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

45 | Autumn 2005 Varia

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/116 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 September 2005 ISSN: 0294-04442

Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 45 | Autumn 2005 [Online], Online since 13 June 2008, connection on 09 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/116

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis

Failed Detectives and Dangerous Females: Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Detective Short Story Ellen Harrington

Escaping the Examined Life in George Moore’s “Home Sickness” Richard Rankin Russell

“Children are Given us to Discourage Our Better Instincts”: The Paradoxical Treatment of Children in Saki’s Short Fiction Ruth Maxey

Revision as Transformation: The Making and Re-Making of V.S. Pritchett’s “You Make Your Own Life” Jonathan Bloom

The Stained-Glass Man: Word and Icon in Flannery O'Connor’s “Parker's Back.” Michel Feith

History and Denial in Nabokov’s “Conversation Piece, 1945” Tim Conley

L’écriture rouge de Sherman Alexie : l’exemple de "The Sin Eaters" Diane Sabatier

My tongue did things by itself”: story-telling/story-writing in “Conversation with a Cupboard Man” (Ian McEwan) Richard Pedot

A Tapestry of Riddling Links: Universal Contiguity in A. S. Byatt’s “Arachne” María Jesús Martínez Alfaro

Earthly Men and Other Worldly Women: Gender Types and Religious Types in Jeanette Winterson’s “Atlantic Crossing” and Other Short Fiction Carla A. Arnell

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Foreword

Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis

1 The ten essays of the forty-fifth issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English deal with nineteenth and twentieth century English, Irish and American stories by W. Collins, A. Conan Doyle, Saki, V.S. Pritchett, Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson, George Moore, Flannery O’Connor, Nabokov and Sherman Alexie.

2 In “Failed Detectives and Dangerous Females” Ellen Harrington studies the gender complications that occur in W. Collins’s and A. Conan Doyle’s stories when detectives interact with women in the household.

3 Ruth Maxey, in “Children are Given Us to Discourage our Better Instincts”: The Paradoxical Treatment of Children in Saki’s Short Fiction,” examines Saki’s portrayal of adult behaviour towards children, the complicities between animals and children in his work, the child’s secret world or private psychic sphere, and the ways in which his literary technique supports these depictions in order to clarify the reason why Saki both challenges and upholds the cruel treatment of children by adults.

4 In his essay “Revision as Transformation: The Making and Re-making of V.S. Pritchett’s ‘You Make Your Own Life,’ Jonathan Bloom focuses on one short story to permit a comprehensive analysis of the additions and deletions, from autograph manuscript to final typescript. He shows how Pritchett fashioned his stories through a long process of writing, re-writing, and revising in order to achieve his intended effect.

5 Richard Pedot’s working hypothesis in his essay “My Tongue Did Things by Itself: Story-Telling/Story-Writing in ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’” is that “McEwan’s deconstruction of the oral/textual antinomy—and by the same token of realism in fiction—has to be approached in relation to the stories’ specific challenge: that of handing narration over to people usually deprived of speech—because of intellectual incapacity and/or because their right to speak is queried on moral grounds.”

6 In “A Tapestry of Riddling Links: Universal Contiguity in A.S. Bayatt’s ‘Arachne’” Maria J. Martinez describes Byatt’s work as a tapestry woven with multiple but interconnected threads. It reads, she explains, like a mixed-genre narrative that manages to give the reader a glimpse of those recurrent patterns associated with myths

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that some writers are still able to retell in stories that are always the same and always different.

7 In “Earthly Men and Otherwordly Women: Gender Types in Jeannette Winterson’s ‘Atlantic Crossing,’” Carla A. Arnell studies Winterson’s complex representation of religion in a story from Winterson’s first short story collection which captures that complexity.

8 Richard Rankin Russell suggests in “Escaping the Examined Life in George Moore’s ‘Homesickness’” that “Home Sickness” is better understood as an imaginative critique of urban modernity, the pace and materialism of which Moore felt undermined the conditions needed for a contemplative mindset.

9 In “The Stained-Glass Man: Word and Icon in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Parker’s Back,’” Michel Feith studies the iconicity of O’Connor’s writing. The short story is viewed as an ideological and aesthetic testament, revolving around a negotiation between Word and Icon. From the religious icon represented in the text, the essay shifts to the text as icon, in a self-reflexive mise-en-abîme of the visual dimension of the whole of O’Connor’s œuvre, insofar as it concentrates meaning in an “anagogical” way.

10 In “History and Denial in Nabokov’s ‘Conversation Piece, 1945,’” Tim Conley uses Nabokov’s favourite theme of the double to question the narrator’s self-declared “liberal” position as he recounts his seemingly accidental encounter with genteel Holocaust deniers. His essay offers a reading of “Conversation Piece, 1945” which reconsiders the political and ideological connotations of what it means to call a fiction “Nabokovian.”

11 In her essay, “L’écriture rouge de Sherman Alexie : l’exemple de ‘The Sin Eaters’” Diane Sabatier analyses Alexie’s story as a macabre allegory in which, by linking the holocaust to the genocide of the Native American tribes, the writer reflects on some of the greatest interrogations of philosophy and literature.

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Failed Detectives and Dangerous Females: Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Detective Short Story

Ellen Harrington Translation : Anne-Laure Hoareau

That empty-headed puppy, Mr. Matthew Sharpin, has made a mess of the case at Rutherford Street, exactly as I expected he would. —Wilkie Collins’s Chief Inspector Theakstone in “The Biter Bit”

1 What makes this new detective Sharpin fail, in addition to his ego, is his blinding admiration for the culprit, Mrs. Yatman. The policeman’s infatuation for the murderous cook, Priscilla Thursby, in another Wilkie Collins story, “The Policeman and the Cook,”1 causes him to destroy the evidence of her guilt and set her free. And, most famously, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Sherlock Holmes’s fascination with “the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet” (168) causes him to underestimate her and fail his client. In Domestic Crime and the Victorian Novel, Anthea Trodd notes the increasing danger that the insertion of the detective into the home environment meant to the ladies of the house,2 but the women antagonists in these stories embody the inverse of that threat, a theme also seen in the fiction of the day, “that the police are ill-equipped to cope with the guile of the angel in the house” (Trodd 40). Each of these stories poses a “dangerous” woman as a challenge to a detective’s authority. While this plot is certainly derived from the sensation fiction of the same era, presenting an intriguingly dangerous or aggressive woman ultimately in need of men’s stewardship,3 these stories also emphasize the weakness of the detective, his inherent human vulnerability. This notion of detective failure complicates the idealization of the detective as a figure of social justice that evolves as part of the classic detective formula. Detective fiction’s interest in discipline and justice as well as

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the penetration of the figure of the detective into private, domestic, and thus feminine, spheres brings gender concerns to the forefront in many detective stories.

2 Both Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin mysteries, published in the 1840s, and Charles Dickens’s serialized novel Bleak House, published in 1852-53, feature a detached, effective detective who successfully solves his cases (with some missteps in the case of Dickens’s Inspector Bucket). The failures that Collins introduces are typical of fiction concerned with contemporary social fears about the power of a professional detective to intrude in the home. The inside job that Sharpin fails to deduce in “The Biter Bit” (1858), a woman conniving to cover an excessive milliner’s bill, also appears in Collins’s popular 1868 serialized novel The Moonstone as Inspector Cuff’s wrong solution to the case. Cuff, whom the novel presents as a clear threat to the daughter of the house Rachel, from whom the Moonstone has been stolen, comes into the case as a capable hired detective; Cuff’s presumption that Rachel took her own diamond to cover secret debts proves wrong. The case is not solved by the seemingly serviceable Cuff, but by a member of the household aided by an insightful doctor’s assistant. Though no recognizable formula for detective fiction exists at the time Collins is writing (indeed, his work helps to establish the formula and, along with Poe’s stories, clearly influences Arthur Conan Doyle’s depiction of Sherlock Holmes), Collins clearly does not work to mythologize the professional detective as a force of justice like later writers will. Considering Collins, Robert Ashley notes that in several of Collins’s detective stories, “the detectives all reach the wrong conclusion” and “the mystery is solved by chance rather than by skillful sleuthing”; Ashley suspects that, “In other words, Collins’s detective fiction was in reality a happy accident” (60). I would argue that these failures are not “accidental” or incidental on Collins’s part. Collins is deliberately creating detectives who make mistakes or blunder through the process to address fears of police interference in the domestic sphere, though his stories ultimately pose the possibility that such intervention can be beneficial rather than threatening. Collins also constructs the home as a dangerous place in need of intervention: “On the image of home as sanctuary Collins superimposes an image of the home as a nest of secrecy, dissimulation, and criminality…” (Trodd 44). He presents crime as an aspect of the cherished domestic space, an assertion that the Holmes stories will amplify later in the century. As even the famously correct Sherlock Holmes admits in “The Five Orange Pips,” “I have been beaten four times—three times by men, and once by a woman” (219). Doyle’s stories lack Collins’s ambivalence about the figure of the detective, and Holmes’s failures serve to further dramatize the importance of detective intrusion into the middle-class home, which the stories also portray as a natural setting for crime. Thus, the detective failures in Collins and Doyle, particularly in cases involving women, bring up contemporary concerns about the domesticity and women’s proper place in society, as well as the role of a developing police force in England in the nineteenth century.

3 Though he employs many of the same detective characteristics, Collins does not take the figure of the detective as seriously as Poe and Dickens do. His distinctive humor comes through in “The Biter Bit” (1858) as Collins sketches a detective so egotistical and self-serving that his professionalism is immediately suspect.4 This stock character, the probationary detective with the Dickensian name of Mr. Matthew Sharpin, is easily identifiable as an unreliable narrator, and the reader is encouraged to view his interpretation of the evidence skeptically from the beginning. The story, told through

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correspondence, takes on an evidentiary quality of its own that further underlines the identification of reader with detective, since the reader gradually apprehends the story of the narrative through Sharpin’s misread clues and the successful detective work of Sergeant Bulmer at the end of the narrative.

4 Chief Inspector Theakstone’s initial complaint to Sharpin, “You have begun by wasting time, ink, and paper” (270), resonates in the brief story, a comment on writing that reiterates complaints about sensational fiction that is meant for entertainment rather than didacticism or aesthetic value. Sharpin also makes derogatory comments about the “penny-a-line” journalist “(who lives by supplying the newspapers with short paragraphs relating to accidents, offenses, and brief records of remarkable occurrences in general…)” (271) whom he suspects of the crime. This Mr. Jay, a satirical portrayal of the writer, also sits down with “pen, ink and paper,” but, unable to write like the loquacious Mr. Sharpin, must lie back down to nurse his apparent hangover (277). This disdain for sensational journalism is doubly humorous coming from the immoral Sharpin in the course of a sensational story, and Sharpin’s own report writing is later called “pages of feeble scribble-scrabble” (288). Collins, using the underlying association between detective and reader, also makes the outright comparison between detective and sensational writer, someone who develops and presents the narrative of crime.

5 By initiating the correspondence with the charge that Sharpin has blackmailed his way into the position, “I think that giving him this unheard-of chance among us, is, in plain words, pretty much like giving him hush money to keep him quiet” (269), Theakstone has effectively characterized Sharpin as a near-criminal himself, blurring the line with the criminal underworld that he will be investigating. Sharpin’s comic egotism, his blunt dismissal of his prudent superiors, (“You are rather an elderly person, and, as such, naturally inclined to be a little jealous of men like me, who are in the prime of their lives and their faculties,” 270) encourages the reader to hope for Sharpin’s failure like the detectives who must work with him. Ultimately, the story provides an ending that implicates the lady of the house and, through his failure, the detective himself.

6 Sharpin relentlessly pursues the hapless Mr. Jay through the intrigue of aiding a friend to elope, duplicating Jay’s actions in the interest of being a good detective, down to ordering the same dinner. The detective employs many excessively complicated modes of surveillance, but lacks the common sense to interpret the information that he obtains. Sharpin is openly fascinated by the flirtatious Mrs. Yatman, the real criminal: “I could go to the world’s end with that woman, if only Mr. Yatman would die” (281). Sharpin’s vaguely threatening wish, expressed to his superior, the Chief Inspector, only further demonstrates his unfitness for his office. Mrs. Yatman is described little beyond Sharpin’s raptures and her fondness for fine clothes, but she is sharp enough to realize that she can evade detection herself by charming the new detective, confusing him about the nature of her obvious crime. She effectively manipulates him by flattering him about his complicated surveillance and fostering and aiding his hare-brained attempts to trap Mr. Jay, proving herself to be the very opposite of the charming domestic angel that Sharpin assumes her to be. Mrs. Yatman is based on a stock character herself, the wily conniving female that steals and feigns illness to manipulate men; she commits an intimate theft in her bedroom against her husband. When he dismisses Sharpin, Theakstone comments, “If we are to have a new recruit among us,

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we should infinitely prefer Mrs. Yatman” (294), a dig enhanced by its gender implications.5

7 While this humorous, lighthearted story is hardly meant to be a serious critique, it admits the possibility of police corruption and excessive self-interest; taken along with Collins’s other failed detectives, it illustrates contemporary misgivings about assuming a detective will be disinterested or capable simply by virtue of his profession.6 But Sharpin’s humorous failure also serves to demonstrate the value of the real detectives’ unobtrusive success. The other detectives in the story, Sergeant Bulmer and Chief Inspector Theakstone, are portrayed as capable detectives worthy of their positions; Collins supplants the problematic detective with the genuine article, disinterested and insightful professionals who quickly solve the case by reading the clues that Sharpin has misread. Though the story openly evokes fears of detective failure and the problematic use of authority, it immediately resolves them in a satisfying ending that reassures the reader about the efficacy of the detective. Also, this detective story openly uses themes from the sensation fiction, figuring women as dangerous criminals to society in general and to detectives in particular and demonstrating that the detective’s underestimating women’s abilities, particularly by idealizing them as household angels, can cause a detective to fail to apprehend the real criminal. However, the story’s experienced detectives do not fall into the trap of idealizing the woman criminal.

8 A detective’s willful refusal to work in service of justice can also cause the system to fail. Collins begins “The Policeman and the Cook” (1880) with the policeman’s deathbed confession, using this ironic twist on the criminal’s relief of a guilty conscience to self- consciously emphasize the blurred line between police and offenders. The narrative, encouraged by and recorded by the priest giving last orders is meant to be “public acknowledgement of my fault, as an act of penance becoming to a Catholic Englishman” (141); this identifies the policeman as a member of an unpopular church and also provides absolution as a motive for his confession. The frame narrative seems designed to attest to the utter truthfulness of the sensational story, since no penitent, religious man would want to die with a false confession on his lips; the narrator can vouch for the sensational story, a testament to its essential truth, and the entire narrative is comprised of letters and documentary evidence right down to the inscription on the murder weapon.

9 As the flashback narrative begins, Collins also sets the stage with the necessary sensational accoutrements of chilly weather and a distressed character’s announcement that “Murder’s the matter” (142). Despite the drama of the scene, the detective still has time to admire the messenger, “I was partial in those days to a tall figure—and she was, as they say, my style” (142), a fact that will become significant in the older detective’s reconstruction of his earlier investigation. The detective checks the veracity of her statement, and the narrative closely follows his impeccable procedure, checking on the landlady, lodgers, and visitors to determine possible suspects and access to the crime scene. An outsider could not have committed the crime, and the story seems to take on a supernatural twist when the murdered man’s wife makes the claim that she must have killed him in her sleep.

10 This Gothic twist is quickly disproved, however, and the wife is cleared when no other evidence of her guilt than her own fears can be produced, and the other members of the household are gradually eliminated as suspects. The major piece of incriminating

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evidence, the bloody knife, unfamiliar and bearing an unfinished inscription to the murder victim, cannot be traced: “We were defeated” (152). In the meantime, the policeman has fallen in love with the cook with the “tall figure” and needs to earn a better position to have the funds to marry: “he felt that he might rise to the highest position in the police force if he succeeded where his elders and betters had failed” (153). This ambition leads him to question by chance engravers whom the inquiry might have missed where even the detective happens to be; the accidental discovery of the correct engraver leads the detective to realize that his betrothed, the cook and certainly the least likely suspect, committed the crime as revenge after her lover jilted her. Thus, in Collins’s wonderfully black irony, the policeman’s good Victorian work ethic and ambition to advance himself have led him to the realization that his betrothed is the killer, though the detective will not send her to the gallows. He shirks his detective duty for the inclination of a lover, and allows the cook to escape.

11 The cook, Priscilla Thurlby, is described by the policeman as “sharp and active” and “a woman I could trust” who had an excellent letter of reference (153). After refusing his attempts at seduction, Priscilla is deserted by her fiancé after the marriage banns had been published. She claims, “the devil entered into me” when the opportunity to strike back at him: “I had the knife in my hand, and the thought came to me to do it, so that they might hang her [his current wife] for his murder” (160). She then addresses the policeman, to whom she had become engaged in the interim, “Mind this! I did really like you—I didn’t say Yes, because you could hardly hang your own wife, if you found out who killed Zebedee” (160). Collins thus presents the familiar sensational image of the woman victimized by the man she trusted most acting out with violence in vengeance. Her final denial serves to emphasize her crafty nature, since her manipulation of the policeman protects her from punishment for her crime in the way that she had foreseen, though she denies the motive.

12 The story ends with a nudge at the righteous reader: “Many people may think I deserve to be hanged myself for not having given her up to the gallows. They may, perhaps, be disappointed when they see this confession, and hear that I have died decently in my bed. I don’t blame them” (160). The notion that God failed to intervene in this miscarriage of justice highlights the divine failure alongside the detective’s moral one. This ironic twist demonstrates the futility of idealizing the figure of the detective, who is clearly prey to the same human failings that afflict all humankind. The policeman’s passion has undermined his professionalism.

13 By repeatedly depicting the failure or incidental success of the professional detective characters, Collins works against the mythologization of the forces of law and order that occurs so pointedly in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. At the same time, both of his failed detectives are new recruits who become emotionally involved in their cases. It may be that Collins is not so much affirming fears of the detective’s misuse of power as he is advocating for a certain type of experienced detective to carefully intervene.7 The ambivalence about detective intervention is largely put to rest in the resolution of “The Biter Bit,” though “The Policeman and the Cook” leaves the possibility of misuse of power open, offering only the belated confession. In these stories, Collins also replays the narrative of the dangerous, underestimated female that we glimpse throughout sensation fiction. Lillian Nayder examines the doubleness in Collins’s writing, which benefits when critics “examin[e] both its subversive and its conventional sides and declin[e] to privilege one at the cost of the other” (xii-xiii). In

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general his fiction seems disinclined to idealize the detective, wary of this figure, yet it admits some need for his intervention. At the same time, Collins’s work effectively demonstrates gender inequities and showcases the victimization of women, while still affirming stereotypes about gender.8 As Nayder notes, Collins’s sometimes subversive critiques are often countered by his stories’ conventional resolutions.

14 After Collins’s cynical take on the human failings and shortcomings of his detectives, the characterization of Sherlock Holmes presents a famously positive take on the detective. Despite the characteristics that make Holmes aberrant, his cocaine use, his ambiguous sexuality, his unemotional self-control, he is idealized as the perfect detective through the eyes of Watson, an unforgettable rendering of the late- nineteenth-century, rational man of science. Doyle’s characterization of Sherlock Holmes in “A Scandal in Bohemia” can be read in answer to Collins’s equivocal take on the figure of the detective. Though not a professional detective in the police force, the amateur Holmes has taken care to professionalize by educating himself, though his detective work forms only an incidental source of income. Holmes’s characterization is, in some respects, a caricature of rational masculinity, and, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Doyle chooses to define Holmes in relation to an exceptional woman.

15 Holmes makes a point of citing and inviting Watson’s position as chronicler, “since you are interested in these little problems, and since you are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences, you may be interested in this” (163). As with Collins’s documentary first-person narratives, Watson’s narrative perspective influences the reader. His acceptance of Holmes’s foibles further legitimates Holmes in the eyes of the reader, and Watson acts as an effective foil for the great detective, also allowing the reader to feel somewhat superior to Watson’s blunt, well-meaning everyman. The appealingly traditional voice of Watson’s narrative mediates “between the reader’s desultory puzzling and the great detective’s intense investigations” (Fowler 155). Watson’s sensational gloss on Holmes’s (pretended) original narrative of ratiocination helps give this fiction the edge of adventure that is so appealing. By mediating the idiosyncrasies of the great detective, Watson enables our amusement and admiration while fostering a lenient attitude to those necessary flaws that surely accompany genius.

16 Within this fiction of rationality played out in sensational, melodramatic narratives, Irene Adler becomes the worthy female opponent, “the woman,” as she and Holmes enact a battle of wits that is self-consciously tinged with the attributes of gender: “She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men” (Doyle 166). Unlike Holmes’s evil nemesis Professor Moriarity, Irene Adler acts primarily in her own interest, rather than for the systematic detriment of others, and she does not reappear to challenge Holmes again. This sexual chemistry in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1892) initiates the successful run of the Holmes stories in The Strand after the less commercially impressive start of the two novellas A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890).

17 In the very beginning of this story, Watson sets forth the adversarial, charged relationship of Holmes and Adler: To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine

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that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained observer to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable mystery. (162)

18 This reads something like an ascetic creed for Holmes, yet each marvelous scientific metaphor for objectivity comes up against “the woman.” Watson’s portrait of Holmes describes Adler as well; as Holmes removes himself from romantic “intrusions,” she remains tantalizingly out of reach. The rational mind of the master detective is repeatedly set against the opaque femininity of his adversary, as Watson protests too much the analytic purity of his friend. This barrier to the “grit” of the “softer passions” is depicted as essential to the perfect functioning of Holmes’s rational mind, which utilizes this weakness in others to trip them up. Even so, this case proves to be one of Holmes’s rare failures: though he boldly ascertains the whereabouts of the blackmail evidence, an imprudent photo of the youthful Crown Prince with his lover, Holmes underestimates her self-knowledge as she manipulates him with a rare flourish of her own. Before she flees, Irene Adler replaces the compromising photograph with a glamorous picture of her alone, the treasure that Holmes gallantly requests in payment for his services.

19 Irene Adler interrupts relations between men in several ways: she conducts an affair on equal sexual terms; she threatens to disrupt the King’s politically and financially advantageous marriage; she intervenes in the professional exchange between Holmes and the King by removing Holmes’s ability to deliver the dangerous photograph; she gives herself in marriage to an equally handsome man, foregrounding her own desires; and she acts for herself rather than relying on her new husband to counter the effects of Holmes’s offensive maneuvers. In essence, she forces Holmes to re-examine his facile presumptions about femininity, and Doyle’s largely conventional narrative moves to re-negotiate the boundaries of desirable femininity. After the disguised Holmes admiringly gazes at her, following her to gather information, she disguises herself and follows him home, meeting his challenge. Interestingly, Adler’s independent financial position makes her stand all the more provocative. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” part of what makes Irene Adler so threatening is that there is no man in her life, father or husband, who can be approached in a gentlemanly fashion to put a stop to her threat against the King. She effectively subverts this process by acting for herself and negotiating for herself. Though the lady’s marriage provides a kind of ultimate protection from the King, the story presents Adler as the initiator, the one in control of the situation.9

20 The characteristics that set Irene Adler apart do not demonize her in the expected pattern of the sensation narrative; instead, her forthright sexuality, her boldness, her use of drag to expand the range of spaces she can comfortably enter make her more desirable to Holmes, who mocks the King’s regret that she is not, as he puts it, on his level. The story presents Holmes’s admiration for the adventurous Adler as a measure of his own worth and his open-mindedness. In the text, Holmes’s professional arrogance is more justified than the King’s personal arrogance, since the King values

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people for their birth rather than their own worth. Interestingly, Holmes’s intellect and ethics seem to make him a savvier candidate for governance than the selfish, egotistical King. Holmes prioritizes worth differently than the King does, and Holmes does not read Adler’s fearless, aggressive femininity as an impediment to marriage at all.

21 As the long quotation cited earlier illustrates, this story presents an ironic rewriting of the classic narrative of unrequited love via Watson, who is depicted as having a more typical love life. Irene lives on in the “dubious and questionable memory” of the public (162), but Holmes retains a wistful attitude and a special designation for the departed lady: “He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honorable title of the woman” (175). Her beauty and self-sufficiency recommend her as a Holmesian prototype, “the woman,” the worthy opponent to man as represented by the detective. Adler’s femininity and sexual viability are foregrounded in the narrative to compensate for the quick intellect and logical mind that reveal the hard, decisive substance of her personality. Even in the story finally told after her death, Adler remains a type at once superior and inimitable, who effectively challenged Holmes, disturbing his complacency and superior stance. This disruption of ordinary typology serves to humanize Holmes, the “formidable antagonist,” and seems to further enhance his credibility by placing this singular instance of his vulnerability in the past: “the defeats by men remain apocryphal, whereas Irene Adler’s outmaneuvering of him … is central to the Holmes legend” (Hodgson 7). In the telling, this “outmaneuvering” of Holmes seems to be more a compliment to him than the reverse, teasing the reader with the hint of a desiring, sentimental man within the “most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has seen” (Doyle 109).

22 “A Scandal in Bohemia” proves a counterpoint to the rest of the Holmes canon. Rarely does Holmes offer women more than friendly interest or paternal concern for their well being, as is proper for a Victorian gentleman.10 Though many of the women in the Holmes fiction are weak or victimized, the Holmes stories present a variety of women who plan or commit crimes. Doyle’s demonstrated interest in these sensational female criminals highlights the tension between the two types of femininity that show up in the Holmes texts, that angelic/dangerous binary that Irene Adler effectively troubles. “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” inverts “A Scandal in Bohemia”; an innocent, aristocratic young woman is dissuaded from marriage when Holmes presents her with her fiancé’s diary, which serves as a catalogue of small trophies from her previous lovers. Another one of his wronged lovers takes advantage of her position as Holmes’s informant to throw vitriol on the preying bachelor. “The Problem of Thor Bridge” reveals the cruel machinations of a wife whose husband has fallen in love with the governess; she kills herself in a manner that implicates the young woman in her murder. Both of these violent women, however, have clearly been wronged, and Holmes’s interest in exposure and reconstructing the motives for the crime emphasizes his sympathy for them. “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” toys with the possibility of violent female sexuality in a foreign woman, whom Holmes redeems by showing her true humanitarian motives. While this scenario affirms a sympathetic view of women, it also firmly reinscribes the male subject position as the dominant one. Ultimately, the enigmatic figure of Sherlock Holmes registers a conventional sensibility in most of the stories: women are creatures to be pitied and protected, both from others and from themselves.

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23 Most of Holmes’s encounters display this traditional attitude, reinforcing his personal superiority in a manner that ironically reflects his own criticism of the King of Bohemia. As a proper scion of the British Empire, Holmes generously, paternalistically aids the women who come to ask for his advice, often working against the male relatives who are supposed to act as guardians for them. More than liberation, this fiction encourages a kind of good stewardship by men of their household women on behalf of society, thus reaffirming a primary theme of sensation fiction. Upright male readers could assure themselves of their virtue in maintaining proper, gentle households: “To keep women down and yet to need them as wives, mothers, housekeepers, lovers, means there is constant pressure, constant fear that the male dominance will crack” (Knight, “The Case of the Great Detective” 374). This fear is usually assuaged in the Holmes stories, which offer in Holmes and Watson moral examples of manhood who serve and protect that fair sex.

24 Thus, the Holmes stories ultimately reaffirm the detective as a moral force working in favor of the status quo. As Stephen Knight comments in his substantial analysis of the stories in Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, Holmes was a hero shaped for a particular class in a particular time and place…” (103). Despite Holmes’s more liminal attributes, he functions with Watson to affirm and support the existing social order, demonstrating that legal and extra-legal policing works to protect women and colonial subjects from themselves and victimizing men. Though the Adler case is technically a failure, its portrayal of Holmes both humanizes him and mythologizes him as a detective, further supporting his mandate as a force of justice and emphasizing his middle-class disdain for the excesses of royalty. Holmes’s admiration for Adler is the result of, rather than the cause of, the failure of the case. In light of this model, the failures of Collins’s detectives seem all the more interesting: his failing detectives, whether humorous or serious, highlight the human flaws in a detective who cannot function perfectly as a “reasoning machine.” Collins’s stories highlighting detective failures demonstrate a deep-rooted ambivalence about the role of the detective even as they seem to establish the need for a detective in the household. His cases work because the detective is shown to be no more than a normal human being, ruled by urges and desires as well as moral training. Collins’s use of first-person narratives in the form of letters and documents also emphasize the variable nature of each account, the different “truths” apparent in an investigative situation, though each story finishes with a clear acknowledgement of what happened. In comparison, Watson’s authoritative retelling of Holmes’s adventures retrospectively gives the truth of the solved case (though Holmes delights in criticizing Watson’s sensationalism).

25 All three female antagonists in these three stories are aggressors, “dangerous” women whose sexual desire or greed is addressed openly in the narrative, though Adler and Thursby are both victims of men first. Holmes’s admiration of Adler because of her outright sexuality and bold actions elevates her from the conniving heroine that the others represent to “the woman,” a superior type. Collins’s detectives are confronted with the failure of the ideal of the Victorian “angel in the house,” and all three female antagonists use the men’s presumptions about female weakness and moral superiority to outwit them. The concerns about detective intrusions into the home that inform the failures in the Collins stories are replaced by the Holmes stories’ resounding demonstration of the necessity of such interventions into the private sphere, which the stories characterize as a common site for crime. Traveling outside of London in “The

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Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” Holmes explains to Watson: “You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them and the only thought that comes to be is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there” (323). The Victorian complaint11 that readers of sensation fiction would be inclined to peer beneath the facades of the apparently respectable neighbors becomes realized as a desirable norm by the turn of the century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashley, Robert. “Wilkie Collins and the Detective Story.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 6.1 (1951): 47-60.

Austin, Alfred. “Our Novels: The Sensational School.” Victorian Fiction: A Collection of Essays from the Period. Ed. Ira Bruce Nadel. New York: Garland, 1986.

Collins, Wilkie. “The Biter Bit.” Classic Mystery Stories. Ed. Douglas G. Greene. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999.

----. The Moonstone. London: Penguin, 1998.

----. “The Policeman and the Cook” (here published as “Who Killed Zebedee?). Victorian Detective Stories: An Oxford Anthology. Ed. Michael Cox. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Cox, Michael. Introduction. Victorian Detective Stories: An Oxford Anthology. Ed. Michael Cox. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Craig, Patricia and Mary Cadogan. The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1981.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1. Garden City: Doubleday, 1930. 2 vols. 316-32.

----. “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 2. Garden City: Doubleday, 1930. 2 vols. 984-1000.

----. “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 2. Garden City: Doubleday, 1930. 2 vols. 1033-44.

----. “A Case of Identity.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1. Garden City: Doubleday, 1930. 2 vols. 109-202.

----. “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 2. Garden City: Doubleday, 1930. 2 vols. 942-54.

----. “The Five Orange Pips.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1. Garden City: Doubleday, 1930. 2 vols. 217-29.

----. “The Problem of Thor Bridge.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 2. Garden City: Doubleday, 1930. 2 vols. 1054-70.

----. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1. Garden City: Doubleday, 1930. 2 vols. 161-76.

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Fowler, Alastair. “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Dancing Men and Women.” Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation. Eds. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. 154-68.

Harris, Wendell. British Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century: A Literary and Bibliographic Guide. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1979.

Hodgson, John A. Introduction. Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays. By Arthur Conan Doyle. Ed. Hodgson. Boston: Bedford Books.

Jones, Susan. “‘Stepping out of the narrow frame’: Conrad’s ‘Suspense’ and the novel of sensation,” The Review of English Studies 49.195 (1998): 306-16.

Knight, Stephen. “The Case of the Great Detective.” Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays. By Arthur Conan Doyle. Ed. John A. Hodgson. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994. 368-80.

----. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1980.

Nayder, Lillian. Wilkie Collins. NY: Twayne, 1997.

Ousby, Ian. Guilty Parties: A Mystery Lover’s Companion. NY: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Trodd, Anthea. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Walton, Priscilla L. “Form and Forum: The Agency of Detectives and the Venue of the Short Story” Narrative 6.2 (1998): 123-139.

NOTES

1. This story was originally published as “Who Killed Zebedee?” in 1881, according to Michael Cox. This later title, “The Policeman and the Cook,” which parallels the other titles in the Collins short fiction anthology Little Novels (1887) highlights the gender binary that I wish to emphasize here. 2. As Trodd explains, the policeman is often figured as an “intruder in the home” in the fiction of this time; “The fiction and journalism of this period yield ample proof of widespread middle-class fears of police intrusion and surveillance” (11). 3. Susan Jones describes the typical plot of the sensation novel, “The action of these novels, concerned with the drama of concealed identities, conflicts over property and inheritance, and the unearthing of guilty secrets of disease and madness, takes place within the confines of the family in a domestic setting” (308). This popular fiction naturally focused on gender through its subject matter emphasizing family and the domestic, and it often featured amateur or professional detectives as characters without focusing the plot on a single case or puzzle in the way that would come to characterize detective fiction. Michael Cox comments that sensation fiction is the bridge between Poe and the true detective story of Arthur Conan Doyle at the end of the century (xv). 4. The title “The Biter Bit” itself references Aesop’s fable “The Viper and the File.” The humorous reference to the story’s sexual politics, as well as its detective interplay, points out the multiple possibilities for the role of biter. 5. By contemporary standards a woman is not a fit professional detective; women will not serve as police until the twentieth century, though they appear sooner in fiction, notably in two novels featuring professional female detectives published in the 1860s, W.S. Hayward’s The Revelations of a Lady Detective (1861) and Andrew Forester Junior’s The Female Detective (1864). See Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan’s The Lady Investigates (15).

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6. In this, Collins anticipates the self-interested detectives that Joseph Conrad sketches in the corrupt world of The Secret Agent (1906); it will eventually become a familiar image to connect detectives to vampires or cannibals, since they depend on crime, an image that the title “The Biter Bit” anticipates. Also, Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery (1892) is one of the first novels to make the detective into a malicious criminal, fueling suspense by withholding his guilt from the reader in a classic locked-room mystery. 7. Cuff’s failure in The Moonstone brings up the same issue. While Cuff is a resourceful, politic, and insightful professional detective, it is more class-appropriate for Franklin Blake and Ezra Jennings to intervene in the upper-class world of the novel. 8. In Wilkie Collins, Lillian Nayder discusses this aspect of Collins in his early writing: “Like The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Collins’s early novels focus on gender relations as well as race relations and depict the victimization of women by tyrannical men who physically assault them, incarcerate them, and threaten their well-being. At the same time, Collins qualifies his social criticism in these early works, as he does in his later fiction, by highlighting the dangers of female nature and the barbarism of the subject races, reinscribing the social norms and stereotypes that he sets out to critique” (15). 9. In contrast, Doyle’s depiction of the femme sole Lady Frances Carfax works against this strong positioning. In “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” the supposedly independent woman in question is tricked by a fraudulent preacher and almost buried alive; this plot presents the discourse of paternalistic protection of lone women that emerges in many of the other Holmes stories. 10. Before a meeting with the nefarious stepfather in “A Case of Identity,” Holmes comments, “It is just as well that we should do business with the male relatives” (198). This highlights an interesting conflict: while Holmes might prefer to handle business with other men, in this case, it is the legal guardian who is the victimizer. 11. See Alfred Austin’s “Our Novels: The Sensational School”: But if people will persist in prying overmuch into the affairs of their immediate acquaintance, they are sure to end up by imputing to them a host of faults and vices, perhaps of crimes, and the modern sensation novel gratifies the same petty taste that hungers for depreciatory tittle-tattle and scandalous violence” (424). Trodd also remarks on this common complaint, specifically citing Henry Mansel’s 1863 article “Sensation Novels” in the Quarterly Review and Leslie Stephen’s 1869 article “The Decay of Murder” in Cornhill.

ABSTRACTS

La nouvelle policière est un genre littéraire populaire à partir de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle. Spécifique à ce genre, le personnage de l'inspecteur de police y est souvent idéalisé parce que ses enquêtes sont menées au nom de la justice sociale. Celles-ci ne sont cependant pas toujours couronnées de succès. La défaite de l’inspecteur peut alors exprimer l’inquiétude d’une intrusion du collectif dans le domaine privé du foyer. Lorsque le foyer comprend des personnages féminins séduisants, l’enquête reflète une inquiétude plus complexe qui fait intervenir la notion des genres. Ainsi, dans « The Policeman and the Cook » (Le policier et la cuisinière) de Wilkie Collins, ce n’est pas seulement son amour propre qui entraîne le jeune inspecteur à l'échec ; c’est aussi la fascination que la jeune femme coupable exerce sur sa personne. Aveuglé par ses appas, l’inspecteur détruit les preuves de sa culpabilité

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pour, finalement, laisser la meurtrière partir en toute liberté. De même dans la nouvelle, bien plus connue, d’Arthur Conan Doyle « A Scandal in Bohemia » (Un scandale en Bohème), fasciné par « la créature la plus joliment chapotée sur terre » Sherlock Holmes manque à mener à bien son enquête. Dans chacune de ses histoires, les personnages féminins s’opposent au stéréotype de la « fée du logis » pour constituer des antagonistes dangereux.

AUTHORS

ELLEN HARRINGTON Ellen Burton Harrington, assistant professor of English at the University of South Alabama, has published previously on the influence of detective fiction and on the influence of nineteenth- century sensation fiction on the work of Joseph Conrad. She is currently editing Scribbling Women and the Form of the Short Story for the Society for the Study of the Short Story and working on a project on women’s popular short fiction at the turn of the century.

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Escaping the Examined Life in George Moore’s “Home Sickness”

Richard Rankin Russell Translation : Laura Romascu

1 George Moore’s 1903 short story collection, The Untilled Field, was the first modern collection of Irish short fiction and, as Richard Allen Cave has noted, influenced Irish short story writers from James Joyce to Bernard MacLaverty to “move dexterously between inner and outer worlds of experience to define the fluctuating qualities of a particular consciousness or sensibility” (“Introduction” xxvi). Moore’s collection features a long-misunderstood story entitled “Home Sickness,” which revolves around the intricate psychological vacillations of James Bryden, as he returns to his native Ireland from his adopted New York City, only to become dissatisfied there and return again to the city. Moore not only brilliantly captures a perennial theme of Irish literature—immigration because of harsh economic and cultural conditions—but also holds Bryden up as the quintessential modern man, who is unconsciously uneasy with the prospect of living the contemplative life represented by a rural Ireland, a milieu which itself is criticized for its sometimes stultifying conditions and its circumscribed daily life. He thus chooses to return to New York’s hustle and bustle in order to escape himself, although he is so unused to self-examination he tells himself he must re- emigrate because of the controlling village priest. Despite Moore’s real criticism of the surveillance methods of the priest and the nosy townspeople, Bryden at least has a chance to live an examined life in Ireland. This potential for self-fulfillment in a bucolic Irish milieu has been misapprehended by critics of the story as thoughtful as Ben Forkner, who praises “Home Sickness” for “concentrat[ing] in Bryden’s dilemma most of the themes of The Untilled Field: exile, barren land, religious domination and interference, and provincial boredom and despair” (29).Moore’s own anti-clericalism has so colored our reading of the stories in The Untilled Field that the aim of this crucial story has been misread as an attack on the Catholic Church at least in part, while the thrust of the story lambasts the lack of self-awareness common to modern, urban man paradoxically conveyed through his highly interior prose style.

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2 Through his subtly depicted study of James Bryden’s mind, Moore richly implies his potential for self-awareness while also suggesting that Ireland and its literature could serve as sites where human consciousness might be protected from the pernicious influence of modernity, often city-centered, which he found increasingly distasteful in England and America. Moore’s imagining of a realistic, communal Ireland as pictured in “Home Sickness” offers an intriguingly different one from the mythologized version even then being proffered by Yeats and Lady Gregory. Although Moore came from a Catholic landowning family in County Mayo and admittedly despised the peasantry of the area, especially on inheriting the estate of Moore Hall upon his father’s death, he nevertheless rises above his anti-pastoral prejudice and adopts a qualified approval of rural life in “Home Sickness” as a site where the individual might attain real selfhood in the context of community. Never one to idealize the pastoral as a site of innocence, or abstract it as a monolithic entity, Moore refuses, however, to dismiss it in favor of an unabashed valorization of the city. Despite his fully realized depiction of Bryden’s interior life in this story, Moore clearly shows how his central character resolutely refuses to engage in any serious self-exploration and thus settles for a sharply delimited self that itself is deadened and diminished by the frenetic pace of life in the Bowery area of New York City, to which he returns and lives out his days.

