Journal of the Short Story in English, 51

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

51 | Autumn 2008 Theatricality in the Short Story in English

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/883 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 December 2008 ISSN: 0294-04442

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Laurent Lepaludier and Michelle Ryan-Sautour

Part 1: Theatricality and the Short Story

Theatricality in the Short Story: Staging the Word? Laurent Lepaludier

Chekhov’s Legacy: the influence of the implicit and the dramatic effect Jacqueline Phillips

Part 2: Theatricality and the Modernist Short Story

Theatricality, Melodrama and Irony in Stephen Crane’s Short Fiction Martin Scoﬁeld

Charades and Gossip: The Minimalist Theatre of Joyce’s Dubliners Valérie Bénéjam

Staging Social and Political Spaces: Living Theatre in Joyce’s “The Dead” Rita Sakr

The dramaturgy of voice in five modernist short fictions: Katherine Mansfield’s “The Canary”, “The Lady’s Maid” and “Late at Night”, Elizabeth Bowen’s “Oh! Madam…” and Virginia Woolf’s “The Evening Party” Anne Besnault-Levita

"Wash" as Faulkner's Prose Tragedy Françoise Buisson

Part 3: Theatricality and the Contemporary Short Story

Behind the Scenes of Sexual/Textual Politics in Angela Carter’s “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Michelle Ryan-Sautour

“This Tableau Vivant… Might be Better Termed a Nature Morte”: Theatricality in Angela Carter’s Fireworks Julie Sauvage

Helen Simpson’s “Opera” Ailsa Cox

From Participant to Observer: Theatricality as Distantiation in “Royal Beatings” and “Lives of Girls and Women” by Alice Munro Lee Garner and Jennifer Murray

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Part 4: A Short Story

“The Tipping Point” Helen Simpson

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Foreword

Laurent Lepaludier and Michelle Ryan-Sautour

1 This issue of the JSSE is a collection of papers given at the International Symposium on Theatricality in the Short Story at the University of Angers (Novembre 30th and December 1st, 2007). These papers have been selected by the JSSE reading committee. The symposium, which convened nineteen speakers from various universities, was organised by the CRILA. It followed a previous CRILA symposium on orality in the short story. Both conferences had been prepared by two years of research and seminars each.

2 The guest of honour of the conference on theatricality in the short story was Helen Simpson, a British short story writer, who read “The Tipping Point,” a short story she had recently written and read on the BBC. Her story is included with her permission in this issue.

3 Another highlight of the conference was the performance of a short story by students from the English department of the University of Angers under the direction of Susan Harloe, artistic director of the San Francisco theatre company “Word for Word”, a company which specialises in the staging of short stories.

4 The articles come under three main headings: after two papers with a general focus on the question of theatricality in the short story, another section is devoted to pre- modernist and modernist short story writers (English, Irish and American); a last section is concerned with contemporary short story writers (English and Canadian).

5 In an article entitled “Theatricality in the Short Story: Staging the Word”, Laurent Lepaludier (CRILA, University of Angers) makes a clear distinction between the short story and the theatre but raises a number of questions about a genre which mixes the narrative and the dramatic modes. The article examines what compares with the theatre in the short story and the devices used by the short story to mimic the theatre. If the nature of a short story is not theatrical, strictly speaking, effects of theatricality can often be identified and studied. The power of a theatrical short story resides precisely in the combination of its narrative and theatrical modes.

6 In “Chekhov’s Legacy: The Influence of the Implicit and the Dramatic Effect”, Jacqueline Phillips (Edge Hill University) studies the marked parallels between Chekhov’s stories and plays in technique, situation and character. But the dramatic effect is also due to

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Chekhov’s use of ellipses or restraint. Chekhov’s legacy is identified and analysed in Katherine Mansfield’s story “Bliss” and in Raymond Carver’s “Are These Actual Miles”.

7 Martin Scofield (University of Kent) approaches the question of theatricality in Stephen Crane’s short stories and their melodramatic aspect. Yet Stephen Crane mocks the excesses of popular dime novels and the melodramatic New York theatre through his ironic distance. He thus aims at a kind of ironic theatricality which ridicules human pretensions and confusions.

8 In “Charades and Gossip: The Minimalist Theatre of Joyce’s Dubliners”, Valérie Bénéjam (University of Nantes) examines James Joyce’s elliptical and minimalist short stories in order to show how theatricality functions in the epiphanies and in the dialogues, with related issues of interpretation and indetermination.

9 Rita Sakr (University of Nottingham) focuses more particularly on Joyce’s story “The Dead” to identify a considerable number of dramatic elements. She recalls the influence of Ibsen and Hauptmann on Joyce and analyses the dramatic and musical effects in “The Dead”. Sound and space function as mediators of the social and political subtext in Joyce’s story.

10 Anne Besnault-Lévita (University of Rouen) deals with five modernist short stories, three by Katherine Mansfield, one by Elizabeth Bowen and another one by Virginia Woolf. She explores what she calls the “dramaturgy of voice” expressed in dialogues, in monologues, in the absence of narratorial mediation. Lexico-grammatical features and phonological features are foregrounded, which creates dramaturgical moments. These remarks lead to an interpretation of the uses of such devices to suggest that Mansfield’s and Bowen’s stories devise a dramaturgy of the solitary self, while Woolf explores a dramaturgy of polyphony.

11 In “’Wash’ as Faulkner’s Prose Tragedy”, Françoise Buisson (University of Pau et Pays de l’Adour) shows how Faulkner’s narrative choices such as fragments of reported or narrated monologues contribute to the theatricality of the story. The succession of tableaux reminds the reader of pantomime and the setting is also given a theatrical quality. This story inspired by Greek tragedy is not devoid of ideological implications.

12 Michelle Ryan-Sautour’s article, “Behind the Scenes of Sexual/Textual Politics in Angela Carter’s ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’” deals with the intertwining of textual and sexual performance in Carter’s re-writing of the literary canon. Through the use of playful Shakespearean intertext, Carter invites the reader onto a literary stage of indeterminate limits, and through an emphasis on the author-reader contract in the performance of reading, inadvertently reveals forms of force and power at work in her fiction.

13 In “This Tableau Vivant …. Might Be Better Termed a Nature Morte’: Theatricality in Angela Carter’s Fireworks,” Julie Sauvage (University of Nantes) also comments on the participation of the reader, emphasizing how Brechtian-inspired alienation effects are at work in Carter’s short fiction through the combined use of pictorial and theatrical aesthetic models. According to Sauvage, the reader can develop conflicting attitudes, as he/she can be simultaneously distanced from the text and become an active actor in the creation of meaning.

14 Ailsa Cox (University of Edge Hill) studies the intertextual relationship between Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Eurydice and Helen Simpson’s “Opera”, exploring, for example, the theatrical quality of Simpson’s narrative technique and her use of direct discourse. Cox

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also comments on the role played by English Restoration comedy in Simpson’s work, and places special emphasis on Simpson’s equivocal ending and her ultimate movement towards a position of liminality between myth and social comedy.

15 In “From Participant to Observer: Theatricality as Distantiation in Alice Munro’s ‘Royal Beatings,’ and ‘Lives of Girls and Women’” Jennifer Murray and Lee Garner (University of Franche-Comté) collaborate to demonstrate how theatrical language in Munro’s short fiction highlights moments that are inherently theatrical, such as scenes involving forms of violence. Murray and Garner also highlight the use of theatricality in relation to reader participation that creates the impression of shielding the characters from the most threatening moments of the narrative.

16 The overall emphasis on the link between short fiction and theatricality led to a variety of interesting, and often surprising conclusions about the capacity of short narrative to manifest, manipulate, and experiment with the characteristics of another genre. Many comments were made about theatricality as metaphor, and on the recurrent overlapping of the concepts of performance and theatricality. The “stage” of literature was also often evoked, with an emphasis on the reader as “spectator” and “actor” in the theatrical functioning of the stories, thus questioning the boundaries of the dramatic setting. This collection of articles attests to the wide range of questions and observations that can emerge when the short story converges with other generic modes, in an ongoing exploration of its own boundaries and its potential to produce strikingly hybrid aesthetic forms.

AUTHORS

MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR Organisers of the Conference and Guest-Editors of this issue

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Part 1: Theatricality and the Short Story

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Theatricality in the Short Story: Staging the Word?

Laurent Lepaludier

1 After working for two years on orality in the short story, the CRILA research centre has been focusing its seminars on the question of theatricality in the short story. The symposium on the question appropriately broadened the research on an international basis. This paper aims at sorting out general directions on the subject. As the call for papers indicated, “[T]he short story is obviously not a dramatic genre, however it sometimes produces theatrical effects.” Theatricality is here simply understood as related to the theatre, or the presentation of plays. The second meaning of the term — i.e. histrionic or artificial — will be considered as a possible quality of theatre-acting. In his Introduction à l’architexte1, Gérard Genette retraces Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on the fundamental forms of literature: the lyrical form, the dramatic form and the epic. He explains that Plato distinguished between the purely narrative mode (corresponding to the lyrical form), the purely mimetic mode (corresponding to the dramatic form) and a mixed mode (with narrative and mimetic forms) corresponding to the epic. Plato’s triad eventually gave way to Aristotle’s dyad: the purely narrative form was neglected and the mixed form was considered as narrative. Genette develops a historical study of the evolution of these formal categories with the Latins, XVIth, XVIIth and XVIIIth century poeticians, and finally more recent criticism.

2 Narrative fiction can actually be seen as a mixed mode, a mode which most of the time blends the narrative and the dramatic forms. If the short story cannot be defined as a theatrical genre, stricto sensu, such marks as the presence of dialogues testify to the dramatic dimension of many stories. In a short story, some passages may create effects of theatricality. But dialogue is not the only form of theatricality in the short story. This calls for a study of the nature and types of theatricality shown in a short story.

3 What exactly compares with the theatre? When does the story mimic the theatre and with what devices? What effects, motivations and implications are there in a genre which mixes the narrative and the dramatic modes? These are general questions I would like to examine and which might inspire some reflexions and further developments or reactions. It seems first that a number of ambiguities should be

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clarified, for when the term “theatricality” is used, it is meant to define different relations to the theatre. Another point of discussion bears on the mixed quality of a type of narrative fiction which mimics the theatre. When the dramatic dimension of some stories supersedes the narrative one, it seems to “aspire to the condition” of theatre — to slightly pastiche and adapt Walter Pater’s famous quote from The Renaissance, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”2. The effects of theatricality will thus be evoked. Finally, when the short story blends the resources of narrative fiction and those of drama, it becomes a sort of versatile hybrid form whose powers should be examined.

The theatricality of the short story

4 The theatricality of narrative fiction in general — and of the short story in particular — should be compared with and differentiated from drama itself. Strictly speaking, the theatricality of a text does not compare with a theatrical performance on stage. The two different modes of mimesis create two different types of illusion. The dramatic mode implies a direct sensory contact between the characters and the audience. The staging of the scene necessitates the presence of actors who impersonate the characters and make us believe in their presence. Quite different is the experience of reading, based on the reader’s power of imagination and his/her faculty to stage the scene in his/her mind. Drama involves watching and hearing. It also differs from reading in the sense that another semiotic encoding/decoding is made possible thanks to direct sensory experience. The actors’ gestures, their movements, the tones of the voices, the lighting, the setting, etc. contribute to producing profound and complex effects on the audience. This cannot be achieved in reading, at least not through the same means. In addition, drama is essentially a collective activity. It involves the cultural and social interaction of a company of actors with an audience, whereas reading a short story — even a theatrical one — is bound to be an individual activity relating a reader with a text. The question of interpretation is thus central: a company of actors already interpret the script of a play for the benefit of an audience and mediate between the audience and the script, whereas the reader of narrative fiction directly interprets the significance of a story. The phenomenological differences in nature between the performance of a play and the reading of a short story are obvious and can be put aside for a while before we return to the comparison of their effects.

5 Comparing a short story with the script of a play seems much more appropriate. Indeed the script of a play and a short story are both texts, and both call for a reading experience. Thus they appeal to the imagination of the reader and preclude direct sensory experience. They both involve a relation between a reader —an individual reader, most of the time— and a text. Of course, a collective or shared reading is possible in cases of rehearsal or dramatised reading in the classroom, the latter being also possible for the short story if it is not too long. But the essential difference lies in the exclusively dramatic form of the script, whereas the dramatic short story also allows passages of narration. Stage directions appear in the theatrical script, but they are most often reduced to a bare minimum. There are, of course, exceptions: some playwrights tend to develop stage directions mostly in descriptive introductions to the plays. This is the case of Eugene O’Neill, for instance. Yet, if, on the whole, drama relies mostly on the characters’ enunciation to impart the audience with the necessary

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information for them to understand the scene, the short story may very well rely on other types of enunciation than dialogues to convey information about the atmosphere, the setting, a narrator’s view or impressions, the characters’ thoughts, the symbolic significance of the text, etc. The narrative and descriptive capacities of a short story can be relied on. When reading Henry James’s, D.H. Lawrence’s, Joseph Conrad’s or Virginia Woolf’s stories, to name but a few famous writers, much meaning is derived from what is not said by the characters. This is not true only of pre-modernist and modernist writers. It also applies to Edgar Poe’s, or Raymond Carver’s, or Alistair McLeod’s stories, for instance. Nevertheless, the capacity of a short story to approach the theatrical script is averred. In “A Society”, for instance, Virginia Woolf devotes the main body of the text to verbal exchanges which mimic the theatre.

6 Generic criticism has identified dramatic and narrative poles in the short story, and more generally in narrative fiction. “Telling” and “showing” are indeed the two major ways of presenting a character or a scene. Some stories rely more on telling and others on showing. There are short stories which are exclusively narrative or descriptive, where dialogue is not used at all, such as Virginia Woolf’s “The Lady in the Looking- Glass: A Reflection”3. Short stories which exclude all narration or description are certainly more rare and, all things considered, the genre of the short story may very well imply, because of its nature, a certain resistance to a complete dramatisation which would turn the short story into the script of a play. Reading Helen Simpson’s story collection Four Bare legs in a Bed and Other Stories4, one may expect “Labour” to be a short story. Yet, it has the form of a five-act Aristotelian play complying with the rules of the three unities and with dramatis personae including the prospective mother, the midwives, the uterus, the cervix etc. In fact, it is the script of a short comic play sharing much more in the spirit of the collection of stories. In less particular cases, some features of the short story genre may constitute factors of resistance to or limitation of the dramatic impulse. The very brevity of the short story often confines the theatrical potentials of the short story to the sketch. The orientation of the short story towards producing what Edgar Poe called the “unique or single effect”5 may be instrumental in precluding certain dramatic genres which call for a fuller and more complex development. In addition, the Joycean epiphany, which often characterises the short story, might be too limited or too intimate to be given a theatrical dimension. The narrative and descriptive impulses and their extensive capacities, aspirations towards the condition of music or the image may also discourage an overwhelming conquest of the story by the dramatic impulse. What is more, if both the play and the short story are characterised by a certain condensation, this condensation is in fact of two different types. The dramatic one is due to the absence of a narrative voice or commentary and implies that information is passed on essentially through the characters’ discourses, whereas condensation in the short story is due to lack of textual space.

7 Another point of comparison can be examined. When the short story refers or alludes to a play, the nature of its theatricality is then intertextual. This can be achieved either through content (reference to a character, a situation, a scene belonging to a play) or through the imitation of the form (through pastiche or parody, for instance). In the first case, the genre of the short story itself is not directly affected as the reader continues to see the text as a short story alluding to a play. Thus, E.M. Forster’s story “The Road from Colonus”6 alludes to Sophocles’ Theban tragedy Oedipus at Colonus, yet the genre of this short story itself is not directly affected by the allusion. The two

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genres are thus treated on two different planes. In the second case — i.e. when the story imitates a dramatic genre — , intertextuality affects more directly the nature of the short story since it seems to change it — albeit partly and for a time — into the script of a play. As a matter of fact, these two types of devices — reference to drama as content and imitation of theatrical form — are often mixed in a story and “The Road from Colonus” is not completely devoid of parodic elements based on subversive imitation of form. It is those formal parallels generating the theatricality of the short story which will more particularly focus my interest.

Effects of theatricality

8 When the story mimics the theatre by means of certain devices, it produces effects of theatricality which may give the impression that the story “aspires towards the condition” of theatre, so to speak. It may come close to the theatre in two ways, either because it resembles the script of a play or because it creates the illusion of a theatrical performance.

9 In passages of dialogues, the short story may appear to be similar to the script of a play. Then, the narrative voice effaces itself or is limited to indications which resemble stage directions. This could be exemplified by a great number of stories. Most of the short story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” by James Joyce could pass for the script of a play. Dialogues come forth and it is as though the words acquired a theatrical dimension. Like in drama, the significance of the story is conveyed essentially through the characters’ parts and the dramaturgy. The narrative is stripped of all that would not be useful for a play and the style resembles stage directions. In two pages 7, the only narrative indications, apart from the regular use of declarative verbs and subjects which allow an identification of the character speaking, are: Mr Henchy returned with the candlestick and put it on the table. He sat down again at the fire. There was silence for a few moments.(…) Mr O’Connor laughed.(…). At this point there was a knock at the door, and a boy put in his head.(…) The old man helped the boy to transfer the bottles from the basket to the table and counted the full tally.(…)

10 The effect of theatricality is thus achieved and the reader feels as if he's watching a play in his/her imagination. The scene is seen potentially as a script which could easily be put on stage. Time corresponds exactly to the time of discourse on stage, and descriptive and narrative indications are directed towards the performance. There is no place for a narrator’s comments or characters’ inner thoughts which would not be voiced. The scene is completely public.

11 Considering its macrostructure, a short story may mimic the script of a play, following rules of a particular dramatic genre: the tragedy, the comedy, the farce, the tableau, the pantomime, the melodrama, the Celtic Renaissance play, the Kabuki play, etc. The papers which follow will illustrate the great diversity of parallels between short stories and dramatic genres.

12 Theatrical effects are not restricted to a formal resemblance with the script of a play. Another type of dramatic effect is due to the power of the short story to create the illusion of performance. In other words, the reader of a short story may feel that the scene evoked is actually performed in front of his/her eyes, as on a stage. This is due to

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several combined factors which I would like to identify —albeit briefly and incompletely—, as a starting point for further developments. For a short story to create the illusion of drama, the scene evoked must be “spectacular”, i.e. suggest that it is worth watching by an audience. It must have visual and oral qualities, for indeed a dramatic scene needs to be seen and heard. Thus dramatic action or a vivid conversation allow the reader to imagine the scene easily. In “Other Kingdom” by E.M. Forster, for instance, Harcourt Worters and Miss Evelyn Beaumont express their opposite conceptions of “Other Kingdom Copse”, a wood that he, the wealthy owner, has bought her as a present. The scene appears vividly on the reader’s inner imaginary stage: “A simple fence,” he continued, “just like what I have put round my garden and the fields. Then at the other side of the copse, away from the house, I would put a gate, and have keys – two keys, I think – one for me and one for you – not more; and I would bring the asphalt path - ” “But, Harcourt - ” “But, Evelyn!” “I – I – I – ” “You – you – you - ?” “I- I don’t want an asphalt path.” “No? Perhaps you are right. Cinders perhaps. Yes. Or even gravel.” “But, Harcourt – I don’t want a path at all. I – I – can’t afford a path.” He gave a roar of triumphant laughter. “Dearest! As if you were going to be bothered? The path’s part of my present.” 8

13 The dramatic conflict over the asphalt path pits Harcourt and Evelyn against each other in a very theatrical fashion. The opposite opinions expressed in direct discourse create a scene which not only attracts the reader’s interest but also contribute to dramatising it as on a stage. This is a typical lovers’ scene in a comedy. The protagonists stand out as well-known theatrical types. Mr Harcourt Worters corresponds to the type of the rich, powerful yet insensitive man who lends a deaf ear to the sensitive, gentle but determined woman he courts. The comic effect lies in the gap between on the one hand what Evelyn expresses — which the readers or audience understand very well — and on the other hand Harcourt’s complete inability to simply hear, understand or imagine an opinion different from his own. The dramatic opposition is enhanced by a vivid dialogue with quick cues. The theatricality of the scene is also highlighted by the oral quality of the dialogue. The hesitations, the repetitions, the interruptions, the rhythmic nature of the verbal exchange, the questions, the ellipses, the roar of laughter, all these elements testify to the orality of the scene, which is part and parcel of its theatrical nature. The overall effect is that the scene appears to be one made for the stage, and even, that it is a scene taken from the theatre. It creates the impression that the scene is being performed on stage. There is a sense of actuality, as though the short story had shifted from a narrative type of mimesis to a dramatic one.

14 The examples illustrating the theatrical quality of short stories abound in this JSSE issue and the analyses of the theatrical devices and of their effects considerably enrich and deepen what I simply sketch here. But if the short story sometimes seems to both “aspire to the condition” of theatre and resist this aspiration, as we previously saw, the power of the theatrical short story may very well reside in its capacity to do both.

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The power of the theatrical short story

15 The power of the theatrical short story does not simply lie in its capacity to imitate drama, which would imply that it is of a subaltern or secondary nature and that its ideal or primary condition would be the theatre. In cases of theatrical adaptations of short stories, the short story could be seen as a potential reservoir for a dramatic development. Conversely the theatrical story could be seen as a mere transformation as are film adaptations of novels. The conceptions of short story writers turned playwrights or of playwrights turned short story writers would certainly throw a light on the subject. The following considerations are simply general reflexions on what the theatrical nature of a short story may imply in terms of aesthetic power.

16 The theatrical short story —if we may call it so, or rather the short story with theatrical effects— engages a dialogue with theatrical genres and with drama in general. It constitutes a very rewarding experience as it invites the reader to explore the borderline between narrative fiction and drama. The reader may thus experience an intertextual and intergeneric journey. The “in-between” generic position allows a view which throws a light on both genres. In her story “Mr. and Mrs. Dove”, Katherine Mansfield stages Reggie and Anne in scenes which compare with dramatic comedies. The serious conversation between Reggie, in love with Anne, and Anne, who finds him rather ridiculous, is punctuated comically by the cries of Anne’s doves: ‘Coo-too-coo-coo-coo’, sounded from the quiet. ‘But you’re fond of being out there, aren’t you?’ said Anne. She hooked her finger through her pearl necklace. ‘Father was saying only the other night how lucky he thought you were having a life of your own.’ And she looked up at him. Reginald’s smile was rather wan. ‘I don’t feel fearfully lucky,’ he said lightly. ‘Roo-coo-coo-coo,’ came again. And Anne murmured, ‘You mean it’s lonely.’ ‘Oh, it isn’t the loneliness I care about,’ said Reginald, and he stumped his cigarette savagely on the green ash-tray. ‘I could stand any amount of it, used to like it even. It’s the idea of – ‘Suddenly, to his horror, he felt himself blushing. ‘Roo-coo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo-coo!’9

17 Mansfield’s text invites the reader to an exploration of sentimental drama and dramatic comedy seen from the short story, and of the short story seen from a theatrical scene, a reflexion she prolongs with a remark on drama through Reggie’s imaginary conception of a potential rival seen as a heroic figure in a sort of cheap sentimental comedy turning into gothic drama in which Reggie is left playing the part of the villain: ‘The point is’ - she [Anne] shook her head – ‘I couldn’t possibly marry a man I laughed at. Surely you see that. The man I marry -’ breathed Anne softly. She broke off. She drew her hand away, and looking at Reggie, she smiled strangely, dreamily. ‘The man I marry-’ And it seemed to Reggie that a tall, handsome, brilliant stranger stepped in front of him and took his place – the kind of man that Anne and he had often seen at the theatre, walking on to the stage from nowhere, without a word catching the heroine in his arms, and after a long, tremendous look, carrying her off to anywhere…10

18 The text shows how the short story operates a dramatic shift in genre which reveals how deeply affected Reggie’s heart is and how the stereotypical theatricality of his rival bears upon Reggie’s sentimental life. The blending of dramatic means through

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theatricality and narrative technique through internal focalisation increases the power of the text.

19 The power of the theatrical short story lies precisely in its hybrid nature and versatility. Indeed, in “Mr. and Mrs. Dove”, the short story’s narrative capacity to give the reader access to Reginald’s mind complexifies the situation and allows the reader to see both Anne’s and Reginald’s views on their relationship. Thus narrative fiction provides added effects or a greater significance when combined with a theatrical scene.

20 Another story by Katherine Mansfield would illustrate this point. In “Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day”, the protagonist lends himself to a lot of imaginary and real theatrical and operatic attitudes. If the theatricality of the scene contributes greatly to a comic effect, the narrative comment allows the reader to delve into Reginald Peacock’s shallow nature with shattering irony. The weaving together of the narrative weft and the theatrical warp magnifies the comic and satirical capacities of each genre. The protagonist’s impressions and thoughts, a narrator’s humourous remark, an unexpected use of bathos are among the narrative means which develop the hilarious dramatic core of the scene: He began to imagine a series of enchanting scenes which ended with his latest, most charming pupil putting her bare, scented arms round his neck and covering him with her long perfumed hair. ‘Awake, my love!’ As was his daily habit, while the bath water ran, Reginald Peacock tried his voice. ‘When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror, Looping up her laces, tying up her hair,’ he sang, softly at first, listening to the quality, nursing his voice until he came to the third line: ‘Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded…’ and upon the word ‘wedded’ he burst into such a shout of triumph that the tooth- glass on the bathroom shelf trembled and even the bath tap seemed to gush stormy applause… Well, there was nothing wrong with his voice, he thought, leaping into the bath and soaping his soft, pink body all over with a loofah shaped like a fish. He could fill Covent Garden with it! ‘Wedded,’ he shouted again, seizing the towel with a magnificent operatic gesture, and went on singing while he rubbed as though he had been Lohengrin tipped out by an unwary Swan and drying himself in the greatest haste before that tiresome Elsa came along, along…11

21 George Meredith’s poem “Love in the Valley” and Wagner’s opera Lohengrin are used with burlesque effect in reciprocally dramatic and narrative ways.

22 The theatrical power of the short story lies indeed in its versatility and compression. It can create dramatic effects through showing, using pastiche or parody, and it can also use the flexibility of narrative fiction through telling in a compressed way. This is one more reason why the short story cannot be seen as a minor genre. It is a very versatile and powerful one. Long seen by some as a genre for beginners who want to have a go at something shorter than a novel, the short story has nevertheless been considered by others as a challenging and experimental one. Indeed, its capacity to absorb the dramatic qualities of theatre testifies to its versatile power. Staging the word is what theatrical short stories can do and it is also what good plays will do.

23 The versatility of the short story can be illustrated by Helen Simpson’s “Café Society”, which introduces two shattered young mothers, Frances and Sally at a lovely and quiet café. Sally is trying to keep her baby Ben as quiet as possible, a task which proves extremely difficult since Ben drops a buttery knife onto his mother’s coat and the knife

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falls noisily to the floor. He brays like a donkey, then grunts like a pig, throws his felt tips against the window while Sally is trying to sustain a conversation with Frances, a young mother she knows only by sight from the nursery school queue. The story is based on an alternate pattern of theatrical dialogues and passages of interior monologue in italics revealing Sally’s or Frances’s thoughts. The dramatic interest and the comic effect culminate towards the end of the story when [A]n elderly woman pauses as she edges past their table on the way to the till. She cocks her head on one side and smiles brightly at Ben, whose mouth drops open. He stares at her, transfixed, with the expression of a seraph who has understood the mystery of the sixth pair of wings. His mother Sally knows that he is in fact temporarily dumb- struck by the woman’s tremendous wart, which sits at the corner of her mouth with several black hairs sprouting from it. “What a handsome little fellow,” says the woman fondly. “Make the most of it, dear,” she continues, smiling at Sally. “It goes so fast.” Sally tenses as she smiles brightly back, willing her son not to produce one of his devastating monosyllables. Surely he does not know the word for wart yet. “Such a short time,” repeats the woman, damp-eyed. Well, not really, thinks Frances. Sometimes it takes an hour to go a hundred yards. Now she knows what she knows she puts it at three and a half years per child, the time spent exhausted, absorbed, used up, and, what’s more, if not, then something’s wrong. That’s a whole decade if you have three! (…) Ben’s eyes have sharpened and focused on his admirer’s huge side-of- the-mouth wart. “Witch,” he says loud and distinct. “Ben,” says Sally. She looks ready to cry, and so does the older woman, who smiles with a hurt face and says,” Don’t worry, dear, he didn’t mean anything,” and moves off. “WITCH”, shouts Ben, following her with his eyes. (…)12

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Forster, E.M. “The Road from Colonus”. Collected Short Stories. 1947. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002, 95-108.

---. “Other Kingdom”. Collected Short Stories. 1947. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 2002, 59-85.

Genette, Gérard. Introduction à l’architexte. Paris : Seuil, 1979.

Genette, Gérard et al. Théorie des genres. Paris: Seuil, Points, 1986.

Joyce, James. “Ivy-Day in the Committee Room”. Dubliners. 1914. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974, 116-133.

Mansfield, Katherine. “Mr. and Mrs. Dove”. Selected Stories. 1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1981, 273-281.

---. “Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day”. Selected Stories, 1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1981, 156-163.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 51 | Autumn 2008 15

Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London : Macmillan, 1873.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed., James A. Harrison, New-York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1902, XI, 106-113.

Simpson, Helen. “Café Society”, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life. London: Vintage, 2001, 10-19.

---. Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories. London: Heinemann, 1990.

Woolf, Virginia. “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection”. The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford’s World’s Classics, 2001, 63-68.

NOTES

1. Gérard Genette, Introduction à l’architexte, (Paris: Seuil, 1979.) See also G. Genette et al. , Théorie des genres, (Paris: Seuil, Points, 1986.) 2. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London : Macmillan, 1873) 135. 3. Virginia Woolf, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection”, The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford’s World’s Classics, 2001) 63-68. 4. Helen Simpson, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1990). 5. “A skilful artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents – he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.” Edgar Allan Poe, from a review originally published in Graham’s Magazine, May 1842, of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed., James A. Harrison (New-York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1902) XI, 107. 6. E.M. Forster, “The Road from Colonus”, Collected Short Stories (1947), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002) 95-108. 7. James Joyce, “Ivy-Day in the Committee Room”, Dubliners (1914), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 124 and 125 (116-133) 8. E.M. Forster, “Other Kingdom” in Collected Short Stories (1947), (Harmondsworth : Penguin) 72-3. 9. Katherine Mansfield, “Mr. And Mrs. Dove”, in Selected Stories (1953), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1981) 277-8. 10. Ibid., 279. 11. Katherine Mansfield, “Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day” in Selected Stories, 156. 12. Helen Simpson, “Café Society”, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000.) (London: Vintage, 2001) 17-19.

ABSTRACTS

Qu’est-ce qui, dans la nouvelle, rappelle le théâtre ? Dans quels cas et par quels procédés la nouvelle imite-t-elle le théâtre ? Quels sont les effets dramatiques, leurs raisons et leurs implications dans un genre littéraire qui mêle le mode narratif et le mode dramatique ? Telles sont les questions d’ordre général abordées dans cet article. Il semble tout d’abord qu’un certain

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nombre d’ambiguïtés devraient être levées, car lorsque l’on utilise le terme de “théâtralité”, il s’agit de divers rapports au théâtre. Un autre aspect du débat porte sur la nature mixte de la nouvelle théâtrale, genre narratif qui imite le théâtre. Quand la dimension dramatique de certaines nouvelles prend le pas sur leur dimension narrative, elles semblent alors “aspirer à la condition” du théâtre – pour pasticher quelque peu et adapter la célèbre citation de La Renaissance de Walter Pater, “Tout art aspire sans cesse à la condition de la musique”. Certains effets de théâtralité sont donc identifiés. Finalement, lorsque la nouvelle mêle les ressources du récit et celles du théâtre, elle devient une sorte de forme hybride dotée de pouvoirs étendus

AUTHORS

LAURENT LEPALUDIER Laurent Lepaludier, agrégation and Doctorat d’Etat, is a professor of English at the University of Angers where he teaches British literature and critical theory. He has written a thesis on Joseph Conrad. Head of the CRILA research centre of Angers, he is also head of the English section of the CERPECA (the Canadian studies research centre of Angers). He has published articles on XIXth and XXth century British novels and short stories, on Canadian short stories, and a book entitled L’Objet et le récit de fiction (P.U. Rennes). His research currently focuses on fiction and knowledge and on the poetics of narrative fiction.

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Chekhov’s Legacy: the influence of the implicit and the dramatic effect

Jacqueline Phillips

1 In Act 4 of Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, the writer Konstantin sits at his desk and crosses out sentences and whole paragraphs from a story he is currently working on. He is dissatisfied with his work, feels it is too explicit, full of superfluous adjectives and adverbs. He envies the writer Trigorin who can convey a dramatic scene in very few words. Konstantin looks through what he has already written: My description of the moonlit night is long and forced. Trigorin’s worked out his methods, it’s easy enough for him. He gives you the neck of a broken bottle glittering against a weir and the black shadow of a mill wheel - and there’s your moonlit night all cut and dried. But I have a quivering light and the silent twinkling of the stars and the distant sound of a piano dying on the calm, scented air1.

2 The advice that Chekhov incorporated into this play is the essence of his poetics of the implicit in the short story. He repeated this advice again and again in countless letters to fellow writers – to cut back – to imply the obvious and the subtle, in order to create a potent scene that stands out.

3 It may seem to be a contradiction to say that a dramatic effect can be achieved through suggestion, through what is not stated directly, but it is this restraint, this holding back of the explicit, that creates the force, immediacy and proximity in Chekhov’s stories, and of those writers that have been influenced by him.

4 Chekhov was essentially a dramatist and this was reflected in his stories, in fact there are marked parallels in technique, situation and character in his stories and plays. Donald Rayfield writes that: Chekhov [used] on drama the techniques with which he had revolutionised short stories. Understatement, ambiguity, inconsequentiality, make the Chekhovian short story: it points to, but refuses to open the cupboard where the skeleton is concealed […] . 2

5 To take an example from Chekhov’s story ‘Sleepy’. The story takes place within twenty- four hours in a small room that is part of a cobbler’s home. A young girl is employed as a nursemaid and is totally exhausted working constantly without sleep. The entire

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narrative is concerned with her battle to stay awake and the consequences if she falls asleep.

6 Our interest here, however, is not so much on the story that is narrated, as on the story that remains unsaid and hidden in the implicitude of the text, providing a basis on which to build a dramatic structure3. In ‘Sleepy’ the scene that unfolds before the reader is vivid and palpable, and yet the only direct description of the room is found in the first paragraph. As the story opens, it is possible to visualise a stage upon which sits a young girl, surrounded by the following scene: A little green lamp is burning before the icon; there is a string stretched from one end of the room to the other, on which baby clothes and a pair of big black trousers are hanging. There is a big patch of green on the ceiling from the icon-lamp, and the baby-clothes and the trousers throw long shadows on the stove, on the cradle, and on Varka … When the lamp begins to flicker, the green patch and the shadows come to life, and are set in motion, as though it is the wind. 4

7 There is nothing superfluous in this description. It not only evokes a strong feeling of the room, there are also elements that are referred to at points in the rest of the narrative that reinforce the setting and the atmosphere of the situation, creating a continuation of the dramatic effect in which the tiny room stands out as if on the stage. But there is a deeper implicit to be found here; Chekhov briefly creates this opening scene and interweaves elements of it into the story, not just to allow the reader to identify with Varka’s situation, but even more powerfully, to feel what she is feeling. He insists that the deep emotion present within the text is more intimately realised through the unsaid.

8 This is achieved through the device of analeptic dream sequences, in order to allow the reader a brief look at Varka’s past and how she came to be in her present situation. A larger picture is effectively compacted within this limited time frame and cramped location, but it is in these dream sequences that we see the dramatic effect most vividly portrayed. For example, the dream sequences allow Varka to step out of the tiny room without having to actually leave it. Everything in the room is linked to her dream experience. The soporific effect of the green icon light, and the moving shadows, lull her to sleep, and they reflect through the images in the dreams where the crying baby is represented along with her desperate need for sleep. As she drifts in and out of her dreams and her past, this device brings about an extension of the scene in the opening paragraph at various points in the story: The lamp flickers. The patch of green and the shadows are set in motion, forcing themselves on Varka’s fixed, half-open eyes, and in her half slumbering brain […] [s]he sees dark clouds chasing one another over the sky, and screaming like the baby. But then the wind blows, the clouds are gone, and Varka sees a broad high road covered with liquid mud; along the high road stretch files of wagons [ …]5

9 It is the strategic use of these chronological ellipses that give the sense of a continuum of the present moment, rather than that of missing information about what happened in the interim. Everything contained in the dream sequences links to her present situation. A palpable sense of linkage and movement, as present slips into past and past into present is shown in the next extract, as her need for sleep also manifests itself in the dream: All at once the people […] and their shadows fall on the ground in the liquid mud. “What is that for?” Varka asks. “To sleep, to sleep!” they answer her. And they fall sound asleep, and sleep sweetly, while crows and magpies sit on the telegraph wires, scream like the baby, and try to wake them6.

