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Journal of the in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

52 | Spring 2009 General issue

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/935 ISSN : 1969-6108

Éditeur Presses universitaires de Rennes

Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 juin 2009 ISSN : 0294-04442

Référence électronique Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009, « General issue » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 01 juin 2011, consulté le 03 décembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/935

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 3 décembre 2020.

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SOMMAIRE

Foreword Linda Collinge-Germain et Emmanuel Vernadakis

Dangerous Similitude in Charles ’ “To Be Read at Dusk” Kimberley Jackson

A History of the American Mind: "" Steven Olson

'The Half Shall Remain Untold': Hunilla of 's Encantadas K. M. Wheeler

Linguistic Structure and Rhetorical Resolution in Katherine Mansfield "The Garden Party" Stephen E. Severn

La tentation mélancolique dans Warm Saturday de Dylan Thomas Claude Maisonnat

Identity is a Slippery Fish – the Discovery of Identity in Elizabeth Bowen's Short Story "The Demon Lover" Zuzanna Zarebska Sanches

Cultural In-Betweenness in "L'expulsé"/"The Expelled" by Samuel Linda Collinge-Germain

Index Nominorum, Issues 41-51

Index Nominum personarum, Issues 41-51

“Echo's Bones": 's Lost Story of José Francisco Fernández

Samuel Beckett's maternal passion or hysteria at work in /compagnie Pascale Sardin

Raymond 's "Myers trio" Robert Miltner

Saroyan's lonely fruitcakes, and other goofs: strategies of resistance to the culture of abundance Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde

Heterosexual/Homosexual definitions and the homosexual of James Purdy's "The Candles of Your Eyes" Clinton E. Hammock

Apocalypse and the resurgence of the creative imagination in Not of the world by Kate Atkinson Helen E. Mundler

Author Interview

Translating a culture in stories from the caribbean: a conversation with Olive Senior Marie-Annick Montout

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 2

Book Review

José R. Ibañez, José Francisco Fernández and Carmen M. Breyones, Eds., Contemporary Debates on the Short Story Carole Birkan-Berz

Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English

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Foreword

Linda Collinge-Germain and Emmanuel Vernadakis

1 The 52th issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English is dedicated to Professor Ben Forkner who, twenty seven years ago founded the Journal and launched its first issue. Professor Forkner will complete his final teaching duties at the end of this grading period but we are delighted that he does not intend to retire from his editorial responsibilities.

2 The present issue contains fourteen essays, an interview and two book reviews. also includes an index nominorum and an index nominorum personarum to issues 41-51, printed out on dark-brick folios whose page numbers are in Roman figures. Authored by both European and American scholars, the essays illustrate a variety of approaches investigating such issues as language structure (Jackson, Wheeler, Severn, Sardin), social and individual identification (Olson, Zarebska Sanchez, Collinge, Sardin, Sautour, Hammock), the poetics of modernist and post-modern creative processes (Maisonnat, Miltner, Mundler) and social critique (Aguilera Linde).

3 The first three essays deal with nineteenth century writers on both sides of , Dickens, and Melville. In “Dangerous Similitude in Charles Dickens’ ‘To Be Read at Dusk,’” Kimberly Jackson studies the “haunted nature of figurative language.” The self-reflexive structure of this story reveals itself through several layers of , each of which “seeks to exorcise the hidden element haunting the similes employed by its narrators, as well as the tales of likeness that they tell.” The embedded do not end well for their . Their likenesses are harbingers of death. The characters are not able to rid themselves of the ghosts that haunt them but are instead consumed by them, “just as the narrators of their stories are consumed by the snow at the end of the tale.” According to Kimberly Jackson, Dickens’ story suggests that figuration is an extraordinary operation that always carries death within it.

4 Steven Olson’s “A History of the American Mind: ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” offers a fresh New Historical reading of Hawthorne’s world famous tale that “takes advantage of” traditional readings. The thesis of the article could be stated thus: “Young Goodman Brown” is a story about the severity of American cultural influences on the identity of its citizenry, about how those influences are internalized for an “American,” and about

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how they effect and affect that individual’s interaction with society. Because the new democracy is formed by the nation’s combination of individuals, it is also a story about how ideas effect and affect the new nation. It is a short history of an evolving America as Hawthorne saw it from his early nineteenth-century, vantage point.

5 In the third essay, “The Half Shall Remain Untold: Hunilla of Melville's Encantadas,” K. M. Wheeler explores the issue of silence. The article deals with “Sketch Eighth Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow” which contains a short, enigmatic, and constantly interrupted tale told by Hunilla. According to K. M. Wheeler this forms a most elusive ‘core’ for another structural element: the narrator’s highly-embellished amplification of her tragedy. The sketch’s ‘gaps’ which repeatedly disrupt the telling at crucial moments are brought out by the framing tale. This is achieved through careful deployment of rhetorical devices such as aposiopesis, anacoluthia, apophasis, and paralepsis etc. These features contribute to a dawning sense that the two tales are unspeakable or that any authentic ‘original’ is unreachable. Related to the emphasis upon story-telling as disrupted and breached, the sketch, K. M. Wheeler says, depicts the representation of ‘lived experience’ as virtually impossible, since experience is an already-constructed artifice.

6 The next six essays deal with various aspects of modernism. Stephen E. Severn’s article “Linguistic Structure and Rhetorical Resolution in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Garden Party’” breaks new ground into Mansfield’s much discussed story. The author of the essay explores the extent to which the linguistic structures of “The Garden Party” serve as markers of class identity. In Severn’s own terms, “both the narrator and the upper class characters employ speech patterns that rest upon denial and negativity. Through the repeated use of tag-questions, they establish a hierarchy of expectation that limits choice and prevents challenge. Affirmation and assertion are scarce; denial and repression are the rule. Conversely, members of the lower classes espouse affirmation and take . Those findings suggest that Laura’s lapse into silence at the conclusion of the text should be read as an of resistance, a refusal to continue with those forms which have shaped her life and consciousness to that point. The text does not prescribe the course that she should follow in the future, but it clearly decries where she has been.” Severn’s interpretation counters the widely held belief that “The Garden Party” fails to form a clear rhetorical stance on the issues of class interaction that it raised.

7 In “La Tentation mélancolique dans ‘One Warm Saturday,’” Claude Maisonnat offers a Lacanian approach to the reflexive and meta-fictional dimension of a story by Dylan Tomas whose “obvious biographical aspect” the reader is invited to take into consideration. Dylan Thomas’s modalities of writing explore, in this story, the mystery of literary creation and the profoundly melancholy source of the creative urge of Dylan Thomas. This is achieved through the medium of “which pervades the second half of the story and whose relation in the guise of the conventional topos of the writer who successfully overcomes his very inability to put pen to paper by using it as the very of his story.” By so doing “he finds a way of turning the symptoms of his paralysis and melancholy into the sinthom of the artist.”

8 In “Identity is a Slippery Fish – the Discovery of Identity in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Story ‘The Demon Lover’” S. Zarebska Sanches explores the theoretical process of identification. The paper argues in favour of Bowen’s claim that identity is an issue of public and private relationship. The immanent negativity perturbing the -

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riddled substance as well as the self reflexive-negativity merge in the subject’s death into a meaningful treatise on inseparableness of selfhood and otherness in one body.

9 Beckett’s short , first in English, then in English and French, is the subject of the three articles which follow. The first story chronologically, “Echo’s Bones” is studied by Jose Francisco Fernández who looks at this work written originally as a conclusion to the short story collection published in 1934 but unpublished due to its “odd features”. Fernández’ aims to offer an introduction to this unknown and neglected story in Beckett's canon which deals with the Belacqua Shuah’s adventures after his death in the penultimate story of the collection.

10 «L’Expulsé» and Company were published in both English and French and this bilingualism/biculturalism is the subject of the two articles which follow. The story «L’Expulsé», written in French in 1946 and published as “The Expelled” in a translation by Seaver and Beckett in 1964, is the subject of the article by Linda Collinge-Germain who approaches the work from the angle of cultural in-betweenness. In addition to the fact that the story was written originally in the author’s second language, the topoï of exclusion, uprooting and hesitation between two territories are prevelant and significant.

11 In her study of Company/Compagnie, a bilingual written by Beckett in the late seventies, Pascale Sardin draws a parallel between Beckett’s texts and Aragon and Breton’s statement “hysteria may in all respects be considered as a supreme means of expression”. Sardin suggests that Beckett found in bilingual writing—understood as a complex rewriting process in the other language—a way of dealing with the intense state of anxiety originating in the uterus; in other words, that he found in bilingual writing his own “supreme means of expression.” Company/Compagnie is a hysterical text both in content and in form, says Sardin, as it relies on a series of dissociative devices.

12 Robert Miltner, in his article on Raymond Carver, proposes reading Carver’s three short stories about the writer Myers as a trio, between and short story. “Put Yourself in My Shoes”, “The Compartment” and “Kindling” all feature a protagonist named Myers and reflexions on the writing process. The sense of being “between” links the stories as Myers is always found “between”: stories in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” trains in “The Compartment,” and lives in “Kindling.” This link “furthers the exploration of Myers, and Carver-Myers, as a writer and as an individual, seeking to define identity and selfhood”, says Miltner.

13 The following two articles deal with ways in which short-story writers question dominant ideologies. Reading William Saroyan’s stories published during the Great Depression in light of his 1968 story “Horsey Gorsey and the Frog”, in fact a critique of the dominant culture of abundance despite its appearance as an innocent children’s tale, M.D. Aguilera Linde argues that this short fiction, peopled by eccentric fools and diehard dreamers, can be read as an attempt to contradict, subvert, or resist the values and institutions of the consumer society.

14 In his study of James Purdy’s story “The Candles of Your Eyes”, Clinton E. Hammock posits the possibility of a “homosexual narrative”, based on the way in which the defining pressure of heterosexuality shapes the representation of “homosexuality” in the story. Oppositions in and structure such as dominance/ submission, beautiful/ugly, dynamic/static work as concepts that underlie the deployment of heterosexual/homosexual definitions.

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15 Michelle Ryan-Sautour studies Angela Carter’s “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan ” and how the concept of theatre is used to explore the nature of illusion, especially in relation to Carter’s perception of identity as performance. “With its pseudo- biographical quality”, says the article’s author, “the text plays upon the reading contract and portrays as a on life’s stage, from his first breath to his last performance.”

16 The first and last stories of Kate Atkinson’s short story collection Not the End of the World are examined by Helen Mundler in this issue’s final article. “Apocalypse and the Resurgence of the Creative Imagination” is the angle from which Mundler approaches “Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping” and “Pleasureland”, both of which feature two young women confronted with an apocalyptic world. The author of the article reads the stories as “a commentary on the postmodern ‘apocalypse’, in which an end has been put to and the imagining subject struggles to survive.

17 In “Translating a Culture in Stories from the Caribbean - A Conversation with Olive Senior,” Marie-Annick Montout broaches various issues pertaining to her translation of the Antillean rhythm, syntax, and phraseology as exemplified in Senior’s stories.

18 The volume concludes with the reviews of Contemporary Debates on the Short Story (edited by J. R. Ibanez) and Adrian Hunter’s Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English, by Carol Birkan-Berz and Teresa Gibert Macada respectively.

AUTHORS

LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN Organisers of the Conference and Guest-Editors of this issue

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Dangerous Similitude in Charles Dickens’ “To Be Read at Dusk”

Kimberley Jackson

1 Charles Dickens’ ghost story “To Be Read at Dusk” was first published in 1852 in Heath’s Keepsake.1 Though it seldom appears in recent Dickens scholarship, the story is unique for its self-reflexivity, a quality not often as apparent in Dickens’ works. The text consists of two ghost stories inside a frame narrative whose occupants are observed by the narrator who, as I explain below, is interrupted by the author himself. While all of these layers of narration would be enough to call attention to the act of itself, there is an additional level of self-reflexivity in the content of the various tales; they are all concerned with figuration and representation. The focus of the frame narrative, and thus the motive force behind the telling of the two inner tales, is the simile and its properness – who voices it, to whom does it belong, to what does it refer, and does it do so convincingly? The two internal tales then serve to demonstrate how likeness, similitude, operates. This operation is, it seems, commonly uncommon; while one of the storytellers claims that the events narrated, instances of likeness, are “as common as cherries in the Black Forest,” they are nonetheless events that most would label supernatural – premonitions, phantoms, doppelgangers and the like (Dickens 235). These events, linked as they are, in Dickens’ tale, to the simile, call attention to the use of figuration itself as a commonly uncommon activity; while it can be performed easily and innocently enough, it conceals the violent initiatory act involved in every representation.

2 Described in various ways by contemporary theorists – separating something from its origin, splitting the experience from its meaning, murdering the thing in favor of its representation2 - the act of naming, of representing something in speech, initiates the violent process of subordinating the unique to the concept. Early nineteenth century philosophers, like G.W.F. Hegel, embraced this initiatory act as an essential part of human progress. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (a defining text for nineteenth century Europe’s understanding and justification of a structure of “progress” moving towards a universalization of meaning) begins with the act of naming as one of the first steps in the dialectic. Friedrich Nietzsche, however, did not seek to naturalize the linguistic act,

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but saw it for the arbitrary and ultimately violent act it would later be characterized as. For Nietzsche, the simile is not one occurrence among others within language but rather, as he would argue only twenty years after the publication of Dickens’ story,3 as a type of (i.e., as a way of creating a connection or likeness between totally different registers), it is the linguistic act par excellence.

3 It is my contention here that Dickens illustrates something more akin to the latter’s view of language when he allows us a glimpse of the phantom nature of the simile in “To Be Read at Dusk.” In this short text, he has made a ghost story of language itself, one which disavows its own nature – “Ghosts! There are no ghosts here!” – even as it spins its macabre tales (Dickens 238).

4 The little criticism that does exist on this short story suggests that through it, Dickens was illustrating and perhaps working through episodes and concerns from his own life experience. As Glancy points out in her article on “To Be Read at Dusk,” the short story abounds with biographical references. Louise Henson, in “Investigations and : Charles Dickens and Ghosts,” takes us through Dickens’ ongoing fascination with and changing views on the nature of ghosts and their connection to such “physiological” phenomena as mesmerism and animal magnetism. She cites “To Be Read at Dusk” as one of the tales in which Dickens explores these possibilities. What I would like to suggest here is that in performing these explorations through literature, Dickens links these phenomena, whether physiological or spiritual, to language in a manner which highlights, even as it disavows, language’s own mysterious, dangerous, and destabilizing nature.

5 While Susan Gillman and Robert Patten, in their article titled “Dickens: Doubles: Twain: Twins,” argue that Dickens’ doubles emanate from a space of stable identity,4 “To Be Read at Dusk” questions this stability through both the author’s and narrator’s evident need to disavow the acts of figuration it contains. This structure of disavowal becomes apparent in the very first scene of the story. It begins: “One, two, three, four, five. There were five of them” (Dickens 235). The five couriers, two of which will narrate the internal stories, emerge in this way, one by one, onto the page before the reader. Observed by the narrator, they will soon begin a heated discussion on the nature of certain phenomena that are like ghosts, but are not ghosts. This discussion will lead to the telling of the two internal tales, which are supposed to verify that indeed such events do occur.

6 The description of the comes next. It is a ghastly landscape “on the summit of the Great St. Bernard in Switzerland,” with “remote heights, stained by the setting sun, as if a mighty quantity of red wine had been broached upon the mountain top, and had not yet had time to sink into the snow.” But, “This is not my simile.” This is the only sentence up to this point in the narrative spoken in the . It is as if another voice comes in here, one not part of the scene, to disclaim ownership of the simile (and perhaps the narrative itself), to disavow the likeness. This present tense voice, speaking as it does from outside the time of the narrative, could only be the author’s. While this particular simile seems harmless enough - the likeness between the setting sun on the snow and spilt wine - it thinly veils a much more sinister one, in which the setting sun is like spilt blood. The author disavows the likeness that is explicitly stated in order to shield himself from the implicit one. If the implied simile does not immediately strike the reader, a more obvious clue follows: “looking at the reddened snow, and at the lonely shed hard by, where the bodies of belated travelers, dug out of it, slowly wither

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away, knowing no corruption in that cold region.” So whether the sun on the snow looks like wine or not, at this point the reader knows that under the snow there most certainly is blood. The danger in the figure lies in the fact that the seemingly innocent simile (sun like wine) hides within it the more sinister one (wine like blood), like the snow hides dead bodies, and we begin to sense that the story itself is built on just such a surface.

7 Neither author nor narrator will take credit for the simile; instead, the narrator asserts that “it was made for the occasion by the stoutest courier, who was a German.” A game of “passing the ” has taken place, through which the blame for the simile moves from the outside in – from the author (Dickens) to the external narrator (who remains unidentified) to the internal narrator (the German courier) – buffering the author and, perhaps, the outside world in which the use of similes is also “as common as macaroni in Naples.” While the author and his world may be protected from what lies hidden in the simile, the narrator, in spite of his own disavowal, is not. He is, in fact, aligned with precisely the most feared quality of the simile: its ability to pass unnoticed. The narrator states, “none of the others took any more notice of it than they took of me” (235). “It” refers to the simile, and “me” refers to the narrator, the two related in that neither is noticed. Oftentimes we do not notice the narrator of a tale, and there is nothing sinister in this. The difference here is that far from remaining unnoticed, the narrator’s presence and hiddenness are highlighted. He is neither a character within the story nor entirely outside it (since he exists within its temporality). He is, rather, himself a simile, as are the five couriers he observes.

8 The relationship between the external and internal narrators is thus itself one of similitude. While the five couriers sit on one bench, smoking and watching the sunset, the narrator is “sitting on another bench on of the convent door, smoking my cigar, like them, and – also like them - looking at the reddened snow” [emphasis added]. So while the wine on the snow might not be the narrator’s simile, the narrator himself not only employs but also is a simile of the couriers – he is like them. Again, the direction of the simile points inward. The couriers are the origin of the simile; it is their emergence that sets the tale in motion and begins this series of ghastly substitutions. As if to assure the reader of the couriers’ “guilt” in this regard, the disavowed simile is repeated: “The wine upon the mountain top soaked in as we looked.” The fact that both types of narrator participate in the very structure of similitude that has been disavowed for the ghastly secret it hides suggests that all that will be spoken by them holds such things within it, like the dead bodies under the snow.

9 Indeed, there is a moment of silence for that which is hidden in the simile: “The mountain in the sunset had stopped the five couriers in a conversation. It is a sublime sight, likely to stop conversation. The mountain being now out of the sunset, they resumed” (235). The mountain in the sunset, this point of the simile, “dusk,” is also the point at which conversation stops. Again there is the insertion of the present tense voice, interrupting the already-interrupted conversation to tell us that this particular sight at this particular time of day is “likely to stop conversation.” Not that it will necessarily stop conversation, but that it is “likely” to do so. Again, it is a relation of “like” that moves the narrative.

10 Evidently, then, this is a story which is not to be told at dusk, since conversation stops here. It is to be read at dusk. Does the title indicate futurity, that it will be read at dusk?

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Or is it a limitation, only to be read at dusk? It is neither of these, but rather to be read at dusk, it is passive and infinitive. It is to be, infinitely, read, passively, as if oneself were being read, at dusk, only at this time of the disavowal of the simile, only at this time of the interrupted conversation. This passive infinitive has implications for both the narrators and the reader. For the narrators, who are supposed to be actively telling the stories, the fact of their being simultaneously read (as part of the story themselves) is highlighted. For the reader, who expects only metaphorically to enter the story she is reading, she finds the story gazing back at her. She encounters a tale interrupted at a crucial moment of self-reflexivity, a point at which the telling of the tale folds back upon its reading and vice-versa. Thus the prescription of the time of the reading ensures that when the story is read, the reader too will be read, will become part and parcel of the haunting simile, will become herself a likeness of the processes at work in the narrative. The disavowal that seems to buffer the outside of the story from the violence of the simile appears now as a distraction put in place by the author to fill the space of silence at this dusky moment when the reader’s world is mirrored in the story.

11 After this interruption, and perhaps as a way of coming to terms with what it portends, the five couriers embark on a verbal mission to complete the simile, to draw out and name the hidden element they are attempting to describe. To do this they must find a name for these phenomena that are like ghosts, but are not ghosts. ‘“if you talk of ghosts - ”’ “But I don’t talk of ghosts,”’ said the German.” (235) The German employs the following example to explain the type of phenomenon they are attempting to name: When you walk along a crowded street . . . and think that a passing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and then that another passing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and so begin to have a strange foreknowledge that presently you’ll meet your friend Heinrich . . . [emphasis added].

12 This example serves as a preface to the two tales that follow, one about an English bride who dreams of the likeness of a dark man who eventually materializes and carries her away, and the other about a set of twins, one of which sends his phantom to warn the other of his impending death. All describe phenomena of likeness, repeated likenesses which lead to some fateful meeting with the subject of the likeness. In each of the two tales, as in the very first simile (sun like wine), the likeness contains the palpable presence of death and serves as further evidence of the violence involved in this commonly uncommon linguistic act.

13 The tale of the English bride is told by the Genoese courier, who claims that he worked for her husband and witnessed the events. The English bride, Clara, has a dream about a dark man three times before her wedding and becomes convinced that she will find the “likeness” of the man and something terrible will happen. The simile is apparently an awful thing for the English bride, a horror that she fears, but she has only encountered half of it. First, there is only the dream, with no corresponding simile: “Not a face she ever saw, or at all like a face she ever saw” (236). Then, the bride and her party arrive at the old Genoese palace that her husband has rented for the summer. The palace, too, as Glancy notes, is a reference to the outside of the story, to the author himself, who wanted to rent such a castle, but it was rejected by the servant he sent to investigate it for being too old and rundown. It could be said that Dickens’ disappointment at not being able to stay in the palace appears in his story as a form of wish-fulfillment, but the description of the place within the courier’s tale suggests otherwise. The courier describes it as being “like a tomb.” The entombing nature of the

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simile is once again revealed, and thus the palace becomes a harbinger of a dark duplicity.

14 The bride knows enough to be frightened of the palace and what it might contain: “Mistress secretly had great fear of meeting with the likeness of that face – we all had; but there was no such thing” (237). Eventually, the likeness presents itself as a guest at the palace. The dark man’s name is Dellombra (of/from the shadow), and indeed he is a shadow of the bride, whose name, appropriately, is Clara. She is the light part of the simile, while he is the dark and deadly implicit side. When faced with this materialization, “her face changed,” she “was nearly terrified to death,” and “wandered in her mind about her dream, all night.” Her husband dismisses her fears and tells her “that it rested with herself to be herself.” The problem is, of course, not the dark man, not the simile, but rather the implicit simile, that she cannot be herself, that the shadow represents her own dark side, one whose power over her is overwhelming: “She would cast down her eyes and droop her head, before the Signor Dellombra, or would look at him with a terrified and fascinated glance, as if his presence had some evil influence or power over her” (238).

15 Clara’s dark man corresponds with that of a real lady, Madame de la Rue, with whom Dickens’ spent many hours, from 1844-5, mesmerizing her in an attempt to rid her of her haunting shadow (Glancy 41-4). It is not surprising that such an internal demon would manifest itself as a character all its own in Dickens’ fictional representation of it. One need only think of ’s monster or the later Edward Hyde. Indeed, Dellombra is very much like Frankenstein’s monster, as he, too, is the male demon of a female character, like the monster is ultimately to Mary Shelley.

16 Madame de la Rue was more fortunate than our heroine, however, as Dellombra eventually steals Clara away, never to be heard from again. Like Frankenstein and his monster, “she vanished into infamous oblivion, with the dreaded face beside her that she had seen in her dream” (Dickens 238). The completion of the simile, for Clara, led to her own disappearance. The author, whose solicitude saved Madame de la Rue, seems to have unleashed her demon into his story. Perhaps it was a form of exorcism, but more likely, it seems, it was an exploration into the full extent of the awful power wielded by this ultimately linguistic operation. Further, this operation does not take place in a closed space but rather, as the title suggests, in the in-between time of dusk in which reader and text are likenesses, both “to be read.”

17 The second tale, told by the German courier, is quite appropriately about twin brothers, each the likeness of the other. Named James and John, the pair is also an intertextual reference to the two brothers in Dickens’ earlier novel Dombey and Son. In Dombey and Son, the brothers are different ages and the younger one has overtaken the older in the business, but in “To Be Read at Dusk,” the brothers are apparently equals in everything, for “[b]etween these brothers there was a great affection” (238). The polarity obviously present in the two brothers of Dombey and Son is only hinted at in “To Be Read at Dusk,” while the separate identities of the two brothers are radically called into question, not simply by their identical looks, but also by the ghostly appearance and death of one of the pair.

18 Before the one, James, is to leave for a trip the other, John, comes to visit, but is taken sick. So he says: “If I get quite better, I’ll come back and see you before you go. If I don’t feel well enough to resume my visit where I leave it off, why you will come and see me before you go.” The emphasis on the second pair of pronouns deserves some attention.

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It reads as accusatory, as if John cannot count on his brother’s reciprocation. Strangely, both options come about. While John does not resume his visit in person, John’s phantom visits James in the night: “it came into my room, in a white dress, and regarding me earnestly, passed up to the end of the room, glanced at some papers on my writing-desk, turned, and, still looking earnestly at me as it passed the bed, went out at the door” (239). After this, John’s servant comes to tell James that John is on his deathbed, so James goes to see him. “He was in white, like the figure – necessarily so, because he had his nightdress on. He looked like the figure – necessarily so because he looked earnestly at his brother when he saw him come into the room . . . ‘James, you have seen me before, tonight – and you know it!’ And so died!” Again, the likeness precedes its subject, but more important, it seems, is this second accusation against James. John’s insistence on his presence in James’ room that night is a direct rebuttal of John’s earlier assertion to his servant: “Now, I am not in the least mad, and am not in the least disposed to invest that phantom with any external existence outside of myself.” While John’s “earnest” looks at his brother after glancing at the papers on his desk indicate that James’ guilt might reside in his handling of the business (as in Dombey and Son), in the end the more pointed accusation involves the disavowal of the likeness. James must admit that he has seen the phantom, which is the likeness not only of his brother but also, of course, of himself. James’ fear of possible madness is nothing compared to this violent double severance: on the one hand, from his twin, and on the other, from his own image mirrored in his twin’s phantom.

19 Thus in both of the internal tales, as in the frame narrative, it is a question of disproving the denial of a violent similitude. In between the two tales, the German courier reinforces this structure of assertion and denial: ‘“What do you call that?’ said the German courier, triumphantly. ‘“Ghosts! There are no ghosts there! What do you call this, that I am going to tell you? Ghosts! There are no ghosts here!”’ (238). There is a strange parallel between the repeated exclamations of the German courier, and another German, Friedrich Nietzsche, who would not write for several years, but who claimed to have quoted Aristotle in writing, “O my friends, there is no friend.”5 What I mean to suggest by providing this parallel is that the German’s lines in Dickens’ story need not be read as first, “Ghosts!,” an exclamation of disgust, followed by “there are no ghosts,” the denial of the existence of ghosts. The way one could read it is as one reads the Aristotle-Nietzsche quote, as first an address to those present, “friends” or “ghosts.” For the way that the five couriers emerge, one by one, in the beginning, and then the way, in the end, they disappear, suggests that they are, perhaps, ghosts themselves: “I waited, when the German courier ceased, to hear something said of this strange story. The silence was unbroken. I looked round, and the five couriers were gone: so noiselessly that that ghostly mountain might have absorbed them into its eternal snows” (239). The ghosts’ calling attention to, and simultaneous denial of, their ghostly character, parallels the present voice’s denial of ownership of the simile in the beginning of the story, as well as all those that follow. Our internal narrators are themselves phantoms of the bodies buried in the snow, voices that speak from underneath the figure.

20 But even that is not the end of what lies hidden or unvoiced in the story. Through the series of exchanges between the five couriers, four couriers are introduced: German, Swiss, Neapolitan, and Genoese. What about the fifth? If he exists, he never speaks. Is this a mistake on the part of the author, or the narrator, or is it an integral part of the tale? “There were five of them.” And yet there are only four who are identified as some

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particular nationality, only four who are identified at all, only four who speak. The fifth courier, like the implicit simile (wine like blood), never speaks, but is present nonetheless, and these voiceless and unvoiced presences lend an air of danger and secrecy to the story.

21 The ghostly nature of the couriers thus turns out to be another of these instances of similitude which hide a silenced, implied element within. While a ghost appears after its subject’s death, and usually emerges, in literature, to realign a “time out of joint,” the types of similitude narrated by the couriers indicate the splitting of the subject from its likeness prior to death. Not only prior to death, but prior to the encounter with the subject of the likeness itself, the simile is a dangerous presence that contains an awful prescience. The fact that the narrators themselves are victims of this same operation highlights the self-reflexivity of the text. As the title suggests, the couriers are as much passively narrated by their own tales as they are actively telling them. They themselves are instances of what they narrate. What actually speaks through the couriers, as well as the narrator, who is also a simile, and the author himself, whose life experiences, narrated in this way, escape his authority with or without his actual disavowal of them, is the act of enunciation itself. The fact that this act has become self-conscious is what gives the story its haunted feel. Whether it speaks about ghosts or not, the haunted nature of language speaks through it. The message is simple. What wants to be heard in this tale is, simply, simile, emerging in the beginning, remaining only long enough to tell tales about crises of likeness. What makes itself felt every time there is a likeness is a third term that is always silenced in each likeness, the presence of the simile itself, announcing itself even in its disavowal, haunting its own narrative, hiding in the shadows of its own enunciation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George . London: Verso, 1997.

Dickens, Charles. “To Be Read at Dusk.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 4.20 (1852): 235-9.

Gillman, Susan and Robert Patten. “Dickens: Doubles: Twain: Twins.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 39.4 (1985): 441-58.

Glancy, Ruth. “To Be Read at Dusk.” The Dickensian 83.1 (1987): 40-7.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: , 1977.

Henson, Louise. “Investigations and Fictions: Charles Dickens and Ghosts.” The Victorian Supernatural. Eds. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 44-63.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lie in the Nonmoral Sense.” Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s. Trans. Daniel Breazeale, 79-93. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979. 79-93.

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NOTES

1. For the history of its publication, see Ruth Glancy’s “To Be Read at Dusk,” The Dickensian 83.1 (1987): 40-7. 2. Since the elaboration of structural linguistics by Ferdinand Saussure, the relations between event and enunciation, between the “thing-in itself” and representation, between the Real and the Symbolic have been variously elaborated by structuralists, poststructuralists, and psychoanlysts, but always the relation is one of violence, trauma, loss, etc. 3. See Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in a Non-moral Sense” (1873). 4. According to Gillman and Patten, Twain’s twins, in contrast, do not spring from such a stable source, but rather from an instability in Twain’s/Clemens own existence. 5. Jacques Derrida wrote his Politics of Friendship (trans. George Collins, Verso, 1997) around this apparent “misquote.”

ABSTRACTS

Pour être lu à la nuit tombante (1852) est une nouvelle de Charles Dickens qui raconte une histoire de fantômes. Le présent article émet l'hypothèse que cette nouvelle, atypique de par sa structure autoréflexive, explore la nature "spectrale" du langage figuré. L'étude s'appuie sur les phénomènes d'autoréflexivité pour mettre en rapport les narrateurs, des récits enchâssés, les personnages et leurs histoires par le biais des figures de style. Dickens écrit cette nouvelle pour montrer que si le recours à un langage figuré constitue une opération courante, il n'en est pas moins vrai que ce recours repose sur la mort.

AUTHORS

KIMBERLEY JACKSON Kimberly Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. She teaches nineteenth century gothic literature, , and tech-noir literature and film. Her publications include article-length pieces on H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, contemporary gothic music, and reality televisión, as well as a book-length project on the posthuman in contemporary tech-noir film titled Techno-Human Infancy, which is currently under review.

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A History of the American Mind: "Young Goodman Brown"

Steven Olson

1 is foremost, with some exceptions, a historical, allegorical, and moralistic writer. That is, he writes about the nature of historical understanding by referring to historical situations or figures. In his better works he writes about this history allegorically, which I hope to clarify in this essay. And as he writes this “allegorical history,” he imparts to his readers a moral lesson, or various lessons, as is implicit in the genre of . As he offers these concrete meanings, however, he allows more permissive, democratic, responses to his stories. “Young Goodman Brown” is, among the short fiction, the superior example of this allegorical history.1

2 In order to foreground my approach to the short story, however, it is helpful to refer to recent readings of . Much recent critical work on The Scarlet Letter assumes that part of the allegorical meaning of the letter A is this: A stands for America as a nation.2 Sacvan Bercovitch's The Office of The Scarlet Letter, as a primary example, presents the novel as representative of the American experience of the mid-nineteenth century. Bercovitch elaborately and thoroughly historicizes the novel, arguing that its “historical subject is neither the problem of the law nor the advantages of consensus. It is the process through which liberal society achieves consensus, the ambiguities through which it makes reconciliation seem both inevitable and desirable, a private necessity we cannot help but choose” (71‑72). While such brief quotation cannot do Bercovitch's book justice, it can demonstrate how Hawthorne's aesthetic and historical use of the Puritans extends into issues of the nineteenth-century.3 Bercovitch continues to historicize the novel in his more recent article, “The Scarlet Letter: A Twice‑Told Tale.” Jay Grossman similarly asserts that the novel is “profoundly implicated in 'contemporary material'—specifically, antebellum discourses of ” (14).4 Whereas Christopher Diffee's “Postponing Politics in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter” criticizes Hawthorne's refusal to take a political stand on important issues, it also assumes the novel's nineteenth-century historical implications. I would like to suggest that the story “Young Goodman Brown” also functions historically along the lines assumed by these scholars and that it is an earlier, albeit less inclusive, allegorical

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history of America which takes as its subject, in large part, an examination of the incipient American mind-set which begins to shape an American identity. As such, it offers not only a viable understanding of how the three primary Hawthornian qualities of history, allegory, and moralism combine, indeed depend on one another, but it suggests how Hawthorne's allegory functions as history.

3 If The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown” are a type of national history, it is important to sketch briefly the type of history that these two works present. They do not present a history of significant persons and events which determine the social or political course of the nation, in the sense that Hawthorne's friend, George Bancroft, would think of history. Bancroft fully accepted the predominant nineteenth-century concepts of historical progress and Manifest Destiny.5 Michael Davitt Bell notes that Bancroft also shared the conventional view of a moral history, or a “history [that] embodied moral truths” (5). Hawthorne would have agreed generally with Bancroft, I believe, on the moral nature of their separate types of historic endeavors. But Hawthorne was more skeptical (as Bercovitch makes clear in Office) about the notions of freedom and progress than was Bancroft, and he saw things more complexly, perhaps because he was not considering history in terms of grand and sweeping events as much as he was analyzing the operations of historical forces or considering the effects of historical forces on everyday people. As Harold K. Bush, Jr., points out, “in direct contrast to the rosy pictures of the Puritans presented by romantic historians like Bancroft, Hawthorne's version of New England's seventeenth‑century privileging of concern over freedom shows how political oppression and civil corruption were created” (148). Bush's article, which includes an intelligent summary of the use of the Puritans as American founding fathers by early nineteenth‑century historians, places Hawthorne among the romantic liberals (like Bancroft), but demonstrates, through the examples of “Endicott and the Red Cross" and “The May‑Pole of Merry Mount,” Hawthorne's more critical perspective, stating that he “sometimes explicitly challenged Bancroft's nearly impervious account” (138).

4 For Hawthorne, Bancroft's type of history, though extremely important, lacked vitality. 6 Hawthorne preferred to embody history in fiction, not an actual accounting of people and events, but a real, or true, one.7 And of course, his preferred of fiction was allegory. So, I suggest, his allegorical fictions are, in a sense, true representations of historical facts. Or, put simply, his fictions are histories.8 Not the only histories. Not the best histories. But they are histories, nonetheless as valid as, say, George Bancroft's history. Histories not as voluminous, perhaps, as Bancroft's; not as attached to precise temporalities or occurrences; not as simply or superficially causal as a nineteenth- century historian's depiction of the influence of institutional, economic, or personal forces. But they are histories as detailed and specific in their own way, and more completely and intricately expressive of national character and psychology and identity; more analytical and exploratory of how ideology shapes the thoughts, and thus the actions, of the citizenry; more expressive of the common workings of a democracy in action at a human level, the level at which a democracy is, by definition, concerned; and more expressive of the daily human workings of a democracy and how these daily workings continue and perpetuate ideology; more expressive, in short, of a lived or living, common or democratic history.

5 How does “Young Goodman Brown” function as allegorical history in the mid- nineteenth century?9

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6 Young Goodman Brown, apparently in ignorance and innocence, goes into the woods one evening, apparently to keep a prearranged appointment with the devil. Complacently, he assumes that he will encounter the ultimate evil face to face, remain untainted, and return to his new wife unchanged, thus proving his Faith. He fails. Or rather his Faith fails him.

7 These broad strokes of the plot reflect the general experience of the Puritans' immigration to the New World, conflating the separatist and non-separatist immigrations and settlements. Assured of the truth of their religion (the Faith), they voyaged forth into the wilderness, where they knew Satan was in residence. Hard as the struggle would be in their war with the devil, their earthly success was assured if they kept their part of the Covenant of Grace and maintained their faith. Not all would be saved, to be sure, but among them were God's Elect, and that belief in election carried with it, as Hawthorne portrays in Goodman Brown, a certain complacency, or “presumption,” as Michael J. Colacurcio identifies it (288). Indeed, they must not fail because they were to be, as John Winthrop forcefully reminded them, “as a city upon a hill.”10 Along with the presumption of their own faith and goodness, according to Hawthorne, Brown and the actual Puritans carry into the woods, the wilderness, a corresponding faith in the goodness of their fellow Puritans. Brown and those aboard the Arabella, or the Mayflower, are a model of Christian charity, assuming their community is one fellowship bonded in the love of Christ. So as Brown thinks well of himself, generously he thinks well of others in his community who also further the means and end of glorifying Christ through their lives—ministers, deacons, and catechists. The complacency and presumption, in other words, are not merely an individual inclination, but a collective one.11

8 It is singularly ironic that generosity, or charity, breeds presumption, but that is precisely Hawthorne's point. The establishes the generosity or charity as false, therefore as presumption. Furthermore, such presumption can result in cruel, unchristian actions, and hence hypocrisy, as Hawthorne suggests early in the story. The devil claims acquaintance with Brown's familial ancestry, that is with his Puritan heritage: “I helped your grandfather . . . when he lashed the Quaker woman . . . . And it was I that brought your father the pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village . . . . They were my good friends, both” (77). Brown replies, “If it be as thou sayest,[ . . .] I marvel they never spoke of these matters. Or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the sort would have driven them from New-England. We are a people of prayer, and good works, to boot, and abide no such wickedness” (77). In short, the Puritans, like Brown, did not see themselves for what they were, people who rationalized their less-than-Christian acts (their destructive religio- and ethnocentric acts) into acts of Divine Providence or construed them as acts attesting to God's glory.12 The double irony of “good works” punctuates Hawthorne's point: first, while they think they are doing good works, in fact the examples of intolerance, the whipping of the Quaker woman and the burning of the Indian village, show quite otherwise; and, second, according to their doctrine doing good works cannot save them. Because they do not believe in free will, there is no incentive to do right action, so they are rendered incapable of “good works,” or at least excused, on an unconscious level, from wrong action. And if excused thus, they will continue to be blind to the evil results of their actions and continue to commit them.

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9 Another debilitating aspect of this ideology, the Puritan tenet of total depravity, further complicates the psychological tension between Christian compassion and the egocentricity resulting from the tenet of Election. Brown carries with him into the woods a conviction that there is evil within him—else why is he going to meet the devil? And with his conviction of his own depravity, Brown also carries a conviction that, if his community is a fellowship, then there is evil in its other members, too. Hence, he needs to hide when he hears voices of people approaching in the woods. He needs to hide himself, his own evil, from them, and he needs to shield himself from the fact that there might be evil in them. In effect, in this complex and conflicting psychological state Brown must isolate himself from his community and hide himself from himself. There is, after all, a close family resemblance between him and the devil, and the devil reminds him early during their meeting in the forest of the diabolical tendencies of Brown's family, of the devil's past associations with his grandfather and father. So not only is Brown suspicious of himself, he is suspicious of his community (especially of those in the last generation who taught him his faith) and of his family roots (those from whom he inherited his faith). In short, what the Puritans brought with them, along with their model of Christian charity and election, were other tenets of , including a conviction of their own innate depravity—original sin. As the New England Primer reminded them, “In Adam's Fall / We Sinned all.” 13 They carried, with their presumptuous conviction of saintly election, a belief in their own, deserved damnation.

10 No wonder that for Brown the black cloud passing overhead bears such a cacophonous turmoil of “a confused and doubtful sound of voices”—a sound that then seems to fade until he doubts whether he heard the voices at all. But the sound returns more raucous, and ends in a “cry of grief, , and terror” and a scream (we do not know if from Brown or the cloud), which is “drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter” (82, 83). The confusion of the doctrine has caused an interior confusion—spiritual and psychological—that results finally in despair: “maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate, that he seemed to fly along the forest-path” (83), becoming the “chief horror of the scene” (83). Ironically, Brown's Faith has in fact driven him to the ultimate sin of despair. And it is his Faith that drove him there, for between the description of the turmoil of voices in the cloud and the “cry of grief, rage, and terror,” Hawthorne interposes Brown's plea to his Faith to save him. But he utters the word “Faith!” with “agony and ,” clearly ironic, allowing the reading that faith, agony, and desperation had functioned together. This reading is further emphasized when the forest mockingly echoes, “‘Faith! Faith!’ as if bewildered wretches were seeking her, all through the wilderness” (82, 83). Brown's bewilderment caused by the conflicting doctrines of his faith is shared by the voices of his community, in the cloud and throughout the forest.

11 Add the Calvinist doctrine of predetermination to this incipient national identity, this ideology of the Puritans (the actual ones and Hawthorne's), and it is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, Hawthorne might say, to achieve a happy conclusion to the story. Believing in goodness and charity might be easy enough, but continuing to believe that goodness and charity exist in oneself and others while confronting evil in one’s self and one’s community members is more difficult, though perhaps possible. Maintaining that belief in the face of intractable damnation is much more difficult, perhaps impossible.

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The problem arises from the human need for a certain degree of psychological comfort or security during one’s earthly life. True, the Puritans' doctrines, arguably the balance between Election and damnation, attempted to allow for such comfort. But from Hawthorne's perspective, when these doctrines were applied, they failed to achieve this balance. Rather, their effect was the opposite. As Claudia Johnson points out, “Young Goodman Brown” describes a “mock descent in the Puritan tradition”: “Though the landscape of [Brown's] heart was available to him, he never saw the true extent of its terrors. . . . Like the stock example of the deluded, self-satisfied man of the justification sermon, young Goodman Brown stands as a negative definition of the regenerative descent” (201, 203). In other words, Brown’s complacency and egotism are the very essence of the sermons given to stir self-examination, a comparison between one’s own thoughts and actions and those of the self-satisfied man. The sermons, like the story “Young Goodman Brown,” present an example of what foibles and sins one must be alert to and try to avoid. I suggest that this self-satisfaction is precisely what Brown stands for, but not, as Johnson claims, as a description of an individual Puritan nor as a representation of the universal human situation, but as a portrayal of the collective American Puritan experience. In short, while American Puritans had the tools, the sermons to which Johnson refers, to examine their own collective heart and soul, I would add that they simply did not examine them very well, or could not effect from such examination an appropriate level of psychological comfort. What stopped them, ironically, was the psychological confusion, not balance, caused by the conflicts of presumption, the belief into depravity of the human soul, and the belief in a predetermined spiritual existence.

12 It is this last tenet—predestination—that causes the most problems, for with free will an individual—or a society—might be able to adjust to its dual nature of good and evil. Without free will, however, one's existence remains illusory and dreamlike, not substantial.14 To put the question of simultaneously maintaining a belief in goodness and intractable, deserved damnation in another way, how can a person who believes that his soul is depraved possibly prevail over Satan—or psychologically adjust to the existence of human evil—when he meets him? From a devout Puritan's perspective, this question could be answered: he does not prevail over Satan (he does not achieve a psychological balance). God triumphs over Satan, and one accepts the reality of God's control and lives according to the covenant. But, Hawthorne asks, what about the individuals and the society that are spiritually and psychologically confused chiefly because they accept the doctrine of predetermination? How do they, under their indoctrinated conditions, prevail when they face Satan? They cannot! Consider Goodman Brown. On the surface he accepts his faith, believing it will sustain him through his dealings with the devil. That is, he believes that love of Christ, the Covenant of Grace, and charity to his fellow Puritans will see him through. He believes, in other words, that his Puritan community is on the path of goodness and righteousness and can thus confront and overcome human evil (the devil) when they meet it (him). But Brown's Faith forsakes him. And it is not simply that his faith leaves him when he breaks the covenant, and without that faith and the power of God it brings through the covenant he cannot stand up to the devil. Rather, it is impossible for him to maintain such faith in the goodness and righteousness of his errand when his doctrine insists simultaneously that he is damned and that he has not the will to do anything about it. The fatal flaw is not in Brown, but in the ideology of his religion, and

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in this case in the ideology of the “Civil Body Politic” as well.15 So, for Brown, as a result of the forces of the ideology he lives under, “his dying hour was gloom” (90).

13 Unfortunately, the gloom is not for Brown alone, but is apparently extended to his progeny and his community: “when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grand-children, a goodly procession, besides neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tomb-stone” (89-90). It is not Brown who determined that there was no hope, nor is it God. It is “they,” Faith, progeny, and neighbors. Brown is arguably responsible for his personal hopelessness, though as a product of his society, he, alone, I would argue, is not singly responsible. His community, his religion, his society determined the gloom of his dying hour. And apparently, because “they” carve no hopeful verse in the tombstone—the only symbol of social documentation in the story and a lasting symbol at that, “they” will continue—have continued—to perpetuate this hopelessness, through religious and social doctrines that are self-condemning. Of course, the place and time period of the story's setting, Salem around the witch outbreak of 1692, also suggest the destructive force of Puritan belief. The combination of presumption and predetermined damnation causes an internal psychological conflict, as in Brown, but it also causes a communal hysteria. The fear, perhaps paranoia is not too strong a word, that is nurtured by the conflict eventually results in a need to purge the evil by scapegoating members of the community. Brown, and other community members like him, could easily attempt to preserve their own sense of goodness by accusing—and in some instances hanging—their fellows in Christ. The Puritans will continue to perpetuate this hopelessness and self-damnation, as they have perpetuated their relationship with the devil from grandfather to father to Brown, if they maintain their conflicting beliefs in election and damnation, and particularly if they maintain their doctrine of divine predetermination over free will. But with free will, there is a chance that they can shape their own actions and beliefs so as to allow the balance between election and human evil.

14 The devil's staff symbolically underscores the possibility of reconciling this dual nature. As in chapter seven of Exodus there are two types of staffs, both turning into serpents: the staffs of pharaoh's sorcerers become serpents, connoting evil (however, they are impotent because only magical or illusory), but the staff of Aaron becomes a serpent which swallows up those serpents of the sorcerers, connoting good conquering evil. The devil's staff in “Young Goodman Brown” can be either, or both. As I read the story, it is most like the sorcerers’ evil staffs. It is, the narrator informs us, “one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian Magi” (79). As such, it implies that the Puritan doctrine (linked for generations with Satan) results, as would the sorcerers' serpents, in destruction of community, neighbors, and individuals. Perhaps a portent of such destruction is signified by the devil giving to Brown the second staff (the walking stick) he makes of a maple branch. Were the Puritan doctrine different, however, acknowledging freedom of will and enabling good works, the staff could be like Aaron's and a symbol of good. The possibility of the second staff being like Aaron's implies a moral lesson in the reverse. That is, “Young Goodman Brown” depicts the forces that shape individual destiny and demonstrates how individuals become victims of those forces. It shows Hawthorne’s readers, in other words, what to be wary of, what to avoid. And most importantly, it instructs them that they have the power to change

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their destiny if they understand how those forces operate on them so that they are able to confront and resist them when they threaten their existence.

15 Ever the moralist, Hawthorne does not merely condemn. One of the main functions of allegory, he believes, is to point out the path to goodness. Free will is key to Brown's and his readers’ worldly as well as spiritual salvation. Had Brown believed in free will, he could, possibly, have escaped his end. Had he free will, then confronting evil in himself, in his ancestors, and in his religious teachers would not be traumatizing because there would be a viable, possible alternative to damnation, viable because one could actually do something about it. As the narrator emphasizes near the end of the story, “Be it so, if you will” (89, my emphasis). But free will means one has to earn, or make, one's salvation. It does not necessarily solve Brown's problem by guaranteeing him salvation, for earning salvation is no easy task. It means that one has to confront and overcome that evil that he meets in the forest, or the evil that is in each human heart. To do this he needs help, and it is not much help to simply condemn. But an understanding of how ideologies can be destructive, even when on the surface they appear to be good, is certainly instructive and helpful. Knowing how an individual arrives at his convictions allows him to change them. So in “Young Goodman Brown” the reader is not given a moral model of right behavior, but is given a “sympathetic” model. In the very condemnation of Brown, in the devil's words at Brown's induction into the cult, is the key: . . . By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin, ye shall scent out all the places— whether in church, bed-chamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood-spot. Far more than this! It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than my power, at its utmost!—can make manifest in deeds...... Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped, that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome, again, my children, to the communion of your race!’ (87, 88)

16 I read this passage thus: accepting sin (evil), but not as the unalterable condemnation of the depraved soul, one becomes “undeceived.” Accepting evil rather as something that can be overcome, as something that an individual or community or nation has the power—the will—to defeat, one or one’s community becomes, as the devil himself admits above, more powerful than the devil. In that sense “Evil” must be Brown’s and the Puritan’s “only happiness,” meaning that facing it with humility and conquering it (which is possible if one’s doctrine acknowledges free will), Brown and his community can escape the presumption and the debilitating effects of the opposing beliefs in election and inescapable damnation. From a Puritan perspective this belief or conversion to the Arminian heresy is diabolical, but from another perspective it is liberating. Yes, with free will comes the danger of doing great harm to one another: they can “penetrate” evil into “every bosom” with a power greater than Satan's. That is, they can place evil in one another's hearts. But the Puritan doctrine drives them to do that anyway, without any effective recourse to change. Or they can “penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin.” That is, they can see through or understand the sin in each other's hearts, so that, unlike Brown in his inability to see beyond the evil, they can effectively confront it—not forget about it, but forgive it in themselves and others. In this latter case, “Evil” can be “happiness” in the sense that it can be conquered, not

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in the sense that it can be reveled in. It can be happiness in the sense that understanding evil enables or empowers people to understand, and achieve, its opposite. Brown's dying hour need not have been gloom, had he and his community (“they”) the ability—which now thanks to the story the nineteenth-century reader and the present day reader have—to see how the doctrinal powers of his historical situation created him and his countrymen. Furthermore, the combination of the allegorical and historical qualities of the story point out that it is not only a self-awareness that Brown, or an individual, needs, but a social awareness and a social responsibility to make broad changes for the better.

17 Since the Puritan mission was simultaneously ecclesiastical and civil, as the Mayflower Compact evinces, the presumption, hypocrisy, and “gloom” of the religion are shared by the government as well. Hawthorne implies this in Brown's and the devil's dialogue when they first meet in the story. After Brown's assertion of the righteousness of his religious settlement, the devil claims a friendship with “deacons from many a church; . . . the selectmen, of divers towns; . . . and a majority of the Great and General Court, . . . [and] the governor” (77). Initially shocked, Brown replies, “Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor and council; they have their own ways, and are not rule for a simple husbandman, like me” (77). But Brown, as a member of the Faith, does have something to do with the government. More exactly, the government has much to do with Brown.

18 Brown's government's blend of the civil and the ecclesiastical is particularly destructive. As history shows, especially the witchcraft trials of 1692, and as William Bradford demonstrates, the practicalities of the civil government or of the social welfare also impinge on the ideals of the religious principles. In terms of what Hawthorne knew of the witch outbreak of 1692, it is quite easy to conclude that Christian principles of love and charity for one's fellows were perverted by the accusations of witchcraft based on spectral evidence.16 Samuel Sewall's public admission of culpability for his participation as a judge in the 1692 , for example, demonstrates that he saw the performance of his duties as grievously sinful.17 Furthermore, Carol F. Karlsen demonstrates in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman that during the New England witch trials of the late seventeenth century religious beliefs and fear of witches were, in effect, used for very worldly purposes: the legal machinery was employed against “women without brothers or women without sons” in order to ensure “the orderly transmission of property from one generation of males to another” (116). In Book 2, Chapters 23 and 34 of his history (especially in chapter 23) Bradford laments the fact that the material need for land causes the dispersal of church members, the splitting of the church, and finally the moving of the seat of the church to a new location.18

19 A more workable system is for a government to be separate from religion,19 and Hawthorne suggests such a separation in a few ways. Brown's disavowal of a connection between his government and his good, religious self (cited in the paragraph immediately above) is the most direct. Later in the story, when Brown refers to the “covenant” (76) he has kept by meeting the Devil in the forest, Hawthorne implies the legalism of Puritanism—a fundamentalist combining of religion and politics. It is ironic, of course, that Brown’s covenant with the Devil rather than with God is emphasized, the irony suggesting, perhaps, that the real evil is in the combination of civil law and

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religious belief.20 The story underscores this idea when the Devil aligns himself with both civil and ecclesiastical aspects of the government. He boasts to Brown, I have a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen, of divers towns, make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too—but these are state-secrets.” (77)

20 The wrongs, or the Devilish evil, of Puritanism which the story notes are the result of this religious and political combination: Brown’s grandfather’s whipping of the Quaker woman, his father’s burning of an Indian village, and the Salem witch trials of 1692, which took place at the Salem meeting house, seat of religious and political government in the community. This meeting house is mentioned twice in the story, once near the beginning and again near the end (see pp. 75 and 89). Finally, the reference the Devil makes to the Old South church of Boston suggests a separation of church and state. Old South was founded in descent in 1669 when twenty-eight members of the First Church of Boston seceded to form the Third Church, which became known as Old South.21 These secessionists favored the Halfway Covenant, which can be seen as a dissolution of earlier, strident Puritan doctrine about baptism and church membership. The Boston Tea Party of 1773, which helped to start the American Revolution, was also ignited by the Sons of Liberty at Old South. The history of this church, therefore, suggests a breaking down of Puritanism and a breaking away of it from the state, which the American Revolution in (1775-1783) helped to accomplish.

21 Were church and state separated, there would be more of an opportunity for justice for all because the governors would less likely be blinded by the hypocrisy resulting from the conflicting and confusing Puritan ideology. The logical extension of Brown's situation to America's, then, is this: Brown's complacency and presumption and hypocrisy are America's complacency and presumption and hypocrisy, and the results for Brown and America alike are morally destructive.

22 But a theocracy, which the Puritans had in mind, cannot simply proclaim its belief in free will, especially since Christian theology as a whole—whether Calvinist-Puritan, Quaker, or Roman Catholic—denies the ability of humans on their own to earn salvation or to absolve themselves of original sin. What means were available in the nineteenth century, in Hawthorne’s mind, to allow such a doctrinal shift? Perhaps a budding American Transcendentalism. Whereas Hawthorne could not yet have been aware of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings (whose pamphlet Nature was not published until the year following the publication of “Young Goodman Brown”), he was most likely aware of, and possibly influenced by, the Boston-centered, Trinitarian-Unitarian debates of the 1820s. In her biography of (Nathaniel’s wife), Patricia Dunlavy Valenti notes that in a letter written in 1823 Elizabeth Peabody assigns her younger fourteen-year-old sister, Sophia, a reading list, which includes published letters debating the nature of childhood innocence. The Trinitarian Leonard Woods argued the natural tendency in children toward evil, whereas the Unitarian, Henry Ware, argued “that children are born innocent and through free will constructed the quality of their characters” (8).

23 Ware was minister of Second Church in Boston in 1829 when Ralph Waldo Emerson was ordained to that church, becoming Ware’s colleague and apparent successor. In October of 1832 Emerson reached a seminal point in his thinking and broke from the Unitarian church over the issue of his administering the Lord’s Supper. Though “apt to feel that

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in other hands than theirs [the Lord’s Supper] easily became a superstitious practice” about which they were uneasy, Unitarians, according to Ralph L. Rusk, “generally wanted to keep the sacrament as a sacred feast” (160). Emerson, however, would not capitulate to administering the feast, arguing that Jesus, “in beginning the rite of the Lord’s Supper, was merely celebrating the Passover with his disciples. His remarks at the time were nothing but the figurative language he was constantly using” (Rusk 163). Thus asserting his own understanding, Emerson concluded that the rite “was without valid authority. It was also positively harmful” (Rusk 163). These self-reliant ideas grew, and a few years later Emerson published Nature (1836), the first full statement of his Transcendental philosophy, which provided the intellectual foundation for optimism and man’s control of his own destiny.

24 Though Emerson maintained himself for some years following 1832 by intermittent, substitute preaching, in effect, his resignation from the Unitarian church removes for him the figure of Christ from the concept of God. And when Emerson states in Nature, “The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me. I am part or particle of God,” he replaces Christ as a necessity to God’s grace with a human being’s own self- determination and advancement to the spirit. These concepts in Nature, along with Emerson’s insistence that the individual in his soul was innately good, articulated a belief that could offer American culture at large a freedom of will. Nature was, in essence, a treatise emphatically proclaiming a type of democracy of the soul, an ideal of every man’s ability to freely will his own future.

25 It would have been difficult, indeed, for Hawthorne to be unaware of such protracted, public, pervasive, and, as in Emerson’s case, life-changing arguments. Furthermore, Hawthorne would likely have been sympathetic to the freer Unitarian position since soon after publishing “Young Goodman Brown” (November 11, 1837, to be precise), he befriended and was befriended by the Peabody sisters, who, especially Elizabeth, were also sympathetic to such concepts and who had moved from Salem to Lancaster in 1820. The story “Young Goodman Brown” itself dramatically emphasizes a transcendental act of the imagination, an assertion of the will to create a new reality. The entire scene of the witch meeting, complete with flaming trees and a baptismal bowl of blood on the stone altar, vanishes, replaced by a glen empty of people, “chill and damp” rock, and a tree bathed in “the coldest dew” (88). The narrator asks, “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch- meeting?” And, he answers, “Be it so, if you will. But, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from that night of that fearful dream” (89). Brown created his own reality with his will, uncontrolled and unconscious though his creative act was. The key is the will. The narrator says, “Be it so, if you will,” implying that there is another choice. A different act of will, perhaps the conscious and disciplined Emersonian act of turning away from the sanctioned religious doctrine and toward the divine potential in man, would allow a different, an optimistic, reality.

26 Thus, Hawthorne's story can be read, and legitimately, as being didactically moral. On one level the moral is simply “forewarned is forearmed.” More specifically it might be this: do not be as complacent and presumptuous as Goodman Brown because it will only get you into trouble, or as put with sophisticated humor by Colacurcio, “the history of the lapsed Faith of Puritanism remains a capital way of learning the benefit of doubt” (59). But, as Colacurcio knows and writes about at length, there is much more

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to this story, and I would suggest that a broader-reaching moral stems from the story's portrayal of how ideology effects and affects incipient and future American society and its members. This moral is not so simple as the one that suggests to an individual that if he remains healthily skeptical and maintains a belief in his ability to will change, he can in fact change: that is, his dying hour, if he wills otherwise, will not be gloom.

27 And with this moral extended to a social level, it is even harder to enact. The situation is not so simple as this: if an individual changes, American society will change. Maybe this process for social change can work, but not very quickly, as Hester Prynne later informs us: “She assured [her visitors] . . . of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should be grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed” (Scarlet Letter 263). Not only is this truth postponed until some vague, “brighter period,” but that period is even qualified—twice! The question becomes, can such change occur in the one-hundred fifty or more years between the setting of the short story and the time of its being written? That is, has America in the nineteenth century accepted free will—rejected natural depravity—to the extent that it can shape its own destiny? And furthermore, will that destiny lead the nation to salvation: that is, allow it to fulfill the promises stated in The Declaration of Independence of equality and the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”? Hawthorne does not answer these questions, but he does pose them for application to and consideration in the nineteenth century. In other words, the situation of the reader in a later historical period than the seventeenth century is Brown's situation: can a nineteenth-century reader, or a twentieth- or twenty-first-century reader for that matter, with the historical and cultural knowledge that Brown lacked, determine his own destiny and obtain happiness rather than gloom? Such a reality at least seems possible. And this possibility is not the faith in progress in nineteenth-century terms of Manifest Destiny nor in seventeenth-century terms of Mission, but it is faith in democracy—in freedom of thought and spirit that allows one to question and therefore more fully understand and possibly subvert the determining forces of the ideologies one lives in and with.

28 While attending Bowdoin College, in 1824 Hawthorne, as a member of the Athenean Society along with future politicians who were and remained his friends, worked for the election of Jackson.22 Though John Quincy Adams won that election by electoral vote (Jackson having the majority of the popular vote), Jackson succeeded in the election of 1828, holding the office of president for two terms from 1829 to 1837.

29 According to Philip Jenkins, Jackson won office by “mobilizing social groups and regions that felt themselves to be the victims of surviving privilege in American society; the west against the east; urban labourers against employers, farmers against financiers” (97). He continues to note the onset of populism during the Jacksonian era: “Presidential electors now tended to be chosen by popular vote rather than by state legislatures” (97), and the Jacksonian spoils system “was now linked to a democratic and anti-elitist theory that held that any man was as technically qualified as another to hold office” (97-98). In short, “Jacksonian democracy took politics into everyday life” (98).23 Clarifying his veto of the Bank of the United States, Jackson proclaimed, In full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages, artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers,

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mechanics, and laborers . . . have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. (quoted in Mayfield, 120; my emphasis)

30 Thus, Jackson proclaimed and stood for a democracy of the common man.

31 How does the story “Young Goodman Brown” suggest this historical application to the nineteenth century? Brown’s circumstances reflect the political situation of the late 1820s and 1830s, the rise of the common man in the populist democracy ushered in by Andrew Jackson. For instance, Hawthorne’s use of “Goodman,” the title for a common man like ’s “Mister,” and the common surname surely associate Brown with the average person, as well as evoke the allegorical tradition of the Everyman of fifteenth and sixteenth-century English plays. Recall, Brown argues to the devil that he (Brown) has nothing to do with the government, but, as I have said, the government has to do with Brown—in the seventeenth century of American Puritanism and in the nineteenth century of Hawthorne.

32 Furthermore, the tumult of the vox populi of the new Jacksonian democracy may be heard in the cacophonous voices emanating from the cloud passing over Brown in the forest: Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once, the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of town’s-people of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion-table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine, at Salem village . . . . There was one voice, of a young woman . . . . And all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward. (82)

33 Such loud, discordant, and threatening voices may be likened to the unschooled, uncouth, impious, and riotous voice of the common man coming into his own in Jacksonian America. This new democratic voice could certainly sound dissonant after the educated eloquence of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution. Such unruly voices, however, could lead to self- government as easily as they could to a self-destruction like that allegorically represented through communion with Satan in the woods or through a “dying hour [of] gloom” (90). With a new optimism and “faith” in human control, which was budding in the debate over free-will in Boston, the result does not have to be self-destruction, as the meeting in the forest may not have “in reality” taken place. The result could be self-determination, self-government, for the greater good.

34 That Hawthorne is writing about a democracy is implied yet further. Though Brown denies his connection to the government, he is, perhaps it is not too much to suggest, part of the government. Second, consider the description of the crowd gathered around the rock altar in the woods near the end of the story: Among them . . . appeared faces . . . which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor was there. At least, there were high dames well known to her, and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls . . . . But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see, that the good

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shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered, also, among their pale-faced enemies, were the Indian priests, or powows, who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft. (84-85)

35 Superficially, the description appears to mix the righteous with the profane. But the heathen and profane beings are only so in the eyes of the Puritans, such segregation being another sign of Puritan hypocrisy, I would suggest. Another way to see this group is as a cross-section of a nineteenth-century American democracy in its ideal inclusiveness. It includes peoples of different continents, races, cultures, genders, ages, social ranks, and marital and sexual status. But it is the Puritan doctrine of Election that causes the segregation and hypocrisy, for the Puritan distinction separating the two segments of the group is that between “sinner” and “saints.” Their very unchristian doctrine has separated humanity rather than joined it together.

36 This result of the doctrine, of the contradiction between election and inescapable damnation, could easily be construed as creating a “loathful brotherhood,” as the narrator calls this group (86). But not loathful because blasphemous. Loathful because self-prescribed and self-condemned. And Brown, as an individual member of such a “congregation” (86), would certainly have cause to feel a “loathful brotherhood” with his community members. But this “loathful brotherhood” has the potential to become a true brotherhood, a democratic community or nation, wherein the people would have equality and freedom regardless of class, race, gender, age, or marital status.

37 How valid is the history “Young Goodman Brown”? Is it as valid, for instance, as an historical account of the Puritan endeavor and the dilemma imposed by their doctrine as a history by George Bancroft, or William Bradford, or Cotton Mather? It is certainly an extremely fanciful, even fantastic, story, with staffs crawling away like snakes, with trees and rocks ablaze only to be damp and cool to the touch in the passing of an instant. The narrator of the story asks a similar question: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?” (89) The story's answer to both questions is similar. With a significant on the notion of free “will”—it is this: “Be it so, if you will. But, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from the night of that fearful dream” (89). And Brown continues thus until his dying hour of gloom. His life was a dying gloom because of that “dream.” The point, obviously, is that the actuality of an occurrence makes little difference. It is the effect that counts. And, as is the relation between dream and reality, so is the relation between the unconscious and reality—between the collective unconscious of the community or nation and the reality that unconscious constructs.

