)

34 This depiction of her own murder in the penultimate scene combines elements of both her husband and the prisoner-student Conor O’Hagan, as if her husband is being channeled through the living prisoner. On the previous page, there is mention of a “shift in Vivianne’s brain” and a vision of herself in Hades. The murder scene is revealed to be a hallucination in the final scene in which we read of Vivianne and Cal driving away together after having been reprimanded by the Education Office coordinator for not following procedure. This final scene includes a description of Vivianne’s physical state: “Vivianne’s head pounded with pain. Her eyes stung with tears like acid, or blood. She was exhausted, wounded, like one who has been stricken, her throat slashed. She was finished, she’d bled out.” This seems like an overreaction, unless we can read it as a metaphorical exorcism, the physical results of a mental process of working through guilt. In this case, Vivianne’s closing words, “‘Next time. Yes’” (274), indicate this change and the possibility that she will not relive the same experience at following classes. There is hope that she will now be free of the crippling survivor’s guilt that haunted her for two years.

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35 Exploring the mystery of identity is a central concern of Oates’s fiction. As a general rule, identity, as a complete commensurable entity, remains elusive, dispersed behind textual strategies that enhance the fragmented nature of her characters’ personalities. In Oates’s work, the question of identity is intimately linked to the existence of liminal realms such as dream-states which seem to afford the possibility of a glimpse into the unconscious realm. “What we dream of, that we are,” Oates has written in an article about the city of her childhood (“Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again,” 77). In another essay, she associates dreaming with madness, admonishing that we must learn to successfully mediate our behavior due to “how precarious our hold upon what we call sanity is” (“Nighthawk,” 60). A pattern emerges in Oates stories involved with the treatment of loss. Loss creates a gap in the character’s understanding of self, a gap that is inadequately filled by the haunting phenomenon. The character is pulled towards death, becomes liminal and temporally dispersed, for to be haunted is to turn away from one’s own life.

36 An earlier story, “Haunted,” turns the screw, creating a ghostly mise-en-abyme. The narrator, an older woman whose children are grown and whose husband has passed, fills a journal with a tale of loss from her childhood. She is haunted by the memory of her best childhood friend who was found murdered and by her own responsibility in this disappearance. Indeed, we are led to believe that it was the narrator who sent her friend to her death at the hands of an evil spirit.

37 For Oates, the short story represents a privileged medium for the treatment of the confusion of loss by allowing for a sustained unity of emotion over the relatively short space of the sketch. Within this framework, haunting is a trope that gives a more concrete form to emotional disorders of a spectral and borderline nature. There is no lengthy dénouement to reassure the reader of the character’s well-being. Rather, the characters are left much in the frame of mind in which they were found and the images of their hauntings remain fixed in the reader’s mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amfreville, Marc. “La Hantise de l’absence.” Tropismes 14, “La Hantise” (2007): 141-58. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean and Marc Guillaume. Figures de l’altérité. Paris: Descartes & Cie., 1994. Print.

Feher-Gurewich, Judith and Michel Tort. Lacan avec la psychanalyse américaine. Paris: Éditions Denoël, “L’Espace analytique,” 1996. Print.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Postgothic Fiction: Joyce Carol Oates Turns the Screw on Henry James.” Studies in Short Fiction 35.4 (1998): 355-71. Print.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “Théorie de la hantise.” Tropismes 14, “La Hantise” (2007): 5-31. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Anniversary.” Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. 241-74. Print.

---. “Building Tension in the Short Story.” The Writer 79.6 (1966): 11-12; 44. Print.

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---. Carthage. New York: HarperCollins, 2014. Print.

---. “Haunted.” Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. New York: Dutton, 1994. 3-25. Print.

---. “The Haunting.” The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005. 95-110. Print.

---. “High.” High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread. New York: The Mysterious Press, 2014. 37-68. Print.

---. “Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again.” Smithsonian 40.12 (2010): 74-89. Print.

---. “Joyce Carol Oates Reread: Overview and Interview with the Author.” Interview with Susana Araújo. Critical Survey 18:3 (2006): 92-105. Print.

---. “Nighthawk: A Memoir of a Lost Time.” Yale Review 89.2 (2001): 56-72. Print.

---. ed. Prison Noir. New York: Akashic Books, 2014. Print.

---. “San Quentin.” Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. 235-40. Print.

---. “The Short Story.” Southern Humanities Review 5.3 (1971): 213-14. Print.

---. “Why Don’t You Come Live With Me It’s Time.” The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction. Eds. Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath. New York: Random House, 1991. 147-63. Print.

---. “You.” The Wheel of Love and Other Stories. Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1970. 315-36. Print.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. 1794. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

Tromble, Tanya. “Fiction in Fact and Fact in Fiction in the Writing of Joyce Carol Oates.” Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies 2.2 (2015). Web. 20 Oct. 2017.

NOTES

1. Due to the difficulty inherent in translating the concepts outlined by Lecercle into English and the risk of altering the meaning that could come with so doing, I have decided to retain the French words for my discussion. 2. The story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2003. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, 2004. It was later collected in The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, 2005. In-text citations refer to the latter collection. 3. First published in Boulevard 28.1&2 (Fall 2012), collected in Black Dahlia & White Rose. In-text citations are to the latter collection.

ABSTRACTS

Au début de sa carrière, Joyce Carol Oates a élaboré une théorie de la nouvelle qu’elle a largement suivie par la suite. Pour elle, le genre de la nouvelle reproduit un univers psychologique et parle à l’inconscient comme l’illustre nombre de ses textes où se développent, dans des espaces liminaux

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fluctuants, des expériences relatives à la conscience ou à l’inconscient. Cet article montre comment certaines théories psychanalytiques ou psychologiques autour de la spectralité ou des désordres affectifs limites peuvent expliquer l’utilisation que propose Oates de la hantise. Dans « The Haunting », les cris inquiétants émanant de cages à lapins dans un sous-sol représentent le traumatisme lié à la perte d’un père. Dans « Anniversary », une femme qui a récemment perdu son mari attend avec impatience l’apparition de son époux défunt et découvre à sa grande surprise que ses étudiants croient aux fantômes.