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10 This repeated back and forth from dream to reality, linking the events in the dream to circumstances in the waking state, give a vivid and dramatic picture without any interruption to the present. Not only do the dreams increase the effect of the sense of extreme sleep deprivation, they also give a more potent picture of her present circumstances: Varka goes out into the road and cries there, but all at once someone hits her on the back of the head so hard that her forehead knocks against a birch tree. She raises her eyes and sees, facing her, her master, the shoemaker. “What are you about? […] he says. “The child is crying, and you are asleep!” He gives her a sharp slap behind the ear, and she shakes her head, rocks the cradle, and murmurs her song. The green patch and the shadows from the trousers and the baby-clothes move up and down, nod to her [ …] Again she sees the high road […] and the shadows have lain down and are fast asleep7.

11 The birch tree in the dream denotes the transition to her present reality, the knock on the head intrudes into the dream, the green light and the movement of shadows lull her back to sleep again, and so it continues. At the end of this five-page story there is the sense that you have not only read something much longer, but that you have witnessed the whole scene as a seamless continuum through the strategy of minimum exposition.

12 It was Chekhov’s innovatory approach to structure, through his theories of laconicism and restraint, that appealed to the modernist writers, his ability to convey the dramas of life implicitly, the pathos, irony and absurdities of human experience, along with the breaking of conventional boundaries of the structure of a narrative. This influence is clearly demonstrated in Katherine Mansfield’s stories. In critiquing a fellow writer’s work she wrote: [The] stories are awfully good, but they don’t quite come off because you used more words than were necessary. There’s a kind of diffuseness of expression […] When one writes like that … it’s as though the nerve of the feeling were gone […]8

13 This is Chekhov’s advice in different words. He wrote: There ought to be nothing unnecessary. Everything that has no direct relation to the story must be ruthlessly thrown out. 9

14 Mansfield’s stories are like one act plays. Through her use of the implicit dimension of language she removes all that does not directly contribute to the emotional impact. In the words of Wilfred Stone: She concentrated the presentation of plot into a brief time span covering only the most dramatic moments. Time past, present, and future all seem to be occurring now in the mind of the protagonist. The whole weight of a life – or of a marriage – is compressed in a moment 10

15 Mansfield’s story ‘Bliss’ demonstrates this dramatic effect through her use of the implicit that is characterised by suggestion, inference, and indirection. In parallel to this she frequently disrupts continuity in the narrative through elliptically constructed sentences that provide silent spaces, and the possibility for the recovery of implicit meaning.

16 ‘Bliss’ is a story of complicated relationships in terms of gender identification. The reader is immediately thrown into the centre of the story, exposing the main character’s state of mind. Although the language used appears to be depicting an exalted state of mind, it is actually exposing the opposite, something far deeper. The opening has a theatrical effect. The main character steps out onto the stage, so to

Journal of the Short Story in English, 51 | Autumn 2008 20

speak, with a strong sense of movement, and energy, that expresses her mood as if she’s speaking directly to the reader/audience: Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or stand still and laugh at - nothing - at nothing, simply. What can you do if you are thirty and turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of late afternoon sun […] sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? …11

17 Although this is expressed as a third person narration, it has the same dramatic impact that Irina’s speech does in Chekhov’s play Three Sisters. As with the protagonist in ‘Bliss’, this outburst of heightened feeling overlays the opposite: in Irina’s case, a yearning to break free from an overwhelming atmosphere of provincial stagnation, with little prospect of change: What a marvellous day! I’m in such a good mood, I don’t know why […] Tell me why I am so happy today? I feel as if I was sailing along with a great blue sky above me, and huge white birds soaring about. Tell me why? 12

18 There are parallels too in the overuse of metaphor, and in how the diction, syntax and rhetorical dimensions of language are leading the reader/audience towards an implicit that suggests a state of mind in delusion, and advancing towards the hysterical in it’s yearning for the unattainable.

19 Mansfield doesn’t just describe the feelings of her protagonist; she brings her out of the page, drawing the reader into the emotional centre of the story. In this manifestation of character, if you like, it is the un-stated, the indirection in the language, that sharpens the experience of the dramatic effect.

20 The character’s state of heightened awareness is suspicious, but this is only suggested indirectly through a use of language that both announces and diminishes her self- confidence at the same time. There is a strong sense of movement as Bertha continues to fly through the story in this delusionary state of bliss, which inevitably draws towards a reality that is in opposition to this, although never stated directly: […] there was still that bright glowing place – that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher […]. She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror – but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling trembling lips […] and an air of listening, waiting for something … divine to happen … that she knew must happen … infallibly.13

21 The elliptic last sentence is just a succession of phrases without any formal linking, but the pauses between them are significant. The gaps are revealing, this is where the story is the most potent and where the drama arises through a palpable sense of doubt, hesitation and even foreboding that pervades, not only this sentence, but the whole paragraph, and indeed the whole story.

22 The real story lies beneath the text and moves relentlessly to the ending, which is interrupted and inconclusive as Bertha’s bubble of bliss bursts after finding her husband and the woman she thinks she’s in love with together in the hall. The story breaks off abruptly at this point as she realises the extent of her delusion, as was anticipated at the start of the story. In the words of Andrew Bennett: The narrative trajectory of ‘Bliss’[…] is revealed at the end to have been encoded within the prose from the story’s opening sentence.14

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23 It is in this active recovery of implicit meaning, on the part of the reader, that gives this story a keen edge, something more than just words on a page that ignite the imagination, instead, an intense participation that contributes to an experience that is akin to the theatrical.

24 It is not possible to discuss Chekhov and his influences, in relation to the dramatic effect, without mentioning the writer, Raymond Carver, who was significantly influenced by him, ‘Chekhov, the writer who has meant so much to me […]’.15

25 As with Chekhov, Carver’s use of the implicit dimension of language, to convey meaning from the unsaid, is at the very centre of his compositional poetics and particularly in terms of a stark potency in the narrative, providing an intense dramatic reading. Carver writes: What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.16

26 This influence is clearly demonstrated in Carver’s story ‘Are These Actual Miles’.17 The omission of the most important fact in the story, that of Leo’s wife, Toni, having to spend the night with a salesman to achieve their goal of selling their car, is possibly one of the finest examples in short story writing of how the unsaid can ‘speak’ about a significant event with powerful and dramatic effect. Narrative tension is achieved by what is not stated, as in the following extract when Toni’s intention is hinted at from the opening of the story when she dresses carefully as if going on a date: “You’re making me nervous,” she says. “I wish you wouldn’t just stand,” she says. “So tell me how I look.” “You look fine,” he says. “You look great. I’d buy a car from you anytime.” […] “It has to be done, so I’ll do it. You take it out, you’d be lucky to get three, four hundred, and we both know it. Honey, you’d be lucky if you didn’t have to pay them […] . I’ll have to have dinner or something, I told you that already, that’s the way they work. I know them. But don’t worry, I’ll get out of it,” she says. “I can handle it.” 18

27 The oblique reference in this example establishes a sense of anticipation of what she might have to do in order to sell the car. The unsaid continues by the very length of her absence and Leo’s waiting, drinking Scotch. In the following extract it is possible to imagine this character sitting on a stage, alone, performing deliberate and precise acts in an attempt to suppress anxiety, and to pass time: He sits on the step with the empty glass in his hand and watches the shadows fill up the yard. He stretches, wipes his face […]. Inside he makes a large drink and turns the TV on […]. He sits at the table with chilli and crackers and watches something about a blind detective. He clears the table. He washes the pan and the bowl, dries these things and puts them away, then allows himself a look at the clock. 19

28 Suggestion suffuses the whole story. Carver delivers narrative tension deftly in the waiting for the wife to phone or return home. It is not difficult for the reader to imagine what’s going on, but not a word is written to indicate what is exactly happening: He circles the kitchen and goes back to the living room. He sits. He gets up. In the bathroom he brushes his teeth very carefully. Then he uses dental floss. He washes his face and goes back to the kitchen. He looks at the clock and takes a clean glass […]. He fills the glass with ice. He stares for a while at the glass he left in the sink.20

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29 The uncluttered simplicity of the prose – the short, direct sentences – gives vitality and dynamism to the text, which is evocative of drama. It is what the characters do not say that is strengthening to the story. The implicit emotion contained in these small domestic tasks shows a glimpse of the truth, the impact of which is stronger than if it were more explicit.

30 In this, he’s following Chekhov’s advice to the letter. Chekhov wrote: If I introduce subjectivity, the image becomes blurred and the story will not be as compact as all short stories ought to be. When I write, I reckon entirely upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in the story.21

31 The implicit aspect in the unsaid, and in the character’s actions, does not directly show a man beset by anxiety, instead, he performs mundane tasks, but the basic nature of his simple actions emphasises his distress more dramatically than a more explicit representation. Again, this device is seen in Chekhov’s plays. For example, at the end of Act 4 in The Seagull Konstantin silently tears up his manuscripts and throws them in a wastebasket under his desk. He then meticulously tidies his desk, placing each item carefully and deliberately. Not a word is spoken; he is alone on the stage, the atmosphere of something unpleasant about to happen is potently conveyed.

32 In an interview, V.S. Pritchett stated: I think intensity is something very marked in the best short stories. They’re not superficial in just hitting upon one or two things. They’ve chosen those things for a purpose which runs clean through the story. And which sharpens it …22

33 The Chekhovian story is one that demonstrates this, these are stories that are not epic in proportion, and do not contain details that examine a moral or social context in which a character is placed. Instead, the dramas of everyday life are portrayed within a sharp, uncluttered narrative that highlights the intensity of the situation, without unnecessary distraction. The focus, is, as if through a telephoto lens, rather than a wide angle, depicting a scene that can be sharply visualised as if on the stage. The theatricality of these stories lies in what is un-stated, in what is left out, leaving a vivid impression of only the most essential elements that actually highlight implicit meaning by which a fuller picture is then created.

NOTES

1. Anton Chekhov, Five Plays, Transl. Ronald Hingley(Oxford University Press, 1998) 111. 2. Donald Rayfield, ‘Chekhov’s Stories and the Plays’, The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov (Cambridge University Press, 2004) 203. 3. Implicitude: a term coined by Marcella Bertuccelli, in relation to the story that is left unsaid and hidden in the implicit dimension of language, Implicitness in Text and Discourse (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2002) 4. Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: W.N. Norton and Company, 1979) 64. 5. ibid, 65

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6. ibid, 65. 7. ibid, 67 8. Andrew Bennett, Katherine Mansfield (Writers and Their Work, Northcote House, 2004) 22. 9. A.B. Derman, ‘Compositional Elements in Chekhov’s Poetics’, Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1979) 302. 10. Wilfred Stone, ed. The Short Story (Boston: McGraw Hill,1983) 337. 11. Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (Penguin, 2000) 48. 12. Anton Chekhov, Five Plays, 172 -173. 13. Mansfield, op.cit. 48-49. 14. Bennett, op.cit. 25. 15. Raymond Carver, “On Errand” in The Story and its Writer, ed. Ann Charters (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martins, 1999) 1588. 16. Raymond Carver, “On Writing”, Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (New York: Vintage, 1989) 26. 17. Raymond Carver, Will You Please be Quiet Please (London: Vintage, 2003) 150. 18. ibid, 150-151. 19. ibid, 153. 20. ibid, 154. 21. Anton Chekhov, “Technique in Writing the Short Story” in The Story and his Writer, 1447. 22. V.S. Pritchett, ‘An Interview with V.S. Pritchett’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 6 (Spring 1986): 29.

ABSTRACTS

L’emploi de la dimension implicite du langage pour exprimer le sens à partir du non-dit se situe au cœur-même de la poétique textuelle de Tchékhov. Cet article examine la structure narrative des nouvelles choisies et y repère la présence de l’effet dramatique au travers de ce qui n’est pas dit. Cette caractéristique est ce sur quoi reposent la structure dramatique et les divers effets produits. Ainsi, dans la nouvelle “Sleepy”, une forte image visuelle est produite par une brève phrase décrivant “une petite lampe verte qui brûle devant l’icône”. L’effet de la lumière verte qui projette des ombres mouvantes dans la toute petite pièce est subtilement renforcé dans l’ensemble de la nouvelle et crée l’impression palpable d’une atmosphère oppressante proche de l’expérience théâtrale. Dans un second temps, l’article montre comment la poétique tchékhovienne de l’implicite liée à l’effet dramatique est incorporée aux œuvres de nouvellistes postérieurs qui indiquent ainsi l’influence de Tchékhov sur leur écriture.

AUTHORS

JACQUELINE PHILLIPS Jacqueline Phillips completed her PhD in creative and critical writing at Lancaster/Edge Hill University. The title of her thesis is ‘The Short Story: Theory and Practice’. She also lectured in Creative and Critical Writing and the Twentieth Century Short Story, at Edge Hill University. She is a short story writer and has published several articles and essays on the short story, most recently an essay for The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, ‘The Prose Narratives: Dream Quilt and the

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Short, Short Story’, (ed. Sheppard R. 2007). Her research currently focuses on the poetics of the implicit in the short story.

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Part 2: Theatricality and the Modernist Short Story

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Theatricality, Melodrama and Irony in Stephen Crane’s Short Fiction

Martin Scofield

1 The writing of Stephen Crane has been frequently discussed in terms of the idea of ‘realism’. Crane himself gave credibility to the use of the term in relation to his own writing, as when he spoke of his admiration for Tolstoy.1 His use of the term here probably suggests above all ‘anti-idealism’ (or perhaps ‘anti-romanticism’). Understood like this, the aim of realism can easily be attributed to stories like Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, or ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky’. But ‘realism’ also usually connotes a certain style: plain, descriptive prose, aiming at a kind of photographic fidelity to the surface of things; a preoccupation with the historical and the everyday; a medium which claims (at any rate) to reflect life directly and without distortion, like Stendhal’s idea of a ‘mirror journeying down the highroad’2, reflecting everything it sees with as little interference of the medium as possible. Of course, ‘realism’ has its conventions and its special means of achieving ‘effect’. But in relation to the common understanding of the phrase in relation to style (an understanding that applies well enough to, say, the novels of George Moore or of Tolstoy), Crane’s style seems very far from realist. This article will begin from the premise that it would be better to abandon the notion of realism in relation to Crane, and focus instead on his use of theatricality and melodrama as a way of highlighting his distinctively heightened and bravura style, particularly in connection with his preoccupation with heroism. Rather than theorizing the notion of theatricality in relation to realism, it will try to draw attention to Crane’s theatrical mode of imagination in the tropes of his style and his sense of structure.

2 Alan L. Ackerman’s book The Portable Theatre: American Literature and the Nineteenth Century American Stage (1999) is mainly about American drama, but it also looks at the relations between theatricality on the stage and theatricality in the novel, picking up on William Dean Howells’ suggestive phrase about the novel as a ‘portable theatre’. In a review of Ackerman’s study, Patricia Lee Yongue regretted the absence of any discussion of ‘such germane texts as Stephen Crane’s Maggie.’3This paper, then, is an attempt to fill that gap; and to suggest that for Crane, as for other writers of the late 19th century and later, drama, melodrama and theatricality, are even more successfully

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deployed on the page than on the stage. (Writers as diverse as Melville, Dickens, Henry James and T. S. Eliot come to mind).

3 Let me begin, then, with the opening of Maggie: A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting him.His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great crimson oaths. […] Tattered gamins made a furious assault on the gravel heap. On their small, convulsed faces there shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus.4

4 From the first paragraph there is the suggestion of a mise-en-scène, a spectacle akin to a bear-baiting perhaps. The ‘delivery’ of the ‘great crimson oaths’ suggests a histrionic mode and the ‘grins of true assassins’ are clearly feigned not real. The little boys curse ‘in shrill chorus’ – either like the chorus of a Greek tragedy or the chorus of an opera or musical. In chapter II Jimmie’s baby brother ‘made heroic endeavors to keep on his legs, denounce his sister and consume a bit of orange peeling which he chewed between the times of his infantile orations.’ (6, my italics), and a page or so later, he watches the violent scene of the mother’s berating of Jimmie, ‘his face in contortions like that of a woman at a tragedy’ (7). The mode is theatrical and burlesque, a kind of mock heroic which, like the mock-heroic of Alexander Pope, both ironizes the scene of conflict and yet suggests, paradoxically, that the passions which gripped the protagonists are, despite the pettiness of the struggle, as humanly intense as the passions of the great heroes of old.5 This technique goes beyond the possibilities of most 19c ‘realism’ (as in, say, the stories of Hamlin Garland) because it makes the impoverished working-class characters more than just victims and figures of conventional pathos: it gives them status by suggesting the force of the human energy which they contain, a force so pitifully wasted in the petty and self-destructive struggles of their lives. The mode is also akin to melodrama, in that feelings and language are rhetorically exaggerated and there is seemingly a stark contrast between good and evil. (This division is the crux of the story’s tragedy: once Maggie is ‘fallen’ sexually she is regarded as wholly vicious by her family, and beyond redemption).

5 The presence of theatricality and melodrama in the style is counterpointed ironically by the description of the melodramas which Pete takes Maggie to see in the New York theatres in chapter VIII: Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the beautiful sentiments. The latter spent most of his time out at soak in pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing aged strangers from villains. Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow-storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir within singing ‘Joy to the World.’ To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they, like the actor, inevitably without. Viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic pity at their imagined or real condition. (27)

6 This melodrama is seen ironically but the irony is complex. The inevitable happy ending (the hero is always noble and always wins) falsifies life, but the desire for the triumph of good is real. The idea that others (‘within’) are always happy is false, as is the belief that those ‘outside’ are always innocently unhappy. But the audience's pity is not only or always factitious or deceived: they hug themselves in ecstatic pity ‘of their

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imagined or real condition.’ (my italics). Melodrama in the popular theatre can be at least half true, and console the audience with the hope of something better. The trouble is that its element of falsity also deceives fatally, and is doubtless one of the things that leads Maggie to identify Pete as ‘her beau ideal of a man’ (19) and ‘a knight’ (20).

7 My general point is that Crane uses the techniques and language of theatricality and melodrama both to bring home to the reader the plight of Maggie and the nature of her world, and to comment ironically on the distortions of popular melodrama which confuse the heroine’s perception of reality. At the same time the verve and panache of popular melodrama is carried over into Crane’s own descriptions which depict the realities of New York squalor in the bold primary colours and exaggerated lines of caricature. The performance of the small, fat vaudeville singer in the theatre (‘He made his face into fantastic grimaces, until he looked like a painted devil on a Japanese kite’) is scarcely less exaggerated than Crane’s own description of the ‘huge fat man in torn and greasy garments’ who follows Maggie to the riverside just before her death. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amid great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face . He laughed, his brown disordered teeth gleaming under a grey, grizzled moustache from which beerdrops dripped. His whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish. Chuckling and swearing, he followed the girl from the crimson legions. (53)

8 (That ‘girl from the crimson legions’ is itself a phrase that might have come from a popular melodrama or ‘penny dreadful’).

9 But perhaps the most powerful and ambivalent combination of melodrama and tragedy comes at the end of the novella, when a chorus of neighbours surrounds the grieving mother of Maggie. There is an excruciating moment of combined sentimentality and genuine pain (on the mother’s part) when she finds a pair of Maggie’s baby shoes and insists that Jimmy bring Maggie’s body and put them on her feet. Then a neighbour comes forward and insists, in a gesture that is for the reader supremely ironic given Mary’s monstrous neglect of Maggie, that she forgive her daughter. And the story ends in a climax of theatrical call and response and a veritable ‘curtain line’ that anticipates the combined pathos and farce of the endings of some of Sean O’ Casey’s plays, where a woman’s genuine lamentations are counterpointed with the drunken dialogue of two soldiers (Juno and the Paycock) or with their sentimental songs (The Plough and the Stars). And as in some sentimental painting, or one of those plays Maggie used to watch, a character will ‘raise her eyes to the sunbeams’ to underscore a pious exclamation: ‘Yeh’ll fergive her, Mary! Yeh’ll fergive her bad, bad chil’! Her life was a curse an’ her days were black an’ yeh’ll fergive yer bad girl? She’s gone where her sins will be judged.’ ‘She’s gone where her sins will be judged,’ cried the other women, like a choir at a funeral. ‘Deh Lord gives and deh Lord takes away,’ said the woman in black, raising her eyes to the sunbeams. ‘Deh Lord gives and deh Lord takes away,’ responded the others. ‘Yeh’ll fergive her, Mary!’ pleaded the woman in black. The mourner essayed to speak but her voice gave way. She shook her great shoulders frantically in an agony of grief. Hot tears seemed to scald her quivering face. Finally her voice came and arose like a scream of pain. ‘Oh, yes. I’ll fergive her! I’ll fergive her!’ (58)

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10 The distinctive difference from O’Casey, however, (and this is a mark of the power of Crane’s prose) is that ultimately the drunken farce and the tragic pain are focused in the same character, Mary, and the power comes from our inability to separate the two elements of self-deception and sincerity, the character’s own theatricality from her sense of reality.

11 In ‘The Bride comes to Yellow Sky’ and ‘The Blue Hotel’ Crane’s deployment of theatricality takes different but no less significant forms, and in both stories it is associated above all with Crane’s analysis of true and false heroism. The former story is first of all an almost copy-book tragi-comedy, in four acts. It begins with a marriage in the first act, brings the threat of death and of the dissolution of the social order in the second and third, and ends in the fourth with the overcoming of both threats and the reconfirming of the new dispensation of marriage. Secondly, the mise-en-scène in each part is calculated to maximize the sense of theatrical spectacle. And thirdly the mixture of tragedy and comedy, violence and humour corresponds to these elements in the theatrical genre. In the second story, the blue hotel itself stands as a symbol for the theatrical (and proleptically, indeed, for the cinematic)6 – that heightened and unreal idea of the Wild West that leads the Swede to his death in downtown Romper.

12 In ‘The Bride Come to Yellow Sky’ the opening scene from the train window, as the train moves from west to east, has been rightly seen as a classic instance of Crane’s ‘impressionism’: ‘The Great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward’7 But it could also be seen as theatrical, since a screen, moving from left to right behind a stage-set window, would be the way of conveying the movement of a train from right to left in a stage scene. The fittings of the Pullman have all the lavishness and ornateness of an opulent stage-set: ‘the sea-green figured velvet, the shining brass, silver and glass, the wood that gleamed as darkly brilliant as a pool of oil. At one end a bronze figure sturdily held a support for a separated chamber, and at a convenient place on the ceiling were frescoes in olive and silver.’ (80) In the second act the scene in front of the Weary Gentleman saloon in Yellow Sky explicitly suggests an altogether tattier and more amateurish stage-set: Across the sandy street were some vivid green grass-plots, so wonderful in appearance, amid the sand that burned near them in the blazing sun, that they caused a doubt in the mind. They exactly resembled the grass mats used to represent lawns on the stage. (83)

13 These grass-mat lawns do not so much contrast with the lavish Pullman car setting of the ‘new estate’ of Sheriff Jack Potter and his bride (80) in a relation of artifice to reality as in a relation of tawdry artifice to splendid artifice. The whole of the story is theatrical because theatricality here is not only a matter of unreality: Jack Potter and his bride could be seen as simply taking part in a different and more convincing kind of drama. Scratchy Wilson wears a costume that is pathetically and cheaply artificial, a ‘maroon-coloured flannel shirt which had been purchased for the purposes of decoration, and made principally by some Jewish women on the East Side of New York’, and boots which suggest not a cowboy but a boy playing a cowboy: ‘And his boots had red tops with gilded imprints, of the kind beloved in winter by little sledding boys on the hillsides of New England’.(85). And in Act 4, the great showdown between Scratchy and Jack (which might have turned out an exact foretaste of Gary Cooper’s High Noon), evaporates into comedy. Scratchy is ‘like a creature allowed a glimpse of another world’

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— or another genre or play — and finally stammers ‘I s’ppose it’s all off now.’ (88) The tragic play has indeed been ‘called off’ and another play put on it its place, a play that can distinguish between the true heroism of Potter and the flashy heroics of Scratchy.

14 In ‘The Blue Hotel’ the genre is perhaps even more cinematic than theatrical, but the two do overlap (and chime in turn with the ‘dime novels’ which the Easterner says the doomed Swede has been reading (97). The bright blue of the hotel, which makes it ‘declare its position against any background’ stands, I suggest, for a music-hall or technicolour world of the cowboy stage-play or film: everything in it is heightened and unreal, a fantasy version of the ‘wild west’ that leads the Swede to his doom. Nothing is quite real: the Swede ‘resembles a badly frightened man’ (90, my italics); the cowboy acts the part of a ferocious gambler, ‘board-whacking’ his cards on the table ‘with a glowing air of prowess and pride.’ (ibid., my italics). It is histrionic heroism rather than true heroism – though one of Crane’s points here, and even more in Maggie or ‘The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky’, is that the two are not always so easy to separate: the hero, as in Shakespeare, may often seem to indulge in a kind of Senecan posturing.8 Scully the proprietor, his face lit from below by a small lamp (the effect is that of footlights) ‘resembled a murderer’ (95, my italics). And on the Swede’s deathly-pale cheeks were ‘two spots brightly crimsoned and sharply edged, as if they had been carefully painted’ – like a clown’s make-up. When the challenge ‘You are cheatin’’ comes from the Swede to Johnny, ‘Such scenes often prove there can be little of dramatic import in environment. Any room can present a tragic front; any room can be comic.’(100) Filmic associations are also present, suggesting an impartial cinematic detachment. ‘The Easterner’s mind, like a film, took in lasting impressions of the three men’(104); in this case the metaphor may suggest his culpable neutrality and detachment. At the end the final ‘shot’ of the cash-register provides an impersonal comment on the Swede’s death which is irresistibly filmic: ‘The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon, had its eyes fixed upon a dreadful legend atop of the cash-machine: “This registers the amount of your purchase.”’(112) The irony of the story comes from the fact that the Swede is betrayed by his theatrical sense of the dangerous wild west, whereas his fate actually comes from a very modern, untheatrical and un-stereotypical gambler. At the same time there is the sense of a modern tragedy of fate, where the death of the Swede is simply ‘the apex of a human movement.’ (113) There is a double irony in theatricality, whereby it can both suggest the fantastic, the artificial and the unreal, and also the structures of a real-life tragedy.

15 Crane saw the world in theatrical terms which enabled him both to ironize heroism (and sometimes to celebrate it at the same time). But I would like to end with one small, curious example where Crane himself explicitly saw one of his strangest short sketches in terms of the actual theatre. In ‘The Upturned Face’ the whole piece turns on the uncanny process of the burial of a dead man during a battle. The man, with no coffin of course, has been laid face up in the grave, and as the soldier shovelling in the soil approaches the completion of his task, he realizes with horror that he is going to have to shovel a load of dirt on the upturned face. Soon there was nothing to be seen but the chalk-blue face. Lean filled the shovel … ‘Good God,’ he cried to the adjutant. ‘Why didn’t you turn him somehow when you put him in. This ---’ Then Lean began to stutter. The adjutant understood. He was pale to the lips. ‘Go on, man,’ He cried, beseechingly, almost in a shout.... Lean swung back the shovel; it went forward in a pendulum curve. When the earth landed it made a sound -- plop.9

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16 Crane had a particular liking for this four-page short sketch (‘I am wonderfully keen on this small bit of 1500 words’)10, and saw it very much in theatrical terms. He wrote in the same letter: [...] I am sending a copy to Forbes Robertson [the famous English actor-manager] in an attempt to make him see that in a thirty minute sketch on the stage he could so curdle the blood of the British public that it would be the sensation of the year, of the time.11

17 But if he ever sent it to Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, the great man must have thought differently, for it was a stage-sketch which the British public was never to see, and perhaps it was just as well, for it is difficult to see how it could ever have worked on the stage. On the page, however, it has the chilling force of deliberate melodrama, a mode which can achieve that frisson of combined horror and farce (that ‘plop’ is deliberately strip-cartoonlike, deflating and anti-heroic) which brings home to us not only a very modern sense of the inextricability of tragedy from farce in contemporary experience (and Crane must have appreciated King Lear, too) but also a fact of great psychological importance: our sense of the peculiar vulnerability and sanctity of the face. What Crane’s style ironizes here is not so much heroism as pathos – the way pathos and the grotesque are intermingled. And he does it through his theatricality, a theatricality of that curious kind that works on a reader rather than a theatre audience, and that is at its best on the page, in ‘the portable theatre.’

NOTES

1. Quoted in John Berryman, Stephen Crane (Cleveland: Meridian, 1962,) 54. 2. Scarlet and Black, trans. Margaret R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982) 365. 3. Modern Philology, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Nov. 2002): 314-17. 4. Stephen Crane, Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, ed. Thomas A. Gullason, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979) 3. All subsequent references are to this edition. 5. See e.g. R. A. Brower, Alexander Pope: the Poetry of Allusion (Oxford University Press, 1986) on the nature of the mock-heroic mode. 6. The first Kinetoscope Parlour opened on Broadway in 1894, and by 1899 the American Mutascope and Biograph Company was making about 500 films a year; but, perhaps surprisingly, there is no record, in the letters or biographies, of Crane having attended a film. 7. ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky’, The Open Boat and Other Stories (New York: Dover Publication Inc., 1993) 79. All subsequent references are to this edition. 8. See for example T. S. Eliot in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Selected Essays (Faber and Faber, 1932). 9. Stephen Crane, Prose and Poetry (New York: The Library of America, 1984) 1286-7. 10. Stephen Crane, Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (London: Peter Owen, 1960) 238. 11. Ibid., 239.

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ABSTRACTS

L’écriture de Crane semble inviter tout particulièrement le lecteur à examiner contes et nouvelles sur le plan de la théâtralité et du mélodrame. Son style se caractérise par une rhétorique souvent grandiloquente, et par ailleurs, sa prédilection pour les contrastes marqués entre le bien et le mal (comme dans Maggie) ou entre la vie ordinaire et les expressions diverses d’héroïsme, se prête aux techniques du mélodrame. Stephen Crane se moque cependant des excès des romans populaires et du théâtre mélodramatique de New York qui plaisent bien, par exemple, à Maggie elle-même. Ce qu’il semble vouloir atteindre, c’est une sorte de théâtralité ironique qui mette les actions humaines nettement en relief et qui souligne leur nature symbolique et héroïque afin de se moquer des attitudes prétentieuses et confuses dans lesquelles tombent les personnages dès qu’ils se considèrent comme des héros.

AUTHORS

MARTIN SCOFIELD Martin Scofield teaches English and American Literature at the University of Kent, England. His publications include The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2006), an edition of The Ghost Stories of Henry James (Wordsworth Classics, 2001), and articles on the short fiction of Henry James, Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff.

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Charades and Gossip: The Minimalist Theatre of Joyce’s Dubliners

Valérie Bénéjam

1 Joyce wrote only one play, but theatricality is a recurrent and essential feature of his prose writing, emerging in close connection with many of the formal innovations for which he is renowned: dramatic narrative technique, for instance, is sometimes sustained to the point where the text turns into a theatre script, as in the “Circe” episode in Ulysses or the “Mutt and Jute” dialogue in Finnegans Wake; interior monologue, borrowed from Edouard Dujardin but greatly perfected with Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated sentences, owes much to the dramatic convention of the soliloquy and to the stage where, in point of fact, many actresses regularly return it. On Bloomsday, celebrating the anniversary of the 1904 fictional day of Ulysses, professional and amateur actors go on stage, as in New York, or take to the streets, as in Dublin, and each year they will play the parts of the characters in the novel. And all year round, all over the English-speaking world, reading groups will meet, sometimes just to hear the text read aloud, thus bringing renewed proof of an intrinsic bond between Joyce’s writing and the theatre. The recurrence of such oral reenactments of Joyce’s texts provides an eloquent illustration to his linguistic experiments, underlining the fascinating play on spoken word and written language that gradually unfolds throughout his work. In the later developments of Ulysses or in Finnegans Wake, what could have first been considered, in Bakhtinian terms, the polyphonic quality of the novel genre, has attained another dimension, combining gossip and acoustic experiments with the human voice in all languages with their expression in writing – a both chaotic and perfectly mastered, cacophonous language, for which critics had to coin a new term: “Wakese.”

2 Beginning with a broad presentation of the topic as it globally relates to Joyce’s work, I will soon narrow the angle to Dubliners and particularly to “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” which is the most evidently dramatic story in the collection. Making a detour through the first epiphanies written by the artist as a young man, I want to suggest

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answers to the broader question of why Joyce used theatricality in his prose writing, and did so first in relation to the short story genre.

Scholars3 have often been puzzled by the distance between the radical formal innovations of Joyce’s prose-fiction writing, and the relatively conventional quality of his play. Written from 1913 to 1915, Exiles falls between, on the one hand, the work on Dubliners (1904-1907) and on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1907-1913), and on the other, the composition of Ulysses (1915-1922). The modernist scholar Hugh Kenner once suggested that, had Joyce disappeared after Dubliners and A Portrait, he probably would have been considered a very talented but fairly conventional writer. With the writing of Ulysses and the even more daunting Finnegans Wake, not only did he put himself into another class altogether, he also forced us to reconsider the complexity and subtleties of the earlier works: some of the stylistic choices or idiosyncratic turns of phrase, which could be deemed awkward, actually reveal depths of complexity which would never have been suspected had we not realized what Joyce was capable of in terms of linguistic mastery and irony in his last two books.1 In retrospect, we are forced to understand the full dimension of the linguistic play and stylistic control deployed as early as Dubliners. Kenner goes on to examine A Portrait and even briefly alludes to Stephen Hero, but in spite of its strategic historical situation between the earlier prose writings and the much more ambitious Ulysses, Exiles is not mentioned. The play is evidently not as famous as the rest of Joyce’s work, and its quality has even been questioned: turned down by both the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Stage Society in London, it was first performed in Munich in 1919, then in London in 1926. On both occasions, it was withdrawn and considered a flop. When Harold Pinter revived it in 1970, theatre critics claimed he was “lifting the veil” off a “floundering lost cause.” Samuel Beckett even wrote to say, “You’re a brave man to take on Exiles. I understand your excitement. I often wondered how it could be done.”2 Despite all the scholars and critics who had deemed the play uninteresting, impossible to produce, and an awkward imitation of Ibsen, Pinter’s production drew general acclaim.3

However,4 if the value of modernism is to be assessed by the boldness of its formal experiments, Exiles pales not only in comparison with the innovations in Joyce’s prose fiction, but also with the theatrical experiments of other modernists, to which Joyce seems to have been rather indifferent. Although he lived in Zurich during World War I, there is for instance no record of his attending the Dadaist performances at the Cabaret Voltaire. Its comic effect partly relying on the unlikely Zurich meeting between Tristan Tzara and James Joyce, Tom Stoppard’s Travesties draws a puppet-like caricature of these two antithetical protagonists and underlines the actual historical lack of communication between them.4 The play also borrows its general plot and a few lines from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest – a hilarious comedy, but certainly no modernist paradigm – which was in fact produced in Zurich by the English Players, the amateur company with which Joyce was involved as business manager. Then when he spent the interwar years in Paris, a central figure of the modernist scene and in contact with many influential, informed personalities, he apparently never attended the Alfred Jarry Theatre or even discussed Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Whilst other bold scenographic experiments were taking place in Europe, such as Gordon Craig’s work on stage design, lighting, masks and marionettes, Joyce seems to have shown no interest in such developments. As a playwright, amateur manager, or

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theatregoer, he remained throughout his career strikingly indifferent to the modernist avant-garde of European theatre.

5 Having posited this paradox, I would now like to trace back Joyce’s earlier years and show how dramatic techniques, albeit traditional ones, were nevertheless at the core of his first revolutionary experiments as a writer. There is in fact a history of Joyce’s involvement with the theatre before he left Ireland. In his remarkable article on “Joycean Drama and the Remaking of Yeats’s Irish Theatre in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room,’” Ben Forkner envisages Joyce’s writing of Dubliners in relation with Yeats’s launching of a national theatre for Ireland.5 Forkner shows how closely Joyce followed Yeats’s efforts, but also how disappointed he became when, in his view, Yeats betrayed Ibsen’s model of dramatic realism for one of dramatic idealism, opting for a rural, nostalgic and parochial vision of Ireland instead of the modern, urban setting Joyce himself would eventually choose. Recognising the theatrical potential of Irish setting and conversations very early,Joyce nevertheless realised Irish audiences were not ready for the “nicely polished looking-glass” he planned to show them, whilst he himself was not prepared for the kind of compromise he considered Yeats had accepted for his own theatre.6 Joyce’s disappointment with the Irish National Theatre may explain both his exile and his choice of a different medium, one that could reach an audience beyond Ireland, while retaining theatricality within its form. Hence a story like “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” which all takes place in one room, with characters entering and exiting, and a theatrical emphasis on props and lighting. Chiefly composed of dialogue and stage directions, the story reads almost like a play script, but remains within the boundaries of prose and of the short story genre.

6 Joyce’s experiments with theatricality had in fact started earlier, and dramatic technique had been at the heart of Joyce’s very first writings, with the strikingly brief texts he called his epiphanies.7 Out of the initial seventy-one, only forty remain, about half of which are usually termed “dramatic,” whereas the other half are “lyrical.” The dramatic epiphanies stand out as the very first instances of Joyce’s inclusion of theatricality in his writing, in noticeable relation to an extremely short and fragmentary literary form. The term “epiphany” is often used in reference to the disillusioned or lyrical moments of revelation attained at the close of a story in Dubliners or of a chapter in A Portrait. Inspiration for these passages did originate in the first epiphanies, some of which were actually incorporated in books later on. However, the original epiphanies were texts in their own right. Considering, as Joyce scholars and editors often do, the epiphanies in terms of what they have subsequently become, we tend to forget what effect they were meant to produce when Joyce first wrote them – not as part of a larger narrative, nor necessarily with the intention of one day including them into one, but as brief, almost fleeting texts, of an inherently fragmentary nature. They appear as mere sketches of just a few lines, with a somehow jotted-down quality to them that may be deceptive. In Stephen Hero, Joyce defines an epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”8 A short dialogue precedes this aesthetic pronouncement: The Young Lady — (drawling discreetly) … O, yes … I was … at the … cha … pel … The Young Gentleman — (inaudibly) … I … (again inaudibly) … I … The Young Lady — (softly) … O … but you’re … ve … ry … wick … ed …

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7 The typographical setting resembles that of a tiny play script, with character names before each utterance and stage directions between parentheses: as readers momentarily shift to the experience of reading a play, they take in this information, but mentally put it between brackets to concentrate on the dialogue. Perhaps because there is a tradition of reading theatre as well as of attending performances, they also tend to inwardly provide a voice and an intonation, refining the acoustic quality and resonance of what they are reading further than they would with conventional reported speech. The dialogue is still regarded as a written text, but it seems already on its way to becoming a living voice. It is both captured on the page and resonating out of it.

This8 minimalist notation of an overheard conversation is also extremely objective in its form and even deliberately incomplete, taking into account as it does the imperfect perception of the listener, both in the stage directions and the elliptic punctuation. To his brother, Joyce explained his aim was to collect “little errors and gestures – mere straws in the wind – by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal.”9 From the outset, the project is thus related to a dialectics of hiding and revealing: the text is here to expose what people would have kept concealed. The young lady and gentleman keep their voices down, hence the numerous ellipses, but it is also in these silences and what they reveal,in the pauses for thought which they allow for readers, that the “vulgarity of speech or of gesture” is exposed.10 At a further level of analysis, the question of interpretation is therefore already – and so early in Joyce’s career – of paramount, if implicit, importance. Readers are never told exactly what Stephen thinks of this dialogue, and their judgement and imagination are free to wander in the blank spaces between the elliptical dots. This is a very deliberate omission, revealing the fragmentary nature of epiphanies as deceptively hasty: the minimalist quality of the dialogue is not so much the result of acoustic deficiency as that of “extreme care,” its precision allowing to capture the “delicateness” and “evanescence” of the moment, but also to hint at the characters’ deeper motivations. In employing theatrical techniques in his prose writing, Joyce probably attempted to import the paradoxical strength of ephemerality which is conveyed by theatre – when it is good theatre of course – and its capacity to make the fleeting moment live and last, to impress its transience in the viewers’ memory. Theatre seems to be the very locus of ephemerality: the performance will never be exactly the same the next night, and what the audience have seen is gone forever, except for the memory they retain of it. The spectators’ awareness of this impermanence makes the experience of theatre-going more precious, and the value, the emotion thus conferred to the performance is probably part of what Joyce wanted to capture on the page. However, employing the linear presentation of a written text that is not meant to be acted, he retains the possibility of second reading and retrospective interpretation. It is a way for Joyce of eating his ephemeral cake and having the in-depth process of interpretation at the same time, of trying to capture the transience of the theatrical performance, while preserving the benefits of the traditional interaction between a reader and a book.11

9 Another example would be the following dialogue, this time taken from the original epiphanies, and involving the young Joyce and his friend Skeffington shortly after the death of Joyce’s younger brother: [Dublin: in the National Library]

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Skeffington – I was sorry to hear of the death of your brother.…sorry we didn’t know in time..…to have been at the funeral..… Joyce – O, he was very young.…a boy…. Skeffington — Still.….it hurts.…12

10 The minimalist, cryptic quality of the fragment underlines Skeffington’s lack of feeling, or even vulgarity. It is both instantly perceived and yet requires to be pondered at length. Here again, the ellipses play an essential part. Made up of four, sometimes five, dots – therefore inordinately long, as if to further attract attention to themselves, their length and recurrence –, they render the rhythm, the hesitations and interruptions of the exchange, transcribing most realistically what has actually been heard. To the modern reader, this is reminiscent of contemporary film scripts or plays, such as David Mamet’s for instance. Given the implicit, fragmentary nature of Joyce’s epiphany, ellipses replace the missing explanations, and seem to leave room on the page for readers to think about the interaction: Skeffington has offered sympathy; Joyce answers by talking about the deceased brother; but probably because he insensitively interpreted Joyce’s “O” as somehow dismissive, Skeffington callously presumes that Joyce’s brother’s youth could have moderated the family’s grief. Therefore Skeffington has wrongly interpreted Joyce’s words, and we in turn are driven to reflect on our own interpretation, of Skeffington’s, and then of Joyce’s words, in short on the hermeneutic process as a whole.

Five11 of the remaining epiphanies take place at the Sheehys’, a family where Joyce was a regular visitor, participating in numerous parlour games. He seems to have been particularly appreciated for his witty contributions to charades, a game in which the audience would guess a word from an acted clue given either for the whole word or for separate syllables. For instance, asked to represent the word “sunset,” Joyce sat in a rounded arm chair with just the top of his head showing over its top; or a group went on to collide and then escape to represent the word “kaleidoscope,” the latter obviously announcing the later developments of Joyce’s linguistic play.13 The parallel with his use of theatrical techniques is also striking, for in charades, an extremely brief theatrical performance is connected to the audience’s effort to interpret what they are watching. The same applies to the ironic dramatic technique in Joyce’s epiphanies: readers are prompted to reflect on what is vulgar or insensitive, to figure it out for themselves. The cryptic, minimal form will function like a riddle or charade: precisely because it is so short and implicit, the dialogue alerts readers to the existence of a hidden meaning.

Commercial12 imperatives probably played their part in Joyce’s choice of the short story genre: a book of epiphanies would never have sold, if he could have secured a publisher for it in the first place.14 It turned out difficult enough to find one for his relatively more conventional short stories: completed in 1907, the collection did not find itself in print until 1914. However, the fragmentary, elliptic, and theatrical nature of the epiphanies could be worked into another brief literary form – the short story. The use of elliptical dialogues, in relation with the question of interpretation, is foregrounded from the outset in the first story in Dubliners, “The Sisters,” which Joyce rewrote completely so that it would serve as a programmatic introduction to the whole collection. The story is centred on the enigmatic figure of a recently deceased old priest, who had been friends with the young boy-narrator. A man called old Cotter brings the news of his death to the child’s uncle and aunt. As Cotter keeps hinting at something wrong with the old man, without ever revealing it, the child’s perplexity

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mirrors our own, and his efforts at deciphering the dialogue he overhears reflect our imperfect understanding of the one we are reading: —No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly … but there was something queer … there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion … He began to puff at his pipe, no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. Tiresome old fool!15

13 The elliptic punctuation is once again conspicuous, and at the very moment when one would expect Cotter’s opinion, a cloud of smoke issues from his mouth instead. A few lines later, he resumes: —I have my own theory about it, he said. I think it was one of those … peculiar cases … But it’s hard to say … He began to puff again at his pipe without giving us his theory. (D 10)

14 When Cotter learns how close the child and the old priest used to be, he explicitly disapproves of their intimacy: —I wouldn’t like children of mine, he said, to have too much to say to a man like that. —How do you mean, Mr Cotter? asked my aunt. —What I mean is, said old Cotter, it’s bad for children. My idea is: let a young lad run about and play with young lads of his own age and not be … Am I right, Jack? (D 10)

15 Here again, the ellipses are not used as lavishly, but one appears at the essential moment when the clue to the mystery would finally be provided. The child is as curious as ever, but will not let show. His aunt on the other hand, will ask again just a few lines later: —But why do you think it’s not good for children, Mr Cotter? she asked. —It’s bad for children, said old Cotter, because their minds are so impressionable. When children see things like that, you know, it has an effect. … (D 11)

16 Needless to say, nothing in the intervening lines has clarified what Cotter means by “things like that, you know”, which we definitely do not know. The child’s frustration is extreme: I crammed my mouth with stirabout for fear I might give utterance to my anger. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile! It was late when I fell asleep. Though I was angry with old Cotter for alluding to me as a child I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences. (D 11)

17 There is a manifest parallel between the child, “extracting meaning from … unfinished sentences,” and ourselves, reading this elliptic dialogue. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce will teasingly demand “an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia” (FW 120:13-14), 16 revealing how the child’s sleeplessness at the opening of Dubliners was but the dawn of a far more ambitious literary project. The rest of “The Sisters” will provide few additional revelations, apart from an incomplete story about the priest breaking a chalice and being found laughing in the confession-box. The priest’s sister speaks the very last words: —Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself. … So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him. … (D 18)

18 That “something” is left pending in yet another final ellipsis.17

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19 I wish nevertheless to pursue the connection with endings, since they usually stand out as privileged moments of epiphanies.18 “Two Gallants” closes for instance on Lenehan’s curiosity and Corley’s gesture in response: —Can’t you tell us? he said. Did you try her? Corley halted at the first lamp and stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm. (D 60)

20 This is the sovereign which Corley has succeeded in securing, probably convincing a young slavey to steal it from the house where she works. However, this has never been explicitly denounced or even stated. The ending is composed like a moment of mock- revelation, complete with gazing disciple, symbolic lighting, and opening of “a” prophetic hand, onto a coin shining in “the” palm. By forfeiting the possessive articles, Joyce implies some transcendence has been attained. However, nothing is revealed but the dismal opportunism and cynicism of the two men. The staging works at a double level, implicitly targeting a double audience: Lenehan the mock disciple, but also readers, who are the real exegetes of Joyce’s revelation. And when Lenehan asks, “can you tell us,” the plural is both the Hiberno-English variant of a singular referring to Lenehan alone,19 and a cunning manner of including readers and their legitimate curiosity in the demand for information. What would pass for closure, and is an effective closing of the story, opens not only the hand, but a whole host of retrospective questionings about facts and ethics: where did the money come from? And who is responsible for turning this young woman into a thief, if that is indeed what she has become? The theatrical techniques inherited from the original epiphanies – cryptic and short dialogue, combined with the idea of revelation – serve both to highlight the words and gestures, and to expose the vulgarity that would be kept hidden. Transferring the minimalist form of the epiphanies to the endings of the short stories, often letting the characters’ words resonate or their gestures speak for themselves, thus alerting readers to the possibility of a hermeneutic problem, Joyce points to the refusal of providing an explanation: he closes to refuse closure.

21 The link between hermeneutics and theatricality may be further related to Joyce's specific typographical habits for dialogues – his spurning of inverted commas, which he jokingly called “perverted commas.”20 In contrast to the traditional framing of each character’s words by inverted commas, Joyce’s disposal of them entails the threatening removal of a certain hierarchy of discourses: there no longer exists a master narrative, with a narrator in a position to quote other speakers and control their discourse.21 There is nothing but a juxtaposition of discourses, and a blurred distinction between written and spoken words, not even retaining the artificial but clear typographical division of written theatre whereby capitals or italics are reserved for character names and stage directions. Joyce’s move was actually such a bold one for his time that the London publisher, Grant Richards, refused to print Dubliners without inverted commas to present direct discourse.22 Richards believed readers would be confused without them, which indeed they should be: the play-writing technique of unquoted dialogue aims at unsettling readers.23

22 Elliptic and unframed dialogue finally leads me to “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” which is the most consistently dramatic short story in the collection, to concentrate on another shady priest figure. In the middle of “Ivy Day” comes a knock at the door: A person resembling a poor clergyman or a poor actor appeared in the doorway. His black clothes were tightly buttoned on his short body and it was impossible to say

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whether he wore a clergyman's collar or a layman's because the collar of his shabby frock-coat, the uncovered buttons of which reflected the candlelight, was turned up about his neck. He wore a round hat of hard black felt. His face, shining with raindrops, had the appearance of damp yellow cheese save where two rosy spots indicated the cheekbones. He opened his very long mouth suddenly to express disappointment and at the same time opened wide his very bright blue eyes to express pleasure and surprise. (D 125)

23 With his tight black clothes, light-reflecting buttons, round hat and shining face with two rosy spots, this idiosyncratic character seems straight out of a pantomime or of some modern-day commedia dell’arte. The excessive yet contradictory expressions he conveys—opening wide his mouth for disappointment at not finding whom he is looking for, and wide his eyes for pleasure at finding whom he does find there—are very much those of a mime, and we would not be surprised to come across them in a Chaplin movie or a Beckett novel. The theatrical quality of the character is even explicitly announced: we are told he may be an “actor,” albeit a “poor” one, perhaps in both meanings of the word. An exclamation soon provides the character’s name: —O, Father Keon! said Mr Henchy, jumping up from his chair. Is that you? Come in! (D 126)

24 However, Father Keon does not identify himself as readily as could be expected: he replies, “O, no, no, no!” and the reader is left wondering whether he is answering the injunction to come in or the question about his identity.24 The difficulty in confirming Keon's identity will in fact soon become central, leaving potentially open a whole range of possible identifications. If characters are only made of words on paper, in “Ivy Day” they are only made of oral language set down on paper: apart from very succinct descriptions – Keon’s is one of the longest –, all the information comes from their own words and the gossip about them. Henchy in particular is a dreadful gossiper, always offering his “private and candid opinion” (D 124 and 125), which is rarely candid and certainly never kept private. As is often the case in the story, gossip will start immediately the person is out of the room. However, instead of bluntly asserting the most slanderous facts about Father Keon, as they are wont to do, Henchy and O'Connor are remarkably hesitant this time: —Tell me, John, said Mr O'Connor, lighting his cigarette with another pasteboard card. —Hm? —What is he exactly? —Ask me an easier one, said Mr Henchy. (D 126)

25 The question now reaches an ontological plane and may be interpreted beyond the explicit surface content of the man’s profession or source of income. The rest of the dialogue will present a succession of possible answers to the metaphysical question of what Father Keon may be, evolving towards less and less precision: “a priest at all?”, “a black sheep,” “an unfortunate man of some kind.”25 The last identification is more equivocal still, or rather comes even lower on the ontological ladder: the men have been waiting for a basket of beers, which a boy has brought, and Henchy's last line about Father Keon is phrased most ambiguously: “God forgive me, […] I thought he was the dozen of stout.” In the first description of the character, indeterminacy and ambiguity were already present: “resembling a poor clergyman or a poor actor,” “it was impossible to say whether he wore a clergyman's collar or a layman's.” 26 Is he a clergyman or a layman, a priest or an actor, or perhaps a poor actor playing the part of a poor priest? This either/or logic is eventually replaced by a both/and logic, when

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Keon succeeds in expressing in one single face two entirely contradictory feelings, his mouth rendering disappointment whilst his eyes convey pleasure and surprise. Further disrupting any certainty, the characters are not the only ones baffled by who or what Father Keon may be: the narration itself is contaminated by indeterminacy.

There26 lies the full potential of inserting drama in fiction-writing: things and people may be left indefinite, undetermined, facts of rumour and hearsay, neither described precisely, nor embodied on stage by real actors. Paradoxically, theatricality does not flesh out the scene in “Ivy Day”: on the contrary, it highlights its insubstantiality. There is no real action, just the petty opposition of gossipers, and with no agon, there are no real protagonists either, just unreliable speakers, the profusion of information only serving to heighten their unreliability and our doubts. “Ivy Day” stands out as a long epiphany of contradictory gossip. Forcing readers into doubt and interpretative questioning, Joyce's playwriting technique, through its minimalist transformation of the short story narrative, enhances the hermeneutic function in reading. Theatre has always offered an excellent model for the dramatic presentation of dialogical oppositions, setting forth contradictory truths and maintaining them as compelling, powerful truths nevertheless. I have already mentioned Mamet and Pinter, who are obvious examples for us today, but Joyce’s model would have been Shakespeare, and particularly Shakespeare's histories, where opposite views are simultaneously put forward, and the audience presented with the problem of interpreting and judging a complex political situation without the support of a univocal, reliable master narrative. This would suit well the Ireland Joyce knew, and be particularly relevant to “Ivy Day” and its political content.27 My tentative conclusion is therefore that, at an early stage in his writing, Joyce considered such theatrical refusal of closure was best worked into the shortest possible form. The epiphany was an exquisite formal achievement, but too unconventional and economically unviable. The short story was the next logical step in this evolution, fitting Joyce’s project of capturing ephemeral moments and giving them dramatic intensity, as the micro-drama of both closing a narrative and refusing to close its meaning would be re-played for each story in the collection.

NOTES

1. Hugh Kenner, Ulysses (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1980) 1987) 12. 2. Samuel Beckett, letter to Harold Pinter, 21 April 1969, personal archive (see Harold Pinter’s official website, http://www.haroldpinter.org/directing/directing_exiles.shtml, accessed on 9 January 2008). 3. Several commentators actually consider it has considerably influenced his own work as a playwright. 4. Tom Stoppard, Travesties (London: Faber, 1975). 5. JSSE 34 (Spring 2000): 89-108. The point I wish to make in this paper is both more formal and perhaps less historical than Forkner’s. I present it as complementary—and complimentary—to the wealth of information and ground-breaking ideas in his article.

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6. Letter to Grant Richards, June 23, 1906, in Letters I, 64. In context, the phrase actually refers to Dubliners. 7. Poems and Shorter Writings, including Epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce and ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, eds. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber, 1991). 8. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1963), 211. Stephen Hero is a first version of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and was first published posthumously in 1944. 9. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber, 1958) 134. 10. The term “triviality” is used in reference to the short dialogue: “This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies.” (Stephen Hero, 211). As always very aware of the Latin etymology of his words, Joyce thus signals both the apparent unimportance of the exchange and its underlying vulgarity, trivialis also bearing the meaning of vulgar (literally found at the crossroads, or tri-via). Strictly speaking, the dialogue has in fact been overheard in the street. Vulgarity explains both why the speakers would rather keep it a secret of no importance, and why Joyce would take the pain to record such trifle. 11. Given the space, I would further argue that, when trying to capture the strength and instantaneousness of drama through theatrical techniques, Joyce is probably aiming at capturing the intensity and immediacy of real life, and that in that sense, the theatrical performance is only an ideal, concentrated version of real life. It is real life already artistically mediated, by the theatre, but not disembodied to the same extent as novels or short stories. Play scripts may look bare, but they call forth embodiment, destined as they are to be fleshed out on stage. From a practical perspective, theatre therefore provides the writer with a whole set of tried out techniques which have proven their efficiency in rendering that evanescent yet vivid feeling of real life. And the final twist of Joyce’s cunning narration lies in this last paradox that it is through the detour of theatre’s artificial reality that he manages to expose his characters’ secret truth. 12. Poems and Shorter Writings, 182. 13. See Joyce’s biography by Richard Ellmann: James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1959) 1982) 51-53. As Ellmann notes, the “kaleidoscope” charade was actually immortalized in Finnegans Wake. 14. Short stories were also easier to place in newspapers and journals: the first version of “The Sisters” appeared in the Dublin agricultural journal The Irish Homestead as its regular features (“Our Weekly Story”) for the week of August 13, 1904 (D 233). 15. I am referring to the rarer, but precious Viking critical edition of Dubliners edited by Robert Scholes and Walton Litz (New York: Penguin Books, 1996) 9-10. Further references appear parenthetically in the text. 16. By convention, references to Finnegans Wake include the page number followed with line number. 17. Although he makes no connection with theatricality, this analysis of “The Sisters” and the rest of my interpretation of Dubliners owe much to Jean-Michel Rabaté’s groundbreaking article, “Silence in Dubliners,” James Joyce: New Perspectives, ed. Colin MacCabe (Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1982), 45-72. 18. This should also be related with the manifest emphasis on style and the particularly well- written quality of Joyce’s endings: the closing of Molly Bloom’s celebrated monologue at the end of Ulysses, Anna Livia Plurabelle’s flowing return to her ocean father at the end of Finnegans Wake, and at the end of Dubliners the last page in The Dead which many consider one of the most beautiful pages ever written in English. 19. P. W. Joyce (no relation), English As We Speak It In Ireland (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, (1910) 1991) 81. 20. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 11 July 1924 (Letters III, 99-100).

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21. Being French and therefore used to their near absence in dialogue, this is something I did not catch on immediately, but was alerted to by Colin McCabe’s remarkable study: James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1979). In addition to its connection with the conventions of written theatre, Joyce's refusal of the traditional use of quotation marks was also influenced by nineteenth-century French novelists, and particularly Flaubert, whose work he knew extremely well. 22. See Robert Scholes, “A Note on the Text” (D 225-26). 23. Joyce also called them an “eyesore” which gave “an impression of unreality” (D 225), and lack of realism seems to have been Joyce’s chief motivation in getting rid of inverted commas, but I would argue that the growing uncertainty achieved by their removal also mimics reality in that reading then resembles our habitual situation of hearing different opinions without being told what they are worth. 24. There is a similar effect in “Grace”: the beginning of the story plays on the impossible identification of the main character, and when his name is eventually provided, it is actually mumbled: “I‘ ‘ery ‘uch o‘liged to you, sir. I hope we‘ll ‘eet again. ‘y na‘e is Kernan” (D 153). The young man who has just saved him answers “Don't mention it,” and here again it is difficult to decide whether he is responding to Kernan's thanks or to his self-introduction. 25. “—Fanning and himself seem to be very thick. They’re often in Kavanagh together. Is he a priest at all? —‘Mmmyes, I believe so. . . . I think he’s what you call a black sheep. We haven’t many of them, thank God! but we have a few. . . . He’s an unfortunate man of some kind. . . . —And how does he knock it out? asked Mr O’Connor. —That’s another mystery. —Is he attached to any chapel or church or institution or— —No, said Mr Henchy, I think he’s travelling on his own account. . . . God forgive me, he added, I thought he was the dozen of stout.” (D 126-27) 26. Italicized by me. Even his “frock-coat” stands halfway between the priest's and the layman's costume. 27. In A Portrait, Joyce would choose a similar dramatic and dialogical presentation for most of the political material in the book, particularly with the Christmas dinner scene in which Stephen as a boy witnesses an argument over the role of the priests in Parnell’s fall. From a different angle and with a completely distinct cast of characters, this is of course the very topic of “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”

ABSTRACTS

Cet essai s’interroge sur la place et la fonction de la théâtralité dans les premiers écrits de Joyce, en relation avec des formes courtes comme la nouvelle. Si l’œuvre de Joyce n’est pas particulièrement remarquable pour son théâtre, la théâtralité joue pourtant un rôle essentiel dans sa technique narrative et ses riches expériences formelles. L’écriture théâtrale lui fournit une forme elliptique et minimaliste (absence de narrateur et de guillemets, usage fréquent des points de suspension) qui, telle les charades de sa jeunesse, complique la tâche herméneutique des lecteurs-spectateurs tout en permettant à l’écrivain de travailler avec réalisme l’acoustique et les rythmes du dialogue. D’abord expérimentée dans ses premières épiphanies, cette technique est ensuite transférée au genre plus conventionnel et commercialisable de la nouvelle. Lui

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apportant l’unicité éphémère du spectacle vivant, le dialogue théâtral peut aussi se transformer, comme dans “Ivy Day dans la salle des commissions”, en douteux commérages qui mettent en cause la fiabilité de la transmission et l’interprétation de l’information. Tout en donnant vie au récit, la théâtralité joycienne laisse libre cours à l’indétermination et à la circulation du sens.

AUTHORS

VALÉRIE BÉNÉJAM Valérie Bénéjamhas been working at the Université de Nantes as a Maître de Conférences in English Literature since 1997. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she wrote her PhD under the supervision of Jean-Michel Rabaté at the Université de Bourgogne (“Cherchez la Femme” dans Ulysses: conductions, reflets et réfractions de Molly Bloom).She has written many articles about Joyce's work, which have appeared in European Joyce Studies, in various French journals (Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, Tropismes, etc.) or have been published online (Genetic Joyce Studies, Hypermedia Joyce Studies). She is currently writing a book about Ulysses, tentatively entitled All About Molly, as well as co-editing a collection of articles on the issue of Joyce's representations, across his work, of spatiality and space. Her current research also investigates the connections between Joyce and Flaubert, as well as the rôle of theatre and playwriting in Joyce's fiction.

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Staging Social and Political Spaces: Living Theatre in Joyce’s “The Dead”

Rita Sakr

1 In his study of the modernist short story, Dominic Head argues that: “The problem facing short story critics is to find a way of escaping their own reductive formulae” (21). The critical framework that the subject of “theatricality in the short story” sets is one of several means to escape reductive formulae in short story criticism. Above all, such a critical framework enables the envisioning of a more productively malleable definition of the genre of the short story in relation to other genres. The required definition would potentially reflect the need for flexibility which seems to be recurrently emphasized but rarely satisfied in discussions of the genre of the short story. One example of these discussions is an essay entitled “Destabilizing Frames for Story” in which Ian Reid touches upon the adaptation of the story “Monsieur Seguin’s Goat” in Alphonse Daudet’s Letters from My Windmill into a play entitled L’Arlésienne (The Girl from Arles). Through this discussion, Reid shows that the text of Daudet’s story “signals its status as a meetingplace for various generic tendencies” (306).

2 Studying short stories in relation not only to dramatic works and theatrical productions but also to the wide array of dramatic and theatrical devices and effects is, in many respects, a step towards articulating a flexible definition of the short story. This revisiting of the genre acknowledges the ways in which the short story functions as a space of hybrid relations among generic tendencies. One fertile area for exploring such relations is James Joyce’s works which operate playfully in relation to the laws of genre. This playfulness reveals itself in Joycean works that more or less respect the laws of their genre while capriciously flirting with other generic tendencies. In this paper, I explore this apparent Joycean paradox by examining aspects of theatricality in Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” My major argument is that certain elements which suggest theatricality in “The Dead” contribute to a virtual staging of the social and political spaces with which Joyce’s story is engaged.

3 First, I briefly trace the theatrical influences that affected the making of this short story. Then, I discuss the role of performance-oriented dramatic devices, namely sound and space, in voicing and embodying the social and political dimensions of “The Dead.”

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4 In a thought-provoking essay on “Joyce, Genre, and the Authority of Form,” Marian Eide contends that: “More than any other writer of the formally experimental modernist period, Joyce explored the varieties of generic structure. In genre conventions he found the constraints of aesthetic precedent and reader expectation that would enable his own creative resistance” (98). Joyce’s creative resistance to genre restrictions is played out in all of his works and even in individual parts of these. While Joyce’s play Exiles was interpreted by many as a lyric despite its conventional dramatic form, the “Circe” episode of his unconventional novel Ulysses has been repeatedly approached as theatre.1 Joyce’s “The Dead,” while highly representative of the modernist short story, includes a great number of devices which produce a theatrical effect.

5 An effective means of entry into the theatrical spaces of “The Dead” is a review of the drama masters whose plays indirectly set the stage for this short story. A few details will suffice. Two major influences on Joyce’s writings are the works of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen and those of the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann. In an essay entitled “Ibsen’s New Drama,” Joyce extols Ibsen’s genius to the point of stating that: “It may be questioned whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times” (48). Joyce’s praise for Ibsen’s use of “hardly a superfluous word or phrase” (“Ibsen’s New Drama” 49) in his plays may well serve as an appropriate critique of Joyce’s own technique of spareness and minimalism in his short stories.

6 Critics have had much to say on the influence of both Ibsen and Hauptmann on Joyce’s oeuvre. In an article published as early as 1962, James R. Baker attributed Joyce’s idea of the living dead to Ibsen’s influence. Three years later, Hugo Schmidt briefly outlined the impact of Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer on Joyce’s “The Dead.” Schmidt pointed out the combination of realistic and symbolic techniques to render the idea of spiritual death and the concept of “death as the most beautiful form of life” (142). A more recent article by Theoharis C. Theoharis argues that “The Dead” is “partly constructed around a sustained analogy to [Ibsen’s play] Hedda Gabler” (791). Theoharis reads the main characters in “The Dead,” the couple Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, and the secondary one, Gabriel’s aunt Julia, as “reincarnations of George Tesman, Hedda Gabler, and Tesman’s Aunt Juliana [in Ibsen’s play]” (792). As for Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, Kathleen Ochshorn finds elements of it in Joyce’s Exiles and Adrienne Auslander Munich parenthetically mentions its influence on “The Dead.”

7 What is striking here is the fact that these critics read the influence of Ibsen’s and Hauptmann’s plays on Joyce’s “The Dead” in terms of characters, themes, and symbolic elements outside the context of theatricality and theatrical effects. In this paper, I will elucidate some significant points concerning theatricality in “The Dead.” My concern here is not the ways in which theatrical elements in Joyce’s short story reflect or refract theatrical devices in Ibsen’s, Hauptmann’s, or any other dramatist’s works. Rather, I am interested in the role of these effects, specifically sound and space, in negotiating the social and political trajectories of “The Dead.” Theatricality is understood here in its broad imaginative sense. As Josette Féral argues in her examination of theatrical language, “[b]y examining conditions that accompany various manifestations of theatricality both on and off stage, one can demonstrate that theatricality is not strictly a theatrical phenomenon” (95). From this perspective, I approach sound and space in “The Dead” as manifestations of theatricality in narrative

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form and as devices that produce theatrical effects outside the frameworks of the play- text and the performance. Before addressing sound and space, I briefly look at what may be interpreted, within the imaginative framework of theatricality in “The Dead,” as dialogue and stage directions.

8 In reading dramatic texts, critics have often pointed out the ways in which dialogue acts in conjunction with or in tension against stage directions (Wallis and Shepherd 9). The text of “The Dead,” up until its last few pages, juxtaposes straightforward pieces of lively dialogue with narrative and descriptive passages which may indirectly be read as stage directions. The speeches of the characters include exchanges in dialogue with varied dynamics and illocutionary force (especially between Gabriel and Molly Ivors and Gabriel and his wife). They also include thematically functional monologues (as in Gabriel’s speech at the dinner table) and comic intervals (by two of the not so welcome guests Freddy Malins and Mr Browne).

9 As for the descriptive passages, these include extensive descriptions of the characters after they enter the imaginary stage implied by the narrative. The action focuses on the night of an annual dance to which the guests arrive successively. The narrative is interrupted with what would, in drama, amount to descriptive stage directions marking the appearance of every new character. Yet, the position of such descriptive passages twists the comparable dramatic convention of descriptive stage direction which usually precedes the first words of each new character. Thus, the description of the main character in “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy, is placed within the latter’s dialogue with Lily the servant who welcomes him at the door. Likewise, the description of the hostesses, Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia, follows rather than precedes their first appearance. Still, these passages, as they focus on precise details of facial and bodily features and punctuate the pieces of dialogue, are curiously reminiscent of descriptive stage directions in plays.

10 Notwithstanding the importance of dialogue and stage directions, the most astounding theatrical effect in “The Dead” emerges in the narration of movement which incorporates two basic theatrical devices, sound and space. The element of movement is central since the focal event of this short story is a dance and since important sections of the text are consecrated to narrating details of the two dances, quadrilles and lancers, in which the characters get engaged. Dance implies music and the narrative of “The Dead” presents a lively orchestration of various musical and sound effects.

11 In an extensive article on Joyce and music, Arthur Nestrovski analyses the critical place of music in Joyce’s oeuvre. Nestrovski makes a number of contentions that are significant here. He argues that: “Once subjected to the exigencies of style, Joyce’s treatment of music—often highly sentimental on the surface—becomes charged with a political meaning that is not always apparent thematically” (Nestrovski 7). He adds that music in Joyce’s writings is “often, if not always, coupled with sexuality” (7). Approaching the “musical horizon” of characters whom he reads as “staged forms” in Joyce’s texts, Nestrovski finds that this horizon is largely “determined by ideological closure”(19) and by “the structural limits imposed upon thought by class positioning within the social totality” (19). Moreover, Nestrovski considers “The Dead” as the Joycean text “in which music is most conspicuously a central theme, at once the symbol and the ambience of life and of death” (13). Ironically, Nestrovski does not provide an in-depth analysis of the important presence of music in “The Dead.” Studies by critics

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including Zack Bowen, David L. Mosley, Jack Morgan, Seamus Reilly, and some of the essays in the collection edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles shed a light on different aspects of the relation of “The Dead” to music. However, none of these works approaches musical elements and effects as specifically a component of theatricality in “The Dead.” In the subsequent discussion, I focus on these musical effects, their theatricality, and their function as political, social, and sexual critique.

12 Joyce’s short story opens with a waltz played on the piano. Piano playing is almost always in the background of the dialogues and the movements in “The Dead.” In Ibsen’s plays A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, the piano is also a significant object, and music and dance function symbolically. Between the quadrilles and the lancers, the narrative of “The Dead” resounds with the Academy piece played by Kate’s and Julia’s niece, Mary Jane. The difficulty and dullness of Mary Jane’s piano piece, its interruption by the narrative of Gabriel’s thoughts and the description of young men leaving the room and returning only after the piano had stopped all intimate the bracketing of the lives of the three spinsters (the aunts and Mary Jane) in the social world in which they occasionally intervene. In contrast to this sense of living death communicated by the interrupted narrative of the piano piece, the following dance stages a lively dialogue between Gabriel Conroy and his colleague, Molly Ivors. The name of the dance, lancers, and the kind of movements it implies, signal the type of exchange that takes place between Conroy and his dance partner. Just like lancers in a battle, Gabriel and Molly attack each other aggressively. Their battleground is the political stage wherein the cosmopolitan Irish, Gabriel, struggles against the claims of the nationalist Irish, Molly. Their rhetorical attacks in dialogue are synchronized with their movements in dance.

13 In several instances in “The Dead,” the tunes played on the piano are accompanied by lyrics. Songs, like instrumental music, are key theatrical devices, and in “The Dead,” they function as vehicles to some of the social and political subtexts implied by the narrative.2 The songs that we hear through the narrative of Joyce’s story are Arrayed for the Bridal which Aunt Julia sings and The Lass of Aughrim which the tenor Bartell D’Arcy sings. In between is the sound of everyone singing “For they are jolly gay fellows” as a response to Gabriel’s speech after the dinner. The importance of these songs is primarily related to their role in articulating a tragicomic sense of the state of the women portrayed in the narrative. Aunt Julia’s song bleakly conveys a macabre celebration of marriage in the voice of a dying spinster. Mr D’Arcy’s song musically narrates the tragic fate of a woman and her child as they are abandoned by an aristocrat. In contrast to the dreariness of these two songs, there seems to be some sense of joyful relief in the collective singing that follows Gabriel’s speech in which he praises the hospitality of his two aunts and Mary Jane whom he calls “the Three Graces of the Dublin musical world” (“The Dead” 233). However, this sense of relief is only illusory. The song which thrice repeats “For they are jolly gay fellows” and then affirms “Which nobody can deny” is quickly interrupted by a disturbing “Unless he tells a lie” (“The Dead” 234-35). The interrupting phrase conveys an implicit duplicity, lying to others and to oneself, in Gabriel’s attitude towards these three women and also towards Molly and his wife Gretta. This orchestration of songs thus shows the social world of the women, the women in the songs, the ones who are singing, and the ones who listen, as marred by various forms of denial and deception by men.