38 Likewise is the relation between fiction and history. Past events influence our present lives. Whether the history is personal, familial, regional, or national; whether it occurred within our view or beyond it so that we had to hear or read about it; whether it occurred during our lifetime or before so was brought down to us written or spoken, implied or explicit; no matter our direct or indirect relationship to the event, so long as we act according to its precepts, its existence is realized. Likewise, constructed principles, doctrines and ideology influence our present lives. Whether an event actually occurred or not, whether a principle was actually manifest or not, is of little consequence. So long as we act according to its dictates or principles, it was and is real.

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39 This is the essence of Hawthorne's little allegory of faith. According to “Young Goodman Brown,” the doctrine of the Puritans created a communal psyche of complacency, presumption, and hypocrisy clashing with the self-loathing of total depravity. The result was a moral confusion of truth, right and wrong, good and evil. As this psychological portrait of Goodman Brown is extended to the community— emphasized by Hawthorne’s chosen setting of the 1692 Salem witch trials, the psychological portrait of the community extends to the psychological portrait of the new nation. At the writing of “Young Goodman Brown” America was sixty years old. Its national character was still being defined—created. Since Hawthorne accepted the historical view that the Puritan founders of the nation passed on their character to the national identity and that that character would be passed on to their national descendents, this psychological portrait becomes that of America itself.

40 The story functions as an allegory, invoking the moral tradition of Everyman, which is appropriate to the new democracy—a government of the people, the common man. The allegorical suggests that America in the first one-third of the nineteenth century, because of its intellectual and psychological inheritance, was in danger of confusing—and thereby forsaking—its basic principles of justice and equality for the individual. It could confuse its good principles of right with evil ones. It could become hypocritical.

41 The solution to this moral crisis was to reimagine the morality of the newly created nation by bringing to consciousness its unconscious, but debilitating ideology and by replacing that ideology with a new, optimistic, vision of hope and control of one’s identity, morality, and future. So, “Young Goodman Brown” is not merely a story about the consequences of keeping or losing one's faith. Nor is it merely a rendition of the psychological state of third generation Puritans, nor a diatribe against American Puritanism, nor a recounting of waning religious passion. But, incorporating all of these and more, it is a story about the severity of American cultural influences on the identity of its citizenry, about how those influences are internalized for an “American,” and about how they effect and affect that individual's interaction with society. Because the new democracy is formed by the nation’s combination of individuals, it is also a story about how ideas effect and affect the new nation. It is a short history of an evolving America as Hawthorne saw it from his early nineteenth-century, New England vantage point.

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NOTES

1. Much has been written about this story, and perhaps there is little “new” to say about it. It has been read from nearly every conceivable critical perspective, from New Critical to post- structuralist, and it has been interpreted as propounding several, often opposing, meanings. I trust that my reading of this allegorical history, however, differs from other readings of this story not only in that it offers a viable understanding of how the three primary Hawthornian qualities of history, allegory, and moralism combine, indeed depend on one another, but that it suggests how Hawthorne's allegory functions as history. While the following is not a complete list of the readings of “Young Goodman Brown,” it includes representative and the most notable ones. New Critical readings: Abel and Matheson. Psychological: Crews and Loving. Historical: Bell, Christophersen, Colacurcio, , Eberwein, Erisman, , Fussell, Johnson, Leverenz, Levin, Shear. Narratological: Dunne. 2. Among recent critics making this assumption are the following: Bercovitch, , Diffee, Grossman, Johnston, Milder, and Millington. 3. One should also see the following three articles, which recognize the achievement of Bercovitch's book but also present its shortcomings: Millington, Milder, Johnston. 4. Jean Fagan Yellin, it is worth noting, implicitly disagrees with Grossman's reading. Rather, making an excellent case that Hawthorne was aware not only of the issues of black slavery but of many particular anti-slavery movements in his immediate vicinity, she asserts that Hawthorne avoided dealing with the issue of black slavery. While each of her two articles on this topic offers a slightly different perspective, “Hawthorne and the American National Sin” is more focused on Hawthorne particularly. 5. Bancroft's first history, which included the American Puritans, appeared in 1837, and Hawthorne's friendship with him did not develop until after this year. “Young Goodman Brown” first appeared in 1835. However, the concepts that Bancroft and other American historians accepted were very much part of the social discourse at the time Hawthorne was writing the short story. Bancroft retained those concepts throughout his career and summarized them in History of the Colonization of the United States. He describes the North American continent as an “unproductive waste” until European settlement changed it. “It is the object of the present work,” he writes, “to explain how the change in the condition of our land has been accomplished; and, as the fortunes of a nation are not under the control of blind destiny, to follow steps by which a favouring Providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory” (3, 4). He notes, also, the importance of freedom to the formation of the nation, writing, “The spirit of the colonies demanded freedom from the beginning” (1). 6. Hawthorne notes history's lack of life in several places, including Septimius Felton (The Elixir of Life Manuscripts 15-16) and “The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair” and “Biographical Stories for Children” (True Stories from History and Biography 5-6, 213-14). 7. By “actual” I mean persons and events the reality of which is based on fact, on corporal or material existence. By “real” and “true” I mean persons and events that have a being which is constructed through text and/or context and which is accepted as having the possibility of a viable existence in a factual, material world. Thompson is succinctly informative about the relationship between history and fiction in Hawthorne's early tales. He writes in The Art of Authorial Presence, “the literary (or the fictional) and the historical are counterpointed yet conflated in Hawthorne's early writings—indeed, throughout his career" (204). And he continues to explain: "Fiction and history differ presumably in the ontological reality of the initiating event . . . . But how does one get back to the real historical event when it is constituted by a series of texts? For Hawthorne the fictional construct truth is always an as if proposition. Rather than monologically presenting one side (one interpretation, e.g., of historical process), Hawthorne

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dialogically dramatizes doubleness, multiplicity, and contradictoriness. In this way romantic fiction is realistic and true. That is, true romance is historically and faithfully fictional. A true romantic fiction would be faithful to both the facts and the romantic and to the subjective interpretations that accrete around those historical facts and those myths, becoming part of them. Such romance is truer than mere factual recounting, truer than free‑floating romance cut loose from local legendary history. The true romance of history is acknowledged to be factual and fictional, framed by the recognition of the ineradicable intertwining of fact and fiction in the human imagination” (235-36). 8. “Young Goodman Brown” functions aesthetically as Bercovitch sees that The Scarlet Letter does: “To understand the novel historically is to recognize that we learn most about background and sources from its aesthetic techniques. And to appreciate it aesthetically is to recognize that what is richest and most compelling about the novel lies in its profound ideological engagement” (18). 9. As with The Scarlet Letter, some critics have recently read “Young Goodman Brown” as reflecting American history in the nineteenth century. See particularly Emily Miller Budick (87‑97), David Leverenz, and Harold K. Bush, Jr. 10. The historical perspective of the separatist William Bradford is well known, but it is perhaps worth referring the reader to some chapters from Book 1 of Of Plymouth Plantation: Chapter 1 starts with the acknowledgment of the continuing wars between the Puritans and Satan. Chapter 4 first suggests the wild quality of America by describing its “ and brutish” and “wild” inhabitants. Chapter 7 includes a copy of a letter from John Robinson that specifically denies that the immigrating Puritans have “presumption” in “their hearts.” Chapter 9 contains the famous quotation describing the New World as a “hideous and desolate wilderness.” Whereas the overriding of John Winthrop's “A Model of Christian Charity” is arguably humble, as is appropriate to the subject matter, the sense of mission that is highlighted smacks of presumption and complacency. So do many of Bradford's earlier chapters of Plymouth Plantation, especially the passages describing Bradford's satisfaction when sailors die after taunting the Puritans, how the sailors are reduced to fearing for their own lives, and the attitude that allows the Puritans to take the food of the natives at such an unproductive and inhospitable time of the year. It is the Puritans’ faith in Divine Providence that allows such thoughts and actions. 11. I do not wish to discount the extraordinary scholarship and convincing interpretations of David Levin and Michael J. Colacurcio of specter evidence and “Visible Sanctity” and of Brown's representing a third generation, Halfway Covenant, Puritan. My understanding and appreciation of “Young Goodman Brown” owes far more to these scholars than the few mentions of their works in this article might imply. I do wish to suggest, however, that the allegorical nature of the story is inclusive enough to also allow a more extended reading of history. 12. A couple of instances from Bradford's Plymouth Plantation illustrate this. Book 1, Chapter 9 tells of a young sailor who berated the Puritans, but “it pleased God before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner” (139). Bradford is just a bit too gratified by this young man's consignment to hell. Chapter 10 relates an anecdote about Divine Providence providing the Puritans with food: this food was clearly the winter stores of the natives, whom the Puritans deprived when they took it. 13. See Franklin, who argues that the catechism used during the time the story is set, John Cotton's Milk for Babes, balances references to the “possibility of salvation” with references to “humanity's certain sinful nature” (71). In Franklin's view Brown fails the doctrine, not vice versa. But my point is exactly that such a balance, though it might be successfully maintained in individuals and with enough social reenforcement in the society at large, was not in Hawthorne's view so maintained, neither individually nor collectively. Therefore, because such balancing failed, the conflicts of the doctrine itself caused Brown's damnation. Or put another way, if you and/or your communal religion believe in human depravity and predetermination, you and/or your community damn yourself.

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14. This insistence on free will most likely comes from nineteenth-century America's rendition of the Puritan mission the “faith” in human progress. 15. See The Mayflower Compact in Bradford, Book 2, Chapter 11. 16. See Levin and Colacurcio. 17. See Sewall's diary entry for January 15, 1697, in which he copies the notice that his minister read from the pulpit and which was posted publically the day before. 18. It is not necessary to my argument that Hawthorne actually knew of these historical particulars that I have appealed to or that he interpreted them in precisely the same way. My point is that Hawthorne understood the workings of history in a similar way, recognizing that religious principles are often forsaken for practical concerns. 19. Bush convincingly connects the appearance of Roger Williams in “Endicott and the Red Cross” with the idea of the separation of church and state. See pages 144-46. 20. Consider also that the Mayflower Compact (see Bradford) links the Puritan’s religious beliefs with their “Covenant[ing] and Combin[ing] ourselves into a Civil Body Politic,” which may “frame . . . laws . . . Constitutions and Offices” (182; see 181-82. Winthrop, too, proclaims loudly in the last three pages of “A Model of Christian Charity” that the Puritans are come to America to form a “government both civil and ecclesiastical” (223; see 223-25). 21. See the website for the Old South Church: www.oldsouth.org 22. These friends were Jonathan Cilley, who was to become a United States congressman; Horatio Bridge, who was to hold a high office in the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., and Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States. 23. See also Wilentz, pp. 309-311, 312-314, and passim; and Watson, pp. 96-131 and 132-171.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article, ancré dans la critique littéraire traditionnelle, a pour thèse que la nouvelle “Young Goodman Brown” est un récit historique. Pour être plus précis, cet article peut être considéré comme une relecture historique qui, néanmoins, s’appuie sur les interprétations traditionnelles du texte. Cette association de perspectives témoigne de la richesse du texte et rend évidentes les nouvelles approches historiques de l’auteur lui-même. La thèse de cet article peut se résumer de la façon suivante : "Young Goodman Brown” se penche sur l’impact important que peuvent avoir les influences culturelles sur l’individu, sur l'intériorisation de ces influences par l’individu et enfin sur comment ces influences créent et affectent les relations de cet individu avec sa société. Par extension, cet article analyse la façon dont les idées créent et affectent une société. En résumé, "Young Goodman Brown" est le condensé historique d'une culture, qui est la culture d’une Amérique démocratique et en pleine évolution.

AUTHORS

STEVEN OLSON Steven Olson, Professor of English, teaches American literature and Film at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington. He has published articles on nineteenth-century American

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literature and a book, The Prairie in Nineteenth-Century American . Presently, he is working on a book comparing of Nathaniel Hawthorne and William .

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'The Half Shall Remain Untold': Hunilla of Melville's Encantadas

K. M. Wheeler

Introduction

1 Melville’s Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles is a group of ten ‘sketches’ about the Galapagos Islands. Melville visited the islands in the early 1840s, possibly several times,1 not long after Charles ’s momentous encounter. Darwin had been mystified and entranced by the ‘creative force’ which such blackened, ruined landscape could still convey to the onlooker, and Melville’s sketches suggest that this paradox provided a stimulus for his own imagination. Of greatly-varying lengths and themes, the first few pieces describe the bizarre and other-worldly landscape and fauna of the volcanic, lava- encrusted rocks. Beaches are strewn with decayed bits of sugar cane, bamboo, and cocoanuts, all ‘relics of distant beauty’ washed up onto this ‘other and darker world’ from the palm isles of the South Pacific. The wondrous Galapagos tortoises are enchanted, huge, antediluvian creatures, their shells engraved with ‘hieroglyphic ciphers’ representing indecipherable histories. Later sketches regale the reader with outlandish encounters: a magical ship Flyaway bewitches the famous American frigate of 1812, the Essex. Or buccaneers turn out to be poet/ philosophers who ‘pirate’ from others. A mock historical sketch based on an infamous governor of an isle in the 1830s meditates on the possibility of reliable facts and impartial history. Rumours and tales about a hermit, Patrick Watkins, are Melville’s starting point for an elaborate exploration of character inconsistency, mirroring the inconsistency of the text. In sketch eight, the experiences of Hunilla – a young woman abandoned upon an isle – struggle for expression, so that processes of perception, of articulating experiences, and of storytelling become central themes. Melville drew upon his experiences of the Galapagos Islands but – like his predecessors on the Galapagos – he borrowed from the literature: “[he] took whatever lay close at hand… covered it with flesh… and gave it life.”2

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2 The extensive use of travel and other sources– like the use of autobiographical experiences – along with the resulting ‘’, applies of course to all his writings.3

3 “Sketch Eighth Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow”, on the other hand, is the only Encantadas sketch which does not draw extensively upon travel sources. It may have originated in the so-called ‘Agatha letters’ to Hawthorne, or been suggested by newspaper accounts in September-November, 1853, about an Indian woman who spent eighteen years on a desert island off the coast of California before being rescued.4 But Melville elaborated these suggestions beyond anything found in his sources, and even seems to have found the sentimental aspects of the reports objectionable.5

4 The Encantadas was first published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (New York) in , April, and May, 1854, under the remarkable pseudonym, Salvator R. Tarnmoor.6 Melville seems to have admired the paintings of the 17th Century Italian painter, Salvator Rosa, who portrayed the kinds of desolate scenery confronting him in the Galapagos.7 This transparent pseudonym in Putnam’s confirms Melville’s interest in authorship, originality, authenticity, and ‘the literary’ itself, developed from early novels and the essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850)8 to The Confidence-Man (1857). The pseudonym is a Poe-like ironic gesture9, perhaps indicating, first, that the sketches are unusually, self-consciously allusive, indeed even predatory upon several other writings (Cowley, Porter, Colnett, Coulter), with Melville himself the buccaneer/ poet of sketch six who ‘pirated’ from others. The pseudonym also suggests he was ‘quoting’ from Rosa’s paintings.10

5 The ten sketches, enchanting their 1854 readers, were republished in 1856 by Dix & Edwards (New York) in the equally-acclaimed Piazza Tales.11 The sketch form of The Encantadas would not have surprised Melville’s readers; Moby-Dick is a novel made up of a mass of 138-odd sketches, The Confidence-Man forty-five. For Harold Beaver, Melville’s “whole aesthetic remained one of the sketch, the tentative essay or ‘draft’, however huge and swollen.”12 Moreover, ‘true’ erections ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! (Moby-Dick, chapter 32, final paragraph)

6 “Sketch Eighth Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow” differs from the other nine ‘sketches’ in Melville’s Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, and raises literary issues unique to Eight. It is the longest sketch, the only one about a woman, and the only one not having origins in tales about the Galapagos. It may well constitute something more of a genuine ‘short story’ than the others (though some readers may feel this about sketches seven and nine). Its structure involves, first, a short, enigmatic, and constantly interrupted tale told by Hunilla.13 Her account forms a most elusive ‘core’ for the second structural element, the narrator’s own highly-embellished amplificatio of her tragedy. The first, embedded tale is complicated by significant gaps which constantly disrupt Hunilla’s telling at crucial moments. The ‘framing’ tale of the narrator overtly draws attention to gaps in Hunilla’s centrepiece version – and creates new breaches of its own – through careful deployment of the rhetorical devices of aposiopeses, anacoluthies, apophases, and paraleipses14– all contribute to a dawning sense that the tale is not only unspeakable. It begins to recede into the distance as the narrator’s embellishments come between us and any authentic ‘original.’15 The plot of the sketch cum short story is also complicated by the narrator’s extreme disruption of by means of prolepsis: he frequently anticipates later events. And our inventive narrator’s gestures to convey ‘lived

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experience’ are depicted as a virtual impossibility, in scene which Hunilla tragically observes and experiences as a ‘dumb show.’ Lived experience is represented as an already-constructed artifice – albeit full of gaps and ruptures – of as much interpretive difficulty as any text or painting. Moreover, Hunilla’s roles as elliptic narrator of her own tragedy and ‘unwilling heroine’ of the narrator’s tale present contradictions and paradoxes: she is indeed the paradigm of an enigma.

7 Also of literary interest is the narrator’s obsessive invocation of his authority for the outer tale by gestures which undermine the authority he seeks to establish. In this sketch, the narrator matter-of-factly assigns the events about Hunilla to his “first visit to the Encantadas,” a typical fictional deception to establish an authenticity or closer relation to ‘life’ for his narrative. The gesture masks the story’s art behind a disguise of historical event and eye-witness reportage. Fact and fiction are inextricably intertwined in this complex ‘yarn.’16

‘For Never Was a Story of More Woe’17

8 The gist of the tale can be gleaned from early paragraphs: A Chola, or half-breed Indian woman of Payta in Peru… with her young new-wedded husband Felipe, of pure Castilian blood, and her one only Indian brother, Truxill, Hunilla had taken passage… in a French whaler…[which would drop them off in the islands on its way to cruising grounds somewhat beyond them]. The object of the little party was to procure tortoise oil… With a chest of clothes, tools… and other things, Hunilla and her companions were safely landed at their chosen place; the Frenchman… engaged to take them off upon returning from a four months’ cruise… [But] the blithe stranger never was seen again. Felipe and Truxill… elated by their good success [with tortoise oil], and to reward themselves for such hard work, they, too hastily, made a catamaran, or Indian raft… and merrily started on a fishing trip…about half a mile from [the shore]. By some bad tide or hap… forced in deep water against that iron bar, the ill-made catamaran was overset, and came all to pieces; when, dashed by broad-chested swells between their broken logs and the sharp teeth of the reef, both adventurers perished before Hunilla’s eyes. Before Hunilla’s eyes they sank…Felipe’s body was washed ashore, but Truxill’s never came… this heavy-hearted one performed the final offices for Felipe…. Day after day, week after week, she trod the cindery beach… With equal longing she now looked for the living and the dead; the brother and the captain; alike vanished, never to return. [Later the narrator’s ship rescues her, taking her back to Payta.] (11-20)

9 The central paradox of “Sketch Eighth” involves the narrator’s repeated insistence on how little Hunilla told of her experiences, which he, by some magic of insight, was able to expand. No sooner has Hunilla been rescued by the crew than we are reassured, “Her story was soon told, and though given in her own strange language was as quickly understood, for our captain from long trading on the Chilean coast was well versed in the Spanish” (paragraph 11).18 All has had to be translated by a Captain whose rough Spanish serves him well in the ‘market-place’ perhaps. But this – “her own strange language” – adds another remove to Hunilla’s story – embedded as it is in the narrator’s embellishments, creating uncertainty about basic facts of Hunilla’s account: elaborations of the narrator’s insatiable imagination put Hunilla’s words at a distance.

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10 Shortly after, the narrator reassures us again that “it needs not be said what now wrapped the lonely widow. In telling her own story, she passed this almost entirely over, simply recounting the event” (17). He further noted that “from her mere words little would you have weened that Hunilla was herself the heroine of her tale” (17); “she but showed us her soul’s lid, and the strange ciphers thereon engraved; all within, with pride’s timidity, was withheld” with “one exception” (18). Later when the Captain asks specific questions, the narrator reports her failure to answer them: “Braced against her woe, Hunilla would not, durst not trust the weakness of her tongue” (40). Much later the narrator calls her “our silent passenger” (67, all emphases added). The paradox intensifies when one scrutinises the speech of Hunilla. Her quoted speech – with only the exception of 18 – is either blatant invention by the narrator (21, 27) or, more interestingly, registers a narrative collapse (see below 41) which opens up gaping holes in both hers and the narrator’s versions. Take the following conversation: “…why did you not go on and notch [the rest of the days] too, Hunilla?” “Senor, ask me not.” “And meantime, did no other vessel pass the isle?” “Nay, Senor; – but – ” “You do not speak; but what, Hunilla?” “Ask me not, Senor.” “You saw ships pass, far away; you waved to them; they passed on; – was that it, Hunilla?” “Senor, be it as you say.” …Then when our Captain asked whether any whale-boats had — — But no, I will not file this thing… (32-41, emphases added)

11 Hunilla’s story is portrayed as brief and with disturbing lacunae (insinuating dire attacks upon her by visiting whalers); ‘explanations’ involve pure superstition and enchantment. Yet our narrator also collapses at crucial moments: And now follows ------Against my own purposes a pause descends upon me here. One knows not whether nature doth not impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy to certain things. At least, it is to be doubted whether it be good to blazon such. (23, 24, emphases added)

12 What might have followed, what might have been told us is, theatrically, excluded. The gaps continue with more insinuating dashes: “When Hunilla ------” (25). In Hunilla’s case, it remains ambiguous how much she tells the Captain, in Spanish, of “two unnamed events,” or what he conveyed in English to the sailors. Whatever this was, the narrator holds back from telling us, but ensures that we know he held back: But no, I will not file this thing complete for scoffing souls to quote, and call it firm proof upon their side. The half shall here remain untold. Those two unnamed events which befell Hunilla on this isle, let them abide between her and her God. In nature, as in law, it may be libellous to speak some truths. (41, emphases added)

13 If the events are unspeakable and, hence, illegible for the reader, then what a reader can ever know or surmise becomes another signal issue in this ‘framed’ story.19

14 We can understand theatrical gestures by the narrator as literary method: not as mere gaps, but gaps with aesthetic function. They draw attention to the communicative act, the telling of the tale, and to the existence of two distinct, quite different tales, the narrator’s and Hunilla’s.20 Hunilla is unwilling to say much; the narrator is loquacious at most times but theatrically unable or unwilling on a few special occasions. Hunilla is unable, for example, to tell the Captain how long she was abandoned:

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But this proved impossible. What present day or month it was she could not say. Time was her labyrinth, in which Hunilla was entirely lost. And now follows ------(22, 23).

15 But here the text of the narrator breaks off, too, in those above dashes. “She could not say” this and much else; he will not. Like her, the reader could be said to be lost in the midst of two versions and several crucial gaps. Indeed, reading abound in the text. The most parodic occurs after the narrator admitted his first collapse (24), and referred to books versus events. He tries but fails to describe the intimated, bizarre event: When Hunilla ------Dire sight it is to see some silken beast long dally with a golden lizard ere she devour. More terrible, to see how feline Fate will sometimes dally with a human soul, and by a nameless magic make it repulse a sane despair with a hope which is but mad. Unwittingly I imp this cat-like thing, sporting with the heart of him who reads; for if he feel not, he reads in vain. (25, 26)

16 Hardly unwittingly we suspect! We then read, “Truly Hunilla leaned upon a reed, a real one; no metaphor; a real Eastern reed…rubbed smoothly even as by sand-paper…” (29). No metaphor indeed! For readers too must lean, but upon a ‘read,’ a real one smoothed and polished by our narrator’s skill, the time staked out by markings, as Hunilla did on her notched reed – her time-keeper for six months.

17 Before our eyes the narrator has emphasised gaps he will not or cannot fill, or he emphasised the brevity of Hunilla’s tale, her refusal to be a heroine in it and his ability to overcome these obstacles. He blithely remarked when he lacked words of hers: It needs not to be said what nameless misery now wrapped the lonely widow. In telling her own story she passed this almost entirely over, simply recounting the event. Construe the comment of her features, as you might; from her mere words little would you have weened that Hunilla was herself the heroine of her tale. But not thus did she defraud us of our tears. All hearts bled that grief could be so brave. (17, emphases added)

18 Whatever she passes over our narrator will rush in and make her a heroine, name the nameless miseries, and create the elaborate supplements that will allow all to experience with and weep for Hunilla. The narrator thereby draws attention not only to the creation of a story, but also to the hearing and reading of it (paragraph 29 above). Reading analogies pervade the text as we ‘watch’ the sailors listening to her tale: During the telling of her story the mariners formed a voiceless circle round Hunilla and the Captain…Nor did ever any wife of the most famous admiral in her husband’s barge receive more silent reverence of respect, than poor Hunilla from this boat’s crew. (51)

19 The narrator also calls attention to his narration and the sailors’ listening, when he constructs his version openly, deliberately dramatising his ‘adumbrations,’ a not inapt word since he conceals and overshadows her tale at least as much as he brings it to light. He not infrequently refers to “this little story” (3, 42). He remarks to his readers, “be it here narrated how it came to pass “(3), “for the truth must out” (3). “Her story was soon told” he says and he insists on her “telling her own story”(17), thereby theatricalising his own telling, his act of narration, his prefigurings and shadowings forth – distracting us from Hunilla’s tale or its (so meagre) content. He twice speaks mysteriously of a “sequel of this little story” (3, 42); the second time he insists that

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“this needs explaining ere the sequel come,” but the ‘explanation’ is an account of the purest superstition (44-8). I can mar a curious tale in telling, And deliver a plain message bluntly’21

20 Subtle analogies abound in the text as the narrator refers to the difficulties both of reading the faces of people and of establishing in language what happened: It is not artistic heartlessness, but I wish I could but draw in crayons; for this woman was a most touching sight; and crayons, tracing softly melancholy lines, would best depict the mournful image of the dark-damasked Chola widow. (10)

21 Here the narrator only enacts the difficulty of verbal representation and interpretation. Later he acknowledges the difficulty of reading faces in a way that suggests to be no more effective than words: “Construe the comment of her features, as you might…” (17). Other examples of the difficulty of reading and interpretation occur at critical moments when the narrator is struggling to give an account of Hunilla’s behaviour: she returns from visiting her husband’s grave for the last time: A few moments ere all was ready for our going, she reappeared among us. I looked into her eyes, but saw no tear. There was something which seemed strangely haughty in her air, and yet it was the air of woe. A Spanish and an Indian grief, which would not visibly lament. Pride’s height in vain abased to proneness on the rack; nature’s pride subduing nature’s torture. (61)

22 He needs to be reassured that though tearless she still feels deeply, much as he insists the reader must feel: “for if he feel not, he reads in vain” (26). Hunilla strains the narrator’s power to rationalise, but he manages on most occasions to find an ‘explanation’ for her tearless reserve: it is Spanish or Indian; it would not visibly lament, though the semantics of the final sentence of paragraph 61 (quoted above) are noticeably strained.22

23 Equally a riddle for him is her deportment when the first mate forbids but two of the dogs on board and, upon departure these her only companions of desolate months cry out “a clamorous agony of alarm. They did not howl, or whine; they all but spoke” (65). “But her face was set in a stern dusky calm. She never looked behind her” (66).

24 Contrastingly, at the outset of the ‘little story’ the narrator describes a rather more successful (and crucial) act of interpretation or ‘reading’ when he gives a long, elaborate account of how an inebriated seaman “paused suddenly, and directed my attention to something moving on the land, not along the beach, but somewhat back, fluttering from a height” (2). He explains that because of intoxication his ‘unwontedly exhilarated’ companion had leapt upon the windlass and, “being high lifted above all others was the reason he perceived the object, otherwise unperceivable; and this of his eye was owing to the elevation of his spirits; and this again – for truth must out – to a dram of Peruvian pisco” (3). Gaze on high meets gaze on high: Glancing across the water in the direction pointed out, I saw some white thing hanging from an inland rock, perhaps half a mile from the sea. “It is a bird; a white- winged bird; perhaps a – no; it is – it is a handkerchief!” “Aye, a handkerchief!” echoed my comrade, and with a louder shout apprised the captain. Quickly now – like the running out and training of a great gun – the long cabin spy- glass was thrust though through the mizzen rigging from the high platform of the poop; whereupon a human figure was plainly seen upon the inland rock, eagerly waving towards us what seemed to be the handkerchief. (4-7)

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25 This passage gives the reader a theatricalised, gradually transformative interpretation of “an object which partly from its being so small was quite lost to every other man on board,” then “the object, otherwise unperceivable” (3), into “some white thing hanging from an inland rock” (4), into a bird, a handkerchief, and finally “a human figure… eagerly waving…what seemed to be the handkerchief”. We are shown how perception works: it is essentially interpretation, and interpretation relies upon some kind of language to bring perception to a conscious level, to a state of structured, formulated experience. Basic perception is revealed to be already an interpretive act. Whether we see Hunilla wildly waving her kerchief as a gentle parody of the author trying to attract the reader’s attention to his , parodies, and bluffs is a matter for each reader’s sensibilities. Or we may reverse the : Hunilla, like the reader, is lost in the labyrinth of the text, wildly waving to be rescued from an illegible tale.

26 The spy-glass of imaginative reading is also needed by readers to “make out” the figure of Hunilla in her full import as that enchanting figure of all figures, a figure of metaphor itself, full of ambiguities and enigmas which make her emblematically enchanting.

27 Viewings and gazings form a central focus of the Chola Widow story from start to finish. Further examples, in addition to the seaman sighting Hunilla’s white kerchief, include the extraordinary depiction of Hunilla’s viewing of the death of brother and husband, her endlessly ‘spellbound eye’ searching for her brother’s never-to-be-found body, then her gazing out to sea in search of a ship, her eventual sighting of the rescue ship, and the seamen’s viewing of her solitary dwelling ‘half-screened from view’ (53). Viewings foreground the act of perception, to demonstrate it as always mediated, complex, and structured.23 These sightings show reading to require a heightened perception, while perception is a kind of reading, never simple, unmediated, or ‘natural,’ but always, already, conventional. The most notable occasion of the constructedness of perception is the extraordinary passage recounting the death of Hunilla’s companions: Before Hunilla’s eyes they sank. The real woe of this event passed before her sight as some sham tragedy on the stage. She was seated on a rude bower among the withered thickets, crowning a lofty cliff, a little back from the beach. The thickets were so disposed, that in looking upon the sea at large she peered out from among the branches as from the lattice of a high balcony. But upon the day we speak of here, the better to watch the adventure of those two hearts she loved, Hunilla had withdrawn the branches to one side, and held them so. They formed an oval frame, through which the bluely boundless sea rolled like a painted one. And there, the invisible painter painted to her view the wave-tossed and disjointed raft, its once level logs slantingly upheaved, as raking masts, and the four struggling arms undistinguishable among them; and then all subsided into smooth-flowing creamy , slowly drifting the splintered wreck; while first and last, no sound of any sort was heard. Death in a silent picture; a dream of the eye; such vanishing shapes as the mirage shows. (15)

28 Perceptual and ‘lived experience’ are a painting; ‘the real woe’ is represented as a sham tragedy on the stage.24 Natural is already art and artificial; the drowning men are painted figures on a painted ocean, framed by no less than the natural branches and leaves of nature’s tree. Not even death, much less one’s responses to death, can be said to be spontaneous, natural, or free from conventions.25 Melville boldly drew death itself as a picture, a ‘sham’ tragedy, a dream, to demonstrate that its deepest meaning is experienced indirectly, mediated and derived from conventions of figurative

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representation from culture, not nature. Frame and content are equally conventional constructions, while Hunilla’s experience and perception are represented as meaningful to her auditors and to herself through verbal or imagistic constructs, not ‘natural’ unmediated feelings. 26 There is no direct, original relationship with the natural world or with the self’s experiences, it seems, but only one mediated by linguistic or imagistic but essentially artistic structures. The of an independent reality prevents us from seeing types of language (verbal, painterly, musical, scientific, and mathematical) as the means by which we consciously grasp anything. Nature herself Melville painted as a literary myth, gaining meaning and reality through figurative language or other re-presentative aesthetic acts of a structuring, transforming perception. There is only transformation; formation is already transformation building on prior acts of metaphoric elements.

29 The narrator adds another dimension to this portrayal; he not only paints the death of the men as a picture. He includes the observer in his verbal painting and includes her emphatically, both in the above paragraph and, for emphasis, in the next one: So instant was the scene, so trance-like its mild pictorial effect, so distant from her blasted bower and her common sense of things, that Hunilla gazed and gazed, nor raised a finger or a wail. But as good to sit thus dumb, in stupor staring on that dumb show, for all that otherwise might be done. With half a mile of sea between, how could her two enchanted arms aid those four fated ones. The distance long, the time one sand. After the lightning is beheld, what fool shall stay the thunderbolt? (16)

30 The complexity of this ‘portrait of a gaze’ is labyrinthine; it expresses Melville’s preoccupation with the problem of the relationship of things or events to representation, whether verbal, pictorial, or other. He created a complex metaphor for reading and writing by not only framing death (the ultimate ‘lived experience’) through imagery, but also by including Hunilla in another verbal frame: she is painted into the painting. The observer is included in the work of art and the reader reads/ watches the verbal portrayal not merely of a happening, but of the reading or observing of it. Hunilla gazed and gazed in dumb stupor staring on a dumb show. Hunilla, through her enigmatic reserve, withholds ‘all’ within (18). This does not “defraud us of our tears” however, thanks to the narrator’s wonderful powers of invention: his ability to establish the authority of illusion, the authenticity of his account, and to transform lived experience into a language free from disfigurement or error.27

The old Salt who salts his tale, Or black veils and feathered tops

31 Or so he pretends. Or pretends to pretend. Melville, in his representation and creation of the figure Hunilla, enacts the convention in fiction of overt creation of characterisation. 28 In sketch eight Hunilla is painted in front of our eyes by the narrator’s fantastic elaborations and interpretations of the so-called bare facts. He embellishes her character with his own peculiar, subjective responses and wondrously embroiders her experiences (and her narration of them) with objectionable, super- added description which cannot have been conveyed by Hunilla. Our narrator’s artistry portrays before the readers’ gaze the painting both of Hunilla and of characterisation itself, and the constructedness, the non-naturalness, of people and selves.29 And it ‘tells

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the story’ of the creation by a story-teller of one of Melville’s most elusive stories. Melville wove in an embedded story for Hunilla to tell the sailors, in order to display the inner workings of story-telling. He sought to demonstrate the mesmerising effects on an , in Hunilla’s case her rescuing sailors, the captain, and our mischievous narrator. Yet he alone, like Ishmael, constructed a version of Hunilla’s story. By telling his elaborately-embroidered tale of her brief tale, he achieves (the illusion of) artistic authenticity.

32 Frequent prolepsis pre-empts suspense. Anticipating the ending, the narrator relieves us of ignorance as to the outcome of the rescue, increasing the focus on modes of telling. The title already reveals the Chola woman to be a widow, while “rescuing a human being from the most dreadful fate” occurs as early as paragraph three. By paragraph nine (out of sixty-eight) readers are told again of the successful rescue: “in half an hour’s time the swift boat returned. It went with six and came with seven; and the seventh was a woman” (9). In paragraph thirteen we are apprised of the failure of the promised original ship’s return, but a more devastating prolepsis is found in fourteen: Yet however a dire calamity was here in store, misgivings of it ere due time never disturbed the Cholos’ busy mind, now all intent upon the toilsome matter which had brought them hither. Nay, by swift doom coming like the thief at night, ere seven weeks went by, two of the little party were removed from all anxieties of land or sea. (14)

33 Narrative revelations anticipating events continue throughout, denuding the tale of suspense; nor can we find a typical plot, only interwoven digression after digression.

34 The narrator’s recounting of a slow, long-delayed return to Payta, vexed by baffling winds and currents into a ‘long passage’ (64), toys with reading . The journey back from the Encantadas to Peru incorporates one of the Romantic Ironist’s favourite ploys, the punning on long (verbal) passages, with travel a metaphor of reading voyages. Hunilla’s desperate need for rescue by the sailors smacks of intimations of lost or abandoned readers stranded or mired in tales whose meanings are elusive, whose plots dissolve into insignificance, whose characters evade clarity, and whose narrators intrude distractingly. At the end, our narrator/sailor has to rescue readers from the tale he wove himself, not through clarification, but by abandoning us to a parody of an ending. Hunilla rides off into the sunset on her cross-bearing donkey but to what, no one knows, and we are left with the enigmatic or parodic symbol of the armorial cross.

35 Narrative displays of concealed happenings and untold experiences expose the gaping fragmentariness of Hunilla’s tale, but more still the narrator’s patched-together speculations, fabrications, and embellishments. Many are presented as Hunilla’s version. These splits and tears disfigure the narrative and foreground the hidden theme of the sketch as an exploration of the complex interpenetration of experience and articulation. They characterize the nature of language and experience as full of holes, cut with ‘ragged edges.’ Imperfections, disfigurements, cracks, and crevices – these express our experience of truth: ever incomplete, flawed, ambiguous and subject to profound revision in the light of further experience. Hunilla’s and the narrator’s stories contain other interesting but less obvious ‘missing links.’ Another lacuna involving both the narrator’s and Hunilla’s tales evades being filled with any certain meaning: the effects on Hunilla’s character and her religious faith of the trials undergone are hinted at but never expressed.30 One resorts, as Hawthorne said, to the

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witchery of language, to the sorcery of art, to the enchantment of words – not to dispel the ambiguity and raggedness of experience but to establish the illusion, created at times by the power of imagination alone, that things are less uncertain than they seemed.

36 Everywhere the flotsam or jetsam of the story strews the white-beach/ page of our reading with interruptions and disruptions; endless literary bits, historical relics, and biblical allusions float in a sea of the narrative. Fragments, shards, scraps and orts – of rumours and tales and quotations from other seamen, relics of memories, optical illusions, piecemeal superstitions and broken spells, ruins of all kinds, shells and reeds – are thrown up on the shore from islands hundreds of miles away; all this ‘rubbish’ contaminates the beach of the island and the page of the story. It threatens to drown any unambiguous perception, either of the work and the people described, or the narrative itself, whether Hunilla’s version or the narrator’s. As with her drowned husband Felipe and brother Truxill, the ‘body’ of the story is a dead one, a missing one, or an insolubly elusive Hunilla-like enigma.31

NOTES

1. See Hershel Parker, : A Biography (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, vol. 1, 1996 and vol. 2, 2002), I, 183 passim, and see C.R. Anderson, Melville in the South Seas (New York, Columbia University Press, 1939). 2. V.W. von Hagen, ed. “Introduction” and “Epilogue” to The Encantadas Or, Enchanted Isles by Herman Melville (illustrated edition, Burlingame, Calif.: William P. Wreden and San Francisco: Grabhorn Press, 1940), v-xxiii and 101-19, page 101. 3. Regarding The Encantadas, the travel sources include Darwin, Robert Fitz Roy (the captain of the Beagle), William Dampier, William Cowley, Benjamin Morrell, Amasa Delano (source for Benito Cereno primarily), and James Burney. Of especial interest are David Porter’s (1815) Journal of a Cruise, James Colnett’s (1798) Voyage to the South Atlantic, and John Coulter’s (1845) Adventures in the Pacific. 4. The most complete report was the Springfield Republican, November 22, 1853. See Robert Sattelmeyer and James Barbour, “The Sources and Genesis of Melville’s ‘Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow’,” American Literature 50 (1978), 398-417. For the Agatha-letters source, see C. N. Watson, Jr., “Melville’s Agatha and Hunilla: A Literary Reincarnation,” English Language Notes 6 (1968), 114-18, and compare Basem L. Ra’ad, “‘The Encantadas’ and ‘The Isle of the Cross:’ Melvillean Dubieties,” American Literature 63:2 (1991), 316-23, who discussed the ‘Agatha Letters’ as a source. 5. Sattelmeyer and Barbour, 417; note: “It is a deceptively sentimental sketch… [using] its sentimentality in very unconventional ways… it exhibits its author’s most characteristic ‘layering’ method of composition – the touchstone of which was almost always some particularly compelling ‘story of reality.’ ” 6. Many critics have discussed the pseudonym, but see especially Margaret Yarina, “The Dualistic Vision of Herman Melville’s The Encantadas,” Journal of Narrative Technique 3 (1973), 141-8; Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850’s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

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University Press, 1997), and M.-M. G. Riddle, Herman Melville’s “Piazza Tales: ” A Prophetic Vision (Goeteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1985). 7. Melville, in Redburn, had already referred to Rosa’s painting in describing his character Jackson, chapters 12 and 55. And see Sharon Furrow, “The Terrible Made Visible: Melville, Salvator Rosa, and Piranesi,” Emerson Society Quarterly 19 (1973), 238, on Rosa’s influence and his paintings in Melville’s house. 8. This essay had the only other pseudonym Melville used: “By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont,” perhaps a gesture toward Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories and Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Poe had recently died in 1850. 9. See further Jill R. Gidmark, “Deception and Contradiction in The Encantadas: Salvator R. Tarnmoor on ‘Not Firme Land,’” North Dakota Quarterly 56 (1988), 83-90. 10. Since advance notice of the sketches was given in the New York Evening Post of February 14 under Herman Melville’s name, few readers fell for the outlandish ‘Salvator R. Tarnmoor’ ascription. Praise in the Berkshire County Eagle of March 10 for Melville as the author would have further enlightened them. 11. The collection includes some of Melville’s most famous short fictions: “The Piazza”, “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno.” This time, the pseudonym was left out, whether by accident or deliberately is not known. 12. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. with an introduction and commentary by Harold Beaver (Harmondsworth and New York, 1972, 1977), 26. 13. The name may well be a play on ‘Una’ of The Faerie Queene; most of the sketches have extracts from Spenser’s work as epigraphs of greatly varying lengths, which create an extraordinary atmosphere from the outset. Sketch eight has, unusually, three short epigraphs, the one from The Faerie Queene only five lines long; the other two are from Chatterton’s Aella and Collins’ “A Song from Shakespear’s Cymbeline” (the latter only in the 1856 edition). On the three epigraphs as concerned with the pity and grief resulting from deception, see Marvin Fisher, “The Encantadas,” in Herman Melville: Critical Assessments, ed. A Robert Lee, 4 vols. (Robertsbridge, East Sussex: Helm Information Services, 2001), 284-301 (originally published in 1974). And see R.C. Albrecht, “The Thematic Unity of Melville’s ‘The Encantadas’,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14 (1972), 463-77, especially 474. 14. Aposiopesis: a sudden breaking off as if from unwillingness to continue (Gk., lit. to be silent); anacoluthon: a break of grammatical sequence (Gk., lit. to cut short, to disappoint); apophasis: a denial of intentions to speak of things strongly hinted at or insinuated (Gk., lit. a denial); and paraleipsis (or –lipsis): a pretended ignoring, for rhetorical effect, of something actually spoken of, as in “not to mention other faults” (Gk., lit. a passing over, a leaving untold). 15. A favourite topic of Melville’s; see The Confidence-Man, for example. 16. See Sattelmeyer and Barbour, 400 ff, and Basem L. Ra’ad, 316-23. 17. Romeo and Juliet V, iii, 309. 18. All quotations are from Herman Melville: Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, ed. Robert Milder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and all numbers refer to paragraphs, not to pages. 19. Bruce L. Grenberg, in Some Other World to Find: Quest and Negation in the Works of Herman Melville. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 209-10, discussed similar gaps, lacunae, and hidden (but hinted at) elements in Billy Budd, Sailor, 208. 20. A. Robert Lee, in “Moby-Dick: The Tale and the Telling,” New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1978), 86-127, said Melville’s writing calls attention to processes of telling and making fiction, in Melville’s “wonderfully canny piece[s] of self-knowing negation,” 91. 21. Lear I, iv, 32-3, variation. 22. E.A. , in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” New Essays on Hawthorne: Hawthorne’s Major Tales, ed. Millicent Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 133-52: Melville’s texts

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demonstrate that the human countenance cannot be taken at ‘face’ value; the narrator or author of a tale is also veiled by the text. An inherent tension between the hidden and the revealed means that some meanings always remain ‘in reserve,’ 145. 23. Peter Bellis, in No Mysteries out of Ourselves: Identity and Textual Form in the Novels of Herman Melville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 188, insisted that for Melville, pure and unmediated representation is not possible; Melville always tested the limits of representation, 12. And see Nancy Fredricks, Melville’s Art of Democracy (Athens, Ga. and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995), for a sustained discussion of Melville’s notions of the limits of our powers of representation. 24. Dryden argued that central parts of the sketch “put into question the very distinction between perception and representation, between events and their verbal or painterly images,” 65. He insisted that Melville makes “the real appear as figure, perception as a form of representation. The present… is already represented,” 66. He goes on to talk of unnaturalness of death; earlier he discussed, 64, the rubbish that intervenes between us and reality and precludes any original relationship to it. 25. Leroy Day, in Narrative Transgression and the Foregrounding of Language in Selected Prose Works of Poe, Valery, and Hofmannsthal (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1988), also argued that for Melville, our world is not natural but constructed; phenomena seemingly natural are conventions, 2-4. 26. Or as Leon Chai explained in The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 420, 422, “without the embodiment of consciousness in a representation, the self possesses no means of knowing itself;” representation is consciousness itself. 27. Davis, L.J., in Factual Fictions. The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), analysed how fictions can either seek to hide and deny their fictionality in order to assert their powers of mimesis of reality, or seek to build into the text a subversive gesture exposing the illusion of reality and exposing the reality fiction ‘reports’ as the one it is in the process of creating. 28. For example, in “” (1852), as well as in “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836), Hawthorne had provided his readers with two very different displays of literary characterisation in fiction. Melville’s Hunilla sketch compares more obviously with the Minister story than with Feathertop because of the tone of serious Romantic Irony pervading it, along with its freedom from the overtly comic, indeed hilarious parody in “Feathertop” of the author/witch creating a ‘straw-man,’ mistaken by ‘readers’ as a ‘real’ person. (And note the “Postscript” to and the example of ‘Donatello’ for further occasions of Hawthorne’s similar hoodwinking of his readers.) 29. And, according to Bellis, Melville’s fictions usually end up showing that a self cannot be given adequate textual or visual forms of representation, 84. 30. See Marvin Fisher, “The Encantadas,” in Herman Melville: Critical Assessments, ed. A. Robert Lee, 4 vols. (Robertsbridge, East Sussex: Helm Information Services, 2001), 284-301, who discussed the impossibility of interpreting Hunilla’s responses; he proposed Christian reaffirmation, stoicism, and disenchantment as undecidable possibilities, 295. 31. In Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948), interpretation and reading are portrayed as the digging up of a recently buried corpse; of the story is imaged as a surprisingly empty coffin, then later a coffin with, shockingly, the ‘wrong’ body. Finally, the ‘clue’ to identification of lies solely in the type of ‘hole’ made in the ‘right’ body by a bullet, only one of several crucial gaps. Faulkner once remarked that of all books he knew, he would like to have written Moby-Dick.

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ABSTRACTS

Des dix esquisses qui composent Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles (1854) de Herman Melville, nous proposons d’aborder la huitième, intitulée « Sketch Eighth Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow », qui contient un récit bref énigmatique et constamment interrompu que fait Hunilla, la veuve du titre. Ce récit est enchâssé dans un autre récit, celui du narrateur qui élabore sa tragédie. Cette étude analysera plus particulièrement deux caractéristiques spécifiques de cette esquisse. Premièrement, les fréquentes interruptions du récit aux moments décisifs : le récit du narrateur attire l’attention du lecteur pour les lacunes du récit qu’il enchâsse tout en créant des brèches supplémentaires par d’habiles recours aux procédés rhétoriques Deuxièmement, ces procédés qui permettent au lecteur de se rendre compte progressivement que les deux histoires sont en fait inénarrables, aucun texte original n’étant possible. La tentative de communiquer la vérité intrinsèque de l’expérience se révèle impossible parce que l’expérience pure est déjà une construction.

AUTHORS

K. M. WHEELER K. M. Wheeler is Reader in English Literature at Cambridge University, England. Author of a study of ’s prose as well as an analysis of several major poems, she has also written Romanticism, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction and Explaining Deconstruction. Other works include Modernist Women Writers and Narrative Art and A Critical Guide to 20th Century Women Novelists. She is presently completing a book on Herman Melville.

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Linguistic Structure and Rhetorical Resolution in Katherine Mansfield "The Garden Party"

Stephen E. Severn

1 What happens when a young woman attempts to cross the boundaries that divide the upper-class world that she inhabits from the lower classes surround her? Katherine Mansfield’s most famous work, “The Garden Party,” explores that question from a decidedly Modernist perspective. First published in February 1922, the short story follows the wealthy Sheridan family as they prepare for an afternoon fête. The narrative focuses on Laura, the "artistic" daughter who argues that the party should be cancelled out of respect for Scott, a poor neighbor who has just been killed while working as a carter. After her lobbying fails to move Mrs. Sheridan, the party takes place as planned, and Laura becomes the centerpiece of the event, thanks to a striking hat that her mother has given her. The party over, Laura visits Scott’s family with a basket of leftover food. Unfortunately, she still wears her prized bonnet, which is now garishly inappropriate. Feeling out of place and ashamed, she pleads before his casket “Forgive my hat” and then heads back to her upper-class world. When her brother Laurie meets her outside the family estate and inquires about her journey, she mouths the words “isn’t life – ” but then speaks no further (296 – 297).

2 For over fifty years, that lapse into silence has been the focus of much critical debate, for it denies the reader access to what presumably would be a final, authoritative pronouncement regarding the outcome of the day’s events. All agree that “The Garden Party” raises questions of class identity and social hierarchy. Laura’s visit to Scott’s home and her interaction with the workers who set up the party lead to comments about “those absurd class distinctions” and arguments with her own family about social roles and proper behaviors (284) . The text’s attitude toward those issues, however, appears to be – at least at first glance – unclear. Does the story offer a sincere and scathing attack on the inequities of the class structures that separate the Sheridans from the members of the lower classes who support them, or is it lightly mocking the

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reformist pretensions of a privileged girl who is utterly immersed in the very social system she questions?

3 Warren S. Walker opened discussion on the topic with his 1957 essay “The Unresolved Conflict in ‘The Garden Party’.” His study concludes that the text fails to develop a coherent rhetorical perspective on the “clash of basic social attitudes” between Laura and Mrs. Sheridan and “no hint of any answer… is to be found in the conclusion (355, 357). That assessment has cut a wide and deep critical wake. Numerous scholars have examined the story’s symbolism, psychological underpinnings, temporality and spatiality in an effort to discern the thematic resolution that Walker suggests is missing. Some, such as Nicholas Nownes, have joined Walker in asserting that the text’s stance on class-based issues resists interpretation: “‘The Garden Party’… defies the traditions of an ordered, unified text. As the story unfolds, themes are introduced, developed to one degree or another, then abandoned essentially unresolved… [the reader is] unable to pin down conclusively narrative meaning” (50 – 51).

4 Unfortunately, these analyses have overlooked the aspect of “The Garden Party” that holds the key to its thematic unity – its linguistic structures. The two events that dominate its – Laura’s plea for forgiveness and her reversion to silence – are speech acts. Not surprisingly, the “hint” that Walker seeks rests in the conversational patterns of the story’s narrator and its characters. Along with its spatial boundaries, language serves as a marker of class affiliation in the text and acts as a barrier that must be crossed when interaction between social strata occurs. Both the narrator and the upper class characters employ speech patterns that rest upon denial and negativity. Through the repeated use of tag-questions, they establish a hierarchy of expectation that limits choice and prevents challenge. Affirmation and assertion are scarce; denial and repression are the rule. Conversely, members of the lower classes espouse affirmation and take action. Because they do not recognize the social expectations that the upper-class linguistic strategy rests upon, they do not play by the “rules” that the Sheridans unconsciously embrace. As such, they challenge the wealthy environment which borders them and in which they work.

5 Laura’s final two speech acts must be read against this broader, structural backdrop and not just as individualized events because as Janet Holmes notes, “accurate interpretation of the meaning of linguistic forms will always require consideration of contextual factors” (49 – 50). Doing so establishes the “The Garden Party” as a narrative of displacement: the development and progression of Laura’s speech patterns mirrors her spatial movement in the last portion of the text. Having stepped out of the upper- class world of the Sheridan’s estate and into the lower-class world of Scott’s community, she makes a simple and direct request that is in accord with the language of her surroundings. Afterward, she meets Laurie in a liminal space: the road that divides the two communities. Caught between worlds, Laura is also caught between language, and she does not know how to speak. The experiences of the day, however, have made it clear how not to speak, and her halt in mid-sentence is an act of self- censorship. She stops herself to avoid reverting to the upper-class linguistic paradigm that her family embraces.

6 The upper-class characters in “The Garden Party” use language as a primary means for establishing control over their environment. They employ linguistic structures that should guarantee the outcome they desire. This strategy is evident from the very outset of the text as the preparations for the party take shape. The fête is a communal event,

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and in theory, the family is working together to make sure that it runs smoothly. Nonetheless, the decisions that are reached on planning issues represent symbolic exertions of power, for each time a family member transforms a personal suggestion into action, his or her own control over the party is affirmed. The Sheridans, however, rarely propose anything directly. Instead, they shape their commentary and suggestions as questions: "Oh, I do love parties, don't you?" (285); "Isn't it a perfect morning?" (285); "Bank them up, just inside the door, on both sides of the porch... Don't you agree?" (286); "Now, if we put this chesterfield against the wall and move everything out of the room except the chairs, don't you think?" (286); "Aren't I in good voice mummy?" (287); "It looks like mice. It can't be mice, can it?" (288); “Don’t they carry one back to all one’s parties?” (288); "If some one had died there normally... we should still be having our party shouldn't we?" (291); "...can't the band have something to drink?" (293). None of these questions are open-ended or unqualified. Instead, the majority of these solicitations constitute tag questions, and they represent a defining feature of upper-class speech in this text.

7 The Sheridans’ use of tag questions creates a façade of open dialogue by giving the appearance of soliciting opinion and presenting choice. In reality, however, these structures obtain assent by reducing the likelihood for challenge. As Robin Lakoff argues in Talking Power, tag questions “strongly presuppose one answer” and are “less a true question than a declarative statement plus a suggestion of camaraderie” (267 – 268). The question “Don’t you think?” assumes that either the speaker’s audience does think that way, or if they do not, at least they will be unwilling to give voice to a dissenting opinion for fear of having transgressed a social expectation. Even when upper-class characters employ questions that are not tag questions in the strictest formal sense, they still avoid open dialogue and challenge at all costs. For instance, when Laura’s sister Meg seeks evaluation of her singing ability, she does not ask Mrs. Sheridan, “What kind of voice am I in?” Such a query could elicit an honest and potentially unwelcome response. Her mother could say, “You sound rather rough today.” To avoid that possibility, Meg puts forth a specific option that she expects her audience to accept: “Aren’t I in good voice mummy?” (287) Although not formed as a tag question, its has the same impact. The language of the Sheridans attempts to force their audience into agreement by removing all other options.

8 The language of the upper classes – both its character and its limitations – comes into sharpest relief when brought into direct contact with lower-class voices because the sense of shared social identity that the Sheridan’s linguistic strategy requires is missing. As Lakoff suggests, “camaraderie” is an essential component of the tag- question and a key to its rhetorical success. The Sheridans as a whole demonstrate neither the desire nor the ability to empathize with individuals below them. They fix their attention only upon their social equals, and as Iversen argues, “Sympathy and tact, as the words occur and recur in Mrs. Sheridan’s and Jose’s vocabulary, only apply to people of their own class” (11). Thus, when Laura suggests to her sister that the party be stopped because of Scott’s death, her reaction is incredulous: “Stop the garden party?… don’t be so absurd…. Nobody expects us to” (290). Her mother responds in essentially the same manner: “People like that don’t expect sacrifices from us” (291). The two women do not reject the demands of those from the lower classes; they fail to even recognize that any such demands might exist. Since the Sheridan family can

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imagine no bond with the workers who set-up the party, any linguistic strategy that relies upon such a connection is destined for failure.

9 Early in the story when her mother dispatches her to oversee the placement of the marquee, Laura experiences this rhetorical failure firsthand. At this point, she is completely immersed in the language of her familial environment, and so, she offers a suggestion in the traditional Sheridan manner: “what about the lily-law? Would that do?” The response of the “tall fellow” is simple, authoritative and utterly ignores the answer implied within the question itself: “I don’t fancy it” (283). His answer represents a linguistic paradigm to which Laura is unaccustomed and the narrator notes her surprise at hearing it. After another possible location is dismissed, the “tall fellow” takes control of the situation by asserting “Look here, miss, that’s the place. Against those trees. Over there. That’ll do fine” (284). This time, the content of the claim and its form dismays Laura because the worker’s plan will keep the karaka trees with their “broad, gleeming leaves, and their clusters of yellow fruit” out of sight. Laura responds to this challenge in the only way that she knows: “Must they be hidden by a marquee?” As before, her audience fails to notice the hint. Therefore, he cannot and does not take it: “They must” (Ibid.) This scene enacts Ole Togeby’s assertion that “linguistic interaction can be seen as an ongoing regulation of the mutual social relation between the interlocutors, a regulation of the ‘pecking order’” (69). Here however, that “pecking order” gets turned on its head because the influence of social expectation that is so central to the effectiveness of the upper-class linguistic strategy disappears.

10 Although Laura cannot meet the workmen on their own linguistic terms, she clearly learns from the encounter and over the course of the story, she begins to explore the rhetorical possibilities of the speech patterns of the lower classes. Crossing these boundaries, however, puts her singularly out of step with the other members of her family, especially her mother. After the party, as the Sheridans begin to discuss the death of Scott, Mrs. Sheridan decides that a token gesture of goodwill toward the bereaved family is needed: “Let’s make up a basket…. it will be the greatest treat for the children. Don’t you agree?” (293). As usual, she employs a tag question in an effort to ensure the assent of her children. Laura’s response, however, comes as a shock. She asks simply, “do you really think it’s a good idea?” (294). Although not unbiased, the question’s direct form is clearly more neutral than the Sheridan’s normal linguistic structures because it does not overtly preclude any particular answer. That structure immediately sets Laura apart from the family. The narrator notes that “she seemed to be different from them all.” Her objection also raises her mother’s ire: “What’s the matter with you to-day?” (Ibid.). The displeasure in these responses obviously stems in large part from the content of Laura’s question, but it also reflects upon the distinctive form that she employs.

11 Laura’s final two speech acts in the story – her apology before Scott’s body and her unfinished question before Laurie – transform the fissure with her family into a complete break. The first of these is unequivocal in its rhetorical implications. She pleads, “Forgive my hat” (296). The statement is much more than a simple apology for a poor choice of accoutrements, however. It constitutes a rejection of the object that dominates the second half of the text and defines Laura’s identity during that period. The hat first appears immediately after Laura approaches her mother and attempts to convince her that the party should be stopped because of Scott’s death. Mrs. Sheridan rebukes her daughter for the silliness of her suggestion, but then gives her a new hat

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because “It’s made for you. It’s much too young for me” (291). Eventually, Laura and the object become one: “the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long black velvet ribbon. Never before had she imagined she could look like that” (292). The use of third person serves to dramatize the extent of the transformation. Instead of seeing herself in the mirror, Laura beholds “this charming girl.” At least on the outside, she has become a new person, thanks entirely to her new hat. The various comments about her appearance by the guests and her family reaffirm her judgment. They all express a mixture of admiration and surprise at her new look: “My word, Laura; you do look stunning” (292). No longer merely the “artistic one,” she becomes an object of desire: “Laura, you look quite Spanish. I’ve never seen you look so striking” (293). Laura earns attention, and indeed becomes the center of it, because of the hat.

12 The reactions of the other characters to Laura’s new appearance are, of course, superficial and based solely upon an article of clothing. But, the text goes even further and suggests that the hat has a more fundamental effect upon her. While admiring herself in the mirror, Laura quickly loses sight of the death of Scott, which up until that moment has been dominating her thoughts: “Just for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in a newspaper” (292). The vision returns to her momentarily and she resolves to speak with Laurie, her brother, about it. But, as soon as he compliments her “absolutely topping” hat, she forgets to tell him.

13 With the banishment of Scott from the internalized world of her thoughts, Laura becomes a purely externalized figure whose focal point is her hat. The object itself connotes a crown, a connection reinforced by the fact that Mrs. Sheridan actually places it on Laura’s head. Marvin Magalaner reads that act as a “coronation” by which the mother is “symbolically transferring to Laura the Sheridan heritage of snobbery, restricted social views, narrowness of vision” (116 – 117). For Walker, the hat represents the “spell of society,” and Laura “does not escape its influence throughout the ritual of the party” (256). The term crown of course provides a metonymic substitution for royal governance, and therefore connotes not only upper-class privilege and snobbishness but also power and authority. Note also that Laura’s name is derived from “laurel,” the classic Greek victory crown. Therefore, her very name furthers conflation of her identity with the object, even as it reinforces its symbolic resonance.

14 Standing before Scott’s body however, Laura rejects all of that. In sharp contrast to her earlier encounter with the workmen, the simplicity and directness of her statement here is unmistakable. The experimentation in linguistic form that she began with her mother after the party reaches fruition. She does not even preface her request with “please.” She merely pleads, “Forgive my hat” (296). The request marks a reversal of power dynamics as Laura makes a direct request to the lower classes without the use of a tag question. Moreover, this is the first time that she uses a possessive pronoun to describe the object. It is no longer “the” hat. It is now “my” hat. She embraces the object and accepts it, specifically to renounce it. She apologizes for both her own actions and all that the hat symbolizes: snobbishness, elitism, privilege, power and authority. Although the narrator’s description of the scene is ironized and exploits the

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decidedly ridiculous nature of the spectacle, Robert Murray Davis notes that Laura’s plea marks her as “more mature than her mother… ever can be” (65).

15 From that definitive statement, the text moves to the truncated, final exchange between Laura and Laurie. From the perspective of linguistic form, the scene emerges as a perverse reenactment of Laura’s first meeting with the workmen. Here, Laura adopts the role of the lower class figures and confounds Laurie’s expectations at every turn. After subtly establishing that Laura’s suddenly strange behavior has become a source of concern – “Mother was getting anxious” – Laurie attempts to gain control of their exchange in typical Sheridan fashion with the use of a tag question posed in the negative, “you’re not crying, are you?” (296, 297). But his sister is crying, and since a simple order of “Don’t cry” would be unlikely to have any effect, Laurie attempts again to re-establish normalcy by suggesting to Laura the one option that will allow for such a spectacle. He asks “Was it awful?” (297). Clearly, he seeks an affirmative answer, for if the scene at the Scotts’ really was “awful,” then Laura’s emotional outburst would be justified. Rather than offer a neutral, open-ended question such as “How was it?”, his query implicitly pushes Laura toward the response he wants.

16 But, having learned from the workmen that morning and newly arrived from the lower-class world of Scott’s family, Laura now stands immune to such insinuation and manipulation. She refuses to take the bait and declares “It was simply marvellous” (297). Both the content and the form of the statement run counter to the linguistic model under which Laurie operates. Laura then attempts to contextualize her assertion further with her existential statement regarding the nature of life. But in doing so, she begins to revert to her old habits. Instead of saying simply “Life is…”, she forms her pronouncement as a negative rhetorical question: “Isn’t life” (Ibid.). If completed, the question would have been constructed to presuppose agreement and would have embraced the fundamental rhetorical strategy of the Sheridan family. To avoid that, Laura does not finish her assertion. Instead, the narrator comments “what life was she couldn’t explain” (297).

17 To date, critics have read “couldn’t” as meaning that Laura, for whatever reason, does not know what to say. Ben Satterfield claims that her silence stems from her inability to understand the experience she has just undergone (70), while Nownes suggests that it reflects the incomprehensibility of the situation itself (56 – 57). Both of these readings cast Laura’s crisis as a crisis of content. If in fact she cannot grasp the situation that she has just faced, or if the situation itself defies understanding, then the leap to the conclusion that the text as a whole is “unresolved” becomes quite short.

18 There is, however, another plausible interpretation of “couldn’t” available to the reader that demands consideration. “Couldn’t” can also signify Laura’s refusal to present her experiences in the form that she starts to employ. In other words, “what life was she couldn’t say in that manner.” Read this way, her silence joins her apology before Scott’s body as a rejection of her upper-class background.