AUTHORS

TANYA TROMBLE Tanya Tromble teaches at Aix-Marseille University. She defended a doctoral dissertation entitled Interminable Enigma: Joyce Carol Oates’s Reimagining of Detective Fiction at the University of Provence in 2010. She has studied various aspects of Oates’s fiction including crime fiction, the epistolary form, violence, the gothic, religion, and 9/11. She co-directed a volume on Oates for the Paris publisher Herne in 2017. She is a member of the editorial boards of several journals: Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, Résonances and Journal of the Short Story in English.

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Haunting and Satire in the Short Fiction of George Saunders

Amélie Moisy

1 George Saunders’s many short stories featuring ghosts and revenants can be read in the light of the studies on spectrality that popularized the terms “hauntology” and “the spectral turn” at the turn of the 21st Century. Central to spectrality studies is the concept of the liminal, inspired by the figure of the ghost, and comprehending what is either off-center and marginal, or on the threshold and implicit, as well as what may overlap or cross boundaries between two zones and is thus characterized by imprecision or fluidity.

2 Saunders is something of a boundary-crossing figure. Born in Texas, raised in Illinois, he earned a BS at the Colorado School of Mines and worked as a field geophysicist and technical writer; he was also awarded an MFA in creative writing, which he now teaches, at Syracuse University; and he has travelled the world in connection with his scientific and writing careers. Brought up a Catholic, he is studying Buddhism. He works in various forms—the essay, the short-story, children’s literature, and the novel —and has received many distinctions, most recently the Booker Prize for his 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, and an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. His work is consistently funny, yet it is a biting reflection on the hubristic defects of the individual (his self-centeredness and self-interest) and of society (its excessiveness, its various forms of violence over the individual and its arrogant imposition of an insane system). He also continually affirms the value of compassion in our measure of others and dealings with them.

3 There are short stories about ghosts, spirits or revenants in each of Saunders’s collections: “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and “The Wavemaker Falters” in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), “Sea Oak” in Pastoralia (2000), “CommComm” and “Brad Carrigan, American” in In Persuasion Nation (2006), and “Escape from Spiderhead” in Tenth of December (2013). His novel, too, provides insight on the effects of haunting. Saunders shows the liminality of satire as a genre, and the spectral dimension of his work gives it more force to promote action. The first part of this essay will situate his work in both “Colbert’s America” of satire and the “Spectral America” of ghostly

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culture, and establish that, among other things, the ghost can be a useful metaphor in satire as it conveys questions of justice. Part two will show how Saunders initiates a reflection on just measure by presenting ghosts and living specters as marginals who reveal mainstream society’s hubristic madness. In part three, some aspects of Saunders’s liminal, dialogic satire will be studied: it emphasizes the need for connectedness by cutting through to essentials. Finally, the question will be posed of which outcomes may be envisaged from Saunders’s satire. It is in his ghost stories that his purpose of a restoration to sanity through the depiction of excess is clearest.

Liminal Satire and the Ghost as Metaphor in Popular American Culture

4 Though Saunders is known as “a writer’s writer” and regularly publishes in that “highbrow US cultural magazine,” The New Yorker, his media profile is so high that he is by now a household name (see Colman, WARC and IMDb sites). He is an intrinsic part of popular American culture in which the satirical genre and ghostly themes are highly developed.

5 Long-running programs like Saturday Night Live and cartoons like Garry Trudeau’s Pulitzer-prize winning Doonesbury, which originated in the seventies, illustrate the American taste for lampooning and irony directed against the establishment, as do the relatively more recent animated series The Simpsons (produced since 1989) or South Park (since 1997); news satire is equally popular—The Onion has been publishing parodies since the eighties and Stephen Colbert, now host of The Late Show, was twice listed as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People for his take-offs in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Saunders has regularly appeared on Colbert’s programs.

6 But for all its popularity, satire is a liminal genre, an aspect making it comparable to the specter. Its etymology, whether one derives it from the satyr, halfway between beast and man, or satura, a mixed dish, points to a destabilisation of norms (Matthews 17), and a disruption of the accepted in thought, style or practice—indeed, it employs many effects, and prompts rueful laughter as it exposes the ridicule of the reader’s own foibles or his leaders’. It is liminal as regards action, proposing none, or mock- solutions, and yet it is a genre geared toward improving its readers and society. How and even whether it does is debated. Justin Griffin has found no proof in recent studies that the reader is ever moved to virtue (171, 184), yet concedes that “by unsettling our convictions, […] asking questions and raising doubts but not providing answers,” satire can ultimately have political consequences (159-60). And Sophia McClennen, professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State University, analysing the effects of satire in her 2012 book Colbert’s America, has asserted its importance in keeping the democratic process alive, notably through its ability to stir activism as viewers “actively look into the issues” after a parodic production (qtd. in Penn State U). Her more general conclusion, expressed since in a study co-authored with Remy Maisel, that “satire’s job is to motivate us to try” (176), highlights the myriad possibilities attendant on the liminal.