14 Moreover, The Lass of Aughrim resonates with political echoes that harmonize with the dynamics of the dialogue and the implications of the narrative. Aughrim is the site of a

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historically significant defeat of the Irish by the army of King William III on 12 July 1691 and a signifier of the subsequent surrender of Ireland to British domination. The question of Irish nationalism and its geopolitical quandaries emerges in the main narrative of “The Dead” and in the embedded narrative in Gabriel’s story of his grandfather’s horse who scandalously circled King William’s statue. It also figures in the dialogues between Gabriel and Miss Ivors and between Gabriel and his wife Gretta at the end. As such, the theatrical effect of the songs in the narrative reflects the sense of dynamic immediacy characterizing the social and political questions with which these songs are engaged.

15 Besides the piano playing and the songs, the most conspicuously resonant sound effects in the narrative are applause and, more prominently, laughter. The positioning of applause in the narrative is significant. Applause precedes and/or follows Mary Jane’s piano piece, Aunt Julia’s singing, and Gabriel’s speech. In all three cases, the context of the applause reveals that the reaction is not entirely genuine. We learn that Aunt Julia’s singing is preceded by “[a]n irregular musketry of applause” (“The Dead” 219). After Mary Jane’s piece, “[t]he most vigorous clapping came from the four young men in the doorway who had gone away to the refreshment-room at the beginning of the piece but had come back when the piano had stopped” (“The Dead” 213). Similarly, at the end of Aunt Julia’s song, “loud applause was borne in from the invisible supper-table” (“The Dead” 220), and it is the alcoholic Freddy Malins who overwhelms the elderly singer with exaggerated compliments and applause even after everyone has stopped clapping. As for Gabriel’s speech, it is greeted with an equivocal response mixing applause from the visible and invisible rooms with a half joking/half serious doubt that Gabriel’s compliments may be a lie. As such, the underlying subtext of the applause in the three instances comprises an implicit critique of the hypocritical manners of the social world portrayed in the story. Furthermore, the applause contributes to a dynamic theatricality both through its effect as sound and through its role in implying a spatial continuity between a visible onstage fictional space and an invisible neighbouring offstage.

16 Even more than applause, laughter creates a distinctively pronounced and ambiguously overwhelming theatrical effect in the space of “The Dead.” This ambiguity is part of the construction of character and theme in Joyce’s story. There is a clear contrast between Gabriel’s “nervous” and self-conscious laughter (“The Dead” 205), on the one hand, and the noisily energetic laughter of Freddy Malins, Mr Browne, and the female characters in the story. On the scale of laughter and the implied scales of liveliness and sympathy, Gabriel is the most death-like of the characters in “The Dead.” Still, what is most striking here is the sheer abundance of laughter in the narrative of a short story entitled “The Dead” and in a textual space animated with talk and memories of the dead. Laughter seems highly ironic and even Gothic in the atmosphere of death. The Gothicism of laughter in “The Dead” is only tentatively affirmative and regenerative. As women are primarily the ones who continuously laugh in Joyce’s short story, the Gothic undertones seem to conspire with a tentatively feminist subtext. Yet, drowned in the vivacious torrent of laughter is a deathly social fabric in which women are silenced in various ways. If my reading here accords with Kelly Anspaugh’s interpretation of intertwined feminist and Gothic threads in “The Dead,” I do not completely espouse Anspaugh’s optimistic view that “the Gothic actually works to support an affirmative reading to Joyce’s story, that it does indeed contribute to a theme of regeneration and

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rebirth” (1). Rather, I find that the narrative negotiation of social and political questions does not yield such positive answers in “The Dead.”

17 This paradoxical coexistence of life and death is communicated not only through laughter but also through the other sounds in the narrative. The piano, the songs, the applause, the laughter, and the other sounds including those of “the wheezy hall-door bell [which] clanged again” (“The Dead” 199), “shuffling […] feet” (202), “clacking […] heels” (203), “clatter[ing]” cutlery (218, 228), “unsettling of chairs” (230), and “skirts sweeping” (230) produce an ambience of living theatre. Such an ambience apparently jars with the theme of paralysis and deathliness repeatedly mentioned in critical interpretations of “The Dead.” The contradiction is only a façade for the deeper layers of rich ambiguity that eschew any simplistic reading of Joyce’s short story. Thus, the varied effects of sound in “The Dead” disrupt any critique in terms of closure or single monolithic meaning. As Dominic Head argues with respect to the stories in Dubliners, “Joyce’s ironic use of structure and plot is one source of this (partially) disruptive tendency, which is extended through the development of a dialogized narrative style” (77).3 One level of this dialogized narrative consists of the various sounds which, while producing a theatrical effect, flow with and against the multiple trajectories of Joyce’s short story.

18 Besides sound, space is a fundamental element which produces a theatrical impression in “The Dead.” The schema of political trajectories in “The Dead” is embodied in the architecture of spaces implied by the narrative and descriptive text. Discussing the basics of theatricality, Féral contends that: “Space seems fundamental to theatricality, for the passage from the literary to the theatrical is first and foremost completed through a spatial realization of the text” (96). Interestingly, the architecture of spaces in Joyce’s short story displays several characteristics that recall theatrical space or that can be imaginatively visualized in theatrical terms namely, levels, the three regions of fictional space, hinterlands, and significant objects.4

19 The space of the main action in the greater part of “The Dead” is a house with two levels. At the beginning of the story, the movements of the maid Lily greeting the guests and engaging in a nervous discussion with Gabriel at the door on the ground floor are synchronized with the ladies’ activities on the upper floor. This pattern is repeated at the end of the party as the guests leave and Gabriel remains on the ground floor admiring his wife while she stands on the stairs listening to Mr D’Arcy singing The Lass of Aughrim. This synchronization of action on the two levels of the house produces the effect of an important theatrical device, that of simultaneous action. In both cases of simultaneous action on the stage of the Misses Morkan’s house, there is a physical and symbolic sense of separation which punctuates the characters’ relationships and which is reminiscent of a similar patterning in a number of plays prior and subsequent to the publication of “The Dead.” A striking example from the first category (before “The Dead”) is Shakespeare’s plays, namely Troilus and Cressida and Romeo and Juliet, where the characteristic separation between the stage and the balcony suggests gender distinctions. In the second category (after “The Dead”), I mention Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman where spatial levels symbolize levels of experience and distance is both literal and metaphorical.5

20 As for the three regions of fictional space, the structuring of these in “The Dead” shifts as one space gets foregrounded in one scene of action while it gets removed to the background in another. The narrative in the first parts of the story moves among the

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spaces of the drawing-room, the refreshment-room, and the supper-room, spaces that recall the setting of naturalist drama. In these spaces, the most significant object, which recalls the stage sets of naturalist drama (especially Ibsen’s), is the piano that hints at the Misses Morkan’s social and cultural interests. If we are to read the movements between the different spaces in theatrical terms, we may say that they orchestrate alternations from onstage fictional space to neighbouring offstage fictional space. As I mentioned earlier, certain sound effects in the narrative (laughter, applause, and other sounds) create continuity between these spaces even when the narrative points out the spatial invisibility of one or more spaces in a specific instance. In the last part of “The Dead,” when the action shifts to the room in the Gresham hotel, the implied neighbouring offstage is the space of the street below. Between these two narratives, at the party and at the hotel, there is the short journey through the main Dublin streets, in which monumental landmarks emerge as politically symbolic objects.

21 From the perspective of theatricality, each monument in “The Dead” functions similarly to a significant object which, in the space of the theatrical stage, “makes meaning, signifies, in its own right” (Wallis and Shepherd 129). Yet, in Joyce’s short story, the significance of these objects does not emerge merely from the sum of their individual meanings but also, and more importantly, from the relations between them. In this context, the irreducible complexity of Irish-British relations and the rejection of simple political conclusions in Joyce’s story are communicated in the narrative through the spatial positioning of the monumental symbols of colonial domination and Irish nationalism.

22 In “The Dead,” the spatial symbols of the political conflict include, on the colonial side, Trinity College, the Four Courts, and the Gresham hotel along and against, on the Irish side, the statue of Daniel O’Connell. The complex ambiguity is mainly the result of the selectiveness of the list which suggestively lacks Nelson’s Pillar, the most obtrusive monument to the British Empire in the street which ends with the Gresham. Such complex ambiguity is further enhanced in Gabriel’s familiar greeting to O’Connell’s statue “Good-night, Dan” (“The Dead” 245) after the fiery conversation which ended with Molly Ivors calling him a “West Briton” (“The Dead 216). However, it would be a mistake to hastily interpret this greeting as a nationalist gesture since the monument to Daniel O’Connell memorializes the hero of Catholic Emancipation, a cause which did not coincide with Irish nationalism. As such, the monuments named in the narrative space of “The Dead” function similarly to significant objects which possess complex symbolic importance and not only aesthetic and mechanical importance in the space of the theatrical stage.

23 The most symbolically functional monument, the Wellington Monument, which figures repeatedly in the narrative is nowhere in the immediate surrounding of the Misses Morkan’s house on Usher’s Island. Yet, this spatial symbol that emerges in Gabriel’s thoughts twice before his speech creates a link between the domestic interior and the public space outside. Similarly, the West of Ireland, which occupies the memories and thoughts of the Conroys at the end, is beyond the immediate space of action. On the surface level of the narrative, the space of the Wellington Monument, associated with the British Empire, is set as ideologically antagonistic to the space of the West of Ireland, associated with Irish nationalism. However, translating the architecture of the spaces in the narrative into an imagined theatrical space allows us to unravel ambivalent spatial politics. These spaces which are neither inside and around the

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Misses Morkan’s house nor on the way to the Gresham suggest virtual offstage fictional spaces. They thus appear as symbolically distant and dissociated from the real space of immediate experience. This space of immediate experience is embodied in the descriptive text and can be imaginatively read, as I have already argued, in terms of onstage and neighbouring offstage spaces. The distant spaces of the Wellington monument and the West of Ireland symbolically represent ideological sites both of which are outside the realm of the characters’ ordinary material experience. Yet, while the West of Ireland and the rest of the Irish landscape are totally covered with snow, the Wellington Monument stands out flashing as a symbol of imperial military might which overpowers the colonized space of Ireland.6 Imagining the space of “The Dead” in theatrical terms, one way to spatially translate the ideological distinction between the Wellington Monument and the West of Ireland is to represent the former as a silhouetted form behind the onstage fictional space. As such, the Wellington monument would appear in the hinterlands which, according to the theatrical definition, “mediate between the onstage fictional and offstage virtual spaces” (Wallis and Shepherd 128). Thus, a theatrical reading of the architecture of spaces in “The Dead” helps elucidate the overdetermined texture of social and political meaning in the narrative. These meanings, that combine connection and separation in various respects, overflow at the end of the story in an acoustic-visual drama when Gabriel “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” (“The Dead” 256).

24 In considering sound and space in “The Dead,” I have made a number of imaginative leaps between genres to develop the implications of theatricality in this short story. My aim, however, has been to show that these elements, sound and space, which are reminiscent of theatrical devices, function as mediators of the social and political subtexts in Joyce’s story. I have emphasized that the orchestration of elements which imply theatricality in “The Dead” prevents a reading in terms of simple unified meaning and reveals, instead, a complex ambiguity irreducible to binary oppositions. As the title of my paper suggests, Joyce’s “The Dead” stages not the deathly paralysis of rigid discourses but the living theatre of social and political spaces.7

NOTES

1. Critics including Austin Briggs, Emer Nolan, Andrew Gibson, and Mark Osteen have pointed out a number of theatrical elements as central to the “Circe” episode. 2. Due to the limits of this paper, I will not discuss the difference between song and instrumental music in “The Dead.” Arthur Nestrovski makes several points concerning the significance of this difference in the context of Joyce’s works, but he curiously omits “The Dead” from his list of Joycean works that include instrumental music. 3. Dominic Head’s argument runs counter to readings which seek to resolve ambiguity in Joyce’s short story. This trend of readings is exemplified in Austin M. Wright’s essay in which he argues that the “final recalcitrance” in “The Dead” is eventually resolved in the “discoverable form” of Joyce’s story (121-23).

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4. The meaning of each of these terms emerges implicitly in the subsequent discussion. Due to the limits of this paper, I do not dedicate an introductory section to specify the definition of these theatrical terms. 5. My interpretation here relies particularly on similar analysis in Studying Plays in which Wallis and Shepherd discuss the significance of levels in Shakespeare’s and Arthur Miller’s plays. 6. A number of critics, including Anne Fogarty and Michael Murphy, have analysed the political meaning(s) of the Wellington Monumentin “The Dead.” Fogarty notes that the fact that Gabriel thinks of both the Wellington Monument and the West of Ireland—associated with nationalism— shows “the impossibility of clear lines of demarcation or of affiliation in a colonial country” (“Remapping Nationalism” 92). In contrast to Fogarty, Murphy sees that Joyce deliberately emphasizes the link between Gabriel’s unsettled relations with Ireland and the Duke of Wellington’s notorious repudiation of the land of his birth (113). I find that neither reading fully explains the distinct political significance of the Wellington monument in Joyce’s text. The crucial detail is that Gabriel reflects on the West of Ireland under the paralyzing effect of the Wellington Monument which, unlike other parts of the described Irish landscape, is able, despite the snow, to flash out as a beacon and a symbol of power. 7. A fruitful critical task—in a larger space than the present article affords—would comprise two dimensions: the study of the various implications of Joyce’s appropriations and transformations of stage devices in “The Dead” and the other stories in Dubliners and the comparison/contrast of reception patterns by the readers of the short story and the audience of its staged version.

ABSTRACTS

Le but de cet article est d’explorer la théâtralité dans la nouvelle “The Dead” de James Joyce. En effet, on identifie un nombre considérable d’éléments dramatiques dans cette nouvelle et ces éléments, particulièrement le son et l’espace, contribuent aux significations politiques et sociaux dans la narration. Au début, je résume les influences théâtrales sur l’œuvre de Joyce et spécifiquement sur “The Dead”. Puis, j’étudie le rôle que jouent la musique et la chanson, en outre le rire et l’applaudissement, dans la signification sociale et politique de cette nouvelle. Finalement, j’analyse l’utilisation de l’espace: l’enchainement de deux actions simultanées et/ou réparties sur plusieurs niveaux spatiaux ; les contrastes entre les différents espaces théâtraux; et la fonction politique des monuments qui prennent le rôle d’objets à caractère symbolique.

AUTHORS

RITA SAKR Rita Sakr is a 3rd-year PhD student at the University of Nottingham. She has completed a thesis on the representation of monumental space in the novels of James Joyce, Rashid al-Daif, and Orhan Pamuk. Her research interests include postcolonial theory and literature, James Joyce, Middle-Eastern literature, cultural geography, and performance theory. She previously taught a course on Drama and the Stage for two consecutive years at the Lebanese University. Among her publications are the two essays “Monumental Space and the Carnivalisation of Power in Joyce’s Ulysses and al-Daif’s Ghaflat al-Turab” in Quest 4 (2007) and “‘That’s new…That’s copy’: ‘Slightly

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Rambunctious Females’ on the top of ‘Some Column!’ in Zola’s L’Assommoir and Joyce’s Ulysses” which is forthcoming in a collection of essays on Joyce and the nineteenth-century French novel.

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Anne Besnault-Levita

1 Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen have a history, a heritage and a poetics of their own which render any comparative study of their work stimulating, yet, to a certain extent, disputable. Mansfield was born in New-Zealand and her art may be partly considered as a response to and a dialogue with her origins (New 114-137); Elizabeth Bowen, whose origins are Anglo-Irish, outlived World War II unlike Mansfield and Woolf, which might partly explain why the psychological is always fused with the social and the historical in her fiction2. Katherine Mansfield was one of the first writers of her generation to gain her reputation solely on the short story; she never completed a novel, while Bowen and Woolf excelled in this genre. As a result, I would argue that Woolf’s and Bowen’s short fictions have been given less attention and credit than their novels, while Mansfield’s achievement has long been, and is maybe still, overshadowed by Woolf’s. Besides, if Mansfield, Woolf and Bowen are now considered to be part of the modernist canon, Mansfield’s “unusual modernism” (Pichardie, 122) has long been considered as second-rate, and Bowen’s “modernism” as less experimental and innovatory than Woolf’s.

2 However, those obvious differences have to be counterbalanced by the three writers’ shared commitment to the possibilities of literary and generic experimentation, as Mansfield’s diary and letters, Woolf’s critical essays and Bowen’s critical prefaces

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testify. Aware of what some historians of modernism have called a crisis in language as well as of certain formal and ideological limits of the novel, they felt an urgent need to explore “the lovely medium of prose” and devise a “new word”, to quote Katherine Mansfield’s famous 1916 letter, that would encapsulate their experience of the modern world and of the modern self 3. For this reason, and although short fiction was perhaps “not [Woolf’s] ideal form”4, they also shared what Bowen called, in her preface to Encounters, “a constructive critical interest in the short-story’s inherent powers and problems” (Bowen 1986, 119-120). Bowen’s point that “the short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation or analysis” (Bowen 1959, 128) was obviously shared, if only at times, by Woolf who found it “easier to do a short thing, all in one flight than a novel”, was never sure that what she wrote were “stories” but felt “free” when she wrote them and “grazing” as near as she could to her “own ideas”5.

3 As short-story writers, Mansfield, Woolf and Bowen belonged to this period which saw the emergence of short fiction or “lyric short story” as opposed to the “tale” or “mimetic story” to take up Clare Hanson’s words6, a form which, according this time to Charles E. May, concentrates on “internal changes, moods and feelings, utilizing a variety of structural patterns depending on the shape of emotion itself, relies for the most part on the open ending, and is expressed in the condensed, evocative, often figured language of the poem” (May 202). Since Poe’s review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales in 1842, this kinship of the short story genre with poetry has been mainly explained in terms of brevity, and reception conditions. A cursory look at short fictions like “Three Pictures”, “The String Quartet”, “Monday or Tuesday”, “Blue and Green” by Woolf, or “Spring Pictures” by Mansfield, to quote the most obvious cases of “genre trouble”, shows how the primacy of subjective experience seized at one “spiritual moment” through a poetics of the apprehended aesthetic whole has indeed been exploited by those authors.

4 Interestingly enough, the acknowledgement of the genre’s polysynthetism, with the insistence on such literary ingredients as unity of effect, compression of time or “the sense of a crisis”7, has not given much room to a debate on the short’s story kinship with drama. In the case of modernist short fiction, this might be explained by what Martin Puchner, in his book untitled Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama, calls an “anti-theatrical dynamic within modernism”. Explaining what he sees as a high-modernist reaction to the “unprecedented celebration of the theatre” in 19th century literature, he writes: The theatre has always been the most public art form, and it continued to depend on collaboration and collectivity even at a time when modernism celebrated the figure of the individual artist who withdraws from the public sphere and the allegedly undifferentiated masses. (Puchner 6)

5 Reading the stories I chose today is obviously an experience which challenges this view but never totally invalidates its presuppositions on the poetics and politics of form. Their theatricality is indeed based on what I have chosen to call a dramaturgy of voice which, since it involves the displaying of female subjectivity as performance while requiring active participation on the reader’s part, raises questions of genre, gender and of the short story as an art of participation. As I have chosen a comparative approach, my answers to these questions will not be accompanied by the close textual analysis which each short story would have required; and because this is still a new

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field of research for me, I would like you to accept part of what follows as provisional and debatable hypotheses.

Question of genre

6 The three short fictions by Katherine Mansfield which I am briefly going to introduce now suggest that if their author always felt “trembling on the brink of poetry”, according to her own confession (Mansfield 1985, 66), she was also often playfully or painfully writing on the brink of theatricality. They remind us that Mansfield was, according to her friend Ida Baker, “a born actress and mimic” (Baker 233) who liked to alter her appearance, disguise herself, was aware both of her multiple selves and of her power of impersonation, as the following extract from one of her letters shows: “A darkened stage — a great — high backed oak chair — flowers — shaded lights — a low table filled with curious books — and to wear a simple, beautifully coloured dress … Tone should be my secret … this is in my power because I know I possess thepower of holding people” (Mansfield 1984, 84). They also remind us that Mansfield had two “kick-off[s] in the writing game”: one being “joy”, the other an “extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to disaster […] —a cry against corruption —“ (Mansfield 1985, 97-98). Indeed, among the many characters who stage themselves and others in her short fiction — a process which might involve “unconscious mimicry, display, pretense, affectation, posturing, role playing, dramatisation and manipulation” (Besnault 81) the Maid in the “The Lady’s Maid”, Virginia in “Late at Night”, and the anonymous speaker in “the Canary” have in common their sex, their deep loneliness, and above all their urge for company and self-expression. In that sense, those stories “challenge the conventional notion of romantic heroine by focusing on an ageing and socially disregarded figure” as Pamela Dunbar argues (Dunbar 71); but they should also be contrasted with “Je Ne Parle Pas Français” in which the immediacy of Raoul Duquette’s discourse and voice is counterbalanced by a pervasive sense of irony and imposture. If social satire and gentle irony are not completely absent from those stories, the disappearance of any narratorial stance — they all have the form of a dramatic script — renders the perception of such undertones more complex than if free indirect speech had been used.

7 “The Lady’s Maid” is a dramatic dialogue in which Ellen tells her life story and the details of her relationship with her mistress to an unnamed listener — certainly a female guest in the house — whose “cues” are systematically replaced by ellipses at the beginning of each paragraph but can easily be reconstructed most of the time: ... I hope I haven’t disturbed you, madam. You weren’t asleep were you? But I’ve just given my lady her tea, and there was such a ice cup over, I thought, perhaps … … Not at all, madam. I always make a cup of tea last thing. She drinks it in bed after her prayers to warm her up. I put the kettle on when she kneels down and I say to it, “Now you needn’t be in too much hurry to say your prayers.” (375)8

8 Introduced by a stage direction elliptically indicating time, space and entrance through free direct discourse — “ELEVEN o’clock. A knock at the door” —, the story stages the spectacle of the domestic, social and patriarchal ideology in which the servant is unconsciously trapped and that the reader gradually discovers as she tells her listener how she sacrificed her chance at marriage to her tie to her “lady”. At the end of the story, the maid’s conditioned responses of self-denial, which, ironically yet pathetically, echo the Lady’s fake claims of altruism —“I asked her if she’d rather I …

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didn’t get married. ‘No, Ellen,’ she said — that was her voice, madam, like I’m giving you—‘NO, Ellen, not for the wide world!” (379) — give way to confusion and the need for oblivion, while the suspension marks no longer figure the suppressed listener’s answers but the unspeakable: … Oh dear, I sometimes think … whatever should I do if anything were to … But, there, thinking’s no god to anyone—is it, madam? Thinking won’t help. Not that I do it often. And if ever I do I pull myself up sharp, “Now then, Ellen. At it again—you silly girl! If you can’t find anything better to do than to start thinking…! (380)

9 In “Late at Night”, a short story written in monologue form which could easily be taken for a one-act play, Virginia, “seated by the fire”, “her outdoor things [being] thrown on a chair,” reads part of the letter she has just received from her lover and complains about his vanity and shallowness: VIRGINIA (laying the letter down): I don’t like this letter at all — not at all. I wonder if he means it to be so snubbing — or if it’s just his way. (Reads.) “Many thanks for the socks. As I have five pairs sent me lately, I am sure you will be pleased to hear I gave yours to a friend in my company.” No; it can’t be my fancy. He must have meant it; it is a dreadful snub. (637)

10 She then expresses her desperate longing for love in a speech riddled with hesitations, interrogations and moments of lucidity, the pathos of which contrasts deeply with the bathetic allusion to the lover’s “rejection” of the socks she sent him: I wonder why it is that after a certain point I always seem to repel people. Funny isn’t it! They like me at first. […] Perhaps they know that I’ve got so much to give. Perhaps it’s that that frightens them. Oh, I feel I’ve got such boundless, boundless love to give to somebody — I would care for somebody so utterly and so completely — watch over them— keep everything horrible away — and make them feel that if ever they wanted anything done I lived to do it. […] Yes; that is the secret of life for me— to feel loved, to feel wanted, to know that somebody leaned on me for everything absolutely — for ever. (638)

11 But as the fire is going out and the doubts accumulate — “I wonder”, “I keep wondering”, “I suppose”, “Funny, isn’t it?” — too numerous to be coped with for the lonely character, forgetfulness and escapism soon replace the nascent self-revelation: Oh, well, don’t sentimentalise over it; burn it! … No, I can’t now—the fire’s gone out. I’ll go to bed. I wonder if he really meant to be snubbing. Oh, I’m tired. Often when I go to bed now I want to pull the clothes over my head— and just cry. Funny, isn’t it! (639)

12 “The Canary”, probably one of Mansfield’s most famous stories, recalls the “Lady’s Maid” and “Late at Night” in its thematic impulse. The female speaker, a boarding- house keeper who lacks human companionship and is sometimes mocked by her lodgers, values her now-dead canary not only as a friend and companion but also as a symbolic lover who made her forget even “the evening star” when he “came into [her life]” (419). ...You see that big nail to the right of the front door? […](418) … You cannot imagine how wonderfully he sang. It was not like the singing of other canaries. […] … I loved him. How I loved him! Perhaps it does not matter so very much what it is one loves in this world. But love something one must. […] (419)

13 In this monologic story set in the form of a dialogue with an absent listener referred to as “you”, emotion, immediacy and pathos prevail and are accompanied, I would argue, by a sense of decency related to the character’s fight against despair. Mansfield’s expurgated narrative technique is based on a thematic contrast between presence and

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absence, and on a dramaturgy of speech resorting to an accumulation of ellipses that echo the void surrounding the protagonist while inscribing in the text her pleas for a response. As the “story” unfolds, speech becomes a form of memorialization which momentarily compensates for loss: … It surprises me even now to remember how he and I shared each other’s lives. […] I spread a newspaper over a corner of the table, and when I put the cage on it he used to beat with his wings despairingly, as if he didn’t know what was coming. “You’re a regular little actor,” I used to scold him. I scraped the tray, dusted it with fresh sand, filled his seed and water tins, tucked a piece of chickweed and half a chilli between the bars. And I’m perfectly certain he understood and appreciated every item of the performance. (420)

14 In the end though, the suspension marks become the typographical and metaphorical traces of a disturbing absence of interlocutor, or audience, which puts the stress on a process of impossible mourning that the reader is required to assess and even to absorb: One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this — sadness? — Ah, what is it — that I heard. (422)

15 The technique is similar in Elizabeth Bowen’s “Oh Madam, …”, which is obviously a rewriting of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Lady’s Maid”, twenty years after9. Although the context, which can easily be reconstructed indirectly, is here that of war-time England, the story being, according to Bowen’s own words in her preface to The Demon Lover, a study of the “strange growths” “provoked by war and the ‘dessication’ of everyone’s life”, “Oh Madam …” stages “the personal cry” of one “individual” (Bowen 1986, 96), another lady’s maid, who bears the burden of responsibility for keeping the recently bombed house — a metonymy for England — intact while “Madam” finally decides to flee to more comfortable quarters: “Oh, madam …Oh, madam, here you are! I don’t know what you’ll say. Look, sit down for just a minute, madam; I dusted this chair for you. Yes, the hall’s all right really; you don’t see so much at first — only, our beautiful fanlight gone.” (578)

16 In non-stop talk that turns out to be an obsequious monologue, the lady’s “cues” being here again systematically replaced by suspension marks, the unnamed maid tries to reassure “Madam”, denying her own fear while revealing it, and displaying, as Katherine Mansfield’s maid did, a painful yet unconscious internalization of imposed roles, whether social or cultural. As the “conversation” unfolds, the illusion inscribed in the pronoun “our” of my first quotation dissolves: the house, “a monument to lack and loss” (Ellmann 8), will be once more deserted by its owner who is finally revealed as being completely impervious to the speaker’s emotions, as her suppressed retorts eventually metaphorize: No such great hurry? — I don’t understand — I — you — why, madam? Wouldn’t you wish —? Why no, I suppose not, madam … I hadn’t thought. You feel you don’t really … Not after all this. But you couldn’t ever, not this beautiful house! You couldn’t ever …I know many ladies feel it for the best. You can’t but notice all those good houses shut. But, madam, this seemed so much your home — (581) Excuse me, madam — Madam, it’s nothing, really. I — I — I — I’m really not taking on. I daresay I — got a bit of dust in my eye … You’re too kind — you make me ashamed, really … Yes, I daresay it’s the lack of sleep … The sun out there … If you’ll excuse me, madam — I’ll give my nose a good — that clears a thing off …

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… And I couldn’t leave this house empty, the whole night … I know, madam; I know that must come in time … Lonely? No; no, I don’t feel lonely. And this never did feel to me a lonely house. (582)

17 The theatricality of the stories I have briefly introduced relies mainly on the absence of any narratorial mediation (a mediation replaced by minimal stage directions in some cases), and on the immediacy of free direct discourse which encodes an individual voice through vernacular language. As in drama, exposition and context are narrativized by the speaker, a structure of dialogue between speaker and audience (here, reader) is implied, and this discursive structure invites active participation of receptor to fill in the gaps, complete characterization and assess values. In terms of dramatic tension, “The Lady’s Maid”, “Oh Madam …” and “Late at Night” revolve around a latent conflict between the I-speakers and their present or absent interlocutors, the turning point of this conflict being situated at the end of the text (as expected in a short story) and resulting in the diminishing resistance of the main protagonist to his or her plight (the issue is the same in “The Canary”). In Bowen’s fiction, the entrance and exit of the Lady indirectly referred to in the maid’s speech illustrates the imbalance of power on which the satiric impulse of the three stories is partly grounded. But as in drama, this satiric impulse, which notably relies on the underlying plot of social, patriarchal and symbolical domination, is not ascribable to a point of view external to the scene. The absence of any form of disappropriation of speech through narratorial control, which, in other short stories, maintains the characters’ voices at a distance, does not render irony inevitable but makes it dependent on the reader’s higher awareness of the protagonists’ inner conflicts and of the aesthetic or cultural contrasts built up by the texts. In her analysis of “The Canary”, for example, Pamela Dunbar suggests that “by making a bird the object of her heroine’s emotions, the author allows the pathos of her portrait to dip over into the grotesque” as the speaker is de facto “disqualified by her sex and lack of social status from the exalted status of the Romantic poet” (Dunbar 72). But another interpretation of the story could choose to emphasize the emotional and theatrical performance of the caretaker whose voice is able to change tones, to call for other voices and to finally defy silence while rendering it painfully palpable.

18 In pragmatic terms, I would argue that in the fictions I have presented, Mansfield and Bowen use the brevity of the genre to “explore the implications of the short story for speech” by enabling their readers to focus on the “verbatim contents” of the texts (Skrbic 43)10. The lexico-grammatical features (questions, exclamations, suggestions), and the phonological features of the linguistic code (repetitions, interruptions, hesitations, pauses, variations in tone indicated by italics) are here foregrounded, illustrating one of Michael Stephens’ points in The Dramaturgy of Style: “When tension enters into the equation of speech and voice, dramaturgical moments occur” (Stephens 4). To be more specific, the tension aroused in the given examples is linked to the illocutionary force of individual speech acts —a force that is mainly expressive —; but it is also linked to the illocutionary force of the texts themselves, which, taken as wholes, restore expressive efficiency to non-canonical speakers who do not use a dominant language but strive at authenticity.

19 Of course, if drama is a performance genre and not a narrative one, it is because the transmutation of the written lines into spoken speech is crucial and depends on the bodily presence of an actor on a stage and on his voice. In the theatre, dialogism also depends on the physical presence of a collective audience, and the illocutionary acts imply perlocutionary acts involving both other characters and audience. Besides,

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drama is a global experience, intellectual, emotional and sensorial, implying visual, auditory and olfactive dimensions, and the building up of meaning through paralinguistic codes (gestures, props, clothing, kinesis, …). We obviously lose those dimensions in the short stories. But we gain here in terms of simplification of plot, universality (notably linked to the absence of contextual markers and names) and emotional impact. We see beyond the pathos of silent lives towards future losses; we may even experience a sense of guilt in our absorption of the silent listener’s role.

20 However, the question of the expressive efficiency of these lonely or excluded speakers remains, as neither cooperation nor mutual support between interlocutors are suggested, which challenges the very idea of communicative competence on the speaker’s part and questions the reader’s own listening competence. For here lies, it seems to me, one of the main achievements of those short stories, but also one of their paradoxes: on a first level of analysis, the dialogic impulse of fiction in general, and of modernist fiction in particular — so often centred on a polyphonic play of sometimes unidentified voices which de-privilege the absolute, authoritarian discourses — seems here to be replaced by a monologic impulse that conveys an urge for authentic self- expression, prevents the reader from dividing his adhesion but could also appear to share what Bakhtin called the “monolithic” aspect of “verbal expression” in drama (Bakhtin 17). However, a closer analysis of the dramaturgy of voice in Mansfield’s and Bowen’s stories suggests that this monologism is a mere illusory surface masking first what I would call a form of dialogism in absentia, then, the polyphony implied by the different speeches reported by the lonely protagonists themselves. Nonetheless, the generic and discursive hybridity of those theatrical fictions creates a conflict in participation and reception. On the one hand, the necessity of our response is triggered by the ellipses of the text; it is conditioned by the widening gap between the speakers’ assessment of their addressees and ours, and by the necessity to re-vocalize speech to seize its expressive intensity (which is another form of participation). On the other hand, we are free to assess, or not, the perlocutionary force of the speech act, to respond, or not, to the impossibility of a cathartic experience, to be less sensitive to pathos than to the possibility of bathos. In the end, how are we to listen to the speaking voices that accept the silence yet fight against it in order not to sink into nothingness, and is there a collective answer to that question?

Genre, voice, gender

21 It is now time to briefly turn to “The Evening Party”, which raises similar questions to those raised by the more “theatrical” short fictions I have been commenting upon, but aims at and reaches different effects. Like other short fictions by Woolf, it revolves around a party used as “a social microcosm of social types and attitudes”, and has “affinities with the drama, as much of it is directly reported dialogue”, most of the speakers being unidentified. “The first-person narrator appears as one of these speakers, and the reader is her guest at the party, overhearing conversations and sharing impressions” (Baldwin 18): ‘Come into the corner and let us talk.’ ‘Wonderful! Wonderful human beings! Spiritual and wonderful!’ ‘But they don’t exist. Don’t you see the pond through the Professor’s head? Don’t you see the swan swimming through Mary’s shirt? ‘I can fancy little burning roses dotted about them.’ (97)

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‘The professor looms upon us.’ ‘Tell us, Professor—‘ ‘Madam?’ ‘Is it in your opinion necessary to write grammar? And punctuation. The question of Shelley’s commas interests me profoundly.’ ‘Let us be seated. To tell the truth open windows after sunset — standing with my back — agreeable though conversation— You asked of Shelley’s commas. A matter of some importance. […] (97)

22 As Dominic Head explains, the short story stages three dialogues: “the dialogue of the narrator with her companion, an ideal listener receptive to the rise and fall of his companion's impressions, the dialogue with the Professor which focuses on the ideological limitations of an authoritative voice, and a dialogue composed of the interactions of the narrator’s voice and the discourses of the party which produces the main conflict of the story […] in the sense that this dialogue generates the main satirical event: a counterpoint of poetic flight and bathetic descent.” (Head, 95).

23 There are a few common themes between “The Evening Party”, and Bowen’s and Mansfields’ stories: the urge to go beyond the politeness and banalities of social interaction, the search for self-expression and communication inducing a dialectic between exclusion and inclusion, togetherness or separation, the question of the other approached through one’s role in a community, the undermining of dominant discourse. There are also some theatrical similarities like the foregrounding of speech in its semantic, pragmatic and phonological dimension, the exploration of the way conversation, dialogue or monologue might tell a story, the existence of “non- cooperative and non supportive exchange structures” posing “difficulties that impact reading”, the use of unidentified speakers to problematize self, utterance and reception (Skrbic, 44-45), a typically modernist feature. However, in Woolf’s “story”, free direct discourse coexists with free indirect discourse, the text is explicitly polyphonic and the dialogue between the two main protagonists shows how aware they are of the limits of mundane conversation and of language itself — “‘Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them”, one says (99) — even if the two of them keep on looking for the possibility of what Austin called the “felicitous conditions of utterance”: ‘The roses nodding —’ ‘The waves breaking —’ ‘Over the fields coming those strange airs of dawn that tries the doors of the house and fall flat —’ ‘Then, lying down to sleep, the bed’s —’ ‘A boat! A boat! Over the sea all night long —’ ‘And sitting upright, the stars —’ (100)

24 If the preceding dialogue is indeed written as a kind of musical score for two voices, those felicitous conditions of utterance will be undermined at the end of the story by the speakers’ attempted retreat into silence and the impossibility to integrate their voice to the other voices of the party.