19 The development of Laura’s character over the course of “The Garden Party” privileges this second, unifying reading because her self-censorship mirrors her spatial movement within the text and reinforces the undefined social sphere into which she has moved at the conclusion. Laura’s final exchange with Laurie takes place of the “great road” that divides the Sheridan’s compound from the community of “little cottages” where Scott’s family lives (290). The text maps class identity directly onto topography, for the neighborhood is “the greatest possible eyesore” and despite

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being at the bottom of a “steep rise,” it is still “far too near” (Ibid.) Thus, the two siblings meet on the demarcation line between the opposing worlds, a neither-here- nor-there no-man’s-land. This is not, however, the first time that they have found themselves at that place: When the Sheridans were little, they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and it was sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went. (290)

20 Given the substantial physical and social barriers which stand in her way, Laura’s repeated forays down the road reflect a deeply ingrained attraction for the poor community that brings her back on her “prowls.” The verb evokes images of stealth and criminal activity. Her visits are not mere walks, journeys or saunterings. Despite the fact that Laura uses the forays as a means of defining her adult status, she would rather not be seen undertaking them and is ashamed of the experience. She recognizes that she has stepped outside of the established cultural norms of the Sheridan family by going down the lane. And yet, she is compelled to go.

21 When she returns to the previously forbidden lane to face Scott’s body, she finds herself freed from the social forces that normally impinge upon her in the Sheridan household and mandate the use of the pre-determined responses that the family’s language dictates. She is also enlightened by her earlier experiences with the workmen and the marquee. Those factors combine to transform Laura. At the moment of her apology, she finally undertakes the simple act of dictating her own physical movement for the first time. Prior to that point, her coming and going is always controlled by others. Mrs. Sheridan sends her to meet the workmen for the marquee, to the kitchen with flags for the sandwiches and to visit the Scott family with the basket. During her conference with the workmen, she is called away by the ringing of the phone. Upon her arrival at the Scotts’, the widow’s sister leads her into the house and then to see the body, despite Laura’s reservations. Even her approach to the corpse is presented as a matter of compulsion: “she couldn’t go out of the room without saying something to him” (296). In all of these cases, Laura is purely reactive and subject to the direction of others. After her apology however, she leaves Scott’s house on her own terms: “And this time she didn’t wait for Em’s sister. She found her way out of the door” (296). Having symbolically rejected her own past and the ornate world of the Sheridans, she assumes control over her actions and forges a new identity.

22 In doing so however, she pushes herself into a liminal space. It is clear where she is not, but it is not clear where she is. Despite her obvious attraction to and identity with her family’s poor neighbors, she cannot remain on Scott’s lane permanently, for she remains what Adam J. Sorkin calls “the privileged daughter of her monied class” (441 – 442). But at the same time, it is clear that she has grown beyond the limitations of the Sheridans’ world, and the text underscores this by denying her access to it. Standing between spatial and social boundaries, she also finds herself caught between linguistic forms. Even though Laura has a clear affinity for the directness and affirmation that characterizes lower-class speech, she also has reservations about its vulgarity. For instance at one point, she wonders about the propriety of a worker speaking of “bang slap in the eye” (283). Thus, when she attempts to give voice to her experience, she recognizes clearly the form not to use, but she cannot grasp the form to use: What life was, she could not say.

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23 Because previous studies of “The Garden Party” have not taken into account the key role that language plays in shaping class identity within the text, their judgments of Laura have focused primarily upon her role in and reaction to the events of the day. Read in such a light, both the sincerity of her pronouncements and the text’s commitment to their rhetorical stance quickly come into question. It is, after all, quite easy for a wealthy woman of leisure to rail against “absurd class distinctions” when she must suffer absolutely no economic or social hardships because of them. Given her ventures down to Scott’s neighborhood as a child and her impending return to the Sheridan estate, she is also subject to charges of what might be termed “cultural tourism.” Satterfield notes that she will “in all likelihood remain in the refuge of their bright house on the hill” (70). Certainly if Mansfield had wanted to leave no doubt about the story’s position, Laura would be seen turning her back on her family and wandering off in a different direction to establish an entirely new identity for her self. This does not happen of course, and therefore, Nownes argues that “Neither Laura nor the narrator ever establish an ordered series of events that might conclusively support reading “The Garden Party” as an account of Laura’s ever increasing wariness of class distinctions" (53). Such a plot-focused critical approach would be appropriate if applied to a realist novel where, as Irving Howe suggests, “Plot… comes to seem inseparable from meaning, and meaning to inhere in plot” (160). It is out of step, however, with Mansfield’s fundamentally Modernist aesthetic where form speaks as loudly as, if not louder than, both actions and words.

24 The unmistakable shift in Laura’s speech away from her original upper-class structures, to lower-class patterns and then finally to a non-space between the two signals that she has undergone an essential transformation. Walker’s claim that the social crisis in “The Garden Party” is unresolved stems in large part from his inability to imagine Laura redefining her relationship to the rest of the Sheridans: “Will she not now have to reorient her feelings toward her family?” (357). In fact, her silence indicates that she has already done exactly that. Although Laura will return to the Sheridans’ home in body, she will be far away in spirit and, like T.S. Eliot’s Magi, “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation / with an alien people clutching their gods” (lines 41 – 42).

25 The ridiculous nature of Laurie’s response to Laura’s truncated question foregrounds the alien space she will now occupy in the Sheridan family. In the final speech act of the text, Laurie employs the standard Sheridan strategy of question as statement – the same linguistic structure that his sister has just rejected with her self censorship: “Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life –“ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood. “Isn’t it? , darling” said Laurie (297)

26 Acting as the voice of the upper classes, the narrator claims that Laurie has a full grasp of what has happened. The reader, however, knows differently. Laura’s understanding of events is based upon her life experiences. Of all the members of the Sheridan family, Laurie is seemingly the most able to intuit her thoughts, given that he has accompanied her on her “prowls,” and there is no indication that any of their other siblings have ventured outside the confines of their upper-class existence. Even so, her perception at that moment is dominated by her visit to the corpse, and Laurie has no access to this. Indeed, his attempt to have Laura describe the event as awful indicates that his expectations are far removed from her experience down the lane. But, the Sheridan linguistic paradigm in which he is clearly immersed renders both his lack of understanding and Laura’s truncated assertion finally irrelevant. He does not need to

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hear Laura’s statement in order to reply to it. In the upper-class world, the listener’s role is only to provide assent, and he readily does this. Moreover, by suggesting agreement without asserting anything, he employs a form which epitomizes the linguistic strategy of the Sheridans, and in doing so, he exposes its utter inadequacy as a means for understanding the world.

27 In all of her fiction, Mansfield rarely, if ever, offers simple, direct answers or ties things up neatly with obvious conclusions. Even by Mansfield’s standards however, “The Garden Party” stands out as a particularly understated text, and she worried about the openness of its ending (Magalaner 118). Resolution is necessarily a relative term, but at least some degree of it can be established here. The attacks that Laura levels at the attitudes and practices of her family are genuine and the text is committed to them. In a world where class conflict is played out on the battlefield of speech, her silence should be read as an act of resistance, a refusal to continue with those forms which have shaped her life and consciousness to that point. The text does not – indeed it cannot – prescribe where she should go, but it clearly decries where she has been.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davis, Robert Murray. “The Unity of ‘The Garden Party’” Studies in Short Fiction. 2.1 (Fall 1964): 61 – 65.

Eliot, T.S. “The Return of the Magi.” The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909 – 1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1980: 68 – 69.

Holmes, Janet: “Hedging Your Bets and Sitting on the Fence: Some Evidence for Hedges as Support Structures.” Te Reo: Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand 27 (1982): 47 – 62.

Howe, Irving. “The Idea of the Modern.” Selected Writings, 1950-1990. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1990. 140 – 166.

Iversen, Anders. “A Reading of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party.’” Orbis Litterarum: An International Review of Literary Studies. 23 (1968): 5 – 34.

Lakoff, Robin. Talking Power. New York: Basic Books, 1990.

Magalaner, Marvin. The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois: UP, 1971.

Nownes, Nicholas L. “‘The Garden Party’: Responding to Katherine Mansfield’s Invitation.” World Literature Written in English 33.2 & 34.1 (1993 – 94): 49 – 57.

Satterfield, Ben. “Irony in the ‘Garden Party’.” Ball State University Forum. 23.1 (Winter 1982): 68 – 70.

Sorkin, Adam J. “Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’: Style and the Social Occasion.” Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 24 No. 3 Autumn 1978. 439 – 455.

Togeby, Ole. “Is There a Separate Women’s Language?” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 94 (1992): 63 – 73.

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ABSTRACTS

Cet essai explore jusqu'à quel point les structures linguistiques contenues dans “The Garden Party” de Katherine Mansfield constituent des marqueurs de l'identité de classe. Tant le narrateur que les personnages de la classe supérieure utilisent des modèles de discours reposant sur le démenti et la négativité. À l'usage répété de questions polies, les personnages établissent une hiérarchie d'attentes limitant le choix et empêchant le défi. L'affirmation et l'assertion sont rares; le démenti et la répression sont la règle. Inversement, les membres des classes inférieures embrassent l'affirmation et agissent. Ces résultats suggèrent que le silence de Laura à la conclusion du texte doit être lu comme un acte de résistance, un refus de continuer à suivre ces formalités qui ont modelé sa vie et sa conscience jusqu'à ce moment. Le texte ne prescrit pas la route qu'elle devra suivre dans l'avenir, mais il décrit clairement où elle s'est trouvée. Cette interprétation contredit la croyance largement répandue que “The Garden Party” ne forme pas une position rhétorique claire à l'égard des enjeux d'interaction entre classes qui y sont soulevés.

AUTHORS

STEPHEN E. SEVERN Valérie Bénéjam has been working at the Stephen E. Severn is the Director of Writing Programs at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas. He holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published pieces on Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Elizabeth Gaskell, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden and the films of Martin Scorsese.

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La tentation mélancolique dans One Warm Saturday de Dylan Thomas

Claude Maisonnat

1 Dylan Thomas termina l’écriture de la nouvelle en Juillet 1938 et elle fut incluse dans le recueil intitulé Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) sans passer par le stade préalable de la parution en revue. Si l’on retient la distinction classique, mais quelque peu schématique, entre la manière des premières nouvelles qui les rapprochait d’une écriture surréaliste dans la mesure où l’onirisme, la déréalisation prenaient le pas sur la logique narrative de l’histoire, et la seconde manière beaucoup plus directement autobiographique, comme en témoigne clairement le titre même du recueil avec son clin d’œil à Joyce, « One Warm Saturday » présente la singularité de combiner ces deux modes narratifs. La dimension autobiographique du texte est patente, puisqu’il s’agit bien de décrire la journée d’un écrivain en herbe qui s’interroge sur sa vocation et sur ses dons. Il passe une journée au bord de la mer, et faute d’objectifs précis, se promène en voyeur sur la plage. Il finit par rentrer dans un bar où il retrouve miraculeusement la fille devant laquelle il était tombé en extase sur la plage, paralysé par sa beauté. À partir de cette coïncidence quasi miraculeuse qui réalise son désir le plus intense de dragueur pitoyable, la nouvelle va basculer dans un monde irréel quasi fantastique dans lequel le protagoniste anonyme se retrouvera dans un lit avec l’objet de son désir au terme d’un trajet labyrinthique qui n’est pas sans rappeler les tableaux d’Escher. Mais la consommation sexuelle tant convoitée n’aura pas lieu car, contraint de quitter la pièce pour satisfaire un besoin naturel pressant, il sera incapable de retrouver le chemin du lit et se retrouvera seul dans une ville fantomatique errant dans la nuit désespérante, gros Jean comme devant.

La comédie du désir

2 La comédie du désir dans « One Warm Saturday » se joue en trois actes situés dans des temps et des espaces bien tranchés qui forment le déroulement chronologique de l’histoire. Le premier acte se déroule en fin d’après-midi sur une plage lors d’un week- end férié. Le protagoniste anonyme qui sera, dans le cours ultérieur de l’histoire,

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affublé du nom générique de Jack par Lou, s’ennuie ferme et passe le temps en observant les gens autour de lui, particulièrement les jeunes filles en maillot de bain et les mères de famille, ce qui laisse rapidement supposer une tentation voyeuriste. En fait, c’est un personnage solitaire qui peine à nouer des contacts humains avec autrui, tant il est enfermé dans un mal-être qui condamne par avance toute tentative de relation avec les femmes. On comprend assez vite qu’il y a un hiatus entre son désir et l’objet du désir. Son désir est de nature sexuelle. Il s’agit d’une scène de drague classique. Le personnage est en quête d’une bonne fortune amoureuse, mais il n’a pas encore trouvé l’objet sur lequel va se fixer son désir. Autrement dit, il opère une confusion entre l’objet cause du désir et sa matérialisation imaginaire l’objet du désir.

3 C’est donc un premier acte placé sous le signe de la vacance, même de la vacuité (sa vie lui paraît vide) et d’une errance qui se voudrait quête. Or, le tournant de ce premier acte est le fait qu’une rencontre va effectivement avoir lieu, que l’objet du désir va se matérialiser en la personne de Lou, une jeune femme assise sur un banc dont la beauté va le sidérer au point qu’il n’ose pas lui adresser la parole. Il se réfugie ensuite dans un bar voisin, le Victoria, où il fait également la rencontre d’un double qui le suivra tout au long de la soirée en la personne du barman. Il est remarquable qu’à peine identifié, l’objet du désir soit d’emblée posé comme hors d’atteinte. Le texte de cette première partie est saturé de références au corps (surtout féminin) et à la sexualité, ce qui ne laisse aucun doute sur les obsessions du jeune homme, bien exprimées par la polysémie du terme « maggot » qui par ailleurs établit un lien entre la sexualité et la mort1. De manière symptomatique, l’inaccessibilité de la femme est annoncée dès le premier paragraphe de la nouvelle, où on le voit dessiner sur le sable une silhouette de femme qui sera immédiatement détruite par un enfant : « [He] … drew on the sand a large, indented woman’s figure; and a naked child, just out of the sea, ran over it and shook water on the figure two wide wet eyes and a hole in the foot printed middle. » (219), tandis qu’une distance ironique est installée grâce à la référence à la figure de Mr Matthews, le « hell-fire preacher », alcoolique repenti, qui menace les pécheurs de tous les feux de l’enfer tout en lorgnant sur les jambes des filles.

4 Le deuxième acte se déroule intégralement dans les salons du pub le Victoria, où le jeune homme vient boire pour se remettre de son échec et noyer la mélancolie2 qu’il engendre. Le bar initialement vide va se remplir progressivement et l’intrigue va se trouver relancée par l’accomplissement miraculeux de la première rencontre ratée, c’est-à-dire l’entrée de Lou en compagnie de deux autres femmes. C’est alors que la vérité sur la jeune femme va graduellement apparaître. La frêle beauté, si fascinante dans sa pureté et sa fraîcheur qu’il n’ose l’aborder : « How beautiful she is, he thought, with his mind on words and his eyes on her hair and red and white skin, how beautifully she waits for me, though she does not know she is waiting and I can never tell her. » (222), se révèle être une femme facile, pour ne pas dire une prostituée, habituée à fréquenter le bar et à séduire les hommes en compagnie de ses deux collègues, Marjorie et Mrs Franklin, qui vont désormais les suivre dans l’histoire. C’est lui-même qui affronte cette vérité refoulée qui refait surface dans son monologue intérieur3 : « You saw a queer tart in a park, his reflection answered, she was a child of nature, Oh my! oh my! Did you see the dewdrops in her hair. » (223). En toute logique c’est donc elle qui l’interpelle dans le bar et lui offre un verre pour entamer la conversation. À partir de là, la dimension strictement réaliste du texte est

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ponctuellement entrecoupée d’intermèdes comiques principalement sur un mode grotesque. Sont donc successivement introduits:

5 - l’ivrogne sans fesses : The drunk man, with the pint held high, danced until he fell, and all the time he never spilt a drop. He lay at Lou’s feet on the dusty floor and grinned up at her in confidence and affection.‘I fell, he said. I could dance like a trooper when I had my beatyem’. ‘He lost his bottom at the last trump,’ the barman explained. ‘When did he lose his bottom?’ said Mrs Franklin. ‘When Gabriel blew his whistle down in Dowlais.’ ‘You’re pulling my leg.’ ‘It’s a pleasure, Mrs Em. Hoi, you! get up from the vomitorium. » (227)

6 - Mr O’Brien :

7 Le riche papa gâteaux à la Rolls, qui achète les faveurs de Lou et qui va les conduire chez elle après la fermeture du pub. Au cours de ce second acte le protagoniste voit le début de la réalisation de ses désirs puisque tout se passe comme si Lou n’avait d’yeux que pour lui, ce qui a pour effet de le plonger dans un délire amoureux bourré de clichés qui suggèrent que l’on est davantage dans le registre du « wishful thinking » que dans celui de la véritable rencontre : I’m telling the world, I’m walking in clover, I’m staring at Lou like a fool, she’s my girl, she’s my lily. O love! O love! She’s no lady, with her sing-song Tontine voice, she drinks like a deep-sea diver ; but Lou, I’m yours, and Lou, you’re mine. (228)

8 Dès lors, le troisième acte qui se déroule dans la chambre de Lou où sont entassés, dans la plus grande promiscuité, les trois femmes, le barman, Mr O’Brien et le protagoniste, va être centré sur la relation amoureuse entre Lou et ce dernier sous le regard des autres spectateurs. Si le second acte était celui de la bascule dans l’irréel et l’onirisme qui tiennent lieu ici de fantasme, le troisième est clairement marqué du sceau du fantastique, dans la mesure où le trajet jusqu’à la chambre de Lou s’apparente à un labyrinthe qui place l’objet du désir presque hors d’atteinte : « Why do you live at the top of the Eiffel tower!’ said the barman coming in. » (232). Que nous soyons passé dans le monde du virtuel est confirmé par l’utilisation massive de verbes modalisateurs qui témoignent d’un désir qui s’affirme sans pour autant recevoir de réalisation : « When he lived with her always, he would not allow her to dream. No other man must lie and love in her head. He spread his fingers on her pillow » (232) L’appropriation graduelle du corps et de l’amour de Lou lieu à un interminable plan séquence au cours duquel monte la passion. A la suite de cette scène son rival n’a pas d’autre choix que de reconnaître sa défaite : « ‘I could see at the flash of a glance that Lou and this nice young fellow were made for each other. I could see it in their eyes. Dear me, no! I’m not so old and blind I can’t see love in front of my nose. Couldn’t you see it, Mrs Franklin? Could not you see it, Marjorie » (233). Le moment de l’union totale est sans cesse repoussé par des discussions sur la poésie et la lecture de poèmes de Tennyson et Browning qu’on lui demande de faire, ce qui a pour effet d’exacerber son désir : Lou, on the wonderful bed, waiting for him alone of all the men, ugly or handsome, old or young, in the wide town and the small world that would be bound to fall, lowered her head and kissed her hand to him and held her hand in the river of light on the counterpane. (235)

9 Pourtant, un ultime retournement de situation se produit puisque, forcé de quitter la chambre pour se rendre aux toilettes, qu’il ne trouve d’ailleurs pas, il se révèle incapable de revenir sur ses pas et de remonter jusqu’à Lou. Il s’égare dans un dédale

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de couloirs sombres qui le conduit à l’extérieur de l’immeuble, ayant irrémédiablement perdu toute chance de rejoindre Lou. Comme par effet de circularité, il se retrouve à errer dans les rues du petit matin, tout comme il errait sur la plage au début de la nouvelle. Tout n’aura été qu’un rêve, un mauvais rêve, un cauchemar. Bien entendu, le contenu symbolique du rêve suit la doxa freudienne, singulièrement dans la dernière scène où la chambre (de Lou) renvoie au corps de la femme. Toutes les portes qu’ouvre le protagoniste figurent les ouvertures naturelles des corps, tandis que le mouvement ascendant puis descendant dans l’escalier de l’immeuble renvoie au rapport sexuel désiré, dont il est finalement exclu. Au bout du compte, cette toute dernière partie de la nouvelle fait irrémédiablement penser aux rêves de paralysie et d’impuissance narrés par , rêves qui traduisent la peur de la castration du rêveur. Pourtant, si la nouvelle se contentait de rapporter ce qu’il convient d’appeler le rêve éveillé des mélancoliques, destiné à leur procurer ce que la réalité leur refuse, elle ne dépasserait pas l’anecdote, toute autobiographique qu’elle soit. Ce qui donne tout son intérêt littéraire à la nouvelle réside dans le fait que l’irréalité des séquences oniriques, comme la prolifération de l’affect mélancolique, servent, en fait, de support à une dimension réflexive qui conduit le lecteur à poser une équivalence entre le désir sexuel, l’omniprésence des corps, et le désir du personnage non pas seulement de devenir écrivain, mais surtout d’être un écrivain dans sa chair, comme s’il existait une essence de l’écrivain. Faute de comprendre qu’on n’est écrivain que dans le temps de l’écriture, l’accès à la création lui sera interdit comme l’accès au lit et au corps de Lou qui acquiert ainsi un statut de Muse : He thought: Poets live and walk with their poems ; a man with vision needs no other company ; Saturday is a crude day; I must go home and sit by my bedroom boiler. But he was not a poet living and walking, he was a young man in a sea town on a warm bank holiday, with two pounds to spend; he had no visions, only two pounds and a small body with its feet in the littered sand. (221)

10 Ce statut de Muse signifie que ce corps tant convoité vient en lieu et place du corps textuel de l’œuvre qu’il n’est pas encore capable d’écrire. Du coup, accéder à Lou serait comme accéder au secret de la création littéraire. La clé de la nouvelle serait le fait que la mélancolie amoureuse agit dans le texte comme un leurre destiné à masquer au sujet la vérité de son désir, car la peur de l’échec amoureux est pour lui moins redoutable que la peur de la stérilité, l’angoisse de n’avoir rien à dire, d’où la fonction de ce que nous avons appelé la comédie du désir, comme le suggèrent à plusieurs reprises certains personnages, et en particulier le barman: « ‘I thought I was attending a première and this was the royal box,’ he said. » (228) En conséquence, la nouvelle illustre le topos désormais classique de la peur de la page blanche et de la paralysie qu’elle engendre, en transformant l’échec redouté en récit de l’échec lui-même, ce qui permet de mettre fin à l’impuissance créatrice, mais cela suffit-il pour autant à en faire un texte littéraire ? On remarquera d’abord qu’il y a bien ici représentation d’un sujet divisé entre le protagoniste qui se retrouve exclu à la fin et la voix du narrateur qui, lui, raconte cette exclusion, car il est parfaitement clair que ce texte a une dimension autobiographique. Tout se passe donc comme si l’échec du protagoniste devenait la réussite de l’instance narrative.

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Portrait de l’auteur en mélancolique

11 D’emblée, le jeune homme au pull marin est présenté comme un poète en devenir. Le récit le montre se projetant dans des situations où font surface ses préoccupations littéraires. En premier lieu, il témoigne d’une constante attention portée au langage, à la primauté du signifiant, et dans les moments les plus noirs de son pessimisme existentiel, ses préoccupations linguistiques parviennent à trouver leur expression, même si c’est sur le mode négatif, en déplorant la maîtrise insuffisante qu’il aurait de son art : As he thought this, phrasing her gentleness, faithlessly running to words away from the real room and his love in the middle, he woke with a start and saw her lively body six steps from him, no calm heart dressed in a sentence, but a pretty girl, to be got and kept. (229)

12 Ici le langage sert d’écran entre lui et sa peur de la réalité, à savoir la possibilité d’une rencontre avec Lou dont il préfère visiblement le portait flatteur que son discours construit à la réalité de son corps de chair et au risque de confronter l’imprévisible de son discours en retour : « How beautiful she is, he thought with his mind on words and his eyes on her hair. » 222) Cette beauté irréelle est immédiatement contredite par une réflexion qu’il fait dans le bar, et qui est plus proche de la vérité : « You saw a queer tart in the park, his reflection answered. » (223)

13 En dépit de son amour de la langue et des mots, il ressent une frustration qui le conduit à relativiser, voire à nier son désir d’être reconnu comme poète, et donc à se distancier de cette image : « He thought: "Poets live and walk with their poems; a man with vision needs no other company…. But he was not a poet living and walking, he was a young man in a sea town on a warm bank holiday." » (221) L’idéalisation du poète comme homme de la parole, qui traverse le monde au-dessus de la mêlée le paralyse : « He remembered his age and poem and would not move. » (226)

14 Dans un deuxième temps, l’intérêt pour la chose littéraire se déplace sur des œuvres connues de tous et illustrant la création réussie, sous la forme d’une intertextualité proliférante qui vient s’inscrire dans le discours des différents personnages. Nous entrons alors dans un monde où les prostituées et les piliers de bar citent et Tennyson et récitent de la poésie. À commencer par Lou qui identifie sans difficulté la citation du Marchand de Venise que lui propose M. O’Brien : « What a night for love, said the old man. ‘On such a night as this did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew. Do you know where that comes from? ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ Lou said. ‘But you’re an Irishman Mr O’Brien.’ » (230) Un peu plus tard, un débat s’engage au sujet de Tennyson, dont Mr O’Brien prétend qu’il était un petit homme bossu, ainsi que le lui avait affirmé son grand-père qui l’avait rencontré. Cependant, la scène la plus riche d’enseignements pour le lecteur se trouve dans l’acte III qui se joue fantasmatiquement dans la chambre de Lou. Sommé, comme les autres, de chanter une chanson pour distraire la compagnie, Jack refuse en raison de sa voix de crécelle. En contrepartie, il lui est demandé de lire de la poésie amoureuse à la dame de son cœur. Il va donc lire des passages de « Come into the Garden, Maud » de Tennyson, extraits d’un recueil qui est la propriété de Lou, et qui porte en dédicace le vers de « Pippa Passes » de Browning : « God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world. » (234) On en conclura que, faute de pouvoir écrire son propre poème en forme de déclaration d’amour à Lou, il prête sa voix à celui d’un autre reconnu, qu’il interpose donc un texte entre lui et Lou.

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15 Ce qui est plus significatif encore, c’est que le jeune homme est contraint de quitter la chambre immédiatement après cette lecture. Tout se passe donc comme si le poème tenait lieu de l’étreinte charnelle attendue, ce qui confirme bien qu’il y a lieu de poser une équivalence structurelle entre le corps textuel et le corps de la belle. Il est donc cohérent de considérer l’impuissance et la paralysie du jeune homme face à l’amour et au corps féminin comme étant des leurres de substitution pour ne pas faire face à l’horreur absolue, le vide de la création, et au bout du compte, le Réel de la création artistique. En conséquence, le poète en devenir éprouve la frustration intense de mesurer sa faiblesse devant l’ampleur de la tâche. Le trajet vers le statut de poète est long, et ce dernier lui paraît donc inaccessible, ce qui entraîne une série de blessures narcissiques caractéristiques de la position mélancolique que le récit n’omet pas de signaler. Dès le début, le sujet est marqué par un éloignement volontaire. Il n’a pas voulu se joindre à ses amis habituels, partis pour s’amuser pendant ce long week-end. Le premier trait marquant de sa mélancolie est une dévaluation de soi quasi systématique. Il se présente comme un homme encombré de marottes, d’obsessions, et il éprouve une certaine jouissance de la mortification qui le pousse à se mettre en scène en tant que raté, que perdant. Ainsi se voit-il : … like a young man doomed for ever to the company of his maggots, beyond the high and ordinary, sweating, sun-awakened power and stupidity of the summer flesh on a day and a world out, … (219)

16 Inutile de préciser que son obsession première est celle de l’écriture dont l’impossibilité même lui fait douter de la réalité de son désir au point de suggérer un brin d’imposture. Ainsi s’admoneste-t-il à haute voix : « And what shall a prig do now? he said causing a young woman on a bench opposite the white-tiled urinal to smile and put her novel down. » (221/222), accusation reprise un peu plus tard en son for intérieur, sous une forme encore plus auto accusatrice : « And what shall the terrified prig of a love-mad young man do next? He asked his reflection silently in the distorting mirror of the empty ‘Victoria’ saloon. » (222) » Cette scène au miroir est à mettre en perspective avec une autre au cours de laquelle il répète un précédent épisode de tentative d’inscription symbolique. Il dessine à nouveau une tête de femme semblable à celle qu’il avait dessinée dans le sable, mais cette fois, c’est sur le comptoir de cuivre avec des traces de bière que le barman vient effacer : « Shielding the dirtiness with his hat, the young man wrote his name on the edge of the table and watched the letters dry and fade. » (223) Tous les ingrédients sont là pour indiquer un effacement du sujet, une sorte d’aphanisis. Cette perte des repères identitaires, cette inconsistance du sujet va de pair avec une certaine morbidité, clairement annoncée dans le portrait que fait de lui le barman à son entrée : « ‘Has the one and only let you down? You look like death warmed up.’» (223) Cette dépersonnalisation traduit un sentiment d’aliénation à soi : He saw with a stranger’s darting eyes that missed no single subtlety of the wry grin or the faintest gesture drawing the shape of his death on the air, an unruly-haired young man who coughed into his hand in the corner of a rotting room and puffed the smoke of his doped Weight. (224)

17 Celle-ci engendre solitude et tristesse : « … the young man in dejection stood, with a shadow at his shoulder. » (221) Cette succession de défaillances de l’image spéculaire est due à la puissance excessive d’un surmoi dominateur qui fait que Jack est en perpétuel état de deuil et éprouve un sentiment de honte et de culpabilité de ne pas être à la hauteur de ses ambitions. Dans cette perspective, si Lou est l’objet impossible du désir de Jack, elle n’en est pas moins fantasmée comme la seule possibilité de

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rédemption du jeune homme : « She could drive my guilt out; she could smooth away my shame ; why didn’t I stop to talk to her? he asked. » (223) Ce qui se répète dans la nouvelle est bien la spirale de l’échec qui entraîne une dévitalisation du monde, mais cette spirale est elle-même tenue provisoirement en échec dans le troisième acte, dans la mesure où le désir de Jack est réalisé fantasmatiquement. Or, il faut remarquer que cette réalisation est finalement déniée à Jack dans une scène classique de la traversée du fantasme4, il se retrouve exclu, hors de l’immeuble. Pour que la nouvelle affiche sa dimension littéraire, il était vital que Jack soit exclu, sans quoi il aurait été prisonnier du fantasme, victime de captations imaginaires aliénantes, et faute de quoi la nouvelle resterait dans l’ordre de l’imaginaire et le registre, le plus souvent régressif, du fantastique.

18 Pour qui voulait bien y prêter attention, cette sortie du fantasme, même si c’est par la petite porte était, en fait, déjà annoncée par les modalités d’une écriture qui se met en scène elle-même pour mieux dénoncer sa dimension de subterfuge, pour mieux nous rappeler que la vérité a structure de fiction. Ces modalités d’écriture participent toutes de ce qu’il convient de nommer un usage particulier de la Lettre, conçue non seulement comme la matérialité du signifiant, mais aussi comme modification du rapport entre signifiant et signifié. Dans cette perspective, seules les manifestations de la Lettre qui est ce que le texte a de plus réel, permettent de faire place au Réel dans l’écriture. La dimension sublimatoire de cette autre modalité du travail de la Lettre est présentée par Julia Kristeva de la façon suivante : Cependant, les arts semblent indiquer quelques procédés qui contournent la complaisance et qui, sans renverser simplement le deuil en manie, assurent à l’artiste et au connaisseur une emprise sublimatoire sur la Chose perdue. Par la prosodie d’abord, ce langage au-delà du langage qui insère dans le signe le rythme et les allitérations des processus sémiotiques. Par la polyvalence des signes et des symboles aussi qui déstablilise la nomination et, accumulant autour d’un signe une pluralité de connotations, offre une chance au sujet d’imaginer le non-sens, ou le vrai sens, de la Chose. (Kristeva, 109)

19 On ne s’étonnera certes pas de trouver chez ce poète de la prose devenu nouvelliste, un recours aux procédés de la prosodie. Un seul exemple nous suffira pour en montrer le fonctionnement. Avant le retournement final dans la chambre de Lou, la tension sexuelle monte imperceptiblement jusqu’au moment où l’acte sexuel étant sur le point d’être consommé, Jack est contraint de sortir. Cette tension à peine perceptible est, entre autres, exprimée par le recours à une métaphore marine : The young man closed his eyes again, for the bed was pitching like a ship ; a sickening hot storm out of a cigarette cloud unsettled cupboard and chest. The motions of the sea-going bedroom were calmed with the cunning closing of his eye, but he longed for night air. On sailor’s legs he walked to the door . (236)

20 Ainsi, l’accomplissement de l’acte sexuel est effectué dans et par le langage lui-même, de façon oblique, quasiment anamorphotique, et non par la vertu de la représentation. Ce passage qui pose une équivalence entre l’acte sexuel et la métaphore marine, nous rappelle directement un passage de Under Milk Wood dans lequel Blind Captain Cat rêve à ses anciennes amours avec la prostituée décédée, Rosie Probert : I’ll tell you no lies The only sea I saw Was the seasaw sea With you riding on it Lie down, lie easy.

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Let me shipwreck in your thighs. (Under Milk Wood, 70)

21 On retrouvera d’ailleurs la « sea saw sea » et les « wrecks » quelques lignes plus loin dans la nouvelle, sous la forme des « rocking on sea-saw floorboards », ce qui conforte le lien de parenté entre les deux images fortement sexualisées, dont les qualités poétiques de la langue qui les véhicule sont identiques avec leur lot d’assonances, d’allitérations et de paronomases.

22 Le travail de la Lettre qui déplace et déstabilise le sens en creusant davantage l’écart entre signifiant et signifié, s’effectue aussi à l’aide de jeux linguistiques tels que l’utilisation de mots en langue étrangère comme le Français, dont la majorité des occurrences sont à connotations sexuelles (Là, là chérie, garçon darling, première). Il faut aussi noter le jeu ironique sur les mots induit par le recours au rhyming slang comme dans « mother’s ruin » ou par la polysémie comme celle du signifiant « bird » dans un pub fréquenté par les prostituées : ‘Oh Lou!’ he said, ‘I am more happy with you.’ ‘Coo! coo! hear the turtle doves.’ ‘Let them coo,’ said Marjorie. ‘I could coo, too.’ The barman looked around him in surprise. He raised his hands, palms up, and cocked his head. ‘The bar is full of birds,’ he said. (230)

23 Ce qui fait que nous ne sommes pas dans l’auto-fiction, c’est moins le mode hétérodiégétique de la narration que le fait que la dimension onirique et les jeux de langage rendent impossible une unité subjective de toute façon illusoire et donc une transparence du sujet à lui-même. Ce constat permet de postuler que ce que rencontre Jack dans cette station balnéaire où sa quête se déplace, et l’instance narrative par le truchement de l’énonciation, ce n’est pas autre chose que le Réel, le Réel de son désir d’écriture, ce qui revient à définir l’écriture comme tuchè ou plus précisément comme la rencontre du Réel de son désir. Si le Réel c’est bien l’Impossible à dire, comme le dit Lacan, on en déduira que la fonction du fantastique dans le texte est de tourner autour de l’impossible à dire du Réel. Il s’agit alors d’aménager des creux, des espaces discursifs comme, par exemple, les sauts métaleptiques entre les divers niveaux narratifs qui vont de la première personne à la troisième, en passant par le Style Indirect Libre. Grâce à ces trous d’ombre, ces ruptures dans la narrativité de la nouvelle, Dylan Thomas parvient à ouvrir des possibilités non pas de représentation du Réel, ce qui relèverait de l’Imaginaire pur et simple, mais des lieux dans le Symbolique où il peut se mi-dire et livrer une certaine vérité du désir.

24 Au final, si la mélancolie est la clé pour comprendre où s’origine le désir d’écriture de Dylan Thomas, il n’en reste pas moins que la nouvelle n’est en rien une production mélancolique, le récit du rêve éveillé du mélancolique, mais par la mise en scène de la position mélancolique qu’elle repère, elle s’en distancie par le recours à l’humour, au grotesque, donc par une écriture de type poétique. C’est pourquoi, on peut hasarder l’existence du très controversé inconscient du texte5 dans la mesure où cet inconscient résiderait dans ces « bouts de Réel » que le texte parvient à capter par le biais du travail de la Lettre. Une véritable écriture littéraire, telle celle de Dylan Thomas, serait porteuse du sceau de ce rapport très particulier qu’elle entretient avec le Réel.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Forest, Philippe. Le Roman, le Réel et autres essais, Paris : Editions Cécile Defaut, 2007

Kristeva, Julia. Soleil Noir, Paris: Gallimard, 1987

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire : Livre XI : Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux de la Psychanalyse, Paris: Le Seuil, 1973

Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Stories, London: J.M Dent and Sons Ltd, 1983

---. Under Milk Wood, London: J.M Dent and Sons Ltd, 1954.

NOTES

1. Dans ce contexte le mot « maggots » prend le sens particulier de lubie ou de marotte que j’interprète comme renvoyant à une forme d’obsession. « …like a young man doomed for ever to the company of his maggots » (219) 2. Toute une série sémantique de la boisson et de l’alcoolisme traverse d’ailleurs le texte et pourrait suggérer que la dimension onirique du 3° acte est le résultat d’une soirée trop abondamment arrosée. 3. Illustration parfaite du fait que le sujet reçoit son message de l’Autre, mais sous une forme inversée. 4. Les portes et les fenêtres que franchit le sujet sont des indices fréquents de la traversée du fantasme, non seulement par les effets de cadrage que ces ouvertures signalent mais aussi par le fait qu’ils décrivent véritablement une sortie hors du monde du fantasme. C’est très exactement ce qui arrive à Jack lorsqu’il se retrouve expulsé de l’immeuble de Lou. 5. Bien évidemment, cet inconscient en forme du discours de l’Autre n’est pas de même nature que l’inconscient d’un sujet parlant tel qu’il se manifeste dans l’analyse, mais sa nature discursive et son rapport avec le Réel font qu’il est structuré comme l’inconscient du sujet.

ABSTRACTS

Dylan Thomas’s 1938 story dramatizes the life of a young would-be writer who aimlessly wanders around the beach of a Welsh sea resort on a bank holiday and encounters a series of mild freaks who draw him into a fantasy world that fulfils his sexual desires, as in a dream from which he awakens at the end. Beyond the obvious biographical aspect of the story the reader is invited to take into consideration the reflexive and meta-fictional dimension of a text whose modalities of writing explore the arcanes of literary creation and reveal the profoundly melancholy source of the creative urge of Dylan Thomas. This is achieved through the medium of fantasy which pervades the second half of the story and whose relation in the guise of the conventional topos of the writer who successfully overcomes his very inability to put pen to paper by using it as the very theme of his story. By so doing he finds a way of turning the symptoms of his paralysis and melancholy into the sinthom of the artist.

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AUTHORS

CLAUDE MAISONNAT Claude Maisonnat is Emeritus professor of contemporary Anglo-saxon literature at the Université Lumière Lyon 2, France. A Conrad specialist he has published more than 30 articles on his works and a book on Lord Jim. Also a specialist of the short story he has written on a wide range of writers including Bernard McLaverty, Edna O’Brien, , Munro, Antonia Byatt, Angela Carter, Malcom Lowry, R. Carver, P. Auster, V.S.Naipaul, Olive Senior, etc. With Patrick Badonnel he has also written a book on the psychoanalytical approach of the short story. He is currently co-editing a book on textual reprising and a special issue of JSSE dedicated to the short fiction of John McGahern.

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Identity is a Slippery Fish – the Discovery of Identity in Elizabeth Bowen's Short Story "The Demon Lover"

Zuzanna Zarebska Sanches

1 Identity is performed or produced through action and not simply, as psychoanalysis has suggested, through identification. It is a process embedded in positionality rather than essences. In early psychoanalysis it was Freud who maintained in his The Ego and the Id that the ego-subject is a corporeal projection one constructs during the lengthy process of identity and unity formation. Still different, Lacan believed subjectification to be indirect/imaginary projection of the body outlined by the image of the other.

2 In one of her interviews Judith Butler says that it is essential to distinguish performance from performativity: the former presumes a subject but the latter contests the very notion of the subject. Butler explains that she begins her work with the Foucauldian premise that power works in part through discourse and it works in part to produce and destabilise subjects. “But then, when one starts to think carefully about how discourse might be said to produce a subject, it's clear that one's already talking about a certain figure or of production. It is at this point that it's useful to turn to the notion of performativity, and performative speech acts in particular - understood as those speech acts that bring into being that which they name.” (Judith Butler http:// www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm)

3 At this point the subject, we may talk about, is a distinctively particular product of a discourse. “Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed. … Likewise performance is the discourse of a pre-established subject.” (Butler 1993: 93) In the analysis of both performative acts (which are not singular in nature), and performances (which supposedly unveil the pre-established subject we see how both the private and the public languages of identification (the personal and the political) are not free. Dino Felluga writes in “Modules on Butler” that “our most

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personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies.” (Felluga 2006) Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” unveils the spuriousness and artificiality of subjectification processes in the way that they are always fruit of the pre-established discourses through which hegemonic powers operate in order to give an illusion of private and public freedom.

4 Writing about otherness from a different critical angle Elizabeth Grosz speaks about politics of imperceptibility – “politics in which it is not the subject who acts, that is an agent producing its own identity retroactively, but forces operating in and through the subject.” (Elizabeth Grosz http://web.gc.cuny.edu/csctw/found_object/text/grosz.htm)

5 Similar to the theory of Butlerian pre-established subject, this is a theory of reciprocal Heideggerian Dasein, where concepts are pre-disclosed before becoming relevant to subjects. It is both a solitary and response-prompted act, which one may call a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity, where more than material form of subjectivity can emerge from a corporeal being. Elizabeth Grosz continues to talk about subject’s acts: “What acts are forces, and these forces are not the effects of a subject but its causes, they are not the intentional object of a subject, but something altogether outside the subject. This philosophy of imperceptibility is about the capacity to act...” (Elizabeth Grosz http://web.gc.cuny.edu/csctw/found_object/text/grosz.htm)

6 “The Demon Lover” story too tries to foreground the idea of becoming rather than being in subjectification – a process in which there are possible various effects of a subject: that of a respectable mother and wife, and that of the demon’s bride.

7 As George Lakoff has said all thinking and discourse originate in bodily experience. This experience involves our notions of surfaces, distances bringing us closer to a peculiar dependence on the Other as an essential point of reference for the Being-there as well as Being-with. It is through others that humans develop the notion of one’s identity. Strangely enough it is not only that we draw from the imagery of the Other, the Other draws from the image of our Self and our own body, hence the reciprocity of images. Uncannily, the Other defines our existence from the inside and the outside. The uncanny and abjectable Other thrives where the meaning collapses, between feminine and masculine, between Inside and Outside. In Zizekian terms it thrives between the Real and the Imaginary of our conscious and unconscious self. As such Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” is a story of through experiencing ‘otherness’ – the bodily presence of the demon who comes back as if woken by the trauma of the WW II. Mrs Drover – in fact now the ‘driver’ or the subject of her private discourse – is faced with her demonic (here different from the public discourse) nature, which at first she does not recognize as hers.

8 In “The Demon Lover” Bowen touches upon the problems of abjection, the Other, the Real and the Imaginary. “The Demon Lover” story has as its pivotal point the letter, which its main character and focalizer, ‘the prosaic woman’ Kathleen Drover finds on a suggestively naked bed, during a short visit to her pre WW II house. To that Bowen is prompt to add that all that Kathleen wanted ‘was in a bedroom chest’ (Bowen 1945: 661). And that “her call here had been planned to be a surprise” so that one starts to wonder what Kathleen believed so important to risk her life for in the Blitz London. “As the clouds lowered and lawns seemed already to smoke with dark… in the tenseness preceding the fall of rain”, Kathleen opens the letter and finds that it contains an

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invitation sent by her former lover ‘with eyes like spectral glitters’ – the lover who is considered to have died in combat during WW I. He is now claiming Kathleen for a long arranged meeting ‘after twenty-five years’. In a quasi erotic metaphor embedded with overflowing sexual tension of the whole situation, rain begins to come crashing down and Kathleen cannot “keep from looking over her shoulder at the stripped bed on which the letter lay” (Bowen 1945: 663).

9 As Kathleen finishes reading the letter, she notices that it is signed K. which in my opinion stands for Kathleen and is not the initial of the old lover’s name as some critics have suggested. In a stroke of literary genius, Bowen constructs a situation in which Kathleen’s mind “performs three functions, those of expectation, attention and ” (Ricoeur 1984: 19). As a result “the future, which it expects, passes through the present, to which it attends, into the past, which it remembers” (Ricoeur 1984: 19). The Real merges with the Imaginary and what lurks at Kathleen from the past is the life she never had and which she exchanged for a respectable family life – a life that does not stand the test of the wartime desiccation of reality. The mirror reflection she also does not recognize as hers and from which she ‘turns away precipitately’ gives Kathleen a glimpse of the Other – the very Other, whose role is that of an audience or an addressee. The rain clears away all the growth of normality like the dust that covers the mirror, which leaves Kathleen “more perplexed than she knew by everything that she saw, by traces of her long former habit of life” (Bowen 1945: 661). The scene of the reencounter with the Other is performed outside in the street since houses in Bowen still offer some safe refuge. With a scream of fear or passion, Kathleen is taken away in an unknown direction in a taxi driven by an apparition of the former lover.

10 The conflict between performativity, abjection, the Other and impersonality finds its parallel in what Slavoj Zizek describes as the conflict between the Real and the dominant ideologies and its reverberations on the Imaginary. Zizek argues that dominant ideologies wholly structure the subject's senses of reality. Yet, the Real is not equivalent to the reality experienced by the subjects as a meaningfully ordered totality. The Real is spread between many resistance points refusing the hegemonic systems of representation and reproduction. The truth is revealed in the process of transiting the contradictions. The relationship of the Real and the Imaginary stands for the revelation of the Real within the subject through the Imaginary of glimpses of the Other, which in fact are the glimpses of the self. “The Demon Lover” is a subtle interplay of the demonic Real and Imaginary discourses of the self/other dyad within both private and public discourses. Identity grows on this terrain sprouting from the gap between the hegemony of the discourse and the opaqueness of the mind. Identity is therefore fickle and instead of striving to achieve completeness –the All- it pursues the incomplete non-All, where something always remains untheorized. According to Zizek, “subjectivity itself is, ultimately, the permanent tension between the phenomenal, experimentally constituted ego and the quasi noumenal, unrepresentable manqué-à- être (lack of being) in relation to which every determinate identity-construct is a defensive, fanthasmatic response.” (Johnstone 2008: 10)

11 Since the subject is “nothing but the failure of symbolization” (Johnstone: 2008), we may argue that the force of subjectification lies outside of the subject, in its reaching outside its innermost kernel. In Lacanian terms moi is the object grounded in the mirror identification and remains empty after uncovering the subjectivities layers – just like in the Zizekian metaphor of peeling an onion and reaching nothing at the end. Lacanian je is however the premise of the signifier, and as follows the signifier is the

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field of the other. And yet Lacan tells us that “any form of self-acquaintance alienates the subject from itself, derailing this emptiness into the fleshed-out fullness of the ego and its embodied avatars.” (Johnstone 2008: 9) Subjectivity, therefore, becomes a personal matter, as long as it remains impersonal, that is as long as it focuses on the other. The greatest fear that Zizek shares with Hegel and Kant, is that subjectivity’s fulfillment is only attained in the subject’s death – meaning there is nothing more meaningful than death, since death stands for “self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with reality” (Johnstone 2008: 22). Death does not stand for nothingness but for absence of annihilation – meaningful contraction of human matter with reality. The subject’s living reality is best presented in the Hegelian gruesome picture of a butchered, dismembered body that on decaying disappears into earthy substance. Similarly in Bowen, Katherine’s possible death is just a contraction of reality, the coming together of her moi and je, which she struggled to conciliate in her ordinary life. One fears however that Kathleen’s fulfillment as a subject will only be attained through her death. But it may also be that her death will only be death for the dominant discourse.

12 The subject’s negative existence is furthermore exemplified in its relation to the object, as in the Moebius strip – “subject and object can never meet” (233) explains Zizek since they are on the same surface and yet on opposite sides that can only merge in death. Because of that the fullness of subjectivity reveals itself to be a fickle moment, the reaching out towards the other, before collapsing into annihilation (the unknown destiny of the taxi swerving to and fro and rapidly disappearing into nothingness with Mrs Drover) and consequently there always remains a stain – “a spot of opacity on the… smooth two-way flow of dialectical reflection between … subject and object” (Johnstone 2008: 234). It may be that subjectivity is constructed in bursts that follow the subject’s repetitive movement from the imaginary to the symbolic, as are Mrs Drover’s hallucinatory flashbacks of her past, as well as her kaleidoscopic vision of the present.

13 What becomes important in the construction of the Other is the relationship to the Other’s jouissance. The other’s experience of jouissance is considered dangerous as it stands for the theft of my own enjoyment. Still, one remains constantly fascinated with the Other’s jouissance to a point that it seems to become palpable. It represents that which is more ourselves than we know and thus prevents us from achieving full identity –as it has been said the All pursues the incomplete non-All. And here again Bowen seems to guide us through this idea, being it also a hint at Kathleen’s former lover’s sado-masochistic habits in which nevertheless Kathleen took pleasure. Bowen writes about Kathleen’s meetings with the demon lover: “The young girl talking to the soldier… now and then- for it felt, from not seeing him in that intense moment, as though she had never seen him at all – she verified his presence for these few moments longer by putting out a hand, which he each time pressed without very much kindness, and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons of his uniform. That cut of the button on the palm of her hand was, principally what she was to carry away” (Bowen 1945: 663).

14 Within the plot of “The Demon Lover”, within the memory of love affair, the naked bed overflows with jouissance in surplus. Another erotic metaphor describes Kathleen’s reaction to the letter as leaving her with an ‘intermittent muscular flicker’ while throwing open ‘the lid and kneeling to search’.

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“No other way of having given herself could have made her feel so apart, lost and foresworn. She could not have plighted a more sinister troth” (Bowen 1945: 664).

15 Therefore, in marrying a respectable man later in the story, Kathleen loathes that which has threatened the borders of her self – the self she conjures from the society’s discourse.

16 Forming an identity is a constant struggle between abhoring that which threatens the borders of our symbolic self and seeing oneself in the Other, the Other which we may come to despise. It stands for rejubilating in the Other’s jouissance. As such, we live according to the principle of the impossibility of self-identity.

17 For Elizabeth Bowen identity is anchored in memory and her “idea of being passively entered into by the past is derived from ” (Lee 1981: 190). She writes in one of her novels entitled A World of Love, “Where there not those who said that everything has already happened and that one’s lookings-forward are really memories? (Bowen 1955: 221) In an essay “The Bend Back”, Bowen states, “One might say one invests one’s identity in one’s memory. To relive any moment, acutely, is to be made certain that one not only was but is” (Lee ed. 1983: 56). With her ideas of memory and time, Bowen offers some consolation to those lost within the matrix of theory. Deleuze’s becomings merge with Ricoeur’s narrative identity and Kristevan ontological and epistemological analysis of time. Ricoeur’s analysis of St Augustine seems useful here. Time has a threefold nature, “The present of past things is the memory; the present of present things is direct perception, and the present of future things is expectation” (Ricoeur 1990: 11). Temporality in Deleuze translates itself into multiple becoming, becoming a desiring machine and the BwO, which results in multiple identities/simulations. Bowen explains, “… how is there to continue to be freshness? By means of ever-differing presentation”. (Lee ed. 1983: 46) The present of subjectivity can only be traced in the backwards-gaze of the Hegelian skull onto memories and where the Result, is the abstraction from the path leading to it.

18 In the development of identity, in subjectification through relations with the Other, Elizabeth Bowen traces the development of her characters’ adolescent identities. However, society is a fantasy, similar to the Real: the abject real, which cannot be symbolised and the symbolic real, which the self struggles to comprehend and fails. And yet to be fully and consciously human one needs to create a dialogue within and without one’s surrounding space. One needs to become a body in a dialogue with other bodies, “what saves us from the past and ultimately from ourselves is the presence of others and our interaction with them” (Kelly 2002: 4). Kristeva writes, “The other is my proper unconscious” (Kristeva 1988: 183). “From the connections of bodies or from experience, human mind forms ideas” (Colebrook 2002: 82), new simulations, conflicts and its consciousness. The completeness of such identity lies in its incompleteness – the body in becoming. Hence, identity is an issue of public and private relationship. It stands for ‘Oneself as an Other’ in a given place and at a given time. Samuel Huntington says, “For people seeking identity (…) enemies are essential.” (Huntington 2002: 20) According to Kristeva “we know that we are foreigners to ourselves, and it is with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others.” (Kristeva 1988: 170)

19 It should be noted that even Zizek remains faithful to the idea of the subject being forever alienated from either culture or nature. The bone subjectivity – ‘the bone in the throat’ of the symbolic – is the agonizing scream of the barred S. Both the Real S-in- itself as the “immanent negativity perturbing the ‘not all’ of being’s conflict-riddled

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substance” (234) as well as the Symbolic S-for-itself as “self reflexive-negativity” (234) contract in the subject’s death into a meaningful surmounting of the division between the subject and the object. Similarly, the heroine of “The Demon Lover” shouts out the final scream on seeing the former lover before she inevitably dies for the dominant discourse. And yet one believes that Kathleen reencounters her bone subjectivity – the Spirit or the demon lover. It is by no means a coincidence that the past fosters the answers for Kathleen, as it is revealed to the Spirit in the inward gaze of the Hegelian bone: “the skull – inwardizing memories… are the scattered skulls of the past figures of consciousness” (Johnstone 2008: 235).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ausch, Robert. Randal Doane and Laura Perez. Interview with Elizabeth Grosz CUNY Graduate Center. 1 Sep. 2007 http://web.gc.cuny.edu/found_object/text/grosz.htm

Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Demon Lover”, Collected Stories. 1980. London: Vintage, 1999.

---.A World of Love. London: Vintage Classics, 1999.

Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge, 2002.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum, 2004.

---. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum, 2004.

Felluga, Dino. Modules on Butler. 3 Dec 2008. http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/ genderandsex/modules/butlerperformativity.html

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Chatto and Windus, 1962.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal . St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1994.

Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations: And the Remaking of World Order. Free Press, 2002.

Johnstone, Adrian. Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

Kelly, Marian. “The power of the past: structural nostalgia in Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and The Little Girls - Critical Essay”. Style. Spring 2002. FindArticles.com. 1 Sep. 2007. http:// findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_1_36?pnum=17&opg=89985873

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. 1941. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

---. Strangers to Ourselves. 1988, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Lakoff, George. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The Press, 1980.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts in Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books, 2004.

---. The Language of the Self: Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. John Hopkins University Press, 1998.

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Lee, Hermione. (ed.) The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elisabeth Bowen. London: Virago, 1986.

---. Elizabeth Bowen. 1981. London: Vintage, 1999.

Osborne, Peter, Lynne Segal. Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler Radical Philosophy, 1994. 1 Sep 2007 http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm.

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. 1984, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.

---. Oneself as Another. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

ABSTRACTS

Le présent article est essentiellement axé sur une théorisation du processus d’identification présente dans la nouvelle d’Elizabeth Bowen « The Demon Lover ». Le sujet de l’histoire, une femme et mère de famille, est hantée par l’amant du titre qui fut son fiancé, un soldat tué à la Première Guerre et réveillé, en tant que spectre, par l’expérience traumatique de la Deuxième. Le sujet de l’identification traverse ainsi une altérité démoniaque pour se définir par le biais d’un processus de devenir plutôt que dans un état d’être. Dans cette nouvelle, où l’expérience identitaire pivote autour du corps du sujet présenté comme chronotope, Bowen semble dire qu’une interprétation subjective du processus d’identification ne peut être que superficielle. Ainsi, c’est le cri agonisant du sujet qui constitue l’ossature de la structure symbolique de cette nouvelle. Baignant dans le doute, l’histoire devient encore plus brouillée par une négativité intrinsèque et une négativité autoréflexive qui s’en dégagent pour se confondre dans la mort du sujet en nous proposant ainsi de lire son histoire comme un traité sur l’inséparabilité du soi- même et de l’autre, d’une identité et d’une altérité au sein d’un seul et même corps.

AUTHORS

ZUZANNA ZAREBSKA SANCHES Zuzanna Zarebska Sanches studied at the University of Warsaw and University Nova de Lisboa where she received her undergraduate degree in 2003. Now, at the University of Lisbon, with a doctoral fellowship from Fundação para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT), she is finishing her PhD dissertation devoted to Elizabeth Bowen’s longer fiction (“Elizabeth Bowen and The Counter Discourses of Femininity”.)

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Cultural In-Betweenness in "L'expulsé"/"The Expelled" by Samuel Beckett

Linda Collinge-Germain

1 Though Samuel Beckett’s short fiction is relatively abundant, texts which are easily identifiable as short stories are limited in number to the ten collected in More Pricks than Kicks, written in English and published in 1934, and the four stories written in French in 1946: “La fin”, “L’expulsé”, “Premier amour” and “Le calmant”, later translated into English either in collaboration with Richard Seaver or solely by Beckett. By writing these stories in French, the language of Beckett’s adopted country, Beckett firmly crossed the linguistic border for the first time in his career, something that would become characteristic in future years as Beckett wrote either in French or in English, then translated into English or French.

2 The title of the story “L’expulsé” conjures up notions of exclusion, uprooting and even more archaically, of birthing. It implicitly suggests two territories, one to exit and one to enter into. The space between two such territories is a “discomfort zone” in its lack of landmarks, but also, and perhaps because of that lack, a zone for exploration. The aim of this article is to determine where and how cultural in-betweenness manifests itself in “L’expulsé”/“The Expelled” – for example in the form of hesitations, both stylistic and situational, in the choice of language – and to study how Beckett manages it. The fact that Beckett’s later short fiction evolved generically away from the easily identifiable short story towards a more hybrid genre more difficult to define certainly attests to the importance of in-betweenness in Beckett’s writing. Beckett was not the first Irishman to continue his writing career abroad after having begun in Ireland, but he was, in the footsteps of Joyce, a self-exiled writer who made language one of the major questions of his aesthetics. In choosing a foreign language in which to express himself, Beckett also chose, as Michael Edwards put it, “the foreignness of language.” “Being written in a foreign language” says Edwards “is part of the works’ meaning.”1 For Beckett, as several critics have remarked2, choosing a foreign language in which to write is a catalyst for a reflexion on the arbitrary nature of the sign, an opportunity to

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explore more fully the notion of language, what it means to use language, to communicate, to write a story.

3 The unnamed narrator-protagonist of “L’expulsé” finds himself on the steps of the house he has been thrown out of, or technically “expelled”. He reminisces with some difficulty about his childhood there and about the purchase of the hat which has been insultingly thrown out after him in a comic gesture of reiteration. As he wanders through the streets following his expulsion, he meets a horse-drawn cab, gets in, rides about the unnamed capital city with the driver and and eventually proceeds to the driver’s house for shelter. He spends the night in the driver’s cab parked in the stable and the next morning extracts himself from the stable window and leaves to pursue his wandering.

4 The locus of the story is between two spaces, suggested first of all by the “no-man’s land” of the setting. Because the story was originally written in French and begins on “le perron”, a typically French construction leading up to a house, and here the house in which the expelled was born, the reader of the French story probably assumes that the story is set in France. Yet Gerry Dukes observed in his introduction to the English version that readers “conversant with the social and economic history of Ireland”3 would easily recognize references to Ireland: the “displays of public piety”, when for example during his ride through the city, the expelled comes upon a funeral and observes the onlookers: “There was a great flurry of hats and at the same time a flutter of countless fingers. Personally if I were reduced to making the sign of the cross I would set my heart on doing it right, nose, navel, left nipple, right nipple. […] The more fervent stopped dead and muttered.”4 Or the odd name of the lawyer, Mr. Nidder, resolving itself when reversed into Reddin, a common Irish surname (“Intro”, 3). But then as a child the protagonist “thought life would be good in the middle of a plain and went to the Lüneburg heath” (36, my italics), a German geographical cultural reference. These contradicting cultural references suggest that the setting is neither France, nor Ireland nor Germany, but somewhere in between.

5 Two territories are implicit in the title itself: one territory to exit and one to enter into, and indeed the dichotomy between inside and outside is a prevalent topos in the story. Interiors and the comfort, safety and often warmth they provide abound, beginning with the double interior of the room in the house from which the protagonist was expelled. In an analeptic remark about his youth, the protagonist remembers “hastening back to the depths of the room, where the bed was” (35). During his wandering, he “enters a cab” and “curls up in the corner”, envies cabdrivers who “spen[d] their day snug and warm inside their cabs […] waiting for a customer” (42) and takes joy in lighting the gas lamp attached to the cab, closing the glass “at once, so that the wick might burn steady and bright, snug in its little house, sheltered from the wind” (44). Finally he spends the night, once again doubly enclosed, in the cab in the stable provided as shelter by the benevolent cabdriver.

6 The hostility of the outside appears first of all in the grammatical form used in the title. In this passive voice construction – to be “expelled” – the action is imposed on the subject by an agent, his perception of the action is negative, he is presented in the position of victim. Being “out of doors in all weathers” (42) is one of the unfortunate working conditions enumerated by the cabdriver and when he asks the protagonist to “climb up beside him on the seat”, the latter had “for some time already […] been dreaming of the inside of the cab and […] got back inside” on that “winter’s day” (43).

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7 Indeed moving between two territories as the protagonist does in this scene moving from the outside of the cab to the inside is a striking leitmotiv in the story which begins, as mentioned earlier, on the “perron” in French and on the “steps” in English, a locus of in-betweenness. The incipit and the entire first page of the story are devoted to the protagonist’s preoccupation with the number of steps and his obsessional attempts at determining the proper count by going up and down, foregrounding not only the in- between space, but the back-and-forth movement therein: “There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the figure has gone from my mind” (32), etc.

8 All of the places mentioned earlier – room, house, cab and stable – feature windows or doors, places of passage between inside and outside. Shutting and opening the windows and doors are repeated actions, hindering or facilitating passage. As a youth the protagonist would “go to the window, part the curtains and look out” (35), during his cab rides windows and doors are repeatedly opened and closed and it is finally from the stable window that the protagonist extricates himself at the end of the story. One of the few descriptions in the story is of the greatly admired “green door” out of which the protagonist was peremptorily and vigourously thrown, the door then being “slam[med]” behind him: “How describe it?”, begins the narrator. “It was a massive green door, encased in summer in a kind of green and white striped housing, with a hole for the thunderous wrought-iron knocker and a slit for letters, this latter closed to dust, flies and tits by a brass flap fitted with springs. So much for that description”, concludes the narrator (35).

9 Finding himself in “the gutter” (33) upon his expulsion, the protagonist eventually rose and “advanced down the street, keeping as close as [he] could to the sidewalk” (37), in other words he remains by choice in the gutter, a second locus of in-betweenness along with the steps. The particular intermediary nature of this space becomes apparent when the reprimanding policeman stops the protagonist saying “The street for vehicles, the sidewalk for pedestrians. Like a bit of Old Testament. So I got back on the sidewalk, almost apologetically, and persevered there” (37). In her study of topography in “Premier amour”, the French title of Beckett’s short story “First Love”, Anne Cousseau astutely observes that “space acquires an ontological value. For one of the problems the Beckett subject is so often confronted with is finding a place to be, to mark himself out. And there is duplicity in that anchorage point: it is both refused and sought, an object of anxiety and of uneasiness, but also an object of quest and of desire.”5

10 Indeed the outside, open space, in which the expelled finds himself is a space for wandering and wondering. Just as an infant is expelled into the world to accomplish his journey from birth to death, just as Adam and Eve are exiles from the Garden of Eden, so the protagonist is thrown out of the “beautiful” house with “geraniums in the windows” (34). His journey through the streets of the city is an existential exile, a quest that will last from “cradle” to “grave”: “I got up and set off. I forget how old I can have been. In what had just happened to me there was nothing in the least memorable. It was neither the cradle nor the grave of anything whatever. Or rather it resembled so many other cradles, so many other graves, that I’m lost” (34). The quest is also suggested in the protagonist’s remark to the cabdriver: “I described my situation to him, what I had lost and what I was looking for. […] He understood that I had lost my room and needed another, but all the rest escaped him” (42). The elliptical and

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derogatory “all the rest” is Beckett’s glib reference to the nebulous of life itself, whose meaning indeed escapes not only the cabdriver, but the protagonist as well, “whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself” (34).

11 The remainder of the story recounts this wandering, resumed indefinitely, we assume, after the night in the stable. It is accompanied by innumerable hesitations and uncertainties – a “fog [that] won’t lift” (37) – which appear in the story both lexically and in the form of repeated stylistic devices expressing hesitation. For example, “not knowing”, “not remembering”, being faced with a “dilemma” are recurrent difficulties encountered by the narrator-protagonist. Interrogative forms, though not used abundantly, are used significantly. The narrator asks himself twice “How describe this hat?” (33, 34) or “How describe this door?” (35). When asked by the cabdriver the simple yet ultimately metaphysical question “Where to?”, the protagonist responds with a quaesitio of unanswered questions (“Is your cab for sale? I said. I added, Without the horse. What would I do with a horse? But what would I do with a cab? Could I as much as stretch out in it? Who would bring me food?”) before finally coming up with an answer which also fuses the trivial and the metaphysical: “To the Zoo” (39). Binary constructions appear repeatedly in the text, expressing hesitation between two possibilities, and often in the form of epanorthoses, a which Bruno Clément observed in much of Beckett’s work and which consists in an affirmation followed by its negation.6 The protagonist advises, for example: “So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them” (32, my emphasis), or comments upon his childhood companions: “I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse […]. But perhaps they were simply being kind” (34, my emphasis).