3 Moore’s interest in fully depicting Bryden’s consciousness in “Home Sickness” is intricately tied to his desire for a reinvigoration of Irish intellectual life over against what he came to see as the stagnant life of the mind he found in England. Properly understanding Moore’s attitude toward Ireland at the time of writing The Untilled Field is crucial for interpreting the story, which despite its harsh, realistic portrayal of Ireland, suggests that it is a site in which cultural revival might take place. That revival, however, would have to start with a genuine reawakening of the self. Cave points out that Moore’s autobiography Hail and Farewell! (published in three parts in 1911, 1912, and 1914) is “an account of how to cultivate a genuine renaissance in the self, which he sees as the only way a larger movement for social and aesthetic revolution will begin to be a possibility in the country” (“Introduction” xxi). Moore gradually realized that portraying fictional selves more deeply and thoughtfully than they had been in Irish literature might prove exemplary for his countrymen’s personal renaissance. In his 1926 preface to The Untilled Field, using language still redolent with latent hope for a true Irish revival of the self, Moore recalls that he wrote the stories “in the hope of furnishing the young Irish of the future with models” (xxix).

4 Much criticism of Moore has been colored by Hail and Farewell!, in which he skewers the romanticism of the Irish Literary Revival, including his own attempts to revive the Irish language. But as Declan Kiberd has shown, Moore was fully invested in the movement at the time of writing The Untilled Field: it would be wrong to assume that the corrosive tone of Hail and Farewell had also characterized his relations with the Gaelic League and the Literary Theatre. The insolent satire which permeates that brilliant but willful book tells us a great deal about Moore’s state of mind between 1910 and 1914, but reveals nothing of the passionate intensity with which he threw himself into the work of the Gaelic League in 1901 and 1902. Those who knew him well in his Dublin years—men like John Eglinton and George Russell—were in no doubt as to the depth of his commitment, which they found at times ridiculous, but which he himself learned to mock only when it abated. (26)

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5 Although Moore felt he was too old to learn the Irish language, he made great efforts to have the stories of The Untilled Field translated into Gaelic, even having the book published first in Irish under the title of An tUr-Ghort in 1902 (20). Even though his later disappointment with the Gaelic League and with Ireland is significant, Moore continued to see the English language “as the language of business, journalism and commerce with the outside world, Irish as the idiom of culture, education and the domestic life” (27). Robert Welch concurs with Kiberd’s assessment of Moore’s antipathy toward English, noting that for Moore, “English itself seemed to be a language slackened by abstraction and commerce, whereas Irish was vivid, fresh, untainted by the exhaustion of modernity” (“Preface” 7).

6 John Wilson Foster suggests that Moore’s conversion to the values of the Irish Literary Revival stemmed from his anti-British stand during the Boer War, which enabled him to conceive of himself as an Irishman concerned with abstract values linked to rural culture such as spirituality: He suddenly thought of himself as an Irishman rather than an Englishman, and found himself railing against English materialism and cosmopolitanism, coarse next to Ireland’s spirituality and nationality. In “Literature and the Irish Language,” he retracted the hymn to England that closes A Drama in Muslin and attacked “the universal suburb” which England was trying to make of the world. (127)

7 Thus, even though Bryden in “Home Sickness” does not speak Irish and despite the story’s having been translated into the English language, Moore suggests that his rural, squalid Irish village functions as a latent site of cultural and personal renewal; Bryden’s re-emigration to America relegates him to a milieu characterized by commerce and trade and a lack of self-reflection. Welch argues that by the time Moore returned to Ireland from London in 1901 he was convinced of the value of contemplative reflection in the individuation process: “he placed great value on the individual gaining, through experience and self-scrutiny, some insight into and acceptance of his own nature” (“Moore’s Way Back: The Untilled Field and The Lake” 29).This self-scrutiny could work best, Moore felt, in the largely non-material milieu of rural Ireland, although he deplored its poverty and what he saw as its close-mindedness.

8 Understanding Bryden’s interior life, much of which occurs below the surface of the story, requires an unusual degree of attentiveness from the reader. Moore placed a special burden on the reader to enter his characters’ minds, which was influenced by his reading of the Russian writer Turgenev, whose A Sportsman’s Sketches provided the model for The Untilled Field. Adrian Frazier points out that in Moore’s 1888 essay on Turgenev, he turns away from the realism of Zola which he had valorized in his early fiction, relegating Zola and popular writer Rider Haggard to the “fact school” and elevating Turgenev as the great master of the “thought school” (162). In his fiction of the early twentieth century, Moore was inspired specifically by Turgenev’s depiction of impressionistic mental states. In his perceptive article on Moore’s indebtedness to Turgenev, Cave points out that Moore’s penchant for letting phrases and details accrete into an aggregate impression of mental attitudes rather than explicitly detailing particular states of mind is directly borrowed from Turgenev, who trusted the reader enough to make the nuanced interpretations necessary for apprehending the contextual point being made: “It is because his mastery of his material is so exact that he can ‘lead the reader at will’; he does not need to describe feelings or analyse mental attitudes because that mastery is so thorough that he has an absolute confidence in the

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reader’s ability to make scrupulous inferences” (“Turgenev and Moore: A Sportsman’s Sketches and The Untilled Field” 46). Cave sees this narrative technique adopted by Moore in the stories of The Untilled Field as the source of his statement to a friend about the “dryness” of the volume that suggests readers must become aware of its complexities by repeated readings of it (45). Only by becoming more familiar with these stories, which have acquired a sort of mythic status in Irish literary history that often impedes their accurate interpretation, can we truly realize Moore’s depth of psychological insight into his remarkable characters that he desperately wished their real-life counterparts might also acquire as part of a growing self-awakening in Ireland.

9 An intense scrutiny of James Bryden enables us to begin building an impression of the conflict operating in “Home Sickness” between the attraction of rural Ireland and the lure of urban America. Moore’s precisely controlled diction and carefully deployed sentence structure even in the opening passage reflect Bryden’s state of mind and its vacillations from moment to moment in subtle and suggestive ways that anticipate Moore’s praise in Avowals (1904) of the similar way in which Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean “relate[s] the states of consciousness through which Marius passed” (Orel 168). For example, the degree to which Bryden has become depersonalized by living in New York City is reflected in the opening paragraphs of the story, in which the narrator only refers to him as “He.” The opening sentence subtly conveys the tedium of his life: “He told the doctor he was due in the barroom at eight o’clock in the morning; the barroom was in a slum in the Bowery; and he had only been able to keep himself in health by getting up at five o’clock and going for long walks in the Central Park” (21). The skillful use of semicolons only creates brief pauses, suggesting the degree to which Bryden has been caught up in the frenetic pace of New York. While he argues that his exercise before work keeps him healthy, he merely has compounded the hectic pace of his day and worn himself out further. He also is likelysubstituting the anonymity of Central Park for the intimacy of his native village. The reason for his trip to Ireland is to improve his health, which has been sacrificed to his career. While he soon finds he longs for Ireland, one connotation of the story’s title, the title also suggests that the frenzied pace of his adopted home has literally made him sick.

10 It is significant that Bryden is only named when he arrives at the train station, five miles from his village of Duncannon, Ireland: “A car was waiting at the station, and the boy, discerning from his accent and his dress that Bryden had come from America, plied him with questions, which Bryden answered rapidly, for he wanted to hear who were still living in the village, and if there was a house in which he could get clean lodging” (21). Part of his warm greeting arises from the villagers’ fascination with a relative stranger from America and part of it stems from the possibility that he will spend money recklessly, but more important, his attachment to a landscape and a web of communal memory here confirms him as an individual most himself in the context of community.

11 One of Charles Taylor’s arguments about the formation of the self seems particularly apposite regarding Bryden’s homecoming. As Taylor points out, “One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it” (35). Taylor is at some pains to make this point, since, as he notes, “not only the philosophico-scientific tradition but also a powerful modern aspiration to freedom and individuality have conspired to produce an identity which seems to be a negation of this [point]” (35). Moore’s description of Bryden’s village accords with the

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long-standing Irish worldview of self-in-community that has been occluded and even denied by the modern world. Bryden’s new self develops through his interaction with the villagers, who function as the “webs of interlocution” that Taylor holds are the constitutive matrix for identity formation (36). Bryden’s interlocutors give him the necessary feedback that helps effect the rise of his latent self, one that is prone to contemplation and self-renewal.

12 After reacquainting himself with some of the villagers on his first night back, Bryden retires to his bed. The passage that follows demonstrates his terror of being left alone. Through sentences that convey a rapid succession of individual sonic images, the narrator shows us Bryden’s realization of the desolation of the village and he lies awake, frightened, undoubtedly missing the impersonal hum of the city: The cackling of some geese in the street kept him awake, and he seemed to realize suddenly how lonely the country was, and he foresaw mile after mile of scanty fields stretching all round the lake with one little town in the far corner. A dog howled in the distance, and the fields and the boreens between him and the dog appeared as in a crystal. He could hear Michael breathing by his wife’s side in the kitchen, and he could barely resist the impulse to run out of the house, and he might have yielded to it, but he wasn’t sure that he mightn’t awaken Mike as he came down the ladder. His terror increased, and he drew the blanket over his head. (24)

13 Since he cannot see, he projects an image of what he knows is likely there and frightens himself at the sparseness of the landscape. Most terrifying of all is Michael’s breathing, not only for its delicate evocation of humanity, but also because of his lying in such close proximity to his wife. Bryden, afraid of relationships generally, is particularly shocked and horrified by this quotidian example of married life, and he longs to escape.

14 Moreover, being within Michael’s house itself, placed as it is in a natural, detached setting with all the intimacy that setting bespeaks, heightens the terror of the city- dwelling Bryden. He has undoubtedly been living in a tenement in New York and that urban dwelling has helped dehumanize him. Gaston Bachelard has pointed out the mechanical properties of urban architecture in articulating his theory of topoanalysis: he argues that houses set “in a big city lack cosmicity. For here, where houses are no longer set in natural surroundings, the relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one. Everything about it is mechanical and, on every side, intimate living flees” (27). Michael’s natural intimacy with his wife, made more personal by his house’s isolated setting, frightens Bryden, who has felt less exposed in the city because of its architectural impersonality and cloistered blocks of buildings. As Bachelard further holds, in a statement pertinent to Bryden’s state of mind here, “In our houses set close one up against the other, we are less afraid” (27). The isolation of the house in this passage thus leads Bryden into a state of mind that nearly disables him mentally. Forced back upon himself and made to contemplate himself more closely than he has done in some time leads him into an awareness of his intense loneliness, a loneliness that has been masked by the impersonality and pace of city life.

15 The next morning, however, he has recovered enough to eat a hearty breakfast and stroll outside. Forbidden by Mike from helping with the mowing, he lounges by the lakeside and dreams the day away, lulled into an imaginative reverie by the combined sounds of the breeze, the reeds, ducks, and by the lapping of the water at the shorelines, along with the interplay of sun and cloud on the water. His reverie puts him into a much better mood, and when he sees the local villagers, he chats idly with them,

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while still feeling himself superior to them: “whenever a peasant driving a cart or an ass or an old woman with a bundle of sticks on her back went by, Bryden kept them in chat, and he soon knew the village by heart” (my emphasis; 25). After meeting and reacquainting himself with the local landlord one day, he procures a boat from him and rows around the lake every morning.

16 Although the passage following this one in which Bryden is portrayed as day-dreaming sounds escapist, his entry into this mindset is actually a crucial step toward acquiring a contemplative approach to life: Bryden rowed about the islands every morning; and resting upon his oars looked at the old castles, remembering the prehistoric raiders that the landlord had told him about. He came across the stones to which the lake dwellers had tied their boats, and these signs of ancient Ireland were pleasing to Bryden in his present mood. (25)

17 Gazing into the distance, into immensity, enables Bryden to be transported in his mind to an imagined, but no less real reality than that which surrounds him. Bachelard argues that daydreaming arrives “in the space of elsewhere” and suggests that “When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings [. . .] it is immense. And one might say that daydream is original contemplation” (Bachelard’s emphases 184). The sheer immensity of Bryden’s vision is achieved by his condition of being motionless, which state, Bachelard claims, facilitates the movement into contemplation: “As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming” (184). Motionless in his boat, Bryden escapes the hectic movement of the city, which militates against contemplation, and acquires through his stillness the dynamism of immensity as described by Bachelard.

18 His expanded mental capacity now make him receptive to other options than those normally presented to him in his formerly circumscribed urban world. Thus, despite his aversion to emotional relationships, when Margaret Dirken appears one evening to him as he fishes a smaller lake near the village bog, she is a welcome respite from his solitude. He has noticed her before at local dances, but had never spoken to her. Now, however, “he was glad to speak to someone, for the evening was lonely, and they stood talking together” (26). As he looks at her, he admires her beauty but then is quickly disturbed: Her cheeks were bright and her teeth small, white, and beautifully even; and a woman’s soul looked at Bryden out of her soft Irish eyes. He was troubled and turned aside, and catching sight of a frog looking at him out of a tuft of grass, he said: “I have been looking for a frog to put upon my pike line.” (26)

19 Although James F. Carens argues that this passage suggests that “Margaret [. . .] has an Irish charm that Bryden cannot dismiss” (54), Bryden’s attitude toward her here is much more complex than Carens implies. Why, within two sentences, is Margaret transformed from an idealized beauty into a troubling image? The answer lies within Bryden’s perverse psychology. At first, he manages to attend to her specific beauty and abstract her enough to incorporate her into his idealized landscape of ancient Ireland that he fantasizes about every morning as he rows a borrowed boat on the bigger lake. But then reality intrudes in the form of individuality. Margaret’s soul peers at him, puncturing his conflated image of woman and myth—she may temporarily function as a Mother Ireland figure in this sense—and resists his abstraction of her.

20 There is not even any real evidence that he cares for her; in fact, he has pursued her out of a perverse desire, it seems, to reincorporate her into his fusion of woman and

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landscape and make her over into the abstraction to which he first was attracted. This desire is compounded by his evident wish to conform to the social conventions of the village, which Margaret apparently brings up in an effort to force his hand on the issue. Despite his disdain for the “peasants” around him, Bryden succumbs to this village woman’s pressure and societal custom and becomes engaged.

21 After the parish priest bans Bryden’s parties in which excessive drinking and a great deal of dancing occurs, he is angered. Bryden has also gotten engaged to Margaret to avoid being censored by the priest, thus unconsciously succumbing to the village conventions he has sought to distance himself from, but since he has no real self- awareness, he still separates himself from the villagers, and is shocked by their obedience to the priest. In thinking about their passiveness, he explicitly contrasts their rural Catholic existence with the urban, secular, restless life he has temporarily left behind in New York: “And their pathetic submission was the submission of a primitive people clinging to religious authority, and Bryden contrasted the weakness and incompetence of the people about him with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he left behind him” (27). Already, though he too, has submitted to the priest’s authority by getting engaged to Margaret, Bryden feels the allure of the city drawing him back, though that place seems to render its inhabitants without agency.

22 Bryden is anxious to be married, but cannot obtain his money from America for several more months. In the meantime, a letter arrives from America from a fellow employee in the bar. Although it is a mere inquiry into whether he is returning from someone who is not close to him, it spurs a renewed longing to return to the Bowery: He tried to forget the letter, and he looked at the worn fields, divided by walls of loose stones, and a great longing came upon him. The smell of the Bowery slum had come across the Atlantic, and had found him out in his western headland; and one night he awoke from a dream in which he was hurling some drunken customer through the open doors into the darkness. He had seen his friend in the white duck jacket throwing drink from glass into glass amid the din of voices and strange accents; he had heard the clang of money as it was swept into the till, and his sense sickened for the barroom. (29)

23 Those loose stone walls surrounding the village remind him of the city walls and pavement of the Bowery. Suddenly he misses not just their uniformity, in contrast to the jumbled stone walls of the village, but also the hubbub of that other life. That world of action and busyness lures him away from the loneliness of the village and the effort he will undoubtedly have to make to start examining and knowing himself if he stays. Although Cave intriguingly argues that Bryden’s vision of the “worn fields divided by walls of loose stones” implies that “the quality of his perception intimates his own slow breaking down to the pattern of spiritual greyness common to the villagers if he should stay” (“Turgenev and Moore: A Sportsman’s Sketches and The Untilled Field” 60), the juxtaposition of the staid rural landscape and frenetic Bowery cityscape in this passage suggest instead his longing for the non-reflective world of the city, although he cannot even reflect enough to admit this fully to himself. Margaret’s clinginess frightens him and, still lured by his image of the Bowery as a site of activity and impersonal relations, he searches desperately for reasons to leave her.

24 “Hunted” alternately by the smell of the barroom and by Margaret’s quest for marriage, he rapidly examines and rejects reasons for going back to America, finally seizing on the priest as a symbol of the harsh repressiveness of the village and convincing himself he misses the excitement of politics:

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The smell of the barroom hunted him down. Was it for the sake of the money that he might make there that he wished to go back? No, it was not the money. What then? His eyes fell on the bleak country, on the little fields divided by bleak walls; he remembered the pathetic ignorance of the people, and it was these things that he could not endure. It was the priest who came to forbid the dancing. Yes, it was the priest. As he stood looking at the line of the hills the barroom seemed by him. He heard the politicians, and the excitement of politics was in his blood again. He must go away from this place—he must get back to the barroom. (my emphasis; 29)

25 Bryden’s loathing for his parish in this passage seems more constructed than real as he seems to struggle valiantly to come up with reasons to leave for the Bowery, repetitively trying to convince himself that the priest is at fault and even feigning an interest in politics as a reason to return.

26 Criticism of the story, however, has overwhelmingly seen this passage and the one cited earlier in which Bryden, shocked by the townspeople’s submission to the priest, contrasts “the weakness and incompetence of the people about him with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he left behind him,” as evidence of Moore’s anti-clericalism and read that attitude onto Bryden. Proof of Moore’s anti-clericalism in general abounds, as his most recent and best biographer, Adrian Frazier, notes. Frazier points out that Moore’s objection was not to Catholicism per se, especially not in its long-standing folk practices such as local pilgrimages and worship in cottages instead of churches, but to the modernization of the Church under Cardinal Cullen’s “devotional revolution,” in which a whole series of devotions used to promote a newer, more rigid dogma were introduced (309). Moore became so dissatisfied with the Church’s drift toward modernism that, Frazier argues, “In The Untilled Field, the tales about artists in Ireland or exiles returned are always tales of dissatisfaction, tales of Ireland as a prison run by jailers who are priests” (309-10).

27 And yet “Home Sickness” stands out from the volume’s other stories about exiles in its focus on the incorporation of an innovative interior narrative technique to depict its protagonist’s state of mind, a strategy that suggests Moore saw strong possibilities for self-renewal in Ireland. Elizabeth Grubgeld has argued that Moore’s fiction written after 1900 increasingly is concerned with developing a narrative style that modeled a growing trajectory toward self-consciousness on the part of his characters: “After the turn of the century, Moore’s fiction steadily advances toward a depiction of the process by which we progress from intuition to consciousness” (204). She realizes the stylistic significance of “Home Sickness” for his subsequent fiction, noting that “In this story, which of all those in The Untilled Field most prefigures the achievements of The Lake and The Brook Kerith, Moore [. . .] establishes a technique integral to his sense of how a life finds meaning through the recollective process of narration” (218).And yet Grubgeld wrongly suggests that Bryden finds meaning in his life “through the recollective process of narration”; rather, when he finally experiences a moment of contemplation at the end of his life, he chastises himself for not having had the courage to live an examined life in Ireland. Bryden’s problem is not so much with the Church’s oppressiveness but with not examining himself.

28 Frazier’s casting of the stories of The Untilled Field as a monolithic example of Moore’s hatred of the modern Church is hardly new. Almost every critic writing on the volume reads Moore’s dissatisfaction with the Church onto his characters including Bryden himself. For example, in what is still considered a landmark essay on The Untilled Field, John Cronin, discussing Bryden’s reason for leaving the village for the second time,

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states that, “his sturdy independence will not brook the priestly control of his lovemaking and his future marriage to Margaret Dirken” (123). In an earlier article, Brendan Kennelly attributes Bryden’s decision to go back to America to the priest’s repressive control of the villagers: “Because of this claustrophobic world with the priest at its centre, Bryden leaves Ireland and Margaret Dirken behind him, deliberately choosing the noisy bar-room in the Bowery slum to the intolerable repression of the Irish village” (154). Seamus Deane concurs, arguing that “although he wants to marry a local girl, Margaret Dirken, and settle down in the beautiful landscape of his youth, the authoritarian interference of the local priest so discourages him that he finally returns to New York and abandons all he loves” (170).

29 Besides being colored by Moore’s personal disdain for the Church’s trajectory toward modernization, this misinterpretation of Bryden’s motives for his decision is undoubtedly influenced by Moore’s depictions elsewhere in the volume of other controlling priests, such as Father Maguire, who figures in the linked stories “Some Parishioners,” “Patchwork,” “The Wedding Feast,” and “The Window,” and attempts to arrange marriages in the parish in order to revive it. But Maguire’s harsh domination of parish life is explicitly contrasted by the gentle character of Father MacTurnan in the stories “A Letter to Rome” and “A Play-House in the Waste.” This character attempts to help his parishioners and, according to James F. Carens, represents “sure evidence that the artist in George Moore could not remain for long a prisoner of his anticlericalism” (57). Clearly, Moore’s priests in The Untilled Field have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Although the priest in “Home Sickness” is authoritarian, his presence does not really explain Bryden’s decision to re-emigrate; rather, he seems to be an excuse hastily seized upon by Bryden as a rationale for departure.

30 Richard Allen Cave’s more thoughtful argument about Bryden’s decision to leave suggests that although the priest’s dominance in the village bothers him, he actually leaves because of his realization of the stultifying quality of life lived by the peasants: Though a parish priest vigorously condemns the drinking and dancing that Bryden’s money can buy for the villagers to celebrate his courting of Margaret Dirkin, more than that shapes his decision to go back to the Bowery: it is the joyless drudgery of the peasant farmers working their smallholdings for a pittance; the hard, unyielding landscape; and the meanspiritedness and self-pity these seem together to induce in the villagers that afflict him. He pities them but comes to dread sharing their condition. (“Turgenev and Moore: A Sportsman’s Sketches and The Untilled Field” 60)

31 Cave’s reading gets significantly closer to the complex reasons for Bryden’s re- emigration than do those of Cronin, Kennelly, Deane, and Frazier, which represent the main line of criticism on this aspect of the story. But even Cave’s response neglects the main reason for Bryden’s departure—his unconscious desire to escape back into an urban environment where he only has to react to those around him and never reflect deeply and develop an emotional and intellectual life. Moore felt strongly at this time that rural Ireland, despite its poverty and the increasing authoritarianism of the Church, could provide the contemplative milieu in which deep personal and societal change might flourish.

32 Additionally, Bryden’s clear disgust with the priest and the attitudes embodied by him, the prose in this passage suggests that he is literally looking around for reasons to return to America. When he recalls the priest’s interference, he does so in a repetitive phrase that suggests he is trying to convince himself: “It was the priest who came to

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forbid the dancing. Yes, it was the priest” (29). Carens briefly acknowledges the possibility of this reading when he notes that, “‘Home Sickness’ thus seems to be touched by Moore’s anticlericalism, unless we conclude that Bryden blames the priest for his departure as a rationalization of his longing for the urban scape of the Bowery” (55). Bryden does not so much hate or fear the priest but fears instead becoming part of a personal community in contrast to the impersonal world of the Bowery he has come to know and love. The priest represents the fear of the intrusion of personal relationships into his emotionless life. After all, he sought Margaret’s hand in marriage partly to escape the priest’s wrath. That the priest stopped the dancing Bryden so enjoys adds to his fear of the personal, for although dancing seems personal, it actually is a way for him to have impersonal relations. We should remember that although he “had found himself opposite to her in the reels” (26), he had barely spoken to Margaret before that first evening when he met her by the lake. That impersonal letter from his co-worker in America that seems so intimate to the villagers who see him read it brings all that bright and busy world back to him, alluring him with its hectic pace. His cycle of illusion/disillusionment has begun again and now he convinces himself that he hates the village and its peaceful life. That life is characterized by interpersonal relationships and is symbolized by his forthcoming marriage to Margaret and his pastureland that the landlord has so generously given them.

33 Thus, even though he will not admit to Margaret or himself that he is not coming back, he leaves. She knows he is leaving, and asks him to tell her outright, but he does not, rushing away instead and rejecting her offer to come with him: He hurried away, hoping he would come back. He tried to think that he liked the country he was leaving, that it would be better to have a farmhouse and live there with Margaret Dirken than to serve drinks behind a counter in the Bowery. He did not think he was telling a lie when he said he was coming back. (58)

34 He vacillates as he runs toward the train station, but luckily meets a car and its motion sufficiently enables him to feel he has left the village and the personal relations it represents behind: “Once he was on the car he felt himself safe—the country was already behind him. The train and the boat at Cork were mere formulae; he was already in America” (58-9). Conveyed by a succession of vehicles, Bryden is quickly led back into the life of the city and its dehumanizing qualities—speed, anonymity, atomic individuality—even before he reaches it. Raymond Williams has argued that the qualities of the modern car—privacy, enclosure, and individuality—recall the earlier descriptions of “crowded metropolitan streets—the people as isolated atoms, flowing this way and that; a common stream of separated identities and directions [. . .]” (296). Bryden’s embrace of these locomotive devices linked to an urban milieu suggests his comfort with particularized negative qualities of life in the city, despite his need for contemplation, a state of mind able to be attained in the city, but only through much more effort than he is willing or able to give.

35 Upon his return, Bryden is relieved to be back in the Bowery and feels “the thrill of home that he had not felt in his village” (30), but he nonetheless has managed to delude himself yet again. America must surely have been a dream to him before he emigrated the first time; its shabbiness and disorder, however, literally made him sick and long for home so he left. Now, after returning the second time, he does not pause to reflect how the milieu of his native village might have satisfied the embryonic life of the mind that had begun to emerge, however fleetingly, during his time there and simply proceeds based on his moods. He merely briefly wonders, “how it was that the smell of

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the bar seemed more natural than the smell of fields, and the roar of crowds more welcome than the silence of the lake’s edge” (30). He will not answer these questions because he is no longer capable of doing so: the city’s impersonal and artificial qualities have successfully blotted out his sensitivity toward the land and his partially regained disposition toward contemplation. Having escaped one terrible marriage, he enters another one, and lives a meaningless life.

36 The disingenuous phrase, “thrill of home,” that the narrator uses to describe Bryden’s return to the Bowery suggests just how fully he is deceiving himself that he is truly home. Despite his poor Irish, Moore would have known that, as Fintan O’Toole has pointed out, the phrases sa mbaile and sa bhaile, the equivalents of the English phrase “at home,” “are never used in the narrow sense of home as a dwelling. They imply, instead, that wider sense of a place in the world, a feeling of belonging that is buried deep within the word’s meaning” (167). Bryden has already acknowledged this deeper sense of home early in “Home Sickness” when he is described in New York as beginning “to wonder how the people at home were getting on” (my emphasis; 21). Despite having experienced back in Duncannon just the sort of “feeling of belonging” that O’Toole argues characterizes the connotations of “at home” for Irish emigrants, Bryden denies that community and settles for a pale simulacrum of one that is largely devoid of feeling.

37 Now, after returning to the city for the second time, he does not pause to reflect how this urban milieu might satisfy the embryonic life of the mind that had begun to emerge, however fleetingly, during his time in his native village and merely proceeds based on his moods. Having escaped one terrible marriage, he enters another one, and lives out the rest of his life. The flatness and limpidity of the sentences in this concluding section suggest just how repetitive and empty his life in New York has become and significantly, he does not even attempt to call the Bowery “home” now: He entered into negotiations for purchase of the barroom. He took a wife, she bore him sons and daughters, the barroom prospered, property came and went; he grew old, his wife died, he retired from business, and reached the age when a man begins to feel there are not many years in front of him, and that all he has had to do in life has been done. (30-1)

38 Bryden has succeeded in his career, but he has failed miserably at any self-examination. Just as he was unnamed at the beginning of the story, implying the dehumanizing effect of the city upon him, he has become reduced by the end of the story to a pronoun again. Always superficial, his inner life has receded even more from him.

39 The last sentences, in which a vision of Margaret floats before his eyes, seem ambiguous upon a cursory reading. Is Bryden merely fantasizing about the life he could have had with Margaret,as many commentators have suggested, and continuing in his cycle of illusion and disillusionment, or is he experiencing something else? I suggest that Margaret’s image is not significant in and of itself, but important for what it represents: the world of personal relations and the contemplative life he might have had if he had remained in the village, broken the engagement off, and began to reflect on his selfhood. For this vision passes quickly and smacks of romanticism: Margaret’s soft eyes and name vivified the dusk. His wife and children passed out of mind, and it seemed to him that a memory was the only real thing he possessed, and the desire to see Margaret again grew intense. But she was an old woman, she had married, maybe she was dead. Well, he would like to be buried in the village where he was born. (31)

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40 Despite its vividness, Bryden rejects this image, realizing the fruitlessness of trying to pursue Margaret yet again.

41 The image that replaces it in the concluding paragraph in the story, a vision of the village, lingers, however, suggesting the life that was available to him there without her that even now is receding from him: There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The barroom was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills. (31)

42 It is easy to conflate this vision of the village with those earlier visions Bryden has of the village shortly before his arrival and during his reveries by the lake in which he naively idealizes the landscape.But Moore makes clear that this vision of his “unchanging, silent life,” is associated with “his memory of Margaret Dirken.” I use “associated” here because the memory of her is not the important vision—it is merely a psychological entry into the landscape of the village and what that terrain potentially represents—self-awareness. Seamus Deane thus misapprehends the significance of this concluding passage by arguing that its “tender note of regret” stems from his memory lingering “on Ireland and Margaret” (171, 170).

43 Although Bryden is stereotypically conflating Margaret and the landscape into a unified figure again, what seems important here and what was lacking in this conflation earlier in the story was his failure to recognize that he needed a contemplative life even as he momentarily had his best chance at it. Earlier, his romantic daydreams about the Irish landscape had been interrupted by Margaret, who temporarily embodied them, and whom he perversely sought. Now, he has entered into a reverie about Margaret, whose image leads him back to those hills and lakes again. This chiastic pattern suggests not a mirroring of his earlier thinking, but a significant change. He now realizes that that milieu, as poor as it was, could have provided him a life with real meaning, a life with deep, lasting human relationships, but that he had impulsively gotten engaged to her in order to escape that very life even as he needed it most. Instead of seeking a woman who might have fulfilled him and aided in his process of self-discovery, he sought one he abstracted and idealized so that he might escape having to know himself and another human being—a double burden. The grinding poverty, the priest, and the peasants of his native village were all abominable to him, not so much for their repressive and repressed qualities, but for their personal qualities. Even as he grasps the significance of that landscape for his life, for what might have been, it recedes from him and he realizes he has never known himself nor never now will.

44 While it has been rightly noted that in the stories of The Untilled Field Moore is deploring the romanticized pastoral Ireland of the nationalists, he nonetheless was attempting to posit rural Ireland, despite some of its repressive qualities, as a site rife with potential for rich cultural and personal renewal. What has passed largely unremarked and unrealized about “Home Sickness,” the most important and lasting story in the volume, is Moore’s stylistically innovative depiction of Bryden as a symbol of modern man, caught up in and depersonalized by the allure of the negative elements of urban modernity, such as atomic individualism and frenzied activity, which preclude any sort of meaningful, contemplative life. Bryden is thus a forerunner of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who also is paralyzed by uncertainty. Just as Prufrock suffers an

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emotional and intellectual death by drowning in the babble of urban voices around him at the end of that poem, so does Bryden, in the pool of chaos and dehumanization that awaits him on his return to the city.

ABSTRACTS

La nouvelle de George Moore, « Home Sickness » (Le mal du pays), publiée dans le recueil The Untilled Field (Le champ en friche, 1903), a été souvent perçue – à tord – comme une œuvre anti- catholique, puisque y est dépeinte au vitriol la figure d’un prêtre réactionnaire. S’il est évident que Moore, lui-même catholique au demeurant, a marqué son œuvre d’un trait profondément anticlérical, la nouvelle « Home Sickness » est plutôt une critique originale de la modernité urbaine. Moore considère le rythme et le matérialisme de cette modernité comme un facteur de dégradation des conditions vitales à un esprit contemplatif. Bien que Moore et le protagoniste de l’histoire, James Bryden, soient tous deux révulsés par certains aspects de la vie rurale, une opportunité s’offre tout de même à ce dernier, celle de mener sur sa vie une réflexion : cependant, celle-ci n’est possible que dans la mesure où Bryden doit quitter New York et retourner définitivement dans son village natal, en Irlande. Il reste que Bryden voit dans l’ingérence du prêtre la raison de son départ vers la ville. A cela, le narrateur ajoute une vérité qu’il assène au lecteur : la ville a mentalement appauvri Bryden…

AUTHORS

RICHARD RANKIN RUSSELL Richard Rankin Russell (Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is an Assistant Professor of English at Baylor University. He specializes in Northern Irish literature, Anglo-Irish literature, and twentieth-century British literature. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature, South AtlanticReview, Modern Drama, New Hibernia Review, Papers on Language and Literature, Colby Quarterly, and English Language Notes, among others. His edited collection of essays on the contemporary Irish playwright Martin McDonagh will appear from Routledge in 2007. He has just completed a manuscript entitled, “Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and the Devolution of Northern Irish Literature.”

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“Children are Given us to Discourage Our Better Instincts”: The Paradoxical Treatment of Children in Saki’s Short Fiction

Ruth Maxey

1 The short fiction of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro), first published in six volumes, features numerous child characters.1 In this respect, as in his use of imperialism and the animal kingdom as literary themes, Saki owes something to Rudyard Kipling (Drake 1962, 11; Pritchett 1963, 614; Greene, 99-102; Allen, 85; Hanson, 34-5).2 His sparkling style recalls the epigrams of Oscar Wilde (E.M. Munro, 40; Chesterton, xii; E. Waugh, viii; Pritchett 1965, 99; Fogle, 83, 91; A. Waugh, ix), while the influence of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll can be discerned in Saki’s taste for the surreal (Chesterton, xii; Pritchett 1963, 614).3 For some commentators, his cold dissections of wealthy Edwardian society echo the fiction of Henry James (Lambert, 40; Pritchett 1965, 98); for others, his work foreshadows the social comedy of P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh (Fogle, 83-5; A. Waugh, viii). One could also argue that Saki’s writing anticipates the subversive, macabre short fiction of Roald Dahl, which draws similar inspiration from unexpected, anti-authoritarian complicities between children and animals (Dahl, 7-31; Warren, 13-16).

2 While critics and writers have traditionally placed Saki within the kind of genealogy of English writing outlined above, his unique status has been just as strenuously claimed (Walpole, viii, xii; Knox, 14; Spears, 12, 22, 58; Overmyer, 171; Gillen, 158; Allen, 86; Fogle, 92; Seymour-Smith and Kimmens, 2279; Self, xi). Indeed, the originality of Saki’s vision is one of several critical commonplaces found in the articles and full-length studies which have appeared since his death in 1916. Others are the misogyny of his writing (A. Waugh, vii, ix-x; Carey, viii); his role as a gay writer (Langguth, 30-1, 116-7, 187-8; A. Waugh, ix; Lauritsen, 850-1; Carey, xii-xiii; Seymour-Smith and Kimmens, 2279-80; Self, xv-xvi); the obsessive degree to which he inserts animals into his work (Knox, 12-14; Lambert, 56; Pritchett 1965, 98-9; Hanson, 44; Salemi, 423-30; Carey, vii);

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and his insistent use of practical jokes (Greene, 101; Grigson, 316; Sharpe, 7; Langguth, 28-30; Fogle, 89-93; Hanson, 47-8; Carey, xi).

3 Commentators from Graham Greene to Will Self have remarked upon the primacy of children in Saki’s work, while the biographies written about him argue that his own unhappy childhood was a creative wellspring for his fiction (Reynolds, xi-xii; E.M. Munro, 3-22; Gillen, 17-19; Langguth, 7-27). Indeed, Greene sees Saki’s vivid, semi- autobiographical depictions of children’s suffering as one of the great strengths of his writing (101). J.W. Lambert notes that “a sense of claustrophobia, private lives, and war against adults sounds through so many accounts of late Victorian childhood” (13), and the privileging of children within the dialectic of Victorian and Edwardian society is widely reflected in literary works by Carroll, Lear, Stevenson, Barrie, and Grahame (Wullschläger, 7). Thus the children in Saki’s stories share common ground with other figures in late-19th- and early-20th-century fiction, such as the unloved, invalid characters of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), and his lack of didacticism on the subject of children continues the tradition of Carroll and Lear.

4 Although Lambert draws attention to the “essentially solitary” nature of Saki’s child characters (60) and Self observes the “cynicism” (xvi) of his attitude to children, very little direct attention has been paid in Saki scholarship to the specific ways in which he particularises childhood, and to his complex, paradoxical position on the subject. Moreover, while his “cruelty” has often been noted, it has only rarely been discussed in the context of his child characters, and then only briefly (Carey,xxii; Self, xvi). In this article, I will explore these neglected aspects of Saki’s writing by examining his portrayal of the adult treatment of children, before turning to the relationship between animals and children in his work; to the child’s secret world or private psychic sphere; and to Saki’s literary technique and the ways in which it supports his depictions of childhood. In my conclusion, I will explore whether in these stories children – in part instruments of Saki’s satire, in part victims of life’s cruelties – ultimately do “discourage our better instincts” (H.H. Munro, 19).

How adults treat children

5 Saki was brought up by two maiden aunts, Charlotte and Augusta, in Devon in the 1870s; and Augusta was described by his sister, Ethel, as “a woman of ungovernable temper …imperious, a moral coward, possessing no brains worth speaking of” (7). Art is made to imitate life through the consistently bad treatment children receive from their parents or guardians in these stories. Sometimes this takes the form of active oppression and deliberate attempts at corruption; at other times, children are simply subjected to disparaging remarks or neglect. It is worth drawing a distinction, however, between two genres of story about children in Saki’s writing: those which feature small children in cameo roles, often to apparently comic effect; and those in which older children are the protagonists, their perspective favoured above all else. There is a world of difference between other people’s children, who are as uninteresting as “other people’s dreams” (308), and the state of childhood as personally experienced in all its bitterness.

6 Children in incidental roles merit little more than a contemptuous passing mention at best, and a bloody fate at worst. Often they are blithely and humorously sacrificed in Nature’s survival of the fittest. In “The Story-Teller” (Beasts), Bertha – a cartoon-like

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character created by the unnamed “bachelor” in his story-within-the-story – is exemplary of this trend. The third-person narrator of the story overall comments explicitly upon the arresting oxymoron of her “horribly good” behaviour (250): “the word horrible in connection with goodness was a novelty that …seemed to introduce a ring of truth …absent from the aunt’s tales of infant life” (250).4 By exposing Bertha’s “goodness” as priggish and hypocritical, Saki departs radically from the Romantic and Victorian figure of the child as a site of sanctity and innocence. But if Bertha is smug and self-serving, the taste for cruelty of the children listening ensures that they do not have the moral high ground. Although this clear-eyed thesis of childhood is more akin to pre-19th-century traditions of the inherently “evil child” (Briggs, 169; James, Jenks, and Prout, 10-13; Heywood, 22, 27), Saki derives subversive strength from his decision not to moralise through such portrayals.

7 The sound of Bertha’s “medals” (awarded for piety) “clinking” (251) betrays her hiding place to the hungry wolf, who stalks familiarly fairy-tale territory by “‘prowling the park to see if it could catch a fat little pig for its supper’” (251). In an inversion of “The Three Little Pigs”, however, it is Bertha who is instead “devoured …to the last morsel” (251). A well-behaved child is viciously killed, yet this plot twist is made to seem acceptable because it occurs within the safe parameters of a consciously fictional, pseudo-nursery story narrative. Furthermore, Bertha’s sanctimoniousness is deemed to be more culpable than the psychologically violent impulses of the bachelor’s young audience, who wholeheartedly endorse a story in which predatory animals triumph over humans, and light (in the form of a pious little girl) is conquered by darkness (the “big, bad wolf” of “Little Red Riding Hood” tradition).

8 “The Schartz-Metterklume Method” (Beasts) is concerned with the issue of children’s education, but – as with the bachelor’s telling of mock-fairy stories – the conventional is again satirised. With a suspension of moral etiquette and Pied Piper mystique similar to those of the bachelor, Lady Carlotta encourages the children in her charge to understand history by re-enacting the violent episode of the Romans’rape of the Sabine women. An earlier story, “Reginald’s Choir Treat” (R.), engages further with the notion of adult pleasure derived from unleashing anarchy among children. Given the opportunity to “supervise the annual outing of the bucolic infants [in] the local choir” (13), Reginald persuades them to go for a swim and then return to the village stark naked. On one level, the detached, sardonic tenor of “bucolic infants” frees Reginald – and the story’s narrator – from responsibility for any damage done to the children. Viewed from another angle, however, this episode contains the unmistakably “homosexual nuances” that John Carey has identified in many of Saki’s Reginald stories (xii). Carey is right to foreground the subtle, but persistent, sexuality at work in these stories, but I would go further and argue that “Reginald’s Choir Treat” contains more alarming undercurrents: wilful unkindness to children at best and paedophilia at worst.

9 Saki is fully alert to the presence of adult hypocrisy towards children in his early stories. In “The Innocence of Reginald” (R.), Reginald argues that “‘people talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes’” (28). But Saki’s own linguistic strategies often relegate children to a lowly status: detachment is implied by “bucolic infants”, and even when Reginald appears to defend persecuted children in “The Innocence of Reginald”, he still refers to the generic child of his observation as “it”. Similarly, and in more sinister fashion, the “Toop child” in “Gabriel-Ernest” (R. in R.) never rises above the status of

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“it”, underscoring the character’s role as inferior animal prey at the hands of the boy- cum-werewolf, Gabriel-Ernest. The Toop child’s lack of gender or indeed of any individual identity (other than family name) ensures that there is little sense of the tragedy of his/her death.

10 The linguistic techniques of Clovis, a recurrent character in Saki’s fiction, display a similarly off-hand cruelty. He asks Mrs. Momeby in “The Quest” (Chronicles) of her lost son, Erik: “ ‘do you mean it’s dead, or stampeded, or that you staked it at cards and lost it that way?’ ” (107) [emphasis added]. Throughout the story, Saki consistently applies a language of cool disengagement to the little boy: he is the Momebys’“restored offspring” (109), a “struggling infant” (109), and “the squalling baby” (109). These stories, in which a child can be both tragic victim and fair game, establish a pattern in Saki’s work of love and hatred for children; the love side of this dichotomy is, as we will see, manifested in later works which focus entirely on a single child. Like his “half out, half in” approach to high society (Birden, n.p.), his contradictory attitude to children implies both that parents and their children are fertile, appropriate material for satire, and that childhood is of compulsive interest to Saki. Indeed, it is a trope he can never quite discard.

Saki’s hierarchy of children and animals

11 Within Saki’s discourse of childhood, animals – generally presented as innately superior to humans – take precedence over children. The anthropomorphised Gabriel- Ernest is, for instance, described in inverse proportion to the dehumanisation of the Toop child. He is “a boy of about sixteen” (47) with specific dietary habits (48) and a languid physical presence, detailed in vaguely homoerotic terms (47). By describing the boy at length and then allowing him to triumph, Saki forces the reader to question the glibly-accepted hierarchy which places people above animals (Knox, 14; Lambert, 56; Spears, 42; Gillen, 80-1; Sharpe, 8). Although initially presented as a boy himself, Gabriel-Ernest echoes Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) in his casual references to child- eating, and while his higher status as an animal is assumed throughout the story, he is also a prime example of how Saki combines the apparently disparate elements of the human and the animal. Even though he more often places them in opposition to each other, Saki suggests, through Gabriel-Ernest, that humans and animals have more in common than might initially meet the eye.5 The character represents a malevolent version of the half-human, half-animal beings of classical mythology – satyrs and centaurs – his animal spirit lurking dangerously inside an ostensibly human body. In an analogous way, a human voice is unlocked from within the eponymous cat, Tobermory (Chronicles). Later manifestations of this theme are the semi-deified, titular ferret in “Sredni Vashtar” (Chronicles), who appears to understand human desires; and Esmé the hyena (“Esmé”, Chronicles). Each creature has a human or semi-human name; each story is named after its animal protagonist – and each story takes the creature’s side.

12 Children are a key element of these imaginative constructs. In “Esmé”, the hyena carries off and kills a child as disposable as Gabriel-Ernest’s victim. In this case, however, the brutality of this act is explicitly acknowledged, although the child is not only reduced to the customarily ambiguous “it”: it has no name at all and is described as “a small half-naked gipsy brat” (76).6 The Baroness conversely personalises the animal as “he”. She insists she must “hurry over” the death of the child victim “because

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it is really rather horrible” (76), and she interprets his/her death rattle as “crying from sheer temper [which] children sometimes do” (77). The child’s “gipsy” background resurfaces when she argues that “ ‘I don’t suppose in large encampments they really know to a child or two how many they’ve got’” (77). Similarly, in “Gabriel-Ernest”, Mrs. Toop is said to be “decently resigned to her bereavement” because she has “eleven other children” (51).7

13 Animals are again implied to have the upper hand over children when Clovis suggests to his hostess in “The Quest” that “‘perhaps an eagle or a wild beast has carried” off her child; she responds that “‘there aren’t eagles and wild beasts in Surrey’…but a note of horror had crept into her voice” (107). In Saki’s world of genteel horror, no English county (not even Surrey) is immune from dangerous predators such as eagles, ferrets, hyenas, and other feral creatures like the lycanthropic Gabriel-Ernest.8 Sometimes his fascination with this device creates an inter-referential quality in the stories concerned. The reader’s recent memory of “Esmé”, for example, lends a chilling frisson of dramatic irony to Clovis’s later remark: “ ‘what a sensational headline it would make …“Infant son of prominent Nonconformist devoured by spotted hyæna”…’ ” (107).

14 For Joseph S. Salemi, these unconventional juxtapositions of humans and exotic creatures are jarring, but can be explained by “the actual proximity and familiarity with live animals that obtained in the Western world …ninety years ago” (424). He still ponders, though, “why Saki makes such excessive literary use” of these wild animals (424). The death of Saki’s mother was linked to an attack by a runaway cow and his childhood drawings, which routinely show humans being gored, and sometimes eaten, by buffalo, lions and bears (E.M. Munro, 16, 21, 23), suggest that this idea was a lifelong obsession. Children are the victims of animals not simply in his fiction but also in his letters, where he is capable of making real-life children the subject of such fantasies, suggesting to his sister that a wolf might be tempted to eat “the small Vernon boys” (E.M. Munro, 46, 71). In this respect, Saki’s world arguably parallels that of Hilaire Belloc, whose Cautionary Verses (1908) features animals attacking and eating naughty children.9 For Self, however, it is Saki’s homosexuality which is the key motivation here. He asks whether, behind the “savagely unsentimental” treatment children receive in “Esmé” and “The Quest”, “there [is] not perhaps the authentically misanthropic voice of the man who knows paternity will never be for him?” (xvi). Saki’s persistent dehumanisation of other people’s children certainly lends support to such accusations, but beyond this lies another response to childhood: his sensitive awareness of vulnerable, intelligent, older children who suffer adult bullying. This is the theme of stories which move from blackly humorous acts of cruelty inflicted on “other people’s children” to dense re-workings of his own personal history. In such stories, animals still occupy a higher place than people, but are shown to have much in common with children: both are subjugated and imprisoned by adults, but are capable of emancipating themselves, sometimes violently. Animals move, moreover, from being the assailants of children to their closest allies, and are thus central to children’s shift from victim status to an early form of selfhood.

Animals as allies for children

15 As a defence against their treatment by adults, Saki’s child protagonists often have a taste for dark ideas and, as I have argued, these impulses tend to be expressed through

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events involving the animals they own and to whom they have turned for comfort in a bleak world. “The Penance” (Toys) describes three children mourning the loss of their cat, killed by an adult neighbour, Octavian, after it attacked his chickens. The children are too intelligent and angry to be bribed by Octavian’s “blood-money” of chocolates and “crystallized violets” (302) and instead take revenge by holding his two-year-old daughter hostage. In this story, as in “Sredni Vashtar” and “The Boar-Pig” (Beasts), Saki demonstrates a situation of kinship and collusion between animals and children – a far cry from the more simplistic comic strategy of pitting vicious animals against helpless children. Here the children have identified with the vulnerability of animals, a quality which sits paradoxically with their lethal potential, and they have decided that members of the animal kingdom vastly outstrip people in importance. Saki reveals a barbaric version of children’s code, in which another child can be taken prisoner as retaliation for the killing of a prized animal. Sredni Vashtar went forth His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white. His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death. Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful (101).

16 This obsessive, quasi-religious call to arms, which recalls the language of political manifestos, elevates the “lithe, sharp-fanged beast” (100) to an object of pagan reverence for Conradin, who worships him “with mystic and elaborate ceremonial … Red flowers …and scarlet berries …were offered at his shrine, for he was a god” (100).10 The ferret is a child-sized object and agent of destruction, and childish justice is eventually achieved when the ferret’s vicious attack on Mrs. De Ropp liberates Conradin from her. This moment, which has often been interpreted as one of fictional vengeance on the self-appointed despots of Saki’s childhood, concludes a story whose complete investment in its child protagonist’s point of view convinces the reader, at a visceral level, that bloody death is a justified punishment for the sustained cruelty of adult guardians. It also makes clear that such a death can be achieved only through the help of animals.11

The child’s secret world

17 “Sredni Vashtar” is Saki’s representation par excellence of the desperation of a child’s private universe. Conradin could not be further from the world of “bucolic infants”, “missing offspring”, and subhuman “it” creatures, while Saki suggests that, through imagination, children can transcend their loneliness. The childish perspective privileged here is similarly intense in “The Lumber-Room” (Beasts), where the narrative is revealed exclusively through the eyes of Nicholas, although, as with all of these stories, it is told in the third person. He has discovered that “by standing on a chair in the library one could reach a shelf on which reposed a fat, important-looking key” which will unlock “the mysteries of the lumber-room” (265). The room becomes an exclusive paradise from which other children are excluded: Nicholas’brother and cousins have been taken to the beach without him and, since access to the lumber- room is usually reserved “for aunts and such-like privileged persons” (265), now is his opportunity to enter this forbidden territory. As Bruno Bettelheim writes of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, “what child is not curious about what adults do behind the closed door and would not wish to find out?” (219).

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18 Once inside, the room becomes a whole world for Nicholas, whose imagination is unlocked by a metaphorical key. Indeed, the room becomes as much a psychological space as a physical one.12 The grey, unappealing, often painful terrain of guardians – the word “aunt” has become a synecdoche for such people – can be eagerly, if only temporarily, abandoned. The unreal and inanimate achieve a magical half-life through the passion felt by Nicholas as he tries to believe in them, while the “life-history” he attributes to the “mandarin duck” (266) inside a colour book about birds recalls Conradin’s invention of the special polecat-ferret cult in “Sredni Vashtar”. In that case, the ferret’s imagined history afforded him the supernatural power of a voodoo fetish. The conclusion to “The Lumber-Room” is gentler, but its message is similar to that of “Sredni Vashtar”: namely, that in spite of constant punishment and privation, a child can retain mental independence, albeit fleetingly, through stolen moments of private fantasy, physically embodied either by a cherished animal or the four walls of a secret room or shed.

19 Saki’s only working-class children, Emmeline and Bert in “Morlvera” (Toys), share the same need to escape and fantasise as his other child characters. Resident in an urban (rather than rural) setting, with London locations acting as a social litmus test, St. James’s Park is their version of the lumber-room. The toy of the story – a doll christened Morlvera by Emmeline and bought for the privileged Victor to give to his cousin – briefly unites the interests of these socially polarised children: Emmeline and Bert instinctively relate to Victor as he clutches the very doll on which they have been projecting a past and a future. Furthermore, the imaginary identity Emmeline delights in attaching to Morlvera resembles the anthropomorphising of animals in other stories. The doll, like the key used to unlock the lumber-room, opens a door into a new corner of the “backstreet” children’s powerfully interior world.

Saki’s literary technique

20 Saki exploits to the full the unsettling contrast between an economical and unobtrusive literary style and the frequently outrageous content of his stories,13 especially those about children. One favoured narrative strategy is to re-work and disorder fairy tales, as we have seen in “Gabriel-Ernest” and “The Story-Teller”. On one level, these texts simply recognise the horror element of traditional children’s literature: stories which are populated by foxes, bears, and wolves, sometimes in disguise; witches and wicked stepmothers (changed here to aunts), who meet a predictably sticky end. But on another level, Saki’s short fiction suggests that predatory animals actually do eat children: a startling departure from the safety of “Little Red Riding Hood” or “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, where we know that the child will at least survive.14 Another recurring device of these texts is their energetic use of names. “Gabriel” suggests angelic qualities, while “Ernest” evokes high-mindedness: both ideas are ironically disproved by events. “Sredni Vashtar” and “Conradin”, which most likely derive (along with the emphatic red of the polecat-ferret cult) from Saki’s experiences as a journalist in Russia, are among many examples of his stylised nomenclature which, like Dickens’naming techniques, carries its own freight of meaning.15

21 In all his stories, Saki consistently manages to suspend the reader’s moral judgement through sparkling satire and the shock ending. He also keeps up the flow of dialogue and description, as for instance in his casual personification of animals and

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dehumanisation of people. As A.J. Langguth puts it of “Tobermory”, Saki presents “the supernatural …with so little flourish that the story is done before logic has recovered itself enough to protest” (173). Paul Larreya, meanwhile, has identified the ways in which Saki’s style invites the reader’s complicity through linguistic implication (98-9, 106) and we have seen how disposable a child can become in a story through his technical sleights-of-hand. At the same time as sweeping the reader along on his wave of stylish amorality, Saki also corrupts religious language, possibly because he views it as another part of the apparatus of authority.16 This tendency can again be applied to children specifically, as in “Reginald on House Parties” (R.) when Reginald sympathises with Herod and child massacre is made to seem comically acceptable.

22 Saki’s use of a double narrative technique in stories such as “Esmé” and “The Story- Teller” maintains authorial distance, rather as adults detach themselves from unpleasant killings: for example, the hyena’s slaughter of the “gipsy” child and the planned extermination of animals in “Louis” (Toys). The bloody deed is always defined otherwise: Strudwarden in “Louis” will “arrange a fatality” for his wife’s dog (297), while in “Sredni Vashtar”, the polecat ferret’s special status co-exists with the sordid reality of “dark wet stains around the fur of jaws and throat” (102): the mark of a very different kind of “red” from that used to symbolise the Sredni Vashtar cult. This detail serves as brutal and shocking evidence for an event which, like the killings carried out by Esmé and Gabriel-Ernest, has effectively occurred off-stage. Through his tropes of inversion, Saki shocks his audience by challenging conventional social pieties in their relation to children: pragmatic hypocrisy, feigned concern, and smugly virtuous pronouncements.

Conclusion

23 This article has attempted to explore Saki’s paradoxical representation of children, who are privileged above older people one minute and subjected to mocking contempt the next. Child characters afford Saki a particularly fruitful vein of satire, his favoured mode, and – through their inherently subversive, irresponsible attitudes and their insouciant ability to exact vengeance where necessary – they allow him to cast a cold light on the shallow, moneyed society around him and to expose its endemic hypocrisy. In so doing, he compels his audience to re-consider how adults deal with children and to re-examine the unthinking social hierarchies which presuppose the superiority of adults over children, and people over animals. Although he is comically clear-sighted about children’s foibles – such as gluttony, naked aggression and a puerile obsession with war17 – such insights generally sustain his ironic inversions of children and adults.

24 Like animals, children have understood certain ideas with an apparently cynical clarity often lacking in their elders.18 They are, furthermore, possibly the most important linchpin of Saki’s writing, because it is through these characters and the stories devoted to them that he can move beyond clever and surprising comic set-pieces to create his most psychologically convincing situations. Drawing in part on his own unhappy childhood, from which his fiction suggests he could never fully detach himself, Saki reveals not only the child’s bitter world of alienation and oppression, but also the secret spheres – in all their mythic power – which children are so adept at fashioning for themselves in order to challenge their role as victims.

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25 Why then does he perpetuate the very cruelty from which such children are seeking to escape? And whose side does he favour: the adults’or the children’s? The sympathy shown to the likes of Nicholas and Conradin co-exists uneasily with the brutal dispatch of very young children in other narratives. The stories in which children appear often tread a precarious line between humour and other, darker forces: cruelty – it is unclear at which point a practical joke becomes an act of malice; and sexual perversion – when does the narrator’s gaze on young male nakedness in, for instance, “Gabriel-Ernest” and “Reginald’s Choir Treat” become paedophiliac? At the same time, the tensions generated by such ambiguities also energise Saki’s stories. One could argue that he identifies fully with child survivors and the emotionally harrowing worlds they inhabit but not with the cosseted, spoilt infants he encountered socially; and he ensures that they experience a measure of the cruelty meted out to his siblings and himself. As Self has argued, the elusiveness of fatherhood may also inform Saki’s crueller responses to children, but there is – above all – a strange justice in the love-hate treatment they receive. Children are no more exempt than anyone else from a harsh fate in these stories: in other words, precisely because they are important as people in their own right, they are not spared the random cruelties of life.

26 I would contend that in Saki’s short fiction as a whole, children ultimately draw out, rather than discourage, the “better instincts” of adults. Stories in which they receive care and attention, whether from their parents and relatives or from a sensitive narrator, outnumber those in which they are sacrificed as part of a shocking dénouement. For an ostensibly amoral and cruel writer, there is unexpected compassion behind Saki’s need to offer the chance of liberty to such figures as Conradin and Nicholas. Similarly, a heartfelt conviction that they deserve happiness informs his drive to lay bare the reality of their horribly claustrophobic childhoods. The voice which makes itself heard through their mouths, and through those of such precocious figures as Matilda and Vera (“The Lull” and “The Open Window”, Beasts) is arguably Saki’s most eloquent and deeply-felt. While we cannot ignore the disturbing flashes of savagery and even sexual perversion in his attitude to children, such characters add a crucial extra dimension to his writing, a dimension made all the more intriguing and complex by his harsh dismissals of children elsewhere. An interrogation of this contradictory treatment not only supports critical claims of Saki’s unique place in English letters, but also enriches our understanding of his work.

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NOTES

1. I will use the following abbreviations to refer to the relevant volumes of Saki’s short fiction: R. (Reginald, 1904); R. in R. (Reginald in Russia, 1910); Chronicles (The Chronicles of Clovis, 1911); Beasts (Beasts and Super-Beasts, 1914); and Toys (The Toys of Peace, 1919). 2. Saki wrote Kipling-inspired political satires, entitled the “Not So Stories”, for the Westminster Gazette in 1902. 3. See “The Westminster Alice” (H.H. Munro, 575-94) in which Saki satirises British political life by using Carroll’s “Alice” characters. 4. See Yvard (112). 5. Compare Salemi (425-6). 6. See Hanson (44). 7. Compare Carey (xxii). 8. Compare Self (xii).

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9. For a discussion of Saki’s “affinities” with Belloc, see Allen (85-8). 10. Compare Sharpe (8) for a discussion of Saki’s “zootheism”. 11. One can also read the fantastical wish-fulfilment in “Sredni Vashtar” in the light of Bettelheim (46), a discussion of children’s “animistic” beliefs in relation to animals. 12. For the psychological associations of rooms in general, see Bachelard (18-20); in fairy tales, Bettelheim (298-303); and in literature more widely, Gilbert and Gubar (83-6, 340, 347, 348). Compare, too, Wullschläger (145) and The Secret Garden: the lumber-room anticipates the transformative possibilities of Hodgson Burnett’s enchanted territory. 13. See Fogle (92). 14. See Drew (97) and Yvard (111-2). 15. See Gillen (74); and on Saki’s use of names more generally, Milne (xi); Greene (101); Spears (24, 42); and Overmyer (173). 16. Saki’s aunts and grandmother tried to instil the fear of God into their charges (E.M. Munro, 6-7, 9, 13), while his early work, The Rise of the Russian Empire (1900), was noted by contemporary critics for its anti-Christian feeling; see Sharpe (12) and Seymour-Smith and Kimmens (2279). A. Waugh argues that Saki’s “repressed homosexuality …explains his rage with the Christian Church” (ix). 17. See “The Strategist” (R. in R.) for gluttony; “Hyacinth” (Toys) and “The Boar-Pig” for naked aggression; and “The Forbidden Buzzards” (Beasts) and “The Toys of Peace” (Toys) for little boys’ obsessive interest in war. 18. Compare Drake (1960, 68) and Spears (74-5).

ABSTRACTS

Les enfants jouent un rôle important dans les nouvelles de Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) ; cependant, bien qu’ils enrichissent son œuvre, l’auteur leur réserve un traitement paradoxal : s’ils sont souvent préférés aux adultes ils sont aussi souvent méprisés – Saki, dirait-on, s’en soucie peu. Cette attitude incite le lecteur à revoir les principes d’une hiérarchie sociale qui, de manière arbitraire, déclare la supériorité des adultes par rapport aux enfants. Il s’agit cependant d’une position foncièrement problématique. Parce que si Saki proteste contre la cruauté des adultes envers les enfants, il semble aussi l’applaudir. La critique conventionnelle place traditionnellement Saki dans la lignée de Rudyard Kipling, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll et Oscar Wilde, quoique sa position dans le monde des lettres serait « unique ». Sa misogyne, son homosexualité, son obsession pour les animaux, son goût pour la farce et d’autres lieux communs concernant son écriture ont également été relevés. En revanche, il n’existe aucune étude spécifiquement consacrée à la façon dont Saki traite les enfants et l’enfance, alors que, selon ses biographes son enfance malheureuse constitue une source majeure d’inspiration pour ses nouvelles. L’objectif du présent article est de répondre à ce manque. Pour ce faire, dans un premier temps la représentation des adultes par rapport aux enfants et la conduite des premiers envers ces derniers est étudiée dans nombre de ses nouvelles. Dans un deuxième temps la représentation de l’univers secret des enfants et la complicité entre ceux-ci et les animaux sont considérées. Après une étude des moyens littéraires qu’engagent ces représentations pour leur mise en oeuvre, l’article se penche enfin sur l’ambiguïté qui gouverne ces représentations. Ainsi se dégage

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l’hypothèse selon laquelle les enfants de Saki s’animent dans son œuvre pour que les meilleurs sentiments du lecteur se maintiennent somnolents.

AUTHORS

RUTH MAXEY Ruth Maxey is a doctoral candidate at University College London, where she is completing a dissertation on issues of home, nationhood and identity formation in South Asian diaspora writing in Britain and the United States. She has published "The East is Where Things Begin: Writing the Ancestral Homeland in Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston (Orbis Litterarum 60.1 [February 2005]: 1-15).

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Revision as Transformation: The Making and Re-Making of V.S. Pritchett’s “You Make Your Own Life”

Jonathan Bloom

1 Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett is one of the twentieth century’s last great men of letters. An essayist, reviewer, biographer, autobiographer, and travel writer, he remains a British institution--one of the most highly regarded literary journalists of his time. Fellow journalists and writers alike admire him for his uncanny ability to distil the essence of what he reads, and to express his perceptive comments in a style that graciously draws attention to the work of other writers, never himself. Not long ago, in a review for the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates listed Pritchett in the select company of those who produce “literary criticism that qualifies as art”.1 Yet as astute as he was as a critic, V.S. Pritchett was also a serious writer of fiction. While honouring his time-consuming, and often exhausting professional responsibilities, he managed to write five novels and ten collections of short stories. Although he has been an invaluable, distinguished curator of Britain’s literary heritage for most of the century, it is principally for his remarkable contribution to the modern short story that he will be remembered.

2 Pritchett has been lauded as the finest English short-story writer of his time and one of the most important practitioners and ambassadors of the genre in the world. Major critics and writers throughout the English-speaking world are unanimous in their praise of his unusual gift for the short form. Walter Allen considered him to be the most outstanding English short-story writer since D. H. Lawrence.2 Paul Theroux judged him “Our best short story writer.”3 In his review of Pritchett’s Collected Stories, Valentine Cunningham called him “the best living English short story writer”,4 and Douglas Hughes deems him “one of the finest, most engaging short-story writers of our time”.5 Other internationally acclaimed practitioners of the art are equally enthusiastic about Pritchett’s accomplishments. William Trevor feels Pritchett “has done more for

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the short story in his lifetime than anyone since Joyce or Chekhov”—high praise from perhaps the finest living short-story writer: The more parochial and domestic these stories appear to be on the surface the deeper the depths they acquire when considered in retrospect. Pritchett writes of the universal by way of a narrow particular, allowing humor and the variations in human relationships to create his patterns of truth.6

3 Eudora Welty claims “that any Pritchett story is all of it alight and busy at once, like a well-going fire. Wasteless and at the same time well fed [.…] He is one of the great pleasure givers in our language.”7

4 However, although he has established an enviable reputation, he has proved a conundrum for critics and scholars alike. At the same time that some reviewers and critics lavish praise on Pritchett, they claim his short stories are too elusive to be studied. While some readers criticize his stories’ lack of plots, others complain about their inconsistent structure. Oddly enough, some of the critics who appreciate his craft, dismiss its importance. One reviewer who was clearly frustrated with the complexity of “When My Girl Comes Home”, for instance, recognised Pritchett’s technical prowess, but managed to turn it against him: The story needs to be read twice for its flavour to be appreciated, and even then one may perhaps feel that its obliquities and lacunae are as much the result of the temptations of a teasing technique as of artistic necessity.8

5 The only critic to write a full-length study in English of Pritchett’s short fiction ironically believes “the essential Pritchett” to be “elusive of all critics”: [I]t is precisely this elusiveness—the lack of a sufficient number of clear interpretive clues—that renders the stories resistant to New Critical dissection. Interpretation of Pritchett stories is sometimes frustrated because causality is dim or ambiguous [….] In fact, most Pritchett stories seem to be wafted away in the wind as heavy critical machinery is driven up. 9

6 Another reviewer feels that “in Pritchett’s stories nothing is ever quite resolved; indeed, having come full circle, his situations seem to dissolve at the very place where they began”.10

7 Even some of those genuinely interested in his craft—who believe it worth study—have not managed to come to terms with it, reluctant as they are to abandon the crutch of plot summary. Ironically, the lavish praise critics have given Pritchett—praise intended to give him the recognition he so richly deserves—has discouraged detailed critical appraisal outside of this journal. Such unqualified praise gives his achievement the power of the kind of magic trick the old man performs at the end of Pritchett’s “The Aristocrat”. Paradoxically, and absurdly, he seems to be viewed as either too fine a craftsman by his admirers or too unorthodox a practitioner by his detractors to warrant more extensive critical attention. As long ago as 1982, Douglas Hughes made an impassioned plea in a guest editorial, chastising the academic community for its shameful neglect of Pritchett’s substantial body of work.11 Except for a handful of articles, one book-length study, a chapter of another, and this journal’s special Pritchett issue in 1986, there has been relatively little response to Hughes’s call to arms over twenty years later. Some reviews of Pritchett’s short-story collections come closer to understanding his art, but the promising ideas necessarily lack development, bound as they are by the space limitations of magazines and newspapers. Unfortunately, without further study, Pritchett may indeed be relegated to the list of forgotten short- story artists whose work seems too slight to merit serious scholarly attention. Until as

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recently as 2005, all of his books published in his lifetime were out of print, and despite Jeremy Treglown’s new Pritchett biography that should help revive interest in him, his publishers have reissued only Mr. Beluncle and a short selection of his short stories.

8 While no one can dismiss the role that intuition and talent plays in constructing meaningful fictions, Pritchett fashioned his stories through a long process of writing, re-writing, and revising in order to achieve his intended effect. His technical approach to the short story is widely known. On numerous occasions he has described his curious method of reducing one hundred pages to short-story length. His most famous comment about this is a result of his own speculation: “How did the story change as I re-wrote it, perhaps four or five times, boiling down a hundred pages to twenty or thirty, as I still do? Story writing is exacting work”.12 Queried about this statement in a long interview toward the end of his life, Pritchett corroborated his earlier revelation in even greater detail: Sometimes I’ve noticed that the story which perhaps runs from about fifteen to twenty pages, I look at the manuscript of it and I find I’ve got versions about that high. [….] You do have to cut down, cut down, cut down. With your writing a narrative story of any kind it always seems to you first of all that every event has equal importance, that every bit of it ought to have three sentences to it; when sometimes three words is quite enough.13

9 According to Pritchett, his seemingly effortless style and construction are dearly achieved: “I write most stories three or four times over. I don’t think I’ve ever just dashed off a short story. It takes me quite a considerable time.”14 Such revealing comments are not confined to his prefaces and interviews. In the second volume of his autobiography, he once again implicates himself as a tireless reviser obsessed with his “protest against the discursive”: I have an impatient character; for every page I write there are half a dozen thrown away. The survivors are criss-crossed with deletions. [...] There is the fascination of packing a great deal into very little space. The fact that form is decisive concentrates an impulse that is essentially poetic. 15

10 Pritchett himself was not the only witness to such claims. Throughout his childhood, Pritchett’s own son, Oliver, now a journalist in his own right, observed his father’s indefatigable manipulation of the printed word first-hand during visits to his study. He has written about these discoveries in a moving forward to a commemorative selection of his father’s work: The handwritten pages, covered in revisions, crossings out, second and third thoughts, and sideways writing in the margins, were given to my mother to type. They would be revised and typed again and again.16

11 Oliver Pritchett, who has had much practice reading his father’s handwriting throughout his life, corroborates the frustrating experience in speaking of his mother’s inexplicable ability to type Pritchett’s autograph manuscripts: Her ability to decipher V.S.P.’s handwriting must have been the result of some sort of brilliant telepathy. When he was abroad a five-line postcard from him would take me two days to work out and a letter could last for a week or more.17

12 Even Pritchett’s lifelong correspondent, Gerald Brenan, who also had numerous opportunities to decipher Pritchett’s “almost illegible” 18 handwriting, believed Dorothy’s powers to be just as magical.

13 From an examination of his papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Texas and the Berg Collection in New York, it is evident that the English language was

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precious to him, but the physical presentation of that language was not. On the backs of many short-story drafts are rough drafts of book reviews he wrote for the New Statesman, or essays he composed for other publications—writings which sometimes interfere with the chronology of a short-story draft. Furthermore, Pritchett delegated all of the typing to his wife, which means that no reader of his manuscripts has the luxury of an occasional typed correction. All of Pritchett’s words are initially handwritten. And while there is no fixed formula for the revisions, the extensive deletions, additions, interleaving of rewritten pages, and roadmaps for Dorothy, they are in evidence throughout his career.

14 The extensive collection of short-story manuscripts has preserved the evolution of Pritchett’s art, not only throughout his career, but between the drafts of each story. This article focuses on one short story to permit a comprehensive analysis of the additions and deletions, from autograph manuscript to final typescript. The discussion of Pritchett’s revisions shows this exceptional short-story artist at work, sculpting one of the most compact and successful stories of his career, “You Make Your Own Life”.

15 The simplicity of plot, structure, and language belie the complexity of the story’s scope. Instead of relying on well-wrought psychological portraits, or elaborate plot and setting, Pritchett makes the telling of the story its essence. Impeccable timing, diction, mastery of the vernacular, and narrative technique make “You Make Your Own Life” quintessentially Pritchettian. Like most of his short stories, it has few characters—the nameless narrator, Fred the barber, and Albert, the other customer in the barber shop —yet like a Chekhov story it has far-reaching implications.

***

16 While it is tempting to compare Ring Lardner’s “The Haircut” with “You Make Your Own Life”, the two stories are far more remarkable for their differences than their superficial similarities. Lardner creates suspense through his narrator’s folksy, ungrammatical, small-town vernacular—copied from Huckleberry Finn—and the barber’s tantalizing digressions, tangents, non sequiturs and repetitions, which cover for Lardner’s lack of plot. While both stories are set in barbershops, the American author’s achieves its comic effects through a relentless monologue—a barrage of language that becomes comical, if tedious. Lardner’s 4,500-word tale suffers from its length, and, once finished, with the suspense diffused, fails to provoke further thought. Contrary to one critic’s observation, “The Haircut” narrator does not engage in a conversation with his out-of-town customer, an omission that necessarily limits its scope.19 The customer’s passive role precludes closer examination of the barber’s character as well as the veracity of his story. Pritchett’s barbershop story, on the other hand, is a spare 2,200 words, devoid of the inessential, in which subtle verbal and situational irony depend upon a deftly chosen word or phrase. Most importantly, Pritchett’s story involves a tale placed within a crucial if unobtrusive frame—a profound technical difference that enables the writer to transform a mere yarn into the complexity of a truly modern short story.

17 If V.S. Pritchett had not made extensive revisions in the typescript draft of “You Make Your Own Life”, it would almost certainly not have become one of his most celebrated stories. One can argue that the act of selection—self-editing—that all short story artists must undertake—is just as creative and important as the initial writing. Excising the

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inessential is an art, and few can have done it better than Pritchett. On the way to the published version, he removes many of the frame-narrator’s speculative remarks about the barber, based on intermittent interpretations of his facial gestures, and judgments about his character. Wishing to leave interpretation to his reader, Pritchett creates ambiguities.

18 The title story from the collection You Make Your Own Life exemplifies the breakthrough Pritchett made in the early part of his career as he established his inimitable elliptical style perfectly suited to comic irony. Unlike some writers, whose numerous drafts of particular stories undergo subtle, minor changes from one to the next, Pritchett often made substantial alterations between his autograph manuscript, first typescript with autograph revisions, and final typescript, the most significant of them usually appearing in the first typescript.20

19 Our discussion will begin with a brief comparison between the openings of the autograph manuscript and the heavily revised first typescript. Although the former has a few autograph emendations, it is most interesting for the way in which its opening was restructured. And, except for the opening, a few line corrections, and a handful of rewritten lines, the surviving first version is reflected in the first typescript. As well preserved as the drafts are, however, the first page of the typescript was replaced by one page of autograph manuscript, probably because Pritchett chose to transform the original opening completely. For the purpose of witnessing the evolution of a Pritchett story, the corrected typescript is most revealing and for that reason I have supplied a transcription of this telling draft as an appendix to which I will refer parenthetically during the course of my comparative analysis. To differentiate between the typewritten and handwritten words in the transcription, Pritchett’s penned emendations are italicized and his handwritten deletions are represented by a single line through the words. Except for a few emendations, the third version – the typescript carbon copy – is a faithful transcription of the heavily edited first typescript.

20 Entitled “The Barber” in the top left hand corner of the autograph manuscript, the story begins with a visitor’s description of a town rather than its barbershop. Instead of intriguing the reader with the inviting, veiled sentence of the second version, “Upstairs from the street a sign in electric light said ‘Gent’s Saloon’”, Pritchett allows the visitor to state his purpose plainly, ending the undistinguished three sentence paragraph with two unremarkable sentences. The personal pronouns that begin those sentences make the narrator’s position more important than the story he is about to tell. Here is the opening page of the first draft: It was a small town in a valley with a slow mud-coloured river running through it, one long main street and only two good trains in the day. I had an hour to wait. I thought I would get my haircut. Genevieve’s was the name of the place. Permanent nursery 12/6, chiropodist in attendance; it looked like a womens’place. But upstairs an electric sign said “Gent’s Saloon”. It was a small hot back room full of sunlight with newspapers on the chairs. “Take a seat. I won’t be long”, said the barber. He was finishing a man’s shave hair. “I haven’t got too long”, I said. The barber took no notice. He was a young man with fair hair receding & brushed up into the air from his forehead. He clipped away in silence with the sun on his back. He did not say anything to his customer and his customer said nothing to him. There was only the sound of the step of his foot in the room on the floor and the, his grunt and grunts of absorption as he cut and the tedious movement of He said

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nothing to his customer and his customer said nothing to him. There was only the harsh sound of the razor over the skin, the rattle of the brush in the jar, the step of the barber on the floor and his absorbed breathing. I read all the murders in the papers. I read the abductions. There were mothers clamouring for lost babies, a clergyman’s wife was caught stealing, a man’s wife met his wife on Folkstone pier three days after he had identified her as a drowned body at an inquest, a girl was drowned trying to save a dog. The skeletons of five men killed in the battle of Hastings had been dug up in the Downs. There it was in black & white, very black, very white and big letters. I put the papers down & looked up. I didn’t believe it.21

21 And here is the opening page of the second draft: Upstairs an electric s from the street an electric light sign a sign in electric light said “Gent’s Saloon”. I went up. There was a small hot back room full of sunlight, with hair clippings on the floor, towels hanging from a peg and newspapers on the chairs. “Take a seat. Just finishing”, said the barber. It was a lie. He wasn’t anywhere near finishing. He had in fact just begun a shave and the customer was having any everything. In a dead place like this town you had to wait for everything. I was waiting for a train, now I had to wait for a haircut. It was a small town in a valley with one long street, one cinema on Thursdays and Saturdays and a slow mud-coloured river moving between willows and the backs of houses. I picked up the a newspaper. A man had murdered an old woman, a clergyman’s wife sister was caught stealing gloves in a shop, a man who had identified the body of his wife at an inquest on a drowning fatality met her the foll three days later in Folkestone pier. Ten An Four thousand Japanese had been killed in an earthquake, an Indian had walked on a bed of barefoot on a bed of fire. Ten miles from this town the skeletons of men killed in a battle eight centuries ago had been dug up in the Downs. That was nearer. Still, I put the paper down. I looked at the two men in the room.22

22 Pritchett not only transforms the opening, deleting such extraneous, misleading details as “Genevieve’s”, the nursery, and the chiropodist, with their incongruous feminine overtones, but finds his true first line imbedded in the second paragraph. The second draft begins more appropriately with the barbershop and, ingeniously, incorporates all the central elements of the story—the setting, speech from the barber, the rivals upon whom the barber’s story will be based, and the narrator’s keen eye for detail and human behaviour—in the first six lines. The narrative sequence in the first draft makes little sense as we move from town to shop to description of the barber and his work to newspaper headlines. The restructured second draft, however, immerses the reader in the central setting of the story before moving to the larger world of the town, and finally to the outside world through the newspaper headlines.

23 In order to make the opening more suspenseful, Pritchett moves the description of the barber and his work that appears in the third paragraph of the first draft to the fifth paragraph of the second draft, albeit with substantial alterations—changes that will be examined later in the analysis. This shift slows down the pacing of the story by delaying the introduction of the main characters, and allows for the completion of the more natural progression described earlier. Furthermore, while the paragraph devoted to news stories separates the portraits of the two main characters in the first draft, its repositioning in the second inextricably links Albert, the customer, and Fred, the barber, “best friends” and rivals, whether in the narrator’s opening, the barbershop, or the barber’s tale.

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24 Finally, the editing of the newspaper contents reveals Pritchett’s intentions as well. The news items in the first draft are clearly more numerous and sensational than they will be in the third. Without specifying the publication, the frame-narrator, in three sentences, refers to “all the murders”, “the abductions”, and the “mothers clamouring for lost babies”. The first draft also includes a “girl […] drowned trying to save a dog”. This combination of the tragic and absurd is typical eye-catching tabloid fare, emphasizing the incredible, not the credible. In both drafts, a clergyman’s relative is caught stealing but her identity changes from wife to sister, her theft unspecified to a pair of gloves. While the isolated incidents appear similar, the addition of four thousand Japanese killed in an earthquake and an Indian’s barefoot fire walk serve to enlarge the dimensions of the events while making them both more distant and abstract. Ultimately, however, they are weeded out in the third draft or final typescript. Even “the skeletons of five men killed in the battle of Hastings” that had been dug up ten miles from town become simply “the skeletons of men killed in a battle eight centuries ago”—the unspecified number of skeletons and nameless battle reinforcing the extent, distance, and anonymity of the human tragedy. Evidently, Pritchett was not satisfied with the second version because he excised the Japanese earthquake and the Indian fire walk, probably to render the series of events less exotic and more credible. In addition, he probably wished to accentuate melodramatic incidents involving two people, not hundreds or thousands, in order to foreshadow the barber’s own sparsely populated tabloid tale. The sarcastic description of the tabloid itself: “There it was in black & white, very black, very white and big letters”, with its mock plea for the veracity of the written word, has the intended, opposite effect. This phrase is replaced by the subtler “That was nearer”, a sarcastic appraisal of the more personal battle’s comparative proximity. Ironically, the narrator himself believes the “battle of eight centuries ago” to be “nearer” than the incidents mentioned earlier. But as soon as he lowers the paper, he looks at the two men whose story involves all the elements of true melodrama -- passionate love, tragic illness, rival lovers, attempted murder, and attempted suicide. The barber’s story is no less sensational than what he has just read. His matter-of-fact telling in such a common setting only heightens the irony. After all, barbershops are full of forgettable banter, not passionate tales of woe. Even the artful addition of the word “Still” in the second draft, expressing the frame- narrator’s ironic (tongue-in-cheek) feigned interest in the final news item, adds to the comic irony in the passage in a way that the more heavy handed phrase, “I didn’t believe it”, does not.