25 I would therefore argue that while Mansfield and Bowen devise a dramaturgy of the solitary self, Woolf explores a dramaturgy of polyphony where voices are both individualized, dis-originated and set against the complex community of a “we”. In each case, though, the dramaturgy of voice addresses our own sense of individuality, solitariness and dissociation, our sensitivity to empathy or distance while raising

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questions about communication and community, collective reception and individual receptivity: … So do we all begin by acting and the nearer we are to what we would be the more perfect our disguise. Finally there comes the moment when we are no longer acting; it may even catch us by surprise. We may look in amazement at our no longer borrowed plumage. The two have merged; that which we put on has joined that which was; acting has become action. The soul has accepted this livery for its own after a time of trying on and approving. To act … to see ourselves in the part — to make a larger gesture than would be ours in life — to declaim, to pronounce, to even exaggerate. To persuade ourselves? Or others? To put ourselves in heart? To do more than is necessary in order that we may accomplish ce qu’il faut. End then Hamlet is lonely. The solitary person always acts. (Mansfield 1985, 243)11

26 Obviously, the fact that in “The Lady’s Maid”, “Oh, Madam …”, “Late at Night” and The Canary” the solitary characters are all women invites us to explore the generic hybridity and discursive complexities of those short fictions in yet another direction. With their “all-female cast”, these four “stories” explore women’s individuality, and their “victimization by a sexual ideology that offers them self-defeating options” (Lassner 36). In so doing they give voice to the voiceless, turning the notion of “voice”, more or less overtly, into the synecdochic and metaphoric expression of women’s struggle with patriarchy: We are firmly held with the self-fashioned chains of slavery. Yes, now I see that they are self-fashioned, and must be self-removed …. […] The knowledge that genius is dormant in every soul — that that very individuality which is at the root of our being is what matters so poignantly. (Mansfield 1985, 35)

27 In this respect, the female subject that Mansfield’s and Bowen’s stories represent and discursively construct is meaningfully contradictory. On the one hand, it manifests an impulse towards the discovery of an immutable, unified self; on the other hand, it bears the traces of the modernistimpulse towards the representation of a self- divided subject. In between pathos and pathology, self-assertion and self- infantilization, “unconsciously parodying patriarchal expectations of the feminine, internalizing masculine imperatives so completely that it persists without men’s presence,” (Parkin Gounelas, 506) Virginia and the other female characters obviously “make a spectacle of themselves”, as the saying goes. Simultaneously, though, the exacerbation of their feelings, the insistence on the expressive function of language rather than on its representative and communicative functions, the resort to affect more than to cognition all contribute to the foundations of a female selfhood, shaky, yet capable of resisting the threats of solitude and victimization. Robin Lakoff’s work on sex-differentiated language in Language and Woman’s Place (1975), which, unfortunately, I won’t have the time here to explore in detail, could help us support the view that voice presentation opens here towards political representation through a series of linguistic features regarded by Lakoff as indicesof women’s style or register: the vocabulary related to women’s domestic domain, the propensity for euphemistic and polite phrases, the partiality for the expression of emotions, the avoidance of anger-ridden terms, the mitigating use of tag questions which reduces the force of the assertion, the use of modals to signal uncertainty, etc … (Lakoff, 77-81)

28 “Drama so often is what is not said” Michael Stephens explains. “That is the quality which short fiction shares with the drama. There are ellipses, pauses, and silences, between which often the very substance of voice, if not language and words, is

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manifested.” (Stephens 4). But voice, I would suggest in an echo to Katherine Mansfield’s famous words on prose, “is a hidden country still.”12 In the modernist short fictions I have been examining, the notion of “voice” refers to the referential voices of impersonated speech, to the unattributed voices de-authorizing the narrative voice, to the thematized voices metaphorizing the self and its vulnerable presence, but also to the voices encoded by the texts and asking for a re-vocalization by their readers. The dramaturgy of voice in “The Canary”, “The Lady’s Maid”, “Late at Night”, “Oh! Madam …” and “The Evening Party” implies theatricality, but without any masks, or, at least, with the possibility that at some epiphanic moments the characters’ voices (as articulated discourse and wordless affect) could display the self to itself and to others. “—Ah, what is it?— that I heard.” wonders the speaker in “The Canary” suggesting the hope that whatever she may have heard, we may temporarily have shared with her.

NOTES

1. M. Stephens, The Dramaturgy of Style : Voice in Short Fiction, Carbondale / Edwardsville : Southern Illinois University Press, 1986, p. 7. 2. “I am, and am bound to be, a writer closely involved with place and time; for me these are more than elements they are actors.” (Bowen 1986, 123) 3. “I do believe that the time has come for a “new word” but I imagine the new word will not be spoken easily. People have never explored the lovely medium of prose. It is a hidden country still.” (Mansfield 1985, 136). 4. Elizabeth Bowen, “Review of Virginia Woolf”, Collected Impressions (Bowen 1950, 80). 5. The quotation referred to here — “And then I shall be free. Free at last to write out one or two more stories which have accumulated. I am less and less sure that they are stories, or what they are. Only I do feel fairly sure that I am grazing as near as I can to my own ideas and getting a tolerable shape for them” — is extracted from a 1924 entry of A Writer’s Diary (Woolf 1978, 97); it echoes a 1917 letter written by Mansfield to Dorothy Brett in which she refers to her story “Prelude” in the following terms: “‘What form is it?’ you ask. Ah, Brett, it’s so difficult to say. As far as I know, it’s more or less my own invention.” (Mansfield 1985, 85) 6. As Hanson puts it, “[Modernist short fiction writers] argued that the pleasing shape and coherence of the traditional short story represented a falsification of the discrete and heterogeneous nature of experience. […] And the achieved and finality of the “tale” was distrusted for ‘story’ in this sense seemed to convey the misleading notion of something finished, absolute, and wholly understood.” (Hanson, 55) 7. “Without [the sense of a crisis] how are we to appreciate the importance of ‘one spiritual event’ rather than another?” (Mansfield 1930, 32) 8. All references to the texts of the short stories are to the editions mentioned in the bibliography. 9. In her preface to the collection Encounters, Bowen wrote: “I first read “Bliss” after I had completed my own set of stories, to be Encounters — then, exaltation and envy were shot through, instantly, by foreboding. ‘If I ever am published, they’ll say I copied her.’ I was right.” (Bowen 1986, 120)

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10. Interestingly enough, Bowen wrote in an essay entitled “Notes on Writing a Novel: “Speech is what the characters do to each other. […] It should short-circuit description of mental traits. Every sentence in dialogue should be descriptive of the character who is speaking. Idiom, tempo, and shape of each spoken sentence should be calculated by the novelist, towards this descriptive end.”(Bowen 1950, 255-256) 11. Not far from there, Woolf’s experiments with conversation and voice would lead the “dramatic soliloquies” of her “playpoem” novel — The Waves — (Woolf 1978, 174) and to her realizing in 1933 that The Pargiters, which would soon become Between the Acts, “tend[ed] more and more […] to drama” (Woolf 1978, 257). 12. “I do believe that the time has come for a “new word” but I imagine the new word will not be spoken easily. People have never explored the lovely medium of prose. It is a hidden country still — I feel that so profoundly.” (Mansfield 1985, 136)

ABSTRACTS

Cet article propose d’explorer la mise en place d’une dramaturgie de la voix dans cinq nouvelles d’auteures modernistes et de montrer comment l’utilisation presque exclusive du mode discursif de la conversation s’accompagne d’une exposition théâtrale du langage et d’une poétique de l’affect qui font écho à l’analyse de Michael Stephens dans The Dramaturgy of Style: “By making fiction voice-centered, the stress goes away from the representational toward the presentational. It becomes gestual, human voice-activated, and the body is the soul because what you see is what you get1.” Il s’agira d’abord de s’interroger sur la façon dont cette dramaturgie de la voix renvoie au statut générique de ces cinq nouvelles, et plus généralement de la fiction brève moderniste. La question du lien possible, mais problématique, entre la notion de “genre” littéraire et celle de “gender” sera ensuite examinée dans le but de mettre en regard le drame de la voix et le drame du moi moderniste au féminin. La dimension orale, dramatique, pathétique ou ironique de la voix dans ces nouvelles nous conduira enfin à tenter de répondre à la question du locuteur féminin dans “The Canary” : “What is it — that I heard?”

AUTHORS

ANNE BESNAULT-LEVITA Anne Besnault-Levita is Maître de Conférences at the University of Rouen where she teaches English literature and translation. She is the author of a thesis on ellipsis in the short stories by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen (1996) and of La Voix du moment : Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories (1997). Her main field of study is modernist fiction and criticism, short story theory, and feminist criticism. She has recently published articles on Virginia Woolf’s short fictions and critical essays and has contributed to Andrew Maunder’s British Companion to the Short Story (New York : Facts on File, 2007).

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"Wash" as Faulkner's Prose Tragedy

Françoise Buisson

1 Faulkner showed his interest in drama when he wrote The Marionettes, inspired by pantomime and commedia dell’ arte, as well as Requiem for a Nun (1951), a novel built like a play and divided into three acts. His narratives are rich in metaphors borrowed from drama and echo Shakespearean texts, most notably in the title The Sound and the Fury (1929), an explicit reference to Macbeth. Faulkner’s vision of life as drama and of human beings as players or actors is also exemplified by “Wash”. The short story, written in 1933 and published in Harper’s in 1934, is “a tale told about an idiot”, the eponymous hero, Wash Jones, who is a poor White. The plot proves quite simple: Faulkner, whose narrators are usually so digressive, seems to abide by the Aristotelian principle of unity of action. Thomas Sutpen, a Southern planter, Civil War hero and Wash’s master seduces Wash’s granddaughter, Milly, and has high hopes for a son in order to secure the survival of his lineage. Unfortunately Milly gives birth to a baby girl, which results in Sutpen’s repudiation of the child and his refusal to provide a decent bed for Milly. Wash kills the seducer with a scythe, a clearly allegorical choice, and commits infanticide, killing his granddaughter with a butcher’s knife before setting his shack on fire. The initial nativity scene contrasts with the final tableau, the Holocaust.

2 Faulkner once said that the short story is “a crystallized instant, arbitrarily selected, in which character conflicts with character or environment or itself […]” (Williams 259). Faulkner’s stylistic and narrative choices also create effects for dramatization. The structure of the short story is based on the ritualistic pattern of the tragedy while Sutpen’s histrionics and Wash’s idealized vision of his master present the reader with the baroque drama of Southern illusion.

3 Although Faulkner usually remains faithful to the theatrical Southern story-telling tradition by choosing homodiegetic or first-person narration, “Wash” is told by an undesignated heterodiegetic narrator who starts his narrative with a dialogue between Sutpen and the Black woman who looks after Milly, the young mother. The nativity scene, which is ironically a repudiation scene, is not focalized; yet, in the following scenes, Wash becomes the focalizer, for the short story is the theatre of an epiphany, that is his realization of Sutpen’s evil nature and his human frailty. Mimesis finds its

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way through diegesis as the third-person narrator gives insights into Wash’s un- transparent mind through fragments of narrated or reported monologues or soliloquies. This mimetic process reaches its climax near the end of the story, when Wash is waiting for the men who want to avenge Sutpen’s death: He could feel them quite near now, the curious and the vengeful. He could even seem to hear what they were saying about him, the undercurrent of believing beyond the immediate fury: Old Wash Jones he come a tumble at last. He thought he had Sutpen, but Sutpen fooled him. He thought he had Kernel [Sutpen] where he would have to marry the gal or pay up. And Kernel refused. “But I never expected that, Kernel!” he cried aloud, catching himself at the sound of his own voice, glancing quickly back to find his granddaughter watching him. (548)

4 Faulkner, as usual, plays with typography to report his character’s mental processes which are either framed by inverted commas and introductory tags/attributive discourse or by italics. Ironically, in a play, italics usually refer to stage directions; in Faulkner’s texts, they usually convey the character’s thoughts in a mimetic or dramatic way. In this extract, Wash is imagining the community gossip about his failure and is thinking aloud, as if he were a character delivering a monologue on stage. Furthermore, his prosaic speech, his idiolect, enables the reader to place him in his social sphere, in other words, among poor Whites. The mise en abyme or dramatization of Wash’s idiolect is all the more significant as Wash cannot bear being regarded as “white trash” by whites and even less so by black people. Wash sees himself centre stage, under the scrutiny of a voyeuristic community who rejects him ideologically. Yet, Wash is doomed to have no say and is faced with the sound and fury of his own discourse. As Anne Ubersfeld puts it, “On voit par quelles médiations l’idéologie s’investit dans un texte de théâtre, moins au niveau du contenu explicite (et même de ses connotations) qu’au niveau de ses présupposés commandant les rapports entre les personnages” (Ubersfeld, I, 213).

5 The murders Wash commits are only alluded to and take place off the stage, in the wings and in the margins of the text, and such ellipses, ironically underlining “l’innommable” – the unspeakable – are quite usual in Faulkner’s texts. The curtain falls on the action but Sutpen’s friends turn the spotlight on the corpse lying on a dark stage: “The lantern itself came on; its light fell upon the quiet body in the weeds and stopped, the horses tall and shadowy” (549). This interplay of light and darkness also contributes to the theatricality of the short story, for the narrator or stage director often shifts light intensity in a symbolic way, turning the character into a mask or a shadow indicative of a life indeed “signifying nothing”. Hence, twilight is associated with hiatus and suspension, particularly when Milly is suspended between life and nothingness: “Her face was becoming indistinct again, again a sullen blur in the twilight” (548).

6 The narrator plays with the reader’s visual sensations, so that the characters fade into shadows or “freeze” into masks. The setting is sketched like a drawing with Faulkner interestingly spinning out the metaphor: “the early sunlight fell in long pencil strokes”, “the splintered pencils of sunlight” (emphasis added, 535). In fact, characterization sometimes proves minimalist and close to caricature, reminding us not only of pantomime, but also of Japanese kabuki drama. More generally, the short story presents us with a tragic Punch and Judy show in which the poor players are but puppets at the mercy of blind forces. No strings seem to tie them up to any God who could redeem them, however. Nearly invisible, the rag dolls themselves look deprived of either

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insight or inner life. The short story writer cannot portray characters in a comprehensive way; in “Wash”, characters seem to be a flurry of “eyes”, “faces” or “shapes”, very often described as “inscrutable”: “the old Negress peered around the crazy door with her black gargoyle face of a worn gnome”; “an absolutely stonelike face” (545). The characters are given an allegorical dimension: […] the still shape of the mother, who lay looking up at him [Sutpen], from still, inscrutable, sullen eyes, the child at her side wrapped in a piece of dingy though clean cloth. (535)

7 The portrait of the mother and her child is probably inspired by pictures or tableaux of the Virgin Mary and Sutpen’s iconoclastic behaviour appears all the more outrageous. He is palpably a Satanic or Faust-like figure. Milly’s grandfather, Wash, is definitely a prosopopeia, especially in the final tableau: Yet still the gaunt, furious figure came on against the glare and roar of the flames. With the scythe lifted, it bore down upon him, upon the wild glaring eyes of the horses and the swinging glints of gun barrels, without any cry, any sound. (550)

8 The adjective “gaunt” is used repeatedly, so that Wash is visualised as a skeleton-type figure, the Allegory of Death1. Once again, the narrator plays with light and darkness, and the flames symbolize the Holocaust, the end of what René Girard would call “the sacrificial crisis”. The reader can also notice, or even hear, the alliterative effects created by the alliterations themselves or the anaphoras so that, paradoxically, the text conveys chaos and fury while the final tableau suggests petrifaction and silence. Such sentences, with their mimetic and hypnotic effect, dramatize or even overdramatize the event. “Textual theatricality” is based on orality, according to Christian Biet and Christophe Triau: “Si bien que le texte résonne tandis que le lecteur, pris dans cette résonance, raisonne à partir de l’oralité qu’il constate et ressent lors de son expérience (renouvelable, et pas nécessairement à l’identique) de lecture. L’oralité serait alors le point focal de conjonction à partir duquel une théâtralité textuelle est possible” (555). The theatricality is enhanced by the use of anaphoras and hyperboles, sometimes abstract words, and by repetitive and well-nigh incantatory rhythms. The text is rich in hyperbolic words such as “crazy”, “fury”, “wild” and even polyptotons such as “fury” and “furious” are not unusual. Such theatricality can account for Wash’s fascination with Sutpen: […] there broke suddenly free in mid-gallop the fine proud figure of the man on the fine proud stallion, galloping; and then that at which thinking fumbled, broke free too and quite clear, not in justification nor even explanation, but as the apotheosis, lonely, explicable, beyond all fouling by human touch. (543)

9 The symmetry between the man and the stallion is underlined by the trope which is a kind of chiasmus; at the end of the sentence, Sutpen’s epic and iconic status is described in terms of hyperbolic proportions. He is thus dramatized both by his mask – the Cavalier’s mask – and by history and legend: the reader, mesmerized by the gallery of portraits, is actually attending a revenge tragedy.

10 The short story is indeed built around the ritualistic pattern of the tragedy. The narrator explicitly refers to the characters as if they were actors on a stage, thus giving a metadramatic dimension to the text: […] the three of them, Sutpen, himself [Wash], his granddaughter, with her air of brazen and shrinking defiance as her condition became daily more and more obvious, like three actors that came and went upon a stage. (542)

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11 There is definitely a play within a play, which is a mise en abyme of the excesses and dangers of dramatization, characters behaving as if they were the puppets of Fate. Doom is inscribed in the setting disintegrating, disappearing among the weeds. The planter’s house is the theatre of decay and decline: “a formal stairs, now but a fading of bare boards between two strips of fading paint” (540). The disappearance of the setting can remind us of Ionesco’s play, Le Roi se meurt. Like characterization, the description of the setting proves minimalist and only a few objects stand out against the gloomy backdrop inherited from the Gothic tradition: Sutpen’s saber and whip, the symbols of his tyranny; the ribbon, which he gives to the young girl so as to seduce and entrap her; Wash’s scythe and butcher’s knife, the instruments of his revenge. The bareness of the setting, symbolic of both Sutpen’s decline and the poor white’s destitution, also reflects the economy of the short story, a genre traditionally requiring conciseness. The symbolism of doors, frames and thresholds has also both a metadramatic and an ideological function. For example, the poor White is not allowed to enter the planter’s house and Sutpen, who stems from a similar social background, was also faced with the same denial as a child.

12 Faulkner is also mindful of both unity of place and unity of time and the short story is certainly a better stage than the novel to achieve this perfect symmetry. An external analepsis describes life on the plantation in the antebellum South, in the old days – ah, les beaux jours! – but only one day elapses between the first scene and the last – from birth to the Holocaust. Equally, from the very beginning, the reader is informed that the die is cast: the narrator “zooms in” on the scythe: “[…] there yet leaned rusting against the corner of the porch the scythe which Wash had borrowed from him […]” (536). This proleptic detail clearly reveals that characters’ stage life will be of short duration. Besides, Faulkner introduces a kind of chorus into the play, even if, like any stage director, he intermingles silence with sounds. The sound of galloping horses – which Wash’s mind associates with his impending punishment – is as obsessive as the humiliating sound of “black laughing” that keeps haunting Wash and partly accounts for his final gesture: “They laughed. It was not the first time they had laughed at him, calling him white trash behind his back” (536); “that black laughing, derisive, evasive, inescapable, leaving him panting and impotent and raging”(537). The black people behave like Furies in mythology and sound like prompters in a play (Wash seems to be able to hear their disparaging comments); the black voices of the chorus are in fact responsible for Wash’s frustration and are harbingers of doom. They are part of the tragic ritual.

13 Furthermore, the short story contains scenes that are not unusual in tragedies. The curtain rises to the suggestion of Sutpen’s symbolic incest with Milly (she is sixteen whereas he is sixty-two and is as old as Wash). His hubris is his Faustian will to preserve a feudal order based on racial and social injustice and to become a major historical figure in the South. Yet his tragic flaw is his evil nature, which reminds us of the weight of evil in Macbeth, the hero of which is also an overreacher2. Yet, Wash subverts the feudal order by killing Sutpen, because he has betrayed the Southern chivalric tradition, especially by showing more sympathy towards his mare than towards Milly. Wash commits both a symbolic parricide – Sutpen is his master, a model father figure – and infanticide, since he kills his granddaughter and her child. The final Holocaust is a cathartic process, implying the purification and restoration of the old order embodied by Major de Spain. This ritualistic violence is necessary to put an end to the wildness of

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Sutpen’s behaviour symbolized by his stallion, and Sutpen himself can be perceived as a Centaur. The adjective “crazy”, often used as a hypallage, shows that such violence is contagious, mimetic and absurd: “the crazy doorway”, “the crazy shack” (536); “the crazy door” (542); “the crazy building” (550). René Girard underlines that violence is absurd in Greek tragedy. “Dans la tragédie grecque, par exemple, il ne peut y avoir d’attitude cohérente au sujet de la vengeance […]. Chacun embrasse et condamne la vengeance avec la même fougue suivant la position qu’il occupe, de moment en moment, sur l’échiquier de la violence” (Girard 29). The Southern plantation is also a theatre of the Absurd. Wash’s hamartia or tragic flaw is his blindness, his fascination with Sutpen. His anagnorisis or recognition that Sutpen’s code is cruel and fallacious leads him to defend his own honour and to subvert “the order and the rule of the living” (547) and then to restore it by sacrificing himself. The death of the couple Wash/ Sutpen is necessary to purify the South and they are both pharmakon or scapegoats, for Sutpen is also the victim of his own social origins. Wash’s furious act can also be construed as the “idiot’s” nihilistic gesture leading nowhere, “signifying nothing”. Wash does not even try to flee from his doom and may be unconsciously aware of the ritualistic dimension of the gothic tragedy that is also the baroque drama of Southern illusion.

14 The metadramatic dimension of the short story reminds the reader that dramatic illusion should not be mistaken for reality. Sutpen’s histrionics as a war hero or a Southern knight or cavalier proves Quixotic through the very theatricality of his posturing: despite his feats during the Civil War, he is defeated – he is no longer a planter, but the owner of a store, “with Wash for clerk and porter” (539) – and is finally a fake devoted to the Lost Cause and doomed to drink “ inferior whisky” with his grotesque double, Wash, a King’s Fool or a kind of Sancho Panza: “But the talk would not be quiet now, as when Sutpen lay in the hammock, delivering an arrogant monologue while Wash squatted guffawing against his post” (539). Wash is Sutpen’s audience and can also be perceived as a metonymy of Sutpen. The title of the short story could have been “Wash and Sutpen”. After the Civil War, the two characters are so symmetrical that Wash is no longer denied the right to enter the former planter’s house: He entered the house now. He had been doing so for a long time, taking Sutpen home in whatever borrowed wagon might be, talking him into locomotion with cajoling murmurs as though he were a horse, a stallion himself. He would carry his burden through the once white formal entrance […]. (540)

15 In fact, either he becomes the master himself and Sutpen is the animal he rides, or he seems to be crossing the threshold of the house with his new bride in his arms. Neither image is devoid of ironical sexual connotations. The grotesque inversion of roles exemplifies the dialectic of master and slave, which also implies that they are interdependent: during the Civil War, Wash provides food for Sutpen’s daughter, Judith, but he is repaid by Sutpen defiling Milly’s honour. The stallion-and-mare metaphor, with its sexual connotations, shows his betrayal of the genteel tradition. As John T. Matthews puts it, “More sharply than in Faulkner’s novels, his stories demonstrate the objectification and silencing of women in the theatre of male desire” (Matthews 29). Judith is silent throughout the short story, just a shadow, even more ghostly than Milly. Women are a mystery to Wash who has a growing awareness of the discrepancy between historical reality and Southern romantic drama. He is no longer passive and finally tears off the mask worn by Sutpen, one of “the bragging and evil

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shadows” (547). His daughter’s “delivery” and Sutpen’s outrageous response trigger off an epiphany that enables him to discover the unreality of what he thought was reality: […] he stood beneath a strange sky, in a strange scene, familiar only as things are familiar in dreams, like the dreams of falling to one who has never climbed. (544) It seemed to him that he now saw for the first time, after five years, how it was that Yankees or any other living armies had managed to whip them: the gallant, the proud, the brave; the acknowledged and chosen best among them all to carry courage and honor and pride. (547)

16 Wash experiences a feeling of Freudian defamiliarization, wavering between reality and dream, realizing that he was the victim of dramatic illusion. Anne Ubersfeld compares the perception of drama to the perception of dream: “De même le théâtre a le statut du rêve : une construction imaginaire dont le spectateur sait qu’elle est radicalement séparée de la sphère de l’existence quotidienne” (I, 35). Wash Jones crosses the “double space” or espace double, the space of daily life and the space of drama. No denial – no suspension of disbelief – is possible. Sutpen’s words have a Brechtian Verfremdung effect on his consciousness: the Southern epic drama becomes alien to Wash. According to Anne Ubersfeld, this feeling of alienation is the effect of the play within the play: En revanche, aux lieux du théâtre dans le théâtre, là où s’insère, à l’intérieur de cet espace scénique affecté du signe moins quelque chose qui dit : je suis le théâtre – en ces lieux, la dénégation se renverse ; puisqu’il est bien vrai que nous sommes au théâtre. Ainsi devraient être étudiés avec précision les points capitaux où se fait ce renversement, où la théâtralité s’affirme. (I, 137)

17 Wash also discovers the power of abstractions such as “courage”, “honor” and “pride”, the theatrical emptiness of words and of “a tale full of sound and fury”: Sutpen embodies the illusions of power whereas drama denounces the powers of illusion and mimesis, and Faulkner’s writing is a mise en abyme of these powers: “L’écriture faulknérienne reste prise dans l’illusionnisme de la mimésis : elle nous invite aux spectacles de son théâtre baroque, fait défiler devant nous décors et personnages” (Bleikasten, 160).

18 Thus, “Wash” definitely enables William Faulkner to cross the boundaries between drama and the short story, especially because of the dramatization effects conveyed by mimetic techniques such as monologues or by stylistic devices such as hyperboles or alliterations; the short story is also built around the same rituals as tragedy, such as epiphanies or sacrifices. The short story can equally be interpreted as a metaphor of dramatic illusion. Because of the condensation and sublimation this genre usually requires, it has definite links with drama. Yet, theatricality pervades all literary genres: it constitutes both a way of perceiving the world and a way of distorting this vision of the world. “Wash” is also a cautionary tale warning the reader against the mesmerizing effects of drama; the short story will later be revised by Faulkner and integrated into a novel, Absalom, Absalom!, which denounces the powers of dramatic illusion.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biet, Christian et Triau, Christophe. Qu'est-ce que le théâtre?. Paris : Folio essais, 2006.

Bleikasten, André. “Modernité de Faulkner”. Delta, n°3 (novembre 1976): 156-69.

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: the Yoknapatawpha County. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!. New York: Vintage International Edition, 1990 [1936].

---. “Wash”. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985 [1950].

---. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage, 1950.

---. The Marionettes: A Play in One Act. Oxford, Mississippi: The Yoknapatawpha Press, 1975.

Girard, René. La Violence et le sacré. Paris: Hachette Littérature, Pluriel, 1972.

Ionesco, Eugène. Le Roi se meurt. Paris: Coll. Folio théâtre, N°42, 1997 [1962].

Matthews, John T. “Shortened Stories: Faulkner and the Market”. Faulkner and the Short Story, Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. 3-37.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Paris: Aubier collection bilingue, 1977.

Ubersfeld, Anne. Lire le théâtre I. Paris: Belin Lettres Sup, 1996 [1977].

---. Lire le théâtre II. L'école du spectateur. Paris: Belin Lettres Sup, 1996.

---. Lire le théâtre III. Le dialogue de théâtre. Paris: Belin Lettres Sup, 1996.

Williams Joan. “Faulkner's Advice to a Young Writer”. Faulkner and the Short Story, Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. 253-62.

NOTES

1. “The figure of Time with his scythe never received a more grim embodiment than it does in the grizzled Wash Jones raising his rusty implement to strike Sutpen down” (Brooks 308). 2. Sutpen can be compared to the king figure René Girard refers to in La Violence et le sacré: “Le caractère quasi encyclopédique des transgressions, aussi bien que la nature éclectique de la transgression incestueuse révèlent clairement quel genre de personnage le roi est appelé à incarner, celui du transgresseur par excellence, de l'être qui ne respecte rien, qui fait siennes toutes les formes, même les plus atroces, de l'hubris” (158).

ABSTRACTS

La critique n'a cessé de souligner les liens étroits entre les romans de Faulkner, la tragédie grecque, le théâtre baroque et les textes de Shakespeare. Dans “Wash”, nouvelle et “histoire

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contée sur un idiot”, le planteur Thomas Sutpen est tué par Wash, pauvre Blanc qui porte le masque du bouffon. Les fragments de monologues rapportés et narrativisés livrés par le narrateur hétérodiégétique permettent au lecteur de pénétrer l'esprit opaque de Wash. Cette “mimésis” des pensées et des paroles du personnage fonde la théâtralité de la nouvelle et la succession d'images figées ou de tableaux plonge le lecteur dans l'univers de la pantomime. Des effets théâtraux sont créés par le clair-obscur et le rôle majeur des seuils et des portes, le décor devenant ainsi le point de mire de la communauté voyeuse. Ce décor est aussi le théâtre d'un inceste symbolique, car Sutpen séduit la petite-fille de Wash. Ce dernier tue le séducteur d'un coup de faux, de façon allégorique, et commet ensuite un parricide : il tue sa petite-fille avec un couteau de boucher. Ces épisodes inspirés de la tragédie grecque ne sont pas dénués d'implications idéologiques et ce qui est théâtralisé par la désintégration de la plantation sudiste, c'est la destruction de l'ordre féodal symbolisée par l'holocauste final.

AUTHORS

FRANÇOISE BUISSON Françoise Buisson is senior lecturer at the University of Pau. She has written a PhD thesis entitled William Faulkner as a Short Story Writer: Tradition and Modernity. She is a member of CLIMAS (Cultures et Littératures des Mondes Anglophones, Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III) and her main research interests are American literature and civilization, Southern writers and the short story. She has written articles on William Faulkner, Kaye Gibbons, T.C. Boyle and Bret Easton Ellis.

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Part 3: Theatricality and the Contemporary Short Story

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Behind the Scenes of Sexual/Textual Politics in Angela Carter’s “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Michelle Ryan-Sautour

‘We dearly love the Bard, sir’ – Lizzie, Nights at the Circus (Carter, 1984: 53).

1 As Julie Sanders observes, the Shakespearean word makes up the “solid vertebrae to Carter’s allusive body of work” (Sanders 2006, 110) where images of Ophelia, Hamlet, King Lear etc. abound, attesting to an intertextual celebration of what Sanders calls the complex “afterlife” of the Shakespearean text (Sanders 2006, 121). Carter’s appropriation of Shakespeare is often one of carnivalesque frolic, confirming her irreverent qualification of the English playwright as “intellectual bubble-gum” (Sage 1992) and the necessity of dethroning his texts from their position of intellectual cult: “there's still the shadow of Leavis, we still feel we have to take it seriously.” (Sage 1992, 186). In her 1991 novel, Wise Children, for example, Shakespeare’s word is revisited through the narrative of Dora and Nora, twin vaudeville stars who live at 49 Bard Road, (my emphasis) Brixton, London on “the bastard side of Old Father Thames” (Carter 1991, 1). They travel to Hollywood to shoot “The Dream,” that is a version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which is qualified in the novel as “a masterpiece of kitsch” (Carter 1991, 111). However, the reversal of high and low culture apparent throughout the novel is not of the postmodern empty sort, as Julie Sanders notes1, but rather reveals a keen awareness of the inherent militancy of the Shakespearean text, as this “bubble-gum,” according to Carter, can also “foment revolutions” (Sage 1992, 186). In a 1992 interview with Lorna Sage, Angela Carter discusses “the idea of Shakespeare as a cultural ideology” (Sage 1992, 185), and comments on the inherent political dimension of the plays:

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I tend to agree that his politics were diabolical. I think I know the sort of person he was, the sort of wet war-hating liberal who was all gung-ho for the Falklands, who in taking sides would have said, you know, it’s a sorry business, but once we have embarked on it … signed William Shakespeare, Highgate Village. That sort of intellectual dishonesty seems to me to reek from all the political aspects of the plays, but the plays themselves add up to something else. You can play them any way you want. It must be obvious that I really like Shakespeare. (Sage 1992, 186-187)

2 Carter’s fiction indeed displays an obvious appreciation for Shakespeare – his work is brought to the surface in her fiction in a process Sage qualifies as a restoration of Shakespeare “to his pre-canonised self” (Sage 1994a, 53). As Sanders notes, Carter wanted to return Shakespeare to the people, “Carter saw the pre-canonised Shakespeare as a champion of popular culture and of illiterate and semi-literate communities. In her view, the Victorians who sanctified him had much to answer for. She lamented the academic narrowness with which his works were hedged” (Sanders 2001, 38).

3 This is particularly evident in Carter’s earlier appropriation of Shakespeare in “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Carter 1985). Carter has indeed expressed a particular affection for the play – “I like A Midsummer Night’s Dream almost beyond reason, because it’s beautiful and funny and camp – and glamourous, and cynical.” (Sage 1992, 187) – and the piece foregrounds a reflection on one of Carter’s favorite motifs: performance and play-acting. “For Carter, Shakespeare was a metonym for theatre, and theatre was something she accorded a deep value to in life as in art” Sanders observes (Sanders 2001, 56). In this particular work, Carter plays upon the genre of the short story to set the stage upon which Shakespeare’s marginal figure, the “Indian boy,” is drawn to the center and transformed into the sexually ambiguous figure of “The Golden Herm.” He/she is a “hermaphrodie verus” according to the character, whose dramatic monologue appears as the “overture” for a “behind the scenes” humoristic parody of the fairy world of Shakespeare’s play. The queen of the fairies, Titania, is described as a buxomed giantess, and the weather is poor as a result of Oberon’s (the king of the fairies) fury at not having the “Indian boy,” that is the boy Titania adopts after the death of a close friend. The Indian Boy, that is “The Herm” in Carter’s version, has a cold. The poor fairies’ wings are water logged, and they are unable to fly properly. Puck is described as a sex fiend, and the text is infused with an explicit eroticism. The human “lovers” of the original play, Hermia/Lysander and Helena/Demetrius, are strikingly absent upon this narrative “stage” where a narrator with omniscient characteristics comments on staging and the setting. The characteristics of short narrative indeed blur with the theatre of romantic comedy in this piece. The overt allusion to Mendelssohn’s music to the play (opus 21/61) in the story’s title further complicates the question of genre, as music is added to Carter’s intertextual field. An overture is intended to open and introduce, and “incidental music” accompanies and fills in the gaps of a theatrical work. In this article, I will comment on the manner in which Carter’s words, as music to a play, come forth to “open” and “fill in the gaps.” I will first concentrate on the manner in which the text questions the ontology of the fictional stage in its intertextual relationship to theatre and music. I will then proceed to explore how affect in the text interpellates the reader and heightens his/her interaction with Carter’s staging of Shakespeare’s word. I will conclude by studying the transfer of the theatre metaphor to the stage of reading as

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performance, thus indicating how reading pragmatics in relation to Carter’s text can be suggestive of a certain form of political agency.

Artifice and the stage of intertextual questioning

4 The stage of exploration, as is characteristic of many of Carter’s shorter texts, indeed wavers on the borders of the short story genre. Paratextually, the title of the text places it on the edges of the fictional “stage” as “Overture and Incidental Music” frames the theatrical work rather than providing its center. The final words of the story correspond to the rising of the curtain and the beginning of the play, “The orchestra has laid down its instruments. The curtain rises. The play begins.”(96), and all preceding discourse is thus implicitly placed outside the boundaries of the stage. According to Linden Peach the paratext indeed sets up an ambiguous intertextual status for the text – “Carter is really saying that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is predicated on an absence.” (Peach 146) – for its implied intention is not so much to revise A Midsummer Night’s Dream but rather to change the way we interact with Shakespeare’s text.