7 Saunders’s frequent use of the liminal figure of the revenant can be seen as a part of the cultural zeitgeist which has led Julian Wolfreys to assert, after Derrida on Marx, “A spectre haunts modernity, and the spectral is at the heart of any narrative of the

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modern” (3). In Spectral America, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock notes that although America has always loved ghost stories, there has been an increase in productions featuring ghosts dating from the period of the film Ghostbusters, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved or Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. Saunders’s ghost stories attest to this fascination with ghosts; some have been produced as plays, and “Sea Oak” was made into a TV movie in 2017. Weinstock ascribes this resurgence in ghostly matters, which he sees as encompassing the spectral discourse in criticism (most notably Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and the recent preoccupation with trauma), to millennial anxiety (6). The ghost is, of course, taken as a symbol in the approach to cultural constructs: as Martin Scofield points out, “The ghostly and the figurative are closely connected; ghosts are already ‘figures’—whether in a supernatural, psychological or simply literary sense—and they can be seen as metaphors that suddenly become literal” (xi).

8 Derrida has associated the specter with the future, seeing “revenants” as “arrivants” in a messianic sense, “to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome […] out of a concern for justice” (211, 220). The limits of Derrida’s hauntology are a matter of debate. Some, like Kate Soper, say that it does not lead to action, since Derrida implies that to incarnate the spirit of an emancipatory politics “in any set of goods, institutions or strategies […] is inevitably to betray the spirit itself” (27). On the other hand, Carlos Manrique gives examples of how Derrida’s hauntology is put into practice to restore justice by the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartado in Columbia. Derrida writes that “There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility” (114), and his specter seems to call for responsible change. Weinstock follows Derrida in positing that ghosts, calling into question the possibilities of a future based on the avoidance of the past, serve as warnings. Yet he believes that for Americans, they are “comforting,” as they represent their desires for truth and justice.” Indeed, they “validate faith and show where we have gotten it wrong” (Weinstock 6). In Saunders’s satirical stories, ghosts have little agency, but are nevertheless comforting, as they validate the role of the temperate virtues of love and compassion in bringing about true justice; they warn and a force for change. The next part provides examples of how they show where modern society has “gotten it wrong.”

Ghosts and Spectral Characters Reveal Established Excess

9 Saunders uses figures from the beyond and spectral characters to make minority voices heard and to suggest the excesses of society. This brings to mind interpretations of the spectral framed by Derrida, such Avery Gordon’s view that stories about minorities, “concerning exclusion and invisibilities,” are ghost stories (qtd. in Weinstock 5); in The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility, Esther Pereen argues that certain categories of people, migrants, servants, or missing persons, may be compared to living ghosts. The trajectory of the figure defined by Lisa Kroger and Melanie Anderson in The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities illuminates Saunders’s work well—they also see the phantasm as a metaphor for the desire for visibility, and posit that “The ghost is […] the sign of […] any person, or group, or cultural moment—that, largely ignored or repressed by the society in which it participates, refuses to be marginalized any longer, but pushes to be recognized” (xii).

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10 Both Saunders’s ghosts and his working-class characters who struggle to make their shaky footing in society more secure raise the questions that, according to Derrida, the specter brings the living to formulate: “What is ours? In what way is it historical? And what does it have to do with so many ghosts?” (63). For they reflect a variety of ills symptomatic of the hubris of those who possess greater social, economic or political power. To illustrate this contention, Saunders’s ghost stories are briefly summed up below, and compared to the pattern identified by Kroger and Anderson—particular stress being laid on “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.”

11 As were many of Saunders’s revenants, his narrators are downtrodden “losers,” the ignored which he recalls to the affluent readers of his stories. Kroger and Anderson point out that “Like the traditional ghost, [living characters in these texts] struggle to make their presence known as they learn to manipulate the liminal spaces they inhabit” (xii). Only the harried narrator in “CivilWarLand” sees the ghosts of the McKinnon family who haunt the historical theme park in which he works. Real ghosts and living specter try to work with, and are frustrated by, a maleficent reality. The attempts of the McKinnon girl to find a beau from among the visitors to the theme park are doomed. And the narrator will fail to keep his place, though he uses a degree of manipulation, “lifting ideas from the McKinnons” (12) and exploiting the violent potential of Sam, the Viet Nam Vet, to defend CivilWarLand from teen gangs.

12 In “CivilWarLand,” as in other stories, the narrator’s ghostly standing in society is contrasted with the excessive, insistent presences in his life of those pictured as returning from the grave. The violent ghost of Mr. McKinnon who advises wife beating, is “enthralled by blood” (19) and murders his family again and again mirrors the violence of society, for he was a Civil War veteran. Dana Del George argues that Saunders’s joint use of “the marvelous artificial” and the supernatural in such stories is a form of magical realism, “offering resistance to the bewildering and dehumanizing forces of late capitalism” (121, 127).

13 One might call Saunders’s specters an aspect of his fantastique social, the term Pierre Mac Orlan applied from the 1920s to art in which ghosts were replaced by the living, and the disturbing effects of social change were evidenced. In Lincoln in the Bardo, the continuance of human losses in the Civil War is envisaged while white and black ghosts fight in a segregated cemetery at the height of the conflict. In the short stories, Saunders’s specters reflect the excesses of the world in which his living ghosts suffer, and underline social change by haunting housing projects and suburban bungalows encroaching on fields, morphing backyards, and especially theme parks. Saunders’s predilection for theme park narratives has led Sarah Pogell to liken him to Baudrillard, arguing that Americans have replaced history with simulacra (461, 464), and Michael Walonen to assert that “for Saunders, the contemporary theme park is symptomatic of not only the leisure obsession of a workaholic culture and a changing spatial and epistemological order, but also of the increasingly precarious and disempowered state of the American worker” (163). Saunders’s microcosmic settings suggest that in the overreaching and hubristically irresponsible macrocosm, the social system, man cannot act virtuously.