12 This hesitating, uncertain protagonist is also the Narrator and the quest undertaken also that of the Narrator. Indeed, choosing a Narrator as protagonist is a way of foregrounding the act of narration, of making narration a subject of the story. Evidence of the self-consciousness of the narrator is abundant throughout the story. The reminiscing narrator makes his reminiscing obvious with distancing comments such as “I remember” or “funny the things you remember”. The metatextual comment which concludes “The Expelled” makes even more explicit the storytelling role of the protagonist, though once again in a hesitant manner: “I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another” (46). The narrator both names the activity and surprisingly gives priority to it by undermining the content of the story, since “another” story could easily replace “this” one.

13 The content of the story is further undermined by the absence of verisimilitude or referentiality. As Gerry Dukes observes in his introduction to the French stories: “Beckett’s earlier, English language fictions, however experimental they may have appeared, still have recourse to the traditional elements of plot, character and recognizable settings. In the transfer to first-person narratives, in which the narrators are endowed with only vague notions of where they happen to be, the necessity to designate specific locations evaporates” (“Intro”, 2). One might add that along with recognizable settings, the traditional elements of plot and character are also put into question. Cause and effect are not the bases for plot construction. The protagonist points out that his expulsion was unmotivated in a highlighted paragraph exceptionally composed of only one sentence: “And yet I had done them no harm” (35). His wandering has no real climax and the story has an open end as the wandering

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continues indefinitely. The protagonist is unnamed, has no age or nationality and is void of believable emotions: he dislikes children, the elderly, the cabman and his horse, and indifferently watches the funeral pass. The logic of the story resembles more closely the logic of dream-like recollecting – association of ideas – than that of cause and effect. The text, which occupies fifteen pages in the 2000 Penguin edition, is composed of only twelve paragraphs, the fewest subdivisions into paragraphs coiinciding with the protagonist’s physical wandering, and though it doesn’t yet have all the characteristics of some of Beckett’s more abstract writing, the text does share similarities with automatic writing.

14 The penultimate scene in the story has the protagonist extricating himself from the womblike cab within the stable: “I got out of the cab. I went out [of the stable window] head first, my hands were flat on the ground of the yard while my legs were still thrashing to get clear of the frame. I remember the tufts of grass on which I pulled with both hands, in my effort to extricate myself” (46). And just as the protagonist gives birth to himself, Beckett gives birth to a new style. His experimentation with the foreignness of a language, the foreignness of language itself, is extended to experimentation with the conventions of plot-oriented storytelling. Using a language theoretically void of emotion for Beckett – French is not his “mother” tongue – , Beckett proposes situations and characters with which the reader cannot identify emotionally. Rather than inviting readers to read with their emotions, he invites them (as the expelled will do following his expulsion) to “begin to reflect on the situation, notwithstanding its familiarity” (33), to reflect on what language is and how stories are told.

15 The cradle/grave juxtaposition quoted earlier in this article appears later in Beckett’s writing. In En attendant Godot, also originally written in French, Pozzo declares in a now oft-quoted existential line: «Elles accouchent à cheval sur une tombe”. (“They give birth astride of a grave”).7 In French, “être à cheval”, literally “to be on a horse”, is an idiomatic expression which means “to be in between”. The secondary yet insisting presence of the horse in “The Expelled” (“Several times during the night I felt the horse looking at me through the window and the breath of its nostrils” (45), “The horse didn’t take its eyes off me. Don’t horses ever sleep?” (46), etc.) could very well be the manifestation of a latent preoccupation with in-betweenness. “Being on a horse” or “walking in the gutter”, Beckett has found an intermediary space in which to write, a place for the expelled.

NOTES

1. Michael Edwards, “Beckett’s French”, Translation and Literature, Volume 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) 69. 2. See Michael Edwards, but also Helena Shillony, « ‘L’expulsé’ de Samuel Beckett: la naissance d’une écriture », Les lettres romanes 45,3 (août 1991) : 207-214 or Stefano Genetti, « La plaine dans la tête j’allais à la lande » : a propos des variantes éditoriales de ‘L’Expulse’ », Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, n° 7 : Beckett Versus Beckett (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998): 25-40.

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3. Gerry Dukes, “Introduction” to Samuel Beckett, First Love and other (London: Penguin Books, 2000) 4. 4. Samuel Beckett, First Love and Other Novellas (London: Penguin Books, 2000) 38. Further references appear parenthetically in the text. 5. Anne Cousseau, « De l’importance des lieux dans ‘Premier Amour’. Topographie affective et topique littéraire », Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui n° 10 (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000) 53. (My translation). 6. Bruno Clément, Œuvre sans qualités. Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994). 7. Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (Paris : Editions de minuit, 1952) 126. The period separating the writing of “L’expulsé” and Godot is relatively short: “L’expulsé” was written in 1946 and Godot in 1948. In Damned to Fame, James Knowlson refers to this period (1946-1953) as “an extraordinarily fertile period during which [Beckett] produced four stories, four novels and two plays, all written in French” (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1996) 358.

ABSTRACTS

Les récits brefs de Beckett sont relativement abondants mais les récits facilement identifiables comme nouvelles sont limités aux dix réunis dans More Pricks than Kicks, écrits en anglais en 1934, et les quatre écrits en français en 1946 - “La fin”, “L’expulsé”, “Premier amour” et “Le calmant”- puis traduits en anglais, soit en collaboration avec Richard Seaver, soit par Beckett seul. En écrivant ces nouvelles en français, la langue de son pays adoptif, Beckett entre de pied ferme dans une aire linguistique nouvelle et débute une carrière d’écrivain bilingue. Une de ces nouvelles, “L’expulsé”, est l’objet du présent article. Son titre évoque l’exclusion, le déracinement ou même, de façon plus archaïque, la naissance. Il suggère aussi l’existence de deux territoires, celui à quitter et celui à intégrer. L’espace entre les deux est un “no-man’s land” dépourvu de repères mais aussi lieu possible d’exploration. L’objectif de l’article est d’étudier la nouvelle sous cet angle de l’entre-deux culturel. L’hybridité générique des récits brefs ultérieurs atteste en effet de l’importance de l’entre-deux dans l’écriture de Beckett.

AUTHORS

LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN Linda Collinge-Germain is an Associate Professor at the University of Angers where she teaches English language and literature and is an active member of the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Langue Anglaise. She is the author of Beckett traduit Beckett: de Malone meurt à Malone Dies, l’imaginaire en traduction (Droz, 2000), a study of Beckett as self-translator, and has also published articles on the subject which have appeared in Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui or thematic collections. Her areas of interest are the bilingual works of Samuel Beckett, reception theory and more currently, cultural in-betweenness in short-story writing and the relation between short story and cinema. She has been co-editor of the Journal of the Short Story in English since 2000.

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Index Nominorum, Issues 41-51

1 Achebe, Chinua, XLVII 177-191; Arrow of God, XLVII 180; Girls at War and Other Stories, XLVII 177-191; No Longer at Ease, XLVII 179; Things Fall Apart, XLVII 179; “Akueke”, XLVII 186; “Girls at War”, XLVII 180; “The Madman”, XLVII 186; “The Sacrificial Egg”, XLVII 180-183, 186; “Uncle Ben’s Choice”, XLVII 180-184

2 Ackroyd, Peter, XL 29-30, 33-34, 37, 40, 43; Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, XL 43; London: The Biography, XL 43; “London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries”, XL 43

3 Adams, Henry, XLIX 33, 42; Education, XLIX 42

4 Adorno, Theodor, XLIX 191, 198, L 13, 36, 41, 45; Aesthetic Theory, XLIX 198

5 Aeschylus, XL 86

6 Aesop, XL 38, XLV 15; , XLI 358; “The Viper and the File”, XLV 15

7 Alberti, Leon Battista, L 193

8 Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women, XLI 360

9 Alexie, Sherman, XLI 110-112, 115, XLV 123-134; Indian Killer, XLV 129; The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, XLI 109-111, 113-115; Reservation Blues, XLI 110; Smoke Signals, XLI 110; The Toughest Indian in the World, XLI 115, XLV 124; “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor”, XLI 111; “Distances”, XLI 111; “Imagining the Reservation”, XLI111; “The Sin Eaters”, XLV 123-134; “Somebody Kept Saying Powwow”, XLI 111; “This Is What It Means to Say, Phoenix, Arizona”, XLI 100

10 Alger, Horatio, From Bootblack to Millionaire, XLIV 91

11 Allen, Paula Gunn, XLVII 77, 104

12 Althusser, Louis, XL 145, L 79, LI 119

13 Altman, Robert, XLVI 173; Short Cuts, XLVI 173

14 Alvarez, Julia, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, XLI 112

15 Amado de Faria, Jorge, XLI 294

16 Anderson, Sherwood, XLVII 87, XLIX 33, 144, 160; Winesburg, Ohio, XLI 103, 107, XLVIII 45, XLIX 160; “The Book of the Grotesque”, XLI 105; “Death in the Woods”, XLI 107; “Hands”, XLI 107

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17 Andrews, Michael, XLI 125

18 , Maya, XLVII 193

19 Anouilh, Jean, Eurydice, LI 142

20 Anthony, Michael, XLI 289

21 Anzieu, Didier, XLV 127-128

22 Apollinaire, Guillaume, XLVII 54

23 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, XLV 101

24 Arendt, Hannah, L 56

25 Aristotle, XLII 157, XLIII 137-138, XLVII 55, XLIX 25, 77, LI 17, 20, 97; Poetics, XLI 27, 38; , XLI 107; Topics, XLII 157

26 Armah, Ayi Kwei, XLVII 183

27 Armstrong, Jeannette, XLVII 102

28 Arnason, David, XLI 83-92; Fifty Stories and a Piece of Advice, XLI 91; “The Sunfish” XLI 83-92

29 Artaud, Antonin, LI 53, 119

30 Atwood, Margaret, XLV 126, XLVII 104, XLVIII 81-93; Cat’s Eye, XLVIII 84, 86; Handmaid’s Tale, XLV 124, 126; “Bluebeard’s Egg”, XLVIII 81-93; “True Stories”, XLVIII 83

31 Auden, Wystan Hugh, XLII 63

32 Auerbach, Frank, XLI 125

33 Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine), XLI 156, XLII 45, 47, 58, XLV 107, XLVII 55; Confessions, XLII 45, 47, 58; Expositions on the Psalms, XLII 33

34 Austen, Jane, XLIII 12, 13, 21, 27, L 70-71; Emma, L 70; Mansfield Park, XLIII 71-72

35 Auster, Paul, The Invention of Solitude, XLIV 76

36 Austin, John L., XLIX 153, L 76; How to Do Things with Words, XLVII 140

37 Babel, Isaac, XLI 187, XLVII 87; The Red Cavalry, XLI 187

38 Bachelard, Gaston, XL 53, XLV 34-35, 55, XLVI 27, 131, 136, 141, XLVIII 30-31, L 192; L’Eau et les rêves: Essai sur l’imagination de la matière, XL 55-56; The Poetics of Space, XLVI 131

39 Bacon, Francis, XLI 125, XLVI 13

40 Baker, Jospehine, XLVII 82

41 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., XLI 87, 112, 114, XLII 33-34, 38-40, 45-47, 50, 53, 57-58, XLIII 66, XLIV 53, XLVI 43, 47, 59, XLVII 111, 130, 178, XLVIII 86, XLIX 43, 138, 143, 145, LI 51, 90; Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, XLII 45, 47, 51, 54, 58; The Dialogic Imagination / Le principe dialogique,; XLI 115, XLII 34-35, 37-40, 43, 57, XLIV 53, XLVII 111, 116, 133, XLIX 138, 143; Ecrits, XLVII 133; Esthétique et théorie du roman, XLVII 130; Notes Made in 1970-1971, XLII 33; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, XLII 46, 55, 58, XLVII 115; Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, XLII 39, 53, 57

42 Baldung, Hans “Grien”, XLVIII 62-64, 66; Death and the Maiden, XLVIII 62-63; Death and Woman, XLVIII 62; Girl and Death, XLVIII 62

43 Baldwin, James, XL 109-120, XLVII 65; Going to Meet the Man, XL 111; “Going to Meet the Man”, XL 109-120

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44 , Honoré de, XLI 128, 188, 206, XLVI 20, 29; L’enfant maudit, XL 53; Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, XLVI 21

45 Banks, Iain, XLVII 31; The Business, XLVII 31

46 Barker, Howard, LI 113

47 Barnes, Djuna, Nightwood, XLI 108

48 Barnes, Julian, Cross Channel, XLVII 22; “Experiment”, XLVII 22

49 Barnes, Margaret Ayre, XLI 309

50 Barrie, James Matthew, XLV 48

51 Barth, John, XLI 377, XLVI 156, 168; Lost in the Funhouse, XLI 108; “A Few Words about Minimalism”, XLVI 156; “The Literature of Exhaustion”, XLI 375

52 Barthelme, Donald, XLVI 168

53 Barthes, , XL 98, 127-128, XLV 133, XLVI 28, 51, 59, XLVII 58, 127, 130, 132, 139, 160, XLVIII 13, XLIX 22, 29, 34, 120, L 12, 185, LI 125-126; Le bruissement de la langue / The Rustle of Language, XLVII 139, LI 125; Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, XLV 133; Essais critiques, XLVI 51; Le Grain de la voix. Entretiens 1962-1980, XLVII 128; Pleasure of the Text / Le Plaisir du texte, XL 128, 133; S/Z, XL 106, XLI 65; “De la parole à l’écriture”, XLVII 127-128 ; “The Reality Effect”, LI 125

54 Bataille, Georges, XLIII 128, 129, XLIX 32, 44, 120

55 Bates, Herbert Ernest, XLI 184, 193, XLV 65

56 Batteux, Charles, XL 144; Nouvel Examen du préjugé sur l’inversion, XL 144

57 Baudelaire, Charles, XLI 338, 366, XLVI 29; Les Fleurs du mal, XLVI 29; “L’Albatros”, XLIV 45-46; “”, XLII 97; “Ode à la Beauté”, XLI 366

58 Baudrillard, Jean, XLVI 108, XLVIII 86-87, 89-90, LI 109-110; “The Procession of Simulacra”, XLVIII 86

59 Baynton, Barbara, XL 85-96; Bush Studies, XL 85-96; Human Toll, XL 85, 94; “Billy Skywonkie”, XL 88, 92-93; “Bush Church”, XL 93-94,; “The Chosen Vessel”, XL 89, 91-92; “Scrammy ’And”, XL 92-93; “Squeaker’s Mate”, XL 87, 92; “The Tramp”, XL 85, 89; “When the Curlew Cried” (working title of “the Tramp”), XL 89

60 The Beach Boys, XLIII 123

61 Becker, Jacques, Casque d’or, XLI 130

62 Beckett, Samuel, XLI 25-39, 130, 149, 226, XLII 86, XLVII 49-64, LI 52-53, 62; Comment c’est / , XLVII 49-64; The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, XLVII 49; Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, XLVII 52; Endgame, XLI 36; L’image, XLVII 49-64; , XLVII 56; Stories and Texts for Nothing XLI 25-39; The Unnameable / L’Innomable, XLV 141, XLVII 59; Waiting for Godot, XLI 128; Watt, XLVI 54; “ and the Lobster”, XLI 226, 229

63 Beerbohm, Max, XLI 245

64 , Ludwig van, XLII 117, L 201, 208

65 Behan, Brendan, XLI 143, 149-151

66 Bell, Vanessa, XLI 43, 44, 50, 54, L 125, 141, 163, 167, 185, 187-188, 201

67 Belloc, Hilaire, Cautionary Verses, XLV 53

68 Bellow, Saul, XLI 277, 314, XLIII 88, XLVI 166

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69 Benjamin, Walter, XLV 157, XLVI 34-35, XLVII 144, 146, L 162; “Le narrateur”, XLVII 88, “L’oeuvre d’art à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique” / “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, XLV 156, XLVII 88, L 162

70 Bennett, Arnold, XLI 169-174, 191; The Grim Smile of the Five Towns, XLI 169; Hilda Lessways, L 178; The Old Wives’ Tale, XLI 169, 173; “The Death of Simon Fuge”, XLI 169-174

71 Bennett, Louise, XLVII 156

72 Benveniste, Emile, XL 145, XLI 73, XLIX 137; Problems in General Linguistics, XLI 81

73 Bergman, Ingrid, XLVIII 96

74 Bergson, Henri, XLVI 27, 140, 142

75 Berkeley, George, XLIX 44

76 , Hector, LI 142

77 , Chuck, XLVIII 66

78 Bettelheim, Bruno, XLV 54-55

79 Bizet, Georges, Carmen, XLIV 43

80 Blanchot, Maurice, XLV 141, XLIX 121

81 Blake, George, The Shipbuilders, XLII 77, 87

82 Blake, William, XL 30, XLV 165, 170-171, L 188

83 Blau, Herbert, LI 119

84 Bloy, Léon, XLI 127

85 , Giovanni, XLVI 21; The Decameron, XLI 103, 109

86 Bogan, Louise, XLIV 42

87 Bond, Edward, LI 113

88 Bonnefoy, Yves, XLVI 59

89 Borgès, Jorge Luis, XLI 245, XLIII 29

90 Bowen, Elizabeth, XLI 179, 343, L 177, LI 81-82, 87-92; Collected Impressions, LI 82; The Demon Lover, LI 87; Encounters, LI 82, 87; “Notes on Writing a Novel”, LI 89; “Oh! Madam...”, LI 81, 87-88, 92-93; “Review of Virginia Woolf”, LI 82

91 Boyle, Tom Coraghessan, XLII 111-112, 119-120, 122-124, 126, 128, 131; East Is East, XLII 111; Riven Rock, XLII 112; The Road to Wellville, XLII 112, 119; Water Music, XLII 111, 119; “The Fog Man”, XLII 111; “The Friendly Skies”, XLII 112; “Greasy Lake”, XLII 111-112; “My Widow”, XLII 112, 123; “Sinking House”, XLII 119

92 Brand, Dionne, XLI 290, XLVII 156

93 Brando, Marlon, XLIX 15

94 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, XLVII 156; “The Dust”, XLI 301

95 Brecht, Bertolt, LI 104, 113, 124, 127, 131, 133, 135; Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, LI 133; Schriften 2, LI 131; “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting”, LI 133; “Über Theater der Chinesen”, LI 131

96 Brenan, Gerald, XLV 67; A Personal Record, 1920-1972, XLV 67

97 Brett, Dorothy, LI 82

98 Bridge, Frank, L 208

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99 Brontë, Charlotte, XLI 224, XLVIII 85; Jane Eyre, XLVIII 85

100 , Gwendolyn, XLVII 197

101 Browne, Sir Thomas, XLV 150, 159, L 11-13; Urn Burial, L 11;

102 Browning, Elizabeth Barett, XLIII 18, 27

103 , Kenneth, XLIV 42

104 Burton, Robert, XLI 182; Anatomy of Melancholy, XLI 182

105 Busby, Margaret, (ed.) Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writing by Women of African Descent, XLVII 194

106 Butler, Judith, LI 116, 119-120

107 Butler, Robert Olen, Tabloid Dreams, XLI 108

108 Butor, Michel, La Modification, XLVI 28

109 Byatt, Antonia Susan, XLI 215-231, 350, XLV 145-161, XLVII 194; Angels and Insects, XLI 215; Degrees of Freddom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, XLI 215; The Game, XLI 215; The Stories, XLI 215; Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings, XLI 215; Possession: A Romance, XLI 215-216, 218-220, 224-225, XLV 150, 153; The Shadow of the Sun, XLI 215; Still Life, XLI 215; Sugar and Other Stories, XLI 215; Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, XLI 215; The Virgin in the Garden, XLI 215, 226; “Arachne”, XLV 145-161; “Art Work”, XLI 220, 228; “A Book of Bad Fairies”, XLI 220; “A Book of Good Fairies”, XLI 220; “The Changeling”, XLI 219, 226, 228; “The Chinese Lobster”, XLI 215-216, 220, 223, 226, 228-229; “The Conjugal Angel”, XLI 220-221; “The Dried Witch”, XLI 218-219, 228; “In the Air”, XLI 228; “The July Ghost”, XLI 217, 226, 228; “Loss of Face”, XLI 228; “Medusa’s Ankles”, XLI 226, 228; “Morpho Eugenia”, XLI 224; “The Next Room”, XLI 217, 221-222, 228; “Old Tales, New Forms”, XLV 146; “On the Day that E.M. Forster Died”, XLI 223, 228-230; “Precipice-Encurled”, XLI 228; “Racine and the Tablecloth”, XLI 218, 228-230, XLV 150; “Rose-Coloured Teacups”, XLI 218, 226, 228; “Sugar”, XLI 222; “Things Are Not What They Seem”, XLI 224

110 , George Gordon, Lord, XLI 241; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, XLI 241; “Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos”, L 187

111 Caedmon, Hymn, XLVII 31

112 Cahan, Abraham, XLIII 45-58; The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto, XLIII 47; Yekl, XLIII 45-58; Yekl and The Imported Bridegroom, XLIII 46

113 Calasso, Roberto, XLV 158; Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia / The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, XLV 147

114 Callaghan, Morley, XLIII 80; That Summer in Paris, XLIII 79

115 , Italo, XLV 148, 153-155, 157, XLVI 54; Six Memos for the Next Millennium, XLV 155; “ and Universal Contiguity”, XLV 148

116 Calzabigi, Ranieri de’, LI 142

117 , Julia Margaret, L 153-154, 157, 159-160, 163-164, 166

118 Camus, Albert, XL 62, XLI 128, XLV 168; L’Etranger, XLV 141; Le Mythe de Sisyphe, XL 62, 67

119 , Truman, XLI 294

120 Carlyle, Thomas, XLI 147

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121 , Leonora, XLII 161

122 Carroll, Jim, XLI 151

123 Carroll, Lewis, XLV 47-48, 113; Alice in , XLIX 143; Through the Looking-Glass, XL 41, XLIX 127, LI 126

124 Carson, Anne, Autobiography of Red, XLV 146

125 Carter, Angela, XL 29, LI 109-136; Burning Your Boats: The Collected Angela Carter Stories, LI 123-125, 127-134; The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works, LI 123, 127; Fireworks, LI 123-136; Nights at the Circus, LI 109, 112, 127; The Passion of New Eve, LI 127; Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings, LI 123; Wise Children, LI 109, 112, 124; “Elegy for a Freelance”, LI 132-133; “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter”, LI 126-127; “Flesh and the Mirror”, LI 124-126, 130-131; “The Loves of Lady Purple”, LI 124, 129, 133; “Master”, LI 132; “Notes from the Front Line”, LI 123; “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, LI 109-122; “Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest”, LI 130; “Preface to Come Unto These Yellow Sands”, LI 127; “Reflections”, LI 126, 132, 134; “The Smile of Winter”, LI 124-125; “A Souvenir of Japan”, LI 124, 128, 132

126 Carter, Betty, XLVII 193

127 Carver, Raymond, XLI 355, 362, 367, 378-381, XLII 61-74, 147-158, XLVI (special issue), L 177, 179, LI 19, 34-36; All of Us: The Collected Poems, XLVI 16, 65, 99; Beginners: The Original Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, XLVI 17; (ed) The Best American Short Stories, XLVI 81; Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose, XLVI 16, 23, 63, 65, 68, 89, 103, 118, 176-177; Cathedral, XLII 62, XLVI 14-17, 67, 75, 77-78, 81-84, 89, 97, 100, 116-117, 158, 160, 173-177, 179; Conversations with Raymond Carver, XLVI 21, 23, 27, 31-32, 46, 48, 53, 59-60; Elephant and Other Stories, XLVI 176, 179; Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, XLI 379-380, XLII 62, 69, XLVI 14, 32, 37, 45, 50-53, 56-57, 60, 81, 116-117, 119, 130, 174-176, 178; Furious Seasons and Other Stories, XLVI 14, 170-171; No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings, XLVI 16, 89, 107, 110; Tell It All, XLVI 16; Ultramarine, XVLI 67, 99; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, XLVI 14-17, 67, 75, 78-79, 81-82, 85, 97, 100-101, 107, 109, 115, 119, 170, 173, 175-176, 178; Where I’m Calling From, XLVI 97-101, 103, 116-117, 148, 175; Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems, XLVI 95; Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, XLII 61, 69, 157, XLVI 13, 15, 17, 43, 65, 67, 90-91, 95, 97, 99, 107, 112-115, 165, 168, 170, 175, LI 35; “The Aficionados”, XLVI 110-111, 117; “After the Denim”, XLII 63, XLVI 96; “Anathema”, XLVI 95; “Are These Actual Miles?”, XLVI 172, 180, LI 35; “Are You A Doctor?”, XLII 157, 180; “The Bath”, XLVI 14, 76, 82-83, 117, 130, 132, 141, 175; “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets”, XLVI 97, 113-114; “Blackbird Pie”, XLII 72, XLVI 72, 97-98, 103, 118, 130, 133, 136, 179; “Boxes”, XLVI 178; “The Bridle”, XLVI 27, 90; “Bright Red Apples”, XLVI 110; “Call If You Need Me”, XLVI 68, 72, 97-99, 103, 177, 179; “Careful”, XLVI 102, 160, 177-178; “Cathedral”, XLVI 14, 52, 76, 81-82, 85-86, 98, 103, 111, 130-133, 136, 144, 160, 173, 180; “Chef’s House”, XLVI 24, 27, 77-78, 97, 102, 131, 133-134, 160, 177; “Chef’s Wife”, XLVI 131; “The Child”, XLVI 65; “Collectors”, XLII 61-74, XLVI 11, 20, 91, 102, 136; “The Compartment”, XLII 71, XLVI 21, 27-28, 65, 97, 117, 160, 178; “Distances”, XLVI 14, 172; “Dreams”, XLVI 24-25, 63, 65, 67-70, 72-73, 90-92, 96; “The Ducks”, XLVI 133, 135; “Dummy”, XLVI 172; “Elephant”, XLVI 65, 178; “Errand”, XLVI 28-29, 147-163, 180; “Everything Stuck to Him”, XLVI 14, 172, “Fat”, XLII 62, 72, XLVI 45, 101, 158, 171; “The Father”, XLII 147-158, 170; “Fear”, XLVI 130; “Feathers”, XLII 66, XLVI 84, 100, 133-134, 157-158, 179-180; “Fever”, XLVI 97, 132-133, 178; “Fires”, XLVI 65; “Furious Seasons”, XLVI 109, 111; “Gazebo”, XLVI 115,

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 87

129, 133-134; “Gravy”, XLVI 130; “The Hair”, XLVI 177; “Harry’s Death”, XLVI 175; “How About This?”, XLII 72; “I Could See the Smallest Things”, XLVI 31, 99, 133, 135; “The Idea”, XLVI 101, 171; “Intimacy”, XLII 63, XLVI 100, 117; “Jerry and Molly and Sam”, XLVI 113; “Kindling”, XLVI 68, 72-73, 96, 99-103, 177-178; “Late Afternoon, April 8, 1984”, XLVI 97; “Late Night with Fog and Horses”, XLVI 72; “Little Things”, XLVI 172; “Menudo”, XLVI 101, 117, 157, 159; “Mine”, XLVI 172; “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit”, XLVI 14, 99, 115-116; “Neighbors”, XLVI 20, 22, 65, 98, 133-134, 171; “Next Year”, XLVI 95; “Nobody Said Anything”, XLVI 112, 136, 172; “On an Old Photograph of My Son, XLVI 65, 97; “On Errand”, LI 35; “On Writing”, XLVI 81, 130; “Our First House in Sacramento”, XLVI 95; “The Pheasant”, XLVI 117, 175, 178; “The Phone Booth”, XLVI 99; “Popular Mechanics”, XLVI 78-80, 115; “Preservation”, XLII 70, XLVI 77, 95, 97, 158, 160, 178-179; “Put Yourself in My Shoes”, XLII 61-63, 71-73, XLVI 20-23, 29, 31-32, 35-37, 43-62, 99, 101, 133, 135; “The Rest”, XLVI 67; “A Serious Talk”, XLVI 96; “Signals”, XLII 71; “Slippers”, XLVI 67; “A Small, Good Thing”, XLVI 14, 16, 27, 76, 82-83, 85-86, 90, 92, 117, 130, 132, 139-145, 175, 180; “So Much Water So Close To Home”, XLII 71, XLVI 14, 16, 24, 26, 34, 100-102, 107, 116, 119-120, 122-124, 131, 173, 180; “A Squall”, XLVI 96; “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk”, XLVI 81; “The Student’s Wife”, XLII 70, 72, XLVI 95-96, 133, 135, 171; “Tell the Women We’re Going”, XLVI 116, 119-120, 131, 173; “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off”, XLVI 116, 172; “The Train”, XLII 69, XLVI 22, 27, 47, 117, 157, 178; “Vandals”, XLVI 68, 71, 92-94; “Viewfinder”, XLVI 20, 49, 79-80, 171-172; “Vitamins”, XLII 66, 72, XLVI 160; “What Do You Do in San Francisco”, XLII 63, 70, XLVI 101, 172; “What Is It?”, XLVI 113, 115; “What’s in Alaska?”, XLVI 95-96, 101, 178; “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, XLVI 31, 78, 80, 92-93, 95, 131, 133-134; “What Would You Like to See?”, XLVI 68-70, 95, 97, 103; “Where I’m Calling From”, XLVI 76, 84-86, 99, 117, 177; “Where Is Everyone?”, XLVI 14, 116, 175, 177, 179; “Whoever Was Using This Bed”, XLVI 131, 180; “Why Don’t You Dance?”, XLVI 26, 31, 79, 97, 101, 103, 133-134, 178; “Why, Honey?”, XLVI 171; “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”, XLVI 98, 114-115; “Yesterday, Snow”, XLVI 101

128 Cather, , XLI 223; Death Comes for the Archbishop, XLI 223; Shadows on the Rock, XLI 223

129 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, XLI 128

130 César, (César Baldaccini), XLI 53

131 Cézanne, Paul, XLIX 20, 27, 33, 46, 121, 164-165, 189-205, L 36, 188, 197; Mont Sainte- Victoire, XLIX 190, 192; Le Pont de Maincy, XLIX 198, 199

132 Chaikin, Joseph, LI 119

133 Chaplin, Charlie, XLIX 15, LI 62

134 , Fred, XLI 315

135 , Geoffrey, XL 30, L 13, 103; The Canterbury Tales, XLI 103, XLII 79

136 Chaudhuri, Amit, XLVII 194

137 Cheever, John, XLI 276-277, XLII 111-113, 115, 119, 124-125, 128, 131, XLIII 107-120, XLVI 14, 117; The Journals of John Cheever, XLII 131; The Letters of John Cheever, XLII 131, XLIII 108; The Wapshot Chronicle, XLII 112; “The Bella Lingua”, XLII 112; “The Country Husband”, XLII 111-112; “An Educated American Woman, XLII 112; “Expelled”, XLII 112; “The Five-Forty-Eight”, XLII 113, 119, 122, XLVI 117; “Goodbye, My Brother”, XLIII 107-120; “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”, XLII 111; “The Swimmer”, XLII 111

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 88

138 , Anton, XLI 57, 58, 130, 172, 174, 176, 179, 185, 195, 197, 201, 204-205, 213, 309-310, 367, 371-372, 377, XLV 64, 68, 82, 113, XLVI 14, 19, 28-29, 34, 147-150, 153, 155-156, 159, 161, 180, XLVII 87, L 186, LI 29-37; Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories, LI 30, 32; The Cherry Orchard, XLVI 149; Five Plays, LI 29, 33; The Seagull, LI 29, 36; Three Sisters, LI 33; “Death of a Civil Servant”, XLVII 95; “A Doctor’s Visit”, XLI 367; “Sleepy”, LI 30; “Technique in Writing the Short Story”, LI 36

139 Chesnutt, Charles Wadell, XLII 23-32; The Marrow of Tradition, XLII 24; The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, XLII 23, 25-26; “The Bouquet”, XLII 23-32; “Her Virginia Mammy”, XLII 26; “The Sheriff’s Children”, XLII 26; “The Wife of His Youth”, XLII 25

140 Chestre, Thomas, Sir Launfal, XLVII 39, 46

141 , Kate, XL 69-84, XLVII 138; The Awakening, XL 70, 72, XLVII 138; Bayou Folk, XL 69, 71, 74; The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, XL 70-74; A Night in Acadie, XL 69, 71; A Vocation and a Voice, XL 70; “At Chênière Caminada”, XL 72; “At the ’Cadian Ball”, XL 72; “La Belle Zoraïde”, XL 79; “Désirée’s Baby” (aka “The Father of Désirée’s Baby”, XL 74), XL 73-75, 78-80; “Ripe Figs”, XL 71; “The Storm”, XL 72-73; “”, XL 73

142 Cicero, XLVII 55

143 Cisneros, Sandra, XLI 108, XLVIII 47, 51; The House on Mango Street, XLI 108, 112, XLVIII 47

144 Clarke, Austin, XLI 290

145 Cliff, Michelle, XLI 289

146 Close, Chuck, XLVI 157

147 Coetzee, J. M., Foe, XLVI 53, XLIX 57

148 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, XLI 215, XLV 151, XLIX 102

149 Collins, Merle, XLI 299-301, XLVII 194; Angel, XLI 300; The Colour of Forgetting, XLI 299, 301; The Ladies Are Upstairs, XLI 301; Rain Darling, XLI 299, 301; Rotten Pomerack, XLI 299; “Gem’s Story”, XLI 301; “Gran”, XLI 299; “Seduction”, XLI 300; “The Visit”, XLI 301; “The Walk”, XLI 299

150 Collins, Wilkie, XLI 245, XLV 13-20, 24-25; Little Novels, XLV 13; The Moonstone, XLV 14, 19; The Woman in White, XLV 19; “The Biter Bit”, XLV13-15, 17, 19; “Mr. Policeman and the ” (aka “Who Killed Zebedee?”, XLV 13), XLV 13, 17, 19

151 Colum, Patrick, XLI 154

152 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, XL 144

153 , William, LI 140-141

154 Conrad, Joseph, XLI 147, 343, XLV 17, XLIX 109, 121, L 73, LI 19; Heart of Darkness, XLI 360, XLIII 69; The Secret Agent, XLV 17

155 Constable, John, XLIII 22

156 Cook, Elizabeth, Achilles: A Novel, XLV 146

157 , Gary, High Noon, LI 46

158 Coppard, Alfred Edgar, XLI 183, XLVII 87

159 Cortázar, Julio, XLI 60, XLVI 34; Entretiens avec Omar Prego, XLI 65

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 89

160 Courbet, Gustave, XLIX 20

161 Crabbe, George, XLIII 18, 19; The Village, XLIII 18, 27

162 Craig, Edward Gordon, L 164-165, LI 53; Ellen Terry and her Secret Self, L 164

163 Cranach, Lucas the Elder, Hercules and Omphale, XLIX 78

164 Crane, Hart, XLIV 42

165 Crane, Stephen, XLII 154, LI 41-49; Letters, LI 48; Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, LI 41-42, 46; The Open Boat and Other Stories, LI 45; Prose and Poetry, LI 48; The Red Badge of Courage, XLII 152, 157; “The Blue Hotel”, LI 45-46; “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”, LI 41, 45-46; “The Upturned Face” LI 47

166 Cratylus, XLIX 60, 63

167 Croker, Thomas Crofton, XLVII 25

168 Cronenberg, David, Crash, XL 104

169 Cross, Eric, The Tailor and Ansty, XLVII 87

170 Culler, Jonathan, L 77; On Deconstruction, L 77

171 H.D., (Hilda Doolittle), Palimpsest, XLI 113

172 D’Aguiar, Fred, XLVII 156

173 Dahl, Roald, XLV 47-48

174 Dalí, Salvador, XL 42; The Persistence of Memory, XL 44; The Soft Watch At the Moment of First Explosion, XL 44

175 Dante Alighieri, XLI 25-39, XLIV 40, 43, 98; Commedia, XLI 25-39; , XLI 28, 36-39, XLIV 98

176 Danticat, Edwige, XLVII 155-166; (ed.) The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, an Anthology, XLVII 159; The Dew Breaker, XLVII 155-156, 158-159, 161; Krik? Krak!, XLVII 156, 158, 161-162; “Between the Pool and the Gardenias”, XLVII 158-159; “The Book of the Dead”, XLVII 155, 158-159, 162; “The Bridal Seamstress”, XLVII 160, 162; “Caroline’s Wedding”, XLVII 157-158, 161; “Children of the Sea”, XLVII 157-159, 161, 163-164; “The Dew Breaker”, XLVII 158, 160; “The Missing Peace”, XLVII 157-159; “Monkey Tails”, XLVII 158; “New York Day Women”, XLVII 157, 164; “Night Talkers”, XLVII 160-161; “Night Women”, XLVII 159, 164; “Nineteen-Thirty Seven”, XLVII 157-159, 161, 165; “A Wall of Fire Rising”, XLVII 157-159; “Women Like Us”, XLVII 161

177 Daudet, Alphonse, LI 67; L’Arlésienne, LI 67; Letters from My Windmill, LI 67; “Monsieur Seguin’s Goat”, LI 67

178 Dean, James, XLII 96

179 De Bernières, Louis, XLI 233-242, XLVII 194; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, XLI 239; “Stupid Gringo”, XLI 234, 239

180 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, XLI 254

181 , Eugène, XLI 280

182 Deleuze, Gilles, XL 139, XLIX 158, 167, 173, 179-180, L 14, 123, 134, 172-173; Différence et répétition, XLIX 179; Le pli, XLIX 173; A Thousand Plateaus, L 126

183 DeLillo, Don, XLI 376-377; White Noise, XLI 376, L 138

184 De Quincey, Thomas, L 186

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 90

185 Derrida, Jacques, XL 132, 139-140, 145, XLV 128, 136, 141, XLVII 51, XLIX 34, 37, L 27, 29, 162; La Carte postale, XL 134 ; L’écriture et la différence, XLV 128; De la grammatologie, XLVII 51; Mal d’Archive: une impression freudienne, XLI 90; Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine, XLV 142; « Le facteur de la vérité », XLII 22 ; « Violence et Métaphysique », L 27

186 , René, XLI 29, 30, 374, XLIX 17

187 Des Forêts, Louis-René, Le Bavard, XLV 141

188 Dickens, Charles, XL 30, 32, XLI 124, 188, 192, 224, 377, XLIII 29-43, XLV 14-15, 56, XLVI 21,66, L 39, LI 42; Bleak House, XLV 14; A Christmas Carol, XLI 36; David Copperfield, XL 32; Great Expectations, XLVI 25, 66, 92; “The Signalman”, XLIII 29-43

189 , Emily, XLII 92, 106-107, XLIV 47, XLV 150, 159; “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, XLII 92, 106

190 , Denis, “Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets”, XLV 156

191 Dilthey, Wilhelm, XL 145

192 Donat, Robert, XLVIII 96

193 Donne, John, XLIX 24

194 Dorris, Michael, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, XLI 113

195 Dos Passos, John, XLIII 75

196 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, XLI 259, XLII 86, XLIV 73; Notes From Underground, XLII 84; “The Double”, XLVI 38

197 Doyle, Arthur Conan, XLV 13-23, XLVIII 13-23, 112-113, LI 112; His Last Bow, XLVIII 21; The Lost World, XLVIII 112; the Sherlock Holmes stories, XLI 105, XLV 15, 19, 21-22, XLVIII 13, 15, 18, 21-22, 112; The Sign of Four, XLV 21; A Study in Scarlet, XLV 21, XLVIII 18; “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, XLVIII 14; “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, XLv 25; “The Adventure of the Dancing Men”, XLVIII 17; “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”, XLV 23; “The Adventure of the Sussex ”, XLV 23; “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger”, XLVIII 21; “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge”, XLVIII 19; “A Case of Identity”, XLV 23; “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax”, XLV 22; “The Five Orange Pips”, XLV 15; “The Problem of Thor Bridge”, XLV 23; “The Red Circle”, XLVIII 13-23; “A Scandal in Bohemia”, XLV 13, 20-23; “The Speckled Band”, XLVIII 14

198 Dreiser, Theodore, XLIX 33

199 Dryden, John, L 13

200 Dujardin, Edouard, LI 51

201 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, XLVII 199

202 Duncker, Patricia, “Sophia Walters Shaw”, XLV 152

203 Dunham, Katherine, XLVII 82

204 , Albrecht, XLVIII 62; Coat of Arms and Death, XLVIII 62

205 Dylan, Bob, XLII 91, XLVIII 65-66; “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, XLVIII 65; “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, XLVIII 65-66

206 Eco, Umberto, XL 18, XLI 75, XLVI 35, XLVII 179; Lector in fabula. Le rôle du lecteur, XLVII 130, 132; L’Oeuvre ouverte, XLI 65

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 91

207 Edgerton, Clyde, XLI 337

208 Edgeworth, Maria, XLIII 12, 14

209 Edmond, Aman-Jean, Femme à l’oeillet, L 197

210 Edwards, Harry Stillwell, XLV 159

211 Eldridge, Roy, XLVII 193

212 Eliot, George (Mary Ann ), XLI 224, XLIII 24; The Mill on the Floss, XLVI 139; Scenes of Clerical Life, XLIII 24

213 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, XLI 125, 127, 342, 370, XLIII 42, XLIV, 34-35, 43, 70, 95, XLV 44, XLVI 174, XLVIII 40, XLIX 75, L 203-205, 207, 224, LI 42, 47; Four Quartets, XLI 374; (ed.) Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, XLVII 95; Murder in the Cathedral, XLIII 42; Selected Essays, LI 47; The Waste Land, XLI 342, XLIV 31, 34, XLIX 75, 103; “The Fire Sermon”, XLIX 75; “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”, LI 47

214 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, XLIII 109

215 Ennius, XLVII 31

216 Erdrich, Louise, XLI 109; The Beet Queen, XLI 109; Love Medicine, XLI 109, 112, XLVII 79, XLVIII 43; Tales of Burning Love, XLI 109; Tracks, XLI 109

217 Erikson, Erik, XLIV 33

218 Esquivel, Laura, Like Water for Chocolate, XLI 113

219 Etherege, George, The Man of Mode, LI 141

220 Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, XLV 146

221 Fanon, Frantz, XLVII 149-150; Black Skin, White Masks, XLIII 63; The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre), XLVII 149

222 Farquhar, George, The Beaux’ Stratagem, LI 139

223 Farrell, James T., XLIV 42

224 Faulkner, William, XLI 107, 109, 259, 308-309, 333, 337, 340, 375, XLII 33-59, XLVI 109-111, 171, XLVIII 53, XLIX 26, 33-34, 110, LI 97-106; Absalom, Absalom!, LI 104; Go Down, Moses, XLI 103, 107-108, 308, XLII 57-58; The Marionettes: A Play in One Act, LI 97; Requiem for a Nun, LI 97; The Sound and the Fury, LI 97; These 13, XLI 308-309; The Unvanquished, XLI 103; The Wild Palms, XLIX 110, 119; “The Bear”, XLII 33-59; “A Rose for Emily”, XLI 256, 309; “That Evening Sun”, XLI 309; “Was”, XLI 308, “Wash”, LI 97-106

225 Findley, Timothy, XLVII 119

226 Fish, Stanley Eugene, XL 98, XLVII 51, 179; Is there a text in this class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities, XLVII 51; “Literature in the Reader”, XL 106

227 -Dieskau, Dietrich, LI 161, 164

228 , Francis Scott, XLI 375, XLIII 75-85, XLIV 91, XLVI 166, 174, XLIX 33, 35, 102, 109-111; The Crack-Up, XLIII 79, 83; The Great Gatsby, XL 36, XLI 138, 140, 368, XLIII 79, 81, XLVI 166; The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, XLIII 79, XLIX 109; Taps at Reveille, XLIII 77; Tender Is the Night, XLIII 77, 80, 81, XLIX 109; This Side of Paradise, XLIX 116; “”, XLIX 102; “May Day”, XLI 138; “The Rich Boy”, XLI 138

229 Fitzgerald, Penelope, Human Voices, XL 34, 43

230 Fitzgerald, Zelda, XLIII 75, 77, 80, 81, 83

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 92

231 , Gustave, XLI 57, 127, 133, 184, 276, 310, XLVI 29, 174, XLVII 127, XLIX 33, LI 61; , XLVI 174; « Un Coeur Simple », XLI 57

232 , Victor, Gone With the Wind, XLI 153

233 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston, LI 48

234 Ford, Ford Madox, , XLI 251

235 Forster, Edward Morgan, XLI 62, 207, 223, 228-230, XLIII 40, XLVI 33-34; Aspects of the Novel, XLVI 33; Collected Short Stories, LI 21; 23; “Other Kingdom”, LI 22-23; “The Road from Colonus”, LI 21

236 , Michel, XLV 128, XLVI 108, 130, XLVIII 106, L 89

237 Fowles, John, XLI 230, XLV 136-137; The Collector, XLV 136

238 Fra Angelico, L 196

239 Frank, Anne, XLV 124

240 Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career, XL 85

241 Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough, XLI 220

242 Freud, Lucian, XLI 125

243 Freud, Sigmund, XL 101, 103, 106, 110, 112-113, 115, 117-118, 122, 126, XLI 305, 307, 360, XLII 155, 157, XLIII 34, 50, 102, 105, 133, XLIV 45, 60, 66-69, 71-75, 77, 79-81, XLV 108, 113, 168, XLVI 23, 32, 64-67, 70, XLVIII 97, XLIX 31, 111, 121, 177, 179, 182-183, 201, LI 103; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, XL 118, XLI 30; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, XLIV 73-74, XLIX 177; L’inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais, XLII 22; The Interpretation of Dreams, XLVI 64; and Their Relation to the Unconscious, XL 115, 126, 133; Totem and Taboo, XL 117, XLI 220, XLIV 68; “The Aetiology of Hysteria”, XLIV 60; “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”, XLIV 66; “Delusions and Dreams”, XLIV 68; “Dostoevsky and Parricide”, XLIV 73; “Family Romances”, XLIV 69; “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”, XL 119; “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence”, XLIV 60; “The Uncanny”, XL 119

244 Friedrich, Caspar David, LI 162; Das Eismeer, LI 163

245 , Robert, XLIV 43

246 Fry, Roger, XLI 59, L 36, 138-139, 158-160, 187-188, 197, 202-203; Transformations, L 139; Vision and Design, XLI 65

247 Frye, Northrop, XLVII 111; Masks of Poetry, XLI 83; “Letters in Canada: Poetry 1952-1960”, XLI 83

248 Gable, , XLIV 41

249 Gadamer, Hans-George, XLIII 137

250 Gaddis, William, XLIX 34

251 Gaines, Ernest J., XLVII 23, 26; Bloodline, XLVII 23; “The Sky Is Gray”, XLVII 23

252 Gallagher, Tess, XLVI 15, 28, 68, 72-73, 103, 175-176; Remembering Carver, XLVI 28

253 Gallant, Mavis, XLI 101, 233-238, 240-242, 273-286, XLII 135-144, XLVII 194; The Collected Stories, XLI 233, XLII 135, 137-145; The End of the World and Other Stories, XLI 273, 274; A Fairly Good Time, XLI 273, 279; From the Fifteenth District, XLI 273, 284, XLII 135; Green Water, Green Sky, XLI 273; Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories, XLI 273, 274, XLII 135-137; Introduction aux Lettres de Gabrielle Russier, XLI 283; My Heart is Broken, XLI 273;

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 93

The Other Paris, XLI 273, 274, 281; Paris Notebooks, XLII 143; The Pegnitz Junction, XLI 273, 280; Selected Stories, XLII 135; What Is to Be Done?, XLI 285; “About Geneva”, 274; “Acceptance of their Ways”, XLI 274; “An Autobiography”, XLI 282; “Baum, Gabriel”, XLI 279; “The Deceptions of Marie-Blanche”, XLI 278; “The Four Seasons”, XLI 281; “From the Fifteenth District”, XLI 277; “Going Ashore”, XLI 282; “Luc and his Father”, XLI 278; “One Morning in June”, XLI 279; “The Other Paris”, XLI 274; “The Picnic”, XLI 274; “Potter”, XLI 283; “The Recollection”, XLI 276; “The Statues Taken Down”, XLI 279; “Things Overlooked Before”, XLII 136; “An Unmarried Man’s Summer”, XLI 281; “Varieties of Exile”, XLII 142; “Voices Lost in Snow”, XLII 135, 137, 143-144; “Wing’s Chips”, XLI 279

254 Galsworthy, John, L 37

255 García Márquez, Gabriel, XLI 294

256 Garland, Hamlin, LI 43

257 Garland, Judy, XLI 96

258 Garnett, David, L 187

259 , Paul, L 198

260 Genette, Gérard, XL 48, 55, 59, XLV 137, 141, 147-148, 150, XLIX 33-34, 39, 121, LI 17; Figures, XL 55, XL 144, XLVI 148; Introduction à l’architexte, LI 17; Narrative Discourse : An Essay in Method, XLIV 31; Palimpsestes, XLVI 147, 150; Théorie des genres, LI 17

261 Gertler, Mark, L 187

262 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, XLVI 123-125; Women and Economics, XLVI 124; “The Yellow Wallpaper”, XLVI 124

263 Giovanni, Nikki, XL 109

264 Girard, René, XLIX 120, LI 100, 102; Le Bouc émisssaire, XLIX 120; La Violence et le sacré, LI 102

265 Glissant, Edouard, XLVII 25

266 , Christoph Willibald, LI 141-143, 145-146; Orfeo ed Euridice, LI 137, 139, 143

267 Gnoli, Domenico, XLVI 157

268 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, XLIV 43, XLIX 102

269 Goffman, Erving, XL 34; The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, LI 151

270 , Nikolai, XLVII 87

271 Golding, William, Lord of the Flies, XLI 126

272 Goldsmith, Oliver, XLIII 21; The Vicar of Wakefield, XLIII 21

273 Gonne, Maud, XLI 149

274 Goodison, Lorna, XLVII 156

275 , Nadine, XLI 246

276 Gordon, Mary, XLIV 107-109

277 , Francisco, XLI 280, XLIX 33

278 Grace, Patricia, XLVII 99, 144, 150-151; Collected Stories, XLVII 144, 151; Electric City and Other Stories, XLVII 144; Potiki, XLVII 99; “Kahawai”, XLVII 143-144, 146, 149-150

279 Grahame, Kenneth, XLV 48

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 94

280 Grant, Cary, XLIX 15

281 Greene, Graham, XLI 147, 201-214, 368, XLV 47-48, 56, XLVII 194; Brighton Rock, XLI 147; Collected Stories, XLI 202; The Comedians, XLI 211; England Made Me, XLI 147; The Honorary Consul, XLI 210, 212; The Human Factor, XLI 204, 211; Nineteen Stories, XLI 202; Our Man in Havana, XLI 212; A Rumour at Nightfall, XLI 147; Twenty-One Stories, XLI 201; “Alas, Poor Maling”, XLI 210; “Chagrin in Three Parts”, XLI 206, 208; “A Chance for Mr. Lever”, XLI 202; “Cheap in August”, XLI 202; “The Destructors”, XLI 202; “A Discovery in the Woods”, XLI 203, 208; “Dream of a Strange Land”, XLI 203; “The End of the Party”, XLI 208, 211; “A Gun for Sale”, XLI 208; “The Innocent”, XLI 203, 210-211, “Journey Without Maps”, XLI 206; “The Jubilee”, XLI 203; “Loser Takes All”, XLI 208; “May We Borrow Your Husband?”, XLI 205; “The Overnight Bag”, XLI 205, 210; “The Root of All Evil”, XLI 203; “Shades of Greene”, XLI 209; “The Shocking Accident”, XLI 205; “Stamboul Train”, XLI 208; “Under the Garden”, XLI 202-203, 208-209; “When Greek Meets Greek”, XLI 210

282 Lady Gregory, XLV 30, XLVIII 26

283 Gregory, , XLIV 42

284 Grey, Zane, XLI 124

285 Grice, Herbert Paul, XL 31, 38, 75, 93, 121, L 74, 76-78, 80; Studies in the Way of Words, XL 43, 133; “Presupposition and Conversational Implicature”, XL 121; “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence Meaning and Word Meaning”, XL 121

286 , Jacob and Wilhelm, XLVII 25, XLVIII 82; “The Robber Bridegroom”, XLVIII 85

287 Gropius, Walter, XLVI 55

288 Grotowski, Jerzy, LI 119

289 Gruau, René, Garçonne, L 197

290 Guattari, Félix, L 123, 134, 172-173

291 Gunesekera, Romesh, XLVII 194

292 Hagège, Claude, XLVII 24; L’Homme de paroles, XLVII 24

293 Haggard, Henry Rider, XLV 32, XLVIII 28

294 Hale, Sarah Josepha, XLIII 26

295 Hallam, Arthur Henry, XLI 220-221

296 Hamilton, Elizabeth, The Cottagers of Glenburnie, XLIII 13

297 Hampton, Lionel, XLVII 193

298 Hardy, Thomas, XLI 140, 261, 308-309, 343, XLIII 24, 27, L 155-156; Two on a Tower, L 155; “The Darkling Thrush”, XLI 301

299 Harris, “Beaver”, XLVII 193

300 Harris, Wilson, XLI 298

301 Harrison, Jim, True North, XLIX 159

302 Harte, Bret, XLIX 42

303 , Gerhart, LI 68-69; Michael Kramer, LI 68

304 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, XLIII 19, 54, XLIV 68, XLIX 111; Twice-Told Tales, XLI 65, XLII 11, 21, LI 20, 83; “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”, XL 98, XLIII 54; “Rappacini’s Daughter”, XL 98

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 95

305 Haycox, Ernest, XLI 259

306 Hayward, W. S., The Revelations of a Lady Detective, XLV 17

307 Hazlitt, William, XLIII 14; Table Talk, XLIII 14

308 Heaney, Seamus, XL 67; The Cure at Troy, XLV 146; North, XL 68; “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing”, XL 68

309 Hegel, Gorg Wilhelm Friedrich, XLIX 35, L 72

310 Heidegger, Martin, XLVI 131, 143, L 162

311 Hemingway, Ernest, XLI 57, 176, 310, 367, 369-370, 375, 377-378, XLII 147, 157, XLIII 75-85, XLV 168-169, XLVI 26, 37, 99, 102, 110-111, 115, 166, 168-169, 172, 174, XLVII 24, 87, XLIX (special issue); Across the River and Into the Trees, XLIX 23; By-Line: , Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, XLIX 89; Death in the Afternoon, XLIX 35, 84, 110; A Farewell to Arms, XLIX 102; The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War, XLIII 76, 81-83; [The Fifth Column and] The First Forty-Nine Stories, XLIX 35, 62, 140, 174; For Whom the Bell Tolls, XLIX 24; The Garden of Eden, XLIX 16, 21-23, 25, 32, 36-37, 79-80, 100, 102-103; In Our Time, XLI 103-104, XLIX 20-21, 34, 85, 159, 169, 173-174, 181; (ed.) Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, XLIX 109; Men Without Women, XLVI 26, XLIX 20, 85, 125; A Moveable Feast, XLII 157, XLIII 78, 79, 82, 83, XLIX 33, 79, 189-190, 201, 203; The Nick Adams Stories, XLIX 17, 19, 21, 137; The Old Man and the Sea, XLIX 162, 168-169; Selected Letters : 1917-1961, XLIII 77, 81, XLIX 99, 101; The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, XLIII 80, XLIX 20; The Sun Also Rises, XLIII 81, XLVI 110, XLIX 26, 29, 32, 73, 84, 100, 110; Three Stories and Ten Poems, XLIX 84, 174; To Have and Have Not, XLIX 24, 34-35; Winner Take Nothing, XLIX 17, 35, 86; “An Alpine Idyll”, XLIX 20, 36; “The Art of the Short Story”, XLIX 43, 158-159; “The Battler”, XLIX 26, 45, 176-177, 181-182, 184-185; “Big Two-Hearted River”, XLI 370, XLIX 30, 36, 45-46, 125, 157-171, 173-174, 176-178, 183-185, 189-193, 196-197, 201, 203; “The Butterfly and the Tank”, XLIII 75-85; “The Capital of the World”, XLIX 24, 35; “Cat in the Rain”, XLIX 41, 43, 84-85, 99-100, 103, 105-106, 149-155; “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, XLIX 17, 91; “Cross-Country Snow”, XLIX 20, 85; “A Day’s Wait”, XLIX 83-84, 86-87, 91, 93; “The Denunciation”, XLIII 75; “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”, XLII 72, XLIX 18, 85; “The End of Something”, XLIX 26, 42-43, 45, 85-86, 109-123, 125, 173, 175-177, 179, 181, 185; “Fathers and Sons”, XLIX 26, 61, 99; “Fifty Grand”, XLIX 83-85, 87, 91; “Hills Like White Elephants”, XLVI 168, XLIX 38-40, 57-66, 70, 86-87, 93, 100, 161; “In Another Country”, XLIX 178; “Indian Camp”, XLIX 18-20, 36, 43, 85, 117, 125-136, 175-176, 181, 185; “The Killers”, XLI 332, XLIX 20, 62, 70, 118, 125; “The Last Good Country”, XLIX 23; “The Light of the World”, XLIX 27, 36, 43-44, 137-147; “The Mother of a Queen”, XLIX 35; “My Old Man”, XLIX 85; “A Natural History of the Dead”, XLIX 95; “Nobody Ever Dies”, XLIX 83-84, 87, 91-92; “Now I Lay Me”, XLIX 18, 20, 37, 87, 160; “Old Man at the Bridge”, XLIX 36, 41, 99, 101, 103, 106; “On Writing”, XLIX 36, 120-121, 164, 169; “A Pursuit Race”, XLIX 87, 91; “The Sea Change”, XLIX 39-40, 67-82, 100, 103; “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, XLIII 81, XLIX 16, 26, 32, 35; “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, XLIII 80, XLVI 100, XLIX 16-17; “Soldier’s Home”, XLIX 85; “The Strange Country”, XLIX 23; “Summer People”, XLIX 110, 118; “Ten Indians”, XLIX 20; “The Three-Day Blow”, XLIX 85, 175, 178-179, 181; “Three Love Stories”, XLIX 72; “Three Shots”, XLIX 17; “Up in Michigan”, XLIX 45, 86, 174-175, 179-180; “A Very Short Story”, XLIX 85

312 Hempel, Amy, XLVI 13, 168

313 Heraclitus, XLV 171

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 96

314 Herbert, George, XLVII 54

315 Hermogenes, XLIX 60

316 Highway, Tomson, XLVII 99

317 Hoban, Russell, The Medusa Frequency, LI 142

318 Hodgins, Jack, XLVII 111

319 Hodgson Burnett, Frances, XLV 55, The Secret Garden, XLV 48, 55

320 Hofkunst, Alfred, XLVI 157

321 Hofmann, Hans, XLIX 200

322 Hofmann, Michael, (ed.) After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, XLV 147

323 Hogg, James, XLIII 12, 24, 28

324 the Younger, Hans, XLII 96, 100

325 Holly, Buddy, XLVIII 66

326 Homel, David, XLVII 100

327 , XL 86, XLI 213, 240, XLIII 139, XLIV 43, XLVII 33; Iliad, XLII 159, 161-162, XLV 98, 146, XLVII 31, 33; Odyssey, XLVII 31, 33, XLVIII 88

328 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, XLI 259

329 , Edward, XLVI 157, XLIX 33

330 Horace, XLIII 138

331 Horne, Richard Hengist, XLIII 27

332 Howells, William Dean, XLII 86, XLIII 46, 47, XLIX 28, LI 42

333 Hucleux, Jean Olivier, XLVI 159

334 Hughes, Langston, XLIII 77, 83, XLVII 199; I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, XLIII 76, 77

335 Hughes, Ted, XLII 150, Tales from Ovid, XLV 146-147

336 , Victor, XLI 379, XLIX 33

337 Hurston, Zora Neale, XLVII 65, 70, 75-86, 197; Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk- tales from the Gulf States, XLVII 79; Mules and Men, XLVII 76; Seraph on the Suwanee, XLVII 76; Their Eyes Were Watching God, XLVII 75-76, 82; “Double Shuffle”, XLVII 80, 82-83; “The Eatonville Anthology”, XLVII 75-86; “Spunk”, XLVII 82, “Sweat”, XLVII 82; “Uncle Tom’s Children”, XLVII 70

338 Husserl, Edmund, XLV 124

339 Hutchinson, Pearse, XLI 145

340 Huxley, Aldous, Point Counter Point, L 206

341 , Henrik, LI 53-54, 68-69, 75; A Doll’s House, LI 70; Hedda Gabler, LI 69, 71; When We Dead Awaken, LI 69

342 Ihimaera, Witi, XLVII 150

343 Ionesco, Eugène, LI 101; Le Roi se meurt, LI 101

344 Irving, Washington, XLI 183, XLIII 12, 13, 23, 24, 26; Bracebridge Hall, XLIII 24, 27; The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., XLIII 13, 14, 26; “The of Sleepy Hollow”, XLIII 23; “The Stout Gentleman”, XLIII 13, 27

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 97

345 Iser, Wolfgang, XLVII 179

346 Isidore of Seville (Saint Isidore), XLVII 55-56; Libri etymologiarum, XLVII 55

347 Jacob of Utrecht, L 197

348 Jakobson, Roman, XLII 157, XLVI 23, 45, 54, XLVII 50, 57, 60, XLIX 35, L 75-76; Fundamentals of Language, XLII 157; “Language in Opposition”, XLVII 58; “Linguistics and Poetics”, XLVII 50, 60; “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”, XLII 157

349 James, Henry, XL 97-107, 130, XLI 42, 70, 194, 230, 244, 304, 308, 310, 340, 350, 370-371, XLV 47, 101, XLVI 21-22, 33, 38, 45, 60, 156, XLVII 23, XLVIII 48, XLIX 36, L 17, LI 19, 42; The Ambassadors, XLI 308; Beast in the Jungle, XLV 101; , XLVI 22; Letters, XLI 53; The Notebooks of , XLI 54; , XLI 370; The Turn of the Screw, XL 97-107; “The Art of Fiction”, XLI 370; “The Coxon Fund”, XLI 42; “The Jolly Corner”, XLVI 38; “The Private Life”, XLVI 156; “The Real Thing”, XLVI 33

350 James, Phyllis Dorothy, XLIII 29

351 James, William, XLIX 20

352 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, XL 51; La Musique et l’ineffable, XL 55

353 Jarrell, Randall, XLI 304-306, 321

354 Jarry, Alfred, LI 53

355 Jaspers, Karl, XLII 84

356 Jay, Paul, XLIV 88

357 Jewett, Sarah Orne, XLVIII 45-46; The Country of the Pointed Firs, XLI 113, XLVIII 45

358 Johnston, Denis, XLI 154

359 Jouve, Vincent, LI 127; L’effet-personnage dans le roman, LI 127

360 Joyce, James, XL 17-28, 62, XLI 127, 143, 147, 158, 170, 202, 205, 307-308, 347, 369, XLIV 34-35, 70, 88, XLV 29, 64, XLVII 52-53, XLVIII 25, XLIX 35, L 17, 24, 204, 224, LI 20, 51-79, 144; The Dubliners, XL 19, XLI 103, 107, 183, LI 21, 51-65, 73, 77; Exiles, LI 52-53, 68-69; Finnegans Wake, XLVII 53, LI 51-52, 57, 59-60; Letters, LI 54, 61; Poems and Shorter Writings, including Epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce and ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, LI 54, 57; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, XLI 113, XLIV 34, LI 52, 54-55, 64; Stephen Hero, LI 52, 55; Ulysses, XLI 113, 127, XLIV 34, XLVII 52-53, XLVIII 53, LI 51-52, 60, 68; “Araby”, XL 17-28, XLI 307-308; “The Dead”, XL 50, XLI 107, 202, 256, 307-308, LI 60, 67-79; “An Encounter”, XL 19; “Grace”, LI 62; “Ibsen’s New Drama”, LI 68; “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, LI 21, 52-54, 61-64; “The Sisters”, XL 19, LI 58-59; “Two Gallants”, LI 60

361 Jung, Carl Gustav, XLI 360

362 Jürgens, Curd, XLVIII 96

363 Kafka, , XLII 76, 86; XLIII 112, XLIV 55, XLV 106; The Castle, XLIV 55, 56; The Metamorphosis, XLI 357; “The Penal Colony”, XLV 106

364 Kalatozov, Mikhail, The Cranes are Flying, XLI 130

365 Kant, Immanuel, XLVI 16; The Critique of Pure Reason, XLVI 13, 16; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, XLVI 16

366 Kantor, Tadeusz, LI 118-119

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 98

367 Kavanagh, Patrick, XLI 125-126, 130-131, 143, 151-153; Prelude, XLI 130; A Soul for Sale, XLI 152

368 Kazin, Alfred, XLI 337, XLIV 37, 86

369 , John, XLI 65, 368, XLV 73, L 13

370 Kelman, James, XLII 75-89; Busted Scotch, XLII 87; An East End Anthology, XLII 87; The Good Times, XLII 80, 87; Greyhound for Breakfast, XLII 84, 87-88; Lean Tales, XLII 82, 87; Not Not While the Giro, XLII 84, 87-88; Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political, XLII 87; “Even in Communal Pitches”, XLII 84; “Extra Cup”, XLII 82; “Forgetting to Mention Allende”, XLII 81; “Greyhound for Breakfast”, XLII 79; “Home for a Couple of Days”, XLII 80-81; “Joe Laughed”, XLII 80-81; “Keep Moving and No Questions”, XLII 84-85; “Not Not While the Giro”, XLII 80-81; “The Same Is Here Again”, XLII 82-83