5 The narrator’s overt references to the staging of the play, in relation to Mendelssohn’s famous music, is indeed suggestive of a complex intertextual relationship, as it simultaneously points to the play and its cultural adjuncts. Mendelssohn’s famous opus 21 (1826), the opening music to Ein Sommernachtstraum, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, later followed by the incidental music (Opus 61) to the play, including the famous “Wedding March” (1843) is paratextually highlighted as the structural principle of Carter’s exploration of the cultural genealogy of Shakespeare’s word, that is the associations that have become entangled with his texts throughout the centuries. The narrator’s comments foreground, for example, how the representation of the wood has been influenced by previous interpretations: No the wood we have just described is that of nineteenth-century nostalgia, which disinfected the wood, cleansing it of the grave, hideous and elemental beings with which the superstition of an earlier age had filled it. Or, rather, denaturing, castrating these beings until they came to look just as they do in those photographs of fairy folk that so enraptured Conan Doyle. It is Mendelssohn’s wood. (89)

6 Such commentary questions processes of “castration” that have occurred throughout the years, processes that attenuate the sexual and political thrust of the plays to suit, according to Sanders, societal concepts of propriety: “Carter has in her sights the hijacking of Shakespeare and his texts by high cultural forces. In her account this move was promulgated by the Victorians, who bowdlerized Shakespeare, censored him, and tidied his playtexts up for public consumption in accordance with the repressed, and repressive morality of their age.” (Sanders 2006, 114). In reference to Carter’s irreverent hailing of Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Wise Children (Carter 1991), Lorna Sage comments on another means by which the play has been subjected to cultural appropriation through the example of Hollywood. In her reference to Hollywood as a “dream factory” she indeed suggests that the metaphor of “dream” be applied to all productions of Shakespeare’s word as a form of artifice: Hollywood is the dream-factory, and so fits her purposes by demonstrating with complete literalness that the ‘stuff. . . dreams are made on’ is material, paint and pasteboard and dry ice. Shakespeare’s wood, Hollywood, the narrative forests that branch out on Carter’s pages, are of the nature of artifice, they come to us out of

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history. It’s that mysterious provenance (‘Father Time has many children’ someone pointed out in Nights at the Circus) that Wise Children tracks down to its lair across the generations. (Sage 1992, 193)

7 “Overture and Incidental Music” indeed seeks to lay bare the genealogy of discourse which “across the generations” has become implicitly associated with Shakespeare’s work.

8 The specific focus in the piece is on the fairy world, and more particularly on the Indian Boy, a minor, voiceless, figure in the original text, who is drawn to the center through the first person narration of the opening line. “Call me the Golden Herm” he says in an obvious echo of Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” thus placing the narrator’s identity at the heart of the story. The piece, however, with a structure loosely based on the idea of music, in many cases does not resemble a story at all, as there is no real plot but rather a discontinuous spattering of vaguely connected scenes and commentary concerning the fairies and their wood. The reader is led to alternate between two narrators, the Golden Herm (“And I am called, the Golden Herm, for I am gold all over; (86)) and a more “omniscient,” didactic narrator, characterized as a director, whose comments on the “script” and “setting” set up an alienation effect suggestive of Brechtian theatre,2 “This wood is, of course, nowhere near Athens; the script is a positive maze of false leads. The wood is really located somewhere in the English midlands.”(87) Affect and intellectual estrangement often coexist uneasily on this textual stage where illusion is intermittently subordinated to social commentary.

9 “The Golden Herm’s” narrative, punctuated by didactic references to the staging of the play on the part of the narrator, indeed fosters discontinuity, and heightens the ambiguous ontological status of this discursive “theatre” (as it is the fictional representation of a play before the play begins). The reader is ironically invited to perceive a “veracious” quality in this fiction that, in being outside the illusion of the theatrical stage, suggests a complex intertwining of art and life with political implications. The questioning of fictional illusion is enhanced by various reflections on character identity. The Golden Herm speculates on his/her existence, “To all this, in order to preserve my complicated integrity, I present a façade of passive opposition. I am here. I am.”(86) The Herm’s identity is further questioned as he is displaced, removed from his origins, as Titania is not his natural parent: “My Aunt Titania. Not, I should assure you, my natural aunt, no blood bond, no knot of the umbilical in the connection.’”(85) The narrator also explores the intertextual identity of Puck, “Puck loves hokey-pokey and peek-a-boo. He has relations all over the place – In Iceland, the puki, the Devonshire pixy; the spook of the Low Countries are all his next of kin and not one of them is up to any good. That Puck!”(89) This quandary of identity is enhanced by commentaries on the existence of the fairies in relation to the reader: Just as your shadow can grow big and then shrink to almost nothing, and then swell up, again, so can these shadows, these insubstantial bubbles of the earth, these ‘beings’ to whom the verb, ‘to be’, may not be properly applied, since, in our sense, they are not. They cannot be; they cannot cast their own shadows, for who has seen the shadow of a shadow? Their existences are necessarily moot – do you believe in fairies? (91)

10 The question directly addressed to the reader typifies the manner in which he/she is invited onto this stage of ambiguous ontological status to reflect upon the contours of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One is left to wonder if this discussion concerns the fairies’ status as characters, as concepts, or as beings of an actual magical world contiguous

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with our own. This is a universe of mutability, of shifting perspective and illusion, as the changing size of the fairies suggests, “But all of them can grow BIG! Then shrink down to… the size of dots, of less than dots, again. Every last one of them is of such elastic – since incorporeal – substance.”(92) The result is an effect of multiple, mutable, fictional layers that seek to explore the limits of the “dream” represented in the play, a process intensified by the various means by which the text interpellates the reader.

Affect and the stage of reader interpellation

11 The text indeed reads as an invitation to the reader. The imperative form of the first line of the Herm’s dramatic monologue draws the reader to the stage, “Call me the Golden Herm,” and is reiterated throughout much of the text with “See me shine!”(86) and “Take a look. I’m not shy. Impressive, huh?”(86). The oral dimension of the “huh” in this last example, seeks out a response, and indeed underlines the receiver’s involvement. Numerous questions are asked to the reader, “Besides, is a child to be stolen? Or given? Or taken? Or sold in bondage, dammit? Are these blonde English fairies the agents of proto-colonialism?”(86) And the description of the Herm’s genitals typifies the intimacy with which the reader is drawn in, creating a sense of physical presence which suggests a reflection on the gap between the fictional stage, and the materiality of bodies that characterizes the theatre, “This elegantly retractable appendage, here … is not the tribade’s well-developed clit, but the veritable reproductive erectile tissue, while the velvet-lipped and deliciously closable aperture below it is, I assure you, a viable avenue of the other gender. So there.”(86) The deictics of “This” and “here” indicate a visual invitation to view the Herm’s sexual organs, which in combination with the “you” and colloquial dimension of “so there,” implies an obvious inroad for the reader. This consistent use of “you” and “we” appears throughout the text in the narrator/director’s discourse as well as in the Golden Herm’s. This is especially evident in passages devoted to overt discursive questioning of the wood as the setting of the play, “You will come home refreshed, with your pockets full of nuts, your hands full of wildflowers and the cast feather of a bird in your cap. That forest is haunted; this wood is enchanted.”3(88) With the use of “that” and “this” in addition to “you” the narrator also underlines the close presence of the reader in relation to the story space. An isotopy of observation and touching in a later passage accentuates this involvement, “And if you did chance to spy him/her, you would think the little yellow idol was a talisman dropped from a gypsy pocket […] Yet, if you picked up the beautiful object and held it on the palm of your hand, you would feel how warm it was […] And, if you watched long enough, you would see the golden sequins of the eyelids move.”(90-91) (The hermaphrodite is often portrayed as the size of a tiny talisman.) The text is indeed saturated with appeals to the senses, setting up a field of affect that explores the gap between text and the physical presence that characterizes the theatre.

12 The dominance of sexual affect further amplifies the involvement of the reader on a more intimate level. The characterization of the Indian boy as a hermaphrodite of varying proportions, along with sexually explicit description undeniably infuses Oberon’s wanting of the child in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with an erotic charge. she [Titania] blames it all on Uncle Oberon, whose huff expresses itself in thunder and he makes it rain when he abuses himself, which it would seem he must do almost all the time, thinking of me, the while, no doubt. Of ME!

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For Oberon is passing fell and wrath Because that she, as her attendant hath A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king; She never had so sweet a changeling; And jealous Oberon would have the child (86)

13 The word “have,” taken directly from the play, indeed resonates with sensuality in this new context. This sexual resonance interpellates the reader on a more primitive level. Sexual explicitness questions the reader’s threshold of sexual propriety and makes of his/her own experiences of the original text an arena for reflection. As Julie Sanders suggests, this fairy world is indeed characterized by more complex forces of identity than first meets the eye, “Carter re-reads Dream from a feminist and postcolonial perspective and strives to reinsert a darker magic and sexuality.”(Sanders 2006, 117). A bawdy sexuality infuses these configurations with a vulgarity that encourages the reader to participate in the dethroning of the Shakespearean word. Puck’s “phallic orientation”(90) appears recurrently throughout the text in the multiple references to his “buggery, and his undinism and his frotteurism and his scopophilia”(90). His ejaculations are characterized as “cuckoo spit” – “Have you seen fairy sperm? We mortals call it, cuckoo spit.”(90) – and his genitals are given a description that recalls that of the hermaphrodite in its explicitness, “Nesting in his luxuriant pubic curls, that gleam with the deep-fried gloss of the woodcarvings of Grinling Gibbons, see his testicles, wrinkled ripe as medlars.”(89)

14 Sexual affect is in turn intertwined with a questioning of the body as signifier, and the performance of sexual identity as a fluid, dynamic phenomenon. The reader is drawn away from the more basic male/female binary, often highlighted as a dominant in the original play, and invited to enter a theatre that releases sexual identity into more ambiguous configurations of desire. Oberon desires the Hermaphrodite, who in turn desires no-one, as a being inherently complete: What does the Herm want? The Herm wants to know what ‘want’ means. ‘I am unfamiliar with the concept of desire. I am the unique and perfect, paradigmatic Herm, provoking on all sides desire yet myself transcendent, the unmoved mover, the still eye of the tempest, exemplary and self-sufficient, the beginning and the end.’ Titania, despairing of the Herm’s male aspect, inserted a tentative forefinger in the female orifice. The Herm felt bored. (95)

15 Oberon masturbates and desires the Herm. Puck is in turn characterized as a sex fiend who also desires the Herm, and rapes mandrakes in consolation for his unrequited love, “The Puck, tormented for the lack of the Herm, pulled up a mandrake and sunk his prodigious tool in the cleft of the reluctant root, which shrieked mournfully but to no avail as old shaggylugs had his way with it.”(94) This field of speculation, the reach of which is too vast to be fully examined here4, is further complicated by the aforementioned theme of mutability in relation to Puck as, after a long process of thinking about the “equipment” he would need to have intercourse with the Herm, he transforms himself into the object of his desire, and in turn is desired by Oberon: The Puck, too, yearning and thwarted as he was, found himself helplessly turning himself into the thing he longed for, and, under the faintly twitching oak leaves, became yellow, metallic, double-sexed and extravagantly precious looking. There the Puck stood on one leg, the living image of the Herm, and glittered. Oberon saw him. Oberon stooped down and picked up the Puck and stood him, a simulated Yogic

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tree, on his palm. A misty look came into Oberon’s eyes. The Puck knew he had no option but to go through with it.(96)

16 The implicit consummation of this unexpected sexual configuration is punctuated by the Herm’s sneeze, “ATISHOO!”(96), a sneeze which jars the narrative from beginning to end, as if to remind the reader of the humorous carnival of parody that predominates throughout the piece.

17 The process of interpellation, as suggested by the typographical force of the sneeze (the use of capitals and an exclamation point) is, in fact, accentuated by the more subtle, but equally intense, form of affect evident in punctuation and the isolated word. As Denise Riley has remarked, punctuation is one of the most obvious displays of affect in a text: Just to glance at punctuation: the exclamation mark, a direct annotation of tone, is uninteresting because it is blatant, but other markers which are not such overt signals of emotion still quietly operate as such – the arch or the sarcastic apostrophes or ‘scare quotes’ to highlight a vexing word […] the punch or triumphant colon, the theatrical hesitancy of the dash, the demurring bracket which may hedge its bets, the self-important or nagging italicisation. (Riley 2000, 3)

18 The excess of exclamation points, colons, ellipses, and italics, points out the need to perceive each of Carter’s words as parody, each word resonating in relation to previous cultural contexts and meanings. A profusion of punctuation thus also cloaks Carter’s text with irony, teasing the reader to seek out hidden emphasis, as is evident in The Herm’s description of Titania, “Tit-tit-tit-omania boxed me up in a trunk she bought from the Army and Navy Stores, labelled it ‘Wanted on Voyage’ (oh yes, indeed!) and shipped me here. Here! to – ATISHOO – catch my death of cold in this dripping bastard wood. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain!”(85) The shifts in register (“bastard”), as well as playful anachronisms (“Army and Navy Stores”), amplify the process of interpellation in the passage. The repetition of the colloquial “tit” – in its irreverent referral to Titania’s large breasts in Carter’s version of the character, the play on the concept of desire with the inverted commas around “wanted,” the colloquial aside “oh yes, indeed!” set apart by brackets, the dashes’ breaks in the line, in combination with the onomatopoeic quality of the sneeze emphasized by capitals, the typographic repetition of the word “rain,” and all of this punctuated by various exclamation marks, enhances the pull behind the Carterian word.

19 This typographical representation of affect, in combination with the discontinuity in tense, in register, intertext, and speculative discourse, varying degrees of humor and even the breaks in the visual organization of the page, tend to undermine the coherency of Carter’s word and render it suspect, tripping up the reader in his/her contact with the text as he/she is led to draw connections, link up the various intellectual hints, and perceive a self-conscious reiteration that suggests a theatricality on the level of language. The use of inverted commas to present the word “boy” at the beginning of the text underlines the manner in which each word is more than it seems, as if wearing a mask, in an ironic gesture that points to multiple contexts well beyond Carter’s text. The first few lines typify the invitation to decipher that prevails as a result: My mother bore me in the Southern wild but, ‘she, being mortal, of that boy did die,’ as my Aunt Titania says, though ‘boy’ in the circumstances is pushing it, a bit, she’s censoring me, there, she’s rendering me unambiguous in order to get the casting director out of a tight spot. For ‘boy’ is correct, as far as it goes, but insufficient. Nor is the sweet South in the least wild, oh, dear, no! It is the lovely

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land where the lemon trees grow, multiplied far beyond the utmost reaches of your stultified Europocentric imaginations.(85)

20 The direct quotation of Shakespeare’s play in relation with the inverted commas, places the reader in a position to revise his/her perception of this minor character of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The reader is thus urged to explore the meaning of the word “boy” along with the discourse on “Europocentric imagination,” to recognize that this is a textual stage intended to open ideas and reach into the genealogy of not only text, but individual words. The affect suggested by typographical insistence is therefore closely intertwined with the affect of political intention, that is the impression of authorial intent that appears to lie behind the interpellating force of the text.

Reading as political performance

21 The text, in foregrounding such varying forms and levels of interpellation, draws the reader into a theatre of exchange that, according to Malgorzata Sugiera’s work, resembles Polish director, Tadeusz Kantor’s, “Theater of Calculated Emotions” which plays upon the affect of intertext to influence the audience’s response through, for example, the use of music: A very important part was played by sound motifs. They were always well-known and popular (as a sentimental waltz in The Dead Class or a very moving Christmas carol and a partisan’s song from World War II in Wielopole, Wielopole). These served as a trigger for the audience’s emotions, activating their memories. Unless this was done, the audience was not able to respond to the more complex, condensed visual motifs, and to clothe them in their own private details and subjective feelings.(Sugiera 2002, 9)

22 The exploitation of the cultural resonance of art forms intensifies the audience’s participation in the performance. The use of affect in music suggested by Tadeusz Kantor’s techniques is echoed most obviously by Carter’s use of Mendelssohn, as the juxtaposition of its romantic suggestiveness with a sexually charged fictional theatre of ideas dominated by masturbation and forms of intersexual eroticism fosters a jarring effect in reading pragmatics. Carter’s fiction lays bare the affect that lies behind the intertextual utterance on many different levels. Virginie Magnat also highlights an emphasis on spectator involvement in the work of contemporary directors such as Artaud, Stanislavski, Chaikin, Blau, and Grotowski, in their confidence in the “revelatory power,” of the theatre as “an affirming, rebellious force that (re)activates human creative potentialities” (Magnat 10). Magnat, in reference to the American director and playwright, Joseph Chaikin, underlines the collective dimension of the theatrical experience, “For Chaikin, the quality of presence and perception, which I have suggested as being the essential characteristic of theatricality, manifests itself as a tangible “dynamic silence” experienced by both performer and spectator, who are “joined to each other by forces [...]: unanswerable questions to do with being alive at all” (1970, 12). “Overture and Incidental Music” echoes this process in a textual way as it openly displays the “nostalgia for anonymity” (Sage 1994, 2) that underlies much of Carter’s fiction. Its self-conscious foregrounding of the intertextual saturation of our cultural productions opens up “unanswerable questions” concerning both sexual and textual identity to both author and reader.

23 This process hinges on the politics of “imposture” that is the dynamics of reading pragmatics Jean-Jacques Lecercle identifies as being at the heart of the reading contract

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as a form of counter-interpellation, that is a complex process of positioning of author and reader in relation to what Louis Althusser identifies as the “always-already” of language (Lecercle 166). In theoretical dialogue with the work of Judith Butler, his description of the staging of speech acts resonates in relation to Carter’s staging of the Shakespearean word as a form of cultural reiteration in flux: Thesis 6 draws the second consequence of that consequence. It is the thesis of metalepsis, according to which the retroactive temporality of the always-already projects the speaker as fictive origin of the speech act. This is how Butler defines iterability: it is ‘the operation of that metalepsis by which the subject who ‘cites’ the performative is temporarily produced as the belated and fictive origin of the performative itself.’ That this thesis is central to the ALTER model [Lecercle’s model of reading pragmatics] has already been suggested, either explicitly or implicitly through the use of terms like ‘fantasy’, ‘ghost’ or ‘pantomime of actors’. Interpellated subjects are fictions, actors-at-an-actant-place. The Scene of Interpellation is a scene indeed, where roles are acted out. (Lecercle 166-167)

24 According to Lercercle, literature serves as the ultimate stage upon which this scene of interpellation can be enacted, “What I am suggesting is that the business of literature, the meta-characteristic which turns what at first sight is merely a family resemblance […] into the defining character of a set or species is its capacity to stage the process of interpellation.” (Lecercle 186). Such a stage is apparent in “Overture and Incidental Music” where the “ghost” of Angela Carter appears intermittently throughout the text in the didactic pull of the narrator’s comments, and in the overall discontinuity and political thrust of sexual connotation. The reader is led to ascribe an identity to Carter as the “fictive origin” of this stage of discursive play where theatrical metaphor and intertext intertwine with affect in the theatre of reading, “where roles are acted out,” where reader and author interact with the multiple guises of the Shakespearean word.

25 The piece is indeed suggestive of what Lecercle highlights as being an essential aspect of Butler’s theory, that is the insurrectionary possibilities of reiteration, “Recontextualisation breaks the chain of authority, it allows the interpellated subject to be displaced, if ever so slightly, from the place ascribed by interpellation.”(Lecercle 167). Carter’s staging hints at a performance that can work in “counter-hegemonic ways’ (Lecercle quoting Butler 167). One can indeed speculate that after having read “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that the words and characters might acquire a different resonance, be it through the infusion of the characters with a sexual affect simply alluded to in the play, or the creation of an aura of “suspicion,” or irony around the Shakespearean word, in relation to “boy,” for example, or “king.” Denise Riley has commented on irony as a form of self-conscious, staged provisionality, “Irony as self-scrutiny is above all conscious of its own provisionality; this is what it stages, and especially in the conspicuous provisionality of the categories of social being. Self-reflecting identities will happily know themselves to be tentative, as irony eyes them finely from different angles and holds them up to the light between its fingertips” (Riley 165). In the movement of concept and affect, and through multiple degrees of irony, Carter’s text opens the Shakespearean word up to the light of the reader’s curiosity, in a hopeful gesture towards what Janelle Reinelt identifies in relation to staged performance, as “palpable possibilities for unanticipated signification” (Reinelt 213). As Lorna Stage once said of “Overture and Incidental Music, “Going ‘behind’ the text you free up the future, patch [Shakespeare] into the quilt of writing once again” (Sage 1994a 46).

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Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge, 1997.

Carter, Angela. Nothing Sacred, London: Virago, 1982.

---. “Notes From the Front Line,” On Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor, London: Pandora Press, 1983.

---. Nights at the Circus, 1984, New York: Penguin, 1986.

---. Saints and Strangers. New York: Penguin, 1985.

---. Shaking a Leg, ed. Jenny Uglow, London: Chatto & Windus, 1997.

Féral, Josette, “Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism (SubStance) 2002; 31 (2-3 [98-99]): 94-108.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, Interpretation as Pragmatics, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Peach, Linden. Angela Carter. London: Macmillan 1998.

Reinelt, Janelle, “The Politics of Discourse: Performativity Meets Theatricality,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism (SubStance) 2002; 31 (2-3 [98-99]): 201-15.

Sage, Lorna, “Angela Carter interviewed by Lorna Sage.” New Writing. ed. Malcolm Bradbury and Judy Cooke, Reading: Minerva, 1992. 184-193.

---. “Introduction,” Flesh and the Mirror, ed. Lorna Sage, London: Virago, 1994a.

---. Angela Carter, Plymouth, UK: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1994b.

Sanders, Julie. “Bubblegum and Revolution: Angela Carter’s Hybrid Shakespeare.” Dans Re- visiting Angela Carter. Ed. Rebecca Munford (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 110-134.

---. Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-Century Women Novelists and Appropriation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001. 37-65

Sugiera, Malgorzata. “Theatricality and Cognitive Science: The Audience's Perception and Reception,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism (SubStance) 2002; 31 (2-3 [98-99]): 225-35.

NOTES

1. “Jean Baudrillard’s highly influential theory of simulacra suggests that in the postmodern era many objects and ideas, aesthetic, cultural, and architectural, are effectively ‘hyperreal’, mere simulacra and simulations of the traditions from which they evolve (see also Malpas 121). In recognizing the fragmentation of Shakespeare into a series of evacuated cultural icons in the modern era, Carter appears to endorse Baudrillardian theory and yet for her this endless reworking of Shakespearean material was not necessarily devoid of political content. In fact, she registered considerable political and cultural force at play in the seemingly tireless reinvention of Shakespearean texts and language in a global context.” (Sanders 2002, 111) 2. Julie Sanders has commented on the influence of Brecht, notably in this alternation between illusion and distanciation as being typical of modern theatre, “Her methodologies were again shaped by contemporary dramatic practice. Parallel to the interest in intercultural performance

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cited earlier, the 1960s and subsequent decades witnessed a Brechtian-inspired determination to politicize and defamiliarize the conventions of mainstream British theatre. Chief exponents of this theatrical agenda included several playwrights who looked directly to early modern drama for inspiration and influence: Edward Bond and Howard Barker, among others […] They also recognized early modern drama’s capacity to mobilize realism and artifice in a series of complex shifts and modulations within a single production or performance […] As Benedict Nightingale has noted, ‘[t]he Elizabethans and Jacobeans in particular ask you to suspend disbelief in the existence of titanic feelings and absolute values’ (qtd. in Saunders 18). Carter seems to have recognized something very similar to contemporary theatre practitioners in this respect.” (Sanders 2006, 116) 3. My emphasis. 4. One could indeed deal in depth with the body as signifier in this passage, and link these questions with the theory of Judith Butler, for example, to fully explore Carter’s use of the Hermaphrodite as a tool for questioning sexual identity.

ABSTRACTS

En 1992 dans un entretien donné à Lorna Sage, Angela Carter évoque l’idée de Shakespeare comme idéologie culturelle (“cultural ideology”). En effet, le discours fictionnel d’Angela Carter est riche en références politiques, et les mots et motifs de Shakespeare se manifestent sous des formes diverses dans son oeuvre, preuve de ce que Julie Sanders identifie comme étant “the afterlife”, c’est-à-dire de l’évolution du mot Shakespearien depuis son texte d’origine (Sanders 2006, 121). Cette évolution est mise en valeur dans “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1985). La nouvelle place le personnage marginal du jeune page (“Indian boy”) au centre du texte où il/elle est transformé en un hermaphrodite avec toute l’ambiguïté sexuelle que cela implique. Il/Elle se présente comme étant un “hermaphrodie verus” et son monologue constitue une sorte d’“ouverture” pour une exploration intertextuelle qui propose une réflexion non seulement sur les implications du masque Shakespearien, mais aussi sur les limites de la scène théâtrale en rapport avec la fiction. Une ouverture (“overture”) a pour objectif d’ouvrir et de présenter, et la musique de scène (“Incidental music”) accompagne une pièce de théâtre pour combler des blancs éventuels. Dans cette nouvelle, les mots de Carter proposent d’ouvrir et de combler des blancs de manière à engager le lecteur dans les multiples couches de discours sexuel/politique chargées d’affect qui au cours des siècles sont devenues indissociables des textes de Shakespeare.

AUTHORS

MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR Michelle Ryan-Sautour is a lecturer at the University of Angers, France and author of a doctoral thesis entitled, “Le Jeu didactique et l'effet sur le lecteur dans The Passion of New Eve (1977) et Nights at the Circus (1984) d'Angela Carter.” (Didactic games and their effect on the reader in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Nights at the Circus (1984)). As a member of the CRILA team at the University of Angers, she participates actively in the group’s research on

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themes such as the implicit in the short story, and she has contributed to the group’s publication on metatextuality in Angela Carter’s short stories. She has also published a number of articles about Angela Carter’s work in Etudes britanniques contemporaines. She is currently working on a project concerning reading pragmatics and power in Angela Carter’s short fiction.

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“This Tableau Vivant… Might be Better Termed a Nature Morte”: Theatricality in Angela Carter’s Fireworks

Julie Sauvage

1 Although she confessed to an early, thwarted vocation for acting and wrote successful radio plays and film scripts,1 Angela Carter authored only two works for the stage proper, an opera libretto she adapted form Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and a translation of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, neither of which have ever been performed.2 Yet the dramatic quality of her fiction has not escaped detection: “If there is a single theme that appears central to criticism of Carter’s writing, that theme must be theatricality,” Christina Britzolakis rightly asserts.3

2 Interestingly enough, when she published her first collection of short stories, entitled Fireworks, Angela Carter added an after word specifying that those “short pieces” were not short stories, but “tales.” To her, she explained, “formally, the tale differ[ed] from the short story in that it [made] few pretences at the imitation of life”:4 The tale does not log into everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience (…) Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural – and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. (BYB, 459)

3 Such artificiality relates to the sometimes derogatory connotations of ‘theatricality,’ which can refer to exaggerated, melodramatic and ultimately unbelievable performances. In Carter’s writing, though, it is derived from a dramatization of the narrative that parallels Brecht’s epic theatre and its well-known alienation effects. As Linden Peach has pointed out,5 the German playwright obviously exerted great influence on the British authoress: he even makes a cameo appearance in her last novel, in the guise of a “runty little German chap” exiled in Hollywood.6 Besides, during her two-year stay in Japan, Carter had ample opportunity to discover the Japanese

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stage, which was certainly predominant in her aesthetic views, just as the traditional Chinese theatre had been influential in Brecht’s theorization.

4 I shall start from Carter’s definition of the tale as contrasted with the short story to determine the part played by theatricality in her transformation of the genre. Focussing first on the unreality effects she creates by referring to painting and tableaus, I shall then examine her theatrical handling of the body, which will lead me to tackle the dramatization of narrative voices in Fireworks and its consequences in terms of reading.

5 “It was midnight - I chose my times and set my scenes with the precision of the born artist” (BYB 68), declares the narrator of “Flesh and the Mirror.” Throughout the collection, similar metafictional comments repeatedly point to the artificiality of the scenery, which tends to be described as a stage set. Such remarks only bear out what the reader had already gathered from the many allusions to paintings and sculptures peppering the whole collection. One only needs to find mountains “sprouting jags as sharp and unnatural as those a child outlines with his crayons” in “The Loves of Lady Purple” (BYB 41), or the waves “mould[ing] the foreshore into (…) curvilinear tumuli like the sculptures of Arp” in “The Smile of Winter” (BYB 55) to realize such pictorial terms present even the most natural landscapes as artefacts. Consequently, as one turns the pages, various settings seem to pop up like the pictures in the child’s book mentioned by the narrator of “A Souvenir of Japan”: “a book with pictures which are cunningly made out of paper cut-outs so that, when you turn the page, the picture springs up in the three stylized dimensions of a backdrop in Kabuki” (BYB 30). In “Flesh and the Mirror,” though, the device fails in spite of the narrator’s efforts and she is left to lament the gap that separates her scenery from reality: “So I attempted to rebuild the city according to the blueprint of my imagination as a backdrop to the plays in my puppet theatre, but it sternly refused to be rebuilt. I was only imagining it had been rebuilt” (69).

6 Yet, even in this instance, the parallel remains clear: the setting of the tale is supposed to retain the artificial aspect of a paper cut-out and the stylised quality of the painted sets on the traditional Japanese stage. No “reality effects” are to be found in Fireworks, at least not in the sense Barthes defined them in his famous article,7 that is, as an attempt to do away with the signified in order to conflate signifier and referent. On the contrary, Carter will often try to foreground the signifier and cast a doubt on the very existence of a referent, thus resorting to a type of theatricality that can be equated with artificiality and prevent any suspension of disbelief.

7 In the last paragraph of “The Smile of Winter,” the narrator explicitly evokes the backdrop she has been depicting: Do not think I do not realize what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you must have gathered, is the smile I wear. (BYB 57)

8 The landscape finally turns out to be either an inscape or a portrait, and the short story itself is summed up through an enumeration of significant images. Carter seems to draw the tale towards the descriptive, developing its pictorial aspect first and foremost,

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sometimes at the expense of the narrative itself. With its inexistent plot, “The Smile of Winter” consists of a series of stills or, as the narrator puts it, of “still lives.” But sometimes, the fragile habitations of unpainted wood; and the still lives, or natures mortes, of rusting water pumps and withered chrysanthemums in backyards; and the discarded fishing boats pulled on the sand and left to rot away – sometimes, the whole village looks forsaken. (…) Everything has put on the desolate smile of winter. (BYB 54)

9 Τhe nature morte verges on the vanitas subgenre as rust and chrysanthemums, especially when fading, are redolent of death. That Carter relates her theatrical sets to still lives, which appears as a locus of tension in Western painting, entails a twofold consequence. As regards realism and representation, first, it may be quite strange to foreground its artificiality, since it is considered to be one of the most mimetic pictorial genres. Yet, in still lives and Carterian descriptions alike, the symbolical value of objects counterbalances the “reality effect” they may otherwise produce. As a matter of fact, symbolical details proliferate in the collection. In his book about objects in fiction, Laurent Lepaludier notes that objects are often “overdetermined” in narrative.8 Moreover, as Susan Hunter Brown has cogently shown through an experiment carried out with two groups of subjects,9 short story readers tend to interpret details, including objects, symbolically – unlike novel readers who are content to consider them as “useless,” like the “seemingly useless” descriptions which create reality effects according to Barthes. That Carter explicitly chooses traditional Japanese backdrops as a model only reinforces the tendency to envisage objects as symbols, which short story readers share with theatre audiences. This is exemplified by the value of mirrors in Fireworks, as analysed by Laurent Lepaludier and Liliane Louvel:10 they can be used by characters, but they also fulfil an intertextual function, evoking the myth of Narcissus or Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Besides, they constitute metatextual clues reflecting the structures of stories based on repetitions and doubles, such as “Flesh and the Mirror” or “Reflections,” thus raising the question of mimesis and representation. In this respect, they call mostly on the reader’s interpretive skills and reinforce alienation effects.

10 Secondly, as the oxymoron suggests, still life combines life and death, movement and stillness. In this respect, enhancing the pictorial qualities of the tale or short story allows Carter to break off its narrative flow. “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter,” for instance, opens on a capital execution scene: (…) the tableau vivant before us is suffused with the sepia tints of an old photograph and nothing within it moves. The intent immobility of the spectators, wholly absorbed as they are in the performance of their hieratic ritual, is scarcely that of living things and this tableau vivant might be better termed a nature morte for the mirthless carnival before us is a celebration of death (…). (BYB 35)

11 Playfully setting into relief their opposition by resorting to their French appellations, the author also refers to the common origin of nature morte and tableau vivant, a theatrical genre in which actors would stand motionless on stage, imitating a famous painting. Its contradictions recall those of the still life genre since it was developed in the 18th century, an era when both audiences and theorists advocated a more realistic theatre, while it substituted stillness to life and the imitation of paintings to the imitation of reality. Its paradoxical theatricality thus combined artificiality and a sense of suspended time. Angela Carter shows comparable intentions in “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter,” as she obviously tries to play “tricks with time,”11 adding one

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paragraph later: “Time, suspended like the rain, begins again, slowly” (BYB 35). Narrative time is slow indeed, as the condemned man’s death occurs only one page later in a dramatic slow motion: “The axe falls. The flesh severs. The head rolls” (BYB 36). Full stops break up the scene into three Grand Guignol stills, a theatrical genre also alluded to in the short story (BYB 39).

12 By treating settings as painted theatre sets, scenes as tableaus, Angela Carter produces unreality effects in the narrative that parallel the alienation effect Brecht aimed to create on stage. She thus calls on the readers’ intellectual abilities rather than on the psychic agency prompting them to believe the stories and identify with the characters. There is more, however, to Carter’s tales than brilliant, superficial intellectual games. Her choice of still life as an aesthetic modelpoints to the significance of death in the theatrical effects she draws from the reference to painting, thus revealing deeper concerns. Her extensive use of tableaus, implying that bodies should be stilled, also targets the readers’ unconscious death drive, thereby appealing to the passive component of their minds.12 In this regard, she could also be said to adapt Brechtian principles to the narrative, as the German theorist insisted that alienation effects should not suppress the spectators’ feelings.

13 Painting, to Carter, always exemplifies the interpersonal or social violence that turns people into masterpieces, therefore objects. It points to the dark theatricality of social life which urges human beings to consider others as things while they themselves strike poses as paintings or behave as puppets, thus symbolically sacrificing others as they sacrifice themselves.

14 Metaphorically, the executioner is a painter: “He brings one booted foot to rest on the sacrificial altar which is, to him, the canvas on which he exercises his art” (BYB 35). So is the famous Lady Purple who “used her lovers as the canvas on which she executed boudoir masterpieces of destruction. Skins melted with the electricity she generated” (BYB 46). Bodies and skins become the canvases on which the painter executes his works, in both senses of the word. Consequently, in “A Souvenir of Japan,” tattooing, the art of painting on the surface of the flesh, illustrates the social violence that turns people into objects or signs: “They paint amazing pictures on their skins with awl and gouge, sponging away the blood as they go; a tattooed man is a walking masterpiece of remembered pain” (BYB 33). The tattooed man’s body is no longer a mere body, just as the performing actor’s body is always a set of signs the audience has to decipher, a substitute for a meaning or even for a picture, in tableaus.13 According to Georges Banu, the connection between the Japanese theatre aesthetics and painting enhances the dehumanization of its actors. Costumes, he writes, end up “turning into essences,” “making the body unreal by submitting it to the topos of painting.” In Noh plays especially, they “set the actor up as a statue.”14

15 This form of social violence actually lies at the historical roots of the theatre, which originates in the ritual sacrifice of an animal which, Michel Serres argues, was substituted for a human. After mentioning the etymology of the word “victim” – literally a substitute, he notes the theatre retains its original ambiguity: Here is the origin of tragedy, of any kind of theatre or representation generally speaking – the Greek word tragos means the goat that is sacrificed as a substitute. On the marble of the altar, who is to die as a substitute for whom? In a theatre, nobody has ever seen anything else than characters mixed with actors, that is, substitutes.15

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16 In Fireworks, the executioner also undergoes a similar ordeal as his own face is transformed beyond recognition by the mask he wears: The close-fitting substance of the mask has become so entirely assimilated to the actual structure of his face that the face itself now seems to possess a party- coloured appearance, as if by nature dual and his face no longer pertains to that which is human as if, when he first put on the hood, he blotted out his own, original face and so defaced himself for ever. Because the hood of office renders the executioner an object. He has become an object who punishes. He is an object of fear. He is the image of retribution. (BYB 36)

17 The description of his face – “by nature dual” – is indeed reminiscent of Michel Serre’s analysis of the actor’s ambiguous status as a substitute. Angela Carter even stresses the fact that the executioner is actually a victim in the etymological sense, since the mask obliterates his original face to such an extent that what is left visible is no longer human flesh, but meat: (…) his blunt-lipped, dark-red mouth and the greyish flesh which surrounds it. Laid out in such an unnerving fashion, these portions of his meat in no way fulfil the expectations we derive from our common knowledge of faces. They have a quality of obscene rawness (…). He, the butcher, might be displaying himself as if he were his own meat. (BYB 36)

18 She insistently reminds her readers that human flesh cannot be conceived of as unpainted, unclothed. Bare, unadorned flesh usually verges on still, dead matter, be it animal or mineral. In this perspective, human faces lie half-way between meat and artefacts, and the “Loves of Lady Purple” plays on the essential ambivalence of the costume that turns meat into flesh but might as well turn flesh into inert matter. The puppet called Lady Purple is said to have once been a woman, a famous heartless courtesan, who finally turned into her own marionette. The tale relates how she comes (or comes back) to life after sucking her puppeteer’s blood. Had he not wished to see his creation with her costume on before kissing her goodnight, however, this unfortunate accident could not have occurred – as suggested in the passage where the magnificent dress imparts a new life on the dead wood: “Now she was dressed and decorated, it was as if her dry wood had all at once put out an entire springtime of blossoms for the old man alone to enjoy” (BYB 49). Yet, ironically, her new existence turns out to be a parody of her previous past lives for, in her predicament, she can imagine no other option than heading to the nearest brothel to act out the same scenario all over again. Hence the narrator’s questioning: (…) had the marionette all the time parodied the living or was she, now living, to parody her own performance as a marionette? Although she was now manifestly a woman, young and beautiful, the leprous whiteness of her face gave her the appearance of a corpse, animated solely by demonic will. (BYB 51)

19 The woman may thus be a victim of the puppet’s white mask, all the more so as prostitutes sell “the nameless essence of the idea of woman, a metaphysical abstraction of the female” (BYB 46), which implies they should negate their own bodies, like so many actresses.

20 One might even argue that, in Angela Carter's view, any human society consists of a mass of depersonalized puppets. Indeed, her characters are always the objects of the others’ gazes and desires which turn them into images or types, so much so that the narrator of “Flesh and the Mirror” is surprised to see she can still “[act] out of character” (BYB 71). Similarly, through names or situations, readers are encouraged to

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project literary or mythical types on the short story characters, a process which calls their identity into question. In “Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest,” we follow twins, Emile and Madeline, whose relationship undergoes serious transformations while they are walking to the centre of a tropical forest. They finally find a fabulous tree and, as the young woman tastes one of its fruits before handing it to her brother, the short story ends on a sentence that is pregnant with meaning: “He took the apple; ate; and after that, they kissed” (BYB 67). Obviously, Emile and Madeline are strongly identified to Adam and Eve and readers are encouraged to consider them as the biblical figures’ doubles. Yet, their father is a scholar and a botanist, which, combined to the boy’s name, certainly recalls Rousseau and his treatise on education, L’Emile. Carter’s character could then be a double of the French philosopher's ideal pupil. Similarly, Madeline’s name may refer to Magdalene the repentant harlot, Eve’s counterpart in the New Testament, and to Edgar Allan Poe’s Lady Madeline in The Fall of the House of Usher. Through onomastics, readers are urged to envisage the characters as types and intertextual doubles. In this respect, their experience parallels that of the narrator in “Flesh and the Mirror,” when she notices that her lover's features are “blurring, like the underwriting on a palimpsest” (BYB 74).

21 As to nameless first person narrators, they constantly enhance the disruption of self inherent in autobiography, a genre that splits the narrative agency into voice and character. They can thus watch themselves performing various roles and sometimes even comment on their own lack of authenticity. In “Flesh and the Mirror,” for instance, the narrator watches herself acting, but she also watches herself watching her performing self: It was as if there were a glass between myself and the world. But I could see myself perfectly well on the other side of the glass (…). But all the time, I was pulling the strings of my own puppet; it was this puppet who was moving about on the other side of the glass. And I eyed the most marvellous adventures with the bored eye of the agent with the cigar watching another audition. I tapped out the ash and asked of events ‘What else can you do?’ (BYB 69)

22 Almost stammering, replete with alliterations, the phrase “I eyed … with a bored eye” renders a schizoid turn of mind that bears a striking resemblance to Brecht’s description of the Chinese actors’ performance: The Chinese show not only the behaviour of people, but also that of actors. They show how, in their own way, actors present people’s gestures. For actors translate the language of everyday life into their own language. So that, when watching a Chinese actor, you can see three characters at the same time: one of them is showing, two are shown.16

23 A single carterian narrator can thus equal a whole Bunraku performance, complete with puppet and puppeteer. Indeed, as the Bunraku genre implies the presence of a chanter who remains off stage yet visible, so Carter’s short stories endow the narrative voice with a theatrical function. The Bunraku chanter’s powerful voice reaches the audience, drawing their attention to the puppets as he sings the story they are performing. Similarly, Angela Carter's tales purport to retain a dramatic, oral quality and elicit the sense they are told.

24 In narrative fiction, of course, voices cannot be heard and readers must be content with voice effects. One of the easiest ways to produce them in writing consists in mimicking a conversation by addressing a mysterious “you.” The second person pronoun standing for an unknown narratee appears in six tales out of the nine that make up Fireworks. Its

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use occasionally counterbalances alienation effects that readers might otherwise find off-putting, as in “A Souvenir of Japan” when the narrator explains she is too honest to abide by the rules of realism: At times, I thought I was inventing him as I went along, however, so you will have to take my word for it that we existed. But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits (…) so that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practice such sleight of hand. (BYB 32)

25 The very same argument is put forward by Angela Carter to explain why she conceives of literary realism as inherently deceitful, and why she herself refuses to put such wily devices into practice. When the narrative voices seem to doubt their own existence, though, the second person pronoun remains the readers’ only point of reference. This leads them to adopt some very uncomfortable postures, for instance in “Elegy for a Freelance,” the last tale in the volume – but definitely not the least since a collection entitled Fireworks should be expected to end with an impressive finishing piece.

26 Like the two short stories preceding it, “Master” and “Reflections,” it is centred on the lethal doubles of fireworks – firearms – and relates the story of several unnamed characters referred to by capital letters. A, B and C are all friends with X, as well as the narrator who never reveals her name, but recounts her story in the first person singular, “I.” Juxtaposed to A, B, C and X, “I” seems to lose its pronominal value to become yet another capital letter. At least, it does not look any more remarkable than X which suggests a name crossed off or even X-rated material, so that readers experience the flicker of a doubt when the characters decide to use a Chinese book, the “I Ching” for divination purposes (BYB 101). In this context, “I” is not necessarily a pronoun and when it is, it hardly refers to a person, since the narrator underlines her own emptiness: “(…) when I met X. That was like finding myself on the edge of an abyss but the vertigo I felt then came from a sense of recognition. This abyss was that of my own emptiness” (BYB 98).

27 Besides, if readers have grown accustomed to taking the narratee’s stance, the opening sentence of “Elegy for a Freelance” may come as a shock to them: “I remember you as clearly as if you’d died yesterday, though I don’t remember you often – usually, I’m far too busy” (BYB 96). They have to realize that the narratee is a dead man, who was killed by the woman now addressing him so impertinently, and that he was a murderer as well.

28 Creating voice effects, imitating a dialogue is tantamount to conjuring up a body with its attitudes and movements for a voice evokes the body it originates from, hence its sensuous qualities which Carter systematically enhances through synaesthesia: Lady Purple’s is like “fur soaked in honey” (BYB 44). In “Reflections” Anna’s voice has a “richly crimson sinuosity,” it “pierce[s] the senses of the listener like an arrow in a dream” (BYB 81) whereas the narrator’s cries appear as “gobs of light” (BYB 93) in the anti-world of the mirror. As Henri Meschonnic puts it: “You can say a voice is moving, penetrating or caressing. There is gesture in a voice.”17 So much so that Carterian voice effects do create what Brecht called a gest or gestus – they suggest the narrator’s gait or bearing, attitudes and gestures, they conjure up a performance.18

29 Some of the short stories in Fireworks thus bear a double resemblance to dramatic monologues. Indeed, their narrators behave like ventriloquists; discourses and voices are not easily distinguished since they often seem to quote and imitate one another. It becomes difficult to tell who is speaking, whose opinions are voiced, as in the following

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excerpt from “Elegy for a Freelance”: “But I told the commissar about you, once (…). But he said if I wanted absolution, that he was the last person to ask for it and, besides, everything is changed now, and we are not the same” (BYB 96). It is unclear whether the narrator herself considers she has changed, whether she speaks on her own or imitates the commissar’s rather clichéd use of revolutionary rhetoric expressing his problematic view on personal identity.

30 Their discourses tend to merge, overlap and sometimes jar. The narrator’s description of a love scene with X is thus given a comical counterpoint: Your flesh defines me. I become your creation. I am your fleshy reflection. (‘Libido and false consciousness characterized sexual relations during the last crisis of Capital’, says the commissar). (BYB 99)

31 Punctuation and typography, with new paragraphs, parentheses and inverted commas, are used almost as musical notations to mark shifts in voices. But their interpretation ultimately depends on the readers and it is difficult to say how they individually handle sentences in capital letters or italics, be they Latin phrases, foreign words or quotations from various discourses or even documents. In “The Loves of Lady Purple,” for example, they are faced with a transcription of the handbills the puppeteer has printed off to advertise his show: Come and see all that remains of Lady Purple, the famous prostitute and wonder of the East! A Unique sensation. See how the unappeasable appetites of Lady Purple turned her into the very puppet you see before you, pulled only by the strings of lust. Come and see the very doll, the only surviving relic of the shameless Oriental Venus. (BYB 44)

32 Italicization suggests emphasis, whereas the exclamation mark, the nominal sentence and the repetition of the imperative “come and see” draw the readers’ attention to a rhythm and intonation that evoke a barker’s booming voice and dramatic diction. So does the typographical blank, which seems to mark a pause, if not a musical rest, allowing the entertainer to get his breath back. Confusion settles as the text is supposed to be the reproduction of a written flier. However, the voice that resonates off the page seems both to imitate a barker calling out to passers-by and to address readers. The latter are then provided with an extensive account of Lady Purple’s performance – a play based on her “pyrotechnical career which ended as if it had indeed been a firework display, in ashes, desolation and silence” (BYB 47).19 The parallel between their experience and that of the puppet show audience suggests that Fireworks is to end in silence as well.

33 All the short stories in the collection exemplify what Henri Meschonnic calls a “dramatization of the printed page”20 which draws readers into the text and potentially prompts them to experience various sensations. In this perspective, typographical blanks play an important role and the critic remarks that they are not silences, or rather that the silences they visually render have a meaning, that they refer to a context and belong to the realm of speech.21 As such, they evoke postures and movements, even under the strangest circumstances. The passage where the narrator tries to come back through the mirror in “Reflections” is thus framed by typographical blanks that give it the appearance of free verse. The visual, typographical disruption reflects the schizophrenic situation the narrator’s mind and body are trapped in as he tries to escape through a looking-glass, fleeing from a world ruled by a knitting hermaphrodite figure: She dropped her knitting as I crashed through the glass through the glass, glass splintered around me driving

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unmercifully into my face through the glass, glass splintered through the glass – half through (BYB 94)

34 Growing indentations both reflect the narrator’s movement through the mirror and suggest a gasping for breath, a syncopated diction further emphasized by a dash that also materializes the surface of the looking-glass on the written page. The theatrical dimension of Angela Carter’s tales clearly appears in the way she uses the printed page to create and combine visual and aural effects, to conjure up stances, voices and intonations that ultimately define meaning.

35 Angela Carter’s virtuoso handling of narrative voices and her general conception of theatricality certainly owe much to her experience of the Japanese stage, combined to her reading of Brecht. Yet, for all the emphasis she lays on refusing realism, she is not concerned only with alienation effects and she uses theatricality to make her readers walk a tight rope between intellectual games and unconscious drives. The aural and even oral quality her tales possess mostly appeal to conflicting psychological agencies in the readers’ minds, pointing to a dialectics of identification and alienation. Typography draws the readers’ attention to the printed page, to the book they are holding, but it also dramatizes the narrative voice, thus promoting reader identification – which finally proves uncomfortable and thus creates alienation effects. If Angela Carter definitely ignores, indeed rebuffs the reader who would believe in the story and existence of the characters, such frustration is fully compensated for both by unconscious and hyper-conscious games and by the pleasure of directing one’s own performances of the text. She turns her readers’ minds into so many small stages with sets, actors and music. In such inner theatres, they can both direct and perform her polyphonic tales with the diction, rhythm and tessitura they may select according to their tastes and fantasies.

NOTES

1. Angela Carter, “Notes from the Frontline” in J. Uglow (ed.) Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (London: Vintage, 1998) 41. 2. See Susannah Clapp’s introduction to The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works (London: Vintage, 1997) vii-x. 3. Christina Britzolakis, “Angela Carter’s Fetishism” in T. Broughton and J. Brystow (eds.) The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter (London: Longman, 1997) 43. 4. Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Angela Carter, Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995) 459. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text. 5. Linden Peach, Angela Carter (London: Macmillan, 1998) 140, 168. 6. Angela Carter, Wise Children (London: Vintage, 1991) 130. 7. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect” in Richard Howard (trans.) The Rustle of Language (Berkeley:University of California Press 1989) 141–48.

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8. Laurent Lepaludier, L’Objet et le récit de fiction (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes 2004) 39. 9. Susan Hunter Brown, “Tess and ‘Tess’: An Experiment in Genre”, Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1982): 25-44. 10. See Laurent Lepaludier, “Passages du miroir et miroir du passage dans ‘Reflections’ d’Angela Carter”, idem, 188-206, and Liliane Louvel, “Le miroir érotique: ‘Flesh and the Mirror’ in Texte/ Image: Images à lire, textes à voir (Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes 2002) 78-85. 11. See Carter’s “Preface to Come Unto These Yellow Sands,” in The Curious Room (London: Vintage, 1997) 497. 12. I am referring to Vincent Jouve’s theory of reading as expounded in L’effet-personnage dans le roman (Paris: P.U.F, 1998) and I am indebted to Michelle Ryan-Sautour who first used this fruitful approach to define the type of reading Angela Carter’s works require in her PhD thesis, Le Jeu didactique et l’effet sur le lecteur dans The Passion of New Eve (1977) et Nights at the Circus (1984) d’Angela Carter (Université d’ Angers, 2000). 13. Such dehumanization it to be found at the core of Japanese social relationships according to the narrator of “A Souvenir of Japan” who remarks: “This country has elevated hypocrisy to the highest style. To look at a samurai, you would not know him for a murderer, or a geisha for a whore. The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live in a world of icons (…)” (BYB 33). 14. Georges Banu, L’Acteur qui ne revient pas (1986, Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 58-59, my translation. 15. My translation of the following excerpt: “Voici l’origine de la tragédie, de tout théâtre en général, de toute représentation : le mot grec tragos signifie le bouc ou la bête que l’on sacrifie de façon substitutive. Sur le marbre de l’autel ou les planches de la scène, qui va mourir en remplacement de qui ? Nul n’a jamais vu au théâtre que des personnages mélangés à des acteurs, autrement dit, des substituts.” Michel Serres, Statues (Paris: Flammarion, 1987) 280. 16. “Die Chinesen zeigen nicht nur das Verhalten der Menschen, sondern auch das Verhalten der Schauspieler. Sie zeigen, wie die Schauspieler die Gesten der Menschen in ihre Art vorfürhen. Denn die Schauspieler übersetzen die Sprache des Alltags in ihre eigene Sprache. Sieht man also einem chinesischen Schauspieler zu, dann sieht man nicht weniger als drei Personen gleichzeitig, einen Zeigenden und zwei Gezeigte” in Bertolt Brecht, “Über das Theater der Chinesen” (1935), Schriften 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1993) 126. Translation mine. 17. My translation of Henri Meschonnic’s assertion: “On dit bien qu’une voix est touchante, ou pénétrante, ou caressante. Il y a du geste en elle, sous une forme sonore.” See Henri Meschonnic, “Le théâtre dans la voix”, Gérard Dessons (ed.), La Licorne 41 (1997): 88. 18. Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation effects in Chinese Acting” in John Willett (trans.) Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill &Wang, 1964) 91-99. 19. Emphasis mine. 20. My translation of Henri Meschonnic’s phrase, “théâtralisation de la page,” in Critique du rythme, Anthropologie historique du langage (Paris:Verdier, 1982) 303. 21. “Est-il légitime d’identifier le blanc typographique au silence? Un silence signifie (…). Il est entre des paroles, du côté de la parole, plus que son contraire, bien qu’on l’y oppose. Un silence n’est pas l’absence de langage.” Henri Meschonnic, idem, 305.

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ABSTRACTS

Dans Fireworks, son premier recueil de nouvelles, Angela Carter recourt à la superposition de deux modèles esthétiques, l’un pictural, l’autre théâtral pour créer des “effets d’irréalité”. Nature morte et tableau vivant se mêlent dans ses récits théâtraux, où personnages et objets se voient attribuer une forte valeur symbolique, approchant celle des acteurs et des accessoires sur scène. L’auteure joue également sur l’intertextualité et sur la dépersonnalisation propre à toute représentation théâtrale pour créer les conditions d’une distanciation comparable à celle que préconisait Brecht. D’une part, ses personnages symboliques dont le corps, tel celui des acteurs, devient un ensemble de signes à déchiffrer dénoncent la dépersonnalisation qu’exerce, selon elle, toute société sur l’individu. D’autre part, ils lui premettent de susciter une relation d’antagonisme entre les instances psychiques du lecteur. Pendants narratifs du théâtre épique, les nouvelles de Fireworks le placent en effet dans une position paradoxale, où des voix narratives auxquelles il ne peut accorder crédit viennent le happer dans le récit, demandant sa participation active, exigeant qu’il endosse le rôle d’un narrataire omniprésent au statut problématique. Il se trouve ainsi conduit à interpréter le texte, tel un acteur dont le débit et l’intonation modifieraient le sens.

AUTHORS

JULIE SAUVAGE Julie Sauvage, a lecturer at the University of Nantes, has recently defended a PhD on theatricality in Angela Carter’s novels at the University of Bordeaux. She has published several articles on novels and short stories by Angela Carter and Kate Atkinson. She is currently working on the rewriting of myth and fairy-tales, narrative voice and image/text relationships in contemporary British fiction.

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Helen Simpson’s “Opera”

Ailsa Cox

1 Helen Simpson is the only contemporary British fiction writer to have built a substantial literary reputation solely on the basis of her short story collections. Amongst the reasons for that success may be the dramatic compression of her work and a comic sensibility which, taken together, give her writing a distinctive drive and immediacy. “The divine Helen Simpson”1 delivers instant gratification, yet that accessibility is combined with a densely allusive, polyphonic style. She has become especially well known for her insights into women’s lives, often through protagonists whose sense of personal autonomy is compromised by marriage and motherhood. What distinguishes her handling of this material is her ability to externalize what are essentially internal conflicts, using wit, irony, striking imagery and the interplay of voices to stage subjectivity.

2 The following essay illustrates this ability through a close reading of her story “Opera” (Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, 2001), which itself describes a theatrical excursion. It is divided into two halves, the first half exploring Simpson’s incorporation of dramatic techniques in her work, especially in her approach to narrative structure and use of direct speech; and the influence, especially, of English Restoration comedy. The second half examines the intertextual relationship with Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Eurydice, making reference to Julia Kristeva’s analysis of the Orpheus legend. These two sections are linked by patterns of speech and silence, and the interplay between onstage performance and audience response.

Staging the Story

3 There is a pronounced theatricality in all of Simpson’s work. This aspect is foregrounded in “Labour” (Four Bare Legs in a Bed, 1990), which inscribes the stages of labour as a five act play with dramatis personae including Uterus, Placenta and Perineum; but it is also evident in, for example, the opening paragraphs of a more recent story, “The Green Room”: A fat woman with a frozen shoulder sat sighing by the steady flames of a fake-coal fire. At her feet crowded a congregation of coffee-dregged mugs, dead wine bottles

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and ashtrays crammed with crushed stubs. Across the room a television chattered gravely, on screen a long face in contre-jour against a scene of bloody devastation; over in the corner crouched a computer caught short mid-document. “I must get on,” said this woman, Pamela, not moving. (Constitutional,92)

4 The stage is set with precision, the exact physical disposition of objects in relation to the character made absolutely clear. There is also the suggestion of improvisation in “this woman, Pamela”, as if the author is making up a name for her on the spur of the moment.

5 Visual storytelling is just one element in Simpson’s theatrical repertoire. The influence of Simpson’s postgraduate research into English Restoration farce can be traced across her work, most obviously in her fondness for pastiching seventeenth century texts. Other examples, in addition to “Labour,” include “Good Friday, 1663”2 and “Escape Clauses” (also in Four Bare Legs in a Bed) and “To Her Unready Boyfriend” (Dear George, 1995). Strategies borrowed specifically from the theatre include extensive passages of direct speech and an approach to structure as a narrative determinant. Simpson’s work is always tightly structured; and she often describes herself blocking out a story on paper at an early stage in its composition3.

6 “Opera” was originally commissioned by BBC Radio, a reliable patron of Simpson’s work and that of many other short story writers in the UK. In this instance, the story was broadcast on Radio 3, the classical music channel. In “Opera” a young woman accompanies her husband on a corporate outing to Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice. The story explores Janine’s growing sense of isolation and loss amongst the boorish businessmen and the other wives.

7 “Opera” is divided into five short chronological segments which we might envisage as four acts, prologue and epilogue: Prologue: Getting ready Act 1: Before the show Act 2: Orfeo Pt 1 Act 3: The Interval Act 4: Orfeo Pt2 Epilogue: Going home

8 This particular structure follows the dramatic unities almost completely, with only the Prologue and Epilogue taking place outside the theatre. Each “act” follows the other in strict succession within a period of less than twenty-four hours. Despite the past tense narration, there is a strong impression of events unfolding within a continuous present – as they might if we were watching them on stage. Simpson represents character externally, largely through direct speech; indeed, the story opens with an extended exchange between husband and wife: “But you love opera,” he said. “Particularly the early stuff. I know you do.” “Yes,” she said. “I do.” (Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, 113)

9 This kind of rhythmic, repetitive dialogue could transfer directly to the stage. Speaking about late seventeenth century English comedies such as The Beaux’ Stratagem and The Provoked Wife, Simpson has said “It’s the dialogue between men and women that makes them great, and it’s the first time you really hear that going on – romantic, but not idealised – actually troubled, and it’s got that unmistakable sound of verisimilitude when you hear it.”4 In the opening prologue, Simpson is using that swift, combative exchange of short speeches which in Greek drama is called stichomythia: “Clients aren’t friends,” she said.

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“They can be,” he said. “You’re so narrow-minded. They can become very good friends.” “No,” she mumbled. “Clients are about money.” (114)

10 As in other textual examples of male/female verbal sparring – for instance, the Hollywood screwball comedies of the nineteen-thirties - the battle of wits represents an ongoing, and unwinnable, battle of the sexes. The two points of view are diametrically opposed; yet, while man and woman remain irreconcilable, the rhythmic patterns and the repetitions, weaving together the male and female voices, creates an underlying unity and mutuality. Except, that is, for Janine’s mumbling. We may wonder if Christopher hears the riposte, or if it is the equivalent of the theatrical “aside”.

11 Simpson also uses dialogue for exposition, again very much as a dramatist might: “Front stalls, gala performance […] just right for a wedding anniversary” (113). Carefully handled, dialogue as exposition accelerates the narrative, dispensing with the need for elaborate scene-setting or back-story, and establishing a strong dramatic pace. Simpson explicitly evokes the stock characters of Restoration drama when she describes Christopher’s interest in his wife’s clothes “as keen-eyed on the effect of this or that dress as any old-style libertine” (113). The irony is that Christopher’s interest is not driven by erotic desire, but by the need for display. So far as he is concerned, they are dressing to impress. The whole excursion is designed as a public performance, a performance to which Janine must be dragged “kicking and screaming” (113).

12 There are also extended passages of direct speech in Acts 1 and 3, before the opera and during the interval. The clients are lampooned, in robust comic fashion: Back in the hospitality room at the interval, Christopher was all tenderness and attention, hovering dotingly over Dominic Pilling of Schnell-Darwittersbank and hanging on Dominic Pilling’s wife’s every word. “London’s getting terribly crowded, isn’t it?” said the wife. “Too many people. I’m afraid I’m a country girl at heart.” (119)

13 Comic incongruity subverts reader expectations. “Christopher was all tenderness and attention” – the “tenderness and attention” echoing the words of the chorus “toujours tendre, toujours fidèle” (117). The punchline comes in the second half of this long sentence; he is “hovering dotingly” not over Janine but over his client and, secondarily, over the client’s wife.

14 On one level, Simpson’s story may be regarded simply as a comedy of manners. Like her Restoration predecessors, Simpson holds a mirror up to contemporary society. As the dramatist Congreve put it: Men are to be laugh’d out of their Vices in Comedy: the Business of Comedy is to delight, as well as to instruct: And as vicious People are made asham’d of their Follies or Faults, by way of seeing them Expos’d in a ridiculous manner, so are good People at once warn’d and diverted at their Expense. (Congreve, 117)

15 While they are not quite as obvious as Congreve’s Lady Wishfort and Sir Wilfull, “Nigel Perkins from Littleboy and Pringle” (115) and “Dominic Pilling of Schnell- Darwittersbank” (119 ) are marked as comic characters by their grotesque names. (“Pilling” suggests that very English epithet, “pillock”.) The vices of contemporary London are pretty much the same as those held up to ridicule on the Restoration stage - sycophancy, snobbery and social climbing. There are further echoes of the Restoration era in the division between town and country; “I’m a country girl at heart,” says Dominic Pilling’s wife. As in previous centuries, running both a London and a country

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establishment is a sign of bourgeois success, though in the contemporary world the pastoral retreat is more likely to be a weekend cottage than the country estate.

16 In plays such as Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), or Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), London is itself a stage, where rakes and libertines engage in spectacle and masquerade, each attempting to “gull”, seduce or outperform the other. Here too, Janine’s husband, the clients and their wives are consciously performing, inverting the relationship between stage and audience. The opera is merely a pretext; while some of the clients feign musical interests, their only real concern is how long they will have to endure it.

17 However, in those “Acts” which take place during the opera, the narrative shifts away from social satire, towards something much more ambiguous. While there are still comic elements, the narrative relies less on the external representation of character through dialogue, and more on the evocation of interior states of consciousness: In the dark listening to the music Janine lifted away from the world of people and things. She forgot about the shadowy pinstripes each side of her, and concentrated on the stage, where mourners like moving white statues tossed flowers on Eurydice’s tomb. (117)

18 While Simpson’s postgraduate research topic was Restoration farce, her fiction belongs much more to the tragic-comic tradition. The concept of the “tragic-comic” is much contested, not least by the Restoration dramatists themselves, and a further analysis lies beyond the scope of this essay. But, as we shall see, in the intertextual response to Gluck’s opera and to the Orpheus legend, the tragic and the comic are interwoven, reflecting the protagonist’s shifting states of consciousness.

Orpheus, Speech and Silence

19 The Orpheus myth has been appropriated numerous times, in all of its many facets, by writers, musicians, artists and film makers. Alice Munro refers to Gluck’s opera in the title story of Dance of the Happy Shades (1968); a later story, “The Children Stay” (1998) is an intertext of Anouilh’s play, Eurydice. Myth has the great advantage for artists and writers of being inexhaustible and ambiguous, capable of multiple and often contradictory retellings.

20 According to the myth, Orpheus is a poet whose music is irresistible, even to wild animals and inanimate objects. When his wife Eurydice dies prematurely he travels to the Underworld to bring her back from the dead. Pluto agrees to free her, on the condition that Orpheus keeps straight ahead on the passage to the upper world, not communicating with her in any way until they are safely back home. Orpheus obeys these instructions until, at the very last moment, he is unable to stop himself responding to his wife’s pleas, and Eurydice is lost to him forever. There is more to come, most of which is less familiar in popular culture. According to Ovid, the grief- stricken Orpheus spurns all other women, turning to male lovers instead. As a consequence, he is torn apart by furious Maenads, and his body re-assembled for burial by the Muses – all except his head which floats out towards Lesbos (see Russell Hoban’s novel, The Medusa Frequency).

21 Gluck’s eighteenth-century version, with a libretto by Calzabigi, stops short, like most retellings, after Orpheus loses Eurydice again. A happy ending is tacked on, thanks to the timely intervention of “Amor”, and the lovers are restored to each other,

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accompanied by a joyful chorus of shepherds and shepherdesses. This is the story Janine is watching, in a reworking by the French composer Berlioz.

22 The onstage performance enacts Janine’s private narrative as she watches these opening scenes, reading Orpheus’s funeral lament as grief for the death of her own marriage: Was it marriage itself which had died, then, she wondered, returning to the other world; was it this ideal of turtle doves and fidelity, of the long-haul flight without betrayal, which had proved unworkable? (118)

23 Janine is Orpheus, but she is also Eurydice, baffled by her husband’s inexplicable neglect as he refuses to acknowledge her on the way home. Fittingly, it is her own intermittent “return” from the dark, enveloping world of the opera to the “world of people and things” (see above) which enables her to articulate her emotional response in intellectual terms. The dialectic between the “world of people and things” and the more liminal interior state induced by the opera might remind us of the interplay of “semiotic” and “symbolic” modalities within the signifying process, as suggested by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva argues that language is conditioned by its own materiality, originated during the pre-Oedipal phase preceding subject formation. Within this “semiotic” disposition, existence is experienced as a libidinal flow of rhythms, sounds and impulse, channelled through the undifferentiated maternal body. With the emergence of a distinctive self-image, distinguishable from the world of objects, a “symbolic” modality comes into play, introducing syntax, logic and fixed definition. These two modalities, the “semiotic” and the “symbolic” are mutually dependent. The semiotic modality cannot produce coherent meaning unless regulated by the symbolic; but the resurgence of the semiotic is essential to literary and poetic types of discourse.

24 Before returning to the story’s intertextual relationship with Orfeo and, in particular, its handling of speech and silence, it is worth considering Kristeva’s own readings of the Orpheus legend, taken from various stages in her career.

25 The descent into the underworld may be seen, quite obviously, as a re-submergence in the semiotic. In a 1986 interview, Kristeva explains that the reason Orpheus can return from this “semiotic” underworld, while Eurydice is trapped there, is that women have difficulty detaching themselves from the archaic mother, and from this amorphous realm of purely sensuous impulse. It is much harder for women to forge an autonomous self: “I might lose myself, lose my identity” (Kristeva 1994: 132). As we have seen in the section I have called the “Prologue,” Janine is dragged “kicking and screaming” from the netherworld she inhabits (113). Since her children were born, she has given up work, and has “retreated into a shambles of soft leggings and sweatshirts, merely day versions of her pyjamas” (ibid).

26 This timeless zone stands in opposition to the “upper” world of social interaction. In this world, clock time is a social necessity. Lives are governed by timetables and schedules, which package the flow of time as discrete and finite units. The clients’ preoccupation with the length of the opera is symptomatic of their clockbound lives in which so-called leisure time must be rationed carefully and holidays are mechanised by Club Med to “recharge the batteries” (120) on almost a factory system.

27 Janine has difficulty re-entering this clock-bound social world, engaging in light chit- chat with the clients and their wives. If the social world is a stage, she is failing to play the part she’s been assigned or to deliver her lines correctly. When she does speak, reeling off information about Gluck and the opera, she is swiftly reprimanded. In the

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rest of this collection, and in Simpson’s work generally, mothers are running against the clock, their lives dictated by the daily schedules of childcare and servicing the family. But we never see the children in “Opera”, and hence Janine’s day-to-day existence seems exempt from clock time. Caught like Eurydice in a nebulous “other” realm, she cannot step smoothly back into the upper world, or establish her authority as an autonomous individual, entitled to speak her own mind.

28 Janine’s voice is muted by her lack of social status. As we saw earlier, she constantly “mutters” and “mumbles”, blunting the force of her argument and, in the opening agon, tipping the balance of power towards Christopher. Simpson draws a clear parallel between Janine’s enforced silence and the instructions imposed upon Orpheus, quoting from the French version of the libretto: Soumis au silence Contrains ton désir Fais-toi violence. (118)

29 Janine’s sensitivity to Christopher’s indifference mirrors Eurydice’s suffering when Orpheus ignores her entreaties; but it is she who is forced, like Orpheus, to steel herself against weakness. Drawing a comparison with the lovers’ ordeal in The Magic Flute, she hopes that she will be able to overcome a difficult phase in her marriage by silent endurance.

30 In her later interpretations of the Orpheus legend, Kristeva moves away from a potentially reductive reading of an intractable split between the netherworld and the land of the living, with its two main figures on either side of the divide. There is an ongoing identification and transference between Orpheus and Eurydice, and between the male and female principle, the symbolic and the semiotic. In her essay “Joyce ‘The Gracehoper’ or Orpheus’s Returned” (published in Les nouvelles maladies de l’ame, 1993), she casts Joyce and his fictional alter egos as the “artist-hero” in a “modern, post- Christian version of Greek myth” (Kristeva 1995: 176) in which the artist is able to turn and gaze at the female without punishment.

31 Ultimately Orpheus and Eurydice, and the qualities they represent, are inseparable despite Pluto’s injunction; and this interdependency is reflected in Simpson’s story. As Janine watches the opera, she switches identification, integrating both roles in her response5. But of course Janine’s response is not just to the on-stage action and the words in the libretto. She is also listening to music. As a form, opera contains a strong element of signification; however, it derives much of its emotional power from the music itself, which is irreducible to a fixed meaning. One of the many meanings we can take from the Orpheus legend is the tribute to the hypnotic, or even the magical, properties of music. To the listener, music consists of pure, overwhelming sensation, awakening basic instinctual drives and, at its most forceful, threatening the dissolution of the conscious self.

32 Simpson stresses these somatic properties through Janine’s involuntary physical reactions. “The music had stolen up on her like hot water flooding over her skin” (118). “The music of Elysium came creeping in through her ears, slow, sublime, holding and catching her breath” (120). The “hot water” prefigures the tears which, despite Janine’s best efforts, come flooding down as she listens to the aria J’ai perdu mon Euridice sung by Orpheus after he has lost Eurydice forever.

33 Regardless of the happy ending, Gluck’s opera evokes complex feelings of tragedy and irrevocable loss which, like the music itself, transcend language. But Janine both yields

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to this drive and resists it, taking deep breaths and self-consciously detaching herself from the music (tactics which, for this reader at least, recall those used to combat labour pains). In the two “Acts” describing the opera, the evocation of a destabilized interior state induced by the music is undercut, not only by intrusions from “the world of people and things” but by Janine’s determined resistance and also by elements of irony and self-parody. This is Janine’s earlier response to the passage in the opera where Eurydice pleads with her husband to acknowledge her: Janine felt a hot prickling sensation behind her face, like walking into a rosebush. Almost the worst thing was being frozen into these corny, passive and wifely attitudes of grief and betrayal. The ravishingly sweet quarrel of their voices blended and untangled, pulling air down into her lungs, making her sigh helplessly. (121)

34 While the emotional impact of the opera is registered through sensual detail, it is accompanied by a more detached and sardonic commentary from Janine herself. Her reverie is also disrupted by crass remarks from one of the clients, Nigel Perkins. The story’s climax comes during the final applause when she calls him a “cloth-eared berk” (122). But the insult is tempered by Janine’s habitual softness of speech; Nigel stares at her uncertain that he has heard her correctly. And the moment is over quickly, Janine reverting instantly to superficial pleasantries. Up until now, she has been disempowered by silence but here she is re-appropriating and subverting the traditional female tactics of silence and submission.

35 The final short sequence, which I’ve called the epilogue, follows the myth quite clearly, casting Janine primarily as Eurydice. Once the clients have gone and the couple are alone, Christopher drops his performance, his “hospitality smile” (123), and becomes even more distant, leaving her behind on the street while he wanders off to look for a taxi. But why is Christopher punishing Janine? Does he know what she said to Nigel? Or is he expressing a more generalized annoyance at her incontinent behaviour, her supposedly excessive and inappropriate speech, the display of emotions which everyone puts down to too much champagne? Simpson doesn’t explain. Janine’s reaction to what we might call his “passive aggression” is to raise her voice: She went wild. She started to run after him, but he was faster than her. “Christopher,” she shouted. He pretended not to hear. “Christopher!” she yelled again. He was a dark figure about to melt into the blackness. “Christopher!” she bellowed with all her might and lung power. (123)

36 The parallels between Janine and Eurydice are unmistakable; but notice it is Christopher who is “about to melt into blackness”. And Janine goes “wild”. She shouts, she yells and she bellows, reminding us of the Maenads, the frenzied women who tore Orpheus apart in the original legend. (She mentioned the Maenads to Nigel Perkins in a caustic remark on the previous page.) The figures of the Maenads stand for libidinous intoxication and for an excess of sensual pleasure and wilful abandonment – “Women and alcohol. Fatal combination”, as Nigel Perkins says (122). Such figures are rather more empowering than the seemingly passive, even masochistic, Eurydice in the opera.