14 Saunders’s social specters follow the pattern identified by Kroger and Anderson: a “tug- o-war” between the social ghosts and society ends in confrontation (Kroger and Anderson xii), but they remain excluded. The plots go from bad to worse, as no amount of manipulation works. In “CivilWarLand,” the narrator’s wife leaves him because Sam,

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the crazed vet, endangered the children, and the investors catch on to the shootings of innocents and withdraw financial support from the theme park. As his ruined employer turns arsonist, the rampaging McKinnon ghosts testify to the excesses of the past that condemn them to liminality and reenactment, and the brutality of the world is driven home when the mad veteran kills the narrator: “Sam comes for me with a hunting knife. ‘[…] You know a few things I don’t want broadcast.’ I’m madly framing calming words in my head as he drives the knife in” (26). Although at the end the narrator, all spirit, sees Sam’s past as an abused child and continuance as a murderer, he can effect no change in him despite his newfound powers.

15 Living ghosts confront an excessive society in Saunders’s other ghost stories, as in “The Wavemaker Falters,” where the narrator, Mr. Guilt, feels responsible for killing a child at his amusement park because he did not ensure all the bolts were in working order. He has to cope with a society which destroys the weak as it has nature, he is haunted by the ghost of the child, and is nearly shot by the child’s father. The ghost’s constant complaining about what has been taken away from him is commensurate with society’s excessive alienating power—both cause desolation within and around the narrator.

16 In “Sea Oak,” marginal characters are also plunged in an ever-worsening situation, but the living might get away with their manipulation of society; the specter does not. The narrator is a male stripper; his loving Aunt Bernie helps him support his sister, cousin and their little boys. They live in fear of gangs on their housing estate, Sea Oak, where Bernie is killed by a robber. She comes back from the grave as a specter who, no longer nice, bullies her family, applying her powers so that she can finally enjoy the good life; yet the disintegrating specter finally “dies again,” after warning them that one of the boys will soon be killed in a gunfight. Her leitmotiv and final words to the narrator are “Show your cock” (123), which the rules forbid him to do, but, seeing no other way to save the child than to move to a better neighborhood, he follows her advice in order to earn money.

17 “CommComm” also features a “silenced” narrator, a ghost-in-life repressed into deceit. A PR person for the Air Force from an underprivileged background, he hopes that when the base closes, shortly, he can be hired by the only employers in town, “the Dirksen Center for Terror [,] the town’s great hope” (331), and stay in his house in Omaha with the ghosts of his murdered parents. The ghosts’ anxious love continues to stifle their son even as they reenact their violent murder every night, reflecting the dysfunctions in an excessive society. To get the local position at, the narrator goes from twisting the truth daily to participating in a cover-up and burying unearthed corpses, but balks at murder and is killed for it. But the narrator’s spirit frees the lingering specters of his parents by telling them that they are dead, and finally fuses into a glorious whole.

18 In “Brad Carrigan, American,” Brad is a participant in a “reality” TV program in which the setting morphs and his standing is unsure. He is the only person to show compassion for the “dead Belstonians,” the war victims who have suddenly landed in his backyard. These zombies show the excessive violence of society, and, Michael Trussler believes, “what American imperialism has repressed;” all the other participants on the show can ignore them, illustrating “the iniquity produced by America as a blithe superpower” (Trussler 211, 210)—but they haunt Brad as he is ejected into “bland gray space” for caring and trying to act, and as he is made to forget (Persuasion 272).

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19 In “Escape from Spiderhead,” the narrator, Jeff is another social specter, a convict involved in sexual and drug experiments, at the mercy of excessive “reformers” who pass off violent sadism as humanistic science. Though he has killed in the past, he refuses to inflict more suffering and in the end, he chooses to commit suicide by tricking his captors, and “escapes” as a spirit.

20 In Lincoln in the Bardo, a novel written entirely in textual citations, practically all of whose authors are now deceased, Saunders’s ghosts are in the purgatory-like Bardo of Tibetan lore, a liminal, in-between state; they do not know that they are dead, any more than did the parents of the narrator in “CommComm,” and like them, have little agency. Though many were social specters in life, they unite to make a stand when Lincoln’s son dies and the President comes to hold his body in the cemetery, his grief compounded by worry over the Civil War. Together they realize the excessive violence involved in any “solution:” We must, to do the maximum good, bring the thing to its swiftest halt and— hans vollman Kill. roger bevins iii Kill more efficiently. hans vollman (306)

21 But they see their way to freeing the boy from malevolent forces that would overtake him in the Bardo. Revealing that they have died, the boy frees them in turn to go on to an unknown future state. And some will make history by haunting that most powerful figure, Abraham Lincoln.

22 Saunders uses ghosts to highlight social and societal dysfunctions, and his intersecting and overlapping themes of exploitation, violence, love and loss drive home the point that the ambient hubristic madness must be countered with just measure, the virtue the Greeks called sophrosyne. The next part focuses on how the liminality of his satirical short stories contributes to a restoration of sanity.

Satire that Cuts Through to Essentials

23 Saunders’s liminal satire is effective as it raises questions and allows for multiple interpretations, in a tone and style that destabilize the norm, transcending the brevity of the short story by much that is implicit: he makes full use of the liminality of the form to return the reader to the essential, temperate virtues, restoring their attractiveness even through his literary allusions to other texts.

24 Scholars today point out that if it ever did exist, satire centering on—in Dryden’s words —“One vice to castigate” in order to press upon the reader a moral alternative is dead and gone, a product of what Graham Matthews terms the “fantasy of the One” after Lacan (Matthews 14, 18). As Griffin remarks, clear moral standards are not always at the heart of satire: The reader’s interest is not in rediscovering that greed is a bad thing or that deceit is to be avoided but in working through (with the satirist’s help) the implications of a given moral position (how far do you have to go in the public defense of virtue?), the contradictions between one virtue (justice) and another (forgiveness), or the odd similarities between a vice (brazenness) and a virtue (steadfastness against censure). (37-38)

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25 In “CivilWarLand,” the narrator’s loyalty can be seen as self-serving. He and his employer condone violence when it seems a way out of difficulty, which links them to Sam, the veteran’s violent parent, and to the country that sent him to Viet Nam where he saw death and learnt to kill, just as Mr. McKinnon learnt to kill in the past. As Pogell points out, the vet’s rampaging is truer to the historical spirit of CivilWarLand than anything else in the park. Posing conundrums such as Griffin describes, in satire which has the reader test a truth through dialogues or the destabilization of the authority in the narrator’s voice (an approach Mikhail Bakhtin termed dialogical or polyphonic— Griffin 41), Saunders shows that responsible action and ethics are confusing on more than the individual scale, and moves the reader, while realizing the distortions of his tales, to reflect on personal and collective dysfunctions and sound his own core.

26 The reader questions the narrator of “CivilWarLand” when he denies his own responsibility in helping to cover up Sam’s murders of gang members and of a solitary candy thief: “It doesn’t say anywhere thou shalt not bury some guy’s hand. By the time I got involved the kid was dead. Where his hand ended up is inconsequential” (20), while even the manager of the strip restaurant who dismisses the narrator in “Sea Oak” for not dancing with enough vigor has a point: “I’m sorry for your loss. […] [O]nly don’t take it out on our Guests, they didn’t kill your dang aunt. […] Why don’t I put an ad in the paper for all sad people who need money? All the town’s sad could come here and strip. Come back when you feel halfway normal” (111). Saunders, who believes all of the characters “Are Us, on a Different Day” (“An Interview”), makes us see our weaknesses, and the commonality of our failings, of our precarious fate, as well as of our better instincts. In so doing, he cuts through to our basic understanding, as Nyingma Buddhism seeks to reach the essential purity of the mind.

27 The desolate Mr. Guilt protests, “enough already, enough, this is as low as I go” in “The Wavemaker Falters” after he has been “low” in mood and in deeds, introducing a note of resolve and suggesting that self-forgiveness is necessary for individual survival and sensible action (44). But the spirit of the land haunts the story as does the dead child. The theme park unsafely recreates an America that has been ruined, a land littered with garbage and franchises (“The moon comes up over Delectable Videos” [43]). And the story resonates with collective guilt: it is as easy to overlook a fatal bolt in the Wavemaker as to ignore what is being done to the environment, to take that example. In “Sea Oak” the working class “loser” characters are reminded that “Anybody can do anything” (106). But the story questions the American dream of hard, honest work crowned by success. Bernie, the excessive specter, reflects society as it is: “The world ain’t giving away nice lives” (122). She preaches overstepping boundaries into the unethical, as others have transgressed against them. When is it reprehensible to do all that one can for one’s children? In the end, Bernie haunts the narrator’s dreams, reminding the reader that fate is arbitrary and the distribution of riches indiscriminate. Reason and sympathy suggest that anyone might share something of their plight, and might take a different view of the moral norm and of the American Dream.

28 Though Saunders’s plots are extravagant and his inventiveness Dionysian, they are regulated by just measure so as to produce a flow of fellow feeling. His distinctive voice can be said to act upon the reader, and light or dark humor merges into passages in which a truth is revealed with clarity, recalling one Latin acceptation of sophrosyne, or temperance, from temperare, “to mix” (North 10-11). Saunders’s stories are always

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humorous in tone. The ghosts are characterized by zany detail. The 19th-century ghost of Mrs McKinnon likes the narrator of “CivilWarLand” because he bought her a Rubik’s cube; for her husband he has “brought […] lighters and Playboys” (13). The ghost of Clive in “The Wavemaker Falters” is still childlike, and exits “producing farts with a hand under his armpit” (40). Aunt Bernie’s specter in “Sea Oak” borrows her niece’s bras: “‘I never had a nice sexy bra,’ says Bernie. ‘And now mine are all ruined,’ says Min. ‘They got this sort of goo on them’” (119). This play on codes, where the reader recognizes an existing phenomenon (Rubik cube mania, older women longing for the beauty of the young) and the humorous twist, gives pleasure.

29 The same dynamic is behind Saunders’s witty use of language. When he suggests all that one will miss in the nether world, he uses the limited working class vocabulary to its comical full expressiveness; as the ghosts of the narrator’s parents in “CommComm” remember their youth, the father dwells on his erections: “‘He’s always talking about boners,’ says Mom. ‘Having a boner is a great privilege,’ says Dad” (349). He often spoofs the newspeak of the living, inserting humorous details that reflect the alienating corporatism of contemporary society. The narrator of “CommComm” spends his time at Community Communications “PIDS-”ing what “Jillian from Disasters” notifies him goes wrong (323). He describes what goes on at his job in the capital letters of standard procedure, suggesting that the system is a machine which humans can only try to propitiate: “He shows me Rick’s Daily Historical-Resource Assessment Worksheet. […] Under ‘Evidence of Pre-Existing Historical/Cultural Presence,’ he’s written: ‘Not that I know of’” (334). Saunders pokes fun at the commercial New Age self-help therapies his lonely characters resort to as anger and guilt management techniques: “I turn on Tape Nine […]. When sadness inducing events occur, the guy says, invoke your Designated Substitute Thoughtstream,” says the narrator of “CommComm” (325).

30 Such humor can create sympathy. In “CivilWarLand,” the devoted narrator, abandoned by his wife and children, is asked for his savings by his ruined employer. In the passage below Saunders ironically places “personal development” in the employer’s vocabulary and furnishes proof of the narrator’s caution; but he also leads the reader to feel for the narrator who reigns himself into insignificance, from hoping against hope: “He says that just for the record and my personal development, he’s always found me dull and has kept me around primarily for my yes-man capabilities and because sometimes I’m so cautious I’m a hoot. […] I want to hit or at least insult him, but I need this week’s pay to find my kids” (24).

31 Often such black humor is offset by the characters’ clear realization of what they are reduced to, leading to a poetic sincerity and vision which, appealing to the higher emotions, the aesthetic sense, or filled with a sense of the presence of divinity, attain the numinous. As the dying narrator of “CivilWarLand” thinks of his children and wife with regret, the accent is on love—“Never again to sleep and wake to their liquid high voices and sweet breaths? Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better” (26). Love is exalted by contrast in the final passage: “Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above [Sam] as he hacks me to bits. […] I see the pain I’ve caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam’s body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone” (26).

32 In “The Wavemaker Falters,” the narrator’s final realization that he can take no more loss comes as he is watching starving longhorn: “Lightning strikes the slaughterhouse

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flagpole and the antelope scatter like minnows as the rain begins to fall, and finally, having lost what was to be lost, my torn and black heart rebels” (44). This American scene, where the flag flies on the slaughterhouse, evokes by contrast the famous lyrics of “Home on the Range,” where what is evidenced is the gift of life on earth: “I would not exchange my home here to range / Forever in azures so bright” (Higley). But gratitude and wonder were perceived by the narrator at gunpoint: “The sound of our home’s internal ventilation system is suddenly wondrous. The mole on [the gunman’s] cheek possesses grace. Children would have been nice” (CivilWarLand 44). And the story will be read an affirmation of life and a re-engagement with it, despite loss.

33 In “CommComm,” the narrator’s spirit sets things right for the murdered man’s wife by telling her the truth, and the two spirits blend. “I was wrong in life, limited, shrank everything down to my size,” say the murdered Christian and narrator together, after setting examples of intercession and liberating truth. Saunders nullifies the margin as they “join something [they] can only describe as Nothing-Is-Excluded” (358). He highlights the possibility of communication and communion with others and the life force.

34 Even “Sea Oak,” which is hardly poetic, has the monstrous Aunt Bernie advocate for learning along with cock-showing: “So many wonderful things in life and where’s your mind? [...] What fun is life when you don’t know nothing?” (119) This ill-expressed desire for soundness and beauty has the clarity of truth; and the comic anticlimactic proof that her nieces are marked by it when she finally goes back to the grave is that they study in their World Books unasked (124).

35 The ordinary words that Brad Carrigan uses to formulate what “the hundreds of ears of corn growing out of the furniture, floors and ceilings” and other events on the show inspire in him have the ring of a beautiful truth that makes sense to the reader, unlike the pronouncements of the other actors who appear comfortable in the series’ mad world: “There’s so much suffering. We have so much, and others have so little. So I was just thinking that, you know, if we took a tiny portion of what we have, which we don’t really need, and sent it to the people who need it…” (Persuasion 244, 247).

36 “Escape from Spiderhead” has Jeff gifted with vision and eloquence in death, seeing his “unwashable transgression” of murder. But as he flies among the birds outside, filled with “life nectar,” he sums up the cleansing effect of the purity at the heart of life which he joins in the afterlife: “[T]hey did not recognize me as something apart from them and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would” (79-81).

37 In “Language between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity,” Adam Kelly has argued that Saunders not only critiques the neoliberal capitalistic parlance and the dominance it represents, but also thinks that poetic contemplation and its pleasures can stand in the way of action, and parodies “the modernist priority given to aesthetic perception in the subjective processing of an event” in “Escape from Spiderhead” and in an earlier story, “The Falls” (52). Kelly equates modernist subjectivity with “thematics of […] social fragmentation and alienation” [Jameson qtd. in Kelly 58]. Contrarily, such action as the characters can take, though it serves no purpose, is the mark of a sincerity that is typified by fellow-feeling. However, the numinous passages cited earlier, typical of Saunders’s fiction, and of heightened transcendence as his characters become spirits, may move the reader to act.

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38 Saunders’s satire destabilizes the norm and asserts the possibilities of life, creating conditions conducive to openness, empathy, and connection between all living beings, rather than a hubristic sense of exceptionality. The end of his essay “The New Mecca” insists on how “powerful” the perception of such universality is, yielding a now famous quote in which he admonishes himself: “Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen” (55). If, as Kelly suggests, such openness is sincerity, just measure would seem to rule out inconsiderate action. For Saunders, though he appeals to our sympathy, makes us consider our acts.

39 Saunders’s ghosts plead for a restoration to sanity. Achilles and Bergmann note that the liminal short story depicts “transitional situations and fleeting moments of crisis or decision” (4, 22). Saunders’s recurrent burlesque ghost figures are transitional, in the wrong world, and moments like those in which the stripper decides to “show his cock” reflect untenable socio-economic situations that show the wrongness of this world. The ghost-in-life protagonists, on the threshold as concerns ethics, provide a glimpse of spiritual truths. Saunders’s stories are appealing because the characters’ inglorious quotidian arrangements in a hellish society are a foil that sets off the Good, in the Greek sense of unity within diversity. In “Everyday Zombies: Ethics and the Contemporary in ‘Sea Oak’ and ‘Brad Carrigan, American,’” Trussler argues that Saunders’s “undead” are “allegorical instances of social critique that signal a utopian desire for improved social conditions based on empathy and political justice” (206). Moreover, Saunders makes use of allusion as a possible resolution of conflict, and intertextual connections, as Griffin points out, enable play with moral ideas that do not have the same status as in philosophical discourse or essays (64).