25 From the very opening of the published version of “You Make Your Own Life”, Pritchett puts the reader in the nameless narrator’s shoes. Attracted by an “electric light” advertising the “‘Gent’s Saloon’”, the narrator climbs “Upstairs from the street” and into the small-town barbershop where he is invited to wait his turn. His succinct description of the shop is followed by a city dweller’s obvious impatience with the slow pace of provincial life. Instead of accepting the inevitable wait patiently, the narrator reveals his unspoken thoughts to the reader in an accusatory tone, frustrated with the barber’s unrealistic estimation and unconscious dishonesty: “Take a seat. Just finishing,” said the barber. It was a lie. He wasn’t anywhere near finishing. He had in fact just begun a shave. The customer was having everything. In a dead place like this town you always had to wait. I was waiting for a train, now I had to wait for a haircut. It was a small town in a valley with one long street, and a slow mud-coloured river moving between willows and backs of houses.23

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26 Paradoxically, Pritchett creates suspense through inaction at this early stage in the narrative, and uses the narrator’s contempt for small-town life to accentuate its dislocation from the outside world. Stranded in this “dead place”, where “you always had to wait,” he must “wait for a haircut” while “waiting for a train” (my italics). The telescoped view of the “small” valley town with one “long” street, and a “slow” mud- coloured river “moving between willows” recalls the bucolic frieze on Keats’s Grecian urn. The willows that have been planted in the second draft are not mere incidental ornaments by the side of the river but a symbol of grief for unrequited love or the loss of a mate. Later in the analysis we will see that even Pritchett’s choice of tree is consistent with the story’s themes.

27 After establishing the dislocated, seemingly uneventful identity of the town, the bored narrator picks up a newspaper, shifts his and the reader’s attention to the predictably sensational stories—distant stories of murder, shoplifting, unsolved mysteries, and exhumed war graves that, ironically, have become banal through the frequency of their appearance. Only in retrospect will the reader understand Pritchett’s abrupt transition from peaceful town to distant troubles involving barbarous acts, the last of which confirms their great distance from the slow time of the town: Ten miles from this town skeletons of men killed in a battle eight centuries ago had been dug up at the Downs. That was nearer. Still, I put the paper down. I looked at the two men in the room.24 (My italics)

28 Like a camera, the narrator’s eye refocuses on the scene before him. The short, declarative, objective sentences beginning with subjects and verbs force the reader to see the scene distinctly, each sentence establishing a separate image or physical detail. The full stops enforce the languid rhythm experienced by nameless narrator and reader alike. Herein lies one of the pacing techniques more closely associated with verse than prose—a hallmark of the modern short story that is rarely used in the novel: “I could see the man in the mirror. He was in his thirties. He had a swarthy skin and brilliant long black eyes. The lashes were long too and the lids when he blinked were pale.”25 In this section of the revised typescript, Pritchett has crossed out a number of the frame-narrator’s subjective, interpretive remarks about both customer and barber that judge, compare, and evaluate. He must have realised that the effectiveness of “You Make Your Own Life” would depend, in part, on the relative discretion of the frame- narrator, especially in that narrator’s opening descriptions of the main characters. With this objective in mind, many of the passages have been excised throughout the second draft while others have been completely rewritten (see appendix). In his description of Albert, for instance, we see Pritchett has deleted “a well-made man” from “He was a well-made man in his thirties.” The phrase “bright long black eyes like a gypsy’s” sheds the comparison and trades “bright” for “brilliant” to become simply “brilliant long black eyes” (appendix ll.4-6). Yet almost imperceptibly, Pritchett’s frame-narrator begins to describe the customer in more subjective terms, unable to report everything wholly without a “suggestion” of interpretation or figurative language. He adds “just that suggestion of weakness” to the customer’s eyes, and where once there was “a glister to his skin like a Hindu’s”, there is now “a sallow glister” (app.ll.7-8) as he sits “engrossed in his reflection, half smiling at himself and very deeply pleased”. Ever careful to monitor his narrator’s assessment of the main characters, Pritchett restricts his interpretive remarks to their facial gestures. Fortunately, the incongruous “bright violet socks” that were probably intended to

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complement the customer’s “very dandyish” dress, described before his exit, but merely detract from the portrait at this stage, have been removed as well (app. l.11).

29 Initially content to present the barber as “a careful man”, Pritchett deletes his frame- narrator’s direct, unequivocal statement about character in the typescript, preferring to restrict his narrator’s description to the barber’s actions. The rewritten description of the barber as “careful and responsible in his movements but nonchalant and detached” assigns human qualities to “movements” in a way that differs from the earlier, more objective reporting of the story’s opening (see app. ll. 12-13). Ever careful to preserve his narrator’s objective tone, Pritchett has pruned away the likening of his barber’s regard for the customer to a painter’s regard for a “picture in a frame” (see app. ll.13-15). This comparison has been replaced by a simple physical description of the barber, lifted from the third paragraph of the autograph manuscript, that balances the description of his customer in the previous paragraph. At the end of the same typescript paragraph we find a similar deletion. Although Pritchett has added “A peculiar look of amused affection […] on his face”, as he looks at the black-haired man, for the purpose of enticing the reader, he has crossed out the more extensive interpretation of the “look” that seems to compare the customer’s “soaped head” to “a piece of putty” (see app. ll. 19-21). Clearly, Pritchett wishes to arouse curiosity about both characters without giving away too many interpretive clues. Yet, even from these early revisions, whether deletions or additions, whether in the autograph manuscript or the corrected typescript, we can see that the barber is the focus.

30 At this stage in the narrative, in fewer than 400 words, Pritchett has not only established the story’s setting, situation, tone, and characters, but has begun a subtle, intentional comparison between the barber and his customer. Both men are in their thirties, but the customer has curly “glossy black hair” to contrast with the barber’s “fair receding hair”. Pritchett’s redundant insistence on this comparison in the first draft has been removed from the second draft: “They were youngish men, both of them, the fair and the dark, much the same age” (app. ll.54-55). Their notable lack of conversation indicates that they are either perfect strangers or know each other well. We are left to wonder whether their mutual silence is a result of familiarity or intimacy. The barber, though silent, is in control of all of the action and movement in the story. The narrator’s active verbs, multiplied through revision, and longer sentences, reinforce the sense of speed with which the barber works as he is “rattling his brush,” “wiping the razor,” “pushing” the chair, “soaping the head” (app. ll. 16-19). Clearly, the barber is in the dominant position as he prepares his customer for the final treatment, and the narrator’s humorous description of his “machine”, replete with war imagery, suggests an instrument of torture in a laboratory or an electric chair: He wheeled a machine on a tripod to the back of the man. A curved black thing like a helmet enclosed the head. The machine was plugged to the wall. There were phials with coloured liquids in them and soon steam was rushing out under the helmet. I don’t know what happened to the man or what the barber did. […] [T]hat customer had everything.26

31 To reinforce the implied reference to war, the narrator describes the customer as “dressed in a square-shouldered grey suit” and likens him to “a guardsman” (app.ll. 42-43), a comparison the author has added to the second draft. The long sentence that has been deleted on page three is even more revealing. Just as he has been editing out some of the visitor’s interpretations of the barber’s facial expressions, Pritchett has deleted several of the visitor’s interpretations of the customer’s expressions: His “eyes

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closed into long slits with satisfaction like a cat’s”, and “he smiled slightly at himself in the mirror and then, with the idle luxurious step of a cat, he went to the door.” (app. ll. 39-40, ll. 46-48). Always sensitive to language, Pritchett has removed both cat comparisons along with their hackneyed associations and exchanged Albert’s parting “wide smile” for a faint one. The “unmistakable” “look of dandified derision” (app. l. 49) that has been penned into the second draft has been crossed out in the third and final draft. The barber’s parting good-bye is accompanied by “a small hardly perceptible smile too” (app. l. 51).

32 At this point, approximately a third of the way through the story, the frame-narrator becomes more of a participant as he succeeds Albert in the barber’s chair. Pritchett continues to permit him to interpret the barber’s behaviour, piquing the reader’s curiosity, but he has deliberately repressed explicit comparisons that may either anticipate the content of the barber’s story or undermine the balance of the narrative. The following passage is a good example of this judicious deletion: The barber put the sheet round me. The barber was smiling to himself like a man remembering a tune. He was not thinking about me. The small sardonic smile like the abstracted smile of a man who remembers A story he has been told and is getting another unsuspected flavour from it. (app. ll. 57-62)

33 Similarly, the “stronger and more sardonic” smile (app. ll. 95-96) has been changed to a “faint”, “sardonic” smile in the second draft and deleted altogether in the final typescript. One of the salient differences between the drafts is effected through changes in the narrator’s perception as Pritchett attempts to make him more of an observer than an interpreter.

34 We learn much more about Albert in his absence, not through the action perceived by the narrator, but through the barber’s own story within the story. Even though Albert leaves the shop, the barber remains eerily preoccupied, smiling to himself as he “glanced at the door where this man had gone”, long after his departure. While making reference to Albert, the barber is described as having “nodded to the door” (app. l. 82) in acknowledgment of Albert’s weekly visits. This too has been written into the second draft. Although they have been crossed out in the corrected typescript, the descriptions of the barber’s reaction to Albert’s exit and the barber’s altered “state […] as if he were still with that man who had just gone out of the door” (app. ll. 78-79), show that Pritchett wished Albert to haunt the shop. Even at the end of his story, the barber is said to have “glanced sardonically at the door as if expecting to see the man standing there” (app. ll. 191-192).

35 Of course the most profound changes in the second draft are those involving the central character, the barber himself, as he is transformed from a crude, sinister, sardonic, vengeful, scheming villain, into a more mysterious, illusive figure—a transformation that necessarily alters the relationships between the characters and has far-reaching implications for the story as a whole. Through a close examination of the extensive revisions, we can see Pritchett altering the very conception of the barber through his frame-narrator’s evolving portrait. Many of the changes involve the deletion of expressive smiles that punctuate the barber’s dialogue. One of the added smiles, however, demonstrates the subtlety of the revisions. In the first draft, the barber is portrayed as “a dull young man with pale blue eyes and a look of ironical stubbornness in him” (app. ll. 72-73). Conscious of the rigidity of such a statement,

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Pritchett has inserted one of his panoply of smiles, a simile that complicates the reader’s conception and builds suspense: “The small dry smile was still like claw marks at the corners of his lips” (app. l. 74). Later on, the barber makes an observation with a veiled but sadistic “grim sort of pleasure”, in reference to the girl, that Pritchett has crossed out (app. ll. 136-137). At the point at which the barber divulges the identity of Albert’s love interest, Pritchett has cut away another, more sinister expression conveyed through the barber’s eyes and mouth: “His small pale eyes glared a little but the dry smile was still on his lips” (app. ll. 148-149). Furthermore, throughout the first draft version of the barber’s tale are numerous telling remarks, that have also been excised because their insistence make him overtly vengeful and threatening. The following passage demonstrates just how pervasive is the first draft’s more marked characterization: The barber stared me hard in the face. “In front of me”, he said. He grinned with quiet assurance. “What did you say?” “I told him to keep quiet or he’d “Keep quiet”, I said. “Or you’ll be a corpse”. “And so he would if he didn’t keep quiet”, he said, relaxing his stare. “Consumptives want it, they want it worse than others, but it kills them”, he said. “I thought you meant you’d kill him”, I said. The young barber gave a short, dry laugh. He chuckled looked at me scornfully. (app. ll. 197-207)

36 This passage is indicative of the original barber’s more pronounced malevolence in the first draft before he was metamorphosed through Pritchett’s artful excision. Presumably, he recognized that by diminishing the role of the frame-narrator, and simultaneously modifying the barber’s character, he could create the ambiguity necessary for more evocative, impressionistic literary possibilities. The revisions in the second draft show Pritchett creating a more subtle portrayal through the implied but unsaid. And as we shall see through a close examination of the story’s most important section, he knows just how to engineer such a transformation, pruning dialogue, creating silences, manipulating the plot, and restructuring the sequence of events so that the barber’s story haunts us long after the final sentence.

37 Appropriately enough, Fred the barber’s story begins with a brief comment about Albert’s receding hairline. Curiously, it is the barber who has the receding hairline, not Albert who has a full head of “glossy black hair” (app. l. 2). From the outset then, the reader must wonder about the veracity of the details that follow. A second unsolicited comment from the barber, an observation about Albert’s throat, indicates his desire to engage the narrator in conversation. Pritchett has revised this exchange extensively in order to draw both narrator and reader into the drama. In the first draft, without the narrator’s participation, the barber appears overzealous, indiscreet, and loquacious. Pritchett has changed the passage dramatically, however, by enlisting his narrator as discreet participant and commentator, adding simple actions that retard the pace and create suspense between the lines (see app. ll. 116-120). Gone are his earlier, subjective asides, replaced by the eerie revelation of an attempted suicide, spoken in the barber’s hushed tones close to the neck with a “small firm friendly grin” and scissors in hand. A

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surprisingly modern aural flashback has been penned in as well. The narrator suddenly hears the echo of Albert and Fred’s earlier good-bye: “So long, Fred”. “Cheero, Albert” (app. ll. 119-120).

38 In the corrected typescript, Fred recounts his story about Albert’s tuberculosis and suicide attempt with subtle, unobtrusive interpretive commentary from the narrator. Except for the narrator’s five brief phrases, this melodrama is uninterrupted for two pages. One has the illusion of a dialogue but this is a monologue that continues until the end of the story, with a handful of the frame-narrator’s comments describing the barber’s gestures and actions. Nevertheless, the narrator’s involvement evinces important responses, misunderstandings, ironies, and clarifications.

39 Instead of allowing the barber to spill the contents of his story prematurely in the succeeding paragraph and diffuse the suspense, Pritchett has cut fifteen sentences of background information from the second draft, the important details of which have been condensed, refined, and relocated in the conclusion of the final typescript. This substantial deletion helps to maintain the reader’s interest in a character that might otherwise be rendered a loquacious bore (see app. ll.122-134). Already a mature writer when he crafted “You Make Your Own Life”, Pritchett understood that silences are often more suspenseful than conversation. Dialogue should not be a verbatim record of what has been said, especially not in a short story where every word counts. It must advance action and wherever it has not, Pritchett has pruned it. This simple principle is the foundation for his elliptical style and one can see merely by glancing through the appendix just how exhaustively it has been applied.

40 The barber’s speech itself becomes increasingly elliptical as he nonchalantly tells his tale of woe. Speaking in half sentences, “absently”, accompanied by the sound of his scissors, he tells a disturbing story in the vernacular that is, ironically, anything but “usual”. We can see that Pritchett has weeded out the narrator’s perfunctory questions designed to further the conversation, preferring the barber’s unfiltered monologue. The reliability of the barber’s narration is most in question once the frame-narrator becomes the listener. In short, clipped phrases, lacking proper quotations and subjects, relayed indirectly by the frame-narrator, the barber begins his seemingly dispassionate account of the suicidal Albert: “He fell in love with a local girl who took pity on him when he was ill, when he was in bed. Nursed him. Usual story. Took pity on him but wasn’t interested in him in that way” (app. ll. 138-141). Despite his denial, the barber’s insistence about the local girl’s isolated emotion of pity suggests she may have had romantic interest in Albert, especially in a story full of irony. After all, the barber describes her as “A very attractive girl”. He suddenly reveals her identity after a pregnant pause: “Matter of fact”, said the barber stepping over for the clippers and shooting a hard sideways stare at me. “It was my wife” (app. ll. 146-147, my italics for autograph addition). To further complicate the situation, we learn that Albert the consumptive, “got it badly” and must have been passionate about and full of desire for the girl who became the barber’s wife. Furthermore, while we know from the first draft that Albert and Fred have known each other since childhood, Pritchett has added “Used to be his best friend. Still was” to Fred’s account of Albert, a comment full of irony (app. l. 154). Even the characters’ background changes from one version to the next. The following passage from the first draft, that has been crossed out in the second draft, shows that the girl was first Albert’s, not Fred’s: “She knew him before she knew me. But she went away for a couple of years to look after a lady and when she got fed up she

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came back. Then I took up with her” (app. ll. 156-159). Pritchett has removed this background from the story in order to make our conception of the barber more ambiguous. While the original version makes him more villainous—an unscrupulous man who steals women away from sick friends, chuckling about his success, the revised draft creates the kind of ambiguity for which Pritchett is famous. Similarly, he has deleted the barber’s mention of Albert’s visits to the girl’s shop—a passage that betrays obvious jealousy “in the same tone of amused scorn” (app. ll. 168-170). Yet Pritchett has salvaged an idea from the too obvious expression of jealousy: “I didn’t mind. I knew my mind. She knew hers” (app. l. 172). To preserve the potential irony of the barber’s supposed confidence in the couple, he has also deleted the more insecure line, “I was glad someone was looking after her” (app. ll. 172-173). All the while the barber expresses and reiterates his confidence in the harmlessness of the river excursions, we cannot discern the reality of the situation. His insistence on purportedly knowing the minds of the other players could be a sign of complete confidence or utter insecurity. Likewise, his seemingly permissive attitude about the river excursions could be interpreted variously. Yet even if we are willing to accept the barber’s self-proclaimed confidence in his wife and “best friend”, we soon realise that the sanctioning of their outings may be part of a more sinister scheme. The barber’s description of the river’s unhealthy humidity in the first draft is utterly factual, but the few words Pritchett has added to the second and third drafts belie the barber’s subtle competitiveness. In the second draft the barber speaks “reflectively” (app. l. 178), and makes an ambiguous reference with the indeterminate subject “It” to either the origin of Albert’s illness, or the complex triangle relationship (see app. l. 179). And in the final typescript, Pritchett has written in an even more telling phrase that hints at Albert’s tactical mistake in his and the barber’s fight for the girl: “That’s when he made his mistake”. Consistent with this competitive tone is a more piquant two-sentence addition to the second draft: “‘He couldn’t get away with it.’” He said. “‘He was smiling at the past’” (app. l. 184). Though the first of these sentences betrays the possibility of a malicious barber full of pent up jealousy and ill-will, the description of the barber’s smile has been excised from the third draft because it portrays him as pleased with his rival’s misfortune, gloating about his demise.

41 The barber’s account of his and his wife’s visits to the convalescing Albert is modified as well. Pritchett has crossed out his frame-narrator’s detailed assessment of the barber’s character, replacing it with a comment about his “cocksure irony” (see app. ll. 192-193). In the first draft, in mentioning his and his wife’s visits to Albert’s before they were married, the barber explains that “Both of us used to go” (app. l. 188). This sentence has been deleted in the second draft, leaving the reader to wonder about Albert and the girl’s relationship during the day, before the barber would “turn up in the evenings” after closing (app. ll. 188-189). We cannot determine if Albert’s lurid bedside invitation to the girl in the barber’s presence is a provocative joke or merely a pathetic plea because the barber’s “short laugh” punctuating his retelling could be interpreted variously in our mind’s ear (app. ll. 194-196).

42 Pritchett allows the barber to react with fervor during his telling of the attempted murder, but he has removed the barber’s defensive explanation which the reader might associate with a possessive, jealous man—a figure whose demeanor would be inconsistent with the self-assurance Pritchett has fashioned for him in the second draft (see app. ll. 211-213).

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43 The barber’s unsolicited remark “I rumbled him” (app. l. 247), meaning he uncovered Albert’s plan, uttered while singeing the narrator’s hair, has been crossed out of the second draft to preserve the ambiguity of the rivalry. Yet these three words and the deleted sentences that follow suggest that the barber may have been uncertain about his own relationship with the girl and sought a way to diffuse his friend’s threat. Once again, Pritchett has made deletions consistent with his subtler portrait of the barber.

44 After finishing “You Make Your Own Life”, we cannot be sure that the girl loved the barber more than Albert, or if Fred simply destroys his rival by allowing his “best friend” Albert to endanger his health on the river. The autograph manuscript confirms a more pronounced vengefulness and malevolence in the barber while the deletion of numerous lines, facial gestures, and vindictive phrases makes the barber more sympathetic, still allowing for the possibility of his retaliatory scheme in the end. There is no “black and white” (see transcription of p.1, first draft) for the mysterious relationships between the three main players in the final version of this understated drama. And it is our inability to explain beyond a doubt that enhances this most thought-provoking fiction.

45 Most critics who have written about “You Make Your Own Life” believe the barber implicitly, but the role he plays in the trio makes his account necessarily subjective. If he is indeed an unreliable narrator, to what extent is he telling the truth? In an overtly ironic story, which lines mean the opposite of what they say? Why does Albert’s brief appearance in the beginning of the story completely contradict the barber’s portrait of him? And what is the explanation for the trio’s continuation? What, after all, is the complex nature of their continued association?

46 An examination of numerous short-story drafts reveals Pritchett’s expert fashioning of the unspoken or the unsaid. There are two kinds of unsaid – what has been deleted from the story and the far more subtle, illusive unsaid that remains in silences. Yet the two work in concert; the first must be excised to create the second. Distilling the essence from a tangible whole creates the desired effect. And, as in impressionist painting in which viewers see different things, Pritchett’s stories permit his readers to interpret different things on different readings. One may wonder why he felt it necessary to work in such a laborious, meticulous manner. But the answer becomes clear once we have consulted his revisions. His initial drafts often contain explicit descriptions of his characters’ appearances, inner thoughts, and motivations that, through extensive revision, deletion, and rewriting make for subtle narratives that give the reader a more active role in the interpretation of the stories. Instead of writing to measure, Pritchett prefers to exceed it and then to cut out unnecessary material in successive drafts. The mere writing of the over-explicit passages gives him a more tangible sense of the characters he has created—a keen sense that enables their elliptical yet convincing presentation. Pritchett’s stories, like Chekhov’s, continually disclose the complexities of human nature through subtle evocation.

47 Pritchett is a maximalist, not a minimalist, whose well-wrought, concentrated stories owe their uncommon intensity to their creator’s meticulous revisions. Dismissed by some readers as a merely traditional writer, he is actually a deft innovator whose genius for making and re-making is in evidence throughout his career.

48 Extracts and quotations from the three drafts of V. S. Pritchett’s “You Make Your Own Life” and Jonathan Bloom’s computer drawn transcription of the corrected typescript are reproduced here by permission of PFD on behalf of the Estate of V. S. Pritchett.

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Permission was also granted by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin for use of this material in its V. S. Pritchett Collection.

NOTES

1. Joyce Carol Oates, “Depth–Sightings”, New York Review of Books, 24 September, 1998, p.4. 2. Walter Allen, “V.S. Pritchett”, The Short Story in English (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 268. 3. Paul Theroux, dust jacket, V.S. Pritchett, The Complete Collected Stories. 4. Valentine Cunningham, “Coping with the Bigger Words” (review of Collected Stories), Times Literary Supplement, 25 June 1982, p. 687. 5. Douglas Hughes, an untitled article included in John Stinson’s V.S. Pritchett, A Study of theShort Fiction (New York, Twayne Publishers, 1992), p. 121. 6. William Trevor, “Pritchett Proclaimed” (review of Collected Stories), New Republic, 2 August 1982, p.32 7. Eudora Welty, “A Family of Emotions” (review of Selected Stories), New York Times Book Review, 25 June 1978, 1, 39-40. 8. Anon. “The Temptations of Technique” in Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 6, 1961. 9. John J. Stinson, V.S. Pritchett, A Study of the Short Fiction, (New York: Twayne Publishers,1992), p.xi. 10. Susan Heath, Review of The Camberwell Beauty. Saturday Review/World, 19 Oct. 1974, 28-9. 11. Douglas A. Hughes, “The Eclipsing of V.S. Pritchett and H.E. Bates: A Representative Case of Critical Myopia.” Studies in Short Fiction 19 (Fall 1982), iii-iv. 12. V.S. Pritchett, Preface, The Collected Stories of V.S. Pritchett (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982), ix. 13. V.S. Pritchett, interview with Ben Forkner and Philippe Séjourné, “An Interview with V.S. Pritchett”, Journal of the Short Story in English 6 (Spring 1986), pp. 24-25. 14. V.S. Pritchett interviewed by B. Forkner and P. Séjourné, Journal of the Short Story in English 6 (Spring 1986), p.23. 15. V.S. Pritchett, Midnight Oil (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 191. 16. Oliver Pritchett, Forward, The Pritchett Century. The Selected Writings of V.S. Pritchett (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), p.ix. 17. Oliver Pritchett, Forward. The Pritchett Century, p.ix. 18. Gerald Brenan, Personal Record, 1920-1972 (London: Cape, 1974), p.338. 19. John J. Stinson, V.S. Pritchett, A Study of the Short Fiction, (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), p.11. 20. The following discussion is based on the three successive drafts of “You Make Your Own Life” in the Pritchett Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin: an autograph manuscript with autograph revisions (9 pp.), a composite autograph and typed manuscript with substantial autograph revisions (12 pp.), and a typed carbon copy manuscript with few autograph emendations (11 pp.). 21. This autograph manuscript, the first known version of “You Make Your Own Life”, is entitled “The Barber”.

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22. Autograph manuscript first page of the heavily revised typescript of “You Make Your Own Life”, Pritchett Collection, HRC. The transcription of the typescript continues from this point in the appendix. 23. V.S. Pritchett, “You Make Your Own Life”, The Complete Short Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), p. 150. (Hereafter, ‘Pritchett, “You Make Your Own Life”’). 24. Pritchett, ‘You Make Your Own Life’, 150. 25. Pritchett, ‘You Make Your Own Life’, 150. 26. Pritchett, ‘You Make Your Own Life’, 151.

ABSTRACTS

V. S. Pritchett s’est rendu célèbre en tant que nouvelliste avec le recueil You Make Your Own Life publié en 1938. ‘“Revision as Transformation: The Making and Re-Making of V.S. Pritchett’s ‘You Make Your Own Life’” s’emploie à reconstituer la genèse de la nouvelle qui donne son titre au recueil, à partir des trois manuscrits originaux afin de montrer l’évolution de l’écriture de Pritchett et l’intérêt de l’auteur pour les espaces blancs et le non-dit. Les premières ébauches de ces trois nouvelles offrent une description exhaustive des personnages, de leurs pensées et de leurs motivations. Après révision, les versions publiées nous présentent des nouvelles elliptiques qui donnent au lecteur un rôle actif dans l’interprétation du récit. La transcription du dernier dactylogramme de la nouvelle étudiée se trouve reproduit en appendice afin d’aider le lecteur à mieux suivre l’analyse des modifications apportées par l’auteur entre ce jet et la version définitive.

AUTHORS

JONATHAN BLOOM Jonathan Bloom has taught at the universities of Oxford and Paris. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and his book, The Art of Revision in the Short Stories of V. S. Pritchett and William Trevor, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in autumn 2006. He is currently working on an edition of the letters and diaries of V.S. Pritchett.

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The Stained-Glass Man: Word and Icon in Flannery O'Connor’s “Parker's Back.”

Michel Feith

1 The climactic confrontation between O.E. Parker and his wife Sarah Ruth, at the end of the short story, boils down a conflict between word and image. Parker the tatooed man has just come back home with a final picture on his back, of a Byzantine Jesus, which he hopes will bring his puritanical wife to heel. But the result falls cruelly short of the intent: “God? God don’t look like that!” What do you know how he looks?” Parker moaned. “You ain’t seen him.” “He don’t look, ” Sarah Ruth said. “He’s a spirit. No man shall see his face.” “Aw listen,” Parker groaned, “this is just a picture of him.” “Idolatry!” Sarah Ruth screamed. (1990: 529)

2 The debate between the iconoclasm of a certain form of Protestant fundamentalism and a more Catholic view, in which images are part of the apostolic tradition and can be seen as devotional aids, exceeds the mere religious settling of accounts which surfaces here and there in O'Connor stories. It also acquires the dimension of a self-reflexive probing of the nature of the work of art, especially of literary representation. After all, the reader is presented with the verbal condemnation of a visual item accessible only through written description. This hints at the iconicity of O’Connor’s storytelling art, which has often been described as “dramatic” and “visionary”. It is also reminiscent of the definition she herself gave of her “incarnational art”, deriving its principles from the Christian doctrine of Incarnation (the Word made flesh) and articulating a theory of language and the relations between verbal representation and the created world (both “real” and “fictional”).

3 Since “Parker’s Back” is, concurrently with “Judgement Day”, O’Connor’s last story, one cannot help viewing it as an ideological and aesthetic testament, revolving around a negociation between Word and Icon. The icon here is more than a mere image. The first meaning of the term is that of a religious painting, of the kind found in Orthodox

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churches, for example, and endowed with some of the sacred quality of what it represents. It is then hardly surprising that the model for the tattoo should be the “haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes” (522), identified by some commentators as that of the Pantocrator Christ at Santa Sophia, in Constantinople. The notion of “verbal icon ”, coined in 1954 by the critic W. K. Wimsatt, alludes to the fashion in which the New Critics, whom O’Connor was intellectually very close to, stressed the autonomy of the poem, as an object of serious, spiritual contemplation (Gray 142). From the religious icon represented in the text, we therefore move to the text as icon, in a self-reflexive mise-en-abîme of the strong visual dimension of the whole of O’Connor’s œuvre, insofar as it concentrates meaning in an “anagogical” way.

4 Parker's tattoo symbolically stands at the intersection of all these levels of interpretation, since it is at the same time an image and a (needlework) piece of writing; it also represents the Incarnation of the sacred on the body and skin. Its clarity and rather celebratory nature might hint at a hypothetical new development in the writer's art, “the impossible Flannery” we will never be able to read.

5 We might take as a guide through the complexity of the story and its significance, its deceptively simple title. “Parker’s Back” denotatively alludes to the main focus of attention, the protagonist’s anatomical back, where the final, controversial tattoo will be imprinted. This is overdetermined by Parker's sense of someone always being behind him, at his back: “Long views depressed Parker. You look out into space like that and you begin to feel as if someone were after you, the navy or the government or religion” (516). Yet another configuration obtains if we shift the grammatical interpretation of the “’s” from a possessive case to a verb form. The meaning would then be “Parker IS Back”, “Parker has returned”; and truly, there are two such circular trajectories in the text. Parker first went out to sea, and came back to the South of his childhood; then, within the chronological scope of our story, he leaves home after his tractor accident to get his new tattoo, and comes back home to his wife in the last pages. A variation on this adverbial meaning of “back” is provided by the text on page 522, when the Christ on the tattoo artist’s catalogue calls to him to “Go back”: back to the right page, but also back home, or even back to the fold of the Redeemed? This is the most important “back” in Parker's life, and may encapsulate a form of reading contract. Our own attempt to respect its terms will take the form of an analysis of Parker’s Odyssey (his coming backs), then an examination of the skin of Parker's back as textual palimpsest, and finally a consideration of the entanglements of Word and Icon in the story.

Parker’s Odyssey

6 Two characteristics seem to single Parker out from most of the other protagonists in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction: he is an active agent in a full-fledged quest, and he is, rather than meets, an Incarnational symbol.

7 Even though the plots of the stories and novels have sometimes been interpreted in terms of quest (Gordon 93-96), many of the characters appear to be rather passive and have their revelations or encounters with Fate “coming to them”. Asbury in “The Enduring Chill”, Julian in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, General Sash in “A Late Encounter With the Enemy”, or Hulga / Joy in “Good Country People” might have

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unconscious desires for the shattering falls they experience, yet they seem to be wishing and waiting more than actively pursuing some sort of cathartic experience. Some characters actually run away from their felt destiny, like Mr. Shiftlet at the end of “The Life You Save May Be your Own”, or Hazel Motes in Wise Blood. The latter seems to be O. E. Parker’s closest prototype: his excursus to the Army and the war parallels Parker’s stint with the Navy and his self-blinding bears the same stamp of corporeal stigmata. Yet if Parker revisits Motes’s trajectory, he does so through a more positive desire for fulfillment, and converts his predecessor’s Oedipal blindness into a contact with light.

8 Other characters, who appears to be engaged in more active pursuits, are actually misdirected, and find what they were not looking for. The Grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” finds death while searching for memories of her youth; Harry / Bevel confuses a literal for a symbolic quest of the Kingdom of God in “The River”. Yet the latter might also be a close prototype of Parker, in the sense that both their quests for a “painted” haven have led them to the real thing.

9 While most characters, therefore, could be compared either to the biblical Jonah fleeing from his calling, or to Job, complaining about his sad, crippled life, Parker would be closer to Ulysses, and his travels to an Odyssey. Both have circumnavigated the known world and come back home, Parker retaining from each stopover one more tattoo, like a map of his peregrinations written on the skin. The “foreign parts” mentioned on page 512 are both the countries he visited and the new additions to his body. The prime mobile of his wanderlust is a deep-rooted dissatisfaction, which finds its medication in the brief solace of each new tattoo. As in the case of Ulysses, his wanderings are a curse as well as a quest.

10 In this somewhat playful mythical configuration, Sarah Ruth, the waiting wife, is hardly a Penelope. If a courtship conducted by means of bushels of apples (515) can remind the reader of the story of Adam and Eve (an inverted, hillbilly scenario of the Fall as a hint to the bride’s sour Puritanism — Blaikasten 13), or of Paris’s choice of Venus in the prologue of the Illiad (Pothier 141 — in this case the Trojan War may be echoed in the couple’s domestic discords), the aptest parallel of Parker’s ununderstandable attraction to this woman might be a parody of Ulysses’s enthralment by Cice, here converted into an unenchanting enchantress. Actually, if we follow the track of this classical typology, Parker takes on the qualities of both Ulysses the wanderer and Penelope the tapestry weaver, who undoes by night what she has threaded by day. A parallel may be found between the Queen of Ithaca, thus stalling for time in a bid to delay her engagement to one of the numerous suitors claiming her hand and Ulysses's succession, and Parker, who accumulates tattoos, making of his body a living tapestry (a needle-work), yet without advancing towards peace, the real object of his quest.

11 This union of active and passive, or masculine and feminine, polarities points to Parker's second original characteristic. Instead of meeting the incarnational symbol and being confronted to it — like Asbury in “The Enduring Chill” (the bird of ice as an avatar of the Holy Ghost), Mr. Head and Nelson in “The Artificial Nigger” (the statue of the black man in the garden), Mrs. McIntyre in “The Displaced Person” (the peacocks), or Henry / Bevel in “The River” (the river itself) — Parker becomes it. His tattooing is a self-fashioning of his body into a work of art, culminating in the icon of Christ, which is literally incorporated, or incarnated, as an inscription of the divine onto the physical. In a way, Parker is another variation on the theme of the failed artist (Julian, Asbury,

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Thomas in “The Comforts of Home” …). Yet, contrary to them, he has something to show for his attempts: he is the artist of his own life, transformed by his “creations”. But this metamorphosis is doubly incomplete: its aim is at first purely narcissistic, as implied in the mention of his contemplation of himself in any “decent-sized mirror” (514) and the benefit of attracting otherwise unattainable girls (513); then Parker needs the mediation of another artist, the “tattoo artist”, who brings to life the desires of the subject. The representative function is therefore split twice in the short story, between active and passive figures: on the one hand, intent and realization are attributed to two personae; on the other hand, the same character is subject and object of the creative act. The mise en abîme resulting from this redistribution of artistic agencies amounts to a self-reflexive meditation on artistic creation in general, and on O’Connor’s work in particular, giving the text the multi-layered dimension of a palimpsest.

Palimpsests

12 “Parker’s Back” can therefore also be read as an artistic Odyssey, from a random collection of tattoos to the final, crowning piece that gives them all coherence, at the same time as it provides the protagonist with spiritual cohesion. The text bears witness to this progression towards, and need for, aesthetic and existential unity. Parker's disappointment when confronted with mirrors posits the need in a negative way: “The effect was not of one intricate arabesque of colors but of something haphazard and botched. A huge dissatisfaction would come over him and he would go off and find another tattooist and have another space filled.” (514). The pictures that are supposed to fill a void only point out to this void and, according to the logic of desire, call for another elusive “fulfillment”. An idolatrous gluttony characterizes this quasi-Lacanian “mirror stage”, in which the desire to identify with a unified image in the mirror is always painfully contradicted by the awareness of failure and an endless quest for / through secondary identifications1.

13 A reconduction of this in the intersubjective mode is to be found in the development of love relationships, first with the aforementioned “girls”, then with Parker's wife Sarah Ruth, a woman he cannot explain his attraction for, yet wants to seduce in a absolute, definitive way. Dissatisfaction began to grow so great in Parker that there was no containing it outside a tattoo. It had to be his back. There was no help for it. A dim half-formed inspiration began to work in his mind. He visualized having a tattoo put there that Sarah Ruth would not be able to resist—a religious subject …. [B]ut as urgent as it might be to for him to get a tattoo, it was just a s urgent that he get exactly the right one to bring Sarah Ruth to heel (519 - 520).

14 One might remark here the mixture of aesthetic and erotic vocabulary, converging in the idea of domination. The transitive use which the tattoo is invited to fulfil (a love charm of sorts) is actually fraught with a narcissistic desire for control. The Other becomes a mirror of the self, her loving and admiring gaze providing the ego with the unity and coherence it lacks. In the story, Parker's feelings for Sarah Ruth reveal his lack of transparency to, and of mastery over, himself. Love, instead of bringing fulfillment, gives way to resentment and frustration: “Not knowing why he continued to stay with a woman who was both ugly and pregnant and no cook made him generally nervous and irritable, and he developed a little tic in the side of his face” (519). This

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merging of seduction and violence seems to characterize both the mystery of Parker's sexuality and the tattooing ethos.

15 The third stage of the process takes place at the end, after Parker has had the figure of Christ imprinted on his back. Even though his relation to the Icon has changed, in ways that remain mysterious to him, his return home is the occasion to make good on the promise of the tattoo, to win his wife's loving submission. But Sarah Ruth does not want to recognize him, and asks his name: “Obadiah,” he whispered and all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts (528).

16 In the description of this — fleeting — epiphany of completeness, the use of the same formulaic phrase — “arabesque of colors” — as above gives the passage a sense of closure and the successful completion of a process. The addition of the edenic “garden” takes the aesthetic unity of the creation on Parker’s back one allegorical step further, into an embodiment of the workings of Grace — the “arabesque” might hint at another form of “needle work”, Oriental carpets which in the Muslim tradition represent Paradise with its “trees and birds and beasts”. Moreover, the image that operates the transposition of the notion of completeness from the physical to the spiritual realm, from body to ”soul” — the metaphor of the “spider’s web” — cannot but draw our attention. On a first level, it alludes to the complex interweaving of tattoos on Parker’s back; then it also connotes the threads connecting the various parts of the individual's existence, which make up his ”soul”. Not least importantly, it is a textual metaphor, pointing self-reflexively to the organic unity and weaving of the short story itself, which has just found its coherence and center in this revelation. The transparency resulting from the infusion of skin with light is also that of the literary palimpsest, bringing to light an intertextual network focused on Flannery O’Connor’s other stories.

17 The diverse tattoos, as listed mainly on page 514, create both a composite picture and a decomposition of the body. “He had a tiger and a panther on each shoulder, a cobra coiled about a torch on his chest, hawks on his thighs, Elizabeth II and Philip over where his stomach and liver were respectively.” Since each image roughly corresponds to an organ or body part, it almost acquires the dimension of a metaphor, sometimes entertaining a motivated relation with the covered item. Apart from the Queen and Prince Consort of England, who do not seem too intimately connected with the digestive organs they adorn (except perhaps in the ancillary position one holds to the other), the idea of muscular strength and savagery unites the wild animals with the muscles. The tattooed body becomes a blazon of the real body, in the Petrarchan and Elizabethan acceptation of the term “a description of a woman’s beauty in the form of a list of her excellent physical features” (Gray 46): each attribute is often defined by means of a fanciful comparison. The result is ambivalent: extravagant praise is conflated with a quasi-sadistic dismemberment of the body of desire; the parts somehow fail to add up, like Parker's images, which “lived inside him in a raging warfare” (514).

18 These skin-deep pictures may be endowed with the humorous charge of Arcimboldo’s parodic visual blazons; they may also evoke (inter)textual blazons. The tiger on the shoulder might be a reminiscence of Henry James's Beast in the Jungle (1903), whose story of a mediocre man waiting for a revelation that finally comes when it is too late must have influenced “The Enduring Chill”. Word echoes of the latter may be found in

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the description of another tattoo: “There emblazoned in red and blue was a tattooed eagle perched on a cannon” (512), as against “But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend” (382). The adjectival reference to the blazon, the color scheme, and of course the bird imagery, allow us to consider a connection between the two passages. The Buddha made in Japan (523) might be a reminiscence of one section of “The Enduring Chill”, where Asbury attends a meeting on Buddhism under the influence of his friend Goetz, who had been in the service there (359). The peacocks Parker has on his knees (523) remind the reader of the central role these birds have in “The Displaced Person”, and in O’Connor’s life at Andalusia, as mentioned in her essay “King of the Birds”, in Mystery and Manners.

19 As a matter of fact, the first revelation, which triggered off Parker's passion for tattoos, happened at a fair, in circumstances similar to the apparition of the androgyne in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” (245). Parker was fourteen when he saw a man in a fair, tattooed from head to foot. Except for his loins which were girded with a panther hide, the man's skin was patterned in what seemed from Parker's distance—he was near the end of the tent, standing on a bench—a single intricate design of brilliant color. The man, who was small and sturdy, moved about on the platform, flexing his muscles so that the arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his skin appeared to have a subtle motion of its own. Parker was filled with emotion, lifted up as some people are when the flag passes (513).

20 The tattooed man, a fair freak of another sort, represents the meeting point of two mutually exclusive realms: body and image, microscosm and macrocosm, just as the androgyne was a cross between the masculine and feminine. But somehow the two overlap, and can be superimposed: the same form of awareness seizes Parker and the little girl in “Temple”, an understanding about self that is not devoid of sexual connotations — an obvious coming to terms with gendered identity in one case, an “uplifting” arousal in patriotic disguise in the other. The Christic connotation of the androgyne spills over to the tattooed man, for he embodies the Cosmic Man, or Parker's “true country” — another possible reading of the raising of the flag. A further common point is the image of the androgynous artist, gendered yet beyond the limitations of gender, which some critics have found in “Temple” (Gordon 163-164) and which could also inform the tattoed body's double status as subject and object, active and passive incarnation.

21 The passage might also point to a further intertextual inscription, that of “The Displaced Person”, a tale in which the beautiful tails of peacocks become a revelation of the patterns of the universe, and take a Christic dimension. An ironic counterpoint between the Catholic priest's rapt contemplation of the peacock , and Mrs McIntyre's preoccupation with the burden of the “D. P.” establishes the parallel between the bird and the foreigner, as two images of Jesus. “Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head”, to which the priest responds by “Christ will come like that!”, while the owner of the place says, referring to Guizac, the Polish refugee, “He didn't have to come in the first place” (226). Parker is, in a sense, a peacock, both in his initial narcissism and in his quest for the perfect design that will reflect the glory of creation, a world to which Christ gives its final, organic unity2. A further connection between the two stories is provided by Parker’s accident (520), a variation on Guizac's murder under the wheels of a tractor (234). But the meaning of the two episodes is reversed: whereas Guizac may be taken to be Christ in disguise, a test for the other

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characters, who unwittingly embodies the sacrificial dimension of this identification in the from of a dissociation between the witness and the symbol, in “Parker’s Back”, the tractor accident brings about a call and revelation to the hero, and makes him literally bear witness, repealing the dissociation.

22 Another such variation on, and positive rewriting of, an earlier text can be identified in relation to Wise Blood. Parker shares with Hazel Motes, the protagonist of this narrative, a feeling of being constantly followed, of having someone at his back. Readers of the novel therefore have a tendency to interpret Parker's intuition in the light of Motes's final conversion, as a sign that he is “Christ-haunted” too. But the ultimate connection between “Parker’s Back” and Wise Blood is the little mummy in the local museum, which gradually becomes a parodic symbol of the New Jesus of the Church Without Christ. This “shrunken man” had been warped out of shape by “some A-rabs”, to become “about three feet long. He was naked and a dried yellow color and his eyes were drawn almost shut as if a giant block of steel were falling down on top of him” (Wise Blood 57). This figure, presumably inspired by Edward Munch’s painting The Cry, unites the connotations of torture, skin color, the grotesque, and an identification with Jesus Christ: it might be seen as the parodic prototype of both the androgyne and Parker. It seems that, as O’Connor’s art developed, she gradually moved from purely parodic views of the Incarnation in a godless world to more positive symbols, the last and most beautiful of which is Parker’s back.

23 Taking this cue, it seems as if “Parker’s Back” was the story that recapitulated and gave coherence to the whole of O’Connor’s œuvre, or allowed to see the coherence beyond the fragmentation of the novels and stories. Parker’s skin and ”Parker’s Back” recapitulate visually and textually the major Incarnational symbols, shedding a more positive light on them, evolving from a rather negative theology to a more affirmative one. The Signifier and Signified — man and God — of the former Incarnational symbols are finally united. Just as the tattoo of Christ endows the various heterogeneous designs with organic unity, the last story could be seen as the crowning piece, which potentially transforms a collection of writings into a “body of work” stamped with the image of Jesus. And in a final, implicit rejection of Sarah Ruth’s iconoclasm, the text also recapitulates the iconic dimension of Flannery’s art, since the other stories are mainly recalled through their visual elements.

24 Nevertheless, the end remains ambiguous, and this “optimistic” reading might have to be relativized by irony. After all, the story does not conclude on an apotheosis, but on a misunderstanding and a broom beating. If Parker really hoped for the image that was going to keel over his wife, as a sex aid of sorts for his marriage, his disillusion measures up to his expectations. But the actual process of inscription of the tattoo on his back, with the patience and slight pain involved, seems to have changed his attitude. The final rejection by Sarah Ruth creates the grotesque image of the painted back full of welts, and a grown man crying like a baby (529-530). The wavering between bathos and pathos seems to imply a double-edged irony: on the one hand, the deflation of the character’s pretenses and possible arrogance; on the other, a full identification with the figure of Christ, in all its aspects: the baby of the Nativity, the suffering sacrificial victim, and the reigning Pantocrator on the defiled Icon. The rise-and-fall is also a fall-and-rise, in a symbolic image into which “everything has risen and converged”.

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Word and Icon

25 The already-quoted debate between Parker and his wife on his return home revolves aroud the comparative status of word and icon in the religious field. One of the phrases Sarah Ruth uses should attract our attention, due to its intransitivity and ambiguities. “God don’t look” can have two meanings, the patent one being pursued in “No man shall see his face” (529). The alternative sense is that God does not see, or watch human beings, that he does not have an effective place in their lives. In a way Protestant (or Calvinist) iconoclasm, a phonocentrism according to which God is Word and not apprehended through the senses, is dangerously close to the Manichean heresy, which denies the Incarnation in establishing an absolute divide between the realms of the spirit and the flesh. Catholic doctrine, on the contrary, states that the power of the creative Word is felt through its effects, cosmogonic and moral. The Word is made visible, and a two-way exchange between Creator and creature can be established. Most literary critics agree that this dogma also informs a theory of language, and that artistic creation in some manner duplicates the processes of “capitalized” Creation. Human language, in the aesthetic sphere, is endowed with a part of this productive, performative power; conversely, this power can be traced back from the work to the source. Here the imagination and the visionary dimension of language have a part to play.

26 Peacocks and gardens on the skin, tractors and burning trees in the text, are part of a network connecting the two levels of Creation, divine and artistic, “Parker’s Back” becomes both a microcosm of Creation, and a microcosm of Flannery O’Connor’s works, thanks to visual correspondences conveyed through the iconic capacity of language. This potentiality of the verbal imagination is used not only by O’Connor, but also by the Bible itself, in contradiction with Sarah Ruth's narrow perception. Moses’ Burning Bush, in Exodus, is the antetype to Parker's burning tree (520): both are occasions for a calling and conversion. This typological reading is of course ironical: Parker’s tractor accident can only parody the epic, spiritual greatness of Moses' direct confrontation with God, yet the former’s conversion is also endowed with a prophetic dimension by duplicating the sacred episode. The passage is ambivalent, a form of respectful parody hailing to the “realism of distances” O’Connor advocated. In similar fashion, the eerie correspondences between Parker’s organs and the tattoo on the surface of his skin seem to unite, in the same mix of double-edged parody, the inside and outside of the body, microcosm and macrocosm. Thanks to his tattooed ”foreign parts”, Parker becomes a contemporary embodiment of the medieval world picture, one of whose key images was the archetype of the Cosmic Man, often superimposed to Jesus himself.

27 Furthermore, there is no incompatibility between word and image on Parker’s skin: he has a tattoo of his mother’s name on a heart (513), a few obscenities are scribbled on his abdomen (514). The very technique of “tracing” (523) the image of Jesus is analogous to writing. The artist’s cue “You don’t want all the little blocks, though” (523), while alluding to the compartmentalized aspect of the Byzantine original, might also remind the reader of block letters. Parker’s back could best be described as “mixed media”, a combination of word and image, sacred and profane… organically unified through a network of correspondences whose cornerstone is Jesus. The text itself is such a mix, in conformity with the classical injunction “Ut pictura poesis”: it is a word-image of an image or, more accurately, the story of an image. The plot endows the tattoo with a

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spiritual dimension, thereby conferring it the status of an Icon. Moreover, it combines the medium of verbal art, time, with the immediacy and permanence of the image: on the levels of form and content, the story balances time and timelessness, the sublunar and the eternal3.

28 Yet, in his quest for the right religious subject that would seduce his wife, Parker rejects the idea of a word-picture: He thought of an open book with HOLY BIBLE tattooed under it and an actual verse printed on the page. This seemed just the thing for a while; then he began to hear her say, “Ain’t I already got a real Bible? What you think I want to read the same verse over and over for when I can read it all?” (519).

29 This humorous passage might be interpreted as a form of reductio ad absurdum, poking fun at the failure of literalism. A picture of a word is a tautology, just as a picture of the Word itself is absurdly reductive. In a way, an art that would not interpret the Word is useless. What the apostolic tradition does for the understanding of the Bible in Catholic dogma, is paralleled in artistic creation by the necessary recourse to imagination in order to find new images that lead back to the original: a derivation from Scripture that yet points back to it. In this defense and illustration of art in general, and O’Connor’s literary art in particular, the synthetic power of the image as both visual shock and support for meditation is emphasized. Parker’s back could then be compared to a medieval manuscript, a sacred text written on a parchment of animal skin, supplemented with illuminations, in the double acceptation of the word: illustrations and visionary symbols of an anagogical nature. What obtains is a sort of reflection of O’Connor’s writing technique, its masterful use of the polysemy of words and striking images, converted into spiritual symbols, like the variation on the Holy Ghost in “The Enduring Chill”.

30 Tattooing in the text can be read as an allegory of the writing process. Joyce Carol Oates has established a parallel with Kafka’s “The Penal Colony”, a short story in which the punishment for transgressing laws consists in being tattooed those laws on the back with a machine. The usual result was death (Oates 44). The similarities with “Parker’s Back” are numerous, especially since the last tattoo represents God, the Father, the source of the Law. The pain of the inscription could also provide a link with the instrument of torture. Yet the description of the process in O’Connor’s story is far less terrible than Kafka’s, as confirmed by the fact that the Pantocrator represents the Son instead of the Father; even though Jesus is seen as a stern Master of the Universe, holding the Book, he also blesses mankind. The ritual is less a punishment than a transfiguration, a rebirth. So, whereas the notion of cruelty Oates detects can definitely be applied to most other stories, this one offers a more positive, even sensuous, vision of writing.

31 The inscription process starts with a back-washing, a hygienic precaution which evokes both a cleansing ritual and the preparation of a white page (thereby transforming Parker’s back into a “paperback” edition). The instruments described on that page (523), the artist's electric needle as well as the sticks, pins and soot of other practitioners, resemble the pen and ink of the writer. Parker’s vigilance, contrasted to his habit of sleeping under the needle, may be a mixture of artistic awareness and spiritual awakening, as suggested by the mention of the owl, a traditional symbol of wisdom, on the tattooist’s own head (521). The slight pain involved, “just enough to make it appear worth doing” (513) is quite remote from the deadly torture in “The

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Penal Colony”, even though a touch of sadism or masochism may be detected. Actually the distribution of the artistic impulse between Parker and the tattooist, who mirror each other, may hint at the split, in the body of the story, between the narrator and the character. The cruel or sadistic component of this relation, often described as a one of the primary characteristics O’Connor’s works, is particularly toned down in this work4.

32 The tattoo “artist”, as both painter and scrivener, is also associated with the divine figure, in a metafictional comment. The finishing touch of the drawing is the pair of eyes, “all-demanding” eyes that speak, call out to the reader or viewer. As Parker had been leafing through the catalogue, the image had given him a sign: He continued to flip through until he had almost reached the front of the book. On one of the pages a pair of eyes glanced at him swiftly. Parker sped on, then stopped. His heart too appeared to cut off; there was absolute silence. It said as plainly as if silence were a language itself, GO BACK.” (522).

33 The sense of revelation, of election in this passage reminds of Augustine’s famous “Tolle, lege” (Take and read): a voice that enticed him to take the Bible and open it at random, to find a passage that put the final touch to his conversion (Saint-Augustin 175). Here the process is inverted: instead of a voice directing to the Book, a voice coming from an image reproduced in a book proffers a call(ing). Once more the relation between the two episodes is of reverent parody: the inversion recalls the distance between the sacred type and worldly character, yet the repetition aims at bridging the gap, in a reverse reading that points back to the source (Parker flipped through the book backwards). Whereas the Word had informed the creation of the Icon, here the Icon silently voices the Word, in a call to the character’s intuition and imagination.

34 When the tattooist finishes his work, he similarly demands Parker’s attention. “ ‘Now look,” he said, angry at having his work ignored.” (525). The metafictional vision implicit in this passage is that art is both a call and a calling, the interpellation of the artist, and that of his/her public. Such a vision recalls O’Connor’s own conception of the artist as prophet: “It seems to me that prophetic insight is a quality of the imagination … There is the prophetic sense of ‘seeing through’ reality and there is also the prophetic function of recalling people to known but ignored thruths” (Conversations 89). The element of reluctance, or resistance to the calling, is another common point between Parker and Old Testament antetypes.

35 If art is an interpellation, it is also a self-fashioning. Parker, as an artist, transfigures his body: the bright arabesque of colors sublimates the skin, so that in the end the flesh reaches a state of transparency, of openness to the light of the spirit. Parker becomes a sort of stained-glass man, in all the senses of the word. Just as the beauty of a church window comes from its taints, the stain and the Fall of man shatter his complacency and make him depend on God's Grace. Parker therefore fulfils Paul’s prediction “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (I Corithians, 13). The body becomes a transfigured icon, a testament of grace. Yet this conception, even if it can be read in the text, remains a subjective image in “Parker’s Back”, distanciated by the inner focalization. But a closer reading of the passage on page 528 would strengthen rather than weaken the Biblical parallel. It is when his wife, barring him entrance to their home, forces him to pronounce and acknowledge his Biblical names — a typological imprint — that Parker feels the light pouring through him. In a way, the image is

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activated by the word, and the two main cultural representations of the Christian divinity as Word and Light are united.

36 Could we go as far as to say that, in her fictional testament, O’Connor (re)traces the existential and theological trajectory of her art? A creation born of frustration, nurtured in suffering, transformed by discipline into a spiritual self-fashioning (Bleikasten 18)? A sublime euphemization of a skin rash— lupus, the predatory red wolf — into a work of art and worship of the sacred (Bockting 38)? But why privilege the “back”?

37 On the level of the story, Parker’s back is of course the only remaining space on his body for such a finishing touch. More metaphorically, Parker had always had the impression that God was at his heels: long views gave him the feeling that someone was “after him” (516), another parallel with Hazel Motes in Wise Blood; then during the vision he had on the moment of his tractor accident, a sort of dissociation of sensibility in which he felt beside himself and out of his shoes (a conversion narrative, Paul’s way to Damascus), “he appeared to see [the sun] both places as if he had eyes in the back of his head,” (520); finally, when his wife asked who was there, “Parker turned his head as if he expected someone behind him to give him the answer” (528). If men bear the imprint of God, the calling, from birth, they often do not want to acknowledge it. This repressed dimension of the psyche is forever at the back of their heads, and they go to great lengths to find what was there from the beginning, just as Ulysses returns home after twenty years, or Jonas takes the circuitous way of the whale’s belly to finally accept his prophetic calling. One could almost say that in O’Connor’s fiction the Freudian unconscious contains the mark of the Maker, and that the often violent return of the repressed is the coming out of the God within. In this sense, Jesus is both inside and outside the subject, which creates a novel form of the Uncanny. The tattoo is therefore not so much an imprint as an expression, the revelation of a address in invisible ink, or encre sympathique.

38 A mark on the back is inaccessible to a single mirror; the “artist” has to resort to a complex reflexive apparatus to let Parker see the tattoo. “He propped one mirror, four feet square, on a table by the wall and took a smaller mirror off the lavatory wall and put it in Parker’s hands. Parker stood with his back to the one on the table and moved the other until he saw a flashing burst of color reflected from his back” (523). It seems that the back of a person stands beyond the immediate narcissistic impulse, that it is the least individual part of a man, reaching either towards the anonymous or the universal. Repossessing the back might give a feeling of completeness, just as it may reveal the power of the absolute. In this sense, the beautiful baroque image of the twin mirrors points at a form of vertigo — endlessly repeated reflections — but also opens vistas to infinity. In another allegory, art could be compared to this double mirror, a reflection of both nature and the artist, the inside and the outside. It represents a gradual discovery of the hidden, unconscious mystery that dwells at the back of appearances, through the imitation of these appearances. Perhaps O’Connor’s famous “realism of distances” is best apprehended through this distorted mimesis, an indirect process in which discovering the right angle of vision is of the essence, in which the natural and supernatural are found to mirror each other5.

39 If we agree that “Parker’s Back” can be considered as one of Flannery O’Connor’s summae artisticae, recapitulating, like the procession of freaks in “Revelation” (508), her most remarkable creations and the impetus behind her literary enterprise, we can

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detect in this testamental work a shift from a “negative theology” centered on the grotesque and scathing irony, to a more “positive” theology celebrating the beauty and complexity of creation, and leading to the sublime of harmonious revelation. This move was announced by other stories, like “The Artificial Nigger” or “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”, but is fully realized only here, in spite of the remaining ambiguity and irony. This shift from Sarah Ruth’s ruthless worldview to Parker’s more life-asserting one was surely influenced by the author’s impeding death. Yet it might also give us a foresight of new potentialities in her art, of a persona that we could call “the impossible Flannery”, and who might have been a poet.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O’CONNOR, Flannery. The Complete Stories. London: Faber, 1990.

Wise Blood. In Three by Flannery O'Connor. New York: Signet.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969.

BLEIKASTEN, André. “Writing on the Flesh: Tattoos and Taboos in ‘Parker’s Back’ ”. Southern Literary Journal 14.2 (1982): 8-18.

BOCKTING, Ineke. “ ‘Parker’s Back’: From the Skin Inwards”. M.-C. Perrin-Chenour, ed. Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories. Nantes: Ed. du Temps, 2004. 38-52.

GORDON, Sarah Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

GRAY, Martin. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harlow: Longman, 1992.

KATZ, Claire. “Flannery O’Connor’s Rage of Vision”. American Literature 46.1 (1974): 54-67.

OATES, Joyce Carol. “The Visionary Art of Flannery O’Connor”. Harold Bloom, ed. Flannery O’Connor: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1986. 43-53.

POTHIER, Jacques. Les Nouvelles de Flannery O'Connor. Eds du Temps/UVSQ, 2004.

SAINT AUGUSTIN. Les Confessions. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964.

TREMONTANT, Claude. Introduction à la pensée de Teilhard de Chardin. Paris: Seuil, 1956.

VANOYE, Francis. Récit écrit, récit filmique. Paris: Nathan Université, 1989.

NOTES

1. André Bleikasten pursues this inroad into Lacanian territory by stating that Parker’s desire for the perfect image represents “his late awakening to the exorbitant demands of narcissism. By tattooing his skin, Parker, one might argue, attempts to phallicize his body, to turn it into a living fetish” (Bleikasten 12).

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2. To a certain extent, the Pantocrator’s gaze on Parker’s back fulfils, in a microcosmic way, the function of Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point. It is the Center of Convergence that attracts and informs all thinking — here, visual — monads in an evolutionary process that will “over- animate”, without destroying, them (Trémontant 78). Whatever O’Connor’s religious opinions about this not-too-orthodox theory, she was able to draw on its imaginative, artisctic potentialities, as proved by the title of her story and collection “Everything That Rises Must Converge”. 3. The definitions of verbal communication as “digital” (arbitrary relation between Signifier and Signified, active decoding, use of the imagination) and of images as belonging to an “analogical” mode of communication (Vanoye 41-43) could lead us to consider the ekphrastic dimension of the story as a final attempt to incarnate the word into an analogy,or anagogy; to raise the level of understanding from plot to contemplation. 4. “There is, then, a sadistic quality to the narrator, who acts as an archaic superego, a primitive internalized image of the parent forcing the characters through the triadic ritual of sin, humiliation, and redemption by wit as well as plot structure” (Katz 57). 5. “I think the writer of grotesque fiction […] is looking for one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees” (Mystery and Manners 42). Even though this definition is concerned with the grotesque as creative distortion at the interface between two realms of being, the physical and the spiritual, the optical apparatus that is evoked can be compared to that of “Parker’s Back”. The distortion of appearances created by the pressure of the supernatural both confirms and transcends the mimetic principle, reminding the reader of a fun-house mirror, a cruder version of the twin reflectors of the last story.

ABSTRACTS

Cette nouvelle tardive, où un homme se fait tatouer un Christ byzantin sur le dos pour séduire une épouse fondamentaliste et iconoclaste, peut se lire comme un codicille testamentaire sur la profonde relation entre le verbe et l'image dans la prose de Flannery O’Connor. La véritable Odyssée de Parker en quête de son épanouissement personnel, se transforme en méditation réflexive sur la nature de la création artistique, épouse la dimension iconique de la prose visionnaire de l'auteur, et constitue l'une des illustrations les plus harmonieuses de sa notion d’ « art incarné ». Le corps tatoué devient un palimpseste abouti, une surimpression intertextuelle de sources telles que la Bible, des précédents littéraires et iconographiques, et le corpus même d’O’Connor. Alors que le procédé d'inscription cutanée peut se comparer à une « allégorie de l'écriture », la force de révélation et d'interpellation de l'image renvoie à l'idéal d'un art religieusement engagé, destiné à ébranler la suffisance du destinataire. Malgré l'ambiguïté de la fin, la spécificité de cette nouvelle nous semble résider dans la transition opérée entre une « théologie négative », vision du monde sans pitié, et une célébration plus positive, libérant les potentialités poétiques, jusque- là passablement réprimées, du style de Flannery O’Connor.

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AUTHORS

MICHEL FEITH Michel Feith is an Associate Professor at the University of Nantes, France. His field of study is American literature, more specifically “ethnic” literatures. His doctorial thesis was entitled “Myth and History in Chinese American and Chicano Literature” (1995), and his publications include articles on Maxine Hong Kingston, Gerald Vizenor, John Edgar Wideman, and the Harlem Renaissance. On the latter subject, he edited, with Pr Geneviève Fabre, Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2001) and "Temples for Tomorrow": Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 2001). He has also edited Nationalismes et régionalismes, survivances du romantisme ? (Nantes, CRINI, 2003) and Des nations, avec ou sans Etat (Nantes, CRINI, 2005), two collections of essays about national identities.

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History and Denial in Nabokov’s “Conversation Piece, 1945”

Tim Conley

1 If Nabokov’s numerous short stories have received less critical attention than his novels –and this is very demonstrably the case1– it may be in part because they do not always conform to the pattern or blueprint recognized in the novels, what Michael Wood calls Nabokov’s “signature” (23-7). Certainly, Nabokov’s novels regularly include elements which readers may well come to expect: the butterflies and the chess pieces, the gun which goes off by the end with Chekhovian reliability, the nod to Lewis Carroll and the jab at Freud. Yet the identification of such a composite recipe as the definition of “Nabokovian” turns out to be improvident and misleading in the same way that, for example, the popular use of the adjective “Orwellian” represents a narrow (in this case, typically one novel) and arguably poor understanding of the author’s writings. Although Nabokov himself would likely convulse at the notion of the comparison, the case of Orwell is insightful here, since it is primarily assumptions about the specifically political underpinnings of privileged (i.e., most republished, taught, and cited) works like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm that enable the value-designation, regardless of how apt these assumptions may be. A similarly established set of values discerned in novels like Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada form the Nabokovian “signature,” though the typical assumption about any political underpinnings of these books is that they more or less do not exist.2

2 That the author’s claim that “nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent” (Strong Opinions 3) enjoys more notoriety than any of his short stories points to how imbalanced the political critique of his texts has remained, and a reader faced with the neglected story “Conversation Piece, 1945” is startled to discover a pointed engagement with history as a stylized, inherently problematic narrative and a complex analysis of exactly what “the literature of social intent” means.

3 Originally published as “Double Talk” in The New Yorker and retitled in Nabokov’s Dozen (1958), “Conversation Piece, 1945” does have some “signature” traits, such as the émigré narrator and the fascination with doubles, but, fascinatingly, it is exactly these

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customary “Nabokovian” features which the story both expects will be taken for granted and employs to subvert, even contradict the narrative itself. The story concerns a gathering in Boston one evening in –as the new title insists in a manner that is markedly anomalous within Nabokov’s fiction– the last year of the second world war. The narrator, who begins by saying he has “a disreputable namesake” (587) but refrains from giving this name, accepts an invitation to one “Mrs. Hall’s apartment house” (the author’s amusement at this word-arrangement is detectable), where he discovers a dozen middle-class people (mostly women) calmly despairing the fate of Nazi Germany in a “bourgeois salon” (588). When the guest speaker, a professor whom the narrator calls Dr. Shoe when he “did not catch his name” (589), finally proposes to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the narrator confesses to being overcome with physical nausea and leaves, not without expressing his scorn to Mrs. Hall on his way out. He takes the wrong hat, however, and the next morning Dr. Shoe materializes at his door and returns the narrator’s larger hat. The narrator only finds Shoe’s hat (Nabokov chuckling again there) when the man has left, but he tosses the hat four storeys down to him.

4 The story’s last three paragraphs compel the reader to re-examine these events, particularly because of the offhand manner of the narrator and the seeming disconnectedness between what they describe and the preceding events. Here the narrator mentions receiving a letter of extortion from what must be the unnamed double, a man who lists ordeals he has suffered for being misidentified as “the author of those depraved, decadent writings” (597), writings which he attributes to the narrator. The letter also accuses the narrator of having appeared “in a drunken condition at the house of a highly respected person” (597), and it is this detail which gives the reader pause.3

5 Calling the story “unusually topical” –an understatement, as I will explain below– Brian Boyd provides a strangely limp reading by taking the narrator, “a liberal Russian émigré” (85; emphasis added), at his word. The narrator is for Boyd little more than a cipher with which Nabokov may “explain his own ideological position” (85). This interpretation leaves several questions unanswered. Is Nabokov simply lying in interviews when he says that ideology and ideas have no place in (his) art? What “depraved, decadent writings” has this quasi-Nabokov written (note that the infamy of Lolita is still ten years away)? Why does the story conclude with the matter-of-fact judgement that “the sum he demanded was really a most modest one” (597), from which the reader may infer that sum was paid? Why pay off a blackmailer?

6 The narrative of history, as “Conversation Piece, 1945” demonstrates, paradoxically assumes its cruellest and most subjective shape when it denies or occludes its own cruel subjectivity. If “the house of a highly respected person” may be read to mean that of Mrs. Hall, recalling Dr. Shoe’s characterization of her as “a very well-known society lady” (596), the narrator’s version of events and, more chillingly, his political position within the loathsome discussion at Mrs. Hall’s assume a completely different complexion – the shoe is now on the other foot, as it were. Nabokov’s narrator complains in the story’s second paragraph that he has been arrested for drunken and disorderly behaviour, though he instances this as another case of mistaken identity. He also explains his being at the “little meeting” (588) as another such doppelganger difficulty: “Mrs. Hall’s Mrs. Sharp was as totally distinct from my Mrs. Sharp as I was from my namesake” (590). This is a telling phrase worth returning to, but it is

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important to consider first the “misadventure, which had nothing to do with the subject of the present account” which the narrator says caused him to be late, and about which he does not elaborate (588). If the reader speculates, based on the working assumption that perhaps the narrator was indeed “in a drunken condition” at Mrs. Hall’s, that the “misadventure” represents drinking, the integrity of the narrator falls away in rapid and illuminating stages. He does not dissent from the views of Dr. Shoe and company not because of “morbid curiosity” or a stammer (590), and his “beginning to feel physically sick” (595) is not a symptom of moral revulsion but of mere inebriation. His exit line about those in attendance being “murderers or fools” seems nothing but a fabrication in light of these considerations as well as his remark about the statement’s not having “come out as smooth as it is on paper” (595). Dr. Shoe later refers to it ambiguously as “the strange remark” (596), hardly a fitting description of the alleged condemnation.

7 It thus becomes all too easy to understand why the narrator takes the wrong hat, and the reader may perceive that the so-called mistakes of the tale’s telling are actually its subliminal corrections. A premonitory shudder is felt at the use of the word “mistake” when Dr. Shoe refers to the invasion of Russia as Hitler’s “mistake” (590), implying that his other acts and schemes, including the implementation of the Final Solution, were right-minded.4 Beginning with the opening anecdote about the overdue copy of the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, the narrator’s account attempts to conceal himself, to deny that he is “the bastard” (588), the drinker, antisemite, and “author of those depraved, decadent writings.” This is Hyde ascribing his own monstrous crimes to Jekyll, with the exact nature of those crimes obscured and the names removed.

8 These inversions may be Nabokovian games, but they are being played with dangerously high stakes.5 The turns of the narratological screw in “Conversation Piece, 1945” do more than reveal the narrator’s abhorrent character in the manner that the surplus and substance of endnotes to Shade’s poem reveal Kinbote’s monomania in Pale Fire. If, on the one hand, the narrator is what Boyd claims, the political thrust of the story becomes an affirmation of platitudes –the Nazis committed atrocities, Stalin is a monster, and those who deny such truths are wretches– despite Nabokov’s repeated execrations of authors who use literature as this sort of platform. In “Ultima Thule,” another story collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, a character who has apparently struck upon a universal, holistic, yet fatally inexpressible “Truth,” defines “any truism” as “the corpse of a relative truth” (515).6 Human beings, the man named Falter admits, experience a “recoil” at the “electric discharge of reality, relative reality, no doubt, for you, humans, possess no other” (514-5). For readers to accept the role of the narrator in “Conversation Piece, 1945” as a morally benign reporter of the banality of evil, they must also accept that Nabokov is capable of writing a fiction which offers unmediated and (literally) self-evident truth, besides the unsettling contradictions I have pointed out within the story itself. On the other hand, in detecting contradictions within the “liberal” facade of the narrator and finding reason to doubt his series of denials and negations ( he is not the “vulgar personality” [587], he is not at the party by choice, he is not in agreement with the notions expressed there, and so on), the reader is confronted with stark questions about the relation of political ideology to historical truth.

9 Boyd is correct in saying that Nabokov “mimics superbly the fluent nonsense of ideas he detests” (86) and the company and conversation at Mrs. Hall’s are, accordingly,

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exceptionally vile. It is worth considering, however, that this sense of repugnance is strongest when the characters’ sentiments are couched in sympathetic, even “liberal”- sounding language. One woman, for example, protests talk of punishing the Germans: They, too, are human beings. And any sensitive person will agree with what you [Dr. Shoe] say about their not being responsible for those so-called atrocities, most of which have probably been invented by the Jews. I get mad when I hear people still jabbering about furnaces and torture houses which, if they existed at all, were operated by only a few men as insane as Hitler. (593)

10 Classic Holocaust denial: it did not happen, and even if it did, it was just a few rotten apples at work. It is probably impossible to isolate the most objectionable word or phrase in this passage, but that “any sensitive person” should be able to use the word “still” in 1945 shows an impatience with history’s inability to accommodate either every person’s viewpoint or ignorance. Of note here is how the appeals to “principles of mercy and common sense” (590) signal the presence of their opposites in exactly the same fashion that the ascription of mistakes and denials of involvement indicate intent and complicity.

11 There is a pregnant convolution of these reversals in Mrs. Hall’s comparison of the fallen Third Reich to Prometheus, “who once stole fire and was blinded by the angry gods” (590). Prometheus is of course a favourite touchstone of Romanticism, and Mrs. Hall is trying to paint a romantic picture of the Nazis (the monstrous “Modern Prometheus” of Frankenstein evidently notwithstanding), but she has muddled her Greek mythology. Mrs. Hall’s conflation of the stories of Prometheus, who was bound to a rock and regularly pecked at by an eagle sent by Zeus, and Oedipus, who put out his own eyes in horror and shame, displays more than ignorance lurking behind her pretensions. Nabokov’s sly reference to Oedipus –curiously unaccompanied by an authorial sneer at psychoanalysis– acts as an accusation very like that offered in Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Tomas, a doctor in Czechoslovakia, publishes an attack on the Communist leaders which compares them to Oedipus: When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your “not knowing,” this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes! (177)

12 Hana Píchová has explored how Nabokov and Kundera both relate “problems of cultural preservation, memory, understanding, and appropriation” (87), and I would add to those words one more: responsibility. Mrs. Hall’s transition from the active voice (“stole fire”) to the passive (“was blinded”) is symptomatic of her refusal to accept both German responsibility for crimes against humanity and her own responsibility, as the intellectual she wants to be seen as, to get her facts straight. Tomas recognizes the Communists as far less noble and less tragic than Oedipus, whose self-inflicted blindness is poetic justice: he cannot permit himself to look upon the horror he did not see before. Mrs. Hall’s Prometheus-Oedipus feels no guilt for his transgression and suffers unjust punishment at the hands of others who are more powerful than he is.

13 This distinction is crucial. Dr. Shoe, Mrs. Hall, and the other grotesques of “Conversation Piece, 1945” claim victim status for themselves: Mrs. Hall calls “very true” the poorly named “paradox” of Dr. Shoe, which states that “the soldiers slaughtered in Europe” were “at least spared the terrible misgivings which we civilians

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must suffer in silence” (591-2). More ironies can be unpacked here. The phrase “terrible misgivings” again sounds the note of the vaguely conscience-stricken liberal, while the only genuine silence is the narrator’s, himself (he repeatedly insists) a victim of circumstance: in the story’s first words, he says he only “happen[s] to have” the unfortunate name (587).

14 Punishments aside, the role of blameless victim claimed by the Czech Communists in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and by the Nazi sympathizers in Nabokov’s story depends upon the assertion of “not knowing.” Here again Mrs. Hall’s invocation of Prometheus is revealing, since the very name “Prometheus” means “foresight” or “forethought.” Nabokov doubles this point by giving his “well-known society lady” the name Sybil, marking her as a farcical oracle who offers not accurate insights into the future but distorted visions of the past. In this capacity she complements the dishonest though respectable-seeming narrator.

15 By noting that Nabokov’s later changing of the title from “Double Talk” to “Conversation Piece, 1945” was to highlight the “unusually topical” nature of the story, Boyd seems to imply that Nabokov had grown less pleased with the story and in rechristening it labeled it as something of a trifle (85), though I feel that, given the more complex reading of the story I have outlined here, more and deeper questions can be posed to the title(s). Both titles centralize speech, in part cuing the reader to mind the nuances of the voice relating this story, but whereas “Double Talk” is clever, “Conversation Piece, 1945” brings more sharply into focus the sometimes puzzling relationship between history and fiction. With the latter title, Nabokov heaps more pronounced disgust upon those stalwarts of the middle class who can reduce atrocities to polite and ignorant chat and treat as novelty acts and ideas which are less than human.7 The term “conversation piece” also refers to a “type of genre painting involving a portrait group posed in a landscape or domestic setting” (OED), and this definition highlights the falsely idyllic setting and the banality of the characters painted within the story while it draws attention to the fact of the frame, the prejudice of the unseen painter’s eye. The additional detail of “1945,” which I have already discussed, assures the reader that despite the generic abstractions, this picture is of a moment in time when people “still” talked about these appalling things in this appalling way.

16 Nabokov makes a significant separation between revisionism and relativism: in fact, he equates this separation with that between a lie and a fiction. Fiction, or more generally a work of art, may contain a lie (the Holocaust did not take place) and re-situate it, re- frame it, invite the reader to view it relative to other information in the narrative. History is a different matter, split as the word is into meaning both what happened and what is said to have happened but incapable of meaning both simultaneously (i.e., what is said to have happened can never exactly be what happened). Nabokov’s dislike of truisms –those “corpses of relative truths”– and his doubts about any absolute “Truth” extend to a principled suspicion of history, often the self-declared voice of truth and enemy of invention. “History is what hurts,” Fredric Jameson has written (and these are possibly the only lines by Jameson with which Vladimir Nabokov might agree): “it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force” (102). From this vantage point we can better appreciate Nabokov’s contempt for

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“the literature of social intent” as a rejection of the purity of any ideology or intention –liberalism included– which necessarily reifies “History” or “Truth.” In “Conversation Piece, 1945,” we as readers are witness to such “grisly and ironic reversals” as leave us without an ideological viewpoint that we can call innocent.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Conley, Tim. “Drawn curtains.” Rev. of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi. paperplates (www.paperplates.org) 5.4 (2003): 43-44.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Nabokov, Vladimir. “Conversation Piece, 1945.” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Vintage, 1995. 587-97.

—. Nabokov’s Dozen. New York: Doubleday, 1958.

—. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.

—. “Ultima Thule.” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Vintage, 1995. 500-22.

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2003.

Píchová, Hana. The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002.

Shrayer, Maxim D. The World of Nabokov’s Stories. Austin: U of Texas P, 1999.

Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the risks of fiction. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.

NOTES

1. Wood offers an example of this trend when he begins his study of Nabokov by noting that the author “wrote poems, plays and novels, but above all novels” (1). 2. “More or less” because a picture of Nabokov as a kind of apolitical liberal (he once said “I do not mind being labeled an old-fashioned liberal” [Strong Opinions 96], which is not quite the same thing as saying “I am a liberal”) has most recently been presented to the public in Azar Nafisi’s bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nafisi’s historicization of novels (and again, the neglect of the shorter works goes unexamined) like Invitation to a Beheading and Lolita are in my view highly selective, just as her representation of the democratic West, and the United States in particular, is surprisingly uncritical. See Conley 43-44.

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3. For reasons I do not pretend to understand, the text of the letter is italicized in the Vintage edition of The Stories, though not in Nabokov’s Dozen, where the story has a compositional date at its end: “Boston, 1945” (140). 4. This chilling use of the word “mistake” is repeated when Dr. Shoe proceeds to explain the “propaganda” about atrocities, which he compares to the so-called German atrocities in the First World War – those horrible legends about Belgian women being seduced, and so on. Well, immediately after the war, in the summer of 1920, if I am not mistaken, a special committee of German democrats thoroughly investigated the whole matter, and we all know how pedantically thorough and precise German experts can be. (592, emphasis added) The ironies here are nothing less than brutal, for the pedantic Shoe is himself of “Teutonic origin” (589) and the fact that the Third Reich’s genocidal program was notoriously documented with cool thoroughness and precision by its engineers also represents the decisive decimation of the rhetoric of Holocaust denial. 5. The politically and ethically venturesome scheme of doubling in this story bears resemblance to Philip Roth’s in Operation Shylock. I know of no substantial comparison of these two writers, but recommend the effort. 6. “Ultima Thule” is a translated fragment salvaged from an abandoned novel of the same name. Bearing in mind Maxim D. Shrayer’s tantalizing suggestion that the puzzling framework of an early story, “Terra Incognita,” may be the result of its “horrific otherworld” being “too indeterminate to write” (52; italics in original), one could argue that Nabokov could not complete a novel with an absolute “Truth” (or even the potential thereof) because its presence would be too determinate to write. 7. Outside of his fiction Nabokov is himself capable of double standards when it comes to acknowledging atrocities. When we read a pronouncement like “[l]isting in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost” (Strong Opinions 101), we might argue that Nabokov refuses to have the distinctive horrors of one historical nightmare interchanged – perhaps even compared– with another, were it not for the firm use of “seditious.” Nabokov can ridicule the scoundrel’s use of American patriotism as a refuge (as he does in “Conversation Piece, 1945”), but he evidently does not see patriotism itself as poshlost.