37 I have called this final section an “epilogue”, but unlike a conventional dramatic epilogue it does not bring closure, sealed with a neat epigram. The final paragraph consists of just one sentence, stopping the narrative in mid-gesture:

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He slowed down gradually, unwillingly, then stopped and stood where he was for a few long seconds before turning to look back at her. (123)

38 Christopher is, however reluctantly, re-enacting the Orpheus role fully conscious that, in mythic terms, that look banishes his wife eternally. His first name echoes the full name of the composer – Christoph Willibald Gluck – a detail withheld from the reader, but which emphasises his controlling presence as he devises the corporate event, allocating the wifely role to Janine. However, while the mythological gesture entails permanent separation, we should remember that the gaze is mutual, and that husband and wife, Orpheus and Eurydice, reflect one another. In those few long seconds time stands still. And anything can happen. If we believe Kristeva, Orpheus can hold his gaze without tragic repercussions.

39 Like many short story writers, Simpson makes the most of the form’s dramatic qualities, especially with regard to structure, direct speech and pictorial elements. But the modern short story also has a strong affinity with the mysterious and indeterminate; and while, as John Gerlach has pointed out, short stories build rapidly towards their endings, they are also resistant to closure. Simpson exploits these generic tensions to the full. The writing itself takes on some of the characteristics of music, evoking that which cannot be fully expressed, at the limits of language.

40 Superficially, “Opera” is a very simple story. Its comic and satirical elements, inspired so often by the Restoration stage, invite a straightforward critique of contemporary bourgeois morality, gender relations and social convention. But Simpson’s reworking of the Orpheus myth offers multiple interpretations, assigning and re-assigning the key roles to its primary characters. Ultimately, the story’s ending draws the reader beyond social observation, into a liminal realm, where she is left to make her own conclusions.

NOTES

1. Nicholas Lezard, “A Wonderful Talent for Misery” (Review of Richard Yates, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness), Guardian January 21st 2006. Review section. 2. Simpson has adapted “Good Friday 1663” as a jazz libretto for Mike and Kate Westbrook. The TV opera was screened by Channel 4 TV in 1995. 3. See the Guardian “Writers’ Rooms” feature, http://www.books.guardian.co.uk/graphic/ 0,,2212450,00.html (accessed 18th January 2008) 4. Interview with Helen Simpson, http://www.newwriting.britishcouncil.org/all/themes/? theme=24 (accessed 18th January 2008). 5. Simpson does not reveal whether - as is the convention nowadays – Orpheus is a “trouser role”, played by a female singer.

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article propose une lecture attentive d’une nouvelle de l’auteur britannique, Helen Simpson, et allie une étude de la théâtralité au sein de la technique narrative avec une exploration d’un lien intertextuel avec l’opéra de Glück, Orfeo. L’article commence par une brève exposition de l’utilisation de la théâtralité dans l’œuvre de Simpson avant d’aborder de manière plus précise le caractère dense de la structure dramatique et l’étude des personnages à travers de longs passages de discours direct. L’article aborde également l’influence de la comédie anglaise de la période de la Restauration, évoquant en particulier la parodie et la satire sociale. Par la suite, l’article explore les motifs de la parole et du silence dans le texte en s’inspirant des lectures de la légende d’Orphée que propose Julia Kristeva. La musique de Glück évoque des sentiments complexes de la tragédie et de la perte irrévocable que ne peuvent exprimer les mots. De la même manière, Simpson donne à sa nouvelle une fin indéterminée, employant des images mythiques afin de s’éloigner du domaine de la comédie sociale pour se rapprocher d’un domaine plus liminal.

AUTHORS

AILSA COX Ailsa Cox is Reader in English and Writing at Edge Hill University in the UK. She is the author of Alice Munro (Northcote House Writers and their Work series 2004) and Writing Short Stories (Routledge 2005); and the editor of The Short Story (Cambridge Scholars 2008) and Teaching the Short Story (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). Her own fiction has appeared in various anthologies in the UK, including the London Magazine and The Virago Book of Love and Loss. She organises a regular series of short story conferences in the North West of England. She is also the founder of the Edge Hill Prize, awarded annually to the author of a published short story collection from the UK and Ireland.

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From Participant to Observer: Theatricality as Distantiation in “Royal Beatings” and “Lives of Girls and Women” by Alice Munro

Lee Garner and Jennifer Murray

1 Theatricality is an explicit metaphor in much of Munro’s early writing and appears in multiple forms and contexts, from the acting out of fantasy, to the analogical commentary, and the simple intertext. Little has been written about this aspect of Munro’s writing, but we have noted that in E.D. Blodgett’s Alice Munro, the author discusses the notion of performance as imitation, as a mimetic function, and relates it to both the questioning of identity (87) and to the refusal of a single vision of the truth: he notes “pretense may also refer to a truth in the process of transformation” (91). Running through Blodgett’s analysis is the assumption that there is an essential self to which the theatrical metaphor may be an aid towards discovery. While accepting certain timeless features of social being, our position would be to refuse the basic notion of an essential self and rather to link the use of the theatrical metaphor in Munro to the exploration of the conflict between the social script and unconscious drives.

2 In our discussion, we will be focusing on specific examples in the stories “Royal Beatings” and “Lives of Girls and Women;” here, the theatrical metaphor comes into play when the basic drives of sexuality and aggression are given expression in a context where the limits of socially acceptable behaviour are transgressed. In these cases, the discourses of ‘theatricality’ are called upon to illustrate the acting out of transgressive moments through a discourse which allows for a distancing gesture within the narration.

3 This distancing operates in several ways: to begin with, the use of the theatrical metaphor facilitates the dramatization of the social and unconscious scripts in which the different characters are caught up, and at the same time, it creates a defamiliarization which allows the protagonist to move (at least partially) from the

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position of unthinking participant to that of detached observer or audience, leaving her relatively unscathed by the consequences of the moments experienced, much as Munro suggests in her comment to Robert Thacker: One thing […] I think is interesting, now that I look back on it: when the [character’s] circumstances become hopelessly messy, when nothing is going to go right for her, she gets out of it by looking at the way things happen — by changing from a participant to an observer. (Thacker 50)

4 Theatrical distancing—or observation—thereby becomes a strategy: it allows for a self- distancing which opens the way to release, escape and learning. In the stories in question, the position of observer is not a passive one, but one which allows the young protagonists, whose perspectives coincide with those of the narrators, to construct a dramatic participative heuristic situation.

5 Finally, the theatrical distancing which the narrative voice sets up prevents the reader from being absorbed into the events of the narration, instead, he or she is situated at a critical distance, an observing distance, along with the protagonist, a position which may also have its collusive aspects, but which nonetheless allows for an evaluative stance rather than one of identification.

6 We have noted that the effects of the forces of the unconscious are a determining element in the shift to the theatrical perspective; it is specifically, if not exclusively, when the drives of sex and aggression manifest themselves in powerful ways that Munro’s texts mobilize the vocabulary of performance, audience, and role-playing to a sustained degree. In “Royal Beatings”, the pre-existing social script defining the mode and limits of parental punishment becomes the site of the expression of the aggressive instinct, whereas in “Lives of Girls and Women”, social norms are over-stepped as the sex drive dominates the relation between the young protagonist Del and the adult Mr. Chamberlain. In both cases, theatricality will provide the distancing necessary to attenuate the potential danger of the situations, and hold them up for cool analysis and ironic reconsideration.

7 To the extent that we all live our lives through social roles, as parents, children, workers, spouses, citizens, we are compelled to conform to a greater or lesser degree to the social script which the specific role implies.1 The presence of ‘others’ activates the notion of performance and the carrying out of the script, with of course, a degree of improvisation or individuality of response. In the textual moments when the vocabulary of the theatrical performance comes to dominate in “Lives of Girls and Women” and in “Royal Beatings”, the social script is under strain, it is being pushed beyond its accepted variations and the characters transgress their attributed roles.

8 In “Royal Beatings”, the scene of Rose’s beating begins within the confines of accepted social behaviour. The time frame is the 1930s; the setting, rural Southern Ontario, and the values are largely those of small-town North American Protestantism. For a father to be called upon to discipline his child through physical violence would not have been unusual or particularly frowned upon. Thus, the scene begins with a sense of the familiar: a sense of a family ritual about to get underway with Flo, the step-mother, calling the father in from his work in the shed, presenting an inventory of her grievances against Rose. The narrator herself, whose perspective is almost at one with

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Rose’s, notes that it is not the specifics of the moment which matter: “It is the struggle itself that counts, and that can’t be stopped, can never be stopped, short of where it has got to go, now” (17). Each of the family members is constrained by the social script and must move into their specific role in the struggle. As for the father, “He is slow at getting into the spirit of things, tired in advance, maybe, on the verge of rejecting the role he has to play” (17). The use of the verbal form ‘has to’ underlines the force of the script in structuring relationships.

9 Once the beating begins, the role the father is playing seems to take over and submerge the more restrained elements of his personality: His face, like his voice, is quite out of character. He is like a bad actor, who turns a part grotesque. As if he must savor and insist on just what is shameful and terrible about this. This is not to say he is pretending, that he is acting, and does not mean it. He is acting and he means it. Rose knows that, she knows everything about him. (18)

10 The father is ‘out of character’ to the extent that, for the most part, he is a reserved, private person who shows little expression towards his family. The role of the punishing patriarch transforms him before the eyes of his daughter, who sees him as “grotesque.” What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that, where the father is concerned, there are two parallel scripts available at any time, roles which are more or less conscious. The father is only ‘out of character’ considered from Rose’s point of view which would see the benevolent father, for the most part absent in the daily round, as the ‘authentic’ father, and the nasty violent patriarch as a ‘role’.

11 Nonetheless, she recognizes a degree of ‘authenticity’ even within the ‘role-playing’ for the father is both “acting” and “he means it.” He is acting the part of the punishing patriarch which he is expected to play, but the violence, which increases steadily throughout the scene, corresponds to an authentic drive, to deep impulses within him; it is the violence which is sincere, whether the motives for it are or not. The narrator brings out here the paradoxical potential of socially scripted situations in which one is “acting” out a role, but where the role becomes a venue for the expression of something which is emotionally real.

12 What is therefore at stake in the theatricality of this scene is the expression and representation of unconscious drives. Here, it is the aggressive drive which is in question: the brutality of the description of the attack shows that there is pleasure; there is physical and psychical release in the violence being perpetrated. Indeed, the father, as he assumes his role, is rejuvenated: “[His look] fills with hatred and pleasure. […] His face loosens and changes and grows younger,” (18). The deployment of the theatrical metaphor provides for the simultaneous representation of hatred and pleasure: repression is released and social duty performed.

13 We note that the inner focalisation on Rose allows for a double positioning of her as both participant and observer: Rose cannot detach herself from the violence to which she is being subjected, but on the other hand, by observing her father, and by analysing his behaviour she is being distanced from the violence of the beating undergone. In her position of attributed ‘knowingness’ (“she knows everything about him”) Rose is accredited with a level of consciousness beyond her years which provides space for the spectator/reader to be both participant and observer.2

14 The narration manages to create another form of distance, an internal distance within the scene; on the one hand, we are given a riveting scene of violence where the

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repetitive use of the word “Bang” translates the abuse in both physical and auditory terms: Her father is after her, cracking the belt at her when he can, then abandoning it and using his hands. Bang over the ear, then bang over the other ear. Back and forth, her head ringing. Bang in the face. Up against the wall and bang in the face again. He shakes her and hits her against the wall, he kicks her legs. She is incoherent, insane, shrieking. Forgive me! Oh please, forgive me! (19) Flo is shrieking too. Stop stop!

15 In this part of the scene, empathy with the victim is strong, but the basis for this empathy is suddenly undercut by the narration. We read: Not yet. He throws Rose down. Or perhaps she throws herself down. (19)

16 By proposing an alternative reading of the scene through the words “Or perhaps she throws herself down,” the perspective on Rose’s position is transformed. At this point, the reader/spectator is made to reflect on the disturbing elements proffered in the dramatized narrative: is the social script so powerfully interiorized that the victim doesn’t know whether she herself is the actor-victim or the spectator-critic. Indeed, the narrator goes on to define Rose as someone who is in an ambiguous position, perhaps not entirely authentic in her status as victim, and returns to the vocabulary of the theatrical to emphasize the point: “for it seems Rose must play her part in this with the same grossness, the same exaggeration, that her father displays, playing his. She plays his victim with a self-indulgence that arouses, and maybe hopes to arouse, his final, sickened contempt,” (19).

17 Like the father, Rose is “acting” but she too “means it”; in this moment where there is a spilling outside of the boundaries of socially sanctioned behaviour, Rose seems to be positioned within a form of internal splitting, divided between her civilised self which retains its intellectual functions and observes; and her animal self, suddenly in unscripted territory, fighting for its survival. Indeed, the scene can only be concluded by Rose’s full recognition of her father’s domination, the victim’s recognition of the power of the aggressor and his indubitable rights in the ideological discourses of 1940’s Canada.

18 It also seems significant that in the case of the beating of Rose, the father and daughter are acting out a scene which springs not from their own feelings, but from the humiliation of Flo, the step-mother, who complains that “The things Rose has said to [her] are such that, if Flo had said them to her mother, she knows her father would have thrashed her into the ground” (16). Here, through Flo’s transparent strategy, the social belief in the educational value of violence towards children and more generally, the tradition of socially sanctioned violence is ironically inserted into the text. Indeed, viewed from one perspective, the entire scene of the beating is an exercise in the violent re-establishment of the family hierarchy: the step-mother will not allow the step-daughter to humiliate her through her repetitive insolence. In this context, Flo becomes the instigator, the privileged audience, the judge, the arbiter of the events: she inscribes the scene within the social norm by stating that her own father would logically have punished her under such circumstances, and she circumscribes the effects of the violence by keeping it ‘in the family’: she locks the door to the store they inhabit, puts up a sign saying “BACK SOON” and declares: “Well we don’t need the public in on this, that’s for sure” (17). In effect, Flo fears that the violence of the scene may take it outside what the actors feel falls within the social norms, and a collective sense of unspoken shame colours the aftermath of the scene. It is a scene of transgression to the extent that the drives which find expression in violence take the

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characters beyond the demands of the social script, and yet, the violence remains within the socially recoverable, does not do any lasting harm to the family unit.3

19 The hypothesis we have been exploring is that the vocabulary of theatricality underscores the acting out of the social script, in particular when it is associated with the potential transgression of its limits due to the expression of unconscious drives. At the same time, the theatrical metaphor provides the reader/spectator with sufficient space and distance to facilitate a critical reading. In the case of “Lives of Girls and Women”, the episode centring on Mr. Chamberlain’s exhibitionist masturbation presents a situation in which the norms of accepted social behaviour have very clearly been transgressed; in this case, the underlying unconscious force is the sex drive.

20 Mr. Chamberlain, who is occasionally present in Del’s mother’s home as the boarder’s boyfriend, has been responding to Del’s childish flirtation with surreptitious slaps and groping. He then takes her for a drive into the country, gets out of the car, walks a while, then proceeds to masturbate before the girl of approximately fourteen or fifteen years old.

21 We note that previous to Mr Chamberlain’s performance, a certain amount of symbolic foreplay has gone on between the man and the adolescent girl. Del, who experiences the world around her as vaguely sexually charged, and who has already had a sexual fantasy in relation to the man, offers to perform as a seal for Mr. Chamberlain in return for a sip from his glass of whisky. Del’s performance as the phallic animal supplemented by Mr Chamberlain’s titillating game of offering and withdrawing the forbidden drink, is followed by a quick gesture on the part of Chamberlain which is both aggressive and sexual in its execution: He rubbed against the damp underarm of my blouse and then inside the loose armhole of the jumper I was wearing. He rubbed quick, hard against the cotton over my breast. So hard he pushed the yielding flesh up, flattening it. And at once withdrew. It was like a slap, to leave me stung. (177)

22 This incident does not upset Del, but rather stimulates her curiosity and her desire: she subsequently makes herself available for other such assaults, seeing in the violence of the sexual expression a form of worldliness: “He went straight for the breasts, the buttocks, the upper thighs, brutal as lightning. […] In the secret violence of sex would be recognition, going way beyond kindness, beyond good will or persons.” (178).

23 Initially, therefore, the sex drive is at work in both characters: when Mr. Chamberlain takes Del for a ride in his car and begins to leave the town limits, Del confesses that “Excitement […] had got the upper hand of [her]” (184). Still within a fantasy world presented by her adult narrating self, Del’s vision of the landscape becomes coloured by her sexual desire: “nature became debased, maddeningly erotic” with “ploughed fields rearing up like shameless mattresses,” (185).4 Yet when the car stops, she notes “Events were becoming real” and the possibility of real sexual intercourse makes her anxious: “so anxious [that] all the heat and dancing itch between [her] legs had gone dead, as if a piece of ice had been laid to it,” (186). At the moment that the signifier ‘ice’ indicates that desire has left Del and is fully in the camp of the dominating Chamberlain, a theatrical vocabulary begins framing his actions to construct them as a performance: “Mr Chamberlain opened his jacket and loosened his belt, then unzipped himself. He

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reached in to part some inner curtains and ‘Boo!’ he said,” (186). The theatrical “inner curtains,” pre-figuring the dramatic, and Chamberlain’s ensuing ventriloquizing of his penis’s “”Boo!”, instantly tip the text into the register of the comic. Again, the reader / spectator experiences a form of ‘release and clarification’: release from the anticipation of danger, and clarification as to the performative nature of ‘Art’ Chamberlain’s intentions.

24 The masturbation scene which follows is one for which Del has no social script; in this context, there is no frame of reference for how she ‘ought to’ behave. She becomes fully positioned in the role of audience, active not as a participant but as an observer. In this context, she describes the sight before her in histrionic terms: The face he thrust out at me, from his crouch, was blind and wobbling like a mask on a stick, and those sounds coming out of his mouth, involuntarily, last-ditch human noises were at the same time theatrical, unlikely. In fact, the whole performance, surrounded by calm flowering branches, seemed imposed, fantastically and predictably exaggerated, like an Indian dance. (187)

25 The world of theatricality is present through the words “mask,” “theatrical,” “performance,” and “dance.” The use and the effect of this theatrical perspective is emphasized through adjectives such as “imposed,” “exaggerated,” and “unlikely,” underlining the breach with the conventional forms of behaviour. Here, there is no longer a relationship of exchange between the two people present, but a relationship of exhibitionism: Del observes the acts or behavior of Chamberlain, but remains separate from, almost untouched by the imposed discourse of this other person who is engrossed in the exposure of his own animality: indeed, the phrase “last-ditch”5 is used in both “Royal Beatings” and “Lives of Girls and Women” to designate the tenuous border between nature and civilization: in “Lives of Girls and Women”, Mr. Chamberlain is heard making “last-ditch human noises” as he approaches his climax, and in “Royal Beatings”, Rose, at the most intense moment of her beating “has given up on words but is letting out a noise, the sort of noise that makes Flo cry, Oh what if people can hear her? The very last-ditch willing sound of humiliation and defeat it is,” (19). In this instance, Rose ceases to use words thereby surrendering her affiliation to the human, and is reduced to making animal-like sounds, provoking Flo’s social sense of embarrassment.

26 In the scene involving Mr. Chamberlain, the narrating stance maintains Del at a distance from any involvement in the sexuality on display; she becomes an observer who offers not an erotic but an empirical account of what she witnesses. Viewing Chamberlain’s penis, she comments: “It had a sort of head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee,” (186). This description, an admixture of observation and analogy, produces at least two effects: it reduces the phallus to a simple bodily organ, taking away its symbolic power; and devalorises it, placing the organ low in the hierarchy of body parts, beneath the elbow and the toe. In this way, the narrator/character is able to remain untouched by the intentions of the ‘actor’, refusing to be his ideal spectator; such phrases as “It did not seem frightening to me… (186); “It looked to me vulnerable, playful and naive” (186); “It did not seem to have anything to do with me” (186), indicate that the desired effect has not been obtained in the viewing girl, and equally, defeats any expectations on the reader’s part of an erotic exchange. Where Del is concerned, the formal assignment of her to a spectator position has distanced her from the former object of her fantasy life,

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so that when Chamberlain, after his act, says: “Quite a sight, eh?”, the narrative consciousness offers us a deflationary reading of events, describing the landscape, as no longer “maddeningly erotic” but as “postcoital, distant and meaningless” (187).

27 Whereas in the case of the family beating, each member of the family gradually slips back into their usual ways of being, in the case of Mr. Chamberlain, Del notes, “I could not get him back into his old role,” (190). Indeed, the experience of spectatorship creates an alteration of Del’s view of the man which the end of the performance cannot undo. Moreover, Chamberlain’s transgression of the social limit and the narrative and theatrical devices used offer us a position of collusive sympathy with Del and the feeling of sharing in her transforming consciousness.

28 The close analysis of our two extracts leads us to the following conclusions: firstly, by using the theatrical metaphor to underline the expression of repressed drives, Munro’s writing inscribes a certain joyful irony in the examination of the animality of humanity, what some would call its baseness, what others would see as its force and vitality. Munro’s reputation for paradox is affirmed in this mode of expression which is inclusive in its approach to the human condition; even in our grotesquery, even in our violence and desire, and even in our enslavement to the social script of our times, there is wonder, there is amusement, and there is potential for growth and transformation. Secondly, the ironic observing distance is one from which the character/reader may feel protected from the potential violence of certain moments of excess, but it is equally one from which the fantastic complexity of the business of being human may be glimpsed. And lastly, the theatrical metaphor is used in such a way that the positions of actor and observer are only ever relative, and the potential for reversal, so essential to the mode of the grotesque, is creatively affirmed. Blodgett, E.D. Alice Munro, Boston: Twayne World Authors, 1988.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor, 1959.

Munro, Alice. “Royal Beatings” in The Beggar Maid, 1977, New York: Vintage, 1991.

---. “Lives of Girls and Women” in Lives of Girls and Women, 1971, New York: Vintage, 2001.

---. “The Flats Road” in Lives of Girls and Women, 1971, New York: Vintage, 2001.

Thacker, Robert, “‘Clear Jelly’: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics” in Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts, ed. Louis K. MacKendrick, Toronto: ECW Press, 1983, pp. 37-60.

NOTES

1. The use of the theatrical metaphor in sociological studies is attested to in Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor, 1959.

2. This shift to an analytical stance is not uncommon in Munro’s writing of theatrical moments. In the story entitled “The Flats Road,” for example, the protagonist, Del, comments on the violence of the young woman recently brought into the neighbourhood as the new bride of Uncle

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Benny: “Her violence seemed calculated, theatrical; you wanted to stay to watch it, as if it were a show, and yet there was no doubt, either, when she raised the stove lifter over her head, that she would crack it down on my skull if she felt like it—that is, if she felt the scene demanded it.” (21) As with Rose’s father, there is the double sense of ‘acting’ and the expression of an authentic emotion. We also witness the same double positioning of the protagonist, Del, as potential victim of theatrical violence, and as someone occupying a coolly detached position of observation and analysis. Within the same framework of experience, the protagonist is at once ‘participant’ and ‘observer’, the latter position finally having more weight. A further analogy between the two scenes is that they draw attention to the tension between the performative element and the expressive function; the father “must” savor certain elements of his role, and the “scene demands” certain things, as if the dramatic aesthetic insists on being given attention, on being allowed its own specificity. 3.

Nonetheless, the potential for disorder implicit in the mixing of the social script and the desire for violence is explored on the level of the framing narrative, a story of a girl called Becky Tyde, whose grotesque appearance is symbolically linked to the violence of her father which in turn gives rise to a form of social violence which goes beyond the parameter’s of the ‘acceptable’, in the form of a lynch mob. 4.

Munro’s imagery here is deliberately overstated, as the adult narrator gently mocks her younger self, in the phase of sexual discovery. This mocking overstatement calls attention to itself and prevents complete identification between reader and character, allowing the reader to participate in the narrative distance of nostalgia and affection. 5.

Interestingly, the word ‘ditch’ has several relevant significations: it can mean to excavate, to get rid of; also to enclose or protect; while ‘last-ditch’ (especially hyphenated) suggests a desperate battle waged at the ultimate boundary.

ABSTRACTS

Dans “Lives of Girls and Women” et “Royal Beatings” la théâtralité fonctionne comme une métaphore explicite qui intervient dans les moments troublants du récit, ceux qui sont liés à l’expression de la sexualité et de l’agressivité. L’usage du discours de théâtre permet à la narratrice de mettre en relief ces moments d’une grande intensité dramatique en opérant un double effet d’amplification et de distanciation. En effet, une certaine distance émotionnelle est obtenue par le biais du langage théâtral. Les protagonistes (adolescentes) de ces nouvelles sont confrontées à des situations qui sont potentiellement traumatisantes ou dangereuses puisqu’elles ont trait aux codes de la civilisation et à la transgression de ces codes. En parlant des limites, la théâtralité dramatise la réalité vécue en même temps qu’elle suggère l’aspect irréel du ‘spectacle’ proposé et tient le spectateur à l’écart, ainsi elle permet au lecteur de participer à la ‘protection’ de l’héroïne contre la brutalité des événements narrés.

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AUTHORS

LEE GARNER Lee Garner is a senior lecturer at the University of Franche-Comté (Besançon). Specialized in Shakespearean studies, his research interest and publications deal mainly with theatre and poetry. He is the director of the Besançon English Language Theatre group at the University of Franche-Comté.

JENNIFER MURRAY Jennifer Murray is a senior lecturer at the University of Franche-Comté (Besançon). Her research and publications focus on North American literature and more particularly on Southern writers (Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams…) and on Canadian literature (Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence…).

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Part 4: A Short Story

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“The Tipping Point”

Helen Simpson

1 Look at that sky. It’s almost sitting on the windscreen. Whose idea was it to hold the Summer School up in the wilds this year? I know my sweet Americans would follow me to the ends of the earth for my thoughts on the Bard; and I know Stratford venues are stratospheric these days. But all this way to study the Scottish play in situ smacks of desperation. If ever a sky looked daggers, this is it.

2 I was quite looking forward to the drive, actually. Impossible to get lost, my esteemed colleague Malkie MacNeil told me, just follow the A82 all the way and enjoy the scenery, the mountains, best in the world blah blah. So I left Glasgow reasonably bright and hopeful this morning after a dish of porridge, up along Loch Lomond, and the light has drained steadily away through Tarbet, Ardlui, Tyndrum, until I realise that it’s eleven in the morning on the fifth of August and I’ve got to turn on the headlights. Storm clouds over Glen Coe. “The cloud-capp’d Towers, the gorgeous Palaces.” Not really. More like a celestial housing estate.

3 Alright, let’s have something suitably gloomy in the way of music. Here we are. Winterreise with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and his manly baritone. No finer example of the pathetic fallacy than Schubert’s Winterreise. “What’s that when it’s at home, Dr Beauman?” That is the reading of one’s own emotion into external nature, child. I still cannot believe that I, confirmed commitmentphobe, have been cast as the rejected lover, ignominiously dumped like some soppy First Year.

4 Nun ist die Welt so trübe, der Weg gehüllt in Schnee. My German may not be fluent but it’s become more than passable in the last year. You’d allow that, Angelika? Now the world is so bleak, the path shrouded in snow. Schnee.

5 It was immediate. As soon as we first clapped eyes on each other etcetera. But, joking apart, it was. I was over in Munich to give my paper on Milton’s Comus; the Masque Form as Debate and Celebration, mainly because I wanted to check out the painted rococo Cuvilliestheater — crimson, ivory and gold — on Residenzstrasse. I needed it for my chapter on European Court Theatre, for the book which now bears your name as dedicatee.

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6 You were in charge of that Conference, Head of Arts Admin for all the participating institutions that week. Once it was over we went back to your flat in Cologne. Jens was staying with his grandmother as luck would have it. Beautiful Angelika, with your fierce pale eagle eyes and beaming smile. I remember capering round your bed like a satyr after you’d given me the first of your ecological curtain lectures. I was quoting Comus at you to shut you up: Wherefore did nature pour her bounties forth With such a full and unwithdrawing hand, Covering the earth with odours, fruits and flocks, Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable, But all to please and sate the curious taste?

7 I was proud and stout and gleeful in the presence of your angularity. It felt like a challenge. Heaping you with good things became part of that. I filled your austere kitchen with delicacies, though that wasn’t easy as you are of course vegan.

8 “Enough is enough,” you said, pushing me away.

9 “You can never have enough,” I laughed. “Didn’t you know that?”

10 “Not so. I have.”

11 Ich will den Boden küssen,/ durchdringen Eis und Schnee / mit meinen heiβen Tränen. Schnee again. I want to kiss the ground, to pierce the ice and snow with my hot tears. Yes, well. Romanticism was your besetting sin, Angelika; your quasi-mystical accusatory ecospeak about the planet. Whereas my line is, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen—I don’t see how anything mankind does can impose change on overwhelming natural phenomena like hurricanes and tsunamis. We resemble those small frail figures in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, dwarfed by the immensity of nature. You took me to see his great painting Das Eismeer in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, jagged ice floes in a seascape beyond hope; and you used it as a jumping-off point to harangue me about the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf. My clever intense passionate Angelika, so quick to imagine the worst, and so capable of anguish; you wept like a red- eyed banshee when you gave me the push.

12 An ominous cloudscape, this, great weightless barricades of cumulonimbus blocking the light. I can’t see another car or any sign of humanity. Once out of this miserable valley, I’ll stop for petrol in Ballachulish. Then it’s on up past Loch Linnhe, Loch Lochy, Loch Oich, Loch Ness, and I’ll be there. Inverness. What’s done is done. Half way through the week there’s a day trip planned to Cawdor Castle, where Duncan doubtless shakes his gory locks on mugs and mousemats all over the gift shop.

13 So then I applied for a peripatetic fellowship at the University of Cologne, and got it. I brushed up my Schiller. I wrote a well-received paper on Gotthold Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm and gave a seminar on Odon von Horvath, the wandering playwright who all his life was terrified of being struck by lightning and then, during a Parisian thunderstorm, took shelter beneath a tree on the Champs Elysees and was killed by a falling branch. Let that be a warning to you, Angelika: you can worry too much.

14 We were very happy, you and me and Jens. He’s unusually thoughtful and scrupulous, that boy; like his mother. They had their annual day of atonement at his school while I was over, when the children are instructed to consider the guilt of their militaristic forefathers in the last century. That was the night he had an asthma attack and we ended up in Casualty. Cue copious lectures from you on air quality, of course.

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15 And here’s the rain, driving against the windscreen with a violence fit to crack it. It’s almost comic, this journey, the menace of those massed clouds, the grey-green gloom.

16 Nor do I have a residual belief that rain is in any way cleansing or purgative. No, no. As you so painstakingly taught me, Angelika, our sins of pollution lock into the clouds and come down as acid rain. Hence Waldsterben, or forest death; and from Waldsterben you would effortlessly segue into flash floods, storm surge, wildfire, drought, and on to carbon sequestration. You were not the only one. You and your friends discussed these things for hours, organising petitions, marching here and there. Your activism made my English students look like solipsistic children, their political concerns stretching with some effort to top-up fees and back down again to the price of hair straighteners.

17 You were in a constant state of alarm. I wanted you to talk about me, about you and me, but the apocalyptic zeitgeist intruded.

18 Darling, shall we go for a swim? No, my love, for the oceans have warmed up and turned acidic. All plankton is doomed and, by association, all fish and other swimmers. Sweetheart, what can I do to melt your heart? Nothing, for you are indifferent to the ice albedo feedback; you are unconcerned that the planet’s shield of snow, which reflects heat back into space, is defrosting. That our world grows dangerously green and brown, absorbing more heat than ever before, leaves you cold.

19 My own dear heart, let’s make a happy future for ourselves, for you and me and Jens. How can that be when the world is melting and you don’t care? How can we be gemutlich together in the knowledge that the twin poles of the world are dissolving, that permafrost is no longer permanent and will unloose vast clouds of methane gas to extinguish us all?

20 You did love me. You told me so. Ich liebe dich.

21 Then came your ultimatum. We couldn’t go on seeing each other like this. Yes, you loved my flying visits, you loved being with me. But no, you could not bear it that our love was sustained at the expense of the future. By making it dependent on cutprice flights we were doing the single worst possible thing in our power as private individuals to harm the planet.

22 “Love Miles,” I countered, morally righteous, fighting fire with fire.

23 “Selfish miles,” you retorted; “We are destroying other people’s lives when we do this.” Very truthful and severe you are, Angelika; very hard on yourself as well as others.

24 Time for a change of CD. More Schubert lieder, I think, but let’s drop Fischer-Dieskau. He’s a tad heavy-hearted for Scotland, a bit of a dampener where it’s already damp enough. Ah, Gerard Souzay, he’s my man. Rather an eccentric choice, but my father used to listen to him and I cottoned on to what he admired. A great voice, fresh, rich, essentially baritonal but keener on beauty than usual. Let’s skip Der Jungling und der Tod, though. OK, here comes the Erlking. There’s a boy here, too, riding on horseback through the night with his father, holding close to his father. Oh, it’s a brilliant micro- opera, this song, one voice singing four parts—narrator, father, boy, and the lethal wheedling Erlking. I’d forgotten how boldly elliptical it is, and how infectious the boy’s terror—“Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörst du nicht,/ Was Erlkönig mir leise verspricht?” My father, my father, and don’t you hear/ the Erlking whispering promises to me? But his father can’t hear anything, can’t see anything, only the wind and the trees.

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25 I used to start laughing uncontrollably at this point, which annoyed my father, who was trying to listen; but it appealed to my puerile sense of humour—vater as farter. Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt fasst er mich an! Erlkönig hat mir ein Lieds getan!

26 My father, my father, now he is taking hold of me! The Erlking has hurt me! And by the time the father has reached home the boy lies dead in his arms. Tot.

27 Listen, Angelika. You make my blood boil. What possible difference can it make whether I get on a plane or not? The plane will take off regardless. Why don’t you concentrate your energies on all those herds of farting cattle, eh? All those cows and sheep farting and belching. Then after that you could get the rainforests under control! The blazing forests! You don’t want me.

28 It’s stopped raining at last. I can see ahead again, the air is clearer now. A truly theatrical spectacle, this sky, with its constant changes of scene. I couldn’t do it in the end. I wanted tenure, sure, but I was being asked to give up too much. The world. The world well lost? No. No, no, not even for you, Angelika.

29 In September I’m attending a weekend conference on Performance Art at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. I’m not going by coach. There’s a seminar on Storm und Drang in Tokyo this autumn, as well as my Cardiff-based sister’s wedding party in Seville. After that there’s an invitation to the Sydney Festival to promote my new book, and the usual theatre conference at Berkeley in spring. All paid for, of course, except the return ticket to Seville, which cost me precisely £11--just about manageable even on an academic’s meagre stipend.

30 You used to have to join the Foreign Office if you wanted to travel on anything like this scale. Now everybody’s at it. The budget airlines arrived and life changed overnight.

31 Sorry, but it’s true. The world’s our sweetshop. We’ve got used to it, we want it; there’s no going back.

32 The downside is, I lost my love. She followed through. And how. She caused us both enormous pain. Ah, come on! For all I know she’s got back together with that little dramaturg from Bremen, the one with the tiny hands and feet. So?

33 Look at those schmaltzy sunbeams backlighting the big grey cloud. Perfect scenery for the arrival of a deus ex machina. “What’s that when it’s at home, Dr Beauman?” A far- fetched plot device to make everything alright again, my dear. There’s Ballachulish in the distance. A painted god in a cardboard chariot. An unlikely happy ending, in other words.

AUTHOR

HELEN SIMPSON Helen Simpson is the author of Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), Dear George (1995), Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000) and Constitutional (2005), all short story collections. In 1991 she was chosen as the

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Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1993 she was chosen as one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists. For Hey Yeah Right Get a Life she was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M. Forster Award. She lives in London.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 51 | Autumn 2008