40 Saunders’s ghost tales rework traditional narratives such as folk tales or fairy tales, and reflect haunting questions. For Kroger and Anderson, “The ghost is a useful metaphor for the uncertainties of life and death settled deep within the psyche of human beings” (xv). Ghosts point back to the lore of humanity in different places and times and encourage consciousness of our common lot; memories of historical, amusing or poetic tales play upon the readers’ expectations and lead them to search for “a way” to orient themselves in their uncertainty.

41 Saunders reworks ghost sightings in oral folklore, as related throughout the world. The Haunted Places website for Virginia lists some that may have inspired the McKinnons, such as Parker’s Battery, with its apparitions of “very unhappy or very confused” Confederate soldiers, or the Natural Bridge Hotel, whose “former owner went mad and killed his wife and children […]. [V]arious members of the family have been seen around the grounds in the night.” Saunders’s tales incorporate various beliefs pertaining to ghosts—in parts of Asia, specters are thought to feed on a person’s life fluids, as the dead child Clive does on Mr. Guilt’s (see Dessaint and Ngwama 589, for example). His specters conform to the classical requirements for the return of literary ghosts: Mr. McKinnon in “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” who murdered his family, could well have to atone for some sin or guilt, but cannot help repeating his crime; the Aunt in “Sea Oak” must warn the living that Troy will be killed; the child Clive in “The Wavemaker Falters” is seeking vengeance on the narrator; and the spectral parents in “CommComm” live with the narrator as they have unfinished business, thinking they are still alive and protecting him (Briggs qtd. in Kroger and Anderson ix).

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42 In tone, these stories resemble comical ghost stories in Irish folklore or in American campfire culture, with undignified ghosts throwing their bones around, as in “Daniel Crowley and the Ghosts” (Curtin), or dismembered ghosts, as in “Piece By Piece” and “Golden Hand” (Schlosser), and the Brothers Grimm’s humorous tales about missing limbs or visitors to heaven, such as “The Three Army Surgeons,” where “dead” hands, heart and eyes act independently, or “The Tailor in Heaven” where the dead man sees everything on earth and throws down God’s footstool in a rage. But their poetic aspects recall Hans Christian Andersen’s mystical insistence on fusion after death and God’s love and mercy. The end of “CommComm” brings to mind “The Little Match Girl,” who flies in brightness and joy above the earth with her grandmother, “The Angel,” who takes a flower and a boy to heaven where all sings, and “On Judgment Day,” which follows the soul after death: all is mercy in heaven, and the proud believer realizes that he was wrong; as the chorus of angels sings, all bask in the infinite love of the heavenly father.

43 Saunders says reading Thomas Wolfe started him writing: “Maybe it was the first time that a literary writer got under my skin. […] I would do a lot of imitations of him, you know—try to write in that sort of lyrical voice” (“George Saunders”). In Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe’s famous “ghost” refrain, “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again” (2, 58, 296…) arises when his characters are beset with questions which defy understanding, about the human condition and its inevitable suffering, grief, desire and loneliness.1 Saunders’s ghosts, too, point to questions concerning life and death, good and evil, the injustice of fate, suffering and alienation, and love.

44 Saunders’s stories, which entertain and interrogate, create group feeling among the living by cutting through to their sympathy. They leave open questions, making readers ponder the answers at their disposal. Figures such as Socrates, Buddha, or Jesus have seen love and justice, based on equality (before the law of the city, of karma, or of God) as the guides to all action (Lenoir ch.14, 15). But Vladimir Jankélévitch opined that equity, which involves love, and verges on injustice, is fairer than legal justice. For Jankélévitch, love and appropriate individual acts rather than set moral or legal rules are necessary for change to bring true justice (Collin). Saunders’s work illustrates the power of compassion and love as the measure that leads to harmony, much as the Greeks imagined sophrosyne (North 17, Snow 84). Whether the stories portray the afterlife as more confusing than his dystopic renditions of the present, or uphold divine love as an ideal, they work to restore harmony and connectedness, validating action.

Active Virtues and Kindred Spirits

45 Saunders fosters sympathy and compassion and his ghost stories increasingly make a case for their agency. The ghosts of the McKinnons and of the narrator’s parents are confused in “CivilWarLand” and “CommComm,” little Clive is sad about his curtailed life in “The Wavemaker Falters,” Aunt Bernie’s specter sees more than her family does but is a tragic figure, decomposing without attaining satisfaction in “Sea Oak,” and the zombies in “Brad Carrigan” are well-nigh powerless. And human specters can do very little. But in the later stories, “CommComm” or “Escape from Spiderhead,” individuals take responsibility and try to act justly and lovingly. There is no justice or reward for them in this life, but they become conscious in death of a love that perceives value and reflects it until all is made pure. This is the love that is greater than legal justice,

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according to Jankélévitch. The employer in “Sea Oak” may be legally just toward the narrator, as her associates had been legally just toward Bernie, and Brad Carrigan is dealt with legally by the bizarre society that Saunders sets him in. But the reader can surmise that equitable treatment, as tolerant and decent as they have been, would promote a saner society.

46 Plato has Socrates pronounce sophrosyne to be the virtue of moral “sanity,” of men who act “rightly and beneficially” (qtd. in Taylor 248-49). In his essay “Manifesto,” Saunders’s spokesperson states that to attain the blessed state of social sanity the individual need do little but observe the decencies of everyday life. Lincoln in the Bardo goes further, upholding the view that killing may be required of politicians, but that individual hopeful and kind action is the only answer when besieged with evil. So the President left his boy in a loaned tomb and went back to his work for the country. In “Lincoln: A Story for Boys,” by Maxwell Flagg. […] Imagine our surprise […] when, passing by an hour or so later, we found the lad still on the roof, looking expectantly about, as if waiting for a carriage to arrive and whisk him away. hans vollman And pardon me for saying so—but that wild-onion stench the young exude when tarrying? Was quite thick already. roger bevins iii Something needed to be done. the reverend everly thomas (24, 33)

47 In the Bardo, the ghosts are not sure whether there is a fair or moral hereafter; the Reverend Everly Thomas fears that there may be some hellish punishment in store for him. Yet to save Lincoln’s boy from torment, he resolves to act and do his best, and ends up sacrificing himself for the lad; and Hans Vollman notes that in the imprint of the Reverend’s departed form, “his countenance now conveyed a sense of tentative hopefulness—as if he were going into that unknown place content that he had, at any rate, while in this place, done all that he could” (276). Vollman and Roger Bevins will pass out of the Bardo saving the spirit of another child.

48 Saunders links kindness to the question of action in his commencement address to Syracuse University’s graduating class of 2013 (published under the title Congratulations, By the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness). In his latest appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, he calls for “radical tenderness” over the justice of rules and laws, citing the example of illegal immigrants as one in which liberals can effect change by sympathetic discussion with hardliners. As Matthews has noted, satirists often portray a machine- like system, representing individuals as mechanized to reveal the contradictions of the whole (20-22). Yet Saunders restores wholeness and connectedness as values by suggesting that the temperate virtues have the power to bring about righteous and beneficial acts.

49 Michael Faber, in a Guardian review, once said, “[T]here is something strangely uplifting about Saunders’s fiction, and not merely because of its quality and verve; there is a sense that the ghost of morality will continue to haunt the machine, in defiance of attempts to exterminate it” (Faber 2006). The virtues he prefers may be termed ghostly, reflecting through the insane situations of his liminal stories,

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apparently calling for no specific action. Still, in asserting that it is in every individual’s power to establish saner, more harmonious relations with others, and in cutting through to essentials in his fiction, Saunders inspires readers “to try,” as McClennen defined the effect of satire. Saunders considers that “part of our moral responsibility” is keeping in mind “those whose lives are unsafe and insane.” “In this way, fiction can be like a meditation, a way of saying: Though things are this way for me right now, they could be different later and are different for others this very moment” (“An Interview”).

50 Saunders’s pieces can lead us, “like a meditation,” to stand up and take sympathetic action when it may be done, thus illustrating some of the powers that Victor Turner attributed to liminal or liminoid works. Turner saw the liminal as part of social or religious ritual that was rare in industrial societies, and spoke of the liminoid for entertaining, yet subversive productions that support alternatives to the status quo and foster a spontaneous solidarity that he called “communitas” through the revision of accepted social conventions As Turner asserted in From Ritual to Theatre, “[W]here liminality is socially positive it presents […] a model of human society as homogenous, unstructured communitas, whose boundaries are ideally coterminous with those of the human species” (qtd. in Achilles and Bergmann 9). In his satire that debouches on the numinous and sympathy with the characters, Saunders encourages “communitas.” In Buddhism, true perfection is emptiness—but as in Tao, where the aim in following the “open life” is to be all that one can be, opening up to Saunders’s spirits enhances our possibilities.

- - - - -

51 In the final analysis, Saunders’s fiction cannot be summed up as simply a defense of any virtue, however desirable. What Saunders finds most “hopeful” is that readers enjoy his wit—the French “esprit,” or spirit: The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we’re ruled by big talking turds, it doesn’t mean that we are. […] [W]hat’s hopeful is this guy who is talking about it at least in a way that kind of lights you up a little bit when you read it. That would be the hopeful thing. Because everything else is just invention anyway. […] [A]nd it’s hopeful because it’s one human being talking to another in a non-condescending, loving way, saying, “Isn’t this a pisser? Isn’t this amazing what we got ourselves involved in here when we were born? Isn’t it sweet? Isn’t it horrible, isn’t it funny, isn’t it terrifying?” And I think just that connection—saying that—is really what literature has to offer. (“George Saunders”)

52 The ghost, a metaphor in spectrality studies, is truly a métaphore vive, a “live,” effective metaphor in Saunders’s satire. It is a fun fantasy that “lights us up a little bit” as we connect, and tells us much about the human condition. There is a part of any work of art that is beyond interpretation, and, like the ghost, is ineffable. Though Saunders’s witty ghost stories do not preach that we should be as kind and helpful as possible as we experience the mystery of our passage on earth, reading them, we better perceive that kin can encompass the other. And if we are not moved to act virtuously at once, his intimations of a measure fluid enough to include empathy may haunt us until they are realized in luminous deeds.

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NOTES

1. The author is indebted to Sarah Cummings, then a doctoral student at SUNY Oneonta University, New York, for her insightful remarks on this topic delivered at the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Society Conference, Albany, New York.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article examine les nouvelles de George Saunders sur des revenants à la lumière des études sur la spectralité pour poser la question de leur effet en tant que satire. La liminalité de la satire rejoint celle du spectre. Les personnages de Saunders, fantômes sociaux, et sa satire variée et allusive mettant l’accent sur la compassion et l’amour plutôt que sur la loi, rappellent la vision derridienne d’un spectre transformateur. Les fantômes dans ces nouvelles montrent que la sophrosine doit réguler l’hubris, et que ses vertus sont nécessaires afin que le changement mène à l’acte juste.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 70 | Spring 2018 169

AUTHORS

AMÉLIE MOISY Amélie Moisy is an associate professor (maître de conférences) in Applied Languages at the Paris Est Créteil University, and a member of the Text, Images and Sounds research group there. She is the author of a doctoral thesis, of numerous articles and a book on Thomas Wolfe (Thomas Wolfe, L’épopée intime, Belin, 2002). She has also written about other American writers, from Tennessee Williams to Barbara Kingsolver. Her research bears on autobiographical fiction, the literature of excess, and Southern authors.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 70 | Spring 2018