371 Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine, XL 31, 90; L’implicite, XL 43, 133, 145

372 Kiely, Benedict, XLI 143-156, XLVII 194; A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly. A Dozen Stories, XLI 144; The Captain With the Whiskers, XLI 153; The Cards of the Gambler, XLI 148; Counties of Contention, XLI 147; Drink to the Bird, XLI 143, 154; In a Harbour Green, XLI 149; King’s Shilling, XLI 146; Land Without Stars: A Novel, XLI 143,147; Proxopera, XLI 148, 154-155; “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly”, XLI 148, 150

373 Kincaid, Jamaica, XLI 289; Annie John, XLI 112

374 King, Bobby, XLVIII 67

375 King, Thomas, XLVII 97-109, 111-115, 117-119, 121, 123; (ed.) All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction, XLVII 100-102, 115; The Dead Dog Café Hour, XLVII 98; Green Grass, Running Water, XLVII 99, 105, 113; Medicine River, XLVII 98, 106; One Good Story, That One, XLVII 103, 112-113; A Short History of Indians in Canada, XLVII 105; The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, XLVII 99, 104-106; “Borders”, XLVII 113; “A Coyote Columbus Story”, XLVII 103, 112-113; “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial”, XLVII 101-102, 114; “Inventing the Indian: White Images, Native Oral Literature and Contemporary Native Writers”, XLVII 100; “Magpies”, XLVII 103; “The One About Coyote Going West”, XLVII 103; “One Good Story, That One”, XLVII 103-104; “A Short History of Indians in Canada”, XLVII 106; “The Voice and the Performance of the Storyteller”, XLVII 106

376 Kingsolver, Barbara, XLI 353-366; Homeland, XLI 354, 356, 365; The Poisonwood Bible, XLI 356, 360-361; Prodigal Summer, XLI 354; “Blueprints”, XLI 365-366; “Fault Lines”, XLI 356; “Homeland”, XLI 365; “Jump Up Day”, XLI 355, 365; “Secret Animals”, XLI 356; “Stone Dreams”, XLI 355, 359-360, 365-366; “What Good Is a Story”, XLI 363

377 Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior, XLVII 165

378 , Rudyard, XLI 69-82, 104-105, 176, XLV 47, XLVII 26, 30, 87; Actions and Reactions, XLI 105; The Day’s Work, XLI 104; Debits and Credits, XLI 105; A Diversity of Creatures, XLI 105; Just So Stories, XLI 69, XLVII 26; Limits and Renewals, XLI 105; Puck of Pook’s Hill, XLI 104; Soldiers Three, XLI 105; Stalky & Co., XLI 104; Traffics and Discoveries, XLI 105; “How the Alphabet Was Made”, XLI 69-82; “How the Camel Got His Hump”, XLI 69; “How the First Letter was Written” XLI 69-70, 77-79, 81; “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin”, XLI 69; “How the Whale Got His Throat”, XLI 69; “”, XLVII 30

379 Knipper, Olga, XLVI 147-148, 151-154, 161, XLVI 180; Memoirs, XLVI 149

380 König, Johann, L 197

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 99

381 Kristeva, Julia, XL 65, XLVII 51, XLVIII 97-99, 106, XLIX 34, LI 137, 142-144, 146; About Chinese Women, XLVIII 97; Les Nouvelles maladies de l’âme, LI 144; Soleil noir, XL 68; “Joyce ‘The Gracehoper’ or Orpheus’s Returned”, LI 144

382 Kroetsch, Robert, Creation, XLI 83, 89

383 Krystal, Henry, XLIV 33

384 Kundera, Milan, XLV 118; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, XLV 118

385 Kuno, Susumu, XLIX 152

386 Lacan, Jacques, XL 110, 112-113, 115-116, 118-119, 122, 124, 129, 133, 145, XLII 154-155, 157, XLIII 139, XLV 99, XLIX 43, 109, 112, 117-119,121, 126, 132, 145; Ecrits, XL 112, 133, XLII 157; Encore, XL 110, 118, XLIX 112, 117, 119; The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, XLIII 139; Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux de la Psychanalyse, XL 118; La Relation d’objet, XL 133 ; Télévision, XLIX 109; “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud”, XLII 157; “The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I”, XLI 157; « Le Séminaire sur ‘La Lettre Volée’ », XL 133; “The Signification of the Pallus”, XLIII 139

387 Lakshmi, Vijay, Pomegranate Dreams and Other Stories, XLI 112

388 Lamarr, Hedy, XLI 96

389 Lamazares, Ivonne, The Sugar Island, XLI 112

390 Lamb, Charles, XLIII 14; Essays of Elia, XLIII 14

391 Lamming, George, XLI 293; In The Castle of My Skin, XLI 297

392 Laplanche, Jean, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, XL 55

393 Lardner, Ring, XLV 68; “Haircut”, XLV 68

394 Larkin, Ellis, XLVII 193

395 Larkin, Philip, XLI 126, 140

396 Lasdun, James, (ed.) After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, XLV 147

397 Laurence, Margaret, XLVII 202, XLVIII 71-79; A Bird in the House, XLVIII 71; The Stone Angel, XLVII 202; “A Bird in the House”, XLVIII 72; “The Diviners”, XLVIII 75; “The Loons”, XLVIII 71-79; “To Set Our House in Order”, XLVIII 72

398 Lavin, Mary, XLI 245

399 Lawrence, David Herbert, XLI 176-177, 183, 199, 223, 261, 308, XLV 64, XLVII 23, 87, 139, XLVIII 53, XLIX 109, 118, L 141, LI 19; “The Blind Man”, XLVI 111

400 Lawson, Henry, XL 85, 87-89, 94, XLVII 127-134, 136; Henry Lawson’s Letters 1890-1922, XLVII 129; Humorous Stories of Henry Lawson, XLVII 128; “The Drover’s Wife”, XL 87, 89; “The Hairy Man”, XLVII 127-134; “No Place for a Woman”, XL 87; “The Selector’s Daughter”, XL 87; “She Wouldn’t Speak”, XL 87; “That Pretty Girl in the Army”, XL 87

401 Lear, Edward, XLV 47-48

402 Leavitt, David, XLVI 13, 168

403 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, XLVIII 111-112

404 Leibniz, Gottfreid, XLIX 173

405 Leighton, Frederic, L 196

406 Lennart, Isobel, XLVIII 96; The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, XLVIII 96

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 100

407 Le Noir, Elizabeth, Village Anecdotes, XLIII 13

408 Leskov, Nikolaï, XLVII 87, 91

409 , Doris, XLI 246, XLV 163; The Golden Notebook, XLI 225; The Grass Is Singing, XLI 246

410 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoon, XLI 45; Minna von Barnhelm, LI 163

411 Levinas, Emmanuel, XLV 124, XLVI 27, 142-143, L 27-28; « Intentionnalité et sensation », XLV 124

412 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, XLVII 178

413 Lloyd, Marie, XL 34

414 Locke, John, L 138

415 Logue, Christopher, War Music, XLV 146

416 London, Jack, XLVI 86

417 Lowell, Robert, XLI 304-305, 313

418 Lycan, William, L 69

419 Lyotard, Jean-François, XL 139

420 McAlmon, Robert, XLIII 80

421 McCann, Colum, XL 47-56; Everything in This Country Must, XL 47-56; This Side of Brightness, XL 56; “Everything in This Country Must”, XL 48-51, 53, 55; “Hunger Strike”, XL 48-53, 55; “Wood”, XL 48, 51, 53, 55

422 McCarthy, Mary, XLI 313; Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, XLI 106

423 McCullers, Carson, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, XLI 266

424 MacDirmid, Hugh, XLVII 31

425 McEwan, Ian, XLV 135-143; The Cement Garden, XLV 141; First Love, Last Rites, XLV 135-136; “Conversation with a Cupboard Man”, XLV 135-143

426 McGahern, John, XL 57-68, XLI 123-141, 377, XLII 167-168, XLVII 194; Amongst Women, XLI 123, 139-140; The Barracks, XL 67, XLI 123, 126, 130-131, 135, XLII 167; The Collected Short Stories, XLII 167; Collected Stories, XL 57-68; The Dark, XLI 123; The End or the Beginning of Love, XLI 125; Getting Through, XLI 123, XLII 167; High Ground, XLI 123, XLII 167; The Leavetaking, XLI 123, 132, XLII 168; Nightlines , XLI 123, XLII 167; The Pornographer, XLI 123; That They May Face the Rising Sun, XLI 124, 129, 134, 139, XLII 167; “All Sorts of Impossible Things”, XL 65; “Along the Edges”, XL 63, 65; “A Ballad”, XL 59, XLI 129; “Bank Holiday”, XL 63, 65, XLI 131, 133; “The Beginning of an Idea”, XL 65; “Bomb Box”, XLI 135-136; “Coming into his Kingdom”, XL 59, 62; “The Conversion of William Kirkwood”, XL 58, XLI 135; “The Country Funeral”, XL 66, XLI 135; “The Creatures of the Earth”, XL 66; “Crossing the Line”, XL 66, XLI 129; “Doorways”, XL 58; “Eddie Mac”, XL 58-59, 67, XLI 135; “Gold Watch”, XL 63, XLI 135; “Hearts of Oak, Bellies of Brass”, XLI 128-129; “The Key”, XL 63-64, XLI 135-136; “Korea”, XL 65, XLI 135; “Lavin”, XL 59; “Like All Other Men”, XL 58; “Parachutes”, XL 63-64, 66, XLI 130, XLII 167; “Peaches”, XL 63; “The Recruiting Officer”, XL 61; “Sierra Leone”, XL 58, 64, XLI 137; “The Stoat”, XLI 135, 140; “Strandhill, the Sea”, XL 60-61; “Swallows”, XL 65-66, XLI 137; “Wheels”, XL 59-60, XLII 168; “Why We’re Here”, XL 62, XLI 135; “The Wine Breath”, XL 57, 61-62

427 McInerney, Jay, XLVI 28, 35-36, 169

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 101

428 MacLaverty, Bernard, XLV 29, XLVIII 25

429 MacLeod, Alistair, XLI 138, 255-272, XLVII 111-112, 118-119, 122-123, 194, LI 19; As Birds Bring Forth the Sun, XLI 255, 266; Island, The Complete Stories, XLI 255, 257, 269-270; The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, XLI 255, 266; No Great Mischief, XLI 255, 258, 267, 271; “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun”, XLI 264, 266, 267, XLVII 112, 118; “The Boat”, XLI 256, 259, 264, 266, 267, 271; “Clearances”, XLI 260; “The Closing Down of Summer”, XLI 258, 263; “In the Fall”, XLI 264, 271; “Island”, XLI 257, 259, 261; “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood”, XLI 266, 269; “The Return”, XLI 256, 266, 267; “The Road to Rankin’s Point”, XLI 264; “Vision”, XLI 257, 259-260, 266, 271; “Winter Dog”, XLI 270

430 McNamara, Brinsley, XLI 149

431 McNeice, Louis, XLI 247, 250-251

432 MacIntyre, Alasdair, L 26

433 McSweeney, Mary, XLI 149

434 Madden, David, XLI 233-234, 236-239, 241, XLVII 194; Sharpshooter, XLI 233, 238; “The of Possibilities”, XLI 234, 236; “The Singer”, XLI 234

435 Maéda, Josaku, XLI 280

436 Maillol, Aristide, XLI 279

437 Malamud, Bernard, XLI 313, XLIII 88

438 Mallarmé, Stéphane, XLVI 53, XLVII 54

439 Malraux, André, XLI 279

440 Mamet, David, LI 57, 64

441 Man, Paul de, XLII 157; “Reading” in of Reading, XLII 157

442 Manet, Edouard, XLI 280

443 Mangan, James Clarence, XL 25

444 Mann, Thomas, XLI 314, XLIX 87; The Magic Moutain, XLIX 87

445 Mansfield, Katherine, XLI 42, 43, 57, 115, 177, 277, XLVII 26, 87, L 138, LI 24-25, 32-34, 81-84, 86-87, 89-93; The Garden Party and Other Stories, LI 33; Selected Stories, XLVII 24, LI 24, 26; “At the Bay”, XLI 115; “Bliss”, XLI 229, LI 33-34, 87; “The Canary”, LI 81, 84, 86, 88, 92-94; “The Doll’s House”, XLI 115; “The Fly”, L 189; “Je Ne Parle Pas Français”, LI 84; “The Lady’s Maid”, LI 81, 84, 86-88, 92-93; “Late at Night”, LI 81, 84-86, 88, 92-93; “Mr. And Mrs. ”, LI 24-25; “Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day”, XLVII 24, LI 25-26; “Prelude”, XLI 115, LI 82; “Spring Pictures”, LI 83

446 Manuel , Niklaus, XLVIII 62; Death and the Maiden, XLVIII 62

447 Marlowe, Christopher, Faustus, XLII 161

448 Martineau, Harriet, XLIII 21

449 Masefield, John, XLI 245

450 Matisse, Henri, XLI 215, 226-227, 318

451 Maugham, William Somerset, XLI 195; Cakes and Ale, XLI 174

452 Maupassant, Guy de, XL 97, XLI 57, 65, 161, 163, 170, 184, 194-195, 213, 244, XLII 87, XLIX 33; « La Maison Tellier », XLIX 143 ; “A Million”, XL 97-98

453 Maxwell, William Keepers, XLI 378-379; So Long, See You Tomorrow, XLI 378

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 102

454 Mayo, Wendell, XLIII 108

455 , Margaret, XLIV 42

456 Melville, Herman, XLV 131, XLIX 64, LI 42, 113; Moby Dick, XLV 131; “Bartleby”, XL 98

457 , Felix, LI 111-112, 119; Ein Sommernachtstraum, LI 112; opus 21, LI 111-112; opus 61, LI 111-112; “Wedding March”, LI 112

458 Meredith, George, “Love in the Valley”, LI 26

459 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, XLII 67, XLIX 45, 165, 167, 202; Phénoménologie de la perception, XLIX 167; Sens et non-sens, XLIX 165

460 Meschonnic, Henri, XLVII 51, LI 133-134; Critique du rythme, Anthropologie historique du langage, XLI 65, LI 134; Pour la poétique II, Epistémologie de l’écriture, XLVII 51 ; « Le théatre dans la voix », LI 133

461 Miller, Arthur, XLIII 87-106, XLV 165, LI 74; After the Fall, XLIII 103, 105; All My Sons, XLIII 89, 103, 104; Broken Glass, XLIII 87, 92; The Creation of the World and Other Business, XLIII 104; The Crucible, XLIII 104; Death of a Salesman, XLIII 103, 104, LI 74; Focus, XLIII 89; The Hook, XLIII 104; The Last Yankee, XLIII 104; The Man Who Had All the Luck, XLIII 103; A Memory of Two Mondays, XLIII 104; Mr. Peters’ Connections, XLIII 104; The Price, XLIII 103, 105; The Ride Down Mount Morgan, XLIII 104-105; The Simon Trilogy, XLIII 87, 103; Some Kind of Love Story, XLIII 104; Timebends, XLIII 87, 91-95, 102, 105; A View from the Bridge, XLIII 104; “Fame”, XLIII 89; “I Don’t Need You Anymore”, XLIII 87, 89, 92, 103, 104; “Monte Sant’Angelo”, XLIII 87, 99; “A Search for a Future”, XLIII 89

462 Miller, Henry, XLIX 42

463 Miller, Max, XL 34

464 , John, XL 30, XLI 155; Comus, LI 162; Paradise Lost, XL 101

465 Minot, Susan, XLVI 168

466 Mishima, Yukio, XLIX 153

467 Mitford, Mary Russell, XLIII 11-28; (ed.) American Stories for Little Boys and Girls, XLIII 28; (ed.) American Stories for Young People, XLIII 28; Atherton, and Other Tales, XLIII 25, 28; Belford Regis, XLIII 25; Country Stories, XLIII 25; (ed.) Lights and Shadows of American Life, XLIII 28; Our Village, XLI 113, XLIII 11-27; (ed.) Stories of American Life, XLIII 25, 28; “Atherton”, XLIII 25; “The Bucaneer”, XLIII 25; “The Cartel”, XLIII 25; “The Chalk Pit”, XLIII 24; “Ghost Stories”, XLIII 24; “Jack Hatch”, XLIII 13, 27; “Jessy Lucas”, XLIII 24; “Marion ”, XLIII 25; “The Old House at Aberleigh”, XLIII 17; “The Roundhead’s Daughter”, XLIII 25; “Violeting”, XLIII 15; “The Visit”, XLIII 17; “The Wager”, XLIII 25; “Walks in the Country”, XLIII 16

468 Momaday, N. Scott, House Made of Dawn, XLII 151, 157; The Way to Rainy Mountain, XLI 113

469 , Claude, XLI 50

470 Monroe, Marilyn, XLIII 104, XLV 165, XLVI 167

471 Montague, John, XLI 150

472 Montaigne, Michel de, XLI 52

473 Moorcock, Michael, XL 29-45; London Bone, XL 29-45; Mother London, XL 29, 31, 43; “The Cairene Purse”, XL 30-32, 43; “The Clapham Antichrist”, XL 30, 34-35; “Doves in the Circle”, XL 30-32; “Furniture”, XL 30, 39-40; “London Blood”, XL 34; “London Bone”, XL

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 103

30, 34, 37-38; “Through the Shaving Mirror or How We Abolished the Future”, XL 31, 39, 41, 44; “A Winter Admiral”, XL 30-31, 33

474 Moore, George, XLV 29-45, XLVIII 25-42, LI 41; Avowals, XLV 33, XLVIII 29; The Brook Kerith, XLV 38, XLVIII 34; A Drama in Muslin, XLV 31, XLVIII 27; Hail and Farewell!, XLV 30-31, XLVIII 26-27; The Lake, XLV 32, 38, XLVIII 28, 34; The Untilled Field (translated as An tUr-Ghort in Irish, XLV 31, XLVIII 27), XLI 103, XLV 29-32, 37-40, 44, XLVIII 25-28, 33-36, 40; “Home Sickness”, XLV 29-45, XLVIII 25-42; “A Letter to Rome”, XLV 39, XLVIII 35; “Literature and the Irish Language” XLV 31, XLVIII 27; “Patchwork”, XLV 39, XLVIII 35; “A Play-House in the Waste”, XLV 39, XLVIII 35; “Some Parishioners”, XLV 39, XLVIII 35; “The Wedding Feast”, XLV 39, XLVIII 35; “The Window”, XLV 39, XLVIII 35

475 Moore, George Edward, XLI 61; Principia Ethica, XLI 65

476 Moore, Lorrie, XLII 119

477 Moravia, Alberto, XLI 60, 211; “The Short Story and the Novel”, XLI 65

478 More, Hannah, XLIII 14

479 More, Thomas, XL 30, 33

480 Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), XLIII 14

481 Morris, Wright, The Territory Ahead, XLI 379

482 Morrison, Toni, XLII 58, XLVII 157, 193, XLIX 34, 121

483 , XLI 380, L 36, 204-205, 207-208; The Magic Flute, LI 144

484 Muldoon, Paul, XL 49, 53, 55; Dancers at the Moy, XL 55

485 , Edward, The Cry, XLV 103

486 Munro, Alice, XLI 93-101, 217-218, XLII 159-165, XLVIII 45, 47, 51, LI 142, 149-158; The Beggar Maid, XLVIII 47; Dance of the Happy Shades, LI 142; Lives of Girls and Women, XLVIII 45, 47; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, XLII 159, 162; Who Do You Think You Are?, XLI 111; “The Children Stay”, LI 142; “Executioners”, XLII 159-165; “Fathers”, XLI 93-101; “The Flats Road”, LI 152; “Lives of Girls and Women”, LI 149-151, 154, 156; “Royal Beatings”, LI 149-151, 156

487 Murakami, Haruki, XLVI 17, 36, 40; “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”, XLVI 36

488 Murdoch, Iris, XLI 215

489 , Vladimir, XLI 377, XLV 113-121, XLVIII 107, Ada, XLV 113; Invitation to a Beheading, XLV 114; Lolita, XLV 113-115, XLVIII 107; Nabokov’s Dozen, XLV 114-116; Pale Fire, XLV 113, 116; The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, XLV 115; Strong Opinions, XLV 114, 119; “Conversation Piece, 1945” (aka “Double Talk”, XLV 114, 119), XLV 113-121; “Terra Incognita”, XLV 117; “Ultima Thule”, XLV 116

490 Nafisi, Azar, Reading Lolita in Tehran, XLV 114

491 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, XLI 293, 301

492 Nancy, Jean-Luc, XLI 43, 52 ; Au fond des images, XLI 54

493 Nicholas of Cusa, XLIX 77

494 Nietzsche, Friedrich, XLI 30, 360, XLIII 119

495 Nooteboom, Cees, « Lessons », XLV 152

496 Norman, Howard, XLVII 101

497 Norton, Caroline, XL 25

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 104

498 Nussbaum, Martha, L 26-28; Love’s Knowledge, L 26; , L 26; “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism”, L 26

499 Oates, Joyce Carol, XLI 256, XLII 91-109, XLV 63, 106, XLVIII 44-45, 51-55, 59-69; All the Good People I’ve Left Behind, XLVIII 44, 51-52, 55; New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature, XLVIII 45; “All the Good People I’ve Left Behind”, XLVIII 52; “At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her: Images of Women in , Lawrence, Faulkner”, XLVIII 53; “Blood-Swollen Landscape”, XLVIII 54; “Depth-Sightings”, XLV 63; “The Myth of the Isolated Artist”, XLVIII 52; “New Heaven and Earth”, XLVIII 52; “Review”, XLVIII 44-45; “Seminar with Joyce Carol Oates”, XLVIII 44-45; “Sentimental Journey”, XLVIII 55; “Short Story into Film”, XLVIII 61, 63, 65, 68; “The Tryst”, XLVIII 53; “Walled City”, XLVIII 52; “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (aka “Death and the Maiden”, XLVIII 61-62), XLII 91-109, XLVIII 59-69

500 O’Brien, Edna, XL 58

501 O’Casey, Sean, LI 44-45; Juno and the Paycock, LI 44; The Plough and the Stars, LI 44

502 O’Connor, Flannery, XLI 294, 309, 367, 371-373, 375, 377, XLV 95-111, XLIX 120; Everything that Rises Must Converge, XLI 113; Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, XLV 101, 109, XLIX 120; Wise Blood, XLV 97, 102-103, 108; “The Artificial Nigger”, XLV 98, 109; “The Comforts of Home”, XLV 98; “The Displaced Person”, XLV 98, 101-102; “The Enduring Chill”, XLV 97-98, 101, 106; “Everything That Rises Must Converge” XLV 97, 102; “Good Country People”, XLV 97; “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, XLV 97; “Greenfield”, XLI 371, 373; “Judgment Day”, XLV 96; “King of the Birds”, XLV 101; “A Late Encounter With the Enemy”, XLV 97; “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, XLV 97; “Parker’s Back”, XLI 373, XLV 95-111; “Revelation”, XLI 372, XLV 109; “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”, XLV 101-102, 109; “The River”, XLV 97-98

503 O’Connor, Frank, XLI 176, 178, 180, 323, XLVII 87-96; The Backward Look, XLVII 87; Bones of Contention, XLVII 88-89, 95; Dutch Interior, XLVII 87; The Lonely Voice, A Study of the Short Story, XLV 123, XLVII 87, 89-91, 95-96; My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories, XLVII 89; The Saint and Mary Kate, XLVII 87; The Stories of Frank O’Connor, XLVII 89; “In the Train”, XLI 323, XLVII 89-90, 92-93, 95-96; “The Majesty of the Law”, XLVII 88-90; “Orpheus and His Lute”, XLVII 89, 94, 96; “Peasants”, XLVII 88-95

504 O’Faolain, Sean, XLI 176, 245, XLVI 148

505 O’Flaherty, Liam, XLI 127, 176, 180; The Tent, XLI 181

506 O’Neill, Eugene, XLI 130, XLIV 52, LI 19

507 Ong, Walter J., XLVII 20, 54, 61, 97-98, 112, 114, 117, 119, 122, 146, 155, 178, 184, 186; Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, XLVII 20, 77, 89, 91, 94, 97

508 O’ Nolan, Brian (Flann O’Brien), XLI 143, 151-152

509 Opie, Amelia, XLIII 14

510 Orwell, George,XLV 113; Animal Farm, XLV 113; Nineteen Eighty-Four, XLV 113

511 Otto, Whitney, XLVII 79; How to Make an American Quilt, XLVII 79

512 Ovid, XLV 146-155, 158-159; Metamorphoses, XLV 146-149, 153-154, 157-158, XLIX 78

513 Ozick, Cynthia, XLI 370

514 Paley, Grace, XLI 110-112, 115, 345-351, XLVII 194; Begin Again: Collected Poems, XLI 345; Collected Stories, XLI 345; Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, XLI 345; Goldenrod, XLI 345; Just as I Thought, XLI 111; XLI 345; Later the Same Day, XLI 345; Leaning Forward, XLI 345;

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 105

The Little Disturbances of Man, XLI 345; 16 Broadsides, XLI 345; “Debts”, XLI 350; “The Loudest Voice”, XLI 346; “Wants”, XLI 350-351

515 Parker, Dorothy, XLI 313, XLIX 125-126

516 Pascal, Blaise, XLVII 96; Pensées, XLI 369, 373

517 Pater, Walter, Marius the Epicurian, XLV 33, XLVIII 29; Studies in the History of the Renaissance, LI 18

518 Paterson, “Banjo”, XL 85

519 Saint Paul, XLV 107-108; Epistle to the Romans, XLII 45; Corinthians, XLV 107

520 Peirce, Charles Sanders, XLI 70-71, 78, 81; Writings, XLI 81; “On a New List of Categories”, XLI 81

521 Percy, Walker, XLI 334

522 Perrault, Charles, XLVIII 82

523 , Francesco, XLV 101

524 Philip, Marlene NourbeSe, XLI 290, XLVII 165

525 Piaget, Jean, XLVII 51

526 , Pablo, XLI 318, XLIX 27

527 Pindar, XLI 240; Fifth Thracian Ode, XLI 240

528 Ping, Wang, XLVIII 100, 103

529 Pinter, Harold, LI 52-53, 64

530 Pirandello, Luigi, XLI 30, 130, XLII 61, XLVI 43, 60

531 Plath, Sylvia, XLI 256, XLII 150, 156, XLVIII 83; Ariel, XLII 157; “Morning Song”, XLII 149-150; “Stings”, XLVIII 83

532 Plato, XLII 16, XLV 130, 158, XLIX 25, LI 17

533 Plautus, XLVII 31

534 Plutarch, L 185

535 Poe, Edgar Allan, XL 133, XLI 42, 44, 60, 63, 157, 245, XLII 9-22, XLV 14-15, XLIX 111, L 171-173, 175, 181, LI 19-20; The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, XLII 21; The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, LI 20; The Fall of the House of Usher, LI 130; Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe, XLII 21-22; The Mysteries of Udolpho, XLII 13; Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, XLII 21; Tales of Mystery and Imagination, XL 56; “The Angel of the Odd”, XLII 21; “Eureka”, XLII 10, 21-22; “The Imp of the Perverse”, XLII 21; “The Island of the Fay”, XL 53; “King Pest”, XLII 21; “The Man of the Crowd”, XLII 21-22; “The Masque of the Red Death”, XLII 21; “The Oval Portrait” (aka “Life in Death”), XLII 9-22; “The Philosophy of Composition”, XLII 9, 21; “The Poetic Principle”, XLII 21; “The Premature Burial”, XLII 21; “The Purloined Letter”/ “La lettre volée”, XL 133, XLII 17, 22; “The Raven”, XLII 22; “Review of Twice-Told Tales”, XLI 65, XLII 11, 21, LI 20, 83; “William Wilson”, XLV 141

536 Pollard, Velma, XLVII 156

537 Pope, Alexander, XLV 150, 159, XLIX 39, 74-75, L 13, LI 42-43; An Essay on Man, XLIX 74, 76

538 Porter, Katherine Anne, XLI 313, 367, 372, 377; Ship of Fools, XLI 313; “Flowering Judas”, XLI 372

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 106

539 Pound, Ezra, XLVI 174, XLIX 20, 27, 33, L 224; “A Retrospect”, XLVII 95

540 Poussin, Nicolas, XLI 41

541 Powell, Padgett, XLI 314

542 Powers, James Farl, XLI 313

543 Prager, Emily, XLVIII 95-110; Eve’s Tattoo, XLVIII 95; In the Missionary Position, XLVIII 95-96; Roger Fishbite, XLVIII 95, 107-108; A Visit from the Footbinder and Other Stories, XLVIII 95-96; Wuhu Diary. On Taking My adopted Daughter Back To Her Hometown In China, XLVIII 95, 98, 102; “A Visit from the Footbinder”, XLVIII 95-110

544 Presley, Elvis, XLII 96, XLVIII 66

545 Price, Reynolds, XLI 315, XLII 113

546 Prichard, Katharine Susannah, XLVII 127-128, 134-142; “The Curse”, XLVII 127-128, 134-142

547 Pritchett, Victor Sawdon, XL 121-134, XLI 159, 175-199, 202, 204-205, 213, 240, 245, XLV 47-48, 63-94, XLVII 194, LI 36-37; A Cab at the Door, XLI 177; The Camberwell Beauty, XLV 65; Collected Stories, XL 133; The Collected Stories of V. S. Pritchett, XLV 64, 66; The Complete Collected Stories, XLV 64; The Complete Short Stories, XLV 72; Dead Man Leading, XLI 187, 189, 202; The Living Novel, XLI 188; Midnight Oil, XLV 66; Mr. Beluncle, XLI 187, XLV 65; The Pritchett Century. The Selected Writings of V. S. Pritchett, XLV 67; Selected Stories, XL 64; “The Aristocrat”, XLV 65; “Blind Love”, XLI 194, 198; “The Necklace”, XLI 194; “Neighbours”, XLI 186; “Rain in the Sierra”, XLI 177; “The Sailor”, XLI 197; “The Satisfactory”, XLI 196; “A Sense of Humour”, XLI 185; “Tea with Mrs Bittell”, XL 121-134; “Tragedy in a Greek Theatre”, XLI 177; “The Two Brothers”, XLI 194; “The Wedding”, XLI 198; “The Wheelbarrow”, XLI 194; “When My Girl Comes Home”, XLV 64; “You Make Your Own Life” (aka “The Barber”, XLV 69-70), XLV 63-94

548 Proust, Marcel, XLI 127, 245, 249, 318, XLII 142, 157, XLIV 88, XLIX 28, 41, L 36, 141, 158-159, 224; Remembrance of Things Past / A la recherche du temps perdu, XL 55, XLII 157, XLIX 20, L 158

549 Pynchon, Thomas, XLVI 77, L 138; The Crying of Lot 49, L 138; “Entropy”, L 138

550 Racine, Jean, XLI 218, 228-230

551 Radcliffe, Ann, XLII 13-14, 22, XLIII 12

552 Rain, Edna, XLVII 98

553 Rand, Ayn, XLI 369

554 Rank, Otto, XLIV 69; The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology, XLIV 69

555 Ransom, John Crowe, XLI 303, 305

556 , L 197; Madonna with Carnation, L 197

557 Rée, Jonathan, I See a Voice, XLI 43,54

558 Reinhardt, Max, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, LI 112

559 , Jean, The Rules of the Game, XLI 130

560 Rhys, Jean, XLI 277

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 107

561 Ricoeur, Paul, XLVII 178, L 14, 173, 180; Le conflit des interprétations : essais d’herméneutique, XLVII 178; « La structure, le mot, l’événement », XLVII 178; “What Is a Text ? Explanation and Understanding”, XLVII 178-179

562 Riffaterre, Michael, XLVI 47, XLVIII 82, XLIX 35; Semiotics of Poetry, XLII 72

563 , Rainer Maria, XLI 133, 380, XLII 64, 70, XLVI 171; “Archaic Torso of ”, XLI 380

564 Rimbaud, Arthur, XLII 150

565 Robinson, Edward Arlington, XLI 154 ; “Mr. Flood’s Party”, XLI 154

566 Robinson, Harry, XLVII 101-103, 106, 114; Write It On Your Heart: The World of an Okanagan Storyteller, XLVII 101; “Coyote Tricks Owl”, XLVII 114

567 Robinson, Marilynne, XLI 304

568 Robinson, Mary, XLVI 13, 35

569 Robson, Mark, XLVIII 96, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, XLVIII 96

570 Rorty, Richard, L 26

571 Rosset, Clément, XLIX 45, 157, 163, 169

572 Rossetti, Christina, “Goblin Market”, XLV 166

573 Roth, Henry, XLIV (special issue); Call It Sleep, XLIV 25, 27, 30, 36-37, 40, 42-44, 46-47, 52, 54, 65-66, 68-71, 73-75, 77, 79-81, 85-94, 96, 100, 103-106, 108; A Diving Rock on the Hudson, XLIV 32, 33, 43, 48, 89, 107; From Bondage, XLIV 31, 34-35; Mercy of a Rude Stream, XLIV 25-36, 40, 42-43, 47, 66, 73, 78, 81, 85-86, 88-89, 94-96, 98, 100, 104-108; Oedipus, Meet Orestes, XLIV 47; Requiem for Harlem, XLIV 29; Rothiana: Henry Roth nella critica italiana, XLIV 54; Shifting Landscape: Selected Essays and Short Stories, XLIV 26-27, 30, 38-39, 43-44, 46, 49, 51, 53-54, 56, 71, 73-74, 76, 79-80, 87, 89, 91-92, 98, 103-111; A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, XLIV 27-29, 42, 104, 108; “At Times in Flight: A ”, XLIV 37-48, 93-96; “Batch 2”, XLIV 46; “Broker”, XLIV 47, 74, 90; “The Dun Dakotas”, XLIV 47, 93, 95-96; “Final Dwarf”, XLIV 65-83; “If We Had Bacon”, XLIV 89, 106; “Itinerant Ithacan”, XLIV 26, 30-36, 94-98 “Kaddish”, XLIV 96, 98; “Lawrence”, XLIV 13-24; “Maine Sampler”, XLIV 13, 75-76, 81; “Many Mansions”, XLIV 47, 90-93; “No Longer at Home”, XLIV 73, 96, 98; “Petey and Yotsee and Mario”, XLIV 47, 92; “P & T Yuletide – a Sketch”, XLIV 27; “The Rail”, XLIV 70; “Report from Mishkenot Sha’ananim”, XLIV 96, 98; “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple”, XLIV 26-29, 35-36, 46-47, 90-93, 108; “The Surveyor”, XLIV 47, 49-63, 96-97; “Vale Atque Ave”, XLIV 96, 99; “The Wrong Place”, XLIV 54-55, 58-61, 96-97

574 Roth, Herman, XLIV 71, 76, 80-81; Sin of Divorce, XLIV 71

575 Roth, Philip, Operation Shylock, XLV 116

576 Rougemont, Denis de, XLIII 31

577 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, XLI 128; Du Contrat Social, XLV 132; L’Emile, LI 130

578 , Peter Paul, XLV 152, L 198; The of Arachne, XLV 152

579 Ruskin, John, Fors Clavigera, XLV 153

580 Russell, George William (AE), XLI 176, XLV 31, XLVIII 27

581 Russell, Sandi, XLVII 79, 193-202; Glancing Fires: An Investigation into Women’s Creativity, XLVII 193; Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present, XLVII 193, 198-199; Tidewater, XLVII 194, 197-198, 202; (ed.) The Virago Book of Love

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 108

Poetry, XLVII 193; “The American Songbook and Beyond”, XLVII 193; “Sister”, XLVII 194-196

582 (Hector Hugh Munro), XLV 47-62; Beasts and Super-Beasts, XLV 47, 49-50, 53-54, 57-58; The Chronicles of Clovis, XLV 47, 51-52; Reginald, XLV 47, 50, 57; Reginald in Russia, XLV 47, 50, 57; The Rise of the Russian Empire, XLV 56; The Toys of Peace, XLV 47, 53, 55, 57; “The Boar-Pig”, XLV 53, 57; “Esmé”, XLV 52-53, 57; “The Forbidden Buzzards”, XLV 57; “Gabriel-Ernest”, XLV 50, 52, 56, 58; “Hyacinth”, XLV 57; “The Innocence of Reginald”, XLV 50; “Louis”, XLV 57; “The Lull”, XLV 58; “The Lumber Room”, XLV 54-55; “Morlvera”, XLV 55; “Not So Stories”, XLV 47; “The Open Window”, XLV 58; “The Penance”, XLV 53-54; “The Quest”, XLV 51-53; “Reginald on House Parties”, XLV 57; “Reginald’s Choir Treat”, XLV 50, 58; “The Schartz-Metterklume Method”, XLV 50; “Sredni Vashtar”, XLV 51, 53-57; “The Story-Teller”, XLV 49, 56, 57; “The Strategist”, XLV 57; “Tobermory”, XLV 56; “The Toys of Peace”, XLV 57; “The Westminster Alice”, XLV 47

583 Salinger, J. D., XLI 277, 313; XLVI 166

584 Salkey, Andrew, XLVII 156

585 Sand, George, XLI 133

586 Sands, Ethel, L 217, 219

587 Sappho, L 193, 197

588 Sargent, John Singer, XLI 42

589 Saroyan, Williams, XLI 147

590 Sartre, Jean-Paul, XLV 129, XLVI 131, XLVII 178; Les Mots, XLV 129 ; « Qu’est-ce que la littérature? » / “What Is Litterature ? ”, XLVII 178

591 Saussure, Ferdinand de, XL 145, XLI 73-74, XLVII, 20, 50; Course in General Linguistics, XLI 81

592 Sayers, Dorothy L, L 98

593 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, XLI 63

594 Schiller, Friedrich, LI 163

595 Schnackenberg, Gjertrud, The Throne of Labdacus, XLV 146

596 Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel, L 208

597 Schubert, Franz, L 207-208, LI 164; Winterreise, LI 161; “Die Forelle” / “The Trout”, L 207-208

598 Schwarz, Hans, XLII 107; XLVIII 62; Death and the Maiden, XLVIII 62

599 Scorsese, Martin, The Last Temptation of Christ, XL 104

600 Scott, Dennis, XLVII 156

601 Scott, Walter, XL 23, XLI 124, 188, 377, XLIII 12, 21; The Abbot, XL 23-24; The Waverley Novels, XLIII 21

602 Scriabin, Alexander, XLVI 25, 63, 65-66, 91

603 Searle, John, L 77

604 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, XLIII 26

605 Seldes, Gilbert, XLIII 81, 82

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 109

606 Selvon, Sam, XLI 288, XLVII 156

607 Seneca, LI 47

608 Senior, Olive, XLI 287-298, XLVII 23, 111-113, 116-119, 123, 167-176, 194; Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories, XLVII 168, 171; Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories, XLVII 113, 168-169, 172; Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage, XLVII 116-117 Gardening in the Tropics, XLI 295; Summer Lightning and Other Stories, XLI 294, XLVII 168-171, 173, 175; “Ascot”, XLVII 168-169; “Ballad”, XLVII 26, 168, 174-175; “Confirmation Day”, XLVII 171; “Country of the One-Eye God”, XLVII 171; “Discerner of Hearts”, XLVII 172; “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?”, XLVII 169-170, 173; “Mad Fish”, XLVII 173-174; “The Tenantry of Birds”, XLVII 168, 171; “The Two Grandmothers”, XLI 296-297; “You Think I Mad, Miss?”, XLVII 112, 115, 118; “Zig-Zag”, XLVII 168-169

609 Serres, Michel, L 14, 148, LI 128-129; Genesis, L 148; Statues, LI 129

610 Shakespeare, William, XLI 43, 124, 126, 128, 137-138, 185, 374, XLV 153, XLVI 13, 21, XLVII 72, XLIX 39, 68-69, 74-75, 77-78, L 13, 36, 39, LI 47, 64, 74, 97, 109-112, 116, 118-121; Anthony and , XLIX 77-78; The Tragedy of Coriolanus, XLIX 69; King Lear, XLI 374, LI 48; Macbeth, XLI 259, LI 97,102; The Merchant of Venice, XLII 155; Midsummer Night’s Dream, XLI 54, LI 109-112, 114-116, 118; Romeo and Juliet, LI 74; The Tempest, XLI 341, XLIX 40, 68, 75, 77, 80, L 192; Troilus and Cressida, XLV 153, LI 74

611 Shange, Ntozake, XLVII 193

612 Shaw, George Bernard, XLI 148, 309, L 164-165

613 Shelley, Mary, XLI 245; Frankenstein, XLV 118

614 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, XLI 65, 368, L 74, LI 91

615 Shen, Tsunh Wen, XLI 218-220

616 Sheridan, John D., XLI 126

617 Sherry, Norman, XLI 147

618 Sickert, Walter, XLI 50, 63, L 14, 198, 213

619 Silko, Leslie Marmon, XLVII 99; Storyteller, XLI 106

620 Sillitoe, Alan, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, XLI 266

621 Silvera, Makeda, XLVII 165

622 Simonides of Ceos, L 185

623 Simpson, Helen, L 70, LI 137-148, 161-166; Constitutional, LI 138; Dear George, LI 138; Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, LI 20, 138; Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, LI 27, 137, 139; “Café Society”, LI 26-27; “Escape Clauses”, LI 138; “Good Friday, 1663”, LI 138; “The Green Room”, LI 138; “Labour”, LI 20, 138; “”, LI 13, 137-148; “The Tipping Point”, 161-166; “To Her Unready Boyfriend”, LI 138

624 Sinclair, Iain, XL 29

625 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, XLIII 88

626 Smith, George Albert, As Seen Through a Telescope, L 161

627 Sollers, Philippe, XLIX 109; Théorie des exceptions, XLIX 109

628 Sophocles, XLV 146; Oedipus at Colonus, LI 21

629 Southey, Robert, XLI 360

630 Souzay, Gérard, LI 164

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 110

631 Spark, Muriel, XLI 243-254, 343, XLVII 194; The Bachelors, XLI 252-253; A Far Cry from Kensington, XLI 252-253; Memento Mori, XLI 249, 252; Robinson, XLI 254; “Bang-bang, You’re Dead”/ “Pan-pan, tu es morte”, XLI 247; “The Executor”, XLI 244; “The Go-Away Bird”, XLI 246; “The House of the Famous Poet”, XLI 250; “The Pawnbroker’s Wife”, XLI 252; “The Poet’s House”, XLI 247; “The Portobello Road”, XLI 244; “The Seraph and the Zambezi”, XLI 243; “The Twins”, XLI 249; “You Should Have Seen the Mess”, XLI 253

632 Spencer, Elizabeth, XLI 325-344, XLVII 194; Fire in the Morning, XLI 336; Knights and Dragons, XLI 328, 331, 334; The Light in the Piazza, XLI 327, 329, 332; The Night Travellers, XLI 328-329, 331, 335-336; Nouvelles du Sud, XLI 325-326; The Salt Line, XLI 335, 341-342; Ship Island, XLI 334; XLI 343; The Snare, XLI 329-330, 334, 338; “The Cousins”, XLI 339; “First Dark”, XLI 329; “The Girl Who Loved Horses”, XLI 339; “I, Maureen”, XLI 330, 338; “Indian Summer”, XLI 334; “Jean-Pierre”, XLI 336; “Prelude to a Parking Lot”, XLI 334, 338; “Ship Island”, XLI 329-330; “A Southern Landscape”, XLI 332-333, 339

633 Spender, Stephen, L 202

634 Sperber, Dan, XL 19, 69, 80

635 Spillane, Mickey, XLI 259

636 Stafford, Jean, XLI 304-305, 313-314

637 Stanislavski, Constantin, LI 119

638 Starr, Floyd Favel, XLVII 98

639 Stein, Gertrude, XL 139, XLVI 166, XLVII 51-53, 55, XLIX 20, 33, 79, 83-84, 190, 192, 203; The Making of Americans, XLVII 51-53; Three Lives, XLI 113; “Poetry and Grammar”, XL 144, XLVII 52-53

640 Steiner, George, XLVII 179

641 Stendhal, XLI 127-128, 276, XLIX 33, LI 41; Scarlet and Black, LI 41

642 Stephens, James, XLI 178

643 Sterne, Laurence, XL 122, XLI 188, L 138; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, XL 133, L 138

644 Stevenson, Robert Louis, XLI 42, XLV 48

645 Stieglitz, Alfred, XLI 50

646 Stoker, Bram, XLV 175

647 Stoppard, Tom, Travesties, LI 53

648 Strachey, Lytton, L 107, 203

649 , Igor, Petrushka, XLIV 43

650 Swedengorg, Emanuel, XLI 221

651 Swift, Jonathan, XLV 150, 159, L 138; Gulliver’s Travels, XL 38, L 138; A Modest Proposal, XLV 51; “A Tale of a Tub”, L 138

652 Synge, John Millington, XLVII 93-94; Prose, XLVII 94

653 Tan, Amy, The Joy Luck Club, XLI 112, XLVII 79, XLVIII 43

654 Tate, Allen, XLI 304-306, 327

655 Taylor, Charles, XLV 33-34, XLVIII 29

656 Taylor, Elizabeth, XLVI 166

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 111

657 Taylor, Peter, XLI 260, 303-324, XLVII 194; A Long Fourth and Other Stories, XLI 324; The Old Forest (film), XLI 317; The Old Forest and Other Stories, XLI 303, 313; Presences, XLI 312; A Stand in the Mountains, XLI 312; A Summons to Memphis, XLI 303, 321-322; Tennessee Day in St. Louis, XLI 312; “The Gift of the Prodigal”, XLI 306; “The Hand of Emmagene”, XLI 310; “Je Suis Perdu”, XLI 321; “Mrs. Billingsby’s Wine”, XLI 315; “The Old Forest”, XLI 317-320; “Rain in the Heart”, XLI 322; “Reservations”, XLI 305; “The Senator’s Daughter”, XLI 323; “Tom Tell Him”, XLI 312; “The Walled Garden”, XLI 307

658 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, The Nutcracker, L 194

659 Tchernychevsky, Nikolaï, Que faire?, XLI 285

660 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, XLV 102

661 Tennyson, Alfred, XLI 138, L 153, 164, 166; “The Lady of Shallot”, L 163

662 Terence, XLVII 31

663 Terry, Ellen, L 157, 160, 163-166; The Story of My Life, L 164

664 Terry, Philip, XLV 148; (ed) Ovid Metamorphosed, XLV 147

665 Thackeray, William Makepeace, XLI 188; Pendennis, L 85

666 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, XLVII 199

667 Thoreau, Henry David, XLIII 109, XLIX 33, 160, 166-167, 170; Journal, XLIX 160, 170; Walden, XLIV 75, XLIX 160, 169

668 , XLV 152; The Rape of Europa, XLV 152, 156-157

669 Todorov, Tzvetan, XLII 16, XLIII 23, 27, XLIX 43, 139-140, LI 41; The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a / Introduction à la littérature fantastique, XLII 22, XLIII 28,; Mikhaïl Bakhtine. Le Principe dialogique, XLIX 138, 143; Poétique de la prose, XLI 86, XLIX 139

670 Tolstoy, Leo, XLI 159, 188, 190, 367, 371-373, 377, XLII 73, XLVI 36, 43-44, 48, 60, 148, XLIX 33; The Death of Ivan Ilych, XLI 379; War and Peace, XLI 135, XLVI 36, 38, 57

671 Toomer, Jean, Cane, XLI 103

672 Torok, Maria, XL 106

673 Toscanini, Arturo, XLIV 43

674 Toussaint, Jean, XLVII 193

675 Trevor, William, XLI 202, 204, 213, XLV 64; “Pritchett Proclaimed”, XLV 64

676 Trollope, Anthony, XLI 308; Barchester Towers, XLI 308; The Warden, XLI 308

677 Turgenev, Ivan, XLI 135, 213, 317, XLV 32, 37, 40, XLVII 87, XLVIII 28, 33, 36, XLIX 33, L 159; A Sportsman’s Sketches, XLI 174, XLV 32, 37, 40, XLVIII 28, 33, 36; “Old Portraits”, XLI 317

678 Turner, William, XL 30

679 Twain, Mark, XLV 156-157, XLVII 179, XLIX 33, 143; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, XLIV 28, XLV 68, XLVII 30-31; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, XLVII 31; Life on the Mississippi, XLV 156;

680 Tyler, Anne, XLVIII 46

681 Tzara, Tristan, LI 53

682 Unsworth, Barry, The Songs of the Kings, XLV 146

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 112

683 Updike, John, XLI 276-277, 304, XLIII 121-141; Olinger Stories, XLI 111; “A & P” XLIII, 121-141

684 Valéry, Paul, XLII 62, 72, XLVI 23, 53, 136; Cahiers I, XLII 62, 72; Cahiers II, XLII 61, XLVI 23, 53; “Les coquillages”, XLVI 136

685 Vanbrugh, John, The Provoked Wife, LI 139

686 Vanderhaeghe, Guy, XLVII 111-112, 118-121, 123; “Cages”, XLVII 112, 120, 123

687 Van Doren, Mark, XLIV 42

688 Velázquez, Diego, XLV 150, 152, 154-159; Las Hilanderas, XLV 149-150, 152, 154-158; Las Meninas, XLV 152

689 , Giuseppe, La Forza del Destino, XLIV 33

690 Verlaine, Paul, XLIX 113-114; « Colloque sentimental », XLIX 113, 115

691 Vidocq, Eugène-François, The Memoirs of Vidocq, XL 23, 25

692 Vinci, Leonardo da, XLI 72, XLIII 94, L 197

693 Virgil, XLI 35, 37, XLIV 43, XLVII 33, Aeneid, XLVII 33

694 Vizenor, Gerald, XLVII 99, 105

695 Voltaire, XLII 64

696 Von Horváth, Ödön, LI 163

697 Von Tepl, Johannes, Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, XLVI 139

698 Wace, Roman de Rou, XLVII 39

699 , L 206; Lohengrin, LI 26; Parsifal, L 207; Tristan und Isolde, XLIV 43

700 Walcott, Derek, XLI 301, XLVII 156

701 Walker, Alice, XLVII 76, 79-80

702 Walker, Margaret, XLVII 196

703 Walton, Eda Lou, XLIV 31, 33, 37, 40-43, 45, 47, 70-72, 85, 94, XLIX 167

704 Warhol, Andy, XLVI 76, 166-167

705 Warner, Alan, XLII 84-85, 88

706 Warner, Marina, XLV 146; The Leto Bundle, XLV 146; “Leto’s Flight”, XLV 152

707 Warren, Robert Penn, XLI 304-306, 324; All the King’s Men, XLI 306

708 Watts, George Frederic, L 160, 164-166

709 Waugh, Evelyn, XLV 47

710 Webster, John, XLI 124

711 Wedekind, Frank, Lulu, LI 123

712 Welch, James, XLVII 99

713 Wells, Herbert George, L 37

714 Welsh, Irvine, XLII 86, XLVII 31; Trainspotting, XLVII 31

715 Welty, Eudora, XLI 107, 233, 260, 309, 313, 325, 343, 377, XLV 64, XLVIII 44-46, 48-53, 55; The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, XLVIII 47-48, 50-51; The Golden Apples, XLI 103, 107-108, XLVIII 44-46, 48-49, 51, 55; The Wide Net, XLI 113; “A Family of Emotions”, XLV 64; “June Recital”, XLVIII 47; “Music from Spain”, XLVIII 48-49; “Place in Fiction”, XLI

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 113

233; “Sir Rabbit”, XLVIII 46; “The Wanderers”, XLVIII 46-47, 50; “The Whole World Knows”, XLVIII 48, 50

716 Wendt, Albert, XLVII 150

717 Westbrook, Kate, LI 138

718 Westbrook, Mike, LI 138

719 Wharton, Edith, XLI 351, XLIII 59-74 ; Certain People, XLIII 67; The Cruise of the Vanadis, XLIII 59; Here and Beyond, XLIII 61; In Morocco, XLIII 59, 61, 63, 67, 71; The Writing of Fiction, XLIII 71; “A Bottle of Evian”, XLIII 67; “A Bottle of Perrier”, XLIII 59-60, 67-68, 70-71; “The Seed of the Faith”, XLIII 59-62, 64, 67, 70-71

720 Whitman, Walt, XLIII 109, XLIX 42, 80, 163, 167; Leaves of Grass, XLIX 167; Specimen Days, XLIX 167; “The Oaks and I”, XLIX 167

721 Wiene, Robert, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, L 15, 221

722 Wilde, Oscar, XLV 47; The Importance of Being Earnest, LI 53

723 Williams, Tennessee, XLI 130, XLV 168

724 Wilson, Edmund, XLIV 46, XLIX 79; Letters, XLIX 79; “The Wound and the Bow”, XLIV 46

725 Winter, Sylvia, XLI 293

726 Winterson, Jeanette, XLV 163-177, L 98; Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, XLV 173-175; Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, XLV 163-164; The Passion, XLV 164-165, 167-169, 171-172; The PowerBook, XLV 164; The World and Other Places, XLV 164, 174; “Atlantic Crossing”, XLV 163-177; “Disappearance II”, XLV 172; “The Green Man”, XLV 166; “Newton”, XLV 168; “”, XLV 171; “The World and Other Places”, XLV 171

727 Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville, XLV 47

728 Wolfe, Thomas, XLI 379, XLIV 43

729 Wolfe, Tom, XLVI 76; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, XLVI 76

730 Wolff, Tobias, XLI 367-381, XLII 111-113, 124, 126, 128, 131, XLVII 194; Back in the World, XLI 367; The Barracks Thief, XLI 367, XLII 112; In Pharaoh’s Army, XLI 367; In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, XLI 367; Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories, XLII 131; The Night in Question, XLI 367-368, 376, 378-380; Old School, XLI 367; This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, XLI 367, 378, XLII 112; “Bullet in the Brain”, XLI 379; “Desert Breakdown, 1968”, XLII 113; “Face to Face”, XLII 113; “Firelight”, XLI 378; “Flyboys”, XLI 378; “Hunters in the Snow”, XLII 112; “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs”, XLII 124; “The Life of the Body”, XLI 369, 373; “Mortals”, XLI 379; “Powder”, XLI 378; “Smokers”, XLII 112

731 Woolf, Virginia, XL 38, 135-147, XLI 41-47, 50, 52-67, 114, 282, 343, XLVII 22-23, 52, XLIX 28, 35, 41, L (special issue), LI 19, 81-83, 90-92; Between the Acts, L 156-157, 164-166, LI 92; Collected Essays, XLI 57-60, 64-65, L 37, 138; The Complete Shorter Fiction, XL 143, XLI 54-55, 64, L 154, 186; The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, XL 144; The Diary of Virginia Woolf, XLI 54, 65; The Essays of Virginia Woolf, XL 144, XLI 57-59, 64-65; Flush, XLI 63, 65, L 56; Freshwater, L 157, 163-164, 166; A Haunted House and Other Stories, XLI 55-56, 64, L 153, 217; Jacob’s Room, L 92, 159, 181, 187, 203; Kew Gardens, XLI 55, L 14, 122-127, 132-134, 188; The Letters of Virginia Woolf, XLI 54; The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, XLI 64, XLVII 23, LI 20; Monday or Tuesday, XLI 55-56, L 124, 137, 171-173, 180-181, 188, 202-205, 208; Mrs Dalloway, XL 39, XLI 343, L 60, 68, 139, 177, 187, 203; Mrs Dalloway’s Party, XLI 55, 64, L 13, 67, 69; Night and Day, L 122, 132, 171, 221; Orlando: A Biography, XLV 175, L 111, 163, 176, LI 123; A Room of One’s Own, L 87, 91, 93, 121-123, 125-126, 133,

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 114

157; Sketch of the Past, L 159; Three Guineas, L 85, 90-91, 114; To the Lighthouse, XLI 54, L 68, 139, 143, 157, 162, 164, 166, 174-176, 179; The Pargiters, LI 92; Two Stories, XLI 55; (introduction) Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, L 157; The Voyage Out, XLI 54, L 73, 166, 171, 204, 212; The Waves, XLI 44, 52, 54, 63, XLVII 135, L 81, 139, 143, 187, 211-212, 217, LI 92; A Woman’s Essays, XL 143; A Writer’s Diary, XL 146, LI 82; The Years, L 161; “Ancestors”, L 68; “Anon”, L 103, 117, 202; “The Art of Biography”, L 18; “Blue and Green”, XLI 44, L 186, 191, 196, LI 83; “The Cinema”, L 15,157, 221-224; “Craftsmanship”, XL 137, 144-145; “A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus”, L 74; “The Duchess and the Jeweller”, L 13, 49-65; “Ellen Terry”, L 157, 166; “An Essay in Criticism”, XLI 57, 60; “The Evening Party”, XL 142, L 74, 188, LI 81, 90-91, 93; “The Fascination of the Pool”, XLI 44-45, 53-54, L 189, 191-192; “Friendships Gallery”, L 111; “Ghosts”, L 157; “A Glance at Turgenev”, L 159; “Happiness”, XL 139, L 68; “A Haunted House”, XL 140-141, 146, L 143-144, 181; “Holborn Viaduct”, L 13, 33-34; “How Should One Read a Book?”, XLI 61, L 52; “The Impassioned Prose”, XL 144; “Incongruous/Inaccurate Memories”, L 153, 157, 161; “The Introduction”, L 13, 68-71, 73-74, 77-80, 91, 94-95; “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”, L 14, 91, 96, 103-119; “Kew Gardens”, L 14, 121-135, 137-152; “The Lady in the Looking-Glass, A Reflection”, XL 140, XLI 44, 47, 49, 54, XLVII 23, L 14, 18, 20, 22-24, 26-27, 189-190, 192-193, 195-196, 198, 217-223, LI 20; “The Legacy”, L 186; “A Letter to a Young Poet”, XLI 65; “Life and the Novelist”, XLI 62, 65; “The Man Who Loved His kind”, L 13, 33, 38, 68; “The Mark on the Wall”, XL 136-138, 140, L 18-20, 137-138, 173-176; 179-180, 186, 188; “Memoirs of a Novelist”, L 17-20, 221; “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, XL 143, XLI 56, L 18-20, 27, 29, 37, 178; “Mr Conrad: A Conversation”, L 73; “Modern Fiction”, XLI 56, 58-59, 65, L 18, 25, 123-124, 138, 174, 202; “Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points’”, L 18, 20-22, 24, 28, 91-92, 94, 189, 191-192, 196-197, 218; “The Moment: Summer’s Night”, L 140; “Monday or Tuesday”, XL 140, 145, L 181, LI 83; “The Moths”, XLI 44; “The Narrow Bridge of Art”, L 172; “The New Dress”, L 68; “Notes on an Elizabethan Play”, XLI 62; “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”, L 190-192, 194, 198; “Ode Written partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville”, L 187, 196; “On Re-Reading Novels”, XLI 44, 56-57, 59-62; “The Pastons and Chaucer”, L 103; “Phases of Fiction”, XLI, 60, 65; “Portraits”, L 186, 188, 190-191, 196-198; “The Reader”, L 202; “Reading”, L 11, 13, 103; “The Russian Point of View”, XLI 57, 59; “A Scene from the Past”, L 160-163; “Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer”, L 190, 195, 198; “The Searchlight”, L 14, 153-154, 156-157, 167, 195; “A Simple Melody”, L 68; “A Sketch of the Past”, XLI 45, L 157, 159-160, 166, 196; “A Society”, L 91-92, 94, 96, 137, LI 19; “Solid Objects”, XL 138, L 13, 33, 43, 186, 188, 192, 195; “Street Haunting”, L 34; “The String Quartet”, XLVII 23, L 14, 201-215, LI 83; “A Summing Up”, L 68; “The Symbol”, L 188-189, 192, 195; “Sympathy”, XL 144, L 18, 23, 26; “Three Pictures”, L 17-18, 21, 189-193, LI 83; “Together and Apart”, XL 142, L 13, 68-74, 77-80; “Uncle Vanya”, L 188, 198; “An Unwritten Novel”, XL 140, L 18, 20-22, 24, 26, 28, 178-179, 181, 186-187; “Walter Sickert: a Conversation”, XLI 50, 63, L 14, 198, 213; “What the Telescope Discovered”, L 153, 157, 161, 195; “A Women’s College from the Outside”, XL 139, L 91-94-95

732 Wordsworth, William, XLI 28, 65, 128, 138, 215, 245, 259, 368

733 Wright, Richard, XLVII 65-74, 199; Black Boy, XLVII 65, 73; Early Works, XLVII 67-69, 73; Eight Men, XLVII 65-66, 70-71; Native Son, XLVII 65, 73; The Outsider, XLVII 73; Uncle Tom’s Children, XLVII 65-70, 73; “Big Black Good Man”, XLVII 73; “Big Boy Leaves Home”, XLVII 67-68; “Bright and Morning Star”, XLVII 69-70; “Down by the Riverside”, XLVII

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 115

70; “Long Black Song”, XLVII 70; “Man of All Work”, XLVII 70-71; “The Man Who Killed a Shadow”, XLVII 72

734 Wycherley, William, The Country Wife, LI 141

735 Yates, Richard, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, LI 137

736 Yeats, William Butler, XL 62, XLI 127, 133, 140, 143, 153, 171, 176, 178, XLIV 43, XLV 30, XLVI 174, XLVIII 26, 53, LI 53-54; “All Souls’ Night”, XL 62

737 Zangwill, Israel, The Big Bow Mystery, XLV 17

738 Zell, Fran, The Marcy Stories, XLI 112

739 , Emile, XLI 284, XLV 32, XLVIII 28, XLIX 27; “J’accuse”, XLI 284

ABSTRACTS

Index

Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009 116

Index Nominum personarum, Issues 41-51

1 Abel, XLIII 99, 104, 119, XLVII 123

2 Abraham, XLI 34, 35, XLII 49-50

3 Achilles, XLII 164, XLV 146

4 Adam, XLI 30, 38, XLV 98, 169, XLVII 104-105, XLVIII 62, LI 130

5 Aeneas, XLI 36, 87

6 Agamemnon, XLII 161, 165

7 Ahab, XLV 129-130

8 Anchises, XLI 87

9 Apollo, XLI 380, XLV 146, 153

10 Arachne, XLV 149-157

11 , XLV 153

12 Artemis, XLV 171-172

13 King Arthur, XLI 342, L 162

14 Asmodius, XLI 165-167

15 Athena, XLII 162, 164, XLV 149-151, 153-156

16 Bacchus, XLV 153

17 Bluebeard, XLV 152, XLVIII 82, 85-86, 90

18 Cadmus, XLV 147

19 Cain, XLIII 99, 104, 119, XLVII 123

20 Cassandra, XLVII 115

21 Cassiopeia, XLIII 118

22 Cerberus, XLVI 46, 59, XLIX 129

23 Charybdis, XLVIII 85

24 Chronos, XLIX 134

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25 Cinderella, XLVIII 101, 108

26 , XLV 98, LI 51, 68

27 , XL 131

28 , XLIII 118

29 Dorcas, XLVII 169

30 Echo, XLI 49, 50, 54

31 Elijah, XLII 106

32 Europa, XLV 150, 152, 156-157

33 Eurydice, LI 137, 139, 141-146

34 Eve, XLIII 102, 104, XLV 98, 169, XLVII 104-105, XLVIII 62, 95, XLIX 42, 126, LI 127, 130

35 Faust, XL 53, XLI 148, LI 99, 101

36 Gabriel (angel), XLV 169, 171

37 Gaia, XLIII 118

38 Galatea, XLIV 42

39 Geryon, XLV 146

40 Hector, XLII 164

41 Helen (of Troy), XLII 161-162; XLIII 118

42 Heracles / Hercules, XLIV 106, XLV 146, XLIX 77-78

43 Hermes, XL 145

44 Herod, XLV 57

45 Herodias, XLIX 42

46 Iphigenia, XLV 146

47 Isaac, XLII 49-50

48 Isaiah, XLI 229; XLI 329, XLIV 88

49 Ishmael, XLV 129, 131

50 Job, XLV 97

51 Jonah / Jonas, XLI 83, 90, 373, XLV 97, 108, 130-131

52 Jove / , XLV 146-153

53 Juno, XLV 146, LI 44

54 Labdacus, XLV 146

55 Lancelot, XLI 342

56 Laocoon, XLI 145

57 Lazarus, XLI 34, 36

58 Leda, XLV 152

59 Leto, XLV 146, 152

60 Lohengrin, LI 26

61 Lot, XLI 359

62 Virgin Mary, XL, 89-91, LI 99

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63 Mary Magdalene, LI 130

64 Medusa, XLI 226, 228, XLVI 121

65 Menelaus, XLII 161

66 Michael (angel), XLV 169-170

67 , XLV 157

68 Moses, XLI 31, 34, XLV 104, XLVII 91

69 Narcissus / Narcisse, XLI 49, 50, 54, LI 126

70 , XLV 153

71 Noah, XLI 203

72 Odysseus, XLVIII 85, 88

73 Oedipus, XL 115, XLI, 77, XLIII 102, 122, XLIV 47, 52, 66, 68, 72, 109, XLV 97, 118, 141, 146, 168, XLVI 181, XLVII 89, LI 21, 142

74 Omphale, XLIX 78

75 Orestes, XLIV 47

76 Orion, XLV 172

77 Orpheus, XLVI 178, 180, XLVII 35, 40, 46, 89, 94, 96, LI 137, 139, 141-147

78 Pandora, XLVII 139

79 Paris, XLII 161, XLV 98

80 Pegasus, XLIV 39-41, 45-47, XLIV 94

81 Penelope, XLV 98, 153; XLVI 142

82 Percival, XLI 342

83 Phaeton, XLV 152, XLVI 20

84 Philoctetes, XLIV 46

85 Philomena, XLV 153

86 Pluto, XLV 152; LI 142, 144

87 Polyphemus, XLVIII 88

88 Priam, XLII 161

89 Prometheus / Prométhée, XLII 20, XLV 117-119

90 Proserpine, XLV 152

91 Psyche, XL 130-133

92 Pygmalion, XLIV 42

93 Don Quixote, LI 102

94 Raphael (archangel), XLI 165-168, XLV 169-170

95 Remus, XLV 152

96 Robin Hood, XLIV 92

97 Romulus, XLV 152

98 Rumpelstiltskin, XLVI 15

99 Ruth, XLIII 116, XLV 164

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100 Sancho Panza, LI 103

101 Sarah, XLI 165-168

102 Shehrazad / Schéhérazade, XLV 132, XLIX 139

103 Scylla, XLVIII 85

104 Sisyphus, XL 62, 67, XLIII 113

105 Sol, XLVI 100

106 Tobias, XLI 164-168

107 Tobit, XLI 164-165, 167-169

108 Ulysses / Odysseus, XLVI 59, XLV 97-98, 108, 152

109 Uranus, XLIII 114, 115, 118

110 Uzziah, XLI 229

111 , XLIII 118, XLV 98, LI 134

112 Zeus, XLV 118

ABSTRACTS

Index

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“Echo's Bones": Samuel Beckett's Lost Story of Afterlife

José Francisco Fernández

1 What until very recently was the terra incognita of Beckett studies, his early fiction of the 1930s, has been given a tremendous impulse in the last decade of the 20th century and in the first years of the 21st, thanks, among other things, to the publication in 1992 by Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier of Beckett’s first novel Dream of Fair to middling Women (written in 1932). Important scholarly works by John Pilling, such as Beckett before Godot (1997), have shed light on dark aspects of Beckett’s writing at this time, and naturally James Knowlson’s magnificient biography Damned to Fame (1996) has provided a reliable account of the author’s life during this obscure period.

2 Recent scholarship has put much emphasis on Beckett’s readings as a young man, in an attempt to trace the sources of his creative imagination (Beckett’s Books, 2006, by Matthew Feldman, and Notes Diverse Holo, 2006, edited by Matthijs Engelberts and Everett C. Frost should be mentioned here). Beckett’s literary habits such as taking notes from every book that came to his hands and his “technique of distant echo and semi-allusion” (Ackerley, 16) when writing his first prose fictions, have also been the subject of much scrutiny.

3 One of the pieces that remains to be studied in depth from this period is the case of his unpublished short story “Echo’s Bones” (1933), whose manuscript is kept at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA. It is a story which tells much about Beckett’s ambitions as a writer, as well as informing about his personal turmoil just after his period at the École Normale Superieur in Paris. “Echo’s Bones” cannot be understood on its own, but it is necessary to relate it to the main texts where it comes from, the novel Dream of Fair to middling Women and the collection of short stories More Pricks than Kicks (1934).

4 Dream… represents Beckett’s attempt to follow the steps of James Joyce with regard to all-inclusive linguistic exuberance. This novel sums up the main features of Beckett’s early work. In the opinion of John Pilling, it is ambitious, courageously experimental and too exotic to take root (Pattie, 51). What is interesting for the discussion of “Echo’s Bones” is that in this novel Belacqua, the first truly Beckettian hero, and the

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protagonist of the short story, appears for the first time. The character of Belacqua is taken from Dante’s Divina Commedia. He is one of the individuals found by Dante waiting in Antepurgatory. This is how Beckett, the student of Modern Languages at Trinity College Dublin, describes Belacqua in a notebook dated 1926: … and while they continue their discourse a voice addresses them, at which they turn, and find several spirits (I neglegenti) behind the rock, & amongst them one named Belacqua, a Florentine and known to Dante, & who tells that he is doomed to linger there outside the gates of Purgatory for a period the equivalent of his life on earth, on account of his having delayed his repentance to the last” (Engelberts, 45).

5 Dream… is an extraordinary verbal artefact which draws attention to the way it is built by means of its erudite references, its games with the reader and its endless disquisitions, rather than to the narrative itself: “In Dream” writes John Pilling, “Beckett does what he can to disguise the fact that the novel is telling several stories over and above the ‘story’ which it is deliberately telling in a ramshackle manner” (1997, 70).

6 Beckett sent the manuscript of his first novel to several publishing houses, but all of them rejected it on the grounds that it was unpublishable: “It took perhaps a year [between the summer of 1932 and 1933], a year ended by the death of his father [26 June 1933], for Beckett to recognise that Dream was doomed” (Pilling 1999, xx).

7 During this period, which he spent in Dublin, although he had abandoned his career as an academic, he did not abandon writing. He took Belacqua again as his main character, but this time Beckett followed a more or less coherent progression in a reasonably realistic setting. The new adventures of Belacqua would make up the stories he was writing, and which would constitute the volume More Pricks than Kicks. The collection was accepted for publication in September 1933 by Chatto and Windus, and it consists of ten interconnected stories. Two of them, “A Wet Night” and “The Smeraldina’s Billet-Doux” were taken verbatim from Dream… As was characteristic in the novel, in the short stories Beckett’s Belacqua is a man of eccentric habits and difficult relationships with women. In More Pricks… he is seen in different everyday scenes: having an Italian lesson, going to a pub, attending a party, going for a ride to the mountains with his girlfriend, etc. But Belacqua is still very much his own man: the reader first gets a glimpse of this weird character through the eyes of a grocer in the opening story, “Dante and the Lobster”: “Being a warm and hearted human man he felt sympathy and pity for this queer customer [Belacqua] who always looked ill and dejected” (15). The reader also obtains more information on him by the reaction he provokes in other people, as when he enters a local pub in the story “Ding-Dong”: “Here he was known, in the sense that his grotesque exterior had long ceased to alienate the curates and make them giggle…” (43). His actions mark him as a peculiar type, someone who follows his own rules: in the story “Ding-Dong” he buys four seats in heaven from a mendicant woman; in “Love and Lethe” he plans a joint suicide with one of his girlfriends; in “Walking out” he is engaged into voyeuristic activities in the countryside. In the penultimate story, “Yellow”, Belacqua is in hospital to undergo minor surgery, although he dies at the operating theatre. In “Draff”, the last story of the collection, Belacqua is buried and his widow, the Smeraldina, begins a relationship with his best friend. The story (and the book) end with the sentence “So it goes in the world”.

8 The collection, however, was not meant to finish at this point. When it was accepted for publication Beckett’s editor, Charles Prentice, suggested the addition of one more story

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in order to help with the selling of the book. Beckett then wrote “Echo’s Bones” in October 1933 while staying with his mother in a house by the sea near Dublin. But the story proved to be unpalatable for the editor’s taste. In a letter written on 13 November 1933 Prentice complained about “Echo’s Bones”: It is a nightmare. Just too terribly persuasive […] the same horrible and immediate switches of the focus, and the same wild unfathomable energy of the population. ‘Echo’s Bones’ would, I am sure, lose the book a great many readers. People will shudder and be puzzled and confused; and they won’t be keen on analysing the shudder (Knowlson, 173).

9 According to Rubin Rabinovitz “It is easy to imagine why Beckett’s editor – no doubt motivated by the best intentions – found the story objectionable. The setting is unrealistic, the plot improbable, the characters bizarre” (Rabinovitz, 55).

10 Samuel Beckett had probably felt elated at the prospect of having his first volume of fiction published, and in “Echo’s Bones” he returned to the lush style of Dream…, probably feeling that he had been given permission to expand freely on his creative impulse. This might explain the disappointment that he felt when the new story was rejected so bluntly. He had returned to a style, unsatisfactory as it was in many ways because of the overwhelming influence of Joyce, that he had nevertheless conquered for himself and which allowed him to give vent to a feeling of self-pity and self- loathing. In a letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy he expressed his bitterness at the rejection of “Echo’s Bones”. In this piece of fiction, Beckett wrote, he had put “all I know and plenty that I was better still aware of” (Pilling 1999, xxi). After the constrained and moderate tone of More Pricks…, in comparison with the vigorous ornamentation of Dream…, Beckett had poured much of himself into “Echo’s Bones” and that’s why this text is important for a clear picture of Beckett at this period.

11 As has been said, instead of imagining a new episode in Belacqua’s life, Beckett chose to recount his after-death adventures. This procedure has its own logic. The original Belacqua, it will be remembered, is found by Dante waiting to be admitted into Purgatory, doing penance for his lack of initiative in saving his soul. The idea of a place and time outside the progress of history, where some kind of punishment is taking place, certainly appealed to Beckett. “On this earth that is Purgatory…” he wrote (Beckett 2006, 510). Even the tone of the stories in More Pricks… has been termed purgatorial: “Where we are, ever, in this story,” writes Robert Cochram about “Dante and the Lobster”, “and in the world Beckett will establish with increasing authority from here on out, is a purgatory verging on hell, a place of more pricks than kicks. This, then, is the basic situation, the given, a world chock-full of suffering and decline, slow decline” (8).

12 In the last story of the collection, “Draff”, which deals with Belacqua’s burial, there are some hints towards a possible activity of Belacqua in an after life, an illusion cut short in the same paragraph in a characteristic self-mocking style: “Belacqua had often looked forward to meeting the girls, Lucy especially, [his third girlfriend, who appears in the sixth story, “Walking out”, and is run over by a car] hallowed and transfigured beyond the veil. What a hope! Death had already cured him of that naïvete” (195). Nothing in the stories of More Pricks…, however, foretells the wild content of “Echo’s Bones”, even though it represents a kind of coda to the collection. The story departs radically from the rest of the short fictions in the volume, both in terms of language used, and with regard to its plot. Besides, in “Echo’s Bones” Beckett enters briefly into a

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territory, that of the , that he would never use again, which makes the piece more extraordinary.

13 The story of “Echo’s Bones”, as we know it today, is a typescript of 28 pages, thematically divided in three parts. In the first one Belacqua is back after his death to the world of the living, transformed into a ghost and feeling gloomy at being back. The narrator refers to “this tedious process of extinction”, or describes Belacqua “revisit(ing) the vomit” (1)1. The protagonist’s true ambition, we infer from the text, is something close to the achievement of nothingness: “In ‘Echo’s Bones’ Beckett’s hero yearns for the bliss of nonbeing, but he is forced to return to life because he made such a mess of it the first time around” (Rabinovitz, 57-58). If his imagination had perished, he thinks, that would be “a step in the right direction” (1). The narrator also transmits the idea that Belacqua is immersed in a cycle of life followed by death until he atones for his sins: “This is he and the position from which he ventures, to which he is even liable to return after the fiasco, in which he is installed for each dose of expiation of great strength, from which he is caught up each time a trifle better, dryer, less of a natural snob” (1).

14 He is sitting on a fence smoking a cigar when a woman, Zaborovna Privet, turns up, and shows an interest in him.2 After a conversation Belacqua follows the woman to her house where he is ravished by her, just as he was raped at the beginning of Dream… by his most consistent lover, the Smeraldina: “When it was his express intention, made clear in a hundred and one subtle delicate ways, to keep the whole thing pewer and above- bawd” (Dream…, 18).

15 The second section (pages 7-19) begins with Belacqua being accosted by a giant, Lord Gall of Wormwood who, after introducing himself and asking for permission to call Belacqua Adeodatus, takes him by the hand, and they move onwards. At one point the colossus takes Belacqua on his shoulders and pushes him up a tree, in a scene reminiscent of “Jack and the Beanstalk”, setting himself and his guest in an aerie. There, Lord Gall confesses to Belacqua that he is unable to beget an heir, and that he fears his dominions will pass on to his rival, Baron Extravas. This aristocrat keeps a liaison with Lord Gall’s wife, to whom he has transmitted syphilis.

16 The giant does not let Belacqua abandon the nest in the tree and keeps on drinking as the afternoon wears on. Belacqua is asked to look around Lord Gall’s possessions, including a castle in the distance. Before he is finally taken down on the ground Lord Gall asks him to lie with his wife and produce a boy for him. An ostrich called Strauss appears and Lord Gall and Belacqua ride on in towards their destiny. Belacqua carries out his duty with unusual enthusiasm on his part and Moll Gall, the giant’s wife, gives birth to a girl: “The episode, until now a blend of fairy tale, dream, and myth, ends as a shaggy-dog story” (Rabinovitz, 56).

17 In section 3 (pages 19-28) Belacqua seems to be closer than before to his final aim of inhabiting the void, he seems to be in the last stages of his penance: “… Belacqua, at last on the threshold of total extinction as a free corpse, sat on his own headstone, drumming his heels irritably against the R.I.P.” (19). This time it is the cemetery groundsman who appeared in “Draff”, the last story of More Pricks…, now named Mick Doyle, who starts a conversation with Belacqua. The groundsman has come to the graveyard to snatch Belacqua’s recently buried corpse. At Belacqua’s exclamation that he is a body, Doyle says: “There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body” (20).

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18 Belacqua bets Mick that he will not find anything in the tomb. Meanwhile dawn is approaching and both men continue their conversation until it becomes loud and angry. Finally Doyle and Belacqua proceed to open the coffin. It is the protagonist who has to split the wood with an axe, and who has to carry the groundsman’s lantern inside the grave. There is nothing there but a handful of stones.3 The groundsman goes away, the Alba, who has been watching the scene from the conning tower of a submarine also departs and the story finishes again with the words “So it goes in the world”.

19 Rubin Rabinovitz has written authoritatively about the connection between “Echo’s Bones” and the stories that conform More Pricks than Kicks. The unpublished story is, in his opinion, an integral part of the collection: it synthesises Belacqua’s relations with women, it explicitly points to the reason for his behaviour (suppressed incestuous feelings), it offers the conclusion of this snob’s progress and presents a solution to the stories encrypted in the form of myth: “… without ‘Echo’s Bones’ an essential part of the novel’s complex structure is lost […] More Pricks than Kicks is subtle, intrincate, brilliant work; the removal of ‘Echo’s Bones’ has made it needlessly obscure” (Rabinovitz, 61).

20 Although “Echo’s Bones” certainly continues with the adventures of Belacqua and offers useful insights for the interpretation of the whole sequence of stories, it is nevertheless true that it is very different from the pieces in More Pricks… both in the language used and in the topics dealt with. It is my contention that it is the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and not the stories in More Pricks… which constitutes the real source behind “Echo’s Bones”.

21 In the first place, the imagery of the short story is similar to the atmosphere of solipsism that can be found in the novel. In some ways Beckett seems to continue the narrative where he had left it in Dream…4 Rabinovitz himself admits: “The Purgatory in “Echo’s Bones” resembles the inner world in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and it also is called a ‘wombtomb’” (58). Beckett put into practice in “Echo’s Bones” what he had presented as a mere outline in Dream…, that is, the expansion of Belacqua’s darkest aspect of his personality, that which escaped the contradictions of his terrestrial being (active/passive; outward/inward) and which is summarized in the concept of “wombtomb”. This term can be interpreted both as an attitude and as a state of mind and it does appear in Dream… when Belacqua finds a release from the routine of life and can dive freely into his thoughts, as can be appreciated in the following excerpt: The third being was the dark gulf, when the glare of the will and the hammer- strokes of the brain doomed outside to take flight from its quarry were expunged, the and the wombtomb alive with the unanxious spirits of quiet celebration, where there was no conflict of flight and flow and Eros was as null as Anteros and Night had no daughters […] His third being was without axis or contour, its centre everywhere and periphery nowhere, an unsurveyed marsh of sloth. (120-121).

22 In the novel only when his mind is drifting with no purpose does Belacqua achieve “a Limbo purged of desire” moving “with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the never-to-be-born” (Dream…, 44), anticipating the oneiric landscape of “Echo’s Bones”. The references in the aforementioned passage to a state of liberation from the commands of desire and reason, the state of a carefree, unproblematic existence in a kind of atemporal realm, could well be an adequate description of Belacqua in “Echo’s Bones”. Therefore I think that with regards to the relation between More Pricks… and “Echo’s Bones” perhaps it is not so much a question of having an incomplete book of

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short stories, but more a question of having a single story that disrupts the whole sequence of More

23 Pricks… “Echo’s Bones” belongs to a different kind of writing, it is set in a different mind-set and it brings a new tone to the previous stories, as Julie Campbell has written: “Although there are many funny moments in More Pricks…, “Echo’s Bones” treats death and purgatory with such a lightness – more so than anywhere else in Beckett – that it would perhaps have given the volume of stories too bathetic a conclusion” (Campbell, 456).

24 Secondly, what can be called the experimental or non-realist features of the narrative are much more marked in “Echo’s Bones” than in the stories of More Pricks…, and this is exactly the field in which Dream… reigns supreme. Although the style in the stories of More Pricks… was defined at the time of its publication as “witty, extravagant and excessive” (Muir, 42), the picturesque adventures of Belacqua here make some kind of sense, and Belacqua himself makes a certain progression, from the naïve young man in the first story, “Dante and the Lobster”, to the individual who tries to devise methods in his mind in order to confront the idea of a hypothetical disaster when he is in hospital in “Yellow”. In More Pricks… he is, as David Pattie has written, “more a part of the world than any other Beckettian protagonist” (54). But in Dream… and in “Echo’s Bones” the author purposely rejects a coherent and puts in its place the narrator’s textual games, as Ruby Cohn states: “Nowhere in the published Pricks is the narrator quite so ubiquitous as in the unpublished ‘Echo’s Bones’” (59). As a further connection between the novel and the short story, both participate in Beckett’s stylistic exuberance, elaborate remarks and disparaging digressions. Many of the obscure erudite quotations in “Echo’s Bones”, for instance, stem from the same sources as those informing Dream… To offer just one example, at a certain point Belacqua exclaims in “Echo’s Bones”: “ In this world […] which, as you know, is all temptation and commercial travelling…” (21), and this sentence is found in a similar form in Dream…: “This frail life that is all temptation and knighthood” (3). The origin of both sentences, as John Pilling points out in his Beckett’s Dream Notebook (86), lies in Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Just as Beckett inserted in Dream sentences he had taken from well-known authors (St. Augustine, Thomas Carlyle), and lesser-known ones (Pierre Garnier, J. G. Lockhart, Victor Bérard), he continued with this procedure in “Echo’s Bones”.

25 “Echo’s Bones”, it can be said as a conclusion, is a valuable literary document. It shows the furthest Beckett went in his imitation of Joyce, a course of action that he would later abandon. It gives a clear picture of a young writer experimenting with new forms, such as the fairy-tale. With regard to the author’s personal life, it offers insights on a young author struggling with obsessions (like his unresolved conflict between his desire for women and his search for independence) that would accompany him in future works.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerley, C.J. Demented Particulars. The Annotated . Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004.

Beckett, Samuel. Dante…Bruno. Vico..Joyce. In Samuel Beckett. The Grove Centenary Edition. Vol. IV. Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism. Ed. Paul Auster. New York: The Grove Press, 2006. 495-510.

---. More Pricks than Kicks. London: & Boyars, 1970 (1934).

---. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1992.

---. “Echo’s Bones”. Typescript B389/122, Beckett Collection. Baker Library. Dartmouth College: New Hampshire.

Beckett’s Dream Notebook. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999.

Campbell, Julie. ‘“Echo’s Bones’ and Beckett’s Disembodied Voices”. Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 11. Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000/Fin sans Fin en l’an 2000. Eds. Angela Moorjani & Carola Veit. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 454-60.

Cochram, Robert. Samuel Beckett. A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Cohn, Ruby. A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005 (2001).

Engelberts, Matthijs and Everett Frost, eds. Notes Diverse Holo. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006.

Feldman, Matthew. Beckett’s Books. London: Continuum, 2006.

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997 (1996).

Muir, Edwin. “More Pricks than Kicks” (Listener, 4 July 1934). Rpt. in Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage. Eds. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman. London: Routledge, 1979. 42-43.

Pattie, David. The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Pilling, John. Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Rabinovitz, Rubin. The Development of Samuel Beckett’s Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

NOTES

1. The page numbers of the story “Echo’s Bones” correspond to the typescript as can be found in Dartmouth College. 2. It should be remembered that both in Dream… and in More Pricks…women, with the exception of the Alba, always express an intense desire for Belacqua, who basically wants to be left alone. He seeks their company but abhors compromise and does not seem very keen on sexual contact. To the Smeraldina’s exasperation in Dream…, he tells her that he prefers to love her in the distance. In the story “Walking Out”, from More Pricks…, he even advices his fiancée to take a lover: “Time and again he had urged her to establish their married life on this solid basis of a cuckoldry” (110-111)

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3. According to the myth of Echo, told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Echo is punished for her talkativeness and rejected by Narcissus, whom she loved. She shrinks and disappears physically until only her bones are left. The bones are later transformed into stones. 4. In a telling episode from section “TWO” of Dream…Belacqua spends two months apart from everyone, alone with his thoughts, mentally visiting a dark space which could be an apt description of the realm inhabited by the protagonist in “Echo’s Bones”: “The lids of the hard aching mind close, there is suddenly gloom in the mind; not sleep, not yet, nor dream, with its sweats and terrors, but a waking ultra-cerebral obscurity, thronged with grey angels; there is nothing of him left but the umbra of grave and womb where it is fitting that the spirits of his dead and his unborn should come abroad” (Dream…, 44).

ABSTRACTS

More Pricks than Kicks (1934), le premier livre de fiction publié par Samuel Beckett, a attiré l'attention des chercheurs presque dès sa parution. Les raisons ne manquent pas puisque le livre nous propose, en dix chapitres, un parcours pour la vie de Belacqua Shuah, le premier héros beckettien. Les chapitres se succèdent et tournent autour du rapport particulier que le protagoniste entretient avec les femmes et de son désir d'échapper aux tentations de la vie mondaine. Les deux derniers chapitres prennent une résonance singulière : Belacqua décède lors d'une opération chirurgicale puis il est enterré. Cependant, la mort du protagoniste ne signifie pas la fin de cette histoire extraordinaire. L'éditeur de Beckett lui a demandé d'ajouter un chapitre complémentaire "Echo's Bones" qu'il a finalement rejeté.

AUTHORS

JOSÉ FRANCISCO FERNÁNDEZ José Francisco Fernández lectures English literature at the University of Almería (Spain). He has co-edited Irish Landscapes (University of Almería, 2003) and Contemporary Debates on the Short Story (Peter Lang, 2007). He is also one of the contributors to The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story (Facts on File, 2007). He is particularly interested in the novels and short stories of Samuel Beckett and has published a variety of critical studies on Beckett’s early fiction.

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Samuel Beckett's maternal passion or hysteria at work in company/ compagnie

Pascale Sardin

Beckett, Surrealism and Hysteria

1 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Samuel Beckett translated a number of texts by prominent French Surrealists, amongst which celebrated poems by Eluard and by Breton, which appeared in the 1932 ‘Surrealist Number’ of This Quarter edited by Edward W. Titus and André Breton himself. Moreover, Beckett worked on the translation of excerpts from The Immaculate Conception, an experimental series of long prose poems by André Breton and Paul Eluard tracing life from ‘Conception’ to ‘Death’ and simulating five forms of mental disorder, and also put into English an editorial published in La Révolution surréaliste signed by Breton and Aragon in honour of the ‘Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria.’1 In this very short manifesto, the authors, who were reasserting their severance from traditional modes of writing, defined hysteria ‘as a supreme means of expression’ and celebrated ‘the greatest poetic discovery of the latter nineteenth century.’ (320-321) Although Beckett probably did not agree with the optimism that accompanied the Surrealists’ championing of the powers of love and dreams, their insistence on the breakdown of reason most certainly struck the young intellectual, while confirming his belief that the future of art lay in avant-garde and the relinquishing of realistic forms of writing. Beckett’s 1934 essay on ‘Recent Irish Poetry,’ which highlights the split in the subject-object relation, also explicitly echoes Breton and Aragon’s extolling of hysteria, which, according to them is ‘marked by the subversion […] of the relations established between the subject and the moral world’ (321) (Knowlson, 1996: 107 and Albright: 11)

2 We also know from Beckett’s ‘Psychology Notes’ held at Trinity College Dublin—which he took in the mid-thirties—that he had read extensively on the subject of psychoanalysis. More specifically, he studied very closely the topic of hysteria dealt

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with in chapters 2, 4 and 7 of The Treatment of Neuroses by Ernest Jones. He was also well aware, from having annotated Otto Rank’s Trauma of Birth that psychoanalysis was invented by Anna O. the first patient whom Joseph Breuer treated in 1881 and whose case was published in 1895 in Studies in Hysteria by Freud and Breuer. What is not recorded in Beckett’s 1930s notes, but what is of utmost importance for his future as a bilingual writer, is that one of Anna O.’s most dramatic hysterical symptoms was her impaired ability to speak German, her mother tongue, and her recourse to foreign languages to express herself when her illness was most acute.

3 Moreover, critics have shown that Beckett’s Psychology Notes were probably taken during his own psychoanalysis with Bion, which was begun after his father’s death in 1933. (Engelberts: 157-159) As is well-known, Beckett stated that he had memories of being into his mother’s womb. Far from being pleasurable, these intrauterine memories were quite unpleasant; he recalled feeling ‘trapped’ and ‘imprisoned,’ ‘crying to be let out’: ‘I remember being in pain but being unable to do anything about it. I used to go back to my digs and write notes on what had happened, on what I’d come up with.’ (Knowlson, 2006: 68) In a February 1970 interview he also said: Even before the foetus can draw breath it is in a state of barrenness and of pain. I have a clear memory of my own foetal existence. It was an existence where no voice, no possible movement could free me from the agony and darkness I was subjected to. (Cronin 2)

4 The pain and powerlessness the young man reminisced were then vividly echoed in Jung’s London 1935 lecture Beckett attended about a girl the world-renowned psychoanalyst could not treat because she had, he said, never actually been born. Beckett was later to refer to this famous case history several times in his oeuvre. He fictionalized it to great effect in the play Footfalls some forty years later, a play further echoed in the novella Company written in the late seventies.

5 It is also well-known that Beckett was a bilingual writer, a writer who nearly systematically translated, adapted or rewrote his text(s) in the other language, be it French or English, depending on the language chosen for the first version of a piece. According to Linda Collinge, who studied Beckett’s rewriting of Malone meurt into English, the recourse to a foreign language was one way for the bilingual writer to cope with the suffering linked to his mother tongue: En choisissant le français comme langue d’expression, Beckett trouvait un moyen d’éviter les pièges affectifs de la langue maternelle et de s’éloigner des douleurs qu’ils impliquaient. […] En s’auto-traduisant, Beckett accepte de retourner dans cet espace linguistiquement difficile, sans accepter pour autant d’être en prise directe avec la douleur affective du retour à la langue maternelle. (76-77)

6 What I would like to add to this analysis is that Beckett found in bilingual writing— understood as a complex rewriting process in the other language—a way of dealing with the intense state of anxiety originating in the uterus; in other words, that he found in bilingual writing his own ‘supreme means of expression,’ that is to say a mode of expression having to do with hysteria. To try and prove this, I will focus on Company/ Compagnie, a hysterical text both in form and content, as I will purport to show through a series of analogies, but also probably the apotheosis of Beckett’s intricate self- translating process.

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Company and the ‘Wombtomb’ Experience

7 As attested by Beckett’s ‘Sottisier Notebook’ held at the University of Reading (MS 2901), in which Beckett jotted down notes in the period covering 1976-1982 and containing ‘draft notes prefiguring Company,’ (Bryden: 195) Beckett started working on the novella shortly after completing Footfalls in 1975. Company was begun under the working title ‘The Voice VERBATIM’ on January 16th, 1977 (UoR MS 2910, see Krance: 189). In April of 1977, Beckett had been busy translating Footfalls into Pas, a task which he completed the next month. Indeed, on May 5th he began the so-called ‘Olympic notebook’ containing a more advanced, and bilingual, version of the novella entitled ‘COMPANY – COMPAGNIE, May 77 – August 79.’ (UoR MS 1822, qtd in Bryden: 109) But a few days later, he asserted that he was ‘pleased that he now has a reasonably good French translation of Footfalls.’ (Pilling: 203) Such proximity might account for the lexical echoes of Footfalls in Company as when one reads: ‘Sole sound in the silence your footfalls,’ (11) or when the phrase it all—which was also the working title of Footfalls— crops up in the repetitive of the text (in the phrase ‘devising it all for company,’ 18, 27, 35). Both texts reflect Beckett’s fascination for the morbid mother-child link originating in the uterus, one reason for his well-documented lifelong dread of women and fertility2. As I have argued elsewhere, Footfalls is a hysterical play, in so far as hysteria etymologically originates in the uterus. Indeed the play takes place in the metaphorical ‘chamber’ of the womb/tomb, placing the spectators, individually, in the position of an infans, a pre-verbal, pre-sexual being, perceiving in May’s abject formlessness their own regressions. Looking back at the very origins of theatre, the play performs a tragic ritualistic ceremony that will never be accomplished. (Sardin: 2008) To a certain extent, Company can be seen to be Footfalls’ pendant in prose form, and for a male voice. In both texts, the structural apparatus of Footfalls/Pas relies on a form of dissociation of sight and sound. In Company, instead of being shown, this dissociation is told. (5) Instead of experiencing it in the here and now of the theatre, the reader is asked to ‘Imagine.’3 In Company, as in Footfalls, ‘A voice comes to one in the dark.’(5)4

8 In both texts also, Beckett toys with the French homophony naître/n’être (‘to be born’/ ‘not to be’ or ‘to be nothing’) and with the English womb/tomb paronomasia 5. The Hearer, lying inert on his back, could well be a paralysed old man, agonising and suffering from a linguistic form of dissociation, hearing his own voice in the second and third person singular. In ‘The Voice VERBATIM,’ a primitive version of Company, Beckett expounds the vocal apparatus of the text: ‘Speech by A overheard by B described to C […] A, B, C, one and the same.’ (UoR MS 2901, qtd. in Krance: 194) What the character hears are memories of his past life which both gratify and torment him. As Stanley E. Gontarski and Chris Ackerley have justly underlined, the ‘piece is dominated by scenes of Samuel Beckett’s early life recurrent in his work that assailed him psychologically until the end. Many are painful. The child in these memories seems never to have been the boy his parents wanted.’ (106) Like the hysteric, the protagonist lives in the past and suffers from memories of the past, especially that of his own birth. 6 He also keeps imagining the room around him as a womb. As Matthew Feldman quite rightly observed, one can read in Company echoes of Beckett’s notes on Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth, especially in ‘the darkened, embryonic condition of the narrator.’ (107) The situation of the hearer ‘huddled with his legs drawn up within the semi-circle of

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his arms and his head on his knees,’ (21) seeking the comfort of another’s presence, reminds us of the ‘[a]nxiety of [the] child left alone in [a] dark room due to his unconscious being reminded (er-innert) of [the] intrauterine situation,’ as described by Beckett in one of his entries on Rank. (TCD MS 10971/8/34, qtd. in Feldman ibid.) In another entry, hysteria and intrauterine life are explicitly linked in Beckett’s notes: ‘hysterical paralysis’ is said to bring the patient ‘to realisation of primal situation, with the horror of being freed from it,’ when the ‘analytic situation identified with [the] intrauterine one’ also puts the ‘patient back in position of [the] unborn.’ (Idem) According to Juan-David Nasio, ‘the fundamental fantasy’ in hysteria is that of the womb; and the way he describes this fantasy is greatly reminiscent both of Company and Imagination Dead Imagine: The scenario is very simple: a man and a woman, their bodies intertwined, conceive a child without any genital penetration. The hysteric is not only the creator and the actor in this dream, playing the role of the immaculate Virgin as well as that of the omnipotent Father; he is also, and above all, the place in which the divine encounter occurs. [...] In this fantasy there is one primary identification: the uterus, the organ that is the hollow womb containing the actual encounter in which life is generated. It is as though the hysteric identifies with the uterus in both of the forms that it assumes in his dreams. [...] Either he is the uterus as an internal organ [...] or he is the uterus assimilated to the hysterical body itself [...]. [...] A uterus contained within a body, and at the same time a uterus containing two bodies [...]. (55-56)

9 Surrealism and its fascination for the unconscious are called to mind here, especially if we remember that the second part of L’Immaculée conception—though not translated by Beckett himself—is actually entitled ‘Intra-uterine (sic) Life.’ Unsurprisingly, its incipit reads: ‘To be nothing.’ This key sentence in the Beckettian corpus is indirectly echoed in Company when the narrative voice says: ‘You were once. You were never. Were you ever?’ (16) Furthermore, automatic writing is hinted at, or maybe a parody of automatic writing, such combinations of words and phrases suggesting language operates on its own, as if severed both from reality and from reason:7 Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company. Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as of another. He says speaking of himself, He speaks of himself as of another. (20)

10 The voice heard in Company seems at times quite detached, amused even, as when it envisions the addition to company a rat or a fly would represent. (22) Hearer’s salvation lies in humour and in word play, intermittently present in the body of the text.8 Playing, a sterile activity, Roger Caillois reminds us in Les Jeux et les hommes, does not produce anything. Indeed, if playing takes place in the ‘world,’ it ignores ‘reality,’ focusing only on its own accomplishment regardless of the outside world. (9, 101) Thus, in Company, Beckett suggests that nothing lies outside the text and outside language; that the dissociation between word and world is complete. This dissociation subverts, like the hysteric does, even if with different means, the ‘relations established between the subject and the moral world’ as Aragon and Breton put it in their text celebrating the ‘Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria’ that Beckett translated as a young man (321). The Beckettian prose poem is uterine in that it is self-sufficient, non-referential, only existing in the boundaries of language. Humour and playfulness on the one hand, hysteria on the other: two self-contained modes of expression, yet based on a principle of discordance or dissociation, thereby very much like Company itself, a double text, existing also in its ‘authorized’ French version entitled Compagnie.

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Mal(é)

11 Bilingualism, hysteria and creativity—three concepts intimately linked in Company. The structural apparatus announced by the narrator: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. To one on his back in the dark,’ (5) is reminiscent of the creative programme developed by French Surrealists in their 1924 Manifesto: Placez-vous dans l’état le plus passif, ou réceptif que vous pourrez. […] Dites-vous bien que la littérature est un des plus tristes chemins qui mènent à tout. […] La première phrase viendra toute seule, tant il est vrai qu’à chaque seconde il est une phrase étrangère à notre pensée consciente qui ne demande qu’à s’extérioriser. (41)

12 Hysterical dissociation as witnessed by Breuer in Anna O. was probably one of the sources of inspiration for the dissociation of two mental states invoked here. When Anna O. was speaking, two states of consciousness would alternate, one normal, the other pathological, which Breuer referred to as ‘absences or condition seconde.’ (35) As Dianne Hunter has noted, this French phrase ‘suggests that for Breuer […] the abnormal states of consciousness represented foreign parts of the self.’ (91-92) Likewise, in Company, the narrative voice alternates between two time sequences and two modes of self-expression involving the second and third person pronouns, ‘absences’ being represented by the numerous blanks and breaks in the narrative. The elliptical and disorganized style of Company is also reminiscent of Anna O’s other symptoms. Indeed, her ability to speak was greatly impaired during her attacks of hysteria, on both the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language; often at a loss for words, she also lost her command of syntax. She no longer conjugated verbs and finally used only infinitives. She also omitted articles. (Breuer 29) All these linguistic symptoms seem to have been, as it were, transposed by Beckett into stylistic devices in Company.

13 At times, Anna O.’s loss of words was such that she had to make them up; in Company Beckett imitated this strategy, as when he coined the neologism philogenitiveness (42) which is translated as philogénétivité in the Minuit edition. (70) As an alternative to making up words, Beckett uses difficult or uncommon nouns, mostly of Latin origin like incontrovertibility (5), saltation (26), unnamability (37) and calcaneum (42), or learned- sounding adjectives like rectigrade (43) and alacrious (51). As a result, the voice sounds strange. But this strangeness of the voice is not a privilege of the English version. In the French manuscript, Beckett prefers entendeur to auditeur, more commonly used (in section 32). Likewise, to translate lie inert, he chooses the verb gésir of rare, literary usage. In French still, he refers to the archaic milles, instead of the more modern kilomètres,9 and chooses le noir immensurable to translate encompassing surface after having first contemplated both the very odd-sounding enceignante and the more banal environnante (in section 36). In Company as well as in Compagnie, Beckett makes the language seem foreign, one language filtering through another and vice versa.

14 In Company/Compagnie, the two meanings of the English word coalesce to make the voice seem strange. Not only does the ‘style or speaking or writing as dependent upon choice of words’ seem at times odd-sounding, but the ‘the accent, inflection, intonation [...] manifested by a speaker’ is remarkable. (Random House Webster College Dictionary 374) In ‘Verbatim,’ Beckett wrote about the voice: ‘No mention of accent. Indefinable. Of one whose mother tongue as foreign as the others.’ (qtd. in Krance 193) Though devoid of accent, the voice sounds ‘foreign,’ distant and strange, while the

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character is said to be ‘[e]stranged from words, things.’ (qtd. in Krance 194) Beckett’s parallel conception of the bilingual texts and the back and forth movement from one language to another it permitted—what Charles Krance has coined ‘transtextual confluence’10—probably accounts for part of this effect. Indeed, close scrutiny of the bilingual set of manuscripts proves that Beckett ‘subjected […] his ‘original’ to revisions based on the translated adaptation’ (Krance xx). This intricate bilingual genesis resulted in the conception of two texts in two different languages, yet each one literally ‘speaking in tongues.’ Again, hysteria comes to mind, for when Anna O. was actually capable of speaking, she would only speak in French, English or Italian, never in German, her mother tongue; sometimes, she would mix up to four or five languages, becoming nearly unintelligible. (Breuer 29) At times, she would only speak English, and if reading a text in Italian or French, would ‘sight-read an excellent English translation with astonishing rapidity and fluency.’ (Breuer 30) And it should not come as a surprise that Anna O. became a translator after her symptoms had receded for good, translating memoirs of one of her ancestors as well as ‘German and from the Talmud and Midrashn together with folk tales and The Women’s Bible.’ (Hunter 109) Interestingly, the metaphor of bilingualism and translation surfaces in Studies in Hysteria; Freud compares the symptoms of hysteria with a ‘pictographic script’ interpreted after the discovery of a ‘few cases of bilingualism.’ (132) In hysteria, the body speaks, becoming a signifier, a language to be deciphered and, as it were, translated. The ‘pathogenic material’ as Freud puts it ‘behaves like a foreign body,’ like an ‘infiltration’ of the ‘living tissue,’ (291-292) the tissue, an appropriate metaphor for the living body and for the text.

15 What is more, Anna O., who was portrayed by Breuer as ‘indulging in systematic daydreaming’ described by her as her ‘private theatre,’ and who told, under hypnosis, ‘sad and fanciful stories,’ (Hunter 94-96) can also be considered the paradigm of the hysterical artist. The creative potential of the hysteric was also a point Beckett had underlined when reading Ernest Jones, adding his own commentaries: An important characteristic of hysterical disorder is the excessive development of fantasy at the expense of adjustment to reality. Thus it becomes practically irrelevant whether a given traumatic memory from the unconscious corresponds with a fact or not, the effect on the patient is the same. Dungeons in Spain. (Mine own.) (Qtd. in Feldman 101)

16 Anna O. even told Breuer that ‘the whole business had been simulated’ (Hunter 101). In Company, in place of ‘simulation,’ Beckett speaks of ‘imagination.’ Variations pertaining to the idea of ‘imagination’ are numerous in his bilingual manuscripts, proving the writer was uncomfortable with the very subject matter of his text. While writing the first paragraph, he successively contemplated using the verbs develop, belie, and confute, before deciding on imagine inspired by the French version (where he also considered réfuter). In the next paragraph, it is the idea of ‘telling a story’ that seems to have bothered him: after considering the verbs recount, relate, submit Beckett opted for tell of [his life/past] in the end, while in French he hesitated between soumettre, évoquer and égrener [un/son passé].

17 Beckett’s difficulty in expressing the very idea of story-telling may be due to the fact that language, the very medium of the artist, seemed to have failed him constantly —‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better,’ says the narrative voice of Worstward Ho (101). Such a failure might be explained by the way we come to speech. After birth, when the mother-child fusion comes to an end, speech becomes a simulacrum of the lost

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primitive mother-child relationship, playing the part of substitute for the severed bodily connection. As Claude Hagège explains: La mère est au commencement, comme celle à laquelle l’enfant veut d’abord parler, vers laquelle il agite ses lèvres comme si, à mesure qu’elle étend l’espace de séparation, il était hanté de nostalgie et accablé d’exil. L’amour des langues n’est fondateur que dans la mesure où la mère, après avoir donné la vie, accompagne les premiers gestes puis s’en va pour toujours, comme par une première mort… (17)

18 Since in Beckett’s experience, be it true or not, this primal experience of the womb was remembered and reconstructed (and later to be fictionalized) as intensely unpleasant, his model for language must have been a flawed and inadequate one. Consequently, this situation would account for his oft mentioned aesthetics of failure, ignorance and impotence: since language can endow the child with but an imperfect link, writing, too, is condemned to be but a series of fiascos. Thus the mal-diction effect pertaining to the double text Company/Compagnie and to Beckettian writing might well find its origin in the malédiction of being born from a deathly womb.

Beckett’s Maternal Passion

19 Beckett probably found in bilingual writing an aesthetic means to deal with the deathliness of the mother-tongue which he kept dis(re)membering from one version to another. The very deathliness of language kept being relived and displaced in the bilingual rewriting process. The maniacal recourse to another language, along with the painful self-translating process this induced, can be read as symptoms of Beckett’s maternal passion. In Le Régime des passions et autres textes French philosopher Clément Rosset draws a parallel between ‘passion’ and ‘all the forms of hysteria,’ both maladies staging ‘an obstinate quest for unhappiness.’ (28) Beckett’s maternal passion, an obstinate desire to disfigure the body of language, is placated by playfulness and humour. In the bilingual text Company/Compagnie, this passion takes the form of Beckett’s hysterical mode of writing which places the reader in the powerless position of a foetus, hardly grasping what is going on in the confines of the enclosed universe of the text(s) yet forced to experience the estranged body of the amorphous mother-text of language.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beckett, Samuel. ‘Recent Irish Poetry,’ in Ruby Cohn, ed., Disjecta, Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, London: Calder, 1983, pp. 70-76.

---. Company, in Nohow On. London: Calder, 1992.

---. Compagnie. Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1985.

---. Worstward Ho, in Nohow On. London : Calder, 1992.

Breton, André. Manifestes du Surréalisme. Paris : Gallimard (Folio), 1979.

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---. & Paul Eluard, L’Immaculée conception. (1930) Paris: Seghers, 1972.

Breuer, Joseph. & Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria, transl. Nocila Luckhurst, intro. Rachel Bowlby. London: Penguin, 2004.

Bryden, Mary. Julian Garforth, Peter Mills, eds., Beckett at Reading, Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at the University of Reading. Reading: Whiteknights Press and the Beckett International Foundation, 1998.

Caillois, Roger. Les Jeux et les hommes. Paris: Gallimard (Folio), 1958, new ed. 1967.

Collinge, Linda. Beckett traduit Beckett: de Malone meurt à Malone Dies, l’imaginaire en traduction, Genève : Droz, 2000.

Engelberts, Matthijs, Frost Everett with Maxwell Jane, (eds.). Notes Diverse Holo, Catalogues of Beckett’s reading notes and other manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with supporting essays. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006.

Feldman, Matthew. Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of the Interwar Notes. London: Continuum International Publishing, 2006.

Gontarski Stanley E. and Ackerley Chris, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Hagège, Claude. ‘Au commencement était le mot mère : entretien avec Claude Hagège,’ in Czechowksi, Nicole et Terrasse, Jean-Marc, La Mère : au commencement. Paris : Autrement, 1992.

Hunter, Dianne. ‘Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna O.,’ in The (M)other Tongue : Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ed. by S. N. Garner, C. Kanaha, & M. Sprengnether. Ithaca & London: Cornell U. P., 1985, pp. 89-115.

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame, the Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.

---., & Elizabeth Knowlson. Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.

Krance, Charles. (ed.). Samuel Beckett’s Company/Compagnie and A Piece of Monologue/Solo, A Variorum Edition. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.

Random House Webster's College Dictionary, Random House New York, 1991, 1992.

Nasio, Juan-David. Hysteria from Freud to Lacan, The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis. Ed. by Judith Feher Gurewich, transl. from the French by Susan Fairfield. New York: The Other Press, 1998.

Pilling, John. A Samuel Beckett Chronology, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Rosemont, Franklin (ed.). What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings. London : Pluto Press, 1978.

Rosset, Clément. Le Régime des passions et autres textes. Paris : Ed. de Minuit, 2001.

Sardin, Pascale. ‘Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls or the Terrorism of Suffering,’ in E. Lamothe, P. Sardin, J. Sauvage, eds., Of Mothers and Death : from Procreation to Creation. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2008.

NOTES

1. In the Franklin Rosemont standard edition of What is Surrealism? Selected Writings (London, 1978), Beckett is credited for having translated seven texts: ‘Introduction of the Possessions,’ ‘Simulation of Mental Debility,’ ‘Simulation of General Paralysis,’ ‘Simulation of Delirium of Interpretation,’ (all of which are taken from the second part of ‘The Immaculate Conception’)

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‘Surrealism and the Treatment of Mental Illness,’ ‘The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria,’ and ‘Murderous Humanitarianism.’ Beckett’s early relationship to French Surrealism in general and hysteria in particular was first brought to my attention when reading Daniel Albright’s Beckett and Aesthetics to whose work I am greatly indebted. These were first published in This Quarter, ‘Surréalist Number,’ Guest Editor : André Breton, vol. V, n°1, Sept. 1932. 2. See Bryden Mary, Women in Samuel Beckett's Prose and Drama: Her Own Other. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. 3. Thus it should not come as a surprise that Compagnie should have been staged to great effect, as in the 1995 Paris Odéon Theâtre production starring David Warrilow. 4. One of the working titles of Company was ‘Heard in the Dark.’ (UoR MS 1765, see Bryden: 111) 5. Beckett spells it as one word in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. 6. Anna O., the first hysteric whose case history was to be recorded by Breuer, simulated pregnancy and birth during her illness. This was not recorded by Breuer in Studies in Hysteria but was reported by Freud in a letter to Stefan Zweig in 1932 (qtd. in Hunter 97). Anna O. was born in 1859 in Vienna in a wealthy Jewish family. She was well-educated; she spoke English, and read both French and Italian. She suffered a hysterical collapse when nursing her sick father when she was twenty-two. She developed a cough that resembled her father’s, she also suffered from anorexia, paralysis, somnambulism, became intermittently deaf and had severe disturbances of vision. 7. Today, although hysteria has very often ‘disappeared’ as a distinct illness from most contemporary clinical nosographies, it continues to fascinate specialists and lay people alike, most probably because hysteria questions the ideas of reason, self and control: ‘It is precisely because hysteria contravenes commonsense notions of rational self-control and autonomy that it continues to evoke both theoretical interest and scepticism. Hysteria has much to teach us, not only about the mechanisms of attention, self-control, and awareness, but also about the social and cultural roots of our sense of self.’ Peter W. Halligan & John C. Marshall, ed., Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Hysteria, Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001, p. 267. 8. On humour and self-translation, see Collinge, 45-70. 9. The same move, though contemplated for a while, is not made in Company: at the very beginning of his notebook Beckett writes as a reminder: ‘leagues instead of miles throughout,’ but finally decides against it. 10. The first manuscript draft of Company was written over a rather long period of time, from May 5th, 1977 to July 27th 1979, and was followed by the French manuscript draft, begun after completion of the former, on August 3rd 1970 but was written quite quickly on the other hand (less than a month since it was completed on August 27th 1979). The bilingual typescripts (two of each) begun on July 27th, 1979 then overlap. The French text appeared first (Minuit, 1980); followed by the English (Calder, 1980); then the American (Grove, 1982).

ABSTRACTS

Alors qu’il n’avait qu’une vingtaine d’année, Beckett traduisait un texte d’Aragon et Breton dans lequel les deux auteurs estimaient que l’hystérie est « peut être considéré comme un moyen suprême d’expression ». À peu près à la même époque, durant sa psychanalyse avec Bion, étaient revenus au jeune écrivain des souvenirs de son séjour dans le ventre maternel. La douleur et le

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sentiment d’impuissance associés à ces souvenirs intra-utérins furent encore ravivés par la conférence que Jung en 1935, et à laquelle Beckett assista, au sujet d’une jeune fille que le psychanalyste ne pouvait guérir car elle n’était jamais tout à fait née. L’auteure montre que l’écriture bilingue permit vraisemblablement à Beckett de supporter cet état d’extrême anxiété. Le système complexe de réécriture dans l’autre langue que Beckett mit peu à peu au point au cours de sa carrière devint ainsi son propre « moyen suprême d’expression », mode qui a à voir avec l’hystérie. Pour ce faire, Pascale Sardin analyse Company/Compagnie, nouvelle bilingue écrite à la fin des années soixante-dix. Comme Pas, dont il est proche, ce long poème théâtral met en scène le lien mortifère mère-enfant qui prend sa source dans l’utérus. Il s’agit en effet d’un texte hystérique, tant du point de vue du fond que de la forme, en ce qu’il s’appuie sur une série des tropes dissociatifs. Company/Compagnie peut également être considéré comme l’apothéose du processus auto-traductif beckettien dans lequel une langue ne cesse d’être contaminée par l’autre. Ainsi, l’effet de mal-diction inhérent à ce double texte en particulier, et à l’écriture beckettienne en général, pourrait venir de la malédiction d’être né d’un ventre ou d’une matrice mortifères.

AUTHORS

PASCALE SARDIN Pascale Sardin is a Maître de Conférences at Bordeaux 3 University where she specialises in Anglo-Irish twentieth century literature and translation theory. She is the author of Samuel Beckett auto-traducteur ou l’art de « l’empêchement », Arras : Artois P. U., 2002 and of Samuel Beckett et la passion maternelle, Bordeaux: P. U. de Bordeaux, 2009. She has also edited Les Mères et la mort : réalités et représentations, Bordeaux: P. U. de Bordeaux, 2008, and Of Mothers and Death : from Procreation to Creation, Bordeaux: P. U. de Bordeaux, 2008.

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Raymond Carver's "Myers trio"

Robert Miltner

1 In 1999, Esquire magazine posthumously published “Kindling,” one of three Raymond Carver stories “found” by Jay Woodruff and Tess Gallagher among Carver’s files in his office in Port Angeles. Along with two stories discovered by William Stull and Maureen Carroll in the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction at Ohio State University, these five lost stories were the impetus for the 2001 collection Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose. Of the stories, “Kindling” is the most remarkable for its central character, a writer identified only as Myers, who makes his third appearance in a Carver story. Myers had previously appeared in Carver’s first published book of fiction—a 1974 Capra Press chapbook, Put Yourself in My Shoes—and again in “The Compartment,” from Cathedral in 1983, though oddly not included in Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories, Carver’s 1988 “major” collection.

2 What is the relationship between these three “Myers” stories by Raymond Carver? What happens when these three stories are read as an intentional or critically constructed composite, as an interlocking short story sequence about the writer, Myers, and perhaps about the writer, Carver? Such a reading would ask us to reconsider the body of Carver’s fiction.

“Put Yourself in My Shoes”

3 “Put Yourself in My Shoes” is the stock tale of a writer who quit his day job to write a novel. In the story, Myers is confronted by the Morgans, whose house he and his wife Paula lived in temporarily while the owner and his wife were in Germany; the house- sitting apparently did not go as the Morgans had planned, and when the “Myerses” (Carver’s label) visit the Morgans over the Christmas holidays, Morgan and his wife tell stories (within the larger outside ) in which they make veiled accusations concerning the way the Myerses conducted themselves while house sitting. After several stories within stories, discussions regarding the writing life, and Edgar Morgan’s advice to Myers regarding his writing future, the plot ends with Myers having found his story: the one he has written and the one we are reading.

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4 This metafictional nature of “Put Yourself in My Shoes” is evident in the surface narrative. Readers discover early that Myers is a writer when Carver shows Myers thinking about a former co-worker with whom Paula still works: “Dick always talked of going to Paris to write a novel, and when Myers quit to write a novel, Dick said he would watch for Myers’ name on the best seller list” (WICF 94). It is important that Myers is talked about as a novelist, since Myers is presented as a writer who “was between stories” (my emphasis), for a while a novelist is engaged in an extended commitment to a project, a short story writer works on fragments, sketches, and small narratives, therefore Myers can be “between stories” more easily as a writer of short stories—as was Carver—so that Myers can live up to his own expectations of writing individual stories by the end of “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” Furthermore, Myers himself knows that he is falling short of expectations—both Dick’s and his own—for, while Dick wants to “watch for Myers’ name on the best-seller list,” readers observe how Myers “began to write his name on the glass [window] as he waited [for Paula to reply on the phone]” (95), the window being where, instead of the best-seller list, Myers writes his name, like a by-line, but in a temporal medium (steam, generated by hot air) on a transparent surface. Readers infer that Myers has not yet had success with publishing, even if he has been writing, for Paula expresses a desire to visit Germany “Maybe as soon as Myers sells something” (101), suggesting that his quitting work to write has not panned out. Myers twice comments indirectly on his faltering as a writer, once by using driving as a writing metaphor, “I think I can get my car started. If I can’t start it, I’ll call you back” (95) and once by using travel, with undertones of sexual performance, as a metaphor, “‘I don’t think I can come,’ Myers said” and “‘I can’t come now,’ Myers said” (94). This performance anxiety and its accompanying fear of impotence—as metaphor for writer’s block—is carried to its extreme when Paula tells Myers that a former co-worker, Larry Gudinas, “committed suicide. He shot himself in the mouth” (95); this has ghostly echoes of Hemingway’s suicide reputedly in popular culture as due to his fear of impotence, a noteworthy comparison given that Carver often commented that “Hemingway [was] an author whose work I admire greatly” (Pope and McElhinny 17). Moreover, this Hemingway reference is reinforced by Dick’s/ Carl’s romantic desire to go to Paris—like Hemingway in the 1930s—to write. Of course, the closest to Paris Myers gets is house-sitting for the Morgans when they go to Germany, a point made even more distinctly when Edgar Morgan goads Myers by proclaiming, “I should think a trip to Europe would be very beneficial to a writer” (101). Morgan is an academic while Myers is not, so he dismisses both Dick’s and Morgan’s advice to follow the imperative of Americans Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, as well as Ireland’s James Joyce, to go to Paris for inspiration. Myers stays, finding his story in the Morgans, so that he can stay his native ground, for his time and place are the America he lives in.

5 Writing issues—craft, technique, influences—are embedded in the narrative and find emphasis in the interior stories. For example, when Edgar Morgan tells the story of his former academic colleague’s infidelity with a young co-ed and his son’s throwing a can of tomato soup at his head, there are two sets of reactions. First, each character has a different emotional response: Morgan gazes at his listeners; Mrs. Morgan pronounces the story “disgusting”; Paula calls it “[h]orrible”; while Myers just “grinned” (102). Secondly, each character suggests that the story could be told from a different point of view: Edgar initially suggests the point of view of the man, then also offers that of the young co-ed; Mrs. Morgan prefers the wife; Paula offers the son’s view; yet Myers

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remains silent. While his silence seems a refutation of realism’s tenet of “point of view” and the author’s god-like omniscience, this same persistent silence permits all the others to express multiple points of view, or rather, since they allow for each character to stand inside the shoes of different points of view, this silence creates opportunities for Edgar, Paula, and Mrs. Morgan to put themselves in some else’s shoes. Edgar Morgan pushes the issue with Myers, insisting he take a position or point of view: “Put yourself in the shoes of that eighteen-year-old coed who fell in love with a married man. Think about her for a moment, and then you see the possibility of your story” (103). This dialogue both echoes the title of the story and emphasizes the metafictional nature of this piece: put yourself in my(ers)’ shoes, it seems to say, and watch him use this episode as his next story, for, as we learn at the end as Myers and Paula leave, “He [Myers] was at the very end of a story” (112).

6 Secondly, the Morgans tell Myers three times how to conduct himself as a writer. He needs, for instance, to be like Tolstoy rather than himself: “It would take a Tolstoy to tell [the story of the colleague’s infidelity] and tell it right ” (103) and “It doesn’t need a Tolstoy to tell [the story of what the Myerses did to the Morgans’ house]” (111).

7 The contradiction between these two statements represents a movement away from the tenants of 19th century realism to which Tolstoy adhered toward a 20 th century postmodern appropriation of material—the subject of Carver’s “Intimacy”—as old styles of storytelling are replaced by new conventions. Ironically, Carver, a writer of this postmodern metafiction, believed that “Tolstoy is the best there is” (Simpson and Buzbee 46). Moreover, when Myers can not stop laughing over Mrs. Morgan’s line that “Fate sent [Mrs. Attenborough] to die on the couch in our living room” (109), Edgar chastises Myers, saying: “If you were a real writer, as you say you are, Mr. Myers, you would not laugh,” Morgan said as he got to his feet. “You would not dare laugh! You would try to understand. You would plumb the depths of that poor souls’ heart and try to understand. But you are no writer, sir!” Myers kept on giggling. (109-10)

8 Lastly, when Morgan wants the “real story”—of what happened when the Myerses house-sat—told, he goads Myers again: “If you were a real writer, sir, you would put that story into words and not pussyfoot around with it, either” (111). What seems evident is that Morgan wants closure, both on the house-sitting incident and the evening’s episode as well, as evidenced in Morgan’s comment regarding the incident with Mrs. Attenborough when he offers closure: “Here is what happened, then. Mr. Myers, I’ll go right to the climax, as you writers say” (108), and his feeling cut-off when Myers won’t give him the closure on the house-sitting incident, particularly regarding his two-volume set of ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic,’ which he demands: …and now, now I’d like this writer [Myers] to tell me exactly what he knows of their whereabouts. Mr. Myers? … I insist on knowing! Morgan called. “I am waiting, sir!” (112)

9 Of course, while Morgan sought a convergent ending with clearly identified closure, Myers gets one, but Morgan doesn’t get one, and further, if we are to believe that Myers will tell this entire story, as “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” then the story becomes divergent, for Myers is no longer “between stories,” but on to the next one. “Myers has apparently overcome his writer’s block,” as Arthur M. Saltzman observes, “Not the tales proffered by their hosts, but the tale of their hosts” (54-5).

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10 What Kirk Nesset has said of “Intimacy” might just as well apply to this story: “Winking at us at times in the story, at play in the fields of the metafictional, Carver sheds new light on the dark inner realm of his craft” (101). As we can see, then, Myers is very much the alter-ego or shadow figure for Carver. “Myers is the man in Carver’s shoes,” quips Arthur M. Saltzman (52); he is “Carver-Myers, the aspiring writer,” as Runyon identifies him (52), with the story operating as a postmodern metafiction on the writing process, and, as Runyon further points out, the job which Myers left so that he could write comes close to the position Carver held with Science Research Associates from 1967-70 (50), echoed by Paula Myers’ reference to Larry Gudinas who “helped out on science books for a while” (WICF 95).1 Moreover, Runyon argues that the Edgar Morgan character is based on John Gardner, Carver’s former teacher, from whom he asserts Carver borrowed story titles, much like the Myerses borrow the Morgan’s personal items: “[John] Gardner is hidden yet displayed in the person of Edgar Morgan (as the – gar of his first name suggests) by a remarkable switching of opposites: “Morgan envies Myers for being a writer, but at a deeper level this is the story of how Carver-Myers … wishes he were Gardner-Morgan (52). Taking Runyon’s writer-character conflation one step further, I want to read the name Myers as a blend of “my” (story or counterpart) and “er” (from the end of Carver), holding the two syllable surname, and reading Myers as an alter-ego for Carver himself, as Carver “Puts [Him]self in My[ers]’ Shoes.”

11 Interestingly, French Carver scholar Marc Chénétier has written on how “Carver’s characters are so often ‘halfway between possibilities’” (quoted in Runyon); this is true for Myers who we find “between stories.” This sense of being “between” links the stories by considering how Myers is always found “between”: stories in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” trains in “The Compartment,” and lives in “Kindling.” This link furthers the exploration of Myers, and Carver-Myers, as a writer and as an individual, seeking to define identity and selfhood.

“The Compartment”

12 Kirk Nesset has called “The Compartment” “one of Carver’s bleakest stories ever” (51). A mostly descriptive piece nearly devoid of dialogue, “The Compartment” presents a now-older Myers who is divorced and working at an engineering firm. He doesn’t seem to be writing. In this “dissonant narrative … about [a] solitary railroad journey” (Kennedy 206), Myers is traveling by train in Europe, in Italy and France, and on to visit his son in Strasbourg. The choice of Strasbourg is interesting, for is it a border town “between” two countries, and, as a result of its varied historical inclusions in German and France, it functions as a border, as an interstitial locale where Myers must make his decision of crossing over or returning.

13 Notably, Myers and his son are estranged: “He hadn’t seen the boy in eight years. There had been no phone calls between them during this time” (47, my emphasis); the loss of time is emphasized when the “expensive Japanese wristwatch [he had] purchased at a shop in Rome” (52) for his son is stolen on the train, leaving Myers frustrated and “tired of trying to make himself understood to strangers” (52). In a way, while the theft of the watch echoes the theft of the $120 by Mrs. Attenborough from Mrs. Morgan in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” the loss of the watch symbolically alters time, for Myers is in the place and time where he has come to meet his estranged son, and it possible that he unconsciously wished to lose the watch in order to disconnect himself from his son,

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an action that is echoed by his unconscious wish to have his train car, the compartment of the title, disconnected so that he can be completely removed from the time and place necessary for a reunion with his son.

14 While it can be assumed Myers has taken Edgar Morgan’s advice that “a trip to Europe would be very beneficial to a writer” (“Put Yourself” WICF 101), as a son might take a father’s advice, Myers, however, subconsciously seems still to refute the European experience when he wonders, regarding his son, about his decision to go to France, a reference which establishes his son as a metafictional extension of himself. Myers, after all, is not in his own territory, but is instead the outsider, the other who has to mix with people who do not speak his language, as evidenced by his frustration when trying to locate the watch he had bought for his son which he discovers is stolen. Ultimately, with his loss of time (the watch) and place (the US for Europe, “his” train car for another), his dislocation is emphasized by his disconnection.

15 Met, Myers’ dislocation is greater than that of his disconnections in Europe, it includes his being uncoupled from his wife and his writing which were central to his character in “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” Myers is at this time is neither married to Paula nor writing, and, given that he has an adult son, it appears as if some twenty years or more has passed since the events in “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” The once humorous and playful writer Myers has become a dour, surly businessman, a mean-spirited man who is disdainful of “foreigners” (54) and who decides, after all his travel, not even to see his son: … a wave of bitterness passed over Myers. This boy had devoured Myers’ youth, had turned the young girl he had courted and wed into a nervous, alcoholic woman whom the boy alternately pitied and bullied. Why on earth, Myers asked himself, would he come all this way to see someone he disliked? He didn’t want to shake the boy’s hand, the hand of his enemy… (54).

16 It appears as if Paula has become an alcoholic, though we don’t see Myers drinking at all, an issue that comes into play when Myers reappears in “Kindling.”

17 Myers moves between first and second class train cars three times, a number that echoes the number of stories the Morgans tell, in the course of the narrative, and, due to his stubborn Americentricism—“He felt it would be humiliating to put his head into one of the compartments and say, “Paree?” or however they said it”—he finds his train car, with his luggage, has been reconnected to another train, leaving him in a second- class car “nearly filled with small, dark-skinned men who spoke rapidly in a language Myers had never heard before” (58). After missing his connection, the story ends with Myers on a train, “going somewhere, he knew that. And if it was the wrong direction, sooner or later he’d find out” (58). In this symbolic way, with Myers on the wrong train, he is again between places. Moreover, Myers had become the cranky Morgan, and the small, dark-skinned men are “jovial” and “laughing,” as Myers was in “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” Where Myers has put himself is in an emotional compartment, as his wish from earlier in the story comes true: “He [Myers] thought this might be a good way to live—in an old house surrounded by a wall” (48). Ultimately, Myers’ “tendency toward insularity” leaves him “insulated in his ‘compartment’” as he remains on the train, “walling out everything external to his selfish world” (Nesset 51); identity and self- hood are self-contained, emphasized by Myers’ near silence in the story, his stubborn denial of emotional connection, and his secreting himself in sleep as the train carries him to an unknown destination.

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“Kindling”

18 Myers makes his final appearance in the posthumously published “Kindling.” Seemingly, Carver has gone back to re-imagine an aging Myers in light of a new horizon of possibility: Myers, like Carver, has become a recovering alcoholic. Carver begins “Kindling” by stating, “It was the middle of August and Myers was between lives” (my emphasis). The phrase “middle of August” suggests a man who is metaphorically in middle age, and the phrase in “between lives” echoes Myers’ being “between stories” from “Put Yourself in My Shoes” and his being between train cars in “The Compartment,” for Myers is between the “drying out facility” he has just left and where he will go when he leaves Sol and Bonnie’s house “in a day or two” (20).

19 Interestingly, the same Myers who lost his suitcase by leaving it in the train car in “The Compartment” is obsessive about not losing the one he takes with him to Sol and Bonnie’s house. When he first arrives, he “gripped his suitcase and stepped inside” (7); when he enters, he “was still holding his suitcase” (8); when talking to his hosts the first time, he “set the suitcase down and opened and closed his fingers. Then he picked up the suitcase again” (8); and as they walk toward Myers’ room, “a door at the end of the little corridor” (9) which is reminiscent of the corridors Myers passed through on the train in “The Compartment,” Carver mentions again that Myers was “carrying his suitcase” (9). Thus, Carver shows Myers holding or carrying the suitcase five times in just three pages, gripping it like a talisman. It is possible to see echoes here of Hemingway’s “lost suitcase” of early manuscripts which in 1922 was either lost by his first wife Hadley (Kohen) or stolen from the Paris train station (Neil); either the suitcase represents Myers’ fear of the loss of the craft he is trying to revitalize in “Kindling” or it shows Carver-Myers’ mirrored connection with his literary mentor, for it appears possible that Myers lost his suitcase when he lost his train car in “The Compartment.” Happily though, Myers “put his suitcase on the bed” (9), then “took his things out of the suitcase and put them away in the drawers” (10), making himself at home, settled as it were, like Holly in “Gazebo” who wishes to be “Dignified. And in a place” (146).

20 Myers, having left the “drying-out facility,” is trying again to be the writer he was in “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” But Carver shows how this is the same Myers from “The Compartment” through this : right after Sol tells Myers that Bonnie wants to be a writer, Bonnie asks Myers what sort of work he does, and Myers replies, “I’ve done everything,” including, it seems, working for an engineering firm, the job Myers held in “The Compartment.” Carver lets his readers see Myers writing four times in his notebook, and once in a letter; even better, he lets his readers see what Myers is writing. Letters seem to come easy, at least when we see Myers writing to his wife: It was a long letter and, he felt, an important one. Perhaps the most important letter he’d ever written in his life. In the letter he was attempting to tell his wife that he was sorry for everything that had happened and that he hoped someday she would forgive him. I would get down on my knees and ask forgiveness if that would help. (15)

21 Certainly, apologies and forgiveness are associated with AA meetings, but this connects Myers to Paula, his wife in “Put Yourself in My Shoes” and who is described as having gone her “separate way[…]” in “The Compartment.” Even more interesting, however, is

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Myers’ written line that he “would get down on [his] knees and ask forgiveness,” for this is exactly the action taken by the unnamed narrator in “Intimacy,” another story about a writer who has broken off with his wife, suggesting that the characters in “Intimacy” may be an unnamed Myers and Paula. While letter writing seems to go well, the notebook is clearly a struggle for Myers. His first entry is dissatisfying: [He] sat down and took a ballpoint out of his pocket. He thought for a minute, then opened the notebook, and at the top of a blank white page he wrote the words Emptiness is the beginning of all things. He stared at this, and then he laughed. Jesus, what rubbish! He shook his head. He closed the notebook… (10)

22 Here, though, we see the old Myers from “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” laughing at bad prose, much as he did over Mrs. Morgan’s line “Fate sent her to die on our couch in the living room in Germany” (109). On the second day, his writing is ludicrously brief: “Late that night, before going to bed, he opened his notebook and on a clean page he wrote, Nothing” (13). Of course, we can read this as Myers’ inability to write, or we can view this as his attempt to keep a journal, diary, or log; does he mean there is nothing to write about, nothing that will come to mind, or is the “Nothing” part of the “Emptiness” from the earlier entry?

23 When Myers offers to chop wood for Sol, he begins to feel like he needs to accomplish something, and finds great satisfaction in doing so, as his third notebook entry indicates: “I have sawdust in my shirtsleeves tonight, he wrote. It’s a sweet smell” (18). The significant shift in Myers’ notebook entries is his movement from abstraction— emptiness, beginning, nothing—to the concrete physical presence of sawdust and the sensual delight of its “sweet smell”; Myers, like any good writer, is showing, not telling, and what he shows is not emptiness but fullness. Yet Myers indicates his concern that what he is gaining he could just as easily lose, as is evident when Carver uses an interior shot to show how Myers views the job: “I must finish this job, he thought, or else…” (19). Myers needs to accomplish something, however rough—like chopping wood. Ironically, Sol tells Myers “Don’t worry about making kindling,” which will later become the Fires of creation, “I’ll take care of that later” (18); the implication is that at a later time, Myers will be able to make kindling, as the title suggests and as the final line of the story tells us, “It was okay like that” (20). As metafiction, reader note that just as abstraction must be replaced with the kinds of concrete details one associates with Hemingway, so too must general plot—sawing and stack[ing] logs—give way to style and technique, the “kindling” of the craft.

24 Readers sense a Nick Adams-like fragility about Myers here, as this echoes Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II” when Nick, who is only able at this point to fish in the open river, knows intuitively that “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (180). Moreover, the night before he leaves after having chopped all the wood, Myers listens to the sound of The Little Quilcene River, again reminiscent of Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II,” and writes his final notebook entry: The country I’m in is very exotic. It reminds me of someplace I’ve read about but never traveled to before now. Outside my window I can hear a river and in the valley behind the house there is a forest and precipices and mountain peaks covered with snow. Today I saw a wild eagle, and a deer, and I cut and chopped two cords of wood. (20).

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25 This entry both summarizes his observations from just before the wood truck arrived (, the deer), his accomplishments (cutting and chopping wood), and his sense of having “arrived” someplace (“very exotic…country”) in lieu of his being “between” places.

26 As in many of Carver’s stories, there is a double: Bonnie, who also “wants to be a writer”(8). Bonnie thinks about writing, imagined entries such as “This tall, stooped—but handsome!—curly headed stranger with sad eyes walked into our house one fateful night in August” (11). Of course, Myers is also thinking about writing. Oddly, Bonnie’s description of Myers is surprisingly like Carver himself: tall, stooped, curly-headed, and, as Carver plays with it, “but handsome,” accompanied by an exclamation point, and the romantic “sad eyes,” the “Saddest eyes I ever saw on a man,” as she tells Sol earlier (11). But it is the echo of Mrs, Morgan’s “Fate” which sent Mrs. Attenborough to die in her living room that is echoed by Bonnie’s “our house” on “one fateful night,” accompanied even more so with her reference to the month of August, when Carver tells his readers that Myers is between lives in “the middle of August,” evoking the end of summer which forecasts autumn’s ripeness, and suggesting the completeness of a writer’s maturation.

27 The “in-between’ spaces” which Homi K. Bhabha suggests “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood…that initiate new signs of identity” (1) offer new information to be gleaned by studying the changing identity of Myers. First, Myers is seen as a writer who takes directly from reality, “the real world” as Dick calls it in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” then as an insular failed writer in “The Compartment,” and finally in “Kindling” as a recovering alcoholic who recovers his writing by learning to gather and synthesize, with a lyrical dimension, events that will tell stories of recovery and re-integration of the self.

The Short Story Sequence

28 Each story in the Myers Trio operates successfully as a free-standing fictional work, so much so that “Put Yourself in My Shoes” was published as a chapbook. One need not connect the other Myers stories to it in order to appreciate the narrative or its impact. Furthermore, given the spread of time between publication of the stories, and the fact that Carver himself never connected these works—nor, interestingly, did critics or interviewers ever ask Carver to comment on Myers’ reappearance from “Put Yourself in My Shoes” in “Compartment”—what happens when the three are considered as a short story composite, as an intertextual body of work?

29 Regarding the first point: a short story composite is “several stories that function simultaneously as autonomous units and as parts of an interrelated whole” (Kleppe 173). Moreover, the short story cycle has literary precedent in works by James Joyce (Dubliners), Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time) and Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio); three writers, by the way, who Carver cited as inspirations and influences.

30 The possibility of Carver’s having written a short story composite—the Myers Trio—has a sound basis. The idea that the Myers stories are readable as a sequence has been suggested by Chad Wriglesworth in his essay “Raymond Carver and Alcoholics Anonymous: A Narrative Under the ‘Surface of Things’” (n150). Randolph Paul Runyon, in his important and influential book Reading Raymond Carver, was the first to study the

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structural connections of Carver’s stories, observing “the interstices between the stories” (Introduction 1) are as important as the individual stories themselves; Runyon offers the term intratextuality to explain “what can happen when the texts…in a text begin to refer to each other in ways that seem to refer to their doing so” (9). Moreover, the Myers Trio operates as a formally organized set of stories which manifests itself through “a developing character” (Mann ix) and operating as a sort of “arranged” text, which Forrest Ingram characterizes as being “assembled … from separate, previously published pieces to form a recognizably connected” sequence” (ix), though in this case, Ingram’s suggestion that this assemblage is conducted by the author or in conjunction with an editor does not apply.

31 But did Carver “plan” a composite of stories? In his important essay “Fires,” commenting on his work as a short story writer and not a novelist, Carver stated that because of the responsibility of parenting and his struggle to achieve a life that was beyond his working class background, he “was going to have to stick to stories and poems. The short things I could sit down and … write quick” (25). Moreover, he added that “To write a novel, it seemed to me, a writer should be living in a place that makes sense…” (26). Later, however, when he was living in Port Angeles, had recovered from the destructive years of alcoholism, and was settled and “in a place,” he could have written “Kindling,” which picks up the Myers-Carver alter-ego and moves it forward, creating a triad of Myers stories. It would be remiss to read them as anything less than a composite of stories. By doing so, scholars we will need to think of Carver in a larger way, as a writer of a short story sequence rather than as a writer of magazine fiction. This, in turn, should open a new area of Carver scholarship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carver, Raymond. “Gazebo.” Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1988. 139-46.

---. “Kindling.” Call If You Need Me. New York, Vintage, 2000. 7-20.

---. “The Compartment.” Cathedral. New York: Knopf, 1983. 47-58.

---. Put Yourself in My Shoes. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1974.

---. “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1988. 94-112.

---. “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” Will You Please Be Quit, Please? New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. 130-50.

Chénétier, Marc. Quoted in Runyon. 7n.

Gentry, Marshall Bruce and Williams L. Stull, eds. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987. 171-80.

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Ingram, Forrest. Quoted in Kennedy. ix.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. “From Anderson’s Winesburg to Carver’s Cathedral: The Short Story Sequence and the Semblance of Community.” Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. J. Gerald Kennedy, ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 194-215.

Kleppe, Sandra Lee. “Raymond Carver’s Poet-Voyeur as Involved Spectator.” New Paths to Raymond Carver: Critical Essays on His Life, Fiction, and Poetry. Sandra Lee Kleppe and Robert Miltner, eds. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 62-74.

Kohen, Yael. “Prof. Examines Lost Hemingway Manuscript.” The Michigan Daily. September 28, 1999. www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1999/sep/09-28-99/news/news12.html

Mann, Susan Garland. Quoted in Kennedy. ix.

Neil, Amy. “Hemingway Project Takes Spanier to Cuba.” Penn State Intercom. November 21, 2002. www.psu.edu/ur/archives/intercom_2002/Nov21/hemingway.html

Nesset, Kirk. The Short Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1995.

Pope, Robert and Lisa McElhinny. “Raymond Carver Speaking.” Interview, 1982. The Akros Review 8/9 (Spring 1984), 103-14. Rpt. in Gentry and Stull. 11-23.

Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992.

Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Simpson, Mona and Lewis Buzbee. “Raymond Carver.” Interview, 1983. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Seventh Series. George Plimpton, ed. New York: Viking, 1986. 299-327. Rpt. in Gentry and Stull. 31-52.

Wrigglesworth, Chad. “Raymond Carver and Alcoholics Anonymous: A Narrative under the “Surface of Things.” New Paths to Raymond Carver: Critical Essays on His Life, Fiction, and Poetry. Sandra Lee Kleppe and Robert Miltner, eds. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 132-153.

NOTES

1. Carver mentions his time as SRA in interviews with Cassandra Phillips (5) and with Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee (45-6, 49) in Conversations with Raymond Carver, Marshall Bruce Gentry and William Stull, eds. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

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ABSTRACTS

Le personnage nommé Myers apparaît comme écrivain dans trois nouvelles de Raymond Carver. La première, « Put Yourself in My Shoes », est une histoire méta-fictionnelle d’une sous-location qui tourne en débâcle ; dans la suivante, « The Compartment », Myers entreprend un voyage en Europe pour retrouver un fils qu’il finit par ne pas rencontrer ; enfin dans « Kindling », une des cinq nouvelles posthumes, on le retrouve dans la peau d’un alcoolique qui tente de se guérir en se remettant à écrire dans une chambre qu’il vient de louer. La présente étude retrace les changements dans la vie de Myers par le biais de ces trois récits montrant comment ils s’inscrivent dans une séquence narrative autour d’un personnage central commun. En se prolongeant dans le temps, la suite de nouvelles finit par créer une seule histoire reflétant parallèlement la vie de l’auteur Carver. L’étude propose ainsi une relecture de l’œuvre carvérienne en y intégrant la notion de séquence.

AUTHORS

ROBERT MILTNER Robert Miltner is associate professor of English at Kent State University Stark and teaches poetry in the Northeast Ohio MFA in Creative Writing Consortium. A co-founder of the International Raymond Carver Society, he is co-editor of New Paths to Raymond Carver: Essays on His Life, Fiction, and Poetry (University of South Carolina Press, 2008) and is editor for The Raymond Carver Review. He is currently working on a book entitled If a Story Answers Itself: Essays on Raymond Carver, chapters of which have appeared in EnterText and Revista Atenae.

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Saroyan's lonely fruitcakes, and other goofs: strategies of resistance to the culture of abundance

Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde

1 In the preface to his 1950 collection The Whole Voyald and Other Stories William Saroyan lays bare the position of the genuine writer as a nonconformist: “The writer is a spiritual anarchist … discontented with everything and everybody … he neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer … is a rebel who never stops. He is the easiest man to belittle, dismiss and scorn.… He is also mad, measurably so, but saner than all others with the best sanity, the only sanity worth bothering about – the living, creative, vulnerable, valorous, unintimidated, and arrogant sanity of a free man (1950: 14). In Horsey Gorsey and the Frog (1968), a seemingly innocent children’s tale, the writer celebrates, once more, those who remain on the fringes and dare to defy, through their eccentricities, the norms of society. Through the dialogue of a blue horse and a green frog, we discover the inevitable clash between the mainstream ideas and the marginal values. The horse believes that the world can be made only of blue horses, so the frog must be a strange-looking horse, but a quadruped after all. The frog vindicates its right to have a different nature, even though there seems to be no other frog nearby to validate its assertion. Moreover, in opposition to the horse’s affirmation that races are the only occupation that makes everything worthwhile, the frog despises the thought of life as a cutthroat competition. Winning or losing are notions that remain immaterial. Sitting idly on a wet rock is what life is all about. Living is, after all, not a race but a waiting game.

2 Walter Cummins observes that “[t]he people with whom Saroyan sympathizes are those who live at the edge of a social system they can’t beat and yet gain insights into the heart of things … the outcasts, rogues, rebels, those who transcend the rules of the commonplace” (1995: 169-176). Unlike Anderson’s grotesques or McCullers’s freaks, Saroyan’s fruitcakes pursue absurd dreams and feel proud of their odd identity in a homogenising, difference-levelling world. “Don’t join, don’t join anything,” that is the piece of advice that the writer gives to his fellow-citizens in an attempt to preserve

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their almost disintegrated individualism (Saroyan 1973: 505). Despite the fact that conformism dominates the average American citizen, now defined as “other-directed,” i.e. too frightened about the disapproval of the peer-group (Riesman 1950), Saroyan’s anomics provide an alternative to the socially adjusted patterns. “Statistics show that any man in good health is out of step with the rest of the world … such misfits are becoming fewer and fewer” (Saroyan, “Good Health,” 1936a:1).

3 In the following pages I will attempt to prove that not only does William Saroyan’s short fiction eyewitness the consolidation of the “culture of abundance” in the thirties and forties, but challenges and contests many of its prevailing principles and institutions as well. Warren I. Susman (1985) argues that the central conflict in contemporary America moves around the opposition between the old Puritan culture of frugality and the emergent culture of abundance. The new driving force of economy is no longer the workers’ labor force but their power as consumers. Spending and not saving, self-fulfillment and not salvation, personality and not self-reliance, become the tenets of the dominant ethos, and the new aspirations of the reshaped citizen. By converting workers into consuming masses the nation managed to overcome the 1929 crisis, a strategic operation, Jean Baudrillard noted, which assured the survival of the economic system smothered with a crisis of circulation (Gane 1991: 69). Without people with money to buy, capitalism was sentenced to death. The new culture deployed a series of strategies (advertising, popular psychology, movies and radio, leisure activities, the five-day working week, the supermarket, etc.) which undermined the moral principles of self-denial and sacrifice, and instilled the worship of personal growth and magnetic personality as tickets to success both in the workplace and in the private sphere. As Baudrillard put it, the modern individual was irremediably forced to become “an enterprise of pleasure and satisfaction” (1988: 48).

4 Saroyan’s ideological position regarding the culture of abundance is made unambiguous from the very beginning. Since the publication of the 1934 volume The Daring Young Man and Other Stories and the 1936 collection Inhale and Exhale, his target of criticism was invariably the transformation of American citizens during the Depression into a mass of half-asleep, confused, robot-like creatures who go to work, eat, and spend their leisure time in movie houses without discovering what life is all about. The problem with his fellow citizens is that their lives lack “a real sense” (Saroyan, “The Life” 1983: 216); their tragedy consists of “not knowing where they are going or coming” (217). In “Friday Unlingual Silence,” a piece of experimental writing that resembles the language proposed by Eugene Jolas, i.e. “the paramyth,” a synthesis of “the dream, daydream, the mystic vision” (Jolas 1949: 29), Americans are compared with “one-celled structures” which have been stultified with “the contemporary obligation” of buying. Spending their salaries on “useless gasoline vehicles” and “pointless cinemas” does not only bring about the “sterility of the most hopeless sort” but also helps reinforce the strength of a state which supports war and genocide: “and in the long run provided you purchase now you may learn you have graced the state with pink shirted stormtroopers.” The ghastly elimination of the economicessentialness [sic] … is the necessary beginningpoint [sic] from which man is to achieve eventually that clarity of humanmotives [sic] which will extend the purpose of sensory awareness to a sphere of something related to godliness (1936b: 2).

5 Competition, the push and rush of American society, the mechanical jobs which degrade people, the money obsession and the endless motion without a goal have

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created an efficient, frazzled worker, a piece of human machinery, “perfected and patented”; a citizen who proves to be passive and docile, devoid of senses, and whose efforts to achieve a magnetic personality have resulted in the obliteration of their egos, i.e. the suppression of their distinctiveness as individuals. As Saroyan asserts it in “The people, yes, and then again, no,” “[s]ince they have decided that the world is not for the people, except in oratory, what is needed is the racially pure piece of machinery as man” (1938a: 162-163).

6 In the 1935 summer review of “The Daring Young Man,” Philip Rahv defines Saroyan’s craft as “a lesson in the atrophy of taste and decay of values” (qtd. in 1991: 33). The reason is that he has resorted to the outdated weapons of modernists to tackle with the problems of an ever-changing, fragile world: aesthetic retreat, language experimentation, mystic vision, and dreams. Too frightened to join the social strife, he has built up a tower to defend himself from the turmoil of society, but the fortress looks rundown and obsolete even before it has been erected. His fiction is therefore a repository of residual values.1 Yet Saroyan himself honestly believed that the true purpose of art was religious in an etymological sense (from Latin religare, “bind”), insofar as it aimed to recover the bonds that man has lost to connect himself with the world again and “to right wrongs, to clean up social inequities,” (Tompins 1967: 7). In his own words, “[a] writer’s only reason for being is to seek to change the lopsided to the balanced –in short, to change the world” (1959: 2). Writing is praying, confesses Joe, the poet who defines the world as being in a state of “Babylonian confusion” (Saroyan 1956: 15). Not in vain, Balakian (1998: 13) has convincingly argued that “[t]he possibility that life could be improved by art remained uppermost in Saroyan’s consciousness.”

7 My contention is that both interpretations may be not contradictory, and certainly do not rule out each other. It is true that the Californian writer avoided taking sides with the Marxist credo, and retreated into the Emersonian ideals of dream, sleep, beauty as the vehicles of self-expression. Yet his intention is clearly didactic insofar as his short stories aim to show, through different methods, how absurd, illogical and meaningless his fellow citizens’ lives have become. “Living is a gyp, a swindle … a first-rate wish, a tenth-rate fulfilment,” Jesse’s uncle affirms in The Hero of the World (1939a: 60). In order to reach his goal Saroyan unmasks the fallacies of the culture of abundance into which Americans seem to be indoctrinated, and helps them open their eyes and start to see. Throughout his short fiction, but also in his , he debunks two important myths and institutions of the dominant culture we are going to deal with separately, even though they constantly overlap: the myth of success and personality, and the tantalizing influence of movies and ads. “If our time has selected falsity instead of truth” (Saroyan 1938b: 795), Saroyan’s purpose is, as I discussed elsewhere, “to lift the veil of the American socio-political simulacrum” (Aguilera-Linde 2002: 26) in order to show his readers how little their consumer aspirations can help them overcome the overwhelming loneliness and deprivation of present reality.

Personality, the key to success

8 The mass of faceless white-collar workers of big cities but also the small town farmers of Saroyan’s short stories have become living dead, loners who get by on food, water and air and who are not in the least aware of the futility and emptiness of living, simply

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because they have been cheated with the spurious dream of success: “We forget to focus our vision on the splendid things and we lose track of our proper function here … The competitiveness of our time oppresses and we forget all the essential things” (“Panorama Unmerciful,” Inhale and Exhale, 242).

9 Susman discusses that since the experience of the Great Depression was viewed as one of individual failure, the solution lay in the discovery of the paths to success. This was the “age of the how-to-do-it book” and of Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, “the best seller of the period” (1984: 165). The method suggested by Carnegie was “adjustment to the existing other”: since “everybody wanted to feel important, the way to get ahead was to make other people feel important. Smile!” In other words, try to fit in and be well liked. Many of Saroyan’s stories are parodies of the self-help book genre. Parody is, as Linda Hutcheon (2000: 85) holds, one of the techniques of “self- referentiality” that reveals both the narrator and the reader’s “awareness of the context-dependent nature of meaning.” “O smile and say ah-ha ah-ha” (Inhale and Exhale, 346) is what the narrator, obviously tongue in cheek, asks his protagonist to do over and over again in order to face the threats of the world: his lack of money, and the overwhelming mechanization of the cityscape he contemplates. In “Seven Easy Ways to Make a Million Dollars” (1938c: 1; 1983: 178-181) he provides a list of the things required to make the grade. “Hungry? Poverty-stricken? Worried? Cheer up. You too can be a millionaire.” In a language reminiscent of ads and mail catalogues Saroyan summarizes the must-do’s: not only the Benjamin Franklin’s aphoristic “early rise” but also more practical tips like “shave but do not cut your left ear,” “move in the direction of your rich friends,” or “present an invention.” By choosing the self-help genre, Saroyan reproduces the formal ingredients (Singleton 2004: 154) of the most demanded genre by the American readership during the crisis: the recipe format (the list of imperatives); the references to the addressee as an undifferentiated whole; the use of pseudo-scientific lingo to refer to the goal in question (“This step is technically known as The Poverty-Stricken Capitalist Hop,” 181; “I refer again to statistics,” 180); the teaching through allegedly objective experiences; the identification of the problem (“Many people have written to me confidential letters asking me to tell them seven easy ways to make a million dollars,” 178); the proposal of the solution (“Let me stress this: Don’t look for a job because things are picking up and some thoughtless person is liable to hire you,” 180) so that eventually the reading has a therapeutic effect: “one more hungry man of the world has been made happy and useful to society” (181).

10 Saroyan also subverts Carnegie’s advice in a good number of his stories. Smiling is what the young protagonist of “The Oranges” is initially unable to do. Forced to sell fruit to the passing cars on Ventura corner (a name rife with symbolic overtones), with two of the biggest oranges in his hand, Luke (the onomasiological implications are clear again) cannot smile at people. His uncle and wife are in dire straits and desperately need the money so they push him to give the best of his smiles because people will buy the moment they see a happy child. Yet not a single orange is sold, and instead of smiling back some of them make faces. Luke wants to cry. His cheeks hurt with the effort of forcing a broad smile during the whole afternoon (Inhale and Exhale, 37). More frequently, Saroyan uses laughter –high-pitched and even raucous, untimely and verging on madness– as a rebellion against the inequities and absurdities of the world; a Brechtian gestus revealing the heroic power of homeless, penniless and half starved people who are still capable of defeating death and chaos in order to reaffirm life and

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order: “They have nothing … yet they laugh …the glory fact of these ungodly days, the great American novel” (“Panorama Unmerciful,” Inhale and Exhale, 245). “The laughter was the mouths of all the dead of the earth twisting with his mouth to the fierce wisdom of pain and death, and it meant this: this is idiocy and insanity” (“Hunger Laughing,” Inhale and Exhale, 230). In “Laughing Sam,” the newspaper boy, who is killed by the elevator at sixteen, hollers the headlines of accidents and tragedies in a strident laughter which the narrator is incapable of understanding at first but who later on interprets as disguised sadness and anger over the misery of the world. In “Taxi to Laughter & Life Unending” the nonplussed protagonist, “a caught mouse in a desolation of towers halls doors spaces enclosed desks contraptions machines” (Inhale and Exhale, 282); a sheepish clerk, enslaved to his work routine and family ties, smiles at commuters and at himself while seeing his face on the train window. All of a sudden the absurdity of his life (“where is my life where is my meaning,” 282) is revealed to him in its grimmest hues. Despite complying with the establishment requirements (“he worked hard and he got himself through college and he went to the city and he saw he fitted into the idea very nicely,” 282) he understands he has done nothing but ruin his life. The epiphany is foreshadowed by the outbreak of laughter: “Laugh at yourself with heart bitter and turn about to see face of him who goes to daily death with you” (282). It is then that he starts to rebel against his life’s emptiness by getting on a taxi that will take him to the ocean. Laughing can also be interpreted as the aural sign which shows that the character has recovered a primitive force, “something old and savage and defiant” (“Aspirin is a member of the N.R.A.,” The Daring Young Man, 1934: 85) which pushes him to scramble for sunlight. It is through laughter that he begins to “smash things, making a path for you to the sun, destroying cities, wrecking subways” (85).

11 Success, either in the shape of a horse race, a card game, a pinball machine or any other slot machine, is an impossible goal which prods Saroyan’s characters into absurd actions. In one of the stories the name of the machine, the Crusader, bears clearly negative overtones. The medieval quest was a bloodshed whereby soldiers killed and travelled far from home in their quest of something that nobody was able to find: “The Holy Sepulchre.” The image parallels the American obsession to make money, the ruthless race to get ahead; a game that is simultaneously cruel and futile. The living dead of “The Crusader,” a story included in Little Children, Joe Torina, Jeff Logan, Marina Russek, and the rest of nameless farmers, attempt to evade reality – the frost has ruined the grape harvest, and there is no business – by playing pinball “from eight in the morning till three, four, five, and sometimes six in the next morning” (Little Children, 186-187). In the meantime signs of progress take over the city. Despite unemployment and starvation, the old telephone building is torn down to give way to a new one; and the outdated newspaper premises get remodelled. However, grief, loneliness, and incommunication divide characters from each other in unbreachable chasms. The ending is a landscape of monotony and serene sadness. Jeff realizes that the business of being alive is like a marble game: “he wanted more” but “there wasn’t more” to find (198). As in the case of the Holy Sepulchre the name of the machine conjures up, “you were only supposed to keep looking for it” (199) despite knowing there was nothing to look for.

12 A reversal of the happy ending of the rags-to-riches formula of the transplanted immigrant can also be found in “The Peasant,” a bitter story that destroys the illusion of America as the promised land, although Sarkis, the big Armenian of Gultik, manages to make his dream come true. Sarkis arrives in New York in 1908, seven years before

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the Armenian genocide, and presently the new world greets him with a gnawing loneliness that keeps him from sleep. The priest advises to take a wife but nothing seems to alleviate the pains of homesickness and lostness. Finally he decides to move west and it is in Fresno that he starts to pick grapes that he places on a timber tray to let them dry in the sun. The reader is led to believe that the story is a celebration of the American Dream: Sarkis raises a family, works hard and as a reward by the sweat of his brow, and a stroke of luck, he thrives: he buys a house, a phonograph, an automobile; years later his prosperity goes on, and to a long list of electrical appliances (vacuum cleaners, radios, refrigerators, a tractor, the radio …) he adds the enjoyment of leisure time on weekends: he takes his wife and children to ice-cream shops and movie theaters. Through the use of free indirect speech conveyed by means of short sentences strategically placed at intervals, and slightly modified so as to gain momentum, the reader discovers the unmistakable symptoms of progress, and the unambiguous appraisal of America as the land of plenty: from the protagonist’s nagging initial uncertainty of “[i]t was all very good indeed: he would not say it was not good, but he did not know” (Little Children, 181); to the dissolution of any qualms in “[i]t was all fine. He knew it was all splendid” (182); to the thoroughly enthusiastic assertion of “[i]t was all marvellous … It was a great age, a great time” (182). The last couple of clipped sentences are, however, added to cancel the reader’s expectations about the hero fulfilling the American Dream. “Still it was sad. He did not know” (182). Albeit his material achievements, he does not belong. In fact, the feeling of alienation and rootlessness has never abandoned him. Years later, when asked “How do you like America?” by his fellow citizens, Sarkis, who is now a respected, well-to-do citizen, still gives the same laconic answer he provided the very first day he arrived in Fresno: “Go; come; and with men known and unknown turn trays. That’s all. Go, come; go, come; know, unknown; and turn trays” (183). The experience of living in the can-do country has been downgraded to a repetitive, mechanical job which is done along with strangers one rarely speaks to. Spiritual isolation, and not success, closes the story.

13 “Harry” is also another tale which overturns the Horatio-Algerish expectations we may have about the protagonist’s meteoric career. Like the typical Alger boys (Lhamon 1976), Harry is bold, plucky, ambitious, self-disciplined and virtuous. He is “too busy to fool around with girls” (181), and shows a clear preference to shopkeeper values: whatever he touches turns to money. Harry is a worldbeater, a go-getter. His glowing personality catapults him to a dazzling success. It is not only that he can persuade people to buy everything he sells: pictures of Jesus Christ and saints when he is only eight; romance novels and beauty secrets years later, and, when he is older, second- hand automobiles that he himself paints in bright colors. He has also the ability to change people’s lives, as someone with a magnetic personality must inevitably do. Intoxicated with the venom of the romance novels, housewives start to cheat on their husbands, and girls lose their heads over the high school boys at the wheel of a gaudy car. Furthermore, he knows how to talk and is well-dressed, two essential requirements to have success. Yet the unravelling of the story is not Harry becoming a top notch businessman but his sudden death before he was twenty-three: “Presidents and kings and movie stars, they all die, they all get sick” (The Daring Young Man, 185). Even though his photo appears on the newspaper, we discover that Harry was the loneliest person on earth, unable to make friends because he could not talk about anything but business. In fact even in his deathbed he is attempting to sell life insurance contracts to relatives and visitors. The celebrity resembles an Andersonian grotesque, and far from being an

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idol that children attempt to emulate, the parodic rendering of the story converts the hero into a comic legend, the butt of funny jokes: “And everybody laughs, remembering him, the way he rushed about town, waking people up, making deals … All this will give you an idea what sort of a name Harry made for himself” (188). The story has become a burlesque of the American salesman.

Movies and ads

14 Frederic I. (1947, qtd. Foster 1991:120) has characterized Saroyan as a romanticist which still perpetuates through his writings the principles of “a new transcendentalism.” Saroyan’s post-Kantian division of the universe into two separate entities – phenomenal and illusory – explains the tragedy of most of his characters, unable to keep a difficult balance between both levels, and condemned to be in a constant state of flux (Everding 1996). The first level is the world we see – a jumbled mix of disparate elements, a catalogue of loose pieces which can only be classified under the heading of disorder and impermanence, “a figment in the nightmare of an idiot” (Razzle Dazzle, 63). The second is the region of dreams, illusions, ideals, yearnings for love, beauty, music, etc. Art is the offspring of the second level whereas war, economy and machinery belong in the first area. “The Great Unwritten America” clearly illustrates the Saroyanesque segmentation of the universe. “There are two regions. One is on the surface and the other is elsewhere. The first is geographical … the region of things, things that are material. … The second region is … the region of things not seen. It is the noblest of all regions” (Inhale and Exhale, 249).

15 The tragedy of the American citizen is that he has been forced to perceive only the first region and to ignore the second so that he has become a living dead, blindfolded, one who rises, goes to work and “returns to the slums of contemporary living” (Inhale and Exhale, 181-182), “harassed by fears” and worried about petty, pointless things. “Everybody [is] in pain,” this is the gloomy conclusion that the narrator reaches in “Aspirin is a member of the N.R.A.” To keep on working without losing sanity one needs to evade fundamentals. The sugar-coated pill comes in the guise of movies and ads. In “Solo for Tin Gazoo” the narrator’s tone is even more hopeless and vindictive: “Unhappy days are here again. Movie-money for all good citizens. Deportation for radicals … We have economic problems to solve, and the way to do it is to send America to a movie, and forget everything, especially humiliation” (Inhale and Exhale, 182). Not very different from Edward Hopper’s paintings whereby it is always possible to see “an imaginary proscenium” framing almost everything (Hughes 1997: 423), Saroyan’s short stories are dominated by characters hypnotized with movies in such a way that fiction has finally blurred, and more often obliterated, the contours of the real world. The image of America presented is obviously one of “heaven on earth” –“large, clear, undiseased,” rife with sweet music, “clipped, fed, garmented and ready for love.” In the hush of the dark theaters Americans can at least imagine the life they will never have. When the sun rises they will have to get back to work in order “to preserve politics and oratory” (Inhale and Exhale, 181). The problem is not merely that the citizen rests contented with contemplating a fakery. Banard (1995) argues that during the thirties movies contributed to replacing the aspirations and dreams of the American workers with make-believe ideals of love and fortune so that their lives might appear less unbearable. Their therapeutic goal consisted not only in healing the wounds of the

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unemployed, penniless citizen by persuading him/her that being rich, or at least about to become rich, “was the normal lot of mankind” (Barnard 1995: 28), but also in creating “the parable of the democracy of goods”: we are all equals as consumers, we have the same rights as buyers regardless of our social position, even though we cannot do anything much to change or influence matters of production and politics.

16 Furthermore, movies fulfill another ideological function: they anesthetize the audience’s critical senses by forcing them to ignore their meaningless existence and take whatever is imposed on them. War, Saroyan never grows tired of repeating, is, to the average American citizen, “all fantasy and cinema” (“The Theatre of War,” 1983: 224). By juxtaposing newsreels and melodramatic movies in the theater programs Americans have become emotionally dead, unable to react before tragedies, maybe because they are led to believe that documentaries are “malarkey,” whereas Hollywood scenarios are real. Saroyan’s priority is not to divert the Americans’ eyes to another direction. He wants them to learn to see. “Careless looking,” “[h]eedless vision,” “[b]lind acceptance” [and] “[t]aking for granted” (Saroyan 1941: 203), the national ocular malady, must be healed at all costs. Like Saramago’s characters of Ensaio sobre a cegueira, citizens need to recover their normal sight so that they can look at their lives in their true light. “The present intention of art is a hollow one”: it does prevent us from seeing how lousy our reality is and, even more importantly, it does not present the possibility to change it. “[N]obody is around with both the perception to see the present reality for what it is and the personal vigor to personally expose it, and introduce an aspect of what it might be” (1939b: 875). The effect of Hollywood is to “force one man at a time into submission,” nothing much can be done to transform the world.

17 “Secrets in Alexandria” revalidates the aforementioned assertion. David Bomerer, the lonesome bookkeeper who lives in a furnished room and spends his days trapped between the routine of paperwork, the absurdities of the world (war, inflation, gas- filled rooms…) and the ecstasy of motion pictures, is unable to fulfill his desires of love even though he is given a chance to meet the right girl. The three movies mentioned in the story – “She Done him Wrong,” “Farewell to Arms” and “Sign of the Cross” – provide the protagonist with different opportunities to channel emotions that do not find a vent in the real world. In the first he manages to get rid of “the day by day identity” (Inhale and Exhale, 222): for a couple of hours he is the manly lover embracing Mae West in a “ruthless, animal way,” not the sheepish, scared guy who wastes his life in an office. In addition to the dream of powerful masculinity the movie also gives him a chance to material success, for he imagines himself having “big cars, elegant manners, money to burn, delicious ladies coming and going” (221). In the second movie, a maudlin melodrama of the triumph of love and life over the atrocities of war, both David and Ruth feel “splendid for weeks,” invigorated and determined to confront their problems, for after all it was wonderful, miraculous to be alive “in spite of manufactured conditions, wars, mass hatred by propaganda” (225). The third, dealing with the torture of the Christians in the Roman circus, make them feel angry, resentful and powerful. At last they could find an enemy, the Romans, they could use as a catalyst to unbridle their rebellion instinct. Since “[f]ilms and other cultural artifacts contain and channel desires” (Lowry 1998: 131) that cannot come true or that are forbidden under the given social conditions, it is not surprising that the selected movies provide the illusion of desire fulfillment, and simultaneously cancel their realization. The dream of material wealth and true love will always be unattainable

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ideals outside the movie theater; their rebellion against the injustices will become a domesticated feeling after a while. The ending is “everybody lonely, no one able to touch another’s life” (229). David takes Ruth for a prostitute and he leaves the theater immediately. Once more, Saroyan overturns the expectations of the romance melodrama: the “meet cute” of Hollywood does not forecast the lovers’ eventual union.

18 Advertising is another institution of the culture of abundance that is ridiculed in Saroyan’s fiction: “production and sale, advertising and deception, promise and fraud, all these things have enslaved the people” (Saroyan 1961: 2). Parody must be here understood not only as a vehicle to showing “a world of simulacra, without depth, center, or causation” (Spariosu 1987: 59), but also as a form of self-reflexivity which aims to disrupt and transgress the norms (Hutcheon 2000). “Raisins” is a good case in point. The protagonist is Fresno, and the story is told by a choric narrator with clear Faulknerian echoes. Yet the theme is not the demise of a stagnant agrarian society which turns its back on progress but rather the transformation of the small town into a prosperous city when it manages to convert its main produce – raisins – into “a necessary part of the national diet” (Inhale and Exhale, 159) by means of costly full- page ads in the “Saturday Evening Post” and a catchy slogan, Have you had your iron today? Jackson Lears in Fables of Abundance (1994) argues that the twentieth century advertising industry is characterized by a movement away from the old natural, almost carnal nineteenth century attachment to goods, and the emergence of a rationalized approach to desire and consumption. Admen now prefer to show customers why they should rationally desire the product. Raisins “banish fatigue,” and therefore wise people should never forget to eat a five-cent package each afternoon.

19 The small town community, with a mayor who “looked like a farmer” (158), and with only a department store where the clerks slept during the whole afternoon because the whole city slept, is a peaceful place anchored in the past, whereby the only signs of progress are the paving of the streets or the purchase by the city of a Ford automobile for the mayor. The disruptive force comes when an educated man who uses big words such as “co-operation, mass production, modern efficiency, modern psychology, modern advertising and modern distribution” (160) arrives in town and persuades that only a national advertising campaign will create such a demand for raisins that it will pay for the packing plant and the central office building. The idea is initially successful but after a while people stop eating raisins without any apparent reason. Despite low prices and efficiency, attractive packages and ads, the economic crisis demonstrates that “we hadn’t changed the taste of man. Bread was still preferable to raisins” (163). The huge desert land around the town wins the battle over the machine: the big packing house, “a useless ornament in the landscape,” is eventually abandoned, the machine turns to junk, and the townsfolk becomes “the contemporaries of jackrabbits” (163).

20 Not only does Saroyan look back with nostalgia to the Emersonian triumph of individualism and nature over the uniformity imposed by the machine age civilization. He also inveighs against the ubiquitousness of the phenomenal reality, the American slavery to form and matter, and the spiritual amnesia which he feared was bound to affect the nation in the following decades. By strategically turning around the categories and values of the hegemonic culture in his short fiction, the Californian writer manages to create a counter-discourse (Foucault 1978: 101) which destabilizes

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the legitimacy of the prevailing order. Through the parody of the vocabulary, catchphrases and persuasive strategies of the self-help genre and ads, and the transformation of the protagonists’ conformist smiles into mad people’s jarred laughter conveying dissidence and rebellion; or by means of the reversal of the generic conventions of the rags-to-riches formula, and the of the narcotic effect of movies, Saroyan reappropriates the basic discursive elements of power with the aim of transforming their political value. Ultimately, the writer’s goal is to remove the citizens’ blinders so that they can abandon their materialistic aspirations and learn to dissent in a society which invariably imposes uniformization and conformity. His maladjusted characters are unable to make the grade, feel alien in a world that demands adjustment, insist on remaining outcasts in the “closed room” dominated by “a large rat race” of American society (Goodman 1960: 160), and eventually create a pocket of resistance which clearly anticipates the centrifugal flight of the Beat Generation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aguilera Linde, Mauricio D. “Saroyan and the Dream of Success: The American Vaudeville as a Political Weapon.” American Drama 11 (2002): 18-31.

Banard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance. Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and the Mass Culture of the 1930s. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Balakian, Nona. The World of William Saroyan. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1998.

Cummins, Walter. “The Unforgettable and the Ordinary in Saroyan’s Last Voyald.” Critical Essays on William Saroyan. Ed. Harry Keyishian. New York: G.K. Hall, 1995. 169-176.

Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Trans. Jacques Mourrain. Cambridge: Polity, 1988.

Everding, Robert. “The Time of Your Life: ‘A Figment in the Mind of an Idiot’.” Critical Essays on William Saroyan. Ed. Harry Keyishian. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996: 124-133.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978.

Gane, Mike. Baudrillard’s Bestiary. Baudrillard and Culture. Routledge: New York & London, 1991.

Goodman, Paul. Growing up Absurd. Problems of Youth in the Organized System. New York: Random House, 1960.

Halsey Foster, Edward. William Saroyan: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991.

Hughes, Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1997.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. Champaign, Illinois: U of Illinois P, 2000.

Jolas, Eugene, ed. transition workshop. New York: Vanguard Press, 1949.

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Lears, Jackson. Fables of Culture: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Lhamon, W.T. “Horatio Alger and American Modernism. The One-Dimensional Formula.” American Studies 17 (1976): 11-27.

Lowry, Stephen. “Ideology and Excess in Nazi Melodrama: The Golden City.” New German Critique 74 (1998): 125-49.

Rahv, Philip. “William Saroyan, a Minority Report.” American . September 1943: 372, 374, 375.

Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd. A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale UP, 1950.

Saroyan, William. The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1934.

---. Inhale and Exhale. 1936. New York: Books for Libraries Press. 1972.

---. “Good Health: Its Cause and Cure.” Ctn. 67, folder 110, Ts. The Saroyan Papers. Department of Special Collection and University Archives. Stanford U.1936a.

---. “Friday Unlingual Silence.” “The Beale St. Traveler.” Ctn 61, folder 1 Ts. The Saroyan Papers. Department of Special Collection and University Archives. Stanford U.1936b.

---. Little Children 1937. London: Faber & Faber, 1964.

---. The Trouble with Tigers. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938a.

---. “Two Theatres.” Theatre Arts 22 (1938b): 793-95.

---. “Seven Easy Ways to Make a Million Dollars.” Ctn 70 folder 8 Ts. The Saroyan Papers. Department of Special Collection and University Archives. Stanford U. 1938c. .

---. “The Hero of the World, or The Heights.” Ctn 49, folder 11 Ts. The Saroyan Papers. Department of Special Collection and University Archives. Stanford U. 1939a.

---. “The Coming Reality.” Theatre Arts 22 (1939b): 870-75.

---. “How to See.” Theatre Arts Monthly 25 (1941): 203-06.

---.Razzle Dazzle. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942.

---.The Whole Voyald and Other Stories. Boston: Little, Brown, 1950

---. “The Babylonian Confusion. A Play in Two Acts.” Ctn 43, folder 45 Ts. The Saroyan Papers. Department of Special Collection and University Archives. Stanford U. 1956.

---. “The Bell by .” Ctn.67, folder 30 Ts. The Saroyan Papers. Department of Special Collection and University Archives. Stanford U. 1959.

---. “The Arts in America. (And Upstarts).” Ctn. 67, folder 28 Ts. The Saroyan Papers. Department of Special Collection and University Archives. Stanford U. 1961.

---. Horsey Gorsey and the Frog. Eu Claire, : Hale House, 1968.

---. “Destroying the Individual.” The Nation. 12 Nov. 1973: 504, 505-06.

---. My Name is Saroyan. A Collection. San Diego: HBJ, 1983.

Singleton, Andrew. “Good Advice for Godly Men: Oppressed Men in Christian Men’s Self-Help Literature.” Journal of Gender Studies 13: 2 (2004): 153-164.

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Spariosu, Mihai. “Allegory, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism.” Eds. Matei Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema. Exploring Postmodernism. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1987: 59-78.

Susman, Warren I. History as Culture. The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Tompkins, Walter. “Rugged Individualist. Saroyan Visit Crackles.” Santa Barbara News Press. 18 May. 1967: 1-2, 7.

Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” New Left Review I/82. Nov-Dec 1973: 3-14

NOTES

1. I use the term “residual” as defined by Raymond Williams (1973: 10): “experiences, meanings and values which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture” but that are “lived and practised on the basis of the residue –cultural as well as social –of some previous social formation.”

ABSTRACTS

Contrairement aux « grotesques » de Sherwood Anderson et aux « freaks » de Carson McCullers, condamnés à vivre dans l’isolement, malgré leurs vains efforts de communication, les fous excentriques de Saroyan poursuivent des rêves absurdes, bravent règles et conventions, et se sentent bien fiers de leur identité insolite dans un monde homogène qui s’obstine à effacer les différences. Dans « Hosey Gorsey and the Frog » (1968), un conte pour enfants apparemment innocent, l’écrivain centre sa critique sur la culture de l’abondance régnante (Susman 1980; Barnard 1995). Par une révision détaillée de ses romans, surtout de ceux publiés pendant la Grande Dépression, nous entendons montrer que l’œuvre brève de l’auteur, où les héros sont des personnages extravagants et des idéalistes surannés, peut être envisagée comme une tentative pour contredire, pour bouleverser ou résister aux valeurs et aux institutions de la société de consommation de masses: le mythe du succès et de la personnalité, l’influence omniprésente du cinéma et les spots publicitaires. Faisant appel à un contre-discours dont l’objectif ultime est de discréditer la légitimité de l’idéologie dominante, les récits de Saroyan mettent à nu l’esprit conformiste de l’Américain moyen.

AUTHORS

MAURICIO D. AGUILERA LINDE Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde is a senior lecturer at the University of Granada where he has been teaching British and American literature since 1992. Co-editor and translator of a volume of Victorian fairytales (Madrid: Valdemar, 1999), and chief editor of an anthology of Indian short fiction (Madrid: Miraguano, 2009) he has published a great number of articles on Saroyan

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(“Saroyan and the Dream of Success: The American Vaudeville as a Political Weapon.” American Drama, 11, 2002: 18-37); Joyce (“Carlyle in Ulysses.” Papers on Joyce, 3, 1997: 49-56); Hemingway (“Hemingway and Gender: Biography Revisited.” Atlantis, 27, 2, 2005: 15-26) and O. Henry (“’Truth is Held in Disrepute’: O. Henry and the Dismantling of Paradigms.” Miscelánea. Journal of English and American Studies, 38, 2008: 11-27). His essay “‘The Wilderness is Interior’: ’ Strategies of Resistance in ‘Two on a Party’” will appear in the 2010 volume of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review. He has also published short fiction. His story “El amor es un cuchillo” (“Love Knife”) was published in Arenas Blancas, University of New México, in 2004. “No preguntó” (“I know you didn’t ask”) was awarded the Yoknapatawpha Prize in 2007, and has been included in a collection of short fiction entitled “Sobre tierra plana” (Madrid: Gens, 2008).

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Heterosexual/Homosexual definitions and the homosexual narrative of James Purdy's "The Candles of Your Eyes"

Clinton E. Hammock

1 Eve Sedgwick argues that heterosexual/homosexual definitions are central to the creation of knowledge Systems in modem Western culture, and order too understand its literary discourse an analysis of heterosexual/homosexual definitions are required.1 When looking more closely at this binary pairings, one observes that one position in the binary pair (in this case, the homosexual) becomes devalued through homophobic cultural pressure in order to subordinate it to an inferior position or identity, but it is also its existence and subordination that gives powerful meaning and privilege to the heterosexual position or identity.2 Despite the apparent naturalness of this distinction, the heterosexual/homosexual distinction is really a historically based and culturally specific classification scheme of the modem Western world, which has the effect of classifying forms of desire on the bases of object choice rather than acts of sexual behavior, and reduces widely diverse sexual practices into a normative (natural)/non- normative (unnatural) formula where the "normal" becomes privileged and oppresses the non-normative defining it as "unnatural." The normative nature of the category "heterosexual" sets up the category "homosexual" as a something to be explained and corrected (while leaving itself unexplained) because of its assumed deviance from the normal.3 What is critical is that this definitional binary quickly became assimilated into Western cultural discourse and Systems of knowledge production, in areas of medical, legal, literary and psychological discourse as a form of cultural labeling, and structures knowledge about the organization of the world. Heterosexual/homosexual definitions became aligned with forms of social categorization, scientific description and subjective identification. Sexuality (in either form) also became a privileged construct for defining identity. Heterosexuality/homosexuality became a master binary, and many other cultural binaries became articulated through this distinction so that there

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ended up being little intellectual or cultural knowledge that was not free from the structuring influence of these sexual définitions.4 Because of its cultural pervasiveness, this pattern of cultural thinking about sexuality inevitably leaves its mark on literary compositions, particularly those narratives dealing with sexuality, and the ways in which writers handle character development and plot structures, and how characters with different sexual/subjective identities work out their stories.

2 Diana Fuss also performs a similar kind of deconstructive analysis, but with an emphasis on identity formation rather than cultural knowledge. She uses the binary metaphor of inside/outside to further elaborate the relationship between the concepts of heterosexual/homosexual as mutually defining subject positions. In her analysis, homosexuality comes to stand for that which is excluded, that which stands outside of the normalcy as defined by the heterosexual, so that the binary heterosexual/ homosexual is "fundamentally a structure of exclusion and exteriorization [that] constructs that exclusion by prominently including the contaminated other in its oppositional logic."5 In other words, people acquire identities in terms of what they are not, by the exclusion of what is different, and by the production of a sense of otherness that is silenced from one's identity.6 For Fuss, the excluded outside (the "other," the homosexual) defines the inside (the "normal," the heterosexual) by what the inside casts away from its own self-definition. The excluded other/outside is fundamental to formulating what is normal/inside. The inside terra cannot recognize that which it excluded and externalized from itself without raising the possibility of a threat to the identity of the inside. To protect itself, the inside/normal identity projects part of itself outside and stigmatizes it as other, and does not recognize it as within the inside/self.

3 Both Sedgwick's and Fuss' analysis are examples of queer theory, which places its emphasis primarily on social analysis and critique, rather than traditional forms of . Literary texts are seen as sites of political and social practices that organize social and cultural codes, and are seen as possessing social force that helps structure identities, social norms and power relations, as they are organized around master sets of binary pairs such as heterosexual/homosexual.7 These binaries inevitably become organized into superior and inferior hierarchical relationships, that reinforce patterns of exclusion and dominance, in which certain feelings, acts, desires, identities and social formations are excluded, marginalized and made inferior. By forcing people to define themselves in terms of heterosexual/homosexual knowledge structures, where the heterosexual is privileged and the homosexual is marginalized.8 Van Leer asserts that this connection between sexuality and knowledge cannot be disconnected from the context in which the marginalized are known, since knowledge is dependent on cultural power, and the "ways in which the disempowered know the empowered are not merely inversions of the ways in which the empowered know them." One must consider how the dominant culture knows the marginalized, and how minorities know themselves.9 Van Leer draws on DuBois' concept of "double consciousness," in which minorities do not know themselves directly, but know themselves through the lenses of the dominant culture, so their identities is told to them through someone else's narrative about them, and their identities are formed in light of someone else's knowledge about who they are.10 If heterosexuals know themselves by what has been valorized as normative as superior and natural, than many persons who formulate a homosexual identity will come to know themselves as inferior and other. Homosexual persons run the risk of reading themselves in terms of

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the knowledge structures and narratives that normalize heterosexuality. In this case, homosexual persons would construct themselves through the dominant sexual discourse that disparages them as inferior. It is the constructing of one's identity in someone else's terms and reading oneself in light of someone else's narrative that interests me here. What I am suggesting is that the reading of the homosexual in heterosexual narrative terms shapes literary narratives in such a way that some stories can be understood as a "homosexual" narrative constructed by heterosexual perceptions about the nature of homosexuality.

4 I want to consider the title short story by the contemporary gay American writer James Purdy from his 1987 collection "The Candles of Your Eyes."11 James Purdy has been a continuously active American writer since the late 1950's and continues to produce fiction, poetry and plays today. Purdy often expresses a vision that is pessimistic, and his work is filled with violence, dark visions of sexuality, and a general rejection of modem American culture.12 As a gay writer, Purdy often refuses to produce positive images of gay men and is not interested in celebrating and asserting sexual diversity as a positive basis for individual subjectivity. This kind of subjectivity Purdy often denies to his characters. Although the author of this story is himself a gay man, he bas created a story that is imbued with textual homosexualizing that is a formulation of the heterosexual other in cast off homosexual terms. My reading of this story will be structured around three sets of binaries that articulate heterosexual/homosexual definitions: dominance/submission, beauty/ugliness, and dynamic/static. These three binaries are informed by the structural imperatives of Western heterosexual/ homosexual definitions, where the homosexual exists as the cast off and inverse of the heterosexual normative. Ail three of these binaries figure longstanding tropes of gay (and anti-homosexual) fictions. My current purpose its to examine some of the ways in which heterosexual/homosexual definitions inform, and are deployed, through these binaries, as manifested in the character development and plot structure of Purdy's short story. These three binaries are both structured by heterosexual/homosexual definitions in their contents, as well as constitute the manifestations of the heterosexual/homosexual definitions themselves.

5 Patterns of dominance/submission involve not only the cultural subordination of homosexuality to heterosexuality, but also the projection of patterns of heterosexual gender roles into homosexual relationships, where homosexual partners act out heterosexual roles of masculine and feminine, that is, homosexual relationships become structured in normative heterosexual terms. At the same time, homosexual persons are cast into "female" submissive roles in relation to heterosexual persons, as inferior regardless of their participation in active or passive sexual behavior with their homosexual partners. For instance, Dyre notes that heterosexuality is posited on the gender difference of masculine/feminine (and the power differential this implies), and is conceptualized in terms of opposites, so male and female sexuality are defined within the context of heterosexuality as male-active/female-passive. This is grafted into homosexual relationships in the form of top/bottom,13 replicating the heterosexual pattern, a pattern defined by the dominant cultural power holders and imposed on the identities of weaker subjects. Another interesting pattern is how homosexuality tends to be coded as "white," and "blackness" tends to get coded as heterosexual in a racial context.14 In this case, blackness becomes assimilated to maleness/heterosexuality as a

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violent threat to civility and culture, whereas whiteness gets depicted as something nurturing, to be protected, and thus feminine and homosexual.

6 This counter-intuitive connection between white and homosexual shows the often- unexpected cultural connections that heterosexual/homosexual definitions will form with other cultural binaries. In the case of beauty/ugliness, this binary is aligned with both the heterosexual and the homosexual but in different contexts. For instance, the heterosexual is aligned with beauty when it is normalized as moral and good, making the homosexual appear as its sinful and ugly opposite, but beauty is also linked to the homosexual through youthful male beauty, which is eventually corrupted through moral decline. Dynamic/static also bas complicated links to heterosexual/homosexual definitions. The static is idealized in heterosexual terms when it exists in the privileged forms of marriage and family life and "happily ever after" romantic endings, and is privileged as dynamic in the form of rebirth/reproduction of children (within the static stability of "home and family"). In comparison (and this connection makes clear the ways in which the homosexual becomes inferior when defined in heterosexual terms, as its cast off cultural opposite) homosexuality can never achieve privileged dynamicism because of its "inherent" sterility/stasis as non-reproductive, and is thus doomed to inferior stasis in the form of repetitious sexual acts, for their own sake, and as selfish and superficial pleasure with no larger moral (reproductive) goal. All homosexual relationships are by comparison static and morally inferior because they lack the heterosexually productive and "proper" balance of dynamic/static. The homosexual then can only produce a form of infantilism among its participants, because it cannot mature and develop beyond its own limited state.

7 These complicated patterns and interconnections are at play in Purdy's "homosexual" story because of its way of defining and presenting homosexuality in heterosexual terms, as its cast off opposite. For the purpose of making the workings of these binaries clearer, I have coded the occurrence of each binary pair through different typefaces. The bold typeface indicates moments and images of dominance/submission; italics code beauty/ugliness, and dynamic/static instances are underlined. In the folio wing, I will consider key moments from Purdy's story. Each of these moments are organized around one of these binaries, which interacts with and informs the expression of the other two binaries. At the end, I will look at the closing event of the story and consider how heterosexual/homosexual definitions structure Soldier's "coming out" as a murderer.

8 The dominance/submission binary, as informed by heterosexual/ homosexual definitions, has the effect of re-coding heterosexual gender roles into a homosexual/ context. This effect is found m Purdy's story in the following: "Soldier insisted Beaut always wear a gold chain he had picked up from somewhere, but the younger man did not like the feel of metal against his throat. He said it reminded him of a gun pointed at him. But in the end he gave in and wore the chain." This is a transparent trope of dominance/submission of Soldier over Beaut through the imposing of marks, signs or indicators of ownership onto the body of another person because it incorporates heterosexual gender codes that masculinize and feminizes Soldier and Beaut respectively. This passage imports heterosexual courting and marriage tropes of jewelry exchange (such as engagement rings and wedding bands) to denote the restrictions placed by one onto another as public markers of ownership. Although, his passage does not make it explicit, the chain is meant to represent the binding/chaining

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of Beaut to Soldier, with the implicit threat of violence encoded in the reference to a gun, to which Beaut surrenders. Soldier's dominance over Beaut is further encoded in Soldier's name. This is a minor but straightforward moment. The central scène in which domination/submission is encoded contains a much more complicated collusion of the three binaries mat help structure the definition of homosexuality in a heterosexual context mat renders homosexuality as either weak or invisible. Soldier used to hold Beaut in his arms and lullaby him in a big rocking chair.... He rocked Beaut in the chair as one would a doll. It was their chief occupation, their sole entertainment. It was an unforgettable sight, midnight-black strapping Soldier holding the somewhat delicate, though really tough, Beaut. If you looked in on them in the dark, you seemed to see only Beaut asleep in what looked like the dark branches ofa tree..... Then he would rock Beaut and lullabv him as the night settled down over the city.

9 This is a love scene, demonstrating the affection between these two men, but this scène, in the heterosexual context of the three structuring binaries I have identified, render homosexual relationships as one of parent/child, not equal partners, and one that is naturally immature The weak/beautiful is subordinated into infantilism, suggesting that "homosexual" relationships are caught up in a form of stasis, where children never grow up and parents don't nurture but exploit for co-dependent reasons. The unbalanced power dynamic is further emphasized by the whiteness of the submissive one and the blackness of the dominant one. The dominant one forces stasis on the weaker of the two, while blackness renders the dominant one invisible. In this case, the homosexual is either weak and passive, or strong but rendered invisible. In this passage, Beaut seems to disappear as an active participant in the relationship (as static), reduced to an infant by Soldier's dominance, and Soldier seems to disappear because of his blackness of the night. Whereas Beaut's beauty makes him shine in the darkness, Soldier's blackness (here a form of ugliness) makes him invisible in the dark. This passage suggests that the proper place for ugliness and blackness (and homosexuality) is to be unseen in the darkness, unless it can be rendered into a passive art object admired for its beauty. The heterosexual cultural force as articulated through the dominance/submission binary, in this case, renders the homosexual as passive and invisible.

10 The binary of beauty/ugliness, also bas a role to play in the defining of homosexuality as inferior and negative in comparison to heterosexuality. Beauty/ugliness tends to play on ideas about surface and of sensual and sexual attractions. Further, it becomes the vehicle for the moral decline and fall of homosexual characters because they lack of depth (which becomes coded as heterosexual "love/depth" as opposed to homosexual "lust/surface"). For instance, in Purdy's initial description of Beaut, he is cast in the role of the tragic condemned beautiful boy that suffers and dies because of his beauty. Beauty Orleans, or Beaut...grew more handsome the older he got, we thought, but he was always from the time he appeared in the Village a cynosure for ail eyes. At seventeen Beaut looked sometimes only thirteen. His most unusual feature, though, happened to be his eyes, which someone said reminded one of flashes of heat lightning .... He had no education, no training. no skills. He wore the same clothes winter and summer. and was often even on frigid December days barefoot. In summer he put on a German undershirt which he pulled down almost as far as his knees. He found most of his clothes outside the bock door of a repertory theater.

11 What is most notable in this description of Beaut, beyond the obvious significance of his name, and celebration of his beauty, is the collusion of beauty with stasis, which

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reduce Beaut to a beautiful surface to be admired and actively looked upon, but not internally active or self-directing. The only thing that comes from within is beauty, the flashes of his eyes, otherwise there is nothing else notable about him: no education, no training, no skills. Beaut's clothing further associates him with surfaces, wearing tossed-off theater costumes. Beaut is characterizes as a passive thing to be viewed as a beautiful object, and as a superficial object of the lust of others. Not only is beauty to be admired, it is also something to take possession of and exploit. Because of Beaut 's extraordinary good looks and his strange eyes, artists were always clamoring to make drawings of him. His friend Soldier...protected or perhaps imprisoned Beaut out of his love for the boy. If you wanted to get permission to draw Beaut, you had to go straight to Soldier first and finagle the arrangements. Soldier would hesitate a long while with a suing artist...after arguing and scolding, would arrive at a just price, and Beaut was begrudgingly allowed to leave for a calculated number of hours.

12 In terms of the homosexual definition (as defined by heterosexual cultural influence) homosexual characters are rendered as exploitive (of other men's bodies for sexual purposes) to be manipulated for sexual conquest or superficial physical intimacy. This seems to be the subtext of the artists wanting to draw Beaut, where the "drawing" is a displaced form of sexual encounter and superficial physical contact, which is projected into a flat one-dimensional surface, another representation of homosexual sensual shallowness. Soldier with his dominance and control over Beaut can exploit his beauty to make available or withhold him as an object of desire. Here the motifs of beauty and dominance collude in a way that is consistent with the structuring of the heterosexual/ homosexual definitions that inform the representation of homosexuality.

13 But beauty cannot last, and in a heterosexually defined context, its renewal is not possible (renewal defined in terms of reproduction). Beauty only exists as momentary stasis leading to eventual decay, as happens to Beaut after Soldier abandons him. As days and weeks passed, the young boy got older-looking, but anything more beautiful. His eves located deep in his skull looked like Utile birthday candles flickering. After wrinkles began forming around those candlelike eves. Some of his teeth came out, but he looked handsome still even without them.

14 Beauty is always somehow linked to stasis, as reflecting timelessness, but is also simultaneously subjected to decay, thus the aligning of beauty/stasis and ugliness/ decay (decay as a negative form of the dynamic). The homosexual logic here drives toward the fall of beauty because beauty cannot renew itself, implying a creeping moral corruption that must underlie the stasis of homosexuality. The dynamic/static binary codes the heterosexual as dynamic in the sense of producing growth, change and development, especially through the metaphor of rebirth and reproduction, as opposed to "homosexual" stasis of (sexual) repetition, infantilism and decay. I have already suggested that stasis and beauty are interconnected in homosexual representations, and that stasis must lead to eventual decline. Here Purdy makes the connection explicit. People in the Village wondered how these two could go on so long together. But it was finally understood that Beaut and Soldier had reached some kind of perfection in their love for one another. They had no future, and no past—just the now in which Soldier rocked Beauty on his knees and kissed his smooth satiny reddish-gold hair..... We knew it couldn't last. Nothing perfect and beautiful bas any future. And these two were already overdue in their paradise together. Doom is what perfect love is always headed for. So then one night Soldier did not come back to that shell

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of a building they had lived together in. Beaut stirred after a while in the chair, like a child in his mother's body wanting to be born. Still. no Soldier. Hunger at last drove Beaut out into the street. Outside. he rubbed his eyes and stared about as if he had been asleep for many considerable years.

15 This passage draws on stasis imagery, with the specter of decay and collapse raised as the necessary outcome of any kind of perfection that could be temporarily achieved in a homosexual relationship. This is the inevitable outcome of a homosexual relationship defined in the context of a "heterosexual" bias, because by definition a homosexual relationship can never be sustained; it cannot renew itself. The assertion that "nothing perfect and beautiful bas any future," read in a Platonic philosophical context, would be an absurd statement, because the perfect and the beautiful are eternal, where stasis is ideal. But heterosexual/homosexual definitions are not located in a Platonic philosophical space, stasis not ideal in a heterosexual/homosexual definitional context where the homosexual is by definition doomed to failure because of its non- reproduction. The homosexual is countered by a heterosexual narrative that strives for "happily ever after" endings, where a proper or morally correct stasis is staged through "family life" that enacts the dynamism of rebirth through reproduction within the context of the static/stable form of marriage/family. From the heterosexual view, the relationship between Soldier and Beaut can have no future except to re-enact dominance/submission and infantilism. At the end of this passage, Purdy evokes heterosexual dynamics that makes Beaut into a child, a sleepy child awakened by hunger. Homosexual characters are reduced to the status of children because of their inability to perform the "adult" biological fraction of reproduction.

16 By the end of the story, stasis imagery becomes predominate, even forming an object correlative to the narrative action (or non-action) with the freezing influence of the cold and the subsequent freezing to death, into human blocks of ice, of Beaut and Orley. This freezing is also associated with the theme of decay that links stasis to negative dynamics (in the homosexual context, the decline and death of beauty, rather than, in a heterosexual context, the linkage of positive dynamics to reproduction). So in the homosexual narrative there is a connection of freezing to decay and the death of beauty. The pipes all froze the front Windows turned to a kind of iceberg, and even the rats were found ice-stiff on the stairs. Ice hung from the big high ceiling like it had grown chandeliers. The staircase collapsed from broken pipes and accumulations of giant icicles. At the first break in the weather, wouldn't you know, Soldier returned. He had some difficulty getting to the upstairs on account of there was no stairs now, only piles of lumber, but he crawled and crept his way up to the rocking-chair room. What he saw froze him like the ice had frozen the house. He saw his place taken by Orley. who was holding Beaut in his arms in his chair, their lips pressed tightly together. their hands holding one another more securely than Soldier had ever dared hold Beat. They looked to him like flowers under deep mountain streams, but motionless like the in November.

17 The winter freeze is an object correlative to the stasis motif of the homosexual relationship; aligned with the theme of stasis is the theme of decay. The association of stasis and decay might seem counter-intuitive. The two would not normally be associated in a heterosexual context where stasis is a suspension of growth/change, but in a homosexual context where stasis is the only possibility, decay in the form of death itself, is its only outcome, thus the linkage.

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18 At the story's conclusion, Beaut is locked into permanent stasis (in the form of his literal freezing), and with Soldier's return, domination is momentarily pitted against stasis (in the form of the bullets against the ice), but stasis wins out. Soldier's act of violence, trying to shoot the already dead bodies, cannot penetrate them. Soldier's act of violence also brings him into a permanent state of stasis. "Explain me" was all Soldier was able to get out from his lips. "Explain me!" When they did not answer. and did not so much as open their eves, he brought out his stolen gun. "Tell me what I am lookin' at ain't so," he thought he said to them. When nobody spoke. he cocked his gun. He waited another minute in the silence, then he fired all the bullets. But as they flew through the melting air, he saw something was wrong even with the bullets, for though they hit their target, their target deflected them like stone. not flesh and blood. We have decided that Soldier had gone crazy even before he emptied the gun on the two lovers. but the realization his bullets did not reach flesh and blood caused him to lose his mind completely.

19 Beaut and Orley are reduced to hard (but beautiful) surfaces, and because Soldier's act of dominance bas no effect, he too becomes locked in stasis in the form of insanity. The theme of decay is brought to its conclusion, culminating in Soldier's insanity. Soldier metaphorically joins the stasis of Beaut and Orley, and remains frozen there in his insanity. He becomes trapped in a vision of reality that is not true, where he is unable to recognize what he is and is not responsible for, explaining why he carries the placard that opens the story, and setting the scène for his "coming out"

20 One of the primary modes of gay self-affirmation bas been formulated in the rhetoric of "coming out," in which the gay person achieves a form of self-awareness and self- acceptance in the process. This rhetoric presupposes that "closeted life" is one in which the sexual self is repressed, or that gay desire or activity is denied or hidden, and coming out is a way of escape into a more honest self-identity.15 Van Leer finds this characterization of coming out as limited and "philosophically primitive," because it takes the basic form of a Puritan confession narrative, where the self must battle and abandon it former ways (the struggle of the gay self to be straight), and achieve a true self when it accepts its true identity and finds wholeness and acceptance. Here the phrase "coming out of the closet" is parallel to the religious expression "coming out of sin."16 This rhetoric, of course views the situation from the homosexual point of view, but this point of view is still structured by the definitional influence of the heterosexual, which would see "coming out" as a confession of sin; a confession of one's nature as unnatural, insane or criminal. Soldier's confession thus conforms to this Puritan confession narrative, whereas the homosexual "coming out" deviates from it by reverses its impulses. The closing of this story takes this Puritan logic seriously in its representations of homosexual characters, and can be read as the catalyst of identity formation and "coming out," but in terms of the heterosexual impulse to define homosexuality as its inferior other, and construct a subjective identity accordingly. After the shooting he went to the police station and charged himself. The police hardly said two words to him, and took down nothing he said. But they did finally get around to going to the rocking-chair room in their own good time. They must have seen at once that Beaut and Orley had been dead for days. maybe weeks. long before Soldier reached them. No gun can kill people who have frozen to death. Every day for many weeks Soldier went to the police precinct and confessed to

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murder. Some of the cops even pretended to take down what he said. They gave him cigarettes and bottled soda. Soldier lives in a different building now with an older white boy. But every day, especially on Sundays, he carries up and down Fourth Street this placard, whose letters are beginning to fade. I AM A MURDERER Why Don't They Give Me the Chair?

21 Soldier's confession of sin is consistent with the heterosexual definition of homosexuality as its "cast out" other that Fuss notes in her analysis of identity formation, as well as Van Leer's discussion of minority self-definition in terms of the empowered group's discourse about the disempowered. Soldier "comes out" in the oppressor's terms and creates a negative identity for himself in light of the heterosexual/homosexual definitions as a criminal.17 Soldier declares his negative subjective identity over and against a positive form of cultural identity, which requires that he be insane and others not take him seriously at the same time, just as heterosexual society does not take homosexuals seriously, but continues to reinforce negative self-abnegating attitudes. Soldier's "coming out" is enacted in terms complicit with the heterosexually derived definition of homosexuality. That is, Soldier comes out in terms set by the heterosexual/homosexual definitions, as defined by dominant culture, that create knowledge Systems for the defining of normative and deviant forms of sexuality, which are metaphorically transferred into Soldier's confession of murder, and is another way of expressing and defining the homosexual as deviant and inferior, as grounded in sin that one bas to "come out" of through a confession of being a criminal and insane.

NOTES

1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) 1. 2. Sedgwick 8-9, 84. 3. Richard Dyer, "Heterosexuality," Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction, eds. Andy Medhursh and Sally R. Munt (London and Washington: Cassell, 1997) 261-264. 4. Sedgwick 2. 5. Diana Fuss, "Inside/Out," in Diana Fuss (ed.). Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) 3. 6. Steven Seidman, Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997) 152. 7. Seidman 147. 8. Siedman 149. 9. David Van Leer, The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (New Yoric and London: Routledge, 1995) 120. 10. Van Leer 121. 11. James Purdy, "The Candles of Your Eyes," in The Candles of Your Eyes and Thirteen Other Stories (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987) 126-132.

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12. For instance see the criticism of James Morrison, "James Purdy (1927- )," Contemporary Gay American Novelist: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1993) 328-339, and Reed Woodhouse, Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998) 75-81. 13. Dyer 264-265. 14. Vivien Ng, "Race Matters", in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction, (eds.) Andy Medhursh, and Sally R. Munt (London and Washington: Cassell, 1997) 224-225 and Van Leer 123-124. 15. Van Leer 123-124. 16. Van Leer 124. 17. Van Leer 124-125.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article cherche à montrer qu’en définissant l’hétérosexualité, on modifie la perception conceptuelle de l’homosexualité de telle sorte que cette perception façonne très fortement la manière dont l’homosexualité est perçue dans « The Candles of Your Eyes », nouvelle de l'écrivain américain, James Purdy (1914-2009). L’article montre en particulier que la présentation des personnages et la structure de l’intrigue créent un récit sur l’homosexualité. Le récit se construit sur des oppositions (dominant/soumis, beau/laid, dynamique/statique) comme autant de concepts soulignant l’opposition hétérosexuel / homosexuel, et conduisant à la construction de personnages homosexuels basée sur les notions de domination et d’apparence extérieure, et d’une intrigue qui présente l’homosexualité en termes de décadence, d’immobilisme et d’aveux de son dévoiement et de son exclusion. (Traduction : Amélie Rioual)

AUTHORS

CLINTON E. HAMMOCK Clinton E. Hammock is a graduate student and holds an MA in Religious studies from Missouri State University, and an MA in English from the University of Missouri: Kansas City. He is interested in the connections between homosexuality and religion and their expression in literary works.

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Apocalypse and the resurgence of the creative imagination in Not the end of the world by Kate Atkinson

Helen E. Mundler

1 Kate Atkinson is a contemporary writer who, whether at the level of hermeneutics or text, habitually draws in her early novels on what could aptly be called various mechanisms of resurgence to structure her work, typically by a process of constant telling, untelling and retelling. She has recently ventured into the genre of detective fiction, a natural forum for teasing the reader with games of burial and rediscovery as tiny details laid down in narrative mutate into plot-drivers. Not the End of the World, Atkinson’s only volume of short stories to date, falls between the two periods and marks a transition in her work: the affiliation to postmodernism and to metafiction is worked out with much greater subtlety, making the commentary on narrative fiction the more complex and interesting. I would contend that this work poses fundamental questions about the nature of creativity today, most essentially, what sort of writing is now possible, and to what extent can the processes of creativity, compromised by the postmodern ethic and aesthetic, continue to survive in our times?

2 In a review of the collection, Rachel Cooke writes, “Not the End of the World kicks off with its weakest entrant – a tale of two women window-shopping while Rome (or Edinburgh) ”. 1 To read the stories as “entrants” in a line-up is to refuse to see their cohesion, or to acknowledge the intricate ways in which they work together intratextually. I should like to argue that the first and last stories, “Charlene and Trudi go Shopping” and “Pleasureland”, on which I have chosen to focus in this study, frame the collection and make its textual concerns coherent. I will seek to demonstrate that these two stories are the primary locus of the self-referentiality of the volume, and of its commentary on creativity. They constitute a textual space in which the deconstruction of discourse is pitted against the poetic force of the imagination, which, in my reading, will ultimately prevail, albeit in a compromised form.

3 The two outer stories can be read as prologue and epilogue to the collection, or like a doxology sung in church, with different words for the beginning and end of the service,

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as appropriate. In order to support this contention, I will first show how the volume as a whole fits together by giving some examples of the overlap of one story into another in the inner stories, of which there are ten. The process of overlapping can in itself be read as a sort of textual resurgence: for what seems at first glance to be a collection of self-contained narratives in fact turns out to be a continuum – albeit of an uneven and chaotic sort – and there is a great deal of intratextual tying-together, at the level of story, of character, and also of cultural reference, with a dense intertextual web being thrown over the knots of intratextuality.

4 While heterogeneous at face value, and with no clear unity of subject matter,2 the inner stories in this collection pull together tightly in a number of ways. They are linked by, indeed riddled with, self-reference. Most obviously, the same characters come up more than once. Pam features as the mother of two teenage children in “Dissonance” and “Wedding Favours”, and also plays a cameo role as a child in another story, “Sheer Big Waste of Love”, in which she is mentioned only in passing as an unknowing witness to the events unfolding around her. The Zane sisters, American beauties in Scotland, feature twice, in “Transparent Fiction” and “The Bodies Vest”, and Heidi, the protagonist of “The Cat Lover”, turns out to be a friend of Missy’s, the governess in “Unseen translation”. Moreover, with a few departures – for example, Missy takes her charge to Germany – most of the action takes place in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling. Given such a restricted geographical frame of reference, it is natural that the characters and their circumstances are to some extent interrelated – thus it is, for example, that Missy’s employer sings in a band, Boak, which Simon, Pam’s son, admires in “Dissonance”.

5 On occasions the utterance of one character becomes central to another story: the title “Sheer big waste of love” begins as a scathing comment on Romeo and Juliet, delivered by the matter-of-fact Rebecca, Pam’s daughter, in “Dissonance” hinting at a blurring of diegetic levels, in that the utterance of a character appears to direct the narrative with a similar power to that of the omniscient narrator – although this device is never made explicit within the inner stories. In the final story, however, it becomes clear that there has indeed been a certain amount of trans-, when one of the main characters, Charlene, turns out to be the narrator of one of the stories, “Temporal Anomaly”, and possibly of several or all of the other stories: she proves, for example, to be familiar with the details of the lives of the Zane sisters (331), and Charlene’s wish in “Charlene and Trudi go Shopping” for “a cat as big as a man” has given birth to the plot of “The Cat Lover”. Moreover, Charlene is also revealed as the mistress of a heterotopia of myth, 3 presiding over the shared references on which the inner stories turn, whether from classical mythology or (NEW: 331). Trudi, meanwhile, assumes less narrative control, but for her part puts together a small postmodern patchwork, creating a nonsense-chant made up of the Bible, Shakespeare, poetry (Keats and Edward Lear), and folk tales: “(...) oh what can ail thee knight-at-arms they went to see in a sieve (...) beauty is truth truth beauty full fathom five” (NEW: 330), thus showing herself to be a repository of shared cultural reference. In these various ways a repertoire of reference to the outside world, fact and artefact, myth, popular culture, and so on is created.

6 While the inner stories contain radical departures from realism, or simply a delight in the forms made possible by postmodernism and the liberation from the constraints of vraisemblance – a boy is fathered by a monster on the seabed in “Tunnel of Fish”, a cat

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grows “as big as a man” in “The Cat Lover”, a dead woman haunts her own home in “Temporal Anomaly” – it is notable, and central to my argument, that the inner stories do no bring into doubt the continued existence of narrative itself. In the inner stories, fictional narratives whose purpose is to reflect, and reflect on, the truths of real, human existence, can exist, and do exist: moreover, the overlaps in character and plot mean that each small world seems to offer the illusion of a guarantee of the existence of the last, and the next.

7 The outer stories, however, differ markedly in this respect, and it is for this reason that I have chosen to isolate them for the purposes of this study. I would argue that their function is to undermine completely the illusions of realism created in the inner stories, and thus to subvert the hermeneutic underpinnings of the collection as a whole. A first clue to the nature of the outer stories comes in reading them alongside the inner stories: there is an ontological destabilising of the text, which can be seen at certain points of intersection between the outer and inner stories. For example, in “Wedding Favours”, Pam, a middle-aged teacher who finds herself unexpectedly made redundant, reluctantly turns to cottage industry with a former colleague, inexpertly hand-crafting table-decorations in the form of trugs of heather, bonbonnières, and so on, and selling them at wedding fairs. Charlene, meanwhile, in the first of the outer stories, “Charlene and Trudi go Shopping”, also frequents such fairs and reads the same articles as Pam – and, it is implied, perhaps writes some of them, since she contributes to the magazines Pam reads. However, in “Wedding Favours”, there is no indication that Pam and her family live in anything but a realistically-portrayed contemporary Edinburgh, whereas in “Charlene and Trudi go Shopping” the narrative is futuristic speculative, altogether divorced from realism and from the assumptions about narrative, which the realist text traditionally allows the reader to share, by allowing him or her to “believe in” the story and the characters as a reflection, in the sense of an imitation, of the world in which we live. I would thus like to show how the outer stories invite the reader to reflect on the nature of illusion in fiction, bringing into question the relation between word and world, and how these stories comment on the cyclical nature of the possibilities of creation, and the inevitability of destruction.

8 The apocalyptic aspect of the outer stories is very marked, in that the trope is that of the eschaton, defined by James Berger as the “actual imagined end of the world”. 4 The first story of the volume takes place in a city which could be Edinburgh, but also Glasgow, London, or a universal “unreal city”, to use T.S. Eliot’s term − that is, a fictional place.5 Given the title, “Charlene and Trudi go Shopping”, the story presents itself as a banal, chick-lit, women’s-magazine-type story. The opening line runs thus: “I want,” Charlene said to Trudi, “to buy my mother a birthday present”. Notwithstanding the slightly unusual syntax of the sentence, the reader might anticipate that this will develop into a “women’s experience” story of the kind which is mass-marketed today, and generally dismissed by critics as being of little textual interest, a continuation of the sort of female fiction popular during the first wave of feminism, in which women’s daily experience had to be validated by being described, published and disseminated − and which today is often considered outdated. However, the list of possible birthday presents for Charlene’s mother, drawn up by Trudi in answer to her friend’s stipulations, (“Something I can put in the post. Something that won’t break”,) makes it clear that the story is about to enter a realm slightly more unstable, more surprising, than chick-lit6 or purely realist fiction:

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A crystal decanter. A fingernail. An egg. A heart. A Crown Derby teapot. A promise. A mirrored-glass globe in which nothing but the sky is reflected. (NEW: 21)

9 The earth-shattering, almost world-ending event which has occurred is not described in the stories, but is evoked only through small, apparently throwaway details. There are a number of indications that something has changed radically in the world in which the women live, although they share quasi-universal concerns such as the procuring of staples, the buying of gifts, and so on. As the story unfolds, of various kinds, carefully named and differentiated, become common currency (“The receptionist appeared to have a Heckler and Koch MP5A3 9mm sub-machine gun under her desk” (NEW: 28), “Charlene (...) fell asleep with her hand on the Sig Sauer semi-automatic she kept under her pillow” (NEW: 31)), and the narrative is peppered with brief, deadpan intimations of disaster, which are neither elucidated nor developed, and which, apparently, have come to seem commonplace: for example, “Somewhere in the distance a bomb exploded softly” (24). Similarly, a few pages later, as the women drink in a bar, “One of the boisterous men in suits fell off his bar stool. The barman pronounced the time of his death as 9.42 ” (30-31). The situation is a source of comedy and a bleak irony, for the women’s hopes and aspirations for the future sit with a grim incongruity with the state of the world around them: “In the hours between curfew and dawn Charlene listened to the sirens wailing through the night and planned an article on ‘Great Tips for Spring Weddings’” (NEW: 30-31).

10 Apocalypse seems to have taken place as some sort of ecological , coupled with a population explosion: 7 the details of precisely what has happened are unclear, although there is a reference to an earthquake (32), and to climate disaster, in that it has “been raining for weeks” (24). As the story goes on, the illusion of normality become more and more compromised, and it becomes clear that something has gone irreparably awry with the country’s economy and distribution systems. However, in ironic contrast with this, the story builds up a gargantuan, Pantagruelian bounty, taking great narrative pleasure in evocation, in description, as an end in itself, as an almost poetic, incantatory force. The women get lost in the tea aisle, because there are so many different kinds to be had: “Chrysanthemum, White Peony, Jade Peak, Oriental Beauty Oolong, Green Gunpowder, Golden Needle, Hubei Silver Tip, Drum Mountain White Cloud, Dragon’s Breath tea” (23).This appears to be a classical cornucopia translated into the modern age (the food hall of Fortnum and Mason’s comes to mind). However, despite this plenty, “[m]ost of the food was too expensive to buy and some of it didn’t look real” (22).

11 It is possible to read this evocation of the state of the country as a comment on the entropy of postmodernity, 8 in which literary and political criticism momentarily fuse: in a post-capitalist world, the consumer society has reached the limits of its vision, and, simultaneously, art and representation reached a nadir of “apocalyptic emptiness”. 9 I would argue that the text uses this critical background in order to establish its commentary on the relation between signifier and signified in postmodern fiction. The relation of the words to the reality they are supposed to describe is thus problematised: the almost endlessly-generated, thesaurus-like lists of goods and objects point up a

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closed system in which meaning is no longer possible, but only a parody of meaning; in which imagination can function merely as an arid self-ironic process. The women’s tendency to generate long, incantatory lists – for example, of breeds of dog – thus imparts a disturbing and destabilising quality to the text: Trudi and Charlene swooned with delight at the idea of dogs (...) “Oh God”, Trudi said, overcome by all the breeds of dog in the world, “a German Shepherd, a Golden Retriever, a Great Dane, a Borzoi – what a great word – a St Bernard, A Scottie, a Westie, a Yorkie.” (27)

12 Types of fabric are similarly treated (“Broadcloth and butter muslin, brocade, brocatelle,” 33), and the presence of these lists can be read as a in an attempt to tie down words to meanings, to fuse the two, to prevent entropy and alienation, and thus to turn around the movement by which language and things have become divorced, and which, for some contemporary writers, signals the end of imagination. Barrages of words are used as an attempt to revive a generative, creative force, and also to act as a series of incantations to lament the passing of creative possibility. Richard Kearney puts it thus: Language, as an open-ended play of signifiers, is no longer thought to refer to some ‘real” meaning external to language (ie, some ‘transcendental truth’ or human subjectivity). Deprived of the concept of origin, the concept of imagination itself collapses (...) “Truth is replaced by parody”. (Keaney, 1988, 253)

13 It is thus eminently appropriate that the women should be trapped in an entropic system they cannot leave, 10 as energy leaches from all its systems and words become stand-ins for things. While the women are attracted to words and greedy for the pleasure they bring (“I love that word”. Dévoré”, (21-22)), the words they cling to hang empty and impotent. “Word” is a poor substitute for “world”, as the women’s punning, as Charlene mishears a remark, points up: “What a wonderful word”, Trudi said. “What a wonderful world?” Charlene said doubtfully. (33)

14 At the end of “Charlene and Trudi go Shopping”, the women go underground, as seen above, and it is not until the last story of the volume, “Pleasureland”, that they return and take up where they left off – only one step closer to the end of the, or at least their, world. The idea of “Pleasureland” as an alternative, fantasy universe, or, to use the terminology of Krishan Kumar, as a utopian vision 11 – compensation for the destruction brought about by the apocalypse – has already been invoked by a frightened, sleepless and solitary Charlene in “Charlene and Trudi go Shopping”. As an escape from the city, which has entered a further phase of destruction, with wild animals from the zoo wandering about the outskirts, museums looted and the streets patrolled by militia: in an attempt to bolster her flagging spirits in the apocalyptic city, she sends herself in imagination to “shady walks through cool gardens (...) where the air is perfumed with attar of roses” (23). As “Charlene and Trudi go Shopping” draws to a close, Trudi’s fantasy is completed by Charlene: “We could call it Pleasureland. And we would be gods. We would be the gods of Pleasureland. And live there forever” (NEW: 40). While in the first story the women wander among the illusion of the bounty of all the world, in the final story, “Pleasureland”, far from finding splendours to match their imaginings, they find themselves barricaded into Trudi’s flat: because plague is suspected in their building and all along the street, and although the women do not believe they have contracted the disease, the militia has no plans to allow them outdoors. There is no escape.

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15 If in the first story the challenge was to choose among material things, or at least to have the illusion of such a choice, here, the women can only invent what is missing. In “Pleasureland”, the point is no longer to identify and procure the exotic, the unusual, the rare: rather, all scenarii are as imagined and as unimaginable as each other. Nothing is to be procured at all, and the idea of drinking coffee of any kind at all is as far-fetched as that of jetting off to Bar in New York for cocktails. The women occupy the time with an extended game of “Let’s pretend”, notably recreating the layout of the shops familiar from the first story in the collection. Only the barest semblance of normality can be maintained, and the entire value-system maintained by the possibility of exchanging money for commodities has broken down: the women eat the meagre scrapings of Trudi’s kitchen cupboards from a Sèvres bowl, casually looted from a latterly-unguarded museum, or use the bowl to collect rainwater. Comedy of a dark kind is maintained by the narrator’s insistence on keeping up the standards of the time before: among the apocalyptic rumblings, with no soap, or even water, the women do not cease to be concerned with fashion and beauty. Style details lodge tenaciously, and bathetically, as the narrative of catastrophe unfolds: “Trudi had taken to wearing a scarf around her head, turban-style, but Charlene didn’t think it was a good look for her”.

16 By refusing to give in to silence, and by keeping up a flow of word games and story- telling – the latter activity of course recalling The Arabian Nights – the women try to put off the inevitable: silence, starvation and a slow death. Running out, momentarily, of word games and narratives, Charlene makes the suggestion “’Or we could just be quiet’”, to which Trudi replies “‘No,’ (...) no, we mustn’t do that’” (329). As they await the end, the only comfort they can offer each other is that of narrative: “Tell me a story”, [Trudi] said to Charlene” (330). Death comes when the women no longer have the strength to move and Charlene cannot remember any more stories, although they still hope for renewal, refusing to admit that the end is nigh. Even as death approaches, the women are still struggling for extraordinary items of vocabulary and lighting on particularly felicitous speech rhythms. There is, however, a brake on the rhythm whereas the listing of items begins to peter out, marking the winding-down of the story and of the collection as a whole: “Nothing dies,” Charlene whispered into Trudi’s ear. “All matter is transformed into other matter.” “Or metempsychosis”, Trudi said weakly, ‘the transmigration of the soul. Into an insect, a tadpole, a bean. A lion, a vine, a baby.” “A star would be nice,” Charlene said. “Or a constellation in the night sky where we could shine like precious diamonds. Are you still there?” “I’m still here,” said Trudi. “It’s grown very dark, don’t you think? Keep talking. Tell me another story.” “I can’t remember any more,” Charlene said. “Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world.” (332)

17 The women are aware that they themselves will one day be turned into discourse, and that being talked about will be their only survival – they will be turned into discourse As Charlene says, “One day archaeologists will find us and wonder about our lives” (330). While the system in which Charlene and Trudi find themselves is undeniably entropic and as such doomed, the text nonetheless offers the possibility of a sort of afterlife: the recycling of myths through the ages finds its echo at intratextual level, and the very stories in this collection will not die but will be recycled and “transformed” in the world to come. The various narratives at all levels of the diegesis

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– myths, the stories the women tell, the very stories of their own lives – constitute “matter to be transformed” into the narratives of the future. However, the movement is not only circular, for the act of restitution of the women’s lives – in itself and act of creation, but without the constraints and limitations either of realism or postmodernism – will be placed in the hands not of writers, or of critics, or of aestheticians of any sort, but of the archaeologists of the future.

18 It may be expected that the archaeologists will find objects and bones and historical artefacts, and will allow scope for “invention” currently disallowed by the aridity of the postmodern rules, in which a character is not the reflection of a woman who lived and breathed but merely an endlessly deconstructible manifestation in words of something whose essence can never by identified. To do so would be to traduce the very tenets of metafictional narrative, and in which language has, through an excess of the meta- discourses of deconstruction, lost all power to connote, to create, and to generate meaning. It is not unremarkable that Kate Atkinson entitles the last story in the collection “Pleasureland”, recalling the “pleasure dome” in Coleridge’s pure and irreducible vision of the Imagination, 12 “Kubla Khan”. By entrusting the spiritual resurrection of Charlene and Trudi, and of the stories, myths and texts of all sorts which nourished them, to the care of academics from another field and another geographical zone, Kate Atkinson places the debate on literature outside the sphere of current critical influence, thereby allowing the deconstructive to be replaced by the constructive – inviting, in other words, a reversal of the recent and current trends in literary theory by which, inexorably, literature has, in Barth’s terms, “exhausted” itself, 13 and, perhaps, its readers. As Christopher Norris puts it, writing of the deconstruction and ultimately the disappearance of the unified, humanist subject, “This is seen as the upshot of a widespread cultural mutation whereby the human sciences have come to recognises that ‘man’ is nothing more than a figure composed by certain (mainly nineteenth-century) discourses of knowledge”. 14 Kate Atkinson’s apocalypse is a textual one, and her eschatological anxiety involves the end of representation itself, and the death of subjectivity. As Richard Kearney expresses it, “The postmodern paradigm is (...) that of a labyrinth of mirrors which extend indefinitely in all directions – a labyrinth where the image of the self (as a presence to itself) dissolves into self-parody”. 15

19 The unsustainability of fiction as it stands in the first decade of the twenty-first century could be said to carry with it the expectation of a new dawn, thus affiliating this work to the kind of apocalyptic fiction which carries with it hope for a new age. However, since this renewal will nonetheless be worked out through the cyclical regeneration of material, Atkinson’s work brings together two contrasted ideas of apocalypse, the Christian, in which the world tends towards destruction and replacement by a new order, established by God rather than man, and the classical, in which, indeed, “Nothing dies (...) All matter is transformed into other matter” (NEW: 332). 16 Thus in Kate Atkinson’s collection, it both is and is not the end of the world. Ultimately I would contend that in this volume she takes narrative fiction to the brink of extinction and leaves it teetering there, and that this is how Kate Atkinson contributes to the struggle for, and against, postmodernism by writers of fiction today.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atkinson, Kate. Not the End of the World. London: Black Swan, 2003 (NEW).

Barth, John. The Friday Book: Essays and other Non-Fiction. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984.

Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Kubla Khan” and Biographia Literaria XIII, in The Portable Coleridge, ed. I.A. Richards. London: Penguin, 1978.

Cooke, Rachel. “Nanny takes Arthur to a Parallel Universe”. , 10th November 2002.

Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land”, in Collected Poems. London, Faber and Faber, 1990 (1936).

Herman, Martina Viktoria. “‘As if by Magic’: Postmodernist Aspects in Kate Atkinson’s Fiction”. Vienna: 2004. http://www.geocities.com/kateatkison14/study/htm

Kearney, Richard. The Wake of Imagination. London: Century Hutchinson, 1988.

Kumar, Krishan. “Apocalypse, Millennium and Today”, Apocalypse Theory and the End of the World, ed. Malcolm Bull. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1995.

Lewicki, Zbigniew. The Bang and the Whimper: Apocalypse and Entropy in American Literature. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1984.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1984.

Norris, Christopher. “Versions of Apocalypse: Kant, Derrida, Foucault”: 229, in Apocalypse Theory and the End of the World.

Pfannkuche, Sarah. “Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson”. http://www.bookslut.com

NOTES

1. Rachel Cooke: “Nanny takes Arthur to a Parallel Universe”, The Guardian, 10th Nov. 2002. 2. In her review of the collection, Sara Pfannkuche, for example, hazards that “the main theme is longing”, without substantiating her remark. 3. The multiplicity of references creates what Brian McHale, drawing on Michel Foucault, terms “a heterotopia” of discordant cultural references. “A heterotopia. The concept comes from Michel Foucault. ‘There is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite’” (McHale, 1984, 44). 4. James Berger, 1999, 5. 5. T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”, 1936. 6. Although Chris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell’s use of this term in the title of an anthology was intended to be post-feminist and ironic, the term is now widely understood to refer to reductive realist narrative, sold as entertainment only. The Bridget Jones books, by Helen Fielding, are perhaps the best-known example of the genre.

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7. Krishan Kumar predicts just such a vision: “I suppose it is inevitable that our apocalypses should be low-keyed – especially once the idea of nuclear apocalypse has moved to the background (...) The end will come as a result of a steady increase in population, or a slow poisoning of the . Catastrophe will be expressed in lines on a graph rather than in the imagery of the Book of Revelation” (Kumar, 1995, 211). 8. I use the term “postmodernity” as opposed to “postmodernism”. Martina Viktoria Herman recalls a distinction which can be usefully drawn between the two: “In order to limit the term postmodernism in its scope, it is, moreover, important to differentiate between the concepts of postmodernity and postmodernism. [...]Whereas postmodernity is, for instance, characterised by the rise and revolution caused by electronic technologies of communication as well as by an increasingly post-industrial economy and a society dependent in information, postmodernism as a term, for example, refers to a novel which raises awareness of itself as a linguistic construct”. “‘As if by magic’: postmodernist aspects in Kate Atkinson’s fiction” (Herman, 2004, 11). 9. Kearney, 1988, 365. “Language, as an open-ended play of signifiers, is no longer thought to refer to some ‘real” meaning external to language (i.e., some ‘transcendental truth’ or human subjectivity) (...) The deconstruction of the category of ‘origin’ is heralded by the famous textual revolution. The humanist concept of ‘man’ gives way to the anti-humanist concept of intertextual play” (Kearney, 1988, 253). 10. Zbigniew Lewicki points out that “For entropy to occur at all, there must exist a closed system; otherwise, an outside supply of energy could balance its losses and stop the process” (Lewicki, 72). 11. “If the millennium supplies the means or the movement towards the end, utopia is concerned with the ends themselves” (...) Utopia is certainly about presenting pictures of the ideal society. Unlike millennialism, it is relatively indifferent to the means of achieving that ideal (...) The means are downplayed; all the concentration is on the nature of the end, on what happens when you arrive in the good society”(Kumar, 1995, 213). 12. “The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria XIII). 13. “John Barth defines the literature of exhaustion as “the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities” (Barth, 1984, 64). 14. “Thus Foucault has a much-quoted passage in Les Mots et les Choses, describing ‘man’ – or the imagined autonomous subject of humanist discourse – as a figure drawn in sand at the ocean’s edge, soon to be erased by the incoming tide” (Norris, 1995, 229). 15. Kearney, 1988, 253. 16. The concept of apocalypse presented in this work corresponds both to the stages of linear, Biblical conceptions of apocalypse, many of which are contradictory regarding aspects such as length of each phase and order of execution, but all of which involve the replacement of the old order by the new, and to the “cyclical” vision of the apocalypse of antiquity, cited by Krishan Kumar, “which saw only return to the eternal starting-point” (Kumar, 1995, 212).

ABSTRACTS

Ce recueil de nouvelles liées entre elles par des thèmes communs, est encadré par deux récits qui se répondent, "Charlene and Trudi go Shopping" et "Pleasureland". Dans les deux nouvelles, deux

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jeunes femmes tentent de vaquer à leurs occupations dans une ville qui se trouve au bord de l'apocalypse. Affrontant avec courage le désastre à l'occasion d'un tour des magasins dans le premier récit, les protagonistes se préparent, dans le dernier, à mourir. Ces deux nouvelles peuvent se lire comme un commentaire de l'"apocalypse" postmoderne : selon cette idée, la mimesis n'est plus possible, et le sujet doit lutter pour sa survie. Cet article se propose d'analyser les limites et les contradictions inhérents au concept d'"imagination postmoderne" et de démontrer que le processus créateur, même dans un monde qui se trouve au bord de l'autodestruction, n'est que subverti, jamais détruit.

AUTHORS

HELEN E. MUNDLER Helen E. Mundler studied in the UK at the Universities of Durham and Strathclyde before moving to France to prepare her doctoral thesis on A. S. Byatt, which she defended in Strasbourg in 1998 and published in Paris in 2003 (Intertextualité dans l’œuvre d’A. S. Byatt, L'Harmattan). She has been a tenured lecturer in English Studies at the University of Paris XII-Val de Marne since 2000, and has worked in recent years on the fiction of Anita Brookner, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, Lucy Ellmann and other contemporary women writers. She is currently writing on the novels of Liz Jensen. She has also published short stories, and a novel (Homesickness, Dewi Lewis, 2003), which was nominated for the Booker.

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Author Interview

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Translating a culture in stories from the caribbean: a conversation with Olive Senior

Marie-Annick Montout

1 Olive Senior was the guest writer at a conference organized by the University of Angers in 1995. I had then my first opportunity to meet her. We’ve never lost track of one another since, and when she said that she would be in Paris in May 2008 and would I be there, I rapidly made up my mind that I would. She was going to have a very busy week, but she would squeeze in time for me on the 15th of May. We would meet in the lobby of our hotel at 10 the following day she said. As it were, the lobby proved to be too noisy, and we decided to go up into my room. The interview turned out to be very conversational.

2 Marie-Annick Montout: The seven pieces1 I chose to translate from your collections of short stories are linked by theme and narrative. They are narrated mainly from the point of view of a character, and report a traumatic event or a long chain of traumatic events in the life of the character which sheds light on his/her present situation and on the way he/she muddles along.

3 Olive Senior: Yes, although the point-of-view character is not always the central one. In ‘The View from the Terrace’, for instance, although the story is narrated from the point of view of Mr Barton and the woman on the hillside plays a secondary role, she is in fact the focus of Mr Barton’s eyes and of the story. For me, this is a story of the past and future engaged in a duel, although I did not think of the story in these terms when I wrote it. But it is also the story of the passing of a colonial elite and the people succeeding them – people living lives of great fragility but who are ultimately triumphant, people like the woman on the hillside. Her future is invested in the children she sends off to school, their clothes clean and pressed every morning. To achieve this takes great ingenuity and also the support of a wider community, something Mr Barton lacks.

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4 M-A M. : That woman is a real character, so strong, so much in charge. Her children running to school down the hill year after year. Is this typical?

5 O. S.: Yes, very much so; she is very typical of the way in which poor women have to find the means to raise their children, often with no visible male support.

6 M-A M. : You present Mr Barton via the pronoun he for the most part, but also via his family name alternating between telling and showing.

7 O. S. : Well, I was telling the story from Mr Barton’s point of view so it seemed natural to use his name or the pronoun ‘he’. In other words, it is not Mr Barton telling the story – in which case ‘I’ would be appropriate – but the author telling the story from Mr Barton’s perspective.

8 M-A M.: Most of the above stories end dramatically with the character’s failure to find his/her way through and to adequately address the question of mental boundaries between races, cultures and classes. Some of the characters have a stroke or become totally crazy or just disappear from the stage. Looking back would you say that stroke and mental disorder are signs of the character’s failure to cross boundaries and to fit into two worlds?

9 O. S. : I think this would be the case for three of the stories under discussion – ‘The View from the Terrace’, ‘The Glass-Bottom Boat’ and ‘The Chocho Vine’ – all of which have protagonists who are elderly and yes, find themselves unable to cope in a rapidly changing environment. But I would also like to emphasize that not all the stories end in tragedy – some characters are triumphant – the wife at the end of ‘The Tenantry of Birds’, for instance, or the woman in ‘The View from the Terrace’. But I do agree that all the characters are challenged by the rapidly changing and complex environments in which they find themselves. Some succeed in making the transition and others are trapped in the moment, by their own rigidity. Their failure is expressed in the stories in physical affliction – I like to think of it as speechlessness or falling into silence. Of course the so-called mad woman in ‘You think I mad, Miss?’ challenges the stereotype by triumphantly and loudly asserting herself.

10 M-A M.: I see what you mean. I for one think the end of “The View from the terrace”2 is an indication of Mr. Barton’s failure to adapt, of his being no longer interested in watching the woman on the hill. Mr. Barton’s interest in life is dead. The values he had always lived by have definitely crumbled down! Now what about Eric in “The Glass- Bottom Boat”?

11 O. S. : Eric has been a victim ever since he was born, of those ineffectual types shaped by his childhood. The irony of the story is that he has left an empowered independent wife for another, seemingly docile woman but then finds himself tied to someone determined to gain empowerment and autonomy. That is just too much for him.

12 M-A M. : The past is quite pregnant in these stories, pervading as it were the characters’ present. Present and past appear to blend. Is this the reason why the time difference is not always marked by tense?

13 O. S. : Have you got examples ?

14 M-A M. : Well this one, for instance3: “Now he realized that the feeling of falling, of having no real centre, had begun long before he had ever met Sybil Pearson. But it was around the time she first came into his life that he had begun to feel frail, like a plant that hadn’t been properly rooted. Going home at night to an empty house with his dinner in the

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oven, he began to get the feeling that his life, his very existence, was so insubstantial that it hardly mattered to any one. Perhaps it had to his mother, but she had died a long time ago.”

15 “He began to get the feeling […]” describes Eric’s feeling at the time he was living with his wife. However the feeling is back again because his relationship with Sybil is rapidly rotting and Sybil no longer ever speaks to him. Cases like this one can be quite challenging for a translator.

16 O. S.: I just do what seems right to me at the time. But I do believe that the present is always shaped by the past and so the interweaving of past and present is typical of all my stories.

17 M-A M. : Also, I sometimes find it awkward in the translation process to switch from patwa to West Indian French and to Standard French as if the language continuum were less familiar in French West Indian literature. Do Jamaicans naturally switch from Creole to Standard English?

18 O. S. : Yes, we typically do what the linguists call code-switching. Of course there are some Jamaicans who don’t speak patwa or creole at all and some who don’t speak standard English. In my work I tend to draw on all the resources of the language so that I am true to the speech of each character. This speech would be indicative of social status, education and so on, as well as the immediate situation in which the language is spoken would determine the code. I use patwa in dialogue but I also sometimes use creole as the language of narration. Here I am navigating between being true to the language and the culture it represents and writing it in such a way that it can be understood by outsiders.

19 M-A M. : I heavily drew on Cassidy’s and Le Page’s Dictionary of Jamaican English and on your Encyclopaedia of Jamaican Heritage for some expressions. There was nonetheless a quotation I could not find anywhere and this is, “Before A married an’ go hug up mango tree, A wi’ live so. Me one.”

20 O. S. : That phrase is actually from a well known West Indian folk song called ‘Mango tree’. The woman is saying that rather than get married and be left at home or abandoned by the man so that she is forced to embrace a mango tree, she will remain single. I guess it’s the anthem of the single woman justifying her status by a critique of married life.

21 M-A M. : Finding French equivalents is sometimes quite problematical. “Green bush, green bush” for instance or “Jane and Louisa” and also “Bull inna pen”, I had a hard time with those.

22 O. S.: Well you know I have often said I am writing a culture – so my work contains many elements from the folk culture – sayings, songs, games, riddles and so on. ‘Green bush, green bush, green bush’ is an element of Jamaican folklore – a word charm, said three times4, to keep wasps away. If stung, you are supposed to grab leaves from the nearest three green bushes to rub on the spot. ‘Jane and Louisa’ is the name of a very popular ring game played by girls throughout the English speaking Caribbean. It’s a courtship game and the chorus is ‘Jane and Louisa will soon come home, into the beautiful garden’. ‘Bull inna pen’ is traditionally a boy’s game because it is very rough. A ring is formed, hands are linked tightly and one boy inside the ring (the ‘bull’) has to charge the ring and break out. Very rough and noisy schoolyard play with spectators cheering.

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23 M-A M. : Are you aware that there are correspondences between West Indian French and West Indian English? I can quote as if followed by simple present in both languages; make somebody do something and “faire quelqu’un faire quelque chose”.

24 O. S.: I don’t know much about the other creoles but I would not be surprised at the correspondences since there are common African origins which will show in the syntax and even some of the words. And we tend to forget that in the days of sail there was much more contact on the islands between people of the different language groups than there is today as well as intra-island migration.

25 M-A M. : Caribbean language is a wonderful language. I think of this verse in ’s “En Mi-Carême”, one of his collection of poems published under the title In A Green Night : “and dry palmettos their sea-noise in the breeze”. Could it be an allusion to the coconut tree found in the hills and called “coco-la-mer” by French speaking Caribbeans— an allusion to the leaves rubbing against one another?

26 O. S. : I think you are right about the sound of the dry leaves rubbing against one another.

27 Olive and I then went on to talk about Martinique, Guadeloupe, Aimé Césaire who had just died, until we realized it was already 12, and we decided to go for a walk in the Luxembourg gardens and to have lunch there. There was an exhibition of iron sculptures, beached boats and fish traps in the gardens, and we stood contemplating them, feeling drawn closer to the West Indies. We lunched over red snapper, a typical West Indian fish Olive said drawing a blue shawl around her shoulders.

RÉSUMÉS

Interview

AUTEURS

MARIE-ANNICK MONTOUT Marie-Annick Montout is a senior lecturer at the University of Angers where she mostly teaches translation. She has passed the Agrégation competition and she has written her thesis on Olive Senior's collections of short stories. She specializes in Caribbean literature in general, and in English Caribbean literature in particular, with an interest in translation strategies for Caribbean texts.

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Book Review

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José R. Ibañez, José Francisco Fernández and Carmen M. Breyones, Eds., Contemporary Debates on the Short Story

Carole Birkan-Berz

1 Edited by three Spanish-speaking scholars with backgrounds respectively in literature, Irish studies and cognitivism, this book aims to approach the short story through a variety of angles by offering contributions from nine leading scholars in the field, including Charles E. May, author of the groundbreaking Short Story Theories (1976). The book opens by highlighting a new impulse in the publication of short stories and a concomitant increase in the academic study of the genre. Insisting on open-mindedness as a prerequisite, the authors set the short story in a global context and aim to go beyond the canonical field of English literature. Naming new fields which have taken up the short story as research material, they mention translation, gender studies, and language-learning (8). The authors also highlight a cognitivist approach among the approaches which are now being used fruitfully. In their view, the short story is an apt medium for demonstrating that ‘the literary mind is not a separate kind of mind, it is the fundamental mind, the mind that makes everyday life possible’ (8). The editors then detail the book’s objectives. Aiming to break new ground, they purport to show and ‘organize multiple perspectives and visions on the short story’ and to analyze the form ‘beyond traditional state of the art critical frameworks’ (9), promising both revision and controversy. In this respect, this book can be placed alongside other edited volumes on the genre such as May’s The New Short Story Theories (1994)or Per Winther et al’s The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis (2004)or Iftekharuddin et al’s The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues (2003). The back cover blurb reminds us that ‘making it new’ either requires studying new authors or reading established ones with a new perspective. In this regard, the book seeks to provide both approaches, such as modern readings of canonical authors, and introductions to more contemporary authors such as Judith Ortiz Cofer or the graphic novelist Carol Swain.

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2 Like the books mentioned above, Contemporary Debates on the Short Story includes and indeed starts with an essay by a short story writer, a welcome step in a critical opus, giving us a glimpse of the creative faculty. In this regard, José Jimenez Lozano’s ‘Reflections on the short story’, printed in the original Spanish as well as in translation, reveals how much a short story’s quality can be informed by the formal or generic issues addressed by the author. In this perspective, Lozano adopts the point of view of writer-reader. His most forceful point is that the short story can be distinguished from the novel in that it gives the reader a ‘shock’ rather than a gradual encounter with characters, plot or atmosphere (21). He also points out that a good short story often commands a new reading, once the reader comes to its end (ibid.). Strikingly, the essay abounds with critical metaphors usually employed for poetry, for example the short story as a sparsely ‘furnished’ space (19), recalling the metaphor of the sonnet as a small room and highlighting the importance of thematic unity and stylistic economy. Robert Frost is also called upon in the hint that a short story, like a poem, ‘must not mean but be’ (20). The insistence on time and rhythm as key parameters of writing is likewise reminiscent of Lozano’s poetic outlook. Lastly, the global or universalistic aim of the collection, highlighted by the attention to form and genre across cultures, is fulfilled in this author’s use of examples from American or Russian literature and in the cross-cultural quotations of readings of Flannery O’Connor by her translator Guadelupe Arbona. All in all, this piece of genre criticism demonstrates that generic boundaries and issues remain fuel for the writer’s creativity even though they may seem superseded by more political, stylistic or narratological ones.

3 With the exception of this opening contribution by Spanish author Lozano, and the closing one by Charles E. May, the essays are then organized chronologically, by order of the author focused on. In the second chapter, entitled ‘On the Margins of Mystery: the Detective in Poe and After’, Thomas Leitch pursues the generic questions broached by Lozano through an investigation of the short story’s origins in detective and mystery stories. In this piece of slightly revisionist literary history, Poe’s practice and criticism of the detective story is seen as laying the groundwork for the short story in general. After surveying and analyzing the different types of stories written by Poe, this essay ends by offering a link between the short story and various genres of modern . Then, reminding us of Poe’s dislike of Washington Irving’s fables or discursive, moralizing tales, Leitch establishes Poe as the creator of the ‘climactic’ tale written in heightened literary diction, where every sentence contributes to a ‘deferred teleology’(27-30). Moreover, Poe is seen as the first writer to set a detective, or detective-like figure, at the center of the story. Such characters engage in investigating and interpreting one event after another, until the reader gets to a climactic resolution of the mystery. Leitch argues that some of Poe’s stories, which either feature a failed detective or do not offer a solution to the puzzle, are the actual forerunners of the modern short story, with its sense of overwhelming ambiguity and lack of closure. In these tales, the hero is not a detective, who organizes all the clues he has found, rather what he terms a ‘hyperaesthete’ (36), who perceives perhaps more acutely but ultimately gets lost in a world of the senses. This perceptive and erudite article is of interest as literary history as well as genre criticism, but also has potential ramifications into cognitive studies.

4 In the next chapter, José Alvarez Amoros offers a deconstructive reading of Henry James’ story ‘The Coxon Fund’, using what he calls a ‘para-Derridian’ frame of analysis.

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In this in-depth article, Amoros gives an analysis of James through the dual and self- avowedly anachronistic viewpoint of Bakhtinian and Derridian criticism (54). After giving a summary of Derrida’s replacement of a metaphysics of speech and presence with twinned notions of writing (écriture) and différance, whereby meaning is found in displacement and trace, the author reminds us of Bakhtin’s dialogism, through which the self only exists in relation to the other. Such critical notions, Amoros argues, are helpful in understanding the narrative construction of ‘The Coxon Fund’. In this story, a talented writer and storyteller is at the center of the plot, but is conspicuously absent from the lines. His gift for speech is constantly emphasized and yet the reader never hears him speak. His alleged brilliance only appears through the narrative filters of various other characters who report hearing him at first or second-hand. This has implications on a cognitive plane, as no omniscient or stable narrator is offered to anchor meaning. This sets apart a form of deceptive realism, in which meaning is stabilized by an authoritative point of view, and what the author terms ‘arch-realism’ (73), where knowledge and understanding may come from ‘guesswork’, ‘biased filters’ or ‘hearsay’ (ibid.). Towards the end of his study, Amoros links his careful, perceptive reading to the notion of impressionism in Henry James’ stories (75). It might be argued, though the author does not make that point, that making an ‘impression’ on the reader by means of the characters’ many impressions of one another contributes to the generic feature of unity of effect which characterizes the short story, despite its modern deferral of meaning.

5 In the following chapter, Laurent Lepaludier discusses the ‘visual dynamics’ of Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Bestre’. Through a thematic, stylistic and metatextual analysis of this short story given from a structuralist perspective, Lepaludier demonstrates how Lewis creates a world of appearances and of screen-like grotesque bodies, yet endows them with a vortex-like movement, in which these images gyrate and succeed each other at a ‘frantic ’ reflected in the rhythm of the text (95). He goes on to show how the fast succession of images leads to an abundance of copies threatening authorial creation as well as thematic unity and characterization (99). In a world of images, the author continues, the capitalized ‘Eye’ takes the place of every organ, not only perceiving but organizing, projecting and distorting images, thus becoming an instrument of brutality. In this way, Lepaludier argues, the narrator Ken Orr and the character Bestre become masks for Lewis, the Vorticist writer-painter, reveling in grotesque realism with a certain violence.

6 Eibhann Walshe’s article, next in the collection, is a historical reading of Frank O’Connor’s short stories in the light of O’Connor’s critique of Irish nation-building. This essay is particularly apt at showing how the short story may challenge official national narratives. Walshe offers a helpful insight in the short story’s dynamics, by making an astute link between loneliness and dissent. Indeed one could argue that the short story is a ‘lonely’ genre, being at once set apart from more canonical ones, but also, as O’Connor forcefully says, in that it has no ‘hero’, merely a string of ‘outlawed figures wandering about the margins’ (115). However, Walshe explains that O’Connor took the form seriously and through it expressed a double sense of alienation: that of the dissenting individual, writing in an ever more insular State. This study is particularly interesting and factual in its first part, which consists in a recollection of early Irish statehood, ideology and censorship. Its second part

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provides perceptive readings and throws light on a particularly sensitive, nuanced yet accessible writer.

7 Salman Rushdie is the focus of the next essay: ‘Recalcitrant Discourse: The Uncompromising Content in East, West Stories’ by Farhat Iftekharuddin. Unlike the previous chapter, which clearly separated the Irish historical context from its embodiment in fiction, this article meshes Rushdie’s stories with their political interpretations. Granted that it may be hard to separate literature from controversy in this case, Rushdie’s literariness would nonetheless benefit from a close textual study. The review of these short stories constitutes a survey of the contemporary Indian sub-continent, of its various peoples, struggles and political scandals. While a historical and socio-political interpretation of these texts is important in its own right, it seems nevertheless reductive. First of all, formal issues appear to be ignored: starting with a panorama of Rushdie’s novels, the author goes on to expound on the short stories, without explicitly distinguishing between the two forms (129). It might have been interesting to ask why Rushdie’s next two books after The Satanic Verses had to be short story collections or sequences - the first one being the children’s fiction Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Second, while Iftekharuddin’s insistence on cultural ‘heterogeneity’(151) might be in keeping with Rushdie’s works, one might wonder whether these short stories were really written with a view to ‘eradicating cultural dissonance’ (ibid.) or towards an imperative of ’symbiotic existence’ (152), and whether such an aim is compatible with ‘recalcitrant discourse’. In a nutshell, a more deconstructive reading of a highly deconstructive writer might have done more justice to the richness of the text.

8 The next chapter, written by Carmen Flys Junquera, discusses the Puerto Rican American writer Judith Ortiz Cofer. In her well researched and theoretically grounded study, Junquera delves into the generic problems caused by the work Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. Is it enough, she asks implicitly, to call this collection of partly autobiographic stories and poems ‘creative non-fiction’, as Cofer herself does – or would other categories, such as the personal essay, the novel-in-stories or the composite novel be more accurate to describe this hybrid work? Junquera goes on to examine all of these categories, rigorously putting many short story theories to the test. Investigating generic boundaries helps her to show how Ortiz’s autobiography is conceived as a kaleidoscope of various memories and acts of witness, and leads her to argue that despite the ever-shifting spaces of the text, the author does remain ‘whole’ (168). Towards the end of the essay, an insightful discussion of space in the short story leads to one on assimilation. Ortiz, who admits she is no longer able to live in Puerto Rico, claims not to have assimilated into the American model, but rather to have adapted. While the writer’s honesty is refreshing, her great reliance upon the English literature canon – adumbrated in Junquera’s quotes of Hawthorne and Woolf – might benefit from a more critical outlook. Overall though, Junquera’s penetrating study is nurtured by her knowledge of English and Spanish-speaking cultures and contributes fruitfully to the ‘global’ or ‘universalistic’ agenda of Contemporary Debates on the Short Story.

9 A graphic short story, Carol Swain’s ‘come down town’ is the subject of Adrienne E. Gavin’s article, next in the collection. Gavin’s starting point is that the short story’s simple plot allows it to ‘break out in many places’ (186), either in the course of a collection or in the space of the story itself. Taking a bold look at an innovative

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artist, she proceeds to analyze the graphic story from the dual perspective of and visual semiotics. The essay chimes nicely with Leitch’s piece at the beginning of the volume as the two protagonists of Swain’s story hark back to Poe’s detective and hyperaesthete figures. One of the characters is indeed a police inspector and the other one a criminal-cum-failed artist who paints the town black. Gavin’s analysis throws light on the question of guilt in the arts, thus uncovering an ethics of the graphic story in Swain’s work. This contribution is therefore a most welcome one. Perhaps one direction which might have been explored further is the visual artist’s challenge of creating an almost black frame, a point which Gavin explores semiotically and partly under the banner of narrative technique, but not in terms of graphic creation.

10 Coming to the end of the volume, Charles E. May’s contribution ‘The Secret Life in the Modern Short Story’ coalesces with Gavin’s exploration of ‘black spots’ in the text. Indeed, May’s point is that the short story comes into being at a crossroads between the mythical romance and the nineteenth century psychological novel. In retaining elements of both forms, the genre’s forte was to suggest that individuals could never be fully apprehended in reality, and always had ’secret lives’. May’s study thus wraps up the collection by tying up many of its threads, such as literary history, cognitive issues, the cosmopolitan dimension (with close readings of Chekhov, Conrad and Joyce), the interest of the short story for new writers (through an introduction to American writer Beth Lordan), as well as a glimpse at issues of loneliness and alienation dealt with in Walshe’s article.

11 In conclusion, this collection is varied and informative. The only criticism one could find, apart from a number of avoidable typos in the text, is that the theoretical framework given is not as novel as the editors might have wanted it to be. In this respect, the traditional ‘monographic’ format of the essays, though conducive to quality scholarship, could have been broken up to a certain extent. Inviting scholars to read short stories with a more comparative outlook for example might have provided the critical distance the editors sought to acquire. The reader might also have wished for a more synthetic account of the volume’s project, which would have tied its disparate pieces, whose links are apparent despite their heterogeneous theoretical stances. All in all, this collection is a step in the right direction, pointing out the increasing relevance of the short story and the continuous interest in genre issues.

RÉSUMÉS

Book Reviews

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AUTEUR

CAROLE BIRKAN-BERZ Carole Birkan-Berz teaches at Paris Descartes University. She is the author of a doctoral thesis on ‘Poetic Forms and National Values in Geoffrey Hill’s work’ and of scholarly articles on poetry and nationhood. Her research focuses on the intersection of literary forms or genres with national or communal narratives.

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Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English

Adrian Hunter’s book is a very welcome addition to the “Cambridge Introductions to Literature,” a series of comprehensive guides written in accessible style which are primarily designed for students and teachers, though they also cater for general readers keen on broadening their knowledge of key topics in the area. This new volume complements Martin Scofield’s The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (2006) by focusing on literature from Britain and other English-language countries except the United States. Since a whole chapter of the former volume had been devoted to Henry James, no equivalent is to be found in this one. Nevertheless, the omission is mitigated by the fact that James’s critical and theoretical commentaries on this literary form are often cited by Adrian Hunter, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling whose main research interests are in 19th- and 20th-century British and American literature. In addition, frequent references to Guy de Maupassant and the formidable presence of Anton Chekhov’s short fiction attest to Hunter’s acknowledgement of the French and Russian influences on Anglophone practitioners of this challenging genre. His clear and succinct analysis is unmistakably grounded on his extensive teaching experience and the sound scholarship he has presented through a number of erudite contributions to academic journals.1 Always highlighting the relationship between texts and contexts, Hunter’s chronological overview first maps the emergence of the short story in England over two centuries and then traces its development in other nations of the English-speaking world. The perception of the ‘shortness’ of the short story as a positive quality – rather than a privation, a hindrance, an obstacle, or a mere matter of ‘non-extension’ – insistently runs through all these pages as their central argument. The exploration of a choice of condensed narratives gives opportunities to encounter many examples of ellipsis, compression, implication, ambiguity, allusion, interrogation and plotlessness, so that in the end readers have a good grasp of how various authors have exploited the manifold aesthetic possibilities of short fiction, a genre which became increasingly governed by its own principles instead of being dependent on those of the novel.

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Starting with some prefatory remarks about “the art of saying less but meaning more” (2) and a concise summary of the book’s contents, the volume is divided into four parts, each of them consisting of three or four chapters. Every part is preceded by a (perhaps unnecessary) introduction which at times seems somewhat repetitive after one reads what follows. The introduction to “Part I: The nineteenth century” charts the ‘rise’ of the short story in England, as illustrated first by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, followed by Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad. The contributions that these four celebrities made to “the art of writing short” are analyzed in the first two chapters of this section, whereas the third chapter (entitled “The Yellow Book circle and the avant-garde”) assesses several once famous but nowadays much less familiar writers, such as Hubert Crackanthorpe, Ella D’Arcy, , and Arthur Morrison, all of them associated with the late-Victorian magazine which – Hunter contends – in the period 1894-97 played an extremely important role in the progression of the British short story, not only by raising its status and increasing its visibility, but also by associating it with the avant-garde. At this point, curious readers seeking additional information about Crackanthorpe’s stories discussed on pages 34-36, for instance, will be frustrated when they discover that the editions included on page 190 of this guide are virtually unavailable, because they date back to the 1890s. As a result, one might question the inclusion criteria, doubting that a writer so little known at present should have taken so much space in this kind of survey. Hunter emphatically claims for Kipling a place in the mainstream modernist canon, and asserts that the Indian-born author was excluded from it by successive generations of critics because of “his fondness for the extraordinary, the magical and the exotic” together with “his reputation as an apologist for imperialism,” in spite of the fact that he “wrote and published in the same period as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf”, producing pieces “as restless and innovative as the stories in Dubliners” (24). However, by locating Kipling in the middle chapter of Part I, the scholar’s contention loses most of its strength, and one may wonder whether, for the sake of consistency, these comments should not have been better moved to the following section, “Part II: The modernist short story,” where we find the names that anyone would have expected. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Samuel Beckett have received the special attention they rightly deserve in four separate chapters, in which Hunter is at his best. In the face of massive critical writing on this area, he avoids entangling details and writes insightfully about the adequacy of the short story to meet the representational demands of the modern world. It is no surprise that this period was marked by the flourishing of an enigmatic genre whose defining qualities coincided with the key values of experimental modernism, including difficulty and obscurity, and the tendency to imply rather than state, to raise unanswered and even unanswerable questions, to favor highly compressed forms of characterization, to take economy of expression to its limits, and to connect brevity with plurality or multiplicity. “Part III: Post-modernist stories” provides a good account of the issues involved in the decades from around 1930 until approximately 1980, a period which witnessed the enduring persistence of modernist theories and practices together with a passionate reaction against them. The nationalist concerns evoked by Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor in their short stories are set in sharp contrast with Joyce’s internationalism. Chapter 8 examines in detail how the two Cork authors’ fictional representations of Ireland departed from the abstruseness of their predecessor’s later works and re-

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established connections with popular oral culture and the regional writing of their native country. The following chapter shows to what extent Elizabeth Bowen and V.S. Pritchett both incorporated the modernist legacy they had inherited and moreover transformed it by turning against its subjectivization and by seeking to restore the social function that storytelling had lost after years of intense experimentation. Hunter specifically complains that Pritchett has not been properly recognized by the academy and partly ascribes such neglect to the melodramatic quality of his short fiction. The closing chapter of this third section offers a detailed discussion of Angela Carter’s rewritings of classical fairy tales, and reviews a selection of Ian McEwan deeply distressing stories, peopled by inscrutable characters whose motivations remain puzzlingly unresolved. “Part IV: Post-colonial and other stories” brings together five Anglophone authors from countries that are geographically far apart, but share the experience of (post)colonialism. Chapter 11 links the New Zealander Frank Sargeson and the Australian Marjorie Barnard, two writers whose politically committed stories address fundamental issues of gender and national identity. While Hunter points out the significant differences between their social and historical backgrounds, he joins James Kelman and Chinua Achebe in Chapter 12 by virtue of their common belief in the importance of cultural self-determination and their rejection of absolutism, whether in Scotland or in Nigeria. The last chapter of the book deals exclusively with Alice Munro’s multi-layered fictional structures, which Hunter praises for their enacting of a complex poetics of deliberate contradiction and uncertainty. These final pages successfully transmit a genuine admiration for Munro’s indirect and elliptical prose, and should further understanding of how her technical skill operates in a selection of individual stories, starting with “Heirs of the Living Body” (1971), moving on to “The Stone in the Field” (1982) and ending with “Friend of My Youth” (1990). Nevertheless, Munro’s work would have been covered in more depth if her contributions of the 1990s and the present century had been also considered. Furthermore, if the newly published criticism on her stories had been taken into account, Hunter would have realized that the “marked reluctance to deal with them as short stories” no longer “persists,” as he affirms on page 165, but has long been relegated to the past. Another flaw in this chapter pertains to the bad academic habit of silencing or referring to “one commentator” (page 166) when the perceptive intuitions of one’s colleagues are drawn upon, but otherwise citing the full name of the same person when expressing one’s disagreement or dismissal. In this case, the scholar who has been unfairly treated is Coral Ann Howells, whose reading of “Friend of My Youth” Adrian Hunter deems unproblematic (page 175). This contention seems particularly improper within the context of a guide addressed to a wide readership that is not likely to be acquainted with Alice Munro (1998) and the other publications with which Howells has enhanced the reputation of whom she calls “Canada’s greatest short-story writer in English.”2 The major deficiency of the book probably lies in its “Guide to Further Reading” on pages 188-96, which is obviously not meant to be exhaustive, but is not as useful as it could be. Since the anthologies on the list of bibliographic references on page 188 date from the years 1956 to 1998, those wishing to find some new titles are bound to be disappointed. On the other hand, the omission of volumes of short stories that have been discussed in various chapters of the book is really perplexing.3 Conceding that no consensus can ever be achieved when evaluating a selection of critical works on

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individual writers, perhaps the author will consider compiling a revised version of the one presented on pages 189-95 so that it becomes not all-inclusive, but sufficient to cover all relevant source material. As to the list of “General critical works on the short story” (pages 195-96), its entries range from 1941 to 1994. No objection is to be made to the inclusion of titles that are still far from being out of fashion because they remain landmark works in criticism of the short story. Yet again, as in the case of the anthologies, one suspects that at least several worthy publications of this kind must have appeared since 1994. Despite these reservations, the advantages of The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English far outweigh the few areas that could benefit from closer attention. One of the greatest achievements of the author of this thought-provoking book lies in his ability to stimulate a well-informed response to a fictional genre which, in spite of its popularity, is still too often misunderstood and plagued by misconceptions. Thus, we owe thanks to Adrian Hunter for sharing with us his knowledge and his love of the short story.

NOTES

1. See, for instance, his essays “Beckett and the Joycean Short Story.” Essays in Criticism 51. 2 (April 2001): 230-44; “Constance Garnett’s Chekhov and the Modernist Short Story.” Translation and Literature 12 (March 2003): 69-87; and “The ‘Custom’ of Fiction: Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Modernist Short Story.” English 56. 215 (Summer 2007): 147-169. 2. Coral Ann Howells, “Alice Munro’s Heritage Narratives,” Where Are the Voices Coming From? Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 5. 3. In the case of Alice Munro (page 193), the following collections are missing: Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), Who Do You Think You Are? (1978, published in the United States and in the United Kingdom as The Beggar Maid), and The View from Castle Rock: Stories (2006).

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Journal of the Short Story in English, 52 | Spring 2009