ABSTRACTS

D’une manière significative, Nabokov a, plus d’une fois, détaché ses écrits de la littérature dite sociale ou engagée. Ce qui est d'ailleurs reconnu par l’ensemble des critiques qui privilégient l’étude de ses romans à celle de ses nouvelles. Dérangeante, la recherche du sens du mot « Histoire » dans « Conversation Piece, 1945 » présente cette nouvelle, peu étudiée, comme une exception significative à la règle ou bien nous permet d’y voir un démenti aux déclarations de l’auteur. Thème favori de Nabokov, le double invite ici le lecteur à examiner de près la position « libérale » adoptée par le narrateur pour rapporter la conversation d’une rencontre, apparemment fortuite, avec des révisionnistes. A présente étude de “Conversation Piece, 1945” réexamine les connotations idéologiques et politiques de ce qu’on appelle « une histoire nabokovienne » pour, éventuellement, redresser certains critères de sa définition.

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AUTHORS

TIM CONLEY Tim Conley is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brock University in Canada. He is the author of JoycesMistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation (2003) and, with Stephen Cain, The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (forthcoming in 2006). He has published essays in many journals, including Comparative Literature, James Joyce Quarterly, and Studies in the Novel.

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L’écriture rouge de Sherman Alexie : l’exemple de "The Sin Eaters"

Diane Sabatier

1 Sherman Alexie, séditieux et engagé, nouvelliste et romancier, ne semble se soucier d'aucune limite. "Native American", issu des tribus amérindiennes Spokane et Cœur d'Alene, étranger de l'intérieur, en quête d’une identité perdue entre "être l'Autre" et "être Soi", Alexie s’est imposé par l'alliance d'un véritable talent littéraire et d'une problématique originale sur l'identité en pointillés, la citoyenneté reniée ou refusée. Si le corps de « l'étranger » semble perpétuellement torturé, on verra ici qu'il n'en demeure pas moins un véritable moyen de rébellion quand il se mue en corpus. On peut lire les nombreuses nouvelles ethniques publiées chaque année aux Etats-Unis comme autant de témoignages de corps d’hommes et de femmes violentés et éparpillés reprenant forme sur le papier et force sous la plume ; autant de corpus d’œuvres d’écrivains violentant le pouvoir de la diaspora blanche. Sherman Alexie devient alors, par ses récits en marge et de la marge, le porte-parole des silencieux enfermés dans la solitude des minorités ; solitude à laquelle fait écho la forme même de la nouvelle selon Frank O'Connor dans son ouvrage The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story1.

2 "The Sin Eaters"2, publiée en 2001 dans The Toughest Indian in the World, constitue le nerf central du recueil, par une allégorie macabre qui marie l'holocauste au génocide des Amérindiens. Tandis que les quatre premiers récits se singularisent par leur humour et leur souci d'échapper à la représentation politiquement correcte des Native Americans, "The Sin Eaters" surprend autant qu'elle dérange. Petit frère du Handmaid's Tale de Margaret Atwood3, ce conte apocalyptique narre l'enlèvement d'Amérindiens et leur emprisonnement dans un complexe militaire souterrain, du point de vue intradiégétique d'un jeune garçon, Jonah. "The Sin Eaters" décrit des corps déchirés, isolés, manipulés, et des êtres en perdition qui cherchent dans le corpus de l’écrivain, c’est-à-dire la narration, l’écriture, le témoignage de la littérature, une voie mnésique, une voix salvatrice.

3 Après avoir souligné la temporalité chaotique, symptomatique du déchirement de l’étranger, j’étudierai comment le corp(u)s devient le langage du pouvoir, de l’oppresseur comme de l’opprimé. Mon analyse se concentrera ensuite sur les

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démystifications entreprises par l’écriture mnésique afin de démontrer que, pour Alexie, c’est en disant l’Autre que l’on devient Soi.

Entre chaos et néant, le temps-Moi

4 Sherman Alexie illustre de façon originale le motif du temps subjectif. Jonah, qui a vécu l'enfermement dans le camp, décrit les moments qui ont précédé cette expérience avec une vision déformée. On touche là à l'ambiguïté temporelle qui marque l'ensemble de la narration. La conscience de Jonah, comme sujet engagé dans la nouvelle, est un événement constituant à part entière. Pour comprendre ce temps subjectif, Emmanuel Levinas s'est, lui, attaché à comprendre la conception husserlienne du temps. Le temps et la conscience du temps ne surgissent pas d'un point intemporel, ni sur le fonds d'un temps préexistant. (...) Le temps ne surgit pas à partir d'une éternité immobile pour un sujet non-engagé. (...) L'écart est rétention et la rétention est écart : la conscience du temps est le temps de la conscience.4

5 Le temps que Jonah présente semble, à ce titre, un flux d'une subjectivité absolue. Ce temps "en spirale" joue, en particulier dans les paragraphes d'ouverture, avec le temps historique marqué par l'assassinat de John F. Kennedy (p.77, l.1) ou, plus loin, la réclusion d'Anne Frank (p. 80, l.1). La présence des tombes au cœur de la cité (p.77, l.22 & p.87, l.2) suggère que le temps de la vie et celui de la mort se mêlent. Le narrateur paraît, dans cette mesure, plongé dans un coma post-traumatique qui brouille ses repères temporels. On pourra parler d'une narration gangrenée par un temps à la fois figé dans une même histoire et à chaque page révolu. Ce temps sclérosant s'annonce par l'anaphore "For the rest of my life" (p.118, l.19). Cette écriture cherche à dépeindre la vie en suspens des "différents" qui, dès la naissance, avant même d'avoir pu imposer leur personnalité, semblent définis, classés, répartis, par la couleur de leur peau. Le langage, oscillant entre l’authenticité et les fausses pistes des conventions, relit les représentations du passé dans une quête de vérité. Alexie met en scène une temporalité chaotique et troublante. Par l'usage d'un temps de narration en spirale, Jonah cherche à dépasser les voix / clichés pour dépeindre l'expérience traumatisante du camp. Ce faisant, il supprime toute nouvelle mortalité. En détruisant les bornes temporelles, Jonah abolit le temps qui détruit les corps et qui engendre la perte de mémoire. Il devient ainsi l'enfant / narrateur immortel qui sauve les corps de l'oubli. On suggèrera que, sans borne, le temps ouvre sur un espace de liberté. Il se modèle avec / après les traumatismes et suit la courbe cassée des souvenirs du futur et des fantasmes du passé. Ce temps, que nous appellerons le temps-Moi, le Moi se créant ici sa propre temporalité, se déploie comme la seule force naturelle que l'homme brisé puisse maîtriser. Ce temps, tel un paradoxe polymorphe, est ancré hors du temps – un temps (con)fondant les frontières entre songe, fiction et vérité. Ce temps troublant, à la fois réel (le souvenir de la Shoah) et imaginaire (le camp de reproduction de la nouvelle), voire fantasmé (on s’en réfère aux divagations de Jonah, p.120, l.21), mêle réalité (notre réel, l'Histoire, la réalité de l'histoire inventée) et création (le réel de l'histoire inventée, la fausseté des songes narrés). Entre néant et chaos, la vie s'infiltre à travers le créé, le (re)nouveau.

6 Ce temps-Moi ouvre la première porte, la clé initiale aux personnages, vers la création scripturale de jeux / je de mots libérateurs ; l'ultime remède aux blessures de guerres, aux blessures de haines.

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Le corp(u)s ou le langage du pouvoir

7 On notera qu'avant le corps / langage de pouvoirs, on trouve le corps / lieu du langage du pouvoir. En effet, les corps traduisent ou détruisent les fantasmes d'un corps, identité socialement et sexuellement correct. Si le corpus du conteur lui appartient intégralement, son corps, lui, demeure la propriété de la société. Par l'observation de la destruction produisant un mythe, concrétisant l'imaginaire en passant par la violence, le corps "étranger" du garçon passe d'objet de souffrance à celui de connaissance. Les corps des personnages subissent, irrévocablement, l'épreuve ultime de la douleur pour devenir des masses reconnaissables, signes compréhensibles par la société. De corps étrangers, ils se muent en corps lisibles. Le corps de la femme, avant tout autre, devient enjeu de pouvoir. Le camp de concentration se transforme alors en un camp de fertilité forcée qui évoque celui de The Handmaid's Tale, situé dans la République / dictature de Gilead. La scène de "procréation" rappelle celle du roman d'Atwood où les corps des femmes sont tout aussi « instrumentalisés » et violentés. Sur la table d'opération, Jonah ressent que la violation de son intimité, exprimée par l'obsédante diacope "sucked out", le prive de son corps / parole. I felt the needle bite into me, heard the impossibly loud hiss of the hypodermic syringe as it sucked out pieces of my body, sucked out the blood, sucked out fluid ounces of my soul, sucked out antibodies, sucked out pieces of all of my stories, sucked out marrow, and sucked out pieces of my vocabulary. I knew that certain words were being taken from me. (p.115, l.4)

8 Ainsi, le silence, que l'on compare plus tard à de la peau (p.103, l.7) suggère que, une fois le corps devenu muet, seul le corpus du nouvelliste peut désormais taire la souffrance en la disant. La tension entre pouvoir et agression résume précisément ce dont il est question dans la nouvelle. Quelle couleur de peau a le pouvoir et que fait-elle pour le conserver dans la mesure le corps serait plus facilement contrôlable que la pensée ? Le père de Jonah passe du corps magique qui dispose de la nature et de l'univers (p.81, l.7) à celui blessé par les coups du soldat. L'enfant traverse l'épreuve de mise à nu et de viol, de dépossession de son propre corps, pour finalement mieux l'appréhender. La seule enveloppe, aux yeux des médecins, définit Jonah en tant qu'individu. Les vêtements arrachés constituaient une armure trop frêle. Sans cette protection, Jonah devient à la fois vulnérable mais plus vrai. Il n'est plus modelé par des vêtements, codes sociaux, mais, ironiquement, libre. Jonah conclut la nouvelle dans la nudité des corps / objets. Si on enferme ces derniers, si on les cache ou si on les brûle dans des camps d'extermination, en les désacralisant, on leur soustrait leur essence. Et de là, un parallèle entre le corps, la peau comme les pages d'un livre où sont écrits (une fois de plus au passif) leurs histoires et le corpus d'un auteur. "I wondered if rich white men were going to turn the pages of books that were made with our skins" (p.94, l.3). Tandis que les militaires arrachent aux prisonniers les corps / paroles, contestataires du langage du pouvoir, Jonah conserve le sien en réactualisant, en re-matérialisant les corps disparus, par l'acte d'écriture. Jonah demeure le conteur immortel et tout puissant qui se remémore le temps où ses contes le rendaient maître du monde, invulnérable : I taught those young men the love songs that forced horses to bow their heads and kneel in the fields, the love songs that revealed the secrets of fire, the love songs that healed, the love songs that precipitated wars. (p. 77, l.26)

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9 La langue devient, alors, le soin qui panse la blessure du monde. De même qu’Alexie démembre les corps des prisonniers à l'instar des soldats, il annule leur désespoir par le dire qui crée un passé, une mémoire, une raison, un sens. Tous les corps des rejetés, des incompris, des Autres, des différents, se composent du corps des écrivains, de leur "Moi corporel" en souffrance, pour reprendre la terminologie de Didier Anzieu5. Et le corps de l'auteur de se fondre au sein du corpus, langage de pouvoir, qui se meut alors dans les corps brisés et les corpus narrés. Et ce tourbillon de corps d'entraîner celui du lecteur, lui aussi "travaillé par l’œuvre". On pourrait évoquer le deuil qu’effectue le lecteur d’Alexie dans la mesure où il se constitue de la perte des utopies, d'une croyance en une humanité porteuse d'un Bien ultime. Alexie ne croit pas en la perfectibilité de l'être humain. Néanmoins, l'écrivain, lui, se porte garant du respect des droits et des libertés universelles.

10 La parole prise, le corpus en marche, Alexie démontre qu'il s'agit désormais de procéder à une vaste entreprise de démystification. Mieux lire les codes, les valeurs et les modes de pensées qui régissent le monde permet de s'en libérer.

Démystifications

11 La tâche que s'impose Alexie s'articule autour de deux points fondamentaux. Il s'agit d'écrire la souffrance de la différence sans sacrifier les dimensions intellectuelle et philosophique. Il lui faut articuler corps et pensée. Ce faisant, le corps mutilé renaît, sauvé sous l'impulsion de l'esprit. L'intervention nécessaire de la langue ouvre alors la réflexion de l'esprit individuel au monde. On serait tenté de placer sa nouvelle dans la catégorie des fictions apocalyptiques dans la mesure où autour de l'invention cauchemardesque d'un camp de concentration pour Amérindiens, elle joue sur la tension entre un contexte historique situé entre la fin des années 1930 et novembre 1963. Effectivement, on remarquera une ressemblance, soulignée par une anaphore oppressante, aux « Japanese relocation camps » avec leurs cellules ovales. On note, de même, la voix d'un narrateur intradiégétique ayant vécu l'expérience, appuyée par le pronom personnel "I" qui ouvre la nouvelle. Alexie a choisi d'évoquer le motif de la différence, et de la souffrance qu'elle procure. Il se met en travers de l'opposition norme / écart, qu'elle s'applique au corps de l’oppressé ou au corpus du conteur. Le terme "apocalypsis", signifiant une révélation, correspond à la volonté de l'auteur d'incarner une voix d'opposition à la version dominante du rêve américain. Le narrateur a alors accès à cette "libre-parole" offerte par "la puissance révélatrice du vrai langage littéraire"6 dont parle Derrida.

12 Alexie semble, à ce titre, ancré dans une nouvelle dimension de la fiction américaine des années 1990, plus consciente des multiples forces culturelles et sociales en action. Cette peinture d'une société pluriethnique se révèle sous la forme du motif du corps. "The Sin Eaters" propose en cela un travail de réécriture du thème du corps couleur menant à la ségrégation, à l'exclusion, à "l'autre". Ce motif paraît toujours extrêmement présent dans la nouvelle américaine de la dernière décennie. Cependant, Alexie ajoute, ici, une nouvelle dimension, un courant apocalyptique, par la différence qui conduit des hommes dans un camp de concentration. On remarquera, par ailleurs, le choix de la référence à l'Holocauste qui intensifie la revendication identitaire de Jonah. En effet, il suggère des parallèles entre la Shoah et la discrimination à l’égard des Amérindiens. Tandis que certains de ses confrères revendiquent la différence raciale, la

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culture "étrangère" et les racines ethniques, Alexie dépeint le cauchemar d'une différence si affirmée qu'elle monte des murs non seulement entre les individus mais aussi entre les enveloppes charnelles qu'elle finit par diaboliser et détruire. Alexie se caractérise dans ses romans par une certaine hostilité envers le(s) mythe(s) américain(s). Alexie ne fait aucune concession ni au rêve américain ni à l'idéalisation des "Native Americans", qu'il dépeint, de fictions en fictions, aussi bien incultes qu'intellectuels, généreux et cupides, malveillants comme enjoués. Des humains, donc, loin des clichés de l'Indien dans sa réserve, des humains comme « les autres ». La (re)naissance de l'homme ne survient que lorsque l'un d'entre eux, à l'instar d'Alexie, arrache le "skeptron", qui confère autorité à l'orateur, des mains des rois puis pose par écrit ses histoires, ses valeurs, sa liberté. Alexie semble alors appartenir à la fois à la littérature d'accusation définie par Anzieu, et à celle de la maturité. En effet, Alexie exhale, plus qu'il ne pousse, un cri / réquisitoire, dans la mesure où il se résout à faire le deuil de ses utopies. La révélation de Jonah se constitue d'une sagesse à l'aube d'un jour de paix et non de guerre.

13 Cette dernière émerge de sa prise de conscience des forces qui le font, du "pouvoir- savoir" dont parle Foucault.

Ecriture mnésique

14 La nouvelle crée un écho cauchemardesque au roman Indian Killer7de Sherman Alexie, où un meurtrier mutilait ses victimes de façon rituelle puis les scalpait. "The Sin Eaters" constitue en cela une relecture effrayante du mythe américain. Elle se définit, à la fois, autant comme une métaphore pour le passé de génocides et d'entreprises d'acculturation des nations amérindiennes par les Etats Unis que comme une véritable gifle envers les blancs politiquement corrects qui idéalisent les "pure Indians". Cette fable aux allures apocalyptiques offre une vision cinglante de l'histoire pourvue d'une lueur d'espoir. L'imagination, clé de voûte du processus fictionnel, incarne le subterfuge nécessaire et le moyen de "défendre le peuple contre lui-même", comme écrit Sartre dans ses Mots.8 Devant l’horreur du démembrement et de l’oubli, Jonah devient le narrateur salvateur et se constitue son propre univers fantasmagorique. Parce que la mémoire du créateur semble avant tout la mémoire du corps, Jonah inscrit dans la chair du corpus, par une écriture mnésique, ses histoires, sa littérature, sa quête de mémoire. Et c'est cette dernière qui le sauve. Tel Ishmael rescapé de la noyade pour raconter l'histoire de la folie destructrice d'Ahab et de la baleine blanche, Jonah survit pour être le porteur de parole. Il remonte le temps, renaît à travers son histoire, crée un lien, tant recherché par ses héritiers, avec le passé torturé de son peuple, rattachant l'ancien monde tribal à celui, contemporain, des blancs et, en cela, offre une possibilité de rédemption. On remarquera que le rêve prémonitoire de Jonah annonce le passage d'un univers ambidextre, à l'instar du père (c'est-à-dire à la fois vers un monde positif et un monde négatif) à un monde orienté vers un chaos ou une renaissance (p.81, l. 19 et l.24). Les « Sin Eaters » se muent alors en des "sinisters" inquiétants. La littérature post-moderne, en particulier par le biais de la parodie, démonte les systèmes de représentation par lesquels nous nous connaissons à travers notre culture. Elle subvertit la doctrine, la "doxa", par un regard critique sur le passé et non nostalgique. On suggèrera, alors, que l'absence d'humour, de ton décalé, de second degré ou de parodie dans la nouvelle, contrairement aux neuf autres nouvelles du recueil, accentue

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l'importance que l'auteur attache à tous ces corps blessés pansés par la langue. En ce sens, par son sérieux, cette nouvelle / pivot offre la clé du recueil. Cet "Indien le plus fort du monde" (pour reprendre le titre du recueil), né de souffrances, est celui qui, par les cris de l'écrit, renaît au monde et, surtout, à lui-même. En lui donnant une mémoire, un passé qui combat les atrocités du temps présent, l'écriture semble constituer le seul territoire que l'enfant puisse fouler sans danger, son histoire identique, se répétant éternellement et, lecteur après lecteur, changeant le monde.

15 Alexie appelle à prendre la parole pour tout dire, pour dénoncer, pour éclairer les ténèbres, pour annuler l'ignorance, pour se libérer ou, tout simplement, être.

L'imagination fictionnelle ou écrire l'Autre pour être Soi

16 La leçon de l’histoire de la différence d’Alexie est celle de son existence même. Par la création d'un monde intérieur fantastique, le garçon survit. Il brise le silence imposé. Que révèle alors l'intertextualité avec le mythe de Jonah enfoui dans la baleine ? Le Jonah de "The Sin Eaters" apprend que seuls son âme et son esprit peuvent l'aider à sortir métaphoriquement de la baleine / prison. Douglas Robinson explique dans American Apocalypses. The Image of the End of the World in American Literature ce qui suit : In the whale's belly, the absence Jonah seeks is revealed as internality, specifically the internality of a prison; to escape, Jonah must unlearn his simplistic notions of externality, and go out by first going in. That is, Jonah's path out of the whale's belly lies not through the whale's skin, an outward direction that a mythic hero (or an Ahab) would take, but through the inwardness of his own mind. (...) One goes out by first going in, and synecdochically inverting internality into externality.9

17 Si l’on en croit Robinson, c'est bien la conscience de son Moi qui ramène le Jonah d’Alexie vers sa communauté. Comme les deux petites filles qui ne se séparent plus parce qu'elles se sont reconnues. En créant cette fable pour le moins déstabilisante, le narrateur prône des valeurs essentielles telles que la tolérance, la fraternité, l'égalité et la liberté. Et la portée de son écriture provocante, irrévérencieuse, pleine d'une frénésie langagière, de croître en intensité et en vie. La nouvelle devient donc un conte initiatique où l'enfermement de Jonah lui permet de comprendre comment en étant lui-même, avec son passé, ses histoires, ses souvenirs, il peut échapper aux militaires, de façon symbolique, et faire de son intériorité une évasion : "I would survive and live on" (p.118, l.24). Ce faisant, Alexie défait l'allégorie de la caverne de Platon : c’est à l'intérieur que l'on apprend, et à l'extérieur que l'on est trompé. Néanmoins, pour Platon, "à l'origine de cette prison qu'est l'ignorance, il y a le corps et ses désirs. Engendrant plaisirs et douleurs, le désir cloue l'âme au corps et la fiche en lui. La philosophie (...) a pour tâche de délier notre âme du corps par la connaissance des réalités intelligibles ou Idées"10. Et quelle est cette vérité que le Jonah de "The Sin Eaters", délivré de son corps, découvre si ce n’est son identité ? Son identité d'Amérindien. Tous les visages rencontrés dans le camp lui rappellent le sien, la couleur de sa peau, mais surtout sa différence par rapport aux blancs. Il est Autre donc lui-même. On pourrait dire que l'initiation de Jonah renverse les principes habituels. Si l'enfant subit une réelle transformation, une mort symbolique par la plongée dans les ténèbres du camp souterrain, ce rite initiatique ne l'entraîne pas du côté du sacré. En effet, sa découverte, son épiphanie, sa renaissance, proviennent de la connaissance traumatisante qui désacralise les corps.

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We could all have been siblings. We could all have been the same person. We could all have been a thousand vestigial reproductions of a single organ, all of us struggling to find a purpose, a space to stand and breathe, enough room to function within the large body of a thing, a person, a crowd called Indian. Like a newborn, I was losing my ability to tell the difference between my body and the body of the person next to me. (p.99, l.8)

18 Si tous les corps paraissent identiques et voués à la même disparition, seuls l'esprit, les contes, les histoires, les corpus que chacun porte en soi, créeront alors la différence. Et une différence, qui cette fois, sera salvatrice. Du corps du nouveau-né perdu, le corpus du narrateur, de l’écrivain, en fait un homme.

19 En outre, le motif du corps symbolique est intensifié par la référence à Moby Dick dans la mesure où l’œuvre de Melville offre, avant tout, la narration d'un corps blessé, d'une déchirure, d'un homme coupé en deux et de sa jambe arrachée. Les allusions à cet hypotexte, c'est-à-dire la baleine qui avale Jonah et le recrache, puis la mention de Ishmael qui inscrit sur son bras les dimensions de la baleine tout comme Jonah compare la peau et les pages d'un livre, intensifient le thème de la résurrection. En effet, tel Ishmael, Jonah survit pour relater son histoire et traduire le monde dans son propre livre ; un monde d'assertions de l'identité à travers la différence. L'intertextualité évidente avec Moby Dick, qui se réfère, comme "The Sin Eaters" au Livre de Jonas, insiste sur une relecture mythique de la nouvelle. On peut comprendre cette dernière comme une terrifiante fiction apocalyptique. Néanmoins, ce serait oublier le choix du prénom de Jonah porteur, ici, d'un sens intertextuel qui aiguise véritablement la portée de la nouvelle.

20 Il semblerait que, chez Alexie, afin de survivre, pour sauver son corps, il convienne de maîtriser le corpus des mots, des textes, des narrations des souffrances du passé. Et les palimpsestes textuels de rappeler les palimpsestes corporels des marques, tatouages et cicatrices. La métatextualité ne semble ainsi pas le véritable subterfuge car il fige les personnages dans leur douleur. Alors, seule la création de ses propres mots, de ses contes, permet de libérer les corps prisonniers du sang coagulé des blessures du passé. Jonah accomplit le processus inverse. Son corps étant « instrumentalisé » par sa couleur, altéré jusqu'à le faire devenir cet autre, "l'étranger", Jonah échappe à la mort par la subversion de l'écriture – seule révolte possible. La vie semble une perpétuelle traduction, un incessant ajustement aux autres. Dans "The Sin Eaters", Jonah, en nommant la lumière "père" et l'obscurité "mère" (p.100, l.12 et 29), plus qu'à traduire le monde inconnu qu'il traverse dans sa propre langue, cherche à combler le vide par ses histoires, par sa voix d'écrivain. Les mots deviennent alors guérisseurs de maux. Selon Alexie, chaque narrateur, pour la plupart intradiégétiques, serait porteur d'espérance dans la mesure où il a survécu. Les nombreuses pages que Jonah offre en constituent les preuves éternelles. Il semblerait que l'enfant ait prolongé son conte autant qu'il ait pu, pendant d'une autre intemporalité, celle de Schéhérazade, pour échapper à l'oubli, à la mort. Cependant, à l'instar du corps, toujours susceptible d'être blessé ou démembré et voué à une lente décomposition, le corpus, une fois achevé, ne devient pas inaltérable. Le corpus et le corps semblent voués à la manipulation du lecteur / regard. Ceci dit, si le récit parvient ou non à conserver son identité malgré les différentes interprétations produites par divers lecteurs, le narrateur demeure le maître des pistes de lectures lancées. De plus, seul le corpus, par l'imagination de son générateur, offre au corps de l’opprimé la possibilité de suturer ses blessures. Ainsi, le corpus sauve l'homme, même si seulement momentanément, lui permettant de s'évader par l'imagination. Cette

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dernière procure à Jonah une désincarnation qui lui permet de ne plus ressentir de douleur physique. I wanted to hear a story told by a woman who knew thousands of stories. Stories had always kept me safe before. I had always trusted stories. Frightened and tired, I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to tell myself a story. (p.93, l.1)

21 On remarquera néanmoins l'emploi du plus-que-parfait qui, par contraste, suggère que seule la création de son propre corpus soulage véritablement l'homme de ses souffrances. Les récits des autres ne protègent plus Jonah. Ces derniers demeurent les contes de l'étranger. Il lui faut introduire son propre conte pour survivre.

22 Si l'issue de la nouvelle ouvre sur une interrogation béante et pose plus de questions qu'elle n'en résout, « The Sin Eaters » suggère qu'entre les mots / maux du corps et le corps des mots, la « scripturalité » permet d'épancher la voix intérieure. Seule la violence du corpus "forcera [l'homme] d'être libre".11

23 Sherman Alexie se trouve au cœur fondamental, batailleur, porte-drapeau, de la génération 2000 de la nouvelle ethnique américaine. Il évoque une identité blessée par la mortification de la chair, d'un "en-dedans" perdu dans un "en-dehors" cauchemardesque. Désacraliser, réifier ou cacher sous un masque le corps, au-dessus duquel règne le "fantôme de l'incarnation", revient à bafouer le Moi fragile de l'Autre dit "minoritaire", "différent", "étranger". Seul remède, le corpus - où le lecteur ne cesse d'entendre la voix intérieure de la différence rescapée de la souffrance du corps, par un corpus démystifiant et pourtant salvateur. On aura vu que si la corporéité peut engendrer des souffrances et faire l'objet de manipulations externes, la textualité, elle, ouvre un chemin vers une intériorité rédemptrice. Elément de troubles et de transgressions sur lequel l'homme cherche à inscrire son discours minoritaire ou ses voix de pouvoir, le corps semble au centre de la problématique du dire. Les nouvelles apparaissent comme des traversées de la corporéité qui mènent à une approche de l'intériorité de l'expérience scripturale - créatrice de vie. Frapper l'imagination par un corpus pour que l'on ne frappe plus les corps. Des pages pour parer contre tous les coups, physiques et idéologiques. Les nouvelles ingèrent la force / violence des narrateurs et génèrent un savoir, non lénifiant, émancipateur. Approcher de façon fictionnelle ce "nulle part" lui donne forme, un espace dans la chair, réelle, des livres et, par notre lecture, une existence. Seulement alors, en parcourant leurs territoires de solitude et d'exclusion, pouvons-nous les annuler, les détruire. Si l'on peut parler, comme Barthes, à propos du style dépouillé d'effets ostensiblement littéraires, d'une "écriture blanche"12, on dira que celle d’Alexie évoque une écriture rouge. Rouge-sang, rouge-feu, rouge de colère, impitoyable, comme un avertissement des "Peaux-Rouges". La nouvelle "The Sin Eaters", par la brutalité de son propos, emprisonne au cœur d'un temps en spirale, dans une cellule ovale, un lecteur malmené. Néanmoins, ce dernier, conscient des forces en mouvement qui le dirigeaient en secret, émerge de la lecture plus libre qu'auparavant. Mettant dans le sillage d'une écriture travaillée une réflexion épistémologique sur l'Autre, la différence, le regard de / sur l'étranger, la signification de l'identité raciale, ici oxymore, Alexie rejoint ainsi les plus grandes interrogations de la philosophie et de la littérature.

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NOTES

1. O'Connor, Franck. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. London: Macmillan, 1962, 19. 2. Alexie, Sherman. The Toughest Indian in the World. London: Vintage, 2001, 76-120. 3. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Toronto: Seal Books, 1998. 4. Levinas, Emmanuel. "Intentionnalité et Sensation". Revue Internationale de Philosophie, fascicules 1-2, 71-72, 1965 : 44-45. 5. Anzieu, Didier. Le corps de l’œuvre, essais psychanalytiques sur le travail créateur. Paris : Gallimard, 1981, 44. 6. Derrida, Jacques. L'écriture et la différence. Paris : Seuil, 1967, 23. 7. Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer. London: Vintage, 1996. 8. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Les Mots. Paris : Gallimard, 1964, 142. 9. Robinson, Douglas. American Apocalypses. The Image of the End of the World in American Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, 145. 10. Roux-Lanier, Catherine. Le temps des philosophes. Paris : Hatier, 1995, 41. 11. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du Contrat Social. (1762) Livre I, Chapitre VII. Paris : Maxi-Poche, "Classiques français", 1996, 32. 12. Barthes, Roland. Le Degré zéro de l'écriture. Paris : Seuil, 1953, 12.

RÉSUMÉS

If the bodies of Native American individuals seem perpetually tormented and exploited, they constitute means of rebellion when they are transformed into the testimony of a witness – into the body of work of the writer. One can read Sherman Alexie’s collection of short-stories, The Toughest Indian In The World (2001), as scattered bodies regaining shape on paper and forces through his angry red ink. The short-story “The Sin Eaters” constitutes its central nerve with a macabre allegory which links the holocaust to the genocide of the Native American tribes. This apocalyptic tale depicts, in an undetermined moment in time, the removal of Native Americans and their imprisonment in an underground military complex, from the point of view of a boy named Jonah. Though it portrays psychological and physical torture, the short-story manages to produce a truly emancipating knowledge. Putting in the wake of the aesthetic aspect of writing an epistemological questioning on the estrangement undergone by ethnic minorities in the United States nowadays, Alexie reflects on some of the greatest interrogations of philosophy and literature. After analyzing the implications of the chaotic temporality of the short-story, I endeavour to study how disfigured bodies altered into the narrator’s body of work betray both the oppressors’ and the victims’ respective languages of power. I then concentrate on the demystifications undertaken by Alexie’s writing of recollection which demonstrates that, by saying the Other, one becomes Oneself.

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AUTEURS

DIANE SABATIER Diane Sabatier is completing her Ph.D. in contemporary American literature at the University of Orléans. Her Thesis, recipient of a National Allocation for Research, is entitled The Dual Senses of Belonging and Absence by Fifteen Short-Story Writers between 1992 and 2003. Her fields of research include Native, African, Mexican, Caribbean and Asian American writersborn after 1960. She has made a dozen presentations in conferences and published several articles such as “Junglee Girl: Ginu Kamani or the Salvatory Erotism” in Résonances or “Thomas Glave and Linh Dinh’s Dual Senses of Belonging and Absence” in Les Cahiers du CIRHiLL.

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My tongue did things by itself”: story-telling/story-writing in “Conversation with a Cupboard Man” (Ian McEwan)

Richard Pedot

1 Ian McEwan’s short stories are notable for their use of solipsistic, and usually morally disreputable, first person narrators, and also for the discrepancy between the squalor or obscenity of the themes and a seemingly detached, unemotional narration. It is in fact doubly surprising that the characters should be telling their stories: on ethical grounds, it may be found scandalous, for instance, that a sexual pervert, guilty of the murder of a young girl, should be able to recount the events leading to that crime without the slightest trace of remorse or even of understanding; on intellectual grounds, it is no less amazing to discover that the same person can simply express himself articulately.

2 Indeed, in a 1978 interview, Ian Hamilton pointed out to the author that in his first collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, “the first person narrator is a lot more literate, if not literary, than you’d imagine him to be if you had a third person account of how he actually behaves” (Hamilton 8). This might simply look like a then unsolved technical problem for a young author trained in Norwich courses of creative writing and at the time privileging pastiche to find his own style. McEwan at first took Hamilton’s remark as “a legitimate criticism”, defining the issue as that of wanting it both ways: your narrators, he claimed, may be fools, “and yet at the same time you want them to be fairly perceptive people” “to carry lines which are your best lines”— which are therefore given to “morally discredited” persons.

3 McEwan’s perhaps disingenuous eagerness to fall in with Hamilton’s observation—he was after all, while still making his debut, talking to a leading critic—may in fact cloud the issue. Pastiche and inexperience will explain the situation only up to a point and this at the cost of ignoring that the idiosyncratic sense of unease elicited by the early stories originates in the tension between an impossibility to communicate and the

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writerliness of the narrator’s account even in the simplest narrative form. It is precisely this tension that a reading of the narratives in formal terms tends to underestimate even as it underlines it—somehow dissolving the squalor of the subject matter into aesthetics, whether the result be considered as success or failure.

4 Unstated and unquestioned in the exchange between critic and writer is the assumption that sordidness calls for a realistic or, better still, naturalistic rendering. This I take to be the drift of both Hamilton’s question and McEwan’s proviso that “those stories are not dramatic monologues inside a naturalistic framework.” The broader implications of the issue for McEwan’s fiction are not my concern here1 but as a means of broaching the topic of orality in his short stories, I would like to draw attention to the suggestion, in McEwan’s argument, that realistic/naturalistic fiction requires careful mimesis of oral enunciation, but at the same time serves as a reminder that orality in written texts is first and foremost a textual effect—and as such liable to deconstruction. My working hypothesis is that McEwan’s deconstruction of the oral/ textual antinomy—and by the same token of realism in fiction—has to be approached in relation to the stories’ specific challenge: that of handing narration over to people usually deprived of speech—because of intellectual incapacity and/or because their right to speak is queried on moral grounds. We will see that pastiche—the borrowing of someone’s voice in order to pitch one’s own—can take on parodic implications, as a critique of our hermeneutic assumptions, grounded in the belief in the prevalence of live speech (Derrida’s “parole vive”) over writing.

5 The focus of study will be one particular story in McEwan’s first collection, “Conversation with a Cupboard Man” (First Love, Last Rites), admittedly a pastiche of Fowles’s The Collector. McEwan’s attempt with this story was “to do the kind of voice of the man” in Fowles’s book, “that kind of wheedling, self-pitying lower middle-class voice” (Hamilton 18). In fact, it is not primarily the quality of the character’s voice that is at stake in the stylistic emulation, but rather, technically speaking, narrative voice, as the enunciative framework in which the reader is given a homodiegetic account of the main character’s own perversion. The term nevertheless in itself remains ambiguous—still too much fraught with psychological connotations, as Genette freely acknowledges (Genette 76)—, even more so in regards with “Conversation”.

6 As a matter of fact, the story is especially interesting in a discussion of orality because it at once foregrounds and forestalls (oral) communication. As a self-confessed dialogue it seems to start auspiciously enough with the following incipit: “You ask me what I did when I saw this girl. Well, I’ll tell you.” (75) Soon, however, the reader will realise that there is no option other than to “listen” vicariously to the long soliloquy of a 18-year- old “baby”, who had been kept in infancy—i.e. deprived of a language—by his mother, up to the age of seventeen. The initial “you” will turn out to be a mute “social worker” (75) whose actual function will never be elucidated, except as the recipient of the narrator’s sorry tale. The narrator himself is a young man whose sole aspiration, in his own admission, is “to climb into the pram” (87)—out of nostalgia for “the old cotton- wool life when everything was done for me, warm and safe” (82)—and who has elicited for his more or less permanent abode a large cupboard, in secluded darkness. His protracted dependence on his mother in fact has rendered him incapable of any genuine contact with the others, and his natural mode of conversation seems to be of the kind he had with a deaf and dumb inmate of the prison where he served a term for various acts of juvenile delinquency, sitting in the latter’s cell saying nothing or at

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times pouring out his thoughts in perfect awareness that he couldn’t be understood. Basically, indeed, speech is too much for him, as he tells his interlocutor: “I’m sitting in this chair with my arms folded, that’s all right, but I’d rather be lying on the floor gurgling to myself than be talking to you.” (76)

7 So it can be said that “Conversation” ironically stretches to the limits of verisimilitude the discrepancy between inarticulacy and literacy, what can actually be spoken and what is said. Yet, as a monologue addressed to an unknown and silent listener, the story has nevertheless a feel of orality about it and contains many of the usual signs that betray or rather mimic oral delivery in texts—to begin with its brevity, which is compatible with short oral delivery. Sentences tend to be short, clipped, in a predominantly paratactic sequence, as befits such kind of supposedly unrehearsed addresses in which the speaker is not meant to have an overall view of his argument beforehand. This is perhaps the most obvious feature borrowed from Fowles’s narrative. In both cases, the short syntactic range is there to convey a sense of the narrowness of the narrator’s understanding which is rooted in immediacy. This is not the linguistic disarticulation that one would expect from such quarters, but neither is it perfect articulacy.

8 Orality is more obvious, to the point of overkill, in all the elements that support the idea of an audience, from phatic phrases to shifters to rhetorical questions. The narrator’s account is interspersed with words that do not have—at first—precise meaning in themselves with a view to maintaining the fragile bond of narrative between the young man and his mute listener, or on the metatextual level, to underscoring it for the reader—possibly the only audience. The innocuous expletive “well” is to be expected, and is certainly used in its many guises, to emphasize a readiness to talk or go on with the talking—as in “Well, I’ll tell you.”—or to offer a more or less genuine apology for one’s behaviour—“I can see you think I’m dirty and bent. Well, I washed my hands afterwards, which is more than some people.” (75).

9 More common however are direct appeals to the addressee: variations of the “you know” type (“you can imagine”, “you’ve no idea”, …); allusions to the listener’s judgement (“don’t think”, “don’t get me wrong”, “I can see you think”, “you might be thinking”, “you might say”, …) or, in a more circuitous way, to anyone’s judgement, presumably including the listener’s (“it sounds pretty stupid” or “incredible”, “That must sound pretty stupid to you.”, …) Rhetorical questions, although they are by definition not destined to be answered by the listener, if ever there is one, belong in a similar category, in the sense that their purpose is more or as much to make a show of holding the line than to help the argument forward (“Why didn’t I run off …?”, “What did I think of?”, “How did I become an adult?”, “So what could I do?”, …) They are in fact neither more nor less direct than the above forms of addressing the hypothetical social worker.

10 The enunciative stakes could then be reversed, arguing that it is not so much the presence of an audience that requires such patterns of communication, as the latter which generate the audience, or simply make one possible. A witness is by no means indispensable, except in potentia. As for the questions, they might as well be the implied witness’s—be they explicitly voiced or the narrator’s guesswork—as the figment of the latter’s imagination, in the absence of any actual addressee. The incipit—“You asked me what I did when I saw this girl.”—is a good case in point, as it dispenses with any interrogation mark, thereby vacillating between the re-statement of a former question,

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a mere echo of it, and something akin to a demand that the question should be put to the speaker, which is the same as putting it in the interlocutor’s mouth.

11 Similar conclusions, of course, can be drawn as regards the direct appeals mentioned above, which set up the conditions for the presence of an interlocutor rather than being its by-product2. This seems to suggest that there is no inherent difficulty in mimicking dialogue in texts, since dialogue is always already a good imitation of itself. Such indicators of orality as those alluded to up to now may be seen to work like grammatical shifters, pointing to positions waiting to be filled up by applicants. As a matter of fact, all of them rely on the I/you deictic pair, itself related more implicitly to spatial and temporal deixis. Predictably, when this deixis is explicit, it contributes to reinforce the illusion of (the narrator’s, and by the same token the social worker’s) presence, but significantly, this occurs exclusively in the opening and concluding paragraphs, as if to frame the whole narrative, and more precisely to introduce the main prop: the cupboard.

12 Interestingly enough, it is just as the narrator conjures up the big wardrobe—“You see that cupboard there, it takes up most of the room.” (75)—that the reader as implied interlocutor is bound to feel the most frustrated: he cannot see—i.e. check the existence of—what the use of shifters (that, there, the) implies is present at the moment of enunciation, which is in turn validated in fiction by the existence, or imaginary presence, of the narrator. This eventually suggests that the most successful imitation of orality in narrative is bound to be at the same time the most doubtful. The paradox has been touched upon already, it is that of the inversion of the process of authentication: in writing, without the immediate presence of the speaker, it is the shifters that imply an actual context instead and not the context that grants actuality to the shifters —“here”, “now”, “you”, etc., being understood in relation to the moment and place of enunciation.

13 To return more specifically to “Conversation”, deictic reference moves in a circle. The reader is led to infer the presence of the room and the piece of furniture because it is a logical consequence of the oral frame of enunciation— of the presence of a narrator pointing to them in his speech. At the same time, however, we take his narrative to be oral because of the shifters, whose handling is specific to a context of oral, immediate communication. Orality is deixis, deixis is orality.

14 Leaving aside the more general questions about phonocentrism such paradox elicits, we are still confronted to a narrative which problematises enunciation as presence—or presence as the site of enunciation—in the subtle play of deictic antinomies (here/ there, now/then). “Here”, the site of enunciation, designates the attic room where the narrator is speaking, in opposition to “there”: “You see that cupboard there, it takes up most of the room. I ran all the way back here, climbed inside and tossed myself off.” (75) So “there” is not situated outside—though such a place exists—but within, to the point, however, of almost including it within itself, taking up most of it. This doesn’t spell the end of the dichotomy in a fusion of opposites, but hints at a hierarchical reversal, with the supplement exiled into secondary position claiming precedence.

15 As suggested by the numerous repetitions of “in there” at the end of the story, following the reiteration of the phrase concerning the volume taken up by the wardrobe, the latter’s inside is a crucial location for the narrator. The implication is that, even though he is presently indulging in speech for the social worker’s sake, he’d rather be indulging himself in the dark and silent surrogate womb “there”. He would

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therefore be truly present to himself not when speaking, here, now, craving instead a pre-linguistic mode of existence, which he has known for the greatest part of his life. The cupboard is not only “there” but also “then”—“the old cotton-wool life” that seems to take up most of his present life: “Mostly I sit in the cupboard thinking about the old times in Staines, wishing it all again.” (87) Yet, we should not jump to the conclusion that presence or reality exists only outside language, in perfect unison with the maternal body. Instead we should acknowledge a disturbing relation between silence and speech, bearing in mind that the young man’s narrative, though legitimated by the social worker’s presence, working as a prompt, revolves around a linguistic void, which can be considered as its originary site, seeing its importance in the narrator’s mind. It is as if the there and then of silence, or of gurgling, were presiding over the here and now, the whole scene, of story-telling—or is it of writing?

16 The tension between here and there, now and then, also being that between speech and silence, finds another expression in the tension we started from: between McEwan’s characters’ literacy/literariness and their foolishness or, we might even say at times, their near-imbecility. The narrator of “Conversation” is no exception to the rule, as his narrative seems such an impossible feat of utterance coming from someone deprived of speech for so long. Indeed, the idiot telling the tale is no Benjy, he has learned a thing or two, and thus at times resorts to unexpected notions, that do no sound his—as, for instance, when he rejects the hypothesis of “the pain-pleasure of being frustrated” (86) to explain his nostalgia of the warm oven in which he had been locked up by a malevolent cook, during a short-lived stint in a hotel kitchen.

17 Should we take the situation merely as evidence of inexperience or of the prevalence of pastiche over naturalistic representation, we would miss much of the text’s capacity to disturb. Read in terms of the narrator’s belated acquisition of language—experienced as violent imposition—and his concomitant longing for a return to a pre-linguistic life “in the pram”, the discrepancy between linguistic ability and existential idiocy takes on a different colouring which is not necessarily detrimental to the diegetic stakes.

18 A brief consideration of the narrator’s summary of his apprenticeship will substantiate this claim. This is how it begins: How did I become an adult? I’ll tell you, I never did learn. I have to pretend. All the things you take for granted I have to do it all consciously. I’m always thinking about it, like I was on the stage. I’m sitting in this chair with my arms folded, that’s all right, but I’d rather be lying on the floor gurgling to myself than be talking to you. (76)

19 In the narrator’s perception, then, the language he uses, which he was forced to learn in about two months (77) is not really his, but an imitation, role-playing. So much for the immediate presence of the speaking subject to himself/herself in speech. “I have only one language, Derrida writes, and it is not mine” (Derrida 15). Such is the paradox that McEwan dramatises by imagining the trauma of acquiring language in a seventeen-year-old boy, of having, in the boy’s “own” words, his tongue doing “things by itself as if it belonged to someone else” (77). The experience of language then is one of alienation, even or perhaps especially that of psychology—the story’s Œdipal frame of reference is a constant ironisation of psychoanalytic discourse. Eventually, no conversation is possible because the implied social worker is offered a mirror of his/her discourse—which makes his/her physical presence dispensable.

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20 In its staging of language as dispossession, “Conversation” is exemplary of the deconstruction of the illusion of speech as presence to oneself. This, I would argued, is achieved not despite the apparent impossibility—from a naturalistic point of view—of the narrative voice, but because of it. Much of McEwan’s short fiction—and this I take to include his first novel, The Cement Garden—belongs to what French critic Dominique Rabaté calls impossible narratives (“textes impossibles”—Rabaté 72), among which he ranks such first person narratives (or récits, in Blanchot’s meaning) as Louis-René Des Forêts’s Le Bavard, Albert Camus’s L’Etranger, Edgar Poe’s “William Wilson”, or again Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable. These fictions have the rhetorical power to mime oral communication and involve the reader in the semblance of a direct address (“l’oralité d’une parole, impliquant le lecteur dans ce qui semble une adresse directe”—Rabaté 17) while being at the same time soliloquies. Hence a foregrounding of the narrative voice (“monstration de leur voix narrative”—Rabaté 7) that puts into question its “presence” (to itself).

21 This is where the scene of story-telling can be seen to become a scene of writing, which is what the Genettian narratological concept of voice, according to Rabaté, tends to play down. The paradoxical combination of speech and silence we have detected in “Conversation” thus emerges as the dramatisation of what, in Western culture at least, defines writing—silent language or written voice. For the paradox is not the sole work of fiction. It results from an inherent flaw within presence, a différance, in spoken language. Fiction foregrounds the phonocentric illusion, the illusion of the fullness of live speech, as a transparent and, as it were, oxymoronically, immediate medium of subjectivity. It plays about with the play within (spoken) language.

22 “Conversation” further problematises the default in presence by making apparent the gap between the speaking subject and a language, his language, that belongs to someone else and by a dramatic use of deictic reference sets the stage for the enigmatic bond of silence and speech that seems to make narratives possible, or even perhaps, necessary. The literariness of speech in McEwan’s story should not be taken as mere artistic blemish. If it is that, how are we to account for the uneasiness felt at reading the solipsistic tale of a “morally discredited” person? Rather it contributes to the problematisation of oral communication, emphasising in particular the alienation of perversion in the discourse on perversion, toying with the (im)possibility of a discourse of perversion. How perversion in McEwan’s fiction, far from being anecdotic, partakes of the exploration of the issue of identity in/through language, in particular by the challenge it constitutes for the construction of narrative voice3, remains to be shown, but “Conversation” is undoubtedly a good starting point for such an adventure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Derrida, Jacques. Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine. Incises. Paris: Galilée, 1996.

Genette, Gérard. Figures : III. Poétique. Paris : Seuil, 1972.

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Hamilton, Ian. “Points of Departure”. New Review 5.2 (1978): 9-21.

McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden. 1978. London: Picador, 1980.

—. First Love, Last Rites. 1975. London: Picador, 1976.

Pedot, Richard. Perversions textuelles dans la fiction d’Ian McEwan. L’Œuvre et la psyché. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999.

Rabaté, Dominique. Vers une littérature de l’épuisement. Paris : Corti, 1991.

NOTES

1. See R. Pedot, Perversions textuelles dans la fiction d’Ian McEwan, for an extended discussion of such tensions within McEwan’s works up to Black Dogs. 2. A stage performance of the story (Lyric Studio Theatre, Hammersmith, 1982) indeed dispensed completely with the postulated social worker, effectively replaced by the audience. 3. Not surprisingly, Derrida’s Monolinguisme de l’autre, also queries the issue of identity, claiming that identity is “never given, received, or reached”, that there is only “the endless, unceasingly fantastical process of identification” to be endured (“Une identité n’est jamais donnée, reçue ou atteinte, non, seul s’endure le processus interminable, indéfiniment phantasmatique, de l’identification”, 53).

ABSTRACTS

Le but de cet article est d’examiner la forme et la fonction du cadre énonciatif d’une nouvelle de Ian McEwan, « Conversation with a Cupboard Man » (First Love, Last Rites), qui semble imiter (pour mieux la parodier) une communication orale. Il apparaîtra qu’en fait cette nouvelle se joue, jusqu’aux limites de la vraisemblance, du hiatus qui existe entre le dit et ce qui peut effectivement être énoncé, ou entre la littérarité des énoncés et l’incompétence linguistique des narrateurs. L’absence de traitement réaliste du « dialogue » entre un travailleur social et le narrateur de « Conversation with a Cupboard Man », un « bébé » de 18 ans, maintenu en enfance (c’est-à-dire privé de langage articulé, maintenu infans) par sa mère, est un commentaire ironique sur l’activité de lire l’illisible, autant que sur la représentation du langage oral dans un texte écrit. Dans cette conversation monologique, le langage est mis en avant comme dépossession, et finit par ressembler à une sorte de donjon déserté par un sujet toujours insaisissable. L’acquisition tardive du langage pour le narrateur, ainsi que son envie de retrouver une existence pré-linguistique, son désir de « retourner dans la poussette », sont l’expression du traumatisme qui consiste à se voir imposer une langue qui, comme le suggère Derrida, n’est jamais la sienne : à voir sa langue, comme le remarque le narrateur, faire des choses par elle- même, « as if it belonged to someone else ».

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AUTHORS

RICHARD PEDOT Richard Pedot is Professor of modern British literature at the English Department of the University of Paris X, Dauphine. He has published numerous articles on contemporary writers such as McEwan, Ishiguro, Carter and Swift as well as on 19th and 20th century writers such as Conrad, Joyce and Hawthorne among others. He is also the author of two books, Perversions textuelles dans l’œuvre d’Ian McEwan. L’Harmattan, 1999, and Heart of Darkness de Joseph Conrad : le sceau de l’inhumain. Ed. du Temps, 2003.

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A Tapestry of Riddling Links: Universal Contiguity in A. S. Byatt’s “Arachne”1

María Jesús Martínez Alfaro

1 It is generally agreed that the postmodern critical consciousness is particularly sensitive to the phenomena of textual transformations and shows a definite preference for rewriting as a frame for critical discussion. As Matei Calinescu points out, “rewriting” is a “relatively new and fashionable term for a number of very old techniques” (1997: 243) but it is, undeniably, and as he himself remarks, what most critics and readers in general have in mind when dealing with much contemporary literature. Whatever the search was for only a few generations ago, the hunt now is “for secret sources, implied models, parodies, and other forms of declared or oblique rewriting” (248). It need not be argued here that the “originality” of present-day art lies in the way in which it makes use of second-hand materials. Writing over and against what has been written, subscribing and, simultaneously, questioning other forms, expressing the new through the old and the already-known, this is what constitutes the essence of most postmodernist literature, a literature which is both enjoyable and disquieting, playful and serious and, above all, aware of its own palimpsestuous (intertextual) quality.

2 Certain historical periods have proved to exert a greater attraction than others on postmodernist writers and readers alike: the Restoration, the eighteenth century, and, above all, the Victorian era. The interest in the latter has even led to the rise of a new genre, which Sally Shuttleworth first called “the retro-Victorian novel” (1997) and which is now commonly referred to as “the neo-Victorian novel”. What I have noticed of late (which does not mean that the phenomenon is that recent, but simply, that this is something I have been thinking about for a relatively short time) is that many writers are looking back farther and beyond the historical periods mentioned above in order to find inspiration in ancient myths and legends. As Marina Warner (2002: 210-11) has pointed out, Hellenic and Roman narratives have fed writers for millennia, but there is indeed “a fresh surge of hunger for revisionings [of these ancient

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narratives], attested by many contemporary writers’ inventions and versions”. Thus, there is Christopher Logue’s War Music (1997), a combination of translation, adaptation and new poem inspired that builds upon Homer’s Iliad; Barry Unsworth’s The Songs of the Kings (2003), a retelling of the events prior to the Greek army sailing for Troy particularly reliant on Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis; Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1991), a play which conflates Sophocles and the troubles in Northern Ireland; Ted Hughes’ best-selling Tales from Ovid (1997), containing twenty four tales in verse translated from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s The Throne of Labdacus (2000), an elegiac meditation on the story of Oedipus uttered by a poetic speaker that enters the mind of the oracular god Apollo; the Canadian Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998), a verse novel about a gay love affair between Heracles and the ancient monster Geryon; Marina Warner’s The Leto Bundle (2002), a novel inspired by the figure of the female in permanent exile (Leto was made pregnant by Jupiter and had to escape the wrath of his wife, Juno) and whose plot sweeps from mythological times to the Middle Ages, to Victorian Europe, and then to the present day; Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles: A Novel (2002); etc. More names could be added to the list, but these, I think, are enough to illustrate my point.

3 In an essay entitled “Old Tales, New Forms”, A. S. Byatt (2000: 123) approaches this resurgence of ancient narratives as part of a more general movement in which other literatures besides those written in English participate. This is, she says, something she found out as early as 1990, when she was chairperson of the judges for the first presentation of the European Literature Prize. By then, she had spent eleven years teaching English and American Literature, and was curious to know what was going on in contemporary Europe, of which she and her writing were also a part: I can remember the moment when I realised I had discovered a pattern of forms and ideas new at least to me —and at the same time as old as Western literature. I began to read Roberto Calasso’s Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia [The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony] late one night in bed in the summer on a French mountainside. I was still reading at dawn, hanging over the edge of the bed, and what I was reading was something I already knew —the Greek myths retold at a gallop, sensuous and immediate, and at the same time threaded through with brilliant and knotty reflections on the relations of myth, story, language and reality. Looking at the other books that excited me among the entries I began to discern a general European interest in storytelling, and in thinking about storytelling. (Byatt, 2000: 123)

4 The frequent recourse to ancient myths and legends on the part of contemporary writers perfectly fits the pattern Byatt refers to in the quotation above. In this context, it is not difficult to understand the appeal exerted in the last decades by Ovid, especially by his Metamorphoses. Ovid is one of the greatest storytellers in ancient literature, but, beyond that, the very concept of metamorphosis seems to be at the core of present-day literary practices: already-existing material is time and again pressed into new ways of telling the world/the self, in which the unitary, the discreet, the permanent, simply do not obtain. Tales of metamorphoses embody both the transformational force affecting stories, which shift forms like the characters in Ovid’s poem, and also the transformational power of storytelling itself.

5 Antonia Byatt’s “Arachne”, which constitutes the focus of this article, is part of an anthology entitled Ovid Metamorphosed (2001), which somehow doubles the idea of metamorphosis back on itself by turning the stories in the classical poem into the object of the same shape-shifting force they tell about. Its editor, Philip Terry (2001:

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15), quotes Michael Hofmann and James Lasdum when, in the introduction to their anthology of new poetic translations —After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994)— they write: “Ovid is once again enjoying a boom”. This “boom”, Terry explains, continued with the publication in 1997 of Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid. In the preface to his best- selling work, Hughes approaches Ovid’s poem in the light of a change of paradigm: the Metamorphoses is contemporaneous with the birth of Christ, this being a time when belief in the Roman gods had collapsed and Christianity was still some way off. Thus, the editor of Ovid Metamorphosed invites us to connect this view of Ovid’s work as emerging from the psychological gulf that opens at the end of an era with the fact that the Ovidian “boom” to which he relates his own collection is taking place, precisely, at the turn of the century. Thus, the renewed interest in Ovid’s work makes sense in the context of the gulf that opens at our own fin de siècle, as if the dynamics of metamorphosis were in tune with our postmodern times. In fact, metamorphosis in Ovid’s poem is something that happens at critical moments, and, similarly, it seems that tales of metamorphoses have often been resorted to through the ages as a vehicle for expressing conflicts and uncertainties. Moreover, many of the concepts that critics have used to describe postmodern fiction are not very different from Ovid’s techniques: play, irony, repetition and parody, heterogeneity, disjunctive style and difference, disruption of borders, nesting (stories within stories), plurivocity, ambiguity, and a view of the self and of meaning as if in constant flux, inapprehensible, unstable, constantly becoming other.

6 Convinced that it would be an impossible task for a single author to try and rework Ovid’s stories by him/herself, Philip Terry asked a number of writers to contribute to his collection by writing whatever they liked, so long as there was some connection with the work of Ovid. The range of stories and variety of tone is wide, thus recapturing something of the heterogeneity of Ovid’s literary production. As to Byatt’s “Arachne”, this is not a short story in the traditional sense, but, in the editor’s words, “a mixed genre narrative weaving together elements of autobiography, essay, art history and sheer story telling” (Terry, 2001: 3). There is much in Byatt’s piece that recalls what Italo Calvino referred to as “universal contiguity” in an essay entitled, interestingly, “Ovid and Universal Contiguity” (in The Literary Machine). It is the purpose of this article then, to see how this idea of universal contiguity applies to a postmodernist narrative that builds on one of Ovid’s stories of metamorphoses in order to produce a beautiful tapestry of interconnected tales.

7 The poetry of the Metamorphoses, Calvino says, is mainly rooted in the “indistinct borderlands between diverse worlds” (1989: 147). Even at the most basic formal level, Ovid’s organisation of his material tends to underline this fact. Thus, the end of a story rarely coincides with the end of one of the books into which the poem is divided. As Calvino explains, this is a technique to whet the reader’s appetite for the next instalment, but it is also an exponent of the work’s contiguity, which would not have been divided into books were it not because its length required a certain number of scrolls (160). The universe of the Metamorphoses is full of tales in which terrestrial forms and stories blend with celestial forms and stories. This contiguity between gods and human beings is just an illustration, an instance, of the contiguity between everything there is: gods and goddesses, men and women, fauna, flora and the mineral world. Moreover, the connections between gods, men, and nature do not imply, in Calvino’s words, a definite “hierarchical order, but an intricate system of interrelations in which

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each level can influence the others [...]. Myth, in Ovid, is the field of tension in which these forces clash and balance” (150).

8 The poetry of “Arachne”, I would say, lies in a similar clash and balance, contiguity and blending, tension and interrelation, between the different elements that make up Byatt’s piece. Moreover, these elements generate in turn so many echoes that the intricate web they constitute seems to be only a part of that which the reader may continue to weave just by tracing the references that the narrative contains and/or by adding his/her own connections to the subject of spiders and weaving, as the author herself does. Interestingly, one reaches the end of the narrative without actually being given “a sense of an ending”. What one gets, instead, is a feeling that the piece could be much longer, as if Byatt’s contribution were just long enough to show that there is no end to possible connections.

9 There are four main narrative threads in Byatt’s “Arachne”, distinguishable by the use of different typefaces. The effect is that of a patchwork, as if the text was a quilt made up of various pieces and materials. Thus, what the reader finds are sections of varying length, each separated by a blank space from the following section, which is invariably written in another typeface. Each of these four typefaces alternates with the others throughout the narrative, a fact which logically confronts the reader with the challenge of finding out the rationale that accounts for the use of a certain typeface in each specific fragment: from the very start, one realises that there must be something that ties together the sections that look the same on the page. This formal fragmentation also produces the same effect as the Ovidian stories left in mid-air at the end of each book: the reader anxiously waits for the next instalment, while simultaneously becoming aware of the curious ways in which the themes dealt with in the sections written in the same typeface intertwine with those explored in the rest. In strict order of appearance, the first narrative thread is that of autobiography, and so, the first person singular is used in these sections to tell about the author’s girlhood and schooldays, her interest in Greek myths, her grandmother’s skill at embroidery, her failed attempts to learn, etc. The second thread is the scientific one: these sections focus on real spiders and comment on their anatomy, the features and abilities of different spices, the properties and composition of spiderweb.... The third thread leads the reader back to Ovid, since it consists of a retelling of the conflict between Athena and Arachne as presented in the Metamorphoses, and a description of the weaving contest between them, followed by the goddess’ decision to transform the girl into a spider. The fourth thread is that of Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas: a description of the painting and of its various interpretations, with a special emphasis on the by now generally accepted view of the work as a version of the fable of Arachne.

10 In a sense, then, one can say that the change in typeface is also a change of subject. In another sense, though, there are also noticeable differences between the sections in which the same typeface is used. For instance, what I have called the autobiographical thread begins with the author’s childhood experiences, but as the narrative advances, it evolves into a reflection on literary spiders. This is still connected with the author, as these literary spiders are, in some cases, spiders in her novels (there is Christabel’s writing of spiders in Possession) and, in other cases, spiders she has read about in other writers’ work (Thomas Browne, Pope, Swift, Emily Dickinson, etc.). Written in the same typeface, we also find a description of an exhibition of tapestries by Danish women which Byatt visited in 1998, and whose technique —similar to Byatt’s— consisted in

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mixing tradition and novelty by having resort to classic and uncommon/unexpected materials (silk, wool, but also plastic strings, feathers and slivers of wood). Moreover, and as pointed out above, if there are differences within the overall coherence of each narrative thread, there are also all kinds of connections and parallelisms between what is told in sections written in different typefaces. Thus, the retelling of the conflict between Athena, goddess of weaving, and Arachne, the proud mortal that dared to compare her art to that of the goddess, is paralleled by the description of Velázquez’s painting; the description of the tapestries that Athena and Arachne wove during the contest intended to settle down the matter of who was better at weaving has a counterpart in the description of the tapestry in the background of Las Hilanderas: a recreation of the Rape of Europa, which is, in turn, one of the scenes in Arachne’s tapestry, according to Ovid’s poem. Women weaving appear in the myth, and in the painting, but they are also part of the author’s family: there is her grandmother, who was a dressmaker and who “could, as I could not, make huge raised furls of satin- stitching, whorls of petals whose colours were dappled and shot with light and shadow, not real flowers, but with an original shifting brilliance”2; her aunt, an infant teacher who used to teach little boys in her class to sew, as well as little girls; and, above all, her great-aunt Thirza, whom the author refers to as a “mythical figure” that she always remembers among exquisitely bright tablecloths and cushions embroidered on ivory satin (A 139). As she grew older, Byatt wrote a story entitled Racine and the Tablecloth in which “Thirza stood for my ordinary origins, and her own bright work, for women making things in snatched time” (A 139). And all this leads the reader to so many other things in the narrative: the colours and the brightness of the embroidery are the colours and chiaroscuros in Las Hilanderas, and also the colours of the different species of spiders, the radiance of spider’s webs when they catch light and look like morning dew on green hedges, or their dull greyness in the corner of an uninhabited house; the author’s ordinary origins are also Arachne’s, as Ovid’s account of the myth begins precisely by emphasising the ordinariness of the girl; Arachne’s rebelliousness is also that of the young Byatt when listening to her headmistress imply that making tablecloths was a useful occupation for a girl, while writing was not; this head-mistress is the nay-sayer, like Athena when she makes it clear to Arachne that there are dreams a girl like her cannot have; Arachne’s thread is the writer’s narrative line, her skill at weaving is the author’s (Ovid’s, Byatt’s) skill at writing; weaving becomes one with writing (spinning yarns) but weaving is also a pre-eminent figure of women’s work... Human and animal, art and nature, myth and reality, male and female, fact and fiction, science and storytelling, writing and weaving, painting and literature, each different and each blending with the other, as the sections in “Arachne”: Byatt’s version of universal contiguity.

11 It is clear to anyone that has read anything by Byatt that her mind is naturally inclusive. As Jonathan Noakes and Margaret Reynolds put it in the introduction to a volume on Byatt’s work, “nothing is too large for her, and nothing too small. But everything is connected and inclusive. One idea will always lead on to another as nothing comes to her singly” (2004: 5). Her work gives us access to an often overwhelming breath of reference and systems of thought: literature, philosophy, history, painting, entomology, biology, biography, law, etc. Autobiography is not so frequent, though. As Byatt admits, “one of the imperatives of my kind of very, very limited autobiography is that it shouldn’t really talk about the fountains within.”3 And yet, she admits that “unexpectedly and for me unusually” the first person singular

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resorted to by the narrator in “Arachne” “briefly coincides with this woman” (in Chevalier, 1999: 17, 18). It is true that the first person is there, but it is also true that it is never there for long, as if the narrative gave formal expression to the author’s being unused to (and surprised at the eruption of) autobiographical writing. If the text is woven as if by a spider, the spider is present but she does not stay at centre of the web. On the contrary, as soon as it meets the author, the narrative moves away from her (away from the “I” of the narrative voice), as if in a constant attempt to bring in “things other”. And this, which refers to a particular narrative piece and to this first-person singular working in it as a simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal force, also holds good when it comes to Byatt’s understanding of her involvement with writing. Thus, she sees herself as a person who is, as it were, the meeting point of a lot of things coming in, which then, on the whole, come out. There is a sort of flow of light coming in and of light emitted, whereas if it all comes in and you can’t release it, it destroys you. There is a sense in which, if I can’t write, experience becomes intensely oppressive, and this is to do with connections, and the connections go through me [...]. It isn’t personal, in a sense. Really, it is the sense of a whole string of connections coming through you, and it is almost your duty to add to them to complicate them, to put your little bit in and send them on their way. (in Chevalier, 1999: 19-20)

12 Things come to her, but she never stays in things just as things do not stay in her: she lets them go, even if slightly changed. This is the eternal flux of metamorphosis, a metamorphosis that is in turn linked with the recurrence of myth, with the development of stories and of art as a whole, as if there was a never-ending thread of connections, of version of versions, and reworkings, and retellings. “Arachne” is also about this thread: the thread that links Byatt with Ovid and with those that have reworked his stories of metamorphoses in between; the thread tying together female weavers in classical myths and tales, and Byatt’s family, and the Danish women weavers in the exhibition she visited in 1998 (referred to as “Northern Arachnes”, A 155), and women working with textiles since ancient times.... Also Velázquez, of course, is “in a line, a thread, of emulation, of reworking from Ovid to Titian to Rubens” (A 143). He made a version of the Ovidian tale in Las Hilanderas, but he also reworked, within this painting, Titian’s The Rape of Europa or, even, very probably, Rubens’ copy of Titian’s version of the mythical story.4 As Byatt says she herself does when writing, Velázquez also put his little bit before he sent all these things back on their way. He added the painting of light on textiles, he added the spinners.

13 Byatt does not substantially alter Ovid’s version of the myth in “Arachne”, which is the technique used by other contributors to the collection.5 Her rewriting consists, rather, in combining the fable of Arachne with things other than Ovid’s story, just as in her other works she combines literature with things other than literature (or not so “other”, after all). Thinking of it, it seems natural that of all the stories of metamorphosis she could have chosen, Byatt should decide on Arachne’s. To begin with, the metaphor of the tapestry fits perfectly within this idea of connections, which is also at the core of spiderweb architecture, and even, ultimately, at the core of the image of the labyrinth: both are, after all, beautiful designs and dangerous traps. Similarly, the narrative in “Arachne” seems to teasingly oscillate between scrupulous patterning and random improvisation, between ordered coherence and lack of design, between reassurance and disorientation, between sameness and difference. Arachne meets Ariadne.6

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14 There are, however, other figures/stories in classical mythology related to the image of the thread and that of weaving: to the already-mentioned Ariadne, one could add the names of such female characters as Philomena, Penelope.... But what makes Arachne’s myth different, what definitely presents it as a logical choice in the light of the all- inclusive dynamics of Byatt’s enterprise, is that this specific episode in Ovid’s poem can be said to contain, in a sense, all the tales in the work that contains it. The Metamorphoses is a miscellany, a summary of the world. If Ovid’s poem is about the contiguity and blending of everything there is, the mise en abyme in Arachne’s tale turns it into the illustration par excellence of universal contiguity. Where is this mise en abyme? In the tapestries woven by the story’s protagonists.

15 As Italo Calvino points out, in “the vast catalogue of myths that the entire poem in fact is, the myth of Athena and Arachne may in its turn contain two smaller catalogues aimed in opposing ideological directions” (1989: 151). Ovid describes with minute detail the tapestries woven by each contender. Athena depicts the great figures of Olympus with their traditional attributes, the main gods in all their splendour and grandiosity, while on the corners she includes four scenes portraying four divine punishments inflicted on mortals who challenged the gods. Arachne concentrates on the cruel and lustful behaviour of Olympian deities, the guileful seductions of Jove, Neptune, Bacchus, Apollo... all slipping into different forms, all wicked and deceptive. The two tapestries contain characters and tales that appear in the poem (the selection is representative enough to see it as standing for the poem as a whole). Moreover, they contain images of metamorphoses within a story of metamorphosis, and they show, in a condensed form, the contiguity of divine, human, animal, vegetable and mineral worlds illustrated by the Metamorphoses in general, as well as by the tale which contains it in particular. It is clear that, as Calvino says, Athena’s and Arachne’s smaller catalogues are aimed in opposite ideological directions. Athena concentrates on the grandiose and powerful side of divinity; Arachne on the cruel, lascivious and predatory one. Athena tries to induce respect, reverence, fear; Arachne incites to irreverence and moral relativity. The precision with which Ovid describes the working of the looms might suggest a possible identification of the poet’s work with the weaving of a tapestry. But which? Who wins the contest in Ovid’s poem? Whose side is the poet on, Athena’s or Arachne’s? And Calvino answers: “Neither one nor the other”. Anyone who inferred from this episode that the poem as a whole should be approached from the point of view suggested by Athena’s tapestry —since Arachne’s challenge is cruelly punished— would be as mistaken as anyone privileging Arachne’s position —since the poetic rendering favours the guilty victim. Byatt also refers to this significant ambiguity in Arachne’s story and agrees with Calvino when he concludes that Ovid’s poem contains all the stories, all the images, all the meanings, without deciding how they should be read (151-52). This is, he says, the ambiguity proper of myth, whose nature, Byatt explains in “Arachne”, is that of “a fluid, endlessly, interconnected web” (A 143).

16 If myth is ambiguous by nature, if Ovid’s Metamorphoses can be read in different ways and no reading is superior to the other, if the final meaning of Arachne’s story cannot be taken for granted, it should not come as a surprise that the relationship between this particular episode in Ovid’s poem and Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas should exhibit a similar indeterminacy, which is in turn intensified by the way Byatt deals with it. The painting is obviously about women’s weaving but, once the connection is established in Byatt’s narrative, the reader somehow expects to be explained how Velázquez’s work

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can be viewed as a version of Arachne’s myth. However, this is something that s/he should find out for him/herself. Las Hilanderas, Byatt points out, depicts the fable of Arachne but it is, above all, a painting about vision and skill (A 146). Thus, she chooses to focus on that —on the painter’s technique, the combination of colours, the different planes, the effects of light and shadow, etc.—rather than account for the painting as a retelling of the contest between Athena and Arachne. The fact that the painting is a reworking of the myth is mentioned more than once in the narrative, but mentioning is not the same as elucidating. This may be part of a strategy intended to involve the reader in the story: by suggesting a link without developing the connection, the narrative invites him/her to become an active participant, to search for the connection him/herself. When looked at from a different angle, though, the sections on Las Hilanderas, the detailed description of the painting qua painting (technicalities included), can be said to be a metacomment on two different codes —those of painting and writing— and on the complementarity of the imaginative processes one may associate with the experiences that each of them afford to the onlooker and the reader, respectively.

17 Painting has to do with images on a canvas, writing, with words on the page. But just as images tell a story, so can words paint images to the reader’s inner eye. Reading Ovid’s elaborate and vivid description of Athena’s and Arachne’s tapestries, one gets involved in the kind of imaginative process that starts with the word and ends with the visual image. Yet the reader of “Arachne” is not reading Ovid, but Byatt’s (rather faithful) reproduction of Ovid’s description. This implies that what the reader experiences when reading Byatt is barely similar to what she experienced when reading Ovid. In a word, both Byatt (in reading Ovid) and the reader (in reading Byatt) move from the words on the page to the mental image of what the tapestries were like. The case is different with the sections on Las Hilanderas, since here Byatt’s intertext is not a literary work but a painting in the Prado Museum, reproduced in hundreds of books and internet pages. Accordingly, the imaginative processes reader and author get involved in seem to run in opposite directions: in describing Las Hilanderas, Byatt begins with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression; in reading her detailed description, the reader imaginatively returns to the painting, creates a visual image by using her words as a point of departure.

18 There is a word in Italian, Calvino says, which does not exist in English: the adjective in question is “icastico” and it applies to whatever evokes a clear, incisive, memorable visual image (1996: 55). Byatt’s writing on Las Hilanderas could be described with that adjective, which means that “Arachne” surely complies with one of the values — visibility— that Calvino suggested should be saved for twenty-first century literature. In the list that he puts forward in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, he includes visibility, as he explains, in order to “give warning of the danger we run in losing a basic human faculty: the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and colours from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact of thinking in terms of images” (92). However, in spite of (or, perhaps, “because of”?) the highly visual quality of Byatt’s prose, my first impulse when I finished reading “Arachne” was to look for a reproduction of Velázquez’s painting in order to conflate both. Word and image were there, in front of me. “Which one works better?”, I asked myself, aware of the fact that this question lay at the core of a long and complicated debate.

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19 As J. Hillis Miller (1992: 159) points out in Illustration, the relation of picture to word has by now become a distinct topic for theoretical and historical investigation, but this issue was the object of explicit theoretical reflection already in the eighteenth century, for example in Denis Diderot’s “Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets” (1751), an essay that ends with a comparison of poetry, painting and music as ways of representing a dying woman. “Is a picture worth a thousand words?”, Miller asks, and he comments on different positions on the subject as illustrated by a wide range of authors. There is, for instance, Mark Twain’s passage in Life on the Mississippi, which Miller quotes to illustrate Twain’s argument for “the helplessness of picture without word”. Miller explains it in the following terms: A picture presents something, but what that something is cannot be known for sure unless the picture is labelled, placed back within the context of some diachronic narrative. The interpretation of picture is, for Twain, necessarily verbal. Without some explicit indication in words of what frozen narrative moment the picture represents, the spectator vibrates back and forth among contradictory alternative stories [...]. This is just what Benjamin was to argue in the essay on “The Work of Art” [...]. In order to be comprehensible, both say, a picture must plainly illustrate a story. Words are necessary to indicate what story it is. (Miller, 1992: 60-62)

20 Interestingly, part of the confusion involving the interpretation of Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas has to do with the labelling of the painting. Velázquez painted it around 1658, for a friend named Pedro de Arce, a funcionario in the royal palace. For over two centuries, no connection was thought to exist between the painting and Arachne’s myth: the picture was believed to represent a scene from everyday life. Thus, in the inventory of Luis de la Cerda, IX Duke of Medinaceli, who in 1711 surrendered the painting to the royal collection, the work is listed as “Mujeres que trabajan en tapicería”. In the inventories of royal collections the subject was also identified as a view of women at work in a tapestry factory: it first appears as an entry in an inventory dated 1772, where it is referred to as “Una fábrica de tapices y varias mujeres hilando y devanando”, while two years later, in 1774, it appears as “quadro llamado de las Hilanderas”. No theme other than this was discovered in the work, that is, till the twentieth century. The key year in the recovery of the mythological subject is 1948,7 when the renowned archival researcher María Luisa Caturla published an inventory of the original owner, Pedro de Arce, dated 1664. In this inventory the painting is listed as “La fábula de aragne”. Later articles by Diego Angulo Íñiguez (1948) and Charles Tolnay (1949) definitely confirmed that Las Hilanderas was a version or an illustration, however original, of an episode in Book VI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Brown 2003).

21 In this case, at least, the history of the interpretation of the painting supports Twain’s and Benjamin’s view, as shown in the quotation above, that words are necessary to point out what the picture is about: it was the discovery of the label attached to the painting in the original owner’s inventory that definitely threw light on the mythological connection. And, probably, it is also true that this label is still necessary to mark out the link between the scene depicted by Velázquez and Arachne’s myth. However, the fact that the subject of the painting was identified did not solve the problem of interpretation. As Jonathan Brown points out: Far from ending discussion of the painting, the retrieval of the subject opened a new chapter in the historiography of Las Hilanderas. Velázquez’s composition is highly allusive and ambiguous. By virtue of his original conception of the antique text, the artist raises questions which both demand and frustrate attempts to answer them. Who are the women in the foreground? Who are the elegantly-

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dressed females who accompany Minerva and Arachne? Why did Velázquez reverse the logic of the composition, placing the climactic moment of the story in the distance instead of in the foreground? And what is the purpose of the quotation from Titian’s Rape of Europa? By a cruel paradox, the correct identification of the subject only obfuscated the significance of this masterpiece. [...] It would be tedious to review and analyze in detail the myriad of interpretations that have been inflicted on Las Hilanderas over the last six decades. Their authors assert with absolute conviction, on the basis of the assembled evidence, that they have unlocked the “secret” of this masterpiece. Unconsciously, however, they make the opposite point —that no single interpretation can possibly be sufficient. (Brown 2003)

22 The conclusion is, then, the same as that reached by Calvino when considering the interpretation of Arachne’s episode and, by extension, that of the Metamorphoses as a whole. As was the case there, the possible interpretations of the painting need not be regarded as mutually exclusive; on the contrary, diverging interpretations can be said to co-exist and enrich one another, as do, no doubt, literature and painting. If one must not try to come down on either side of the contest in the myth, it is surely off the point to try and prove the superiority of word over image, or vice versa. In a farther illustration of what Calvino calls universal contiguity, then, what Byatt’s piece ultimately suggests in this respect is that it is much more interesting to see how literature and painting connect with one another, how one complements the other. After all, it is practically impossible to read something without having images come to your mind or, conversely, to see a painting or an image of another type without having a narrative evoked by it.8 Both text and image are made sense of as a sign, and given the fact that the word “graphic” can refer either to writing or to picture, one cannot help wondering, as J. Hillis Miller does, whether the seemingly eternal “polemos within the graphic” can be counterbalanced by showing that the two parties are “different forms of the same thing, as blue and red are both light”. But then, “What would this ‘something’ be?” (Miller, 1992: 75).

23 To Byatt this “something” has to do with the skilful delineation, on the artist/writer’s part, of the visible and invisible worlds at the point where they touch (A 146). In one of the sections that make up “Arachne”, Byatt remembers beginning her first novel with a description of air visible in heat, of light on a lawn. Similarly, she points out that she became interested in painting because she was interested in the mapping of the visibility of light (A 147). There is something in visible forms of light, threads, currents, or dust-motes floating in a beam from a window, which arouses our aesthetic sense, Byatt says, and she associates it with “the Platonic forms of perfection, the transcendent order whose shapes we discern in the solid world, and draw, paint or build” (A 146). This brings together, once again, the different threads in Byatt’s narrative. Las Hilanderas is presented as a painting whose author has dexterously managed to map the visibility of light or, as has been pointed out above, as a painting about skill and vision. Sight and vision, the visible and the invisible, are intertwined here as they are in embroidery made on “transfers”: shadowed shapes of flowers and leaves ironed on the linen on which the women in Byatt’s family (and she herself) worked, ghostly lines of a pattern that she explicitly compares with neo-Platonic forms (A 139). According to the author, spiderweb —like sea-shells, like leaf-skeletons, or like the growth of branches from a trunk, and twigs from branches— are also visual reminders of the order inherent in the mess and excess of the world (A 147). And finally, the recurrence of myth is also the recurrence of certain patterns shaping

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human life, patterns that “tell us that something remote is beckoning to us” (Calasso, 1993: 10). Thus, as Byatt points out in the very first paragraph of “Arachne”, myths have always been alive and can still caught us up in their original power (A 131).

24 I must admit I was somewhat impressed by the word with which Ovid closes the Metamorphoses: “Vivam”, that is, “I shall live”. A daring remark, but definitely true. Did he know that the inexhaustible possibilities of his “raw material” combined with his artistry were a secure passport to posterity? Perhaps. Be it as it may, there is something in the repeatability of myths and stories that has to do with the battle against time, with that part of us which also wants to utter Ovid’s “Vivam”. Maybe the reason for this is that, as Byatt puts it, they are ultimately to do with death. That is why the interest in tales is something that the young have and the old rediscover: children love stories because they see themselves as infinite and immortal, while the old engage with tales knowing that they are finite, that the tales will outlive them (Byatt, 2000: 131-32). Thus, the universal contiguity of a narrative like “Arachne” is not only a contiguity between different subjects or different fields of knowledge. It is also an attempt to weave time in, out and around. The origins of myth get lost in time, and the same goes for the origins of spiders, which have been on earth for at least four hundred million years (A 148). But, in addition to (old) myths and (old) spiders, the reader of “Arachne” also comes across seventeenth-century Velázquez and Thomas Browne, eighteenth-century Swift, Pope and Edwards (the American poet and divine), nineteenth-century Emily Dickinson (disciple of Edwards), the twentieth-century childhood of Byatt, her contribution to a collection that saw light in the year 2000, the announcement made in an article published in the New Scientist, in the week when Byatt wrote this piece, that Quebec scientists plan to make biosteel from spider-silk —a biodegradable fibre strong enough to stop bullets— in the near future (A 157), etc.

25 What is past and what is to come, the vast and the small, fantasy and experience, mythological deities and spiders, all form part of the same thing in Byatt’s universe, since, as she concludes, “what we see is a clue only to the force and the beauty, and the order and the complexity, of what we don’t see. Gods, or spider-silk” (A 157). At a time of lost metaphysics, the black and white uniform lines of a short narrative can still powerfully suggest that there is an intriguing connection between the visions of the eye and those of the spirit, between the many colours and forms of what we can see and another world which has always been there, and which has been told many times in stories that are always the same and always different.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, John. 2003. “Minerva, Arachne and Marcel”, tout-fait: the Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal 2.5. Retrieved April 27, 2004, from http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/ letters/brown.html

Byatt, A. S. “Old Tales, New Forms”, in On Histories and Stories, London: Vintage, 2000, 123-50.

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---. “Arachne”, in Ovid Metamorphosed, ed. Philip Terry, 2001 (2000), 131-157.

Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks, London: Cape, 1993 (1988).

Calinescu, Matei. “Rewriting”, in International Postmodernism. Theory and Practice, eds. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997, 243-48.

Calvino, Italo. “Ovid and Universal Contiguity”, in The Literary Machine, trans. Patrick Creagh, London: Picador, 1989 (1987), 146-61.

---. Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh, London: Vintage, 1996 (1992).

Chevalier, Jean-Louis. “‘Speaking of Sources’: An Interview with A. S. Byatt”, Sources. Revue d’études anglophones, 1999, nº 7: 6-28.

Miller, J. Hillis. “Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line”, Critical Inquiry, 1976, 3.1: 57-77.

---. Illustration, London: Reaktion Books, 1992.

Noakes, Jonathan and Margaret Reynolds. A. S. Byatt (Vintage Living Texts Series), London: Vintage, 2004.

Redondo Bonet, Lucas. “Las Hilanderas”. (n. d.) Retrieved April 27, 2004, from http://www.uv.es/ ~mahiques/hilander.htm

Shuttleworth, Sally. “Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel”, in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor Shaffer, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997.

Terry, Philip, Ovid Metamorphosed, London: Vintage, ed. 2001 (2000).

Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

NOTES

1. This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented as a contribution to the 28th International Conference of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (Valencia, 16-18 December 2004). The research carried out for the writing of this article has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (MCYT) and the European Regional Development Fund, in collaboration with the Aragonese Government (HUM200400344/FIL). 2. “Arachne” 137. Hereafter the abreviation A will be used in parenthetical references. 3. Fountains and springs are a recurrent motif in Byatt’s work. These “fountains within” are of a different kind, since they are directly connected with the author’s private life and experiences. Byatt’s remark occurs in an interview and is preceded by the interviewer quoting Coleridge’s lines: “I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passions and the life, whose fountains are within.” 4. The Fable of Arachne is another painting by Rubens which Velázquez included in one of his works (it is one of the paintings on the back wall in Las Meninas). 5. To give some examples, Marina Warner’s “Leto’s Flight” freely adapts the story of Leto by deliberately confusing it with other stories (those of Leda, Romulo and Remo, Ulysses and even Bluebeard); Patricia Duncker’s “Sophia Walters Shaw” is a sort of feminist distopyan fable based on the rape of Proserpine by Pluto, the god of the underworld, who here presides over an underworld of sex shows and grotesque sexual services; Cees Nooteboom’s “Lessons” is a contemporary story of betrayal and love in a Dutch lycée, which both reflects and enlarges upon its source: the tale of Phaeton; etc.

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6. Byatt mentions the title of a poem written by Christabel in Possession —“Ariachne’s Broken Woof”— and traces its title to a couple of lines in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Act V. This “Ariachne”, a curious mixture of Arachne and Ariadne, is also commented on by J. Hillis Miller in “Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line”. Miller points out that the conflation of Ariadne and Arachne is also implicit in Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, where the reader finds a discussion of the labyrinth as a structure inhabited by “the spider, or other monster in midweb” (in Miller, 1976: 59, emphasis added). As to Shakespeare’s “Ariachne”, Miller adds, the partial homonymy of the name reflects the relationship between the two stories. The tales of Ariadne and Arachne are similar, though not wholly congruent, and both involve the images of thread or of weaving. The same happens when it comes to the “hybrid” name, since Ariachne is and is not Arachne, just as is and is not Ariadne. The connection between these names ultimately calls attention to the “is-and-is-not” dynamics inherent in myth, that is to say, to the similarity and dissimilarity of stories in the same narrative line, as well as to the repetition with a difference of distinct myths (66). 7. There had been other significant discoveries in previous years, all leading to the same interpretation. Thus, in 1903, the English critic C. R. Ricketts observed that the composition depicted on the tapestry hung on the rear wall was a partial copy of Titian’s Rape of Europa; and in 1940, expert on Velázquez Enriqueta Harris identified the figures in the background as Athena gesturing towards Arachne, even if she mistakenly saw them as woven into the tapestry. 8. This is particularly true of Byatt’s prose, whose visual quality has already been pointed out, but this is also very much the case with Las Hilanderas. As Redondo Bonet (2004) explains, the composition of the painting is typically baroque, theatrical, as it were, in the sense that Velázquez divides his work in scenes that have to be approached not simultaneously, but in succession. This technique is slightly reminiscent of those medieval paintings whose sections, or groups, must be read in a particular order, like the pages of a book. Colour and light are dextrously used by the painter in order to create different planes, which are but different stages of a narrative.

ABSTRACTS

Le présent article naît d'une vogue de réécriture d'histoires mythologiques grecques et romaines illustrée, entre autres, par le recueil Ovid Metamorphosed édité par Philip Terry en 2000. Ce volume comprend aussi la nouvelle d'A. S. Byatt, « Arachné ». Replacé dans le contexte de l'intérêt renouvelé pour la mythologie classique, « Arachné » est étudiée par le biais de la « contiguïté universelle », concept que son auteur récupère chez Italo Calvino qui l'avait forgé pour expliquer la dynamique textuelle des Métamorphoses d'Ovide. Ainsi, « Arachné » se présente telle une tapisserie tissée de fils multiples et toujours liés entre eux. Il s'agit d'un genre narratif composite qui parvient à donner un aperçu des schémas récurrents des mythes classiques mais qui parvient aussi à prouver que certains auteurs sont toujours capables d'en réécrire les trames qui se suivent sans jamais être les mêmes. (Traduit par Emilie Cantin)

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AUTHOR

MARÍA JESÚS MARTÍNEZ ALFARO María Jesús Martínez is Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology of Zaragoza University, where she teaches English Language and Literature. She is the author of Text and Intertexts in Charles Palliser's The Quincunx (Ann Arbor, UMI, 1996) and, continuing the line of research initiated by this work, she later wrote her PhD dissertation on Narrative Strategies in Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, The Sensationist and Betrayals. She has co-edited, with Ramón Plo, a volume of articles entitled Beyond Borders: Re-defining Generic and Ontological Boundaries (C. Winter: Heidelberg 2000) and she has also published several articles in national and international journals. Her research focuses on postmodern literature in general and, more specifically, on such issues as metafiction, parody, intertextuality and detective fiction, in relation to the novels of John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, Barry Unsworth, Paul Auster and Charles Palliser, among others.

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Earthly Men and Other Worldly Women: Gender Types and Religious Types in Jeanette Winterson’s “Atlantic Crossing” and Other Short Fiction

Carla A. Arnell

1 Among critics of high culture and pundits of popular trends, it is a truth almost universally acknowledged that twentieth-century art reflects an “age of secularism” or an “age of unbelief.” In the literary culture of the Western world there is ample evidence of such secularism: a glance at the New York Times summer fiction lists from the 1990s—featuring reading delights ranging from Ian McEwan to Doris Lessing— illustrates how little such fiction focuses on anything explicitly or implicitly religious. But as twentieth-century historical events often dramatized, religion has remained a significant force in human lives, for better or for worse. And though religion may now be more ubiquitous in life than in art, a small cadre of twentieth-century writers have continued to reflect upon religious matters, despite the relative dearth of complementary criticism about religion in literature.

2 The British writer Jeanette Winterson is one popular twentieth-century author whose fictions have frequently focused on religion, a topic clearly inspired by the significant role of religion in her young life. It is well known by now that Winterson grew up in a Pentecostal Evangelical family, was well schooled in the Bible and Evangelical rituals, and was destined by her mother to be a church missionary. Her early novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit recounts, in quasi-autobiographical fashion, the story of her rejection of that tradition and her self-awakening. But despite the prevalence of religious themes, motifs, and allusions in this and other Winterson fictions, most criticism about Winterson’s work has largely ignored the topic of religion per se,1 perhaps on the assumption that Winterson’s relation to religion is simply a given: she grew up in a Pentecostal Evangelical family that was rigidly repressive, and her fiction, when it

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treats religion, simply satirizes a world she has wholly rejected. In fact, though, I would argue that Winterson’s representation of religion is more complicated than it might at first seem, and her first short story collection cleverly captures that complexity.

3 Winterson first made a literary name for herself with her 1987 autobiographical fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a novel for which she won the Whitbread Prize for the year’s best first novel. Since then, she has continued to focus on novelistic fiction, ranging from her fairy-tale-like historical fiction The Passion to The PowerBook, a metafictional love affair between author and reader, mediated by the metaphor of Macintosh computing mechanics. But with the 1998 publication of The World and Other Places, readers of Winterson’s novels were finally able to see a sustained example of her work within another fictional genre, the short story. The short stories in this collection are imaginatively varied, but they also revisit themes and motifs familiar from her novels: storytelling, truth and lies, passion, religion, and gender identity. “Atlantic Crossing” is one short story that illuminates Winterson’s thematic preoccupations, especially her interest in how gender identity conforms to or clashes with religious identity.

4 This story tells the tale of two characters who coincidentally cross paths while traversing the Atlantic on an ocean liner. The main character, Duncan Stewart, is a homebound man on his way back to London, and it is he who narrates the ship story and interprets its events. The other character, Gabriel Angel, a nineteen-year-old black girl, is leaving home rather than returning, and she both unsettles Stewart’s conventional expectations and inspires his desire to domesticate her. In this respect, “Atlantic Crossing” replays the antinomy between Henri and Villanelle in Winterson’s 1987 novel, The Passion, another story about the chance meeting and inevitable clash between a hidebound male narrator who longs for home, and an otherworldly, free- spirited female, who cannot be bound anywhere. In “Atlantic Crossing,” however, Winterson juxtaposes the religious and the spiritual or otherworldly to distinguish her characters, using this distinction to mark their gender and disposition. Although this story critiques a narrow, rule-bound religiosity, gendered male, I shall argue that Winterson’s story supports an alternative religious perspective, a renovated Blakean spirituality that is gendered female. Ultimately, the gender types that emerge in “Atlantic Crossing” not only replay gender patterns from The Passion, but they also link this short story with others in Winterson’s short story collection.

5 The plot of “Atlantic Crossing” is simple and, even, clichéd: An older man meets an attractive younger woman on a trip, he falls in love with her, she is uninterested in a romantic liaison, and he must head home with his passion unrequited. The story takes place in 1956, “[t]he year Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe” (19). This incidental detail situates the story in an era known for its conventional character—a time when men were men, women were wives, and children were everywhere. The popular cultural reference to Miller and Monroe gives some context to Duncan’s romantic dreams, for the Miller/Monroe romance seems to make real the age-old male fantasy of Beauty and the Beast.

6 But the significance of “Atlantic Crossing” is to be found less in its plotline and setting than in its character portraiture. Duncan is one of a growing number of Winterson’s male narrators who are hindered in their self-fulfillment by a belief in conventional mores that borders almost on religious faith. It is this hidebound state that Winterson uses Duncan to critique.

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7 Perhaps Duncan’s most distinctive characteristic is his nervousness, and in some sense, his conventionality springs from this basic anxiety about himself and the world. The critic Michael Wood has linked nervousness with Winterson’s early female characters in referring to “the nervous, passionate young lesbians of Jeanette Winterson’s fiction” (983). I would argue, however, that it is typically Winterson’s male narrators, rather than her female characters, who manifest a marked nervousness. Though Duncan has chosen this transatlantic trip as a diversion from his everyday life, he admits, “Journeys make me nervous, so I was up too early on the morning of my leaving, opening and shutting my trunk and bothering the porters about safe storage” (19). Moreover, when he notices the young woman Gabriel Angel and her friend laughing and pointing at the ship, her conviviality disturbs him: “Whatever it was, they both laughed, which did nothing for my nerves. I wanted to be reassured by the imposing vessel before me, not have it picked at like a cotton bale” (20). Duncan’s nervousness before the ship voyage suggests that he has traveled little and is more comfortable safe at home than sailing forth on a journey during which anything might happen.

8 In this respect, Duncan is akin to the male narrator in Winterson’s short story “The Green Man.” This story echoes Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” mirroring the prosaic and circumscribed domestic world that Rossetti contrasted to a colorful, supernatural goblin marketplace. In Winterson’s story, the male narrator is imprisoned by his suburban green lawn, confined out of timidity to one small square of a much larger and more mysterious world. The strange gypsies who come to town once a year, peddling their exotic wares, signify this mysteriousness, representing the world of license and strangeness that the narrator both yearns for and fears. The coming Midsummer holiday, with its tradition of “visions” and “strange dreams” and “lawlessness,” also reminds him of his fears (141). In contrasting himself to his ancestors who used the holiday “to celebrate what they feared,” he admits, “What I fear I avoid. What I fear I pretend does not exist. What I fear is quietly killing me. Would there were a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late” (141-2). These comments, coupled with his initial resistance to the gypsies’ siren song, betray the same kind of nervousness that Duncan experiences before his ship sets sail: a fear of the mysterious, the unknown, and the unpredictable. And this disposition later contributes to Duncan’s inability to connect with Gabriel Angel.

9 Perhaps as a manifestation of his nervousness, Duncan is almost obsessively controlling and orderly, a characteristic that is reflected superficially in his physical appearance. He reflects, “It is early in the morning, not yet six o’clock. I have dressed carefully. My tie is even and my shoes are well polished and double knotted. Anyone can look at me now” (29). In addition to this fastidiousness about his clothes, Duncan also worries about order on the ship. So, when the young woman, Gabriel Angel, is booked to share his cabin, he immediately resolves to “straighten [the matter] out” (23). He had expected a man for a cabin mate, “some tough guy who wanted late night Scotch and a pack of cards” (23). And both the disruption of his conventional expectations as well as his belief in the proper order of things for men and woman make him uncomfortable. As he says, in a comment that reflects his concern with keeping things properly separated and categorized, “When you dig under the surface, past the necessities, men and women don’t mix” (23).

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10 Duncan’s preference for a careful, orderly life connects him with two other Winterson narrators, both men and both gardeners. In “The Green Man,” the narrator describes how much time he spends on horticulture in his circumscribed suburban world. He explains, “I have taken great pains to neaten the garden. It is a triumph of restraint. Although it is summer and clematis and rose would garland my head if I let them I have clipped their easy virtue into something finer. They climb, they decorate, they do not spread” (135). Here the natural beauty of the clematis and rose would be his, if only he gave them license; he prefers, however, to keep them as controlled and confined as he himself is in his green square of world. Similarly, in Winterson’s The Passion, after the French soldier Henri is imprisoned in an island insane asylum for a crime of passion, his female friend, Villanelle, encourages him to escape and be free. Henri refuses partly because Villanelle will not allow him to marry her or control her life, and, unable to possess her with his passion, he prefers to stay in the island asylum (152).2 So, instead of joining Villanelle in freedom, he works away at an asylum garden that gives him the controlled contentment he was unable to find in the rough-and-tumble, war-torn world at large.

11 Henri’s choice to stay on his safe island sanctuary leads Villanelle to wonder if “perhaps he has lost himself” (150), and this lack of self-identity plagues Duncan as well. Early in the story, Duncan admits to a penchant for “invisible worlds” and adds tellingly, “mostly I’m part of the invisible world myself” (20). Then also, for some odd reason, perhaps fear, perhaps to aid his voyeurism, before the ship sets sail he sits near its gangway “hunched up in a roll of rope” (20), observing passers-by. This role of rope serves as a metaphor for the way in which his self is bound and hidden. Duncan himself is vaguely aware of his insubstantial self-identity. In contrasting his ever-disappearing self to the vibrant self he sees in Gabriel, he generalizes about the nature of selfhood by saying, “You thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. I’m telling you because I know” (25).

12 Indeed, Duncan’s self has slipped down beneath layers of convention. This conventionality is especially evident in his choice of work. Despite his attraction to stories (19) and to “invisible worlds” (20), he has chosen a profession that values neither of those things. Introducing himself to Gabriel Angel, he blandly reports: “I’m a business man. I do business” (24). In choosing a conventional profession that ill-suits his temperament, Duncan once again bears a resemblance to The Passion’s Henri. A gentle, sensitive soul, Henri nonetheless joins Napoleon’s army when, amidst the ennui of ordinary life in the French countryside, his village is hit by an epidemic-like passion for Napoleon. Once he gets to the army, he wants “to be a drummer” (5), but these musical inclinations are quickly quashed when he is assigned to be Napoleon’s cook. Even this job at first inspires his creative instincts, as he “imagine[s] a training as a pastry cook building delicate towers of sugar and cream” (5). Unfortunately, though, the army world, like Duncan’s business world, offers no outlet for his creative aspirations, and he is assigned to an undesirable role wringing chickens’ necks for Napoleon’s dinner. Thus, Henri’s profession ends up being as grotesque as Duncan’s is bland, and both jobs constrain each man’s creative instincts like a role of rough rope. Sadly, Duncan, like Henri, is bound by conventions that are at odds with his inner strivings.3

13 Both Duncan and Henri find their self-identities smothered in part because of the male models they associate with or admire. In reflecting on the ideal male, Duncan thinks to

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himself, “A man shouldn’t be too introspective. It weakens him” (21). But when Duncan applies that male model to himself, one realizes how ill it suits him. After all, the entire story represents an effort, however halting and restrained, to search out his self- identity. Duncan’s ill-fated male modeling is further exemplified when he thinks to himself, “[Lack of introspection] is the difference between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. I’m a Hemingway man myself although I don’t believe it is right to hunt lions” (21). Here Duncan models himself upon Hemingway, even though Hemingway’s trademark qualities are not his own. For, he ethically objects to Hemingway’s passion for hunting.

14 In a similar way, The Passion’s Henri admires and follows Napoleon, despite the fact that Napoleon’s warmongering is deeply antithetical to his sensitive soul. But Henri is smitten by a romantic passion for Napoleon out of a desire to have something or someone in which to believe.4 He explains, “We’re more or less religious in our village and we honour the priest who tramps seven miles to bring us the wafer, but it doesn’t pierce our hearts” (9). Napoleon does pierce their hearts. Indeed, before the war a priest friend predicts to Henri, “[Napoleon will] call you… like God called Samuel and you’ll go” (17). The priest’s prediction proves true, and when Henri is called, he feels graced by a “miracle” for having been “chosen” (19). But the godlike Napoleon turns out to be self-centered, power-hungry, and brutal, whereas Henri’s own character is such that even in the agricultural fields at home, he can kill troublesome moles only “by looking the other way” (31). And in the killing fields of Napoleon’s war, Henri spends more time dragging bodies off the battleground than adding bodies to it; as Villanelle reports, “he had been in the army eight years without so much as wounding another man. Eight years of battle and the worst he’d done was to kill more chickens than he could count (147). The male models that guide Duncan and Henri hold particular power perhaps because those models add drama to their ordinary lives. As Henri says of Napoleon, “He made sense out of dullness” (20). But the order and meaning that Napoleon and Hemingway offer carries with it the cost of each man’s self. This cost is made clear by both Henri’s eventual insanity and Duncan’s emotional outburst at the end of the story. As Duncan surveys the ship’s deck in his isolation, he remarks, “I wish the wind would drop. A man looks silly with tears in his eyes” (30). By the end of the story, one senses that Duncan is suffering for his self-suppression, and this reaction to the wind is natural both physically and emotionally. Yet, Duncan wants to suppress his self-expression out of a conventional fear of what men should and should not do in public.

15 As with Henri in The Passion, Duncan’s conventionality is linked in subtle ways with his religious upbringing. Duncan comes from a religious background and is still guided by literal “facts” from the Bible. When he first meets Gabriel Angel, he believes she “should be a man” because in the Bible “Angels are men. Look at Raphael and Michael” (22). “Gabriel is a man’s name,” he insists (22). To which she replies, “Gabriel is an angel’s name” (22). Duncan also relies on his biblical framework to explain why the ship’s staff put a female in his cabin in the first place. He says, “The Purser, like me, like any normal person guided by Bible basics, had assumed Gabriel’s name was a man’s name. That’s why we had been yoked together” (23). And later, as Duncan is trying to resist Gabriel’s attractiveness, he reflects on the biblical Fall story, using it as a life lesson to beware of women bearing fruit. He says: Eight days at sea. One day longer than God needed to invent the whole world, including its holiday pattern. Two days longer than he took to make [Gabriel’s]

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Grandmother Eve and my Grandfather Adam. This time I am not falling for the apple. (24)

16 All of these examples show how Duncan’s narrow biblical perspective limits his sense of what is possible and constrains him to an undue cautiousness.

17 But just as Duncan’s biblical religious perspective defines his conventionality, so Gabriel’s spiritual and otherworldly nature plays a subversive role, unsettling the conventional order of things. Her name alone illustrates this otherworldly freedom. For, if Gabriel “is an angel’s name,” it goes beyond traditional male/female categories; her supernatural nature, implied by her name, allows her to straddle the worlds of male and female, slipping into and out of those worlds as deftly as the web-footed woman Villanelle navigates from one Venetian canal to another. In commenting on Winterson’s disruption of customary or normal categories such as gender, Laura Doan suggests, “[Winterson’s] fiction is a serious invitation to readers to imagine the emancipation of ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ from the exclusive and totalizing domain of patriarchal and heterosexual authority. The emergence of new paradigms throughout Winterson’s work reverses, relativizes, and problematizes notions of normal and natural in order to ‘naturalize’ cultural oddities, monstrosities, abnormalities, and conformities…” (154). In “Atlantic Crossing,” Winterson undermines ordinary conventions for the normal or natural through the supernatural woman Gabriel Angel.

18 As an example of Gabriel’s supernatural or otherworldly character, she, unlike Duncan, seems to be attuned to something other than the materialist world. As she and Duncan are chatting on the deck together about love and other things, “she start[s] talking about a man with stars in his hair and arms stretched out like wings to hold her” (25). At this talk of a reality beyond the ordinary, Duncan is frightened. He says, “I moved away as soon as I could” (25). Ironically, although the religiously-schooled Duncan seems to know the facts of the Bible—the details of the Fall story (24) or the gender of Raphael and Michael (21)—he seems to have no apprehension of a living spiritual reality. But Gabriel Angel, whose name tags her as a spiritual being, speaks of a vision that could easily have come from the Bible’s Book of Revelation, though it is a personal variation on John’s vision of the “Son of Man” (Rev. 1: 12-16). This vision has a vivid presence in her life, which enlivens and fulfills her. As Duncan comments at the end of the story in imagining Gabriel’s future contrasted to his own, “The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can’t get warm. Soon Gabriel Angel will come on deck in her short sleeved blouse and carrying a pair of borrowed binoculars. She won’t be cold. She has the sun inside her” (29-30). This second “sun,” I would suggest, refers metaphorically to the Son of God, but in the heterodox Blakean sense of Jesus Christ the Imagination. For the “sun inside” Gabriel enables her to see the world, even with “borrowed binoculars,” as a place enchanted by romantic possibilities (25).

19 Duncan’s perception of the “sun inside” Gabriel also points to the transparency of her vibrant soul and its harmony with her psyche. In contrast to Duncan and other hidebound male narrators, Gabriel’s self is unbound by ordinary conventions. She is an “aviator” by profession (24), a job that is unorthodox for a woman, but symbolic of her free-spiritedness. And she seems to be have been uniquely destined for the aviator’s life. Duncan explains, “She told me she was born in 1937, the day that Amelia Earhart had become the first woman to complete the Atlantic crossing, solo flight. Her granddaddy, as she calls him, told her it was an omen, and that’s why they called her Gabriel, ‘bringer of Good News,’ a bright flying thing” (24). Significantly, one of the few

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male characters in Winterson’s stories who seems to have found happiness is also a pilot. In “The World and Other Places,” the male narrator spends his childhood days building “model aeroplanes” (89), and when he grows up and joins the Air Force, he returns to his parents’ home feeling “like an angel on a visit. I felt like Gabriel come to tell the shepherds the Good News” (94). His exuberance and joy match that of Gabriel Angel and contrast with Duncan’s resigned unhappiness. Both aviators represent the joy that springs from fulfilling one’s authentic dreams and, in Blakean fashion, acting on one’s desires.

20 In addition to Gabriel’s self-integrity, she has a romantic faith in the way of the world that differs from Duncan’s nervousness. As she assures Duncan, transfiguring the Bible’s Sermon on the Mount to suit herself, “I am poor but even the poorest inherit something, their daddy’s eyes, their mother’s courage. I inherited the dreams” (25). By contrast, as Duncan sees things, “the world isn’t interested in a little black girl’s dreams” (25). Here Gabriel’s faith contrasts with Duncan’s fundamental skepticism, illustrating a key difference between Gabriel’s spirituality and Duncan’s literal-minded religiosity. Whereas Gabriel’s faith seems to make all things possible, Duncan’s “Bible basics” realism hobbles and hinders him.

21 Gabriel’s faith in the world manifests itself in her comfort with change and risk, again a contrast to Duncan’s controlling orderliness. As if to emphasize Gabriel’s risk-taking and inclination to aspire, when she and Duncan divvy up the cabin bunks, she immediately chooses the top one, explaining simply, “I like heights” (23). In this respect, Gabriel parallels The Passion’s Villanelle, who chooses life as a gambler, a risk- taking profession that ties her to nothing but the wheel of fortune. This female comfort with change and risk, according to another Winterson story “Orion,” represents a realistic apprehension of the nature of things. In that story, the Greek goddess Artemis is contrasted with the god/hunter Orion. Artemis’s comfort with hanging in the stars amidst an ever-evolving universe reflects her acceptance of metamorphosis as a metaphysical state of the universe (61). Describing a universe of Heraclitean change, the narrator says, The fiery circle that surrounded [Artemis] contained all the clues she needed to recognize that life is for a moment in one shape, then released into another. Monuments and cities would fade away like the people who had built them. No resting place or palace could survive the light years that lay ahead. There was no history that would not be rewritten, and the earliest days were already too far away to see. (61)

22 With this cosmic vision, Artemis is able to be at home with homelessness: The stars show her how to hang in space supported by nothing at all. Without medals or certificates or territories she owns, she can burn as they do, travelling through time until time stops and eternity changes things again. She has noticed that change doesn’t hurt her. (61)

23 Here Artemis dramatically differs from Orion, who becomes a monument in the skies, but “isn’t always at home. Dazzling as he is, like some fighter pilot riding the sky, he glows very faint, if at all, in November” (63). Artemis’s brilliance illustrates that Gabriel’s and Villanelle’s love of change, chance, and risk is not just a romantic illusion, but a profound way of apprehending the world’s fundamental being. Indeed, such otherworldly wisdom may contribute to the glowing presence of the “sun inside” Gabriel Angel.

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24 Winterson’s female characters, then, differ significantly from the traditional Victorian “angel in the house.” In place of that familiar figure, Winterson’s fiction typically features a resident demon—the male spirit, caged and bound and struggling to possess his free-spirited female counterpart. Paulina Palmer has observed this plot pattern in The Passion, which frequently demonstrates “[t]he oppressive effect which heterosexual conventions and expectations have on women” (168). Similarly, “Atlantic Crossing” shows Duncan, possessed by heterosexual conventions of courtship and marriage, and driven by the desire to make Gabriel Angel his own. He imagines “running away” with her on a trip laced with romantic vagaries: “I could have held her hand through Martinique, Las Palmas, Tenerife. I could have put my arm around her waist through the straights of Gibraltar” (27). Here, Duncan’s language reveals his desire to hold and confine Gabriel. And ultimately, he tries to tie her down to marriage (29), confident that he is a suitable mate. He explains, “I am materially comfortable. I can provide. I could protect. I have a lot to offer a young woman in a strange place” (29). What Duncan fails to realize, as he wonders why Gabriel does not want him (29), is that Gabriel is quite comfortable in strange places, and though Duncan is materially sufficient, he is spiritually inadequate as a soul mate.

25 Duncan’s spiritual emptiness links him with yet another male narrator in Winterson’s short story collection. In “Disappearance II,” the narrator, Samuel Wisbech, has lived in the same house, in Orlando-like fashion, for “three hundred and thirty years” (124), despite his fifty-three years of age. As Samuel explains, “It was my father’s house, and his father’s before him, and so on, back through history as though history were a family album” (119). Both Samuel and his house, however, suffer from a state of dilapidation. When a tourist at the house begs him to “be himself” and put aside his formal posturing, Samuel says, “Myself? Itself? The house, me, me, the house. My voice sounds like the wind at the window. My skin is the texture of flaking plaster. I am upholstered like an old man, an old house, there is decay on us both” (126). In contrast to Samuel, his mother and the other women who once inhabited the house have long fled from it, his mother having found the horse stables more suitable to her “wild thing’s nature” (121). At the end of the story, he tries to recover the women’s vanished voices but he realizes that “they are all in there [on the other side of the wall] and I am here, caught in my house, room by room, unable to find the only room where there is peace” (130). Samuel is comfortable and “safe” in his house (128), but he lacks peace. And perhaps he also lacks a living soul, for the story begins and ends with the disconcerting discovery that his house has “one room missing” (119). Samuel’s housebound state, therefore, serves as a metaphor for the barren state of his soul. Both he and Duncan are materially fulfilled, but spiritually empty. And that emptiness may well explain why the female tourist talks less and less the longer she stays in Samuel’s house (129) and why Gabriel Angel never answers Duncan’s marriage proposals.

26 With the portrait of hidebound, religious men and unconventional, otherworldly women in “Atlantic Crossing” and other Winterson fictions, one might ask whether or not Winterson is simply—and even simplistically—reinforcing familiar binaries, such as male and female or religion and spirituality. From one perspective, she seems to do just that. In the case of gender, the reviewer Rosellen Brown once went so far as to assert that Winterson’s “stories feel like pretexts” for her “vengeful hostility to men and marriage… and her compensatory vision of women as the stronger, more sane and even physically dominating sex” (10). And inasmuch as it is often the male characters in

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Winterson’s short stories who need salvation from conventional conformity, and the female characters who construct more flexible and creative alternatives for self- fulfillment, there may be some truth to Brown’s criticism.5

27 An analogous privileging of spirituality over religion is evident in Winterson’s fiction as well as in Art [Objects], her collection of nonfiction essays on art.6 Whereas Winterson cites “lack of spirituality” as a major defect of the “Realist” worldview inherited from Victorian thinkers (AO 137-8), her attitude towards “religion” is sometimes ambivalent, but often directly critical. Simply calling to mind a list of religious figures from her fiction—Pastor Spratt, Jeanette’s mother, Georgiana, and Duncan—illustrates the degree to which characters representative of conventional religious institutions are humorously mocked or implicitly criticized. By contrast, those Winterson characters, such as Villanelle, who ignore roles dictated by scripture, dogma, ritual, or religious tradition find fulfillment. For, the author seems to suggest that traditional religious trappings constrain the individual and hinder him or her from plumbing the sacred depths of subjective experience. Thus, even as Winterson continues to borrow from Christian religious tradition, for instance in her use of Scriptural language and narratives, “she also resists the Christian institutions that derive from those same Biblical texts…” (Eide 288).

28 What she does credit religion with, however, is opening our vision to other realities. In Art [Objects], she writes, We think we live in a world of sense-experience and what we can touch and feel, see and hear, is the sum of our reality. Although neither physics nor philosophy accepts this, neither physics nor philosophy has been as successful as religion used to be at persuading us of the doubtfulness of the seeming-solid world. This is a pity if only because while religion was a matter of course, the awareness of other realities was also a matter of course. (Winterson 135-6)

29 For this reason, she asserts, “the arts fare much better alongside religion than alongside either capitalism or communism. The god-instinct and the art-instinct both apprehend more than the physical biological material world” (AO 136). In this sense, she believes that religion once opened up imaginative spaces that the “Realist” worldview has since closed.

30 And indeed, the title of Winterson’s short story collection—The World and Other Places— hints at the importance of recognizing realities beyond this world, with its fragmented bodies, warring opposites, and “dead vision” (AO 145). Therefore, I would ultimately argue that Winterson’s stories offer a double perspective—the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. For Winterson, seeing things in terms of simple binaries is seeing them with the fractured, “dead vision” of a fallen world—through Napoleon’s monocular stare rather than Villanelle’s kaleidoscopic vision. To the extent that Winterson critiques such “dead vision,” such fallenness, her fictional worlds retain traces of binaristic alienation.

31 But if art necessarily begins from the fractured “world as it is,” Winterson thinks that it must transform the world as well; critic Louise Humphries captures this aesthetic credo in saying that for Winterson “art springs from life, but transcends it” (6). And Winterson herself notes, “Art is a way into other realities, other personalities… Strong texts work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists. They could not do this if they merely reflected what already exists” (26). Like the “strong texts” she describes, Winterson’s own fictions push beyond binaries that “already exist,” offering

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a transcendent vision of freer or fuller realities. That sense of the transcendent leads her to create character ideals who, at their best, are neither male nor female, or who comprehend both in their complexity: the androgynous creature Winterson admired in Woolf’s Orlando and recapitulated in characters such as Villanelle and Gabriel Angel.

32 Furthermore, if readers shake the kaleidoscope of their own critical vision ever so slightly, they might see how distinctions between even religion and spirituality shift and ultimately slip away in Winterson’s fiction. For Winterson, art itself functions as a kind of religion, offering knowledge of the transcendent, a source of salvation, and a vehicle for human communion. Her sense of the transcendent places faith in a reality beyond what meets the eyes and in a power capable of conjuring such realities. She writes in Art [Objects], “The earth is not flat and neither is reality. Reality is continuous, multiple, simultaneous, complex, abundant and partly invisible. The imagination alone can fathom this and it reveals its fathomings through art” (151). Indeed, because art can fathom such hidden depths, Winterson sees a marked spiritual character in its language. About such language, she confesses, “Now, many years after a secular Reformation, I still think of language as something holy” (AO 153). Moreover, language is not just holy in her view; it is also salvific. Recalling the power of the holy word in her own childhood, she observes, “I used books as Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing uses holy wafers, to mark out a charmed place and to save my soul” (AO 122).

33 Finally, though, Winterson believes that art goes beyond private consolation or individual salvation, taking one out of oneself and linking individual souls both to other readers and other realities (AO 136); in this sense, art is not limited by the radical subjectivity of “mere” spirituality. Indeed, in its root sense, “religion,” from the Latin religere, means simply to “bind together.” And inasmuch as art binds us together, enabling all human beings to partake of the fruits of the spirit, it offers a kind of religious communion that renders us both whole and holy. Perhaps, then, Winterson does not wholly reject religion. Instead, she has resurrected a religion of art, meant to restore an age of belief not just in this world, but in other places, too.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bollinger, Laura. “Models for Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette

Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” Tulsa Studies in Women’sLiterature 13 (1994): 363-80.

Brown, Rosellen. “Fertile Imagination.” Rev. of Sexing the Cherry, by J. Winterson.

Women’s Review of Books 7.12 (1990): 9-10.

Doan, Laura. “Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Postmodern.” The Lesbian Postmodern.

Ed. Laura Doan. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 137-155.

Eide, Marian. “Passionate Gods and Desiring Women: Jeanette Winterson, Faith, and Sexuality.” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 6.4 (October 2001): 279-91.

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Heelas, Paul and Linda Woodhead et al. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is GivingWay to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Humphries, Louise Horskjaer. “Listening for the Author’s Voice: ‘Un-sexing’ the Wintersonian Oeuvre.” Sponsored by Demons: The Art of Jeanette Winterson.

Eds. Helene Bengtson, Marianne Borch and Cindie Maagaard. Odense, Denmark: Scholars’ Press, 1999. 3-16.

Moore, Lisa. “‘Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson.’”

Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. Eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. London: Routledge, 1995. 104-27.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Revised Standard Version. Eds. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Palmer, Paulina. “Lesbian Fiction and the Postmodern: Genre, Narrativity, Sexual Politics.” Just Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Earnshaw. Postmodern Studies 23.

Eds. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.

Seaboyer, Judith. “Second Death in Venice: Romanticism and the Compulsion to

Repeat in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.” Contemporary Literature 38.3 (1997): 483-509.

Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. 1987. New York: Vintage, 1989.

---. Art [Objects]: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. 1995. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

---. The World and Other Places. 1998. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Wood, Michael. “The Contemporary Novel.” The Columbia History of the British Novel. Ed. John Richetti. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 965-87.

NOTES

1. Two notable exceptions include Laura Bollinger’s 1994 essay “Models for Female Loyalty: The Biblical Ruth in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” and Marian Eide’s 2001 essay “Passionate Gods and Desiring Women: Jeanette Winterson, Faith, and Sexuality.” Clearly, though, more work needs to be done to understand the role of religion in Winterson’s fiction. 2. Given how often Henri himself has been controlled by passion for another (Napoleon, for instance), it may seem odd that he should desire to control someone else. Yet, as Judith Seaboyer suggests, Henri seems to possess a subterranean drive for power and potential for violence, shadowed forth in the figures of the cook andNapoleon, who function as “doubles” for Henri in Seaboyer’s interpretation (504). She writes, “The reason Henri gives for his grief, and the ostensible reason for his insanity, is Villanelle’s refusal to marry him, her failure to match his passion with her own. His grief is real, as is his love, but his behavior, and his belief that to return to the world would necessitate a return to killing, suggests that his decision is a response to his war experiences. The return of the repressed in the form of the cook triggers in Henri a capacity for violence he had denied, and the asylum, for all its horror, offers a place of safety within which he is able to contain what he perceives to be his own terrifying potential” (Seaboyer 504; italics mine).

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3. In this respect, Duncan and Henri resemble Tom, the male narrator who struggles to define an authentic self in Winterson’s story “Newton.” Because his “Newtonian” neighborhood is bound by stale laws and customs, Tom must hide his true, “quantum” self to avoid ridicule for being abnormal (166). For instance, he has an intellectual’s penchant for reading, but because this pastime is so unusual in his hidebound neighborhood, he must hide his Camus in the fridge when his neighbor stops to visit (166). 4. Paulina Palmer accounts for Henri’s “hero worship” of Napoleon in Freudian terms, suggesting that his adulation is “oedipal in nature” because he once refers to Napoleon as a “little father” (166). In addition to this psychoanalytic theory, a religious explanation of Henri’s adulation is called for, given the explicitly religious language used to describe his passion. 5. Lisa Moore seems to echo Brown’s point about Winterson’s privileging of female over male in arguing that Winterson uses the male perspective to support lesbian relationships by having the male envy and admire the quality of such relationships. She offers Henri as an example of this, inasmuch as he longs for, but is excluded from, the passionate intensity of Villanelle’s relationship with the “Queen of Spades” (112). 6. In using the terms “religion” and “spirituality,” I here borrow the recent definitions put forward in Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead’s 2005 sociological study The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Although Heelas and Woodhead acknowledge that spirituality can be part of religion, they suggest that “religion” emphasizes an external, wholly Other “source of significance and authority to which individuals must conform at the expense of the cultivation of their unique subjective-lives,” with conformity entailing obedience to a set of “life as” roles dictated by “scriptures, dogmas, rituals, and so on” (6). By contrast, they suggest “spirituality” emphasizes “inner sources of significance and authority and the cultivation or sacralization of unique subjective-lives” (Heelas and Woodhead 6).

AUTHORS

CARLA A. ARNELL Carla A. Arnell is Assistant Professor of English at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she teaches courses in medieval literature and the British novel. She has contributed articles to Christianity and Literature, Studia Mystica, Mythlore, and Mythes, Croyances et Religions on medievalism and twentieth-century religious fiction.

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