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Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle
30 | Spring 1998 Varia
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/73 ISSN: 1969-6108
Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes
Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 1998 ISSN: 0294-04442
Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 30 | Spring 1998 [Online], Online since 05 June 2008, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/73
This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Flux et désir dans "A slip-up" de John McGahern: incontinence et écriture Claude Maisonnat
When Coyote meets Adam: or Thomas King’s new space Marta Dvorak
Baldwin's "The Outing" and the sacral quality of male love Raymond-Jean Frontain
Other rooms, other texts, other selves: Alice Munro’s “Sunday afternoon” and “Hired Girl” Ildikó de Papp Carrington
Aldous Huxley : « Nuns at luncheon » ou les jeux du Je Clémentine Robert
Mystery, magic, and malice: O’Connor and the Misfit Gary Sloan
Journal of the Short Story in English, 30 | Spring 1998 2
Flux et désir dans "A slip-up" de John McGahern: incontinence et écriture
Claude Maisonnat
1 La courte nouvelle de John McGahern, "A Slip-up", est incluse dans le recueil Getting Through, publié en 1988. En apparence, elle met en scène l'histoire banale d'un couple de retraités sans enfants de la région de Londres, anciens fermiers irlandais qui ont quitté l'ingrat sol natal dans l'espoir de trouver une sécurité matérielle plus grande en venant travailler comme concierges dans un établissement scolaire anglais. Pourtant, la routinière ronde des jours de ces retraités, qui tuent l'interminable attente d'une mort banlieusarde et solitaire en se rendant invariablement du Tesco pour les courses, au Royal pour la tournée de bière, ponctuellement, à la même heure, se trouve soudain bouleversée par un incident, le "slip-up" du titre, qui se résume au fait qu'Agnès a oublié son mari Michael devant le magasin et est rentrée seule à la maison. On découvre alors que ce dernier est resté planté tout ce temps là devant le magasin, perdu dans une rêverie qui le ramenait dans son passé irlandais, et qui ne s'est interrompue que quelques heures plus tard, lorsqu'Agnès, aidée des tenanciers du Royal où il n'a pas fait sa visite quotidienne, le retrouve à l'endroit même où elle l'avait laissé. Pourtant, la banalité même de cette anecdote de la vie quotidienne d'un couple de vieillards perdant la mémoire, produit chez Michael un effet de honte si disproportionné au regard de la trivialité de l'événement, que le lecteur ne peut s'empêcher de soupçonner que ce qui est en jeu dans ce "slip-up", pourrait bien avoir valeur de lapsus, d'acte symptomatique, c'est-à-dire d'acte manqué, dans lequel le corps est en jeu, et qui fait affleurer un désir inconscient. Dans la mesure où ce désir répond d'un inconscient qui serait structuré comme un langage soumis aux effets du déplacement et de la condensation, il peut se lire comme un message soumis aux caprices de la libre association (si mal nommée) sous l'effet du relâchement de l'influence inhibitoire de la censure. C'est le rêve éveillé de Michael qui va nous fournir la clef de la nouvelle, si l'on veut bien le déchiffrer comme lapsus, comme message incongru. Ce sera l'objet de ce travail que de proposer une lecture analytique de la nouvelle, qui prendra en compte
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non seulement le niveau de l'énoncé, les contenus de représentation, dont on verra qu'ils signifient poétiquement que Michael a été victime d'incontinence, mais aussi le niveau de l'énonciation où l'enjeu de la nouvelle semble être celui de l'écriture même, de la peur de la page blanche, littéralement d'un retour problématique aux sources de l'inspiration poétique.
Michael ou le désir oublié
2 D'emblée, Michael est présenté comme un personnage soumis aux désirs de sa femme, un mari qui préfère obéir plutôt que protester, se soumettre plutôt qu'exprimer son propre désir. Avatar moderne et suburbain du mari dominé, le soir même de leur aventure honteuse, il proteste mollement lorsqu'Agnès entend leur faire retrouver le train-train rassurant des visites au Royal, et il cède une nouvelle fois sur son désir : I don't know if I want to go out tonight.' 'Of course you'll go out tonight. There's nothing wrong with you, is there? When she said that he knew he had to go (34).
3 Les premières paroles que prononce Michael dans la diégèse reconnaissent qu'il a cédé sur son désir en vendant, sur les injonctions d'Agnès, la ferme ancestrale. Sur le mode de la répétition apparaît un leitmotif qui dit bien la dimension obsessionnelle du regret exprimé : Maybe we should never have given up the farm and come here. Even though we had no one to pass it on to(29). 'Well, we'd never have had to retire if we'd stayed'; what he said already sounded lame (29). It wouldn't have happened if we'd kept the farm (34).
4 L'événement inconnu qui a causé la honte de Michael est, d'après lui, directement lié à cet abandon de la terre natale, cette trahison du lieu originel, maternel, dont il est à jamais exclu. Rappelons que la ferme qu'il revoit dans son rêve est associée à sa mère, qu'elle est située entre deux lacs, et qu'il se revoit petit garçon se promenant avec elle entre ces deux lacs : What had happened today would never have happened if they'd stayed, he thought, and there'd be no shame; but he didn't speak it (29).
5 Néanmoins, cet événement traumatique reste de l'ordre de l'inavouable, de l'indicible, Michael ne peut en parler, même avec Agnès, puisque le paragraphe d'ouverture de la nouvelle nous dit : There was such a strain on the silence between them after he'd eaten that it had to be broken (29).
6 Pourtant, nous verrons que le silence a déjà été brisé par le corps de Michael qui a fait signe en prenant le relais d'un discours censuré. Il doit donc s'agir de quelque chose de beaucoup plus profond que le simple oubli de la matinée. Ce qu'il ne peut dire, ou plutôt avouer, c'est sa défaillance du jour bien sûr, mais beaucoup plus profondément, sa nostalgie d'un passé à jamais révolu qui est à l'origine d'un désir de régression.
7 Dans l'économie du désir qui règle ses rapports avec Agnès, il est celui qui l'accompagne au magasin Tesco, mais qui ne rentre jamais dans le bâtiment, qui reste à l'extérieur (on dry days he stayed outside), qui n'achète rien, et dont le sac de toile reste désespérément et symboliquement vide. Or le désir de Michael est intimement lié à des images de flux, de liquides, que dans son rêve il tente de remettre en mouvement.
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L'une des oppositions qui structure le texte de la nouvelle est celle établie entre la siccité cf. les "dry days", déjà citées, ou les "withered beans and pea stalks" du jardin, et l'élément liquide (dans son rêve Michael imagine qu'il remet en état la ferme tombée à l'abandon, réparant des murs et érigeant des limites). Cette opposition métaphorise, bien sûr, l'opposition entre l'aridité, la stérilité et la vie. Or, ce jour là, le rêve de Michael le conduit à rétablir la circulation de l'eau du ruisseau voisin où les vaches viennent boire (the drains were choked... when he followed the stream to the boundary he found water blocked there). De façon tout à fait imaginaire puisqu'il s'agit d'un rêve, c'est bien le flux du désir que Michael tente de remettre laborieusement en circulation, mais comme dans la "réalité" il est exclu de son propre désir, cette activité imaginaire de réactivation des flux se traduira par un geste symbolique de son corps qui a valeur de retour du refoulé.
8 Mais, auparavant, il convient d'examiner le fait que si Michael est celui qui a oublié son désir, c'est aussi celui qui est l'oublié ou l'exclu du désir sexuel. Une autre modalité de l'économie du désir qui gouverne ses relations avec Agnès concerne précisément l'inexistence de tout rapport sexuel entre eux. Agnès la bien nommée porte inscrite dans son nom l'abstinence, puisqu'étymologiquement il signifie celle qui est chaste, Sainte Agnès figurant parmi la liste des vierges et martyres. On nous apprend par ailleurs que leur couple est resté stérile, et la description de leur relation évoque plutôt le rapport mère/fils que le rapport mari/femme, Agnès s'occupant exclusivement de nourriture et de protection, son "slip-up" à elle n'est-il pas de l'avoir oublié devant le magasin, comme une mère peu attentive ou perturbée oublierait un enfant incapable de rentrer seul à la maison. Et de fait, Michael ne rentre pas seul, c'est Agnès qui vient le récupérer. Pourtant cette défaillance du désir sexuel n'est pas directement signifiée en tant que telle dans la nouvelle. Au-delà des quelques indices que nous venons de repérer, elle est poétiquement mise en scène dans le rêve de Michael sous l'effet caractéristique du déplacement inhérent au travail du rêve. Paradoxalement, l'obsession de Michael, dans ce rêve, semble être de rétablir des limites, d'ériger des murs pour faire obstacle aux forces envahissantes de la nature sauvage (le désir) qui cherche sans fin à gagner du terrain sur les surfaces cultivées (civilisées) de la ferme. Ce colmatage du désir est un labeur sans fin, comme en témoigne son activité fantasmatique acharnée : The fields were full of rushes. The garden had gone wild, and the hedges were invading the fields... the stone wall was his pride because it was the beginning. Before the wall was built there were no limits. Everything looked impossible (32).
9 A la manière de l'obsessionnel qui, chaque jour, "task by single task", s'attaque à une tâche impossible, Michael s'efforce de contenir le désir, pendant qu'Agnès fait ses achats au Tesco. A la minutie et à la fragmentation des tâches imaginaires accomplies avec une routine et une régularité idéales, fait pendant la ponctualité exacerbée qui préside aux rares activités qui règlent le vide de leur vie : "I always leave the Royal at ten, never a minute more nor less". Pourtant, ce jour là, son travail de remise en état de la ferme va détruire en quelques heures toute sa construction imaginaire, son corps le ramenant aux réalités physiologiques qu'il refuse visiblement de prendre en compte.
10 La dimension métaphorique du récit des activités agricoles et réparatrices de Michael est tout à fait classique. Elle est fondée sur l'image du jardin et de la terre symbolisant le corps féminin, terre qu'il faut ensemencer pour qu'elle devienne féconde, ceci à partir de la théorie infantile selon laquelle l'homme déchire le sillon de la femme pour y verser la semence d'où croîtra la graine. La sexualisation de ces images est tout à fait
Journal of the Short Story in English, 30 | Spring 1998 5
évidente dans la nouvelle qui met l'accent sur le jardin en friche où toute végétation est morte et desséchée. Ce jardin est explicitement associé à Agnès, et le rêve nous dit que Michael n'a plus la force de le bêcher. Aux "withered bean and pea stalks" masculins (mentionnés à plusieurs reprises), il convient d'opposer les roses féminines qu'Agnès ne peut que garder pour elle-même. Nul n'est besoin d'insister pour faire apparaître les connotations sexuelles de la citation ci-dessous, qui doit être lue comme une émouvante méditation sur la mort du désir : He'd go to the field garden. The withered bean and pea stalks needed pulling up and the earth turned... He opened the gate into the garden, enclosed on three sides by its natural thorn hedges, and two strands of barbed wire ran on posts to keep the cattle out on the fourth. Each year he pushed the barbed wire farther out, and soon, one of these years, the whole field would be a garden, completely enclosed by its own whitethorns. He pulled up the withered bean and pea stalks with the thorn branches that had served as stakes and threw them in a heap for burning (33).
11 Cette mort du désir sexuel est ainsi illustrée par l'impuissance de Michael, et son fantasme de voir un jour le jardin agrandi et florissant est traduit par les images classiques du travail de la terre que Michael ne peut plus assumer en raison de son âge : Then he began to turn the soil... Agnes could keep all her roses in the front garden... And then he felt himself leaning over the fork with tiredness, though he hadn't half the ridge turned. He was too weak to work (33).
12 De même, plus loin, lorque l'on passe du rêve à la réalité, le signifiant de l'impuissance finit par faire surface dans l'affirmation : "It was in this impotent rage that he heard the horn blow" (33).
13 Si ce qui doit être réprimé chez Michael c'est le désir sous tous ses aspects, une des fonctions de son rêve est de montrer qu'il est impossible de refouler indéfiniment le désir, en conséquence de quoi ce dernier fait retour dans le réel sous forme de lapsus et d'acte manqué. C'est précisément ce que décrit la nouvelle, encore une fois sur le mode du déplacement, qui nous permet d'interpréter la véritable obsession des éléments liquides et des flux. Notons d'abord que l'élément liquide est prédominant dans le texte sous des formes variées, depuis les deux lacs proches de la ferme maternelle (on notera l'absence de référence au père dans cette nouvelle, comme si la paternité était impossible, ainsi qu'en témoigne le sort de Michael), jusqu'aux bouteilles de Bass que le couple boit avec une régularité quasi métronomique au Royal, en passant par l'activité principale du rêve central de Michael le jour du "slip-up", qui va maintenant requérir toute notre attention. Dans la continuité de son rêve de retour à la ferme de son enfance en vue de la restaurer, inlassablement et quotidiennement repris, le jour du "slip-up" vient introduire une rupture : This morning as he walked with Agnes, he decided to clear the drinking pool which was dry after the long spell of good weather (32).
14 Ce jour là, le travail qu'il s'est fixé va consister à rétablir le flot du ruisseau qui, à l'instar de son propre désir, s'est progressivement asséché. Pourtant cette activité imaginaire n'est pas sans produire un effet dans le réel, puisque si l'abreuvoir va se remplir à nouveau, en revanche c'est sa vessie qui va se vider. Métaphoriquement, et encore une fois poétiquement, cette partie du rêve représente en effet un moment d'incontinence qui justifie, bien plus sûrement que le simple oubli, le sentiment de honte éprouvé si fort par Michael. Rappelons que, dans les deux cas (le rêve et le slip- up), il est question de boisson. Il nettoie l'abreuvoir (drinking pool) où les vaches viennent boire (then he paved the side with heavy stones so that the cattle would not
Journal of the Short Story in English, 30 | Spring 1998 6
plough in as they drank), alors que sa seule activité dans la vie consiste à aller boire, matin et soir, quelques "pints of Bass". A cet égard, il est clair que les bouteilles et pintes de bière font partie de la thématique des liquides, mais qu'elles métaphorisent en quelque sorte un désir contenu, quasiment ritualisé, un désir qui ne menace pas le lien social. Il est symptomatique que les deux vieillards insistent sur le fait qu'ils ne boivent jamais à la maison, qu'ils ne boivent qu'au pub, et que la bière qu'ils gardaient autrefois pour Noël est réservée aux invités, comme s'il y avait là un tabou impossible à transgresser. Si, ironiquement, Michael reste planté devant le "off-licence", il ne fait pas de doute que lui-même ne s'autorise pas le moindre écart, la moindre licence dans ce domaine. Son désir, ici métaphorisé par sa soif, reste donc bien canalisé, contenu, prisonnier d'un monde de convention, de conformisme.
15 Ce désir refoulé dans la réalité va donc faire retour dans le rêve sous forme de l'activité de nettoyage, de déblocage, de récurage, de remise en circulation des flux liquides. Il faut citer ici le passage entier afin de mieux percevoir tout ce que le récit met en jeu à ce moment là : This morning as he walked with Agnes he decided to clear the drinking pool which was dry after the long spell of good weather. First he shovelled the dark earth of rotted leaves and cowshit out on the bank. Then he paved the sides with heavy stones so that the cattle would not plough in as they drank, and he cleared the weeds from the small stream that fed it. When he followed the stream to the boundary hedge he found water blocked there. He released it and then leaned on his shovel in the simple pleasure of watching water flow. For all that time he was unaware of the shopping bag, but when all the water had flowed down towards the pool he felt it again by his side. He wondered what was keeping Agnes. He'd never finished such a long job before outside Tesco's. Usually he counted himself lucky if he was through with such a job -by the time he'd finished his bottle of Bass in the Royal by ten to one. The drain was now empty and clean. All the water had flowed down to the pool. (32).
16 La polysémie du lexique employé dans cette évocation réaliste du nettoyage du lit d'une rivière et du rétablissement de son courant, nous invite à lire indirectement, sans complaisance ni méchanceté, la description émouvante d'un vieil homme victime d'un accès d'incontinence. Le réseau de signifiants dont la polysémie nous permet de dire qu'il s'agit ici moins d'un nettoyage campagnard que d'une miction, est fondé sur la récurrence du signifiant "water", et particulièrement dans l'acception que lui donne l'expression anglaise "to pass water". Une eau qui murmure est depuis longtemps un symbole reconnu de la miction, mais il est important de noter qu'ici McGahern ne se contente pas de ce symbole élémentaire et ponctuel, il l'inclut dans une stratégie discursive dont la polysémie est le mode de fonctionnement, et non la correspondance terme à terme qui aurait pour effet de fermer le texte au lieu de l'ouvrir. A partir de là, un premier niveau de lecture s'offre au décodage. Que peut être en effet cette "water blocked there"? Que dire du verbe "to release" dans l'expression "He released it", ou encore la phrase "the simple pleasure of watching water flow" qui nous renvoie au thème de la régression infantile ? Quant à cet incongru "shopping bag" qui refait surface à ce moment précis en se rappelant à la conscience de Michael, on peut voir en lui une vessie imaginaire désormais vidée de son contenu répandu en flaque (pool) sur le trottoir, d'où le sentiment de soulagement et presque de jouissance qui transparaît dans les formules "The drain was empty and clean" ainsi que "... All the water had flowed down towards the pool " (répété deux fois). Même l'utilisation euphémistique du signifiant "job" ("such a long job, such a job"), dont on note la présence de deux
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occurences dans ce bref passage, renvoie à cette image d'un vieil homme qui littéralement s'oublie, un "slip-up" en anglais est un "oversight", un oubli.
17 Un indice textuel vient confirmer la pertinence de cette interprétation s'il en était besoin. Avant de se rendre au Royal pour la soirée, l'instance narrative ajoute au détour d'une phrase "He rose and washed, changed into his suit, combed his coarse white hair and at exactly twenty to nine, as on every evening of their lives, they were closing 37B door in Ainsworth Road behind them", comme s'il s'agissait d'effacer les traces désagréables de l'aventure du matin pour mieux réintégrer la monotonie de leur vie sans histoire, donc précisément de nier ce qui est de l'ordre d'une histoire inédite. Cet oubli a sans nul doute valeur d'acte manqué pour Michael mais de discours réussi aux yeux du lecteur. Il illustre ce retour du désir refoulé, grâce au corps qui parle dans le réel. Pour la première fois que Michael ne cède plus sur son désir, c'est son corps qui prend le relais. Ceci rend d'autant plus pathétique sa situation que, semblable en cela à Fraser Woods qui avait raté son suicide par pendaison et était devenu sans le vouloir l'attraction (morbide) du village, son entourage (Agnès aussi bien que les habitués du Royal) s'acharne à le réintégrer dans le circuit ronronnant de la routine sociale, en faisant comme si rien ne s'était passé.
18 La nouvelle se termine en effet sur la formule "he'd have to go up to the counter for their next round". Michael est prisonnier d'un cercle infernal dans lequel son désir est nié, pourtant ironiquement Agnès dit la vérité en s'efforçant de le convaincre que rien ne s'est passé, que tout a eu lieu dans sa tête. La voiture qui apporte le télégramme dans le rêve figure bien, en fait, le message que reçoit Michael quant à la vérité de son désir perdu. Il n'est donc pas étonnant de voir que, même sous la houlette dionysiaque de Denis le bien nommé, qui s'efforce d'égayer la soirée et qui offre à Michael la pinte qu'il n'a pas bue à midi, comme si l'on pouvait rattraper ce qui a été perdu, l'enthousiasme n'y est plus. La mort du désir signifie la mort du sujet, et Michael est condamné à vivre cette mort-dans-la-vie jusqu'à sa dernière heure. La structure en chiasme de la nouvelle dont la partie centrale est le rêve de Michael, enfoui au fond de sa mémoire, n'est alors qu'une autre représentation de sa situation d'homme aliéné, enfermé dans un monde sans ouverture, sans avenir.
Flux et écriture
19 Il serait cependant erroné de réduire la nouvelle de McGahern à une histoire banale et triste de vieillissement et de déclin physique, car se serait passer à côté de sa dimension réflexive. Son titre même nous invite, à la suite de Freud, à essayer d'interpréter le lapsus qu'il annonce, et ce d'autant plus ouvertement que l'acte manqué qu'il constitue en l'occurence est de nature purement verbale, puisque si le lapsus consiste à substituer un autre mot à celui que l'on voulait dire, il est le lieu où l'inconscient affleure, interfère avec le discours du sujet. On est donc amené à se demander quel est le non-dit de ce lapsus, c'est-à-dire quel est le message que le texte de la nouvelle occulte au moment même où il le met en mots. Autrement dit, nous allons considérer la nouvelle non pas en tant que représentation d'un lapsus, ce que nous venons de faire, mais en tant que lapsus, en la rapportant non pas au personnage de Michael mais à l'instance narrative, l'actualisation de l'acte d'énonciation. Pour ce faire nous postulerons que Michael est une figure du double de l'auteur, mais que précisément il y a une énorme différence entre ce qui arrive à Michael - l'incontinence comme
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symptôme - et ce qui arrive au sujet de l'énonciation - l'écriture comme sinthome. En effet, l'instance narrative fonctionne comme le tenant lieu de l'auteur réel McGahern, qui se dissimule derrière un récit apparemment hétérodiégétique à la troisième personne. A y regarder d'un peu plus près, le texte consacre la plus grande partie de l'espace narratif au récit du rêve de Michael, qui est de fait placé au coeur de la nouvelle, pas seulement en raison de la structure chiastique dont nous avons parlé plus haut, mais aussi de façon thématique. Or, que fait Michael si ce n'est raconter une histoire, reconstruire son histoire imaginaire, se mettre en scène dans un scénario narratif proche en celà du fantasme ? Dans son fantasme, il est à la fois sujet de l'énoncé et sujet de l'énonciation, il est le maître d'oeuvre de la diégèse et de la narration, autrement dit, il est comme Dieu dans sa création, autre image banale de l'auteur, qui est ici tout à fait en harmonie avec son nom qui signifie "Celui qui est comme Dieu".
20 Par ailleurs, si son histoire se construit comme un rêve, elle relève du même mode de fonctionnement textuel régi par la condensation et le déplacement, et donc elle dit quelque chose qu'il ne peut dire. On peut alors légitimement postuler que le travail du rêve dans l'histoire de Michael se pose en équivalent strict du travail du signifiant qui caractérise l'écriture littéraire dans la nouvelle elle-même. La création imaginaire de Michael est intimement liée à son enfance et à son passé irlandais, ce qui lui donne une dimension affective certaine. Michael illustre fort bien le fait que "l'affect est mémoire". A cet égard, le sentiment de honte qu'il éprouve peut être rapporté à la culpabilité d'avoir trahi ses origines profondes, d'avoir renoncé à son irlandité pour se perdre dans un anonymat collectif. Il est intéressant de noter maintenant que Michael n'a pas de nom de famille, comme pour insister sur cette perte des origines. Chez Michael, le fantasme de l'objet perdu a pour fonction de nous rappeler que le rapport du sujet au désir ne s'établit que sur le mode du manque, et que c'est de ce manque même que surgit la parole. Quand cette parole ne peut advenir, c'est le corps qui prend le relais, comme en témoigne la mésaventure de Michael, mais il va de soi que le texte de la nouvelle, lui, produit des effets de parole, et que Michael n'est pas qu'une figure du double de l'auteur. La fonction de Michael et de son rêve/fantasme est de montrer au lecteur quels sont les enjeux de l'écriture. Si l'on veut, on peut dire que Michael est l'avatar de l'écrivain raté, du mauvais écrivain, dans la mesure où l'écriture du rêve ne lui permet pas de se détacher des captations imaginaires qui le retiennent prisonnier d'une enfance et d'une Irlande mythiques, tandis que pour McGahern l'écriture de la nouvelle a bien un rôle de castration symbolique qui lui permet de ne pas s'identifier à l'image de l'écrivain tout-puissant, maître de son discours et de sa fiction, et au contraire d'accepter que le texte soit le lieu d'un savoir qu'il détient mais auquel il n'a pas accès. Autrement dit, McGahern sait que le texte, comme l'inconscient, est un savoir sans sujet, et toute véritable écriture, au-delà des questions de choix esthétiques conscients, laisse sa place au travail du signifiant que produit le discours de l'Autre dans le discours du sujet écrivant.
21 Pour le dire autrement, si Michael est dans le fantasme, l'écriture est pour McGahern une traversée du fantasme. Si Michael, pris comme il l'est entre une Angleterre aliénante et une Irlande à jamais perdue, est un homme qui n'a plus de lieu, pour McGahern c'est l'écriture qui fonctionne comme lieu de l'inscription dans le symbolique. McGahern ne fait pas comme Michael, il ne se perd pas dans le rêve, il écrit, et l'écriture, en tant qu'entrée dans le symbolique, est pour lui une façon de
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prévenir la chute dans l'imaginaire, tout en laissant libre-jeu au discours de l'Autre dans son propre discours. En mettant en scène la chute de Michael dans l'imaginaire, le sujet de l'énonciation s'en prémunit dans la mesure exacte où il n'y a pas identification.
22 Il ne faut pas perdre de vue que la nouvelle ne s'ouvre pas directement sur Michael en position de sujet de l'énonciation, bien que l'incipit "There was such a strain on the silence between them after he'd eaten that it had to be broken" puisse se lire comme un énoncé au discours indirect libre, c'est-à-dire rapportant les pensées de Michael. Or précisément c'est cette impossibilité d'assigner une source énonciative unique et stable qui permet à une parole de se faire jour dans le texte, car elle ouvre un espace de lecture. Cet énoncé est attribuable à la fois à Michael et à l'instance narrative qui se trouvent ici indissolublement liés par la même problématique, puisqu'il s'agit, et ce ne saurait être un hasard, de la question de l'arbitraire de la prise de parole. Ce qui est en jeu c'est de déterminer le moment critique du passage du silence à la parole. La nouvelle s'ouvre donc sur un silence qu'il faut briser, on notera le modal "had to" qui indique que le désir du locuteur est soumis au désir d'un autre inconnu qui ne lui laisse pas le choix, mais il s'agira aussi bien du désir de Michael que celui de l'instance narrative. En d'autres termes, cet incipit pose la question de savoir ce qui contraint l'auteur à prendre la parole, et suggère que ce dernier n'est pas la figure toute- puissante qui organise et contrôle tout, comme tente de le faire Michael dans le rêve en dressant des limites partout, mais qu'il est en partie soumis au discours de l'Autre, l'inconscient.
23 Dans cette perspective, et si l'on se souvient que la thématique du rêve est celle de la stérilité du couple et de sa vie, liée à la nécessité d'un retour aux sources, d'une tentative pour rétablir le flot du désir, c'est bien du désir d'écriture que parle la nouvelle. Son silence inaugural a pour fonction de conjurer l'angoisse de la page blanche, la stérilité de l'écrivain, comme le laisse supposer le fait que l'auteur au moyen de l'écriture de la nouvelle, à l'instar de Michael dans le rêve, n'a de cesse de rétablir un flux qui est comme une sorte de remontée aux sources, mais cette fois aux sources de l'écriture, comme si elle pouvait se tarir à la manière du ruisseau de Michael.
24 Or que nous dit la nouvelle à ce propos ? Tout simplement que l'auteur, comme Michael, court le risque de la stérilité en se coupant de son passé et de ses origines irlandaises. Dès lors l'écriture apparaît nécessairement comme la mise en jeu d'une identité dont le passé ne peut être oblitéré, le poète "ne peut chanter que dans son arbre généalogique". La fonction de la nouvelle est aussi de conjurer la terreur du silence définitif, du tarissement de l'inspiration, car pour l'écrivain cette perte est de l'ordre de l'indicible. Il ne peut pas la dire, mais en même temps il la dit par l'intermédiaire de celle de Michael, autrement dit en acceptant que l'Autre de son discours ait son mot à dire dans son texte, et ce faisant, il illustre le fait que "son message, le sujet le reçoit de l'autre sous sa forme inversée" (Lacan, 73). Notons, par ailleurs, que la nouvelle "A Slip-up", occupe la deuxième position dans le recueil, après "The Beginning of an Idea", nouvelle au titre emblématique, que l'on peut voir comme l'incipit même du volume, et dont la lecture confirme que l'ensemble du recueil se place sous le signe d'une réflexivité problématique qui illustre la modernité de l'écriture de McGahern.
25 Pour terminer sur une note quelque peu ludique, on pourra remarquer que dans le contexte irlandais et post-joycien de l'oeuvre de McGahern, il n'est sans doute pas trop farfelu de voir dans l'incontinence de Michael une variante liquide du "A letter, a litter"
Journal of the Short Story in English, 30 | Spring 1998 10
de Joyce, une perception du statut de la lettre comme déchet, ainsi que semble le montrer l'exemple suivant. Une phrase récurrente attire l'attention du lecteur dans la nouvelle : il s'agit de l'affirmation réitérée à Michael par les autres : "You've missed your bottle of Bass", qui est à relier au titre que l'on peut alors décoder comme un lapsus, si l'on considère que le signifiant de l'incontinence refoulé dans le texte est le signifiant "piss", on voit alors par quel déplacement le jeu sur la lettre pointe au lecteur le fait que le p redoublé de "slip-up" qui suggère, au moins au niveau phonologique en anglais le verbe "to pee" vient compenser le p/pee manquant censuré par le m initial de "to miss", et il convient de rétablir alors la vérité : ce que les autres signifient à Michael, c'est bien "You pissed your bottle of Bass". Ironie on ne peut plus dramatique que c'est précisément ce jour là que la pinte de bière rituelle n'a pas été consommée. Si l'on me pardonne le néologisme, je concluerai en disant que l'écriture dans la nouvelle c'est ce qui illustre la différence entre Michael et McGahern, c'est ce qui permet de passer du "mictionnel au fictionnel".
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Freud, Sigmund, Le Rêve et son Interprétation, Paris, Gallimard, 1925.
Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, Paris, Le Seuil, 1966.
Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire, Livre XVII, L'Envers de la Psychanalyse.
Maisonnat, Claude, "Jeux d'écriture et création problématique dans 'The Beginning of an Idea'", in John McGahern, Poitiers, La Licorne, 1992.
McGahern, John, Getting Through, London, Faber and Faber, 1988 Paris, Le Seuil, 1991.
RÉSUMÉS
The aim of this paper is first to examine the networks of signifiers that structure the text around the problematics of liquids and flows, thus emphasizing its highly poetic mode of functioning. In this perspective the "slip-up" of the title appears as a form of parapraxis illustrating the fact that the forgotten, or repressed, desire of Michael, which cannot be acknowledged through the symbolic code of language, ultimately finds an outlet through a sort of language of the body that puts him in an awkward situation generating an apparently unjustified feeling of shame. In a second stage, it will try to account for the reflexive dimension of the short story, no longer merely considered as the story of a "slip-up", but it will argue that the text itself is a "slip up" dramatizing and betraying a fear of the blank page.
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AUTEURS
CLAUDE MAISONNAT Professeur au département d'anglais à l'Université Lumière-Lyon II, où il enseigne la littérature contemporaine. Spécialiste de la nouvelle, il a publié nombre d'articles sur les nouvelles américaines et britanniques et son nouveau manuel sur la méthodologie de l'analyse textuelle appliquée à la nouvelle (en collaboration avec P. Badonnel) doit paraître l'automne prochain.
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When Coyote meets Adam: or Thomas King’s new space
Marta Dvorak
1 The short story collection One Good Story, That One was published in 1993 by native writer Thomas King, whose imaginative and playful works are grounded not in print culture but in the strong oral tradition of native culture. Although his work often reflects the realities of a certain ethnocultural community, that of status and non- status Indians in Canada and the United States, it nevertheless goes beyond the realm of the sociological or anthropological, simultaneously foregrounding the role of formal codes and conventions in storytelling1. This paper will first of all focus on King’s multiple narrators, the numerous I's that range from intradiegetic narrators of questionable competence to extradiegetic narrators straddled between internal and external focalisation. These narrators oscillate between the stance of omniscient narrator and that of external storyteller; they are partly character, partly storyteller. I will then go on to examine the settings, which King constantly alternates, moving the reader from the contemporary world of Natives living on reserves to those living off. He moves from the contemporary to the historical, just as he moves from the historical to the ahistorical, projecting us back to the places of Amerindian or Judeo-Christian mythology. Through the techniques of defamiliarization, deconstruction, and recontextualization, King blurs the borders between history/ reality and myth/ magic, questioning the historicity of the frontier myth and the origins of North American civilisation. We shall see how his literary production, grounded in dialectic and syncretism, ultimately creates a new literary and social space.
2 Let us take a look at the beginnings of some of the short stories and see what they have in common : 1) Alright. You know, I hear this story up north. Maybe Yellowknife, that one, somewhere. I hear it maybe a long time. Old story this one. One hundred years, maybe more. Maybe not so long either, this story. So. You know, they come to my place.2
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2) This one is about Granny. Reserve story. Everyone knows this story. Wilma knows it. Ambrose knows it. My friend, Napioa. Lionel James. Billy Frank knows it, too. Billy Frank hears this story in Calgary. He hears it three times. Maybe six. Boy, he tells me, here comes that story again. Sometimes this story is about Wilma. Some people tell it so that Ambrose is all over the place. The way I tell it is this way and I tell it this way all the time.3 3) This one is about Coyote. She was going west. Visiting her relations. That’s what she said. You got to watch that one. Tricky one. Full of bad business. No, no, no, no, that one says. I’m just visiting. Going to see Raven. Boy, I says. That’s another tricky one. Coyote comes by my place. She wag her tail. Make them happy noises. Sit on my porch. Look around. With them teeth. With that smile. Coyote put her nose in my tea. My good tea. Get that nose out of my tea, I says. I’m going to see my friends, she says. Tell those stories. Fix this world. Straighten it up.4 4) You know, Coyote came by my place the other day. She was going to a party. She had her party hat and she had her party whistle and she had her party rattle. I’m going to a party, she says. Yes, I says, I can see that. It is a party for Christopher Columbus, says Coyote. That is the one who found America. That is the one who found Indians.5
3 The stories told in the repetitive mode of oral stories, and told in the first person singular by extradiegetic narrators have phatic beginnings that immediately establish contact with the receiver. Witness the first word of the title story of the collection, which is "Alright" (reinforced throughout the short story by plentiful interjections indicating discourse such as "so" or "anyway"), and which is followed immediately by the personal pronouns directly invoking the narratee and his or her contact with the narrator: "You know, I hear this story up north", as well as the modaliser: "Maybe Yellowknife, that one, somewhere" (p. 3)6. Social or emotional contact thus moves from the implicit to the explicit, is maintained through the shifter "you" in which readers everywhere recognize themselves. Similarly, the deictic in the opening sentence of "Magpies" that begins "This one is about Granny" places the story into the domain of the already mentioned, the known and familiar. The sentence fragment that follows it ("Reserve story") classifies the story into a known category, allowing the reader to participate in the creative process by anticipating pattern.
4 Yet, all the while encouraging us to establish a rapport with the narrator, King sabotages the interaction and prevents us from ever really knowing who the narrator is. In some of the stories in the collection, we divine the narrator’s identity as a tribal elder through his use of native terms transcribed phonetically, and through a narration in the form of oral idiom: a haphazard, sporadic use of the third person singular accompanied by a parasite "s" in the other forms ("I says, they says"), the exclusive use of the simple present, the elision of the relative pronoun, the use of demonstrative pronouns in place of personal pronouns, the inversion of, and/ or elision of subject and verb, the tagging on of "this one/ that one/ those ones" at the end of sentences to reinforce or take the place of the subject. The first person narrator of the title story recounts how a friend of his brought three young white anthropologists to see him so that they could record his stories. In "Magpies" the intradiegetic narrator is called "old one" by one of the native characters, while the narrator of "The One About Coyote Going West" is called alternatively "Grandmother" and "Grandfather". This narrator functions on two diegetic levels: although he/she is not really a character but a
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storyteller, (s)he interacts with his/her narratee, Coyote, who in turn not only commissions and listens to the story but also participates in it. When Coyote, a Trickster figure in North American Indian mythology, first drops by for a visit, the narrator challenges the veracity of the stories she tells about Christopher Columbus that she has gleaned from history books, and agrees to tell the "real" story about "who discovered Indians" (p. 69). I have been using the masculine and feminine pronouns for the narrator because this figure of the Elder, this voice of wisdom, is both male and female. At times Coyote addresses him/her as Grandmother, at other times as Grandfather. This indefinite, or double dimension of the narrator mirrors the bipolarity of the Trickster figure, which in oral stories is traditionally powerful yet comic, awesome yet mischievous, corporal yet incorporal, natural and supernatural, male and female.
5 In spite of its basic indeterminacy, the persona of the narrator in each story takes shape in our minds, as the focalisation simultaneously caters to yet turns the tables on certain stereotypes imposed on a colonised people and perpetuated by the colonisers. The whites in the title story are perceived as loud talkers with short attention spans but nice white teeth. When requested to tell a story for the anthropologists eagerly waiting with their tape recorders, the narrator offers to tell the one about Jimmy who runs the store near Two Bridges and who has a car but who never drives, or the funny one about Billy Frank and the dead-river pig. But these suggestions meet with little enthusiasm, as they do not correspond to white expectations of Indian storytelling as shaped by Hollywood films and dime-store novels, and the narrator is asked to tell an "old" story, a good "Indian" (p. 5) story of Creation. The narrator is thus encouraged to conform to preconceptions that associate whites with the contemporary world of science, technology and communication, all the while locking natives into the mould of the Other, relegating them to the past, to the irrational, to myth and magic. By offering to tell the story about Billy Frank who hurt his back and lost his truck, by introducing digressions in his Creation story and analogies to contemporary experience, the narrator breaks the mould of the Other, sets in motion a conjunctive process linking the native with the prosaic realities that make up the lives of the majority of today’s North American inhabitants, whatever their cultural heritage may be.
6 We non-native readers are led to accept as one of us (i.e. as a fellow member of contemporary Western civilisation) this extradiegetic narrator whose presence is so strong that it exposes the storytelling process. Nevertheless, we are warned at the beginning of the short story that the narrating I heard the story "up north", and that it is an "old" story. Thus our narrator is but passing on a tale that has been told many times before in countless places and periods7. Who is I? Here we can echo Rimbaud and say that "Je est un Autre"8 for even after having made the distinction between the creator-author and his creature-narrator, the I of "I hear this story up north" is perhaps not the same I as the one that, after the interjection "So" signalling the end of discourse and the beginning of story, tells what seems to be the story proper: "they come to my place" (p.3). We are faced with a strategy of embedding in which a chameleon narrator shifts from receiver to teller, or rather a Chinese box spiral in which the I puts on or peels off masks, changing identities, compressing periods, telescoping geographical locations as well as levels of diegesis. For throughout the story proper recounted by the original storyteller (original in the sense of first in time), the contemporary narrator relaying to us the story he heard leaves his imprint through his trademark refrain "maybe... maybe not", first voiced in the exordium. In this way,
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King creates a layered effect, a multiple identity. For King’s multiple narrator is unreliable, even incompetent, peppering the narration with modalizing terms such as "I don’t know", "I think", or "I forgot" that deny his power of testimony. He is unreliable with respect to space, unreliable with respect to time. He confides to us that he heard the story in Yellowknife, but then qualifies the information with the modalising terms "maybe" and "somewhere" (p.3). Where, then, is "my place"? Are we in the Northwest Territories or the neighbouring Yukon? On Canadian territory or American? We have no means at our disposal of placing borders, of placing the story.
7 King creates the same uncertainty with respect to temporality: "Old story, this one. One hundred years old, maybe more. Maybe not so long either, this story" (p.3). We are faced with more than mere hesitation concerning dates. King actually generates a double dimension: historical and ahistorical. His narrator mixes precise references to a chronological, measurable past (100 years) with vague terms that evade historicity such as "a long time" or "later". But in fact, we come to realize that the narrator uses the chronological lexicon erroneously, or rather subjectively and freely in the Native fashion rather than objectively in the white fashion9. When the narrator begins the story of Creation, recounting how in the beginning there was nothing, no water, no land, no stars or moon, no Indians or white men, he specifies that the latter came "later, maybe one hundred years. Maybe not" (p.5). The numerical figures signifying the historical mode are actually being used in a mythical mode, and time expands indefinitely when a century encompasses billions of years. How then can we gauge since when this "one-hundred-year-old" story has been transmitted orally fromI to I?
8 Thomas King is evidently exploring and problematizing the distinctions we make between the historical and the mythical, between fact and fiction. He desacralises and calls into question certain founding myths upon which Western civilisation is grounded by taking the reader on a unique voyage through time and space.
9 Many of the stories project us back to the time of the creation of the world. It is suggested many a time that Coyote was present on the primeval scene, even that she was at the origin of the universe10. In "A Coyote Columbus Story", King compresses time and space and fuses the story of Creation with the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the shores of North America. Bored because the Indians refuse to play with her anymore, Coyote makes three ships, and soon these men "in silly clothes" arrive looking for things to sell : Yes, says those Columbus people, where is the gold? Yes, they says, where is that silk cloth? Yes, they says, where are those portable colour televisions? Yes, they says, where are those home computers? (p.123-24)
10 King’s parody of how Columbus "found" America and the Indians (while actually, as the narrator points out to Coyote "Those things were never lost", p.127), functions through a deliberate, even systematic use of anachronism that deflates the noble heroic deeds of white history books through contiguity with the modern and the trivial. How better to question the historicity of the founding myth than to deconstruct it, recontextualize it, and reweave the strands along with contemporary cultural references?
11 Through a similar syncretic technique, in "One Good Story, That One" we are projected into the Garden of Eden, only to find that the archetypal Garden of our Judeo-Christian heritage has been transformed into the Garden of Evening. The story deconstructs Genesis and subverts it by interpolating into it figures from native folk tales and
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references to modern consumer society to desacralise a text that a large part of Western society still regards as a revelation, as a recording of absolute truth. In this Garden in which converge east and west, ancient and modern, history and myth, Ah- damn is writing down all the names of the animals. But although in the Biblical text Adam named every beast of the field and every fowl of the air brought before him as a mark of the domination over every living creature that God had given him, here the animals who parade in front of Ah-damn dictate their Indian names to the white man who is reduced to the role of mere transcriber. Dog come by, says A-ma-po. Raven come by, says Na-co-tah. Coyote come by, says Klee-qua. (p.8)
12 The Trickster of native mythology furthermore makes a fool of Ah-damn by walking past him half a dozen times dressed up differently. Only Eve alias Evening, an Indian woman, is intelligent enough to notice all the coyote tracks that come around in a full circle. If Adam, the mythical figure larger than life, father of humanity, has been trivialized and transformed into a mere interjection that we utter when we hit our thumb with a hammer, even so does King subvert the figure of the Old Testament Deity. When Evening finds mee-so or apples growing in a tree along with potatoes and pumpkin and other good things to eat, this god warns her to leave the tree alone. We learn that this god has a bad temper like Harley James. Bad temper, that one. Always shouting. Always with pulled down mean look (...) That one goes to town, get drunk, come home, that one, beat his wife. (p.7)
13 The analogy made linking the Old Testament God with a twentieth century drunk who beats his wife turns the Garden of Eden and the sacred text inside out. The fact that Harley James’s wife ends up leaving him would suggest that defiance of the deity is possible. The intersecting planes of "reality" and myth introduce a political dimension into the space of the story. The narrator in the end goes on to draw a parallel between this god’s expulsion of Ah-damn and Evening from the Garden and the whites’ expulsion of North American Indians from their lands. We can note the pointed use of the possessive to underscore the dispossession and displacement : that one says that Evening and Ah-damn better leave that good place, garden, Evening’s garden, go somewhere else. Just like Indian today. (p.9)
14 When the narrator informs us that upon leaving the Garden, Ah-damn and Evening "come out here" and have "a bunch of kids" (10), he is in effect telescoping two spaces, the ahistorical archetypal space of Paradise and the historical, "real" space of contemporary urbanized North America. A new space has in fact been created: a liminal zone between the world of the teller and the world of the receiver. The story is permeable to two-way interference, allowing characters to walk out of it just as it allows narratees to enter it. When the narrator begins his story of Creation, he cautions his listeners about the power of the word: "You fellows keep listening, I says. Watch the floor. Be careful" (p.5) as if verbalising a space in which there is no matter might cause the floor to drop out from under their feet. The hinted at shift from Austin’s constative speech act to a performative one does take place in the end. When the anthropologists say goodbye and leave, the narrator carefully cleans up "all the coyote tracks on the floor" (p.10).
15 Thomas King’s short stories belong to what Linda Hutcheon calls narcissistic narrative that shifts the focus "from the ‘fiction’ to the ‘narration’ by either making the
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narration into the very substance of the novel’s content, or by undermining the traditional coherence of the fiction itself"11. King’s work is, in Hutcheon’s terms, diegetically self-conscious and linguistically self-aware; in other words it is fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and linguistic identity. Now if a certain unreliability, a certain weakening of the powers of the narrator is one of the specificities of postmodern writing, it is perhaps because it is an effective strategy in getting the reader to participate in the construction of meaning. If, as Austin pointed out, to tell is to act, we must also admit the corollary that to read is to act, and that to act is "both to interpret and to create anew- to be revolutionary, perhaps in political as well as literary terms"12.
16 King destroys our notions of space and time, disrupts artistic illusion to mock monolithic views, and transposes the values of one age or culture onto the positions of another. His stories are echo-awaking in the sense of the Greek term legein, i.e. a telling or narration that brings together, that forces an awareness in the receiver that the story personally concerns both the narrator and the narratee. If King displaces the world of legend into a naturalistic world of contemporary events and bathetic topical references, it is to lure readers into sharing a new literary space, and perhaps even beyond that, to lure them into creating a new social space, a new Garden where there will be room for all.
NOTES
1. For a survey of the larger body of Native literature to which King’s work belongs, a literature "revealing a continuum of the ancient and the modern that is complex", cf Penny Petrone, Native Literature in Canada, From the Oral Tradition to the Present, Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990, p.vii. Much of this literature, however, does not make use of contemporary storytelling strategies, as does King. The writing is often content-oriented, with mechanical narrative structures, a conventional linear time frame, trite imagery and an absence of narratorial distancing. These works are nonetheless of undeniable sociological significance, and contribute to removing the social group from its position of marginality. 2. "One Good Story, That One", in One Good Story, That One, Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 3. All further quotations refer to this edition. The numbering is mine. 3. "Magpies", p. 21. 4. "The One About Coyote Going West", p. 67. 5. "A Coyote Columbus Story", p. 121. 6. Emphasis mine unless stipulated otherwise. 7. Similarly, in "Magpies" the story moves from place to place, varies according to the teller. Consequently, the intradiegetic I is a persona that is and yet is not that of the narrator who has heard it somewhere. It is interesting to note how the narrator feeds the ambivalence by proclaiming that his version is immutable ("The way I tell it is this way and I tell it this way all the time") yet immediately contradicting himself: "Sometimes I tell you about those magpies first"(p.21).
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8. Arthur Rimbaud, Lettre à Georges Izambard, in Oeuvres de Rimbaud, Paris: Garnier, 1960, p. 344. 9. The painter/ writer Emily Carr noted with astonishment the different notions of time held by the Native communities of the west coast, particularly the fact that their cemeteries noted the time of death in terms of centuries, considering any smaller units to be totally insignificant. Cf. "Century Time" in Klee Wyck, Toronto, Clarke, Irwin and Co. Ltd., 1965. 10. For example: "There was nothing else in this world. Just Coyote. She could see all the way, too. No mountains then. No rivers then. No forests then. Pretty flat then. So she starts to make things. So she starts to fix this world" ("The One About Coyote Going West", p. 69). 11. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: the Metafictional Paradox, New York: Methuen, 1984, p. 28. 12. L. Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, p. 161.
RÉSUMÉS
Cette étude examinera le recueil de nouvelles intitulé One Good Story, That One de l'auteur amérindien Thomas King, en particulier sa technique, qui consiste a alterner des narrateurs homodiégétiques d'une compétence douteuse avec des narrateurs hétérodiégétiques suspendus entre une focalisation interne et externe, entre la position de narrateur omniscient et celle d'observateur extérieur, mi-personnage, mi-raconteur. Quant aux lieux de l'action T. King les situe tantôt dans le monde contemporain des autochtones qui vivent soit à l'intérieur soit à l'extérieur des réserves, tantôt dans les lieux anhistoriques de la mythologie amérindienne ou judéo-chrétienne. Par le biais de la défamiliarisation, de la déconstruction et de la recontextualisation, T. King estompe les frontières entre l'histoire/la réalité et le mythe/la magie mettant en question l'historicité du mythe de la frontière et les origines de la civilisation nord- américaine. Sa production littéraire, fondée sur la dialectique et le syncrétisme ludiques, crée un nouvel espace social et littéraire.
AUTEURS
MARTA DVORAK Maître de Conférences à l’Université Rennes 2, fondatrice et directrice du Centre d’Etudes Canadiennes. Sa recherche porte essentiellement sur la littérature contemporaine du Canada. Ses articles ont été publiés dans des revues canadiennes et françaises, et deux ouvrages ont paru sous sa direction en 1997 : La Création biographique, et Canada et bilinguisme, aux Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
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Baldwin's "The Outing" and the sacral quality of male love
Raymond-Jean Frontain
1 In a 1973 interview, James Baldwin protests American paranoia on the question of homosexuality. "[L]ove comes in very strange packages," he observes; "the trick is to say yes to life" (qtd. in Leeming 309). The difficulty of "say[ing] yes to life" is at the heart of Baldwin's exploration of homosexual relationships in his fiction. David's feeling of suffocation in Giovanni's Room is indicative of his fear of loving another male, a discomfort which has tragic consequences for them both; Vivaldo's suppression of his feelings for Rufus precipitates, in part, the latter's suicide in Another Country; and even after years in a caring relationship with Jimmy, Arthur Montana remains unable to love freely and dies alone of a heart attack in the men's room of a London pub in Just above My Head. As I have shown elsewhere, Baldwin relies upon the biblical story of David's grief over the death of Jonathan, who had loved him "as his own soul" (1 Sam. 18.1), to carry the weight of meaning in his novels where lament at the loss of a man whom the survivor loved "passing the love of women" (2 Sam. 1.26) is central. Baldwin's novels are in large part elegies by a survivor who understands the significance of what he has lost only after it is too late.
2 As significant, however, is Baldwin's concern with the adolescent male on the verge of sexual self-discovery who is just unwrapping that "strange package," love. The question of whether he'll say "yes" to life or be tormented by his homosexuality is treated in Go Tell It on the Mountain as John Grimes wrestles with his feelings for Elisha 1 in Giovanni's Room where David's boyhood abandonment of his friend Joey after a night of sexual experimentation anticipates his rejection in adulthood of Giovanni; in Another Country where Eric experiences "an eternal,… healing transformation" (206) through his adolescent interracial affair with LeRoy (who "contained the mystery which had [Eric] in the throat," 204); in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone where Leo Proudhammer's attempt to comfort his older brother, Caleb, brings about his sexual initiation; and in Just above My Head where teenagers Arthur and Crunch discover love--with its terror of "being carried away from the shore" (208)-- in a boarding house room one Saturday afternoon in Georgia.
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3 It is the very "otherness" of homosexuality that allows it to figure the mystery of life itself for Baldwin--exciting and confusing, as prone to create guilt and self-doubt as to inspire the most powerful exhileration. The question is, How will the boy respond after his first homosexual engagement? Will he dare accept his authentic self, grow in integrity, and continue to share with others the strange gift of love, as Eric, Arthur, and Leo do to varying degrees? Or will he be emotionally dwarfed, unable to love fully and freely, as happens to David, Crunch, and Caleb? Much of the power of Go Tell It on the Mountain derives from Baldwin's decision not to take the novel's action past John Grimes's adolescent awakening; the reader has no way of knowing what will happen to the boy, making the novel finally as mysterious to the reader as his own experience is to John.
4 An adolescent boy's awakening to life and his response to that "strange package," love, is the subject of one of Baldwin's earliest published short stories, "The Outing" (1951), which--as biographer David Leeming (75) reports--is "an outgrowth" of Crying Holy, the novel that Baldwin worked on for ten years before revamping it as Go Tell It on the Mountain2 Significantly, "The Outing" uses the biblical David story to suggest not the elegiac quality of a lost or failed relationship, but the sacral quality of male love3 Although knowledge of the myth allows the reader to anticipate the grief that will presumably come to the principals should Johnnie's father discover his son's homosexuality (Saul denigrates Jonathan's unseemly affection for David in 1 Samuel 20.30), Baldwin seems more interested in how he can use the biblical analogue to suggest the painful sense of election that comes to a boy through his growing awareness of his attraction to another male. The story is an epiphany--a moment of religious revelation--far different than the kind expected by the church faithful as they make their annual Fourth of July outing. As such it is the prototype for the same-sex relationships found in nearly every one of Baldwin's novels, but most particularly for that of Arthur and Crunch in Just above My Head, Baldwin's last completed fiction.
5 The "outing" of the story's title has three referents. Most obviously, it refers to a Harlem congregation's holiday daytrip on a boat which travels up the Hudson River, docks at Bear Mountain where the passengers spend the afternoon picnicking and rowing, and departs at dusk to return to Manhattan. During the course of the outing, the adult members of the Mount of Olives Pentacostal Assembly remind two boys-- Johnnie, the pubescent son of authoritarian Deacon Grimes, and Johnnie's slightly older friend David Jackson--of their need to be saved. The boys, of course, are on an "outing" of a different kind. In their first expression of burgeoning sexuality, they have pooled their money to buy a birthday gift for Sylvia Daniels; David in particular is troubled by the confusing feelings that she elicits from him. But most subtly the story concerns the homosexual "outing" of Johnnie who is just beginning to understand the nature of the feelings that he has for his best friend.
6 Provocatively, much is anticipated but little actually occurs in "The Outing." Every year the church saints hope that their example will attract the unsaved to join them on their outing, "Gentile, Jew or Greek or sinner." But "the Jews and the Greeks, to say nothing of the Gentiles… showed themselves, year after year, indifferent to the invitation" (20), and far from the Assembly's making any converts this year, "a few of the strangers who had come along on the outing appeared at the doors and stood watching with an uneasy amusement" while a service is conducted in the ship's ballroom (44). Likewise, when he is not asked to preach that day, Deacon Grimes recognizes that despite his
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having been pastor of his own church in the south, he is being passed over by the Harlem church's hierarchy; his hope of being allowed to "bring the message Sunday night" (42) will never be fulfilled as long as he remains in Harlem. He is frustrated on the domestic front as well, a bitter exchange with a suddenly independent Johnnie forcing him to realize how much his oldest son resents his tyranny over the family; uncertain what to do, he can only threaten to mete out punishment after they return home. David, Johnnie, and Johnnie's younger brother Roy spend much of the story awaiting the moment when they can approach Sylvia, safe from the watchful eyes of her formidable mother. It finally does not matter that Johnnie is absent when David and Roy seize their one opportunity to present the gift, for they have only a short time to speak with her, and David's awkward hope of romance is shattered when her talk, parroting the adults', is limited to correcting his spiritual state. In the meantime, Johnnie, disappointed after having run off and hoping that David would follow him, sulks in the woods before eventually deciding to rejoin his brother and friend. He finally locates them, however, in a rowboat in the middle of the lake. After a long while they saw him [on the shore] and waved and started to bring the boat in so he could join them. But the day was ruined for him; by the time they brought the boat in, the hour, for which they had hired it, was over; David went in search of his mother for more money [so they can rent the boat another hour] but when he came back it was time to leave. (57)
7 Every action attempted in the story is suspended or thwarted; no one returns from the outing untroubled, much less satisfied. What is more, the reader's sense of non-action and unfulfillment is intensified by the quasi-minimalistic and episodic way in which the story is told. Baldwin's narrative moves cinematographically from group to group among the members of the outing, reporting snatches of conversation and scanning the surface of apparently minor and unconnected events. Even the extended description of the shipboard service is broken by Baldwin's play of shifting narrative perspectives. Generally refraining from penetrating any character's interior -- and, thus, allowing his reader insight into motive or cause and effect -- Baldwin creates the impression that nothing of consequence is occurring.
8 But clearly there is something taking place behind these facades. Critical changes are occurring even if they are not immediately ascertainable, particularly as regards Johnnie, who comes close to being the story's central intelligence. The outing takes place on Independence Day when America celebrates a transformation -- the creation of a new, independent entity. And everything about the story bespeaks the liminal, the suspension between two spaces or states of being in which neither is eliminated but neither dominates. The story begins as the church members gather on board the boat just before it pulls away from shore, and it concludes shortly before docking again that night; the narrative is concerned with the hours during which the members of the church assembly are suspended in a zone apart from the quotidian and familiar. The boat's passage allows for images of an unseen or sub-surface power that suggest the working of a greater, invisible force: Beneath them the strong, indifferent river raged within the channel and the screaming spray pursued them. In the engine room… the ship's gears… rose and fell and chanted. The tremendous bolts of steel seemed almost human, imbued with a relentless force that was not human.(41)
9 The characters are propelled by a force they can neither see nor control, but propelled towards what, or to what purpose, the story does not say.
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10 Likewise, although all of the characters may be frustrated in their expectations, the unrelenting feeling of expectation that runs through the story nonetheless causes the reader to anticipate an annunciation or revelation of some sort4 The saints speak of the Spirit "jumping" on one unexpectedly, and pray that the Lord will "touch" David and Johnnie, causing them "to make a noise" and shout to the Lord (38); they repeatedly encourage the boys to "surrender" to the Spirit (37). The boys themselves are uncomfortable being caught between two stages of physical development as they undergo adolescent hormonal changes. Longing for the time when he will be free of his father's tyranny, Roy exclaims, "Be glad when I'm a man" (31). And the boys' comparing notes on their initial growth of body hair and other indications of pubescence drives Roy to ask, "Now ain't this a hell of a conversation for church boys?" (30). Their liminality is even more painfully apparent to the saints than it is to themselves. When they join the saints for the prayer service, they evince a striking, even an exciting change; as though their youth, barely begun, were already put away; and the animal, so vividly restless and undiscovered, so tense with power, ready to spring had been already stalked and trapped and offered, a perpetual blood-sacrifice, on the altar of the Lord. Yet their bodies continued to change and grow, preparing them, mysteriously and with ferocious speed, for manhood. No matter how careful their movements, these movements suggested, with a distinctness dreadful for the redeemed to see, the pagan lusting beneath the blood-washed robes. In them was perpetually and perfectly poised the power of revelation against the power of nature; and the saints, considering them with a baleful kind of love, struggled to bring their souls to safety in order, as it were, to steal a march on the flesh while the flesh still slept. (47-48)
11 But whatever the intentions of the saints, on this outing the religious and the sexual zones of experience interpenetrate, religious enthusiasm and sexual fervor overlapping no matter how hard the saints try to separate flesh and spirit, suggesting that contrary to church teaching, nature may itself be the force of revelation leading David and Johnnie forward.
12 "The Outing" thus del portends an annunciation that is never explicitly made, every detail of the story bespeaking a pending release from one state of being into another. Nowhere is this more clear than at the story's close, where the incomplete, suspended actions of the story culminate in an image both mysterious and sinister. All during the trip home David seemed preoccupied. When he finally sought out Johnnie he found him sitting alone by himself on the top deck, shivering a little in the night air. He sat down beside him. After a moment Johnnie moved and put his head on David's shoulder. David put his arms around him. But now where there had been peace there was only panic and where there had been safety, danger, like a flower, opened. (57)
13 While Johnnie leans against David, the younger, smaller, more vulnerable boy is quite literally dependent upon his older, stronger protector and friend. In keeping with the rest of the story, the scene is static and silent; nothing of overt significance happens and neither boy speaks. Yet clearly something has happened. A mysterious transformation has occurred in their relationship, as indicated by the haunting final image of danger opening before the boys like a flower. Their silence, suggestively, is the result of a fullness of emotion they do not completely understand and about which they do not know how to speak.
14 Like the stories in Joyce's Dubliners, "The Outing" hints at a significance that is never directly articulated. Full disclosure is made, however, through Baldwin's use of biblical
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analogues. As their names suggest, David and Johnnie are modern counterparts of biblical David and Jonathan. The narrator of the First Book of Samuel emphasizes the special relationship between King Saul's son and the outsider who comes to court, and who is described as being "ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to" (1 Sam. 16.12). "The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David," the narrator records, "and Jonathan loved him as his own soul" (1 Sam. 18.1); "Saul's son delighted much in David" (1 Sam. 19.2). The emotional intensity of their relationship is evident when they suffer a parting at which "they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded" (1 Sam. 20.41). Upon the death of Jonathan, David is left to lament: "I am very distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love was wonderful, passing the love of women" (2 Sam. 1.19-26).
15 Like the biblical pair, Baldwin's David is Johnnie's "especial pal," Johnnie having introduced David to the church where his father is deacon (34). Biblical David opens a rift between Jonathan and Saul, just as Baldwin's David precipitates an angry exchange between Johnnie and Deacon Grimes at the very moment that the boat is pulling away from shore (36). This last detail suggests that what occurs is a defining moment in Johnnie's life, the moment when he leaves his familiar moorings and dares to create an independent existence for himself5 His emotional dependence upon David in this regard is dramatized shortly afterwards. Johnnie and David wandered restlessly up and down the boat alone. They mounted to the topmost deck and leaned over the railing in the deserted stern. Up here the air was sharp and clean. They faced the water, their arms around each other. "Your old man was kind of rough this morning," David said, watching the mountains pass. "Yes," Johnnie said. He looked at David's face against the sky. He shivered in the sharp, cold air and buried his face in David's shoulder. David looked down at him and tightened his hold. "Who do you love?" he whispered. "Who's your boy?" "You," he muttered fiercely, "I love you." (42-43)
16 David's coaxing this expression of love from Johnnie is in keeping with Baldwin's reading elsewhere of The First Book of Samuel's suggestion that an unequal passion existed between the two biblical characters (Frontain 42-44)6
17 The intensity of Johnnie's love for David is stated outright in one of the few passages in the story in which Baldwin violates a character's interiority. During the religious service, Johnnie felt suddenly, not the presence of the Lord, but the presence of David; which seemed to reach out to him, hand reaching out to hand in the fury of flood- time, to drag him to the bottom of the water or to carry him safe to shore. From the corner of his eye he watched his friend, who held him with such power; and felt, for that moment, such a depth of love, such nameless and terrible joy and pain, that he might have fallen, in the face of that company, weeping at David's feet. (517
18 It is David, not the Lord, whose spirit fills Johnnie, the very juxtaposition of the two suggesting the sacrality of Johnnie's love for David. Johnnie's uncertainty about how David will respond--whether his own feeling for David will damn him or save him--is "the abyss which suddenly yawn[s]" before him (53), and anticipates the danger that opens like a flower at the conclusion of the story.
19 Neither Johnnie nor David understands yet the significance of a "love passing the love of woman" that they feel for one another, and the story does not say whether they will
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accept the strange package in which love has come to them. But if their relationship holds true to the use made of the biblical myth in Baldwin's other narratives, Johnnie-- like Giovanni and Joey--will suffer to be loved but eventually abandoned; and David, like his namesake in Giovanni's Room, will first be moved to have the younger, weaker male depend so entirely upon him, but then will grow increasingly uncomfortable with his partner's emotional neediness and push him aside. In Baldwin's continued rewriting of the myth, the David figure does not fully understand the significance of the Jonathan figure's love until he has lost it8 Johnnie and David's end is written in their beginning-- if one grasps the workings of Baldwin's biblical archetype.
20 "Now everybody ain't got the same kind of spirit," Father James irenically observes (39), without realizing that the spirit that has seized Johnnie is not the kind of religious inspiration that the saints--and probably not Baldwin's more religiously orthodox readers--might understand. Baldwin uses the biblical analogue to invest Johnnie's feelings for David with a sacramental character, the Bible authorizing a narrative of adolescent homosexual self-discovery for which Baldwin otherwise had no model. The shiver of recognition that Johnnie, and perhaps David as well, has at the conclusion of the story must be juxtaposed with the service on board which is so passionate that even modest Sylvia is moved to shout. The spirit that infuses Johnnie and David, however, is equally sacred, plunging the boys past reason and speech into pregnant silence. For David to reject Johnnie is a sacrilege--as another David will discover in Giovanni's Room. For David to deny Johnnie's feelings for him is to fail to say "yes" to life.
21 Only in Just above My Head, his final novel, is Baldwin's assertion of the sacrality of human sexual love--and homosexual love, in particular--as fully developed as it is in this short story. Questioning his relationships, narrator Hall articulates the general problem of all Baldwin's novels when he wonders if I would find it in myself the strength to give love, and to take it: to accept my nakedness as sacred, and to hold the nakedness of another. For, without love, pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you are striving to meet, a soul which is striving to meet yours. (309-10)
22 The ability to accept one's own nakedness as sacred, "and to hold the nakedness of another" as sacred too, is at issue in every one of the multiple relationships in the novel9 but the theme is most consistently developed in terms of Arthur's relationship with Crunch. As young as he is, Arthur does not question the sexual aspect of their relationship, for "he had not doubted for a moment that all love was holy" (443). Baldwin goes further and infuses Arthur and Crunch's love with the biblical ethos of yada, a Hebrew verb which means both to have knowledge of, and to have sexual intercourse with, another person. The boys "were beginning to know each other," the reader is told; "the biblical phrase unlocked itself and held them together in a joy as sharp as terror" (213). Ultimately, what Crunch and Arthur know is "the love which is salvation" (172).
23 The sacral nature of their love is most clearly seen in the exquisite scene in which Arthur and Crunch first consummate their relationship (203-10), Baldwin orchestrating their love-making to the words of a spiritual. So high, you can't get over him. So low, you can't get under him. So wide. You can't get around him. (208)
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24 The language of the hymn, which refers to a Christian's search for the divine, takes on a shocking phallic double entendre since in this scene Crunch is teaching Arthur to perform fellatio. It is this very sexual exhileration that Arthur knows with Crunch, who becomes the god of Arthur's affections, that Johnnie is on the verge of knowing with David in "The Outing."
25 As his first published treatment of homosexuality, "The Outing" is a kind of self-outing on Baldwin's part. The very brevity of the short story format allows Baldwin to maintain what D. A. Miller (chap. 6) calls a "secret subject" that is an "open secret.10 Homosexuality is never expressed, members of the church community remaining blind to the drama that is taking place in their midst, and Johnnie himself unable to name his feelings for David. But Baldwin's use of the biblical prototype allows him to suggest the nature of that love without openly stating it. The story is about an "outing" in this final sense as well, Baldwin writing allusively or elliptically to capture the mixed feeling of fear and excitement as David and Johnnie prepare to unwrap the strange package, love.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Baldwin, James. Another Country. New York: Dial P, 1962.
- Just above My Head. 1979. New York: Dell/Laurel, 1990.
- "The Outing." 1951. Going to Meet the Man. New York: Dial P, 1965. 29-57.
Bergman, David. "The African and the Pagan in Gay Black Literature."
- Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing. Ed. Joseph Bristow. London: Routledge, 1992. 148-69.
Frontain, Raymond-Jean. "James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and the Biblical Myth of David." CEA Critic 57, 2(Winter 1995): 41-58.
Holy Bible. Authorized (King James) Version. Nashville: Gideons, 1975.
Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1994.
Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Sarotte, Georges-Michel. Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theatre from Herman Melville to James Baldwin. Trans. Richard Miller. Garden City, NY: Anchor- Doubleday, 1978.
Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. 1989. New York: Dell/Laurel, 1990.
NOTES
1. Presumably recounting what he learned from Baldwin directly, biographer Weatherby reports that the novelist was forced by his publisher "to tone down the homosexual ending of the first novel" (133).
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2. "The Outing," first published in New Story, is collected in Going to Meet the Man (1965), the text that I quote. 3. The biblical significance of the names David and Johnnie was suggested by Georges-Michel Sarotte (54-60) when he paralleled their relationship with that of David and Giovanni in Baldwin's later novel. Sarotte, however, makes the identification only in passing and fails to develop the thematic significance for the novels that followed Baldwin's publication of the story. Bergman likewise makes the identification (155), but sees the sacral element working against the homosexual element in the story. 4. For example, the reader is told that Johnnie's "mother, on all social occasions, seemed fearfully distracted, as though she awaited, at any moment, some crushing and irrevocable disaster" (32). 5. The parallel between Saul and Deacon Grimes goes further. Just as King Saul suffers to be told by the prophet Samuel that the Lord "hath also rejected thee from being king" (1 Sam. 15.23), Johnnie's father is passed over as a preacher by Father James. 6. That Johnnie's attraction to David is more powerful than the latter's regard for him is suggested elsewhere in the story: when the boys are discussing how they can mark Sylvia's birthday and Johnnie eagerly asks David the date of his own (30); when a slip on Johnnie's part acknowledges that David's is stronger than his own interest in Sylvia (40); and when Johnnie unsuccessfully tries to lure David away from Sylvia and Roy by going off on his own, hoping that David will follow (52). 7. The conflict between the Lord and David as the object of Johnnie's attention parallels an earlier scene in which Sister Daniels grumbles to Sylvia, "'You got to get closer to the Lord.' Sylvia smiled and bit her lip; she cast a glance at David" (38), suggesting that David supplants thoughts of the Lord in Sylvia's mind as well. Throughout the story, Sylvia is loosely associated with biblical Michal as Johnnie/Jonathan's rival for David's affection. A curious reversal takes place, however, in that Sylvia is first seized by the Spirit and shouts during the shipboard service, whereas Michal is cursed for disparaging David's enthusiasm in dancing naked before the Ark of the Covenant (2 Sam. 6.13-23). Sister Daniels' earlier comment (38-39), though, raises the possibility of shouting as sexual hysteria, and Sylvia's preaching to David (55) is in keeping with Michal's attempt to restrain the "power of nature" that manifests itself in biblical David's exuberance. 8. Biographer Leeming describes the dynamic of Baldwin's love relationships with other men (76). Attracted primarily to heterosexual men unlikely to reciprocate his feelings, Baldwin repeatedly created tragedy for himself by investing his emotional capital in men by whom he inevitably felt betrayed. The resulting sense of loss is reflected in his fiction where Baldwin creates homosexual characters who love deeply and open themselves to being hurt by their lovers. It is why, I suspect, Baldwin identified so strongly with biblical Jonathan. Capable of loving another male "as his own soul," he nevertheless did not expect to be appreciated by the other until after the relationship had failed. The appearance of Leeming's superb biography after my article on Giovanni's Room had already been set in print prevented me from taking advantage of the evidence he offers that confirms parts of my thesis regarding Baldwin's fascination with the biblical David story. Leeming, for example, quotes Baldwin saying that the name David is "special to me" (196), confirming that Baldwin did indeed feel a special attraction to men named David. Leeming's descriptions of Baldwin in love, however, would have allowed me to withdraw my complaint that this was a blank space in existing descriptions of him, and have allowed me to speculate on the extent to which Baldwin himself, like his character David, was made to feel uncomfortable by a lover's unsettling sexual and emotional neediness. Leeming's filling in that space forces me to revise my hypothesis that Baldwin identified with both David and Jonathan. As Leeming makes clear, Baldwin was invariably the more needy partner.
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9. Sex between Crunch and Julia, for example, is described as an act of prayer. In their first union, Julia feels "as though his lunging body would touch and open and drench and heal her soul. He, as it were, prayed with her" (240). 10. What is so powerful about this short story's reworking of the biblical David archetype is that it records a single action--the boys' growing awareness of the intensity of their feelings for each other--and freezes the frame at that moment of recognition. Baldwin is less successful when he tries to show the full development of a relationship. His novels after Another Country are diffused, even the haunting relationship of Arthur and Crunch losing its impact as Just above My Head rambles on. "The Outing" is powerful because it does not betray the boys' uncertainty about where their relationship will proceed. Clearly, I disagree with Bergman's thesis that "The Outing" focuses upon "that crucial moment when the childlike love of one boy for another is transformed into the adult awareness of the sinfulness of same-sex affection" (155). While arguing the overt antagonism of the black evangelical church to the boys' relationship, additionally, Bergman confuses Johnnie's ireful father, Deacon Grimes, with the irenic church pastor, Father James (155), a confusion that does serious injustice to the latter's character.
RÉSUMÉS
Le sujet de "La Sortie Annuelle", de James Baldwin, est la découverte de la vie par un adolescent et sa réaction face à l'étrange expérience qu'est l'amour. Baldwin s'inspire ici de l'histoire biblique de David et Jonathan pour suggérer le caractère sacré de l'amour que son héros Johnnie ressent pour son ami David. Bien que connaître le texte de la Bible permette au lecteur de prévoir la douleur qui affligera les héros si le père de Johnnie vient à découvrir l'homosexualité de son fils, Baldwin semble préférer utiliser le parallèle biblique pour évoquer la difficulté qu'éprouve un jeune homme lorsqu'il se sent élu, qu'il prend progressivement conscience de son attirance pour un autre homme. L'histoire est une épiphanie bien différente de celles qu'attendent les fidèles de l'Eglise lorsqu'ils participent à la procession du 4 juillet. A ce titre, elle reflète les relations homosexuelles que l'on trouve dans presque tous les romans de Baldwin, et plus particulièrement de celle entre Arthur et Crunch, dans Juste au-dessus de ma tête. (Traduit par Isold de GOËTLOGON)
AUTEURS
RAYMOND-JEAN FRONTAIN Professeur de littérature et d'études transversales au département d'anglais de l'Université du Central Arkansas. Il a écrit ou édité cinq ouvrages et publié de nombreux articles sur des thèmes bibliques dans la littérature occidentale. Son ouvrage le plus récent s'intitule : The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (Haworth, 1997)
Journal of the Short Story in English, 30 | Spring 1998 28
Other rooms, other texts, other selves: Alice Munro’s “Sunday afternoon” and “Hired Girl”
Ildikó de Papp Carrington
1 In 1957 the Canadian Forum published one of Alice Munro's early short stories, "Sunday Afternoon," later included in her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968. This story, which Munro has identified as using adolescent "autobiographical material," narrates the humiliating experience of Alva, a poor country-high-school girl working for the Gannetts as a summer maid in their affluent suburban home ("Real" 23; "Conversation" 58). Although she is lonely, self-conscious, and virtually invisible and mute, she insists that she does not feel "lonesome and downtrodden" (Dance 167). During a cocktail party, Mrs. Gannett's cousin sneaks out to the kitchen to kiss Alva and confide that he has been invited to the Gannetts' Georgian Bay island for an August weekend. Although he restores her self-confidence, the story's conclusion suggests her reluctance to recognize what she might encounter on the island, "a new and still mysterious humiliation," most likely inflicted by this socially superior seducer (171).
2 In 1994 the New Yorker published Munro's "Hired Girl," a sequel to "Sunday Afternoon" and the first such sequel that Munro has ever written (11 Apr. 1994). It continues and completes the unresolved situation in the conclusion of the earlier story.1 Although Alva is now called Elsa and the Gannetts have been renamed Montjoy, Elsa is the same country teenager employed for the summer, still refusing to "admit that [she is] in the least humbled or lonely" ("Hired" 83). The August weekend mentioned in "Sunday Afternoon" brings Mr. and Mrs. Hammond to the Montjoys' Georgian Bay island, and Ivan Hammond, like the man in the earlier story, goes out to the kitchen to talk to the hired girl, but his wife is with him. When Mrs. Hammond leaves, he makes the slightly risqué suggestion that Elsa try swimming in the nude, but he does not kiss her. Later, swimming topless, Elsa fantasizes about the disturbing "pleasure" she could get from "his desired corruptness" (87). This difference between the behavior of the two girls and of the two male characters signals major changes in the second story.
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3 In interviews Munro has defined her repeated use of the same material as a method for trying to achieve new understanding. "It may be that you… have to go back… and mine the same material and look at in different ways, or in the same way, and sometimes you get to it and sometimes you don't." Making "changes in technique" prevents you from becoming "mechanical" and "maybe assist[s]… you to fresh perception" ("Real" 12, 13). The fresh perception is the product not only of new techniques but also of maturity. "[T]he way you see your life does change as you grow older and so there is just a constant reworking of… material ("Scottish" 91).
4 In the sequel's reworking of "Sunday Afternoon," Munro's new perception is revealed in two integrally related shifts, a shift in point of view and a corresponding shift to textual and tonal complexity. Munro moves from the defensiveness of an adolescent protagonist in "Sunday Afternoon" to the self-criticism of a retrospective adult narrator in "Hired Girl." "Sunday Afternoon," in which the last word is humiliation, criticizes the rich characters for exploiting poor young Alva (Dance 171), but in "Hired Girl" Elsa criticizes herself for believing that being "young and poor" gave her "the right" to achieve a "queasy triumph" over her employers (88). Simultaneously, Munro also increases the significance of literature, reading, and storytelling to her narrator's definition of her own identity. Through a combination of explicit allusion and subtly ironic echoes, the narrator's reading and storytelling in "Hired Girl" create complex levels of intertextuality to make a metafictional comment on both stories and on Munro's authorial identity.
5 These changes can be seen by comparing similar scenes in the two stories: scenes between Alva/Elsa and her female employer and between the girl and her employers' daughter, letter-writing scenes in which the hired girl lies about her situation, the already-mentioned cocktail party kitchen scenes with the male guest, and scenes in which literature and reading become the hired girl's instrument for defining her identity as more than just a servant. Against the background of similarity in these scenes, the differences between the two stories are dramatically highlighted.
6 In "Sunday Afternoon" the emphasis in most scenes is upon the Gannetts' affluence, upon what they possess: not only two beautiful homes with lawns manicured by "Chinese gardeners," "glittering cars," and boats, but "a whole island that they owned; nothing in sight that was not theirs" (Dance 166, 167,169). Amid all this, Alva's poverty is objectified by the painful contrast between herself and Margaret, the Gannetts' teenage daughter. Compelled to wear the former maid's ill-fitting uniform, Alva rationalizes her helpless envy of Margaret's collection of expensive summer formals: "Alva had not known [Margaret] had so many" (168). In "Hired Girl," this symbolic contrast is muted, for Elsa does not have to wear a uniform. Although the cheap homemade dress in which she arrives is already sweat-stained, she is usually allowed to be comfortable in shorts. Because the Montjoys' daughter, Mary Anne, is only ten, her wardrobe is not an issue.
7 But the most important difference between the Gannetts and the Montjoys is that in spite of owning a summer home on a beautiful island, the Montjoys are a family not defined by the glamour of possession but marked by many different kinds of loss. Because Mr. Montjoy has very poor eyesight, he is constantly misplacing and losing things, an affliction that Elsa finds comic. Far worse, Mrs. Montjoy's mother, Mrs. Foley, has lost her mind. Suffering from what seems to be Alzheimer's, she cannot recognize her own daughter. Neither can she remember the Montjoys' most tragically ironic loss,
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the death of Jane, their pretty three-year-old daughter, in a freak accident precipitated by a search for a lost bracelet. Trying to locate her valuable possession, Mrs. Montjoy moved a cupboard that "toppled down on" the child and killed her (88). Until the story's climax, Mrs. Montjoy does not speak of her dead child; but, as if somehow attempting to prevent what has already occurred, she is obsessed with always keeping everything in the right place in her cupboards. Mr. Montjoy's constantly repeated question, "Where the hell is the---?" (85), Mrs. Foley's pitiful query, "Can you tell me where Jane is?" (86), and Mrs. Montjoy's cupboard-organizing compulsion all emphasize the family's dispossession and the irony of their family name. And even their friends are marked by loss. Although Elsa finds Ivan Hammond handsome, glamorous, and "courtly," he has been invited to the island because he has lost his job and is "depressed" (86). The upperclass seducer in "Sunday Afternoon" is unemployed, unhappy, and uninterested in seduction in "Hired Girl." Therefore, the wealthy Montjoys and their lavishly entertained friends are paradoxically have-nots as well as haves: their wealth has not protected them from infirmity, death, or grief. But the adolescent Elsa, obsessed with her loss of identity as the Montjoys' servant, has to grow up before she can recognize their suffering.
8 Thus the difference between possession and dispossesion emerges from a change in Munro's narrative technique that makes such recognition possible. "Sunday Afternoon" is limited to Alva's adolescent point of view, presented both objectively and subjectively. The first and third sections of the story are narrated about Alva from a third-person point of view. In the middle section of the story, however, the third- person narration is interrupted by a long quotation from Alva's letter to her mother, in which her first-person narration reveals that Alva is not only concealing her unhappiness from her mother but also trying to conceal it from herself by denying and rationalizing her humiliating position. "Hired Girl," on the other hand, is narrated by Elsa as a much older, retrospective first-person narrator, remembering and evaluating her adolescent experience. The double-voiced technique of such a point of view is immensely flexible. It allows the narrator to "slide up and down the time axis that connects [her] two [temporally distant] selves" (Cohn 145) and thus to introduce constant interruptions of both monologues and dialogues to comment on and criticize her past behavior.
9 This difference in the manipulation of point of view in the two stories is integrally linked to another major difference: the relative significance of the scenes in which literature and reading form the narrative topic.2 In "Sunday Afternoon" Alva has no other diversion but sitting in the maid's room and reading books from her employers' den. When she goes there to get a book, Mr. Gannett asks her if she gets enough to eat. Annoyed by this question that reduces her to "a heifer," she rejects the "mysteries and historical novels" he is about to offer her and asks him for King Lear and The Red and the Black; she leaves the den "feeling well-pleased" because "she [has] shown him she [does] something besides eat" (Dance 165, 166). By impressing her employer, she has redefined her position, but she does "not want to read" in her stiflingly hot room (166). To try to escape from this room, she writes a letter to her mother in which she insists, "I'm not a maid really" (167), repeatedly denies being lonesome, thereby of course revealing that she is, and enthusiastically pretends to look forward to going swimming in Georgian Bay.3
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10 What redefines Alva's identity in her own eyes, however, is neither the unread books nor the strained concealment of her letter but the amatory attention of the male guest. Until he comes into the kitchen, another hot room, she feels not only invisible because "nobody look[s]… at her" as she serves the food (164), but also inaudible because, surrounded by the "incomprehensible faint noise" of the party, "she [cannot] make a sound…, not a dint" (170). His lingering kisses, however, make her see herself in a dramatically different way: "This stranger's touch had eased her; her body was simply grateful and expectant, and she felt a lightness and confidence she had not known in this house" (170). The promise of erotic excitement that she reads into his future presence in Georgian Bay fills her with a paradoxical mixture of anticipation and apprehension: "She saw [the Island] indifferently now; it was even possible that she wanted to go there. But… there was something she would not explore yet---a tender spot, a new and still mysterious humiliation" (171).
11 In "Hired Girl" Munro develops and resolves this open-ended situation by assigning literature, reading, and storytelling much more significant functions than they have in "Sunday Afternoon." In 1994, the same year "Hired Girl" was published, she defined the "excitement" of reading as a subject in her fiction: "people don't generally write about… how big a part reading plays in your life[:]… it's like a constant other room you go into besides the room you're living in" ("Scottish" 93). She communicates the excitement of this other room by alternating and ultimately intertwining two strands of literary references through "Hired Girl." One strand alludes explicitly to Homer's Nausicaä and implicitly to the Nausicaä episode in James Joyce's Ulysses, and the other includes quotes from two of Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, "The Dreamers" and "The Supper at Elsinore." Through this intertextuality, Munro weaves a unifying but paradoxical pattern to structure her narrative, to comment on her narrator's style and on her own authorial role, and, at the story's climax, to illuminate and criticize how Elsa exploits the Montjoys' loss of their child in order to recoup her loss of identity as their servant.
12 "Hired Girl" is set on Nausicaä, the Montjoys' Georgian Bay island. When Mrs. Montjoy and Elsa arrive there by boat, Elsa sees the island's name "written on a board at the end of the dock" (82). Although Mrs. Montjoy identifies Nausicaä as a Shakespearean character, Elsa suppresses her impulse to explain that Nausicaä was "the girl on the beach---the princess playing ball with her friends---whom Ulysses surprised when he awoke from his sleep" (82). This introductory scene not only differentiates between the philistine Mrs. Montjoy and Elsa but also, because Elsa does not parade her "superior knowledge," begins to erode her sense of herself, which is defined by the "familiar… satisfaction and misgiving" of such knowledge (82).
13 This erosion of her identity continues in many other ways. Dislocated on the island, Elsa is almost immediately aware that nothing is there for her, not even the rocks and trees, because she is a servant. Mary Anne tactlessly announces that, although Elsa is "sort of pretty," her prettiness "isn't the same thing" as the attractiveness of rich girls because she is a maid (83). This remark virtually erases Elsa's pleasing physical identity. In addition, poor Mrs. Foley is repeatedly confused about who Elsa is---maybe the grocery delivery girl? But as the delivery service has long been discontinued, there is no such girl. Ivan Hammond also confuses Elsa with someone else, addressing her as Minnie. When Mary Anne is naively astonished that the unathletic Elsa cannot define herself by her proficiency in one of the sports with which the affluent occupy their
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leisure, Elsa begins to use a literary weapon, storytelling, to resist the cumulative erosion of her identity.
14 For Mary Anne's benefit, she exaggerates "all the isolated and bizarre circumstances" of her poor rural background to dramatize a "false impression" of constant hard work and hardship because, in her self-defensive pride, she has a mistaken idea of the Montjoys' attitude. As the retrospective narrator interrupting this past storytelling now recognizes, "it seemed that I had to protect… a whole precious and intimate though often unpleasant way of life from contempt, which I supposed to be nourished in the icy hearts of people like the Montjoys" (85).4 Through the verbs seemed and supposed, the retrospective narrator distances herself from her deluded adolescent self.
15 The first indication that Mr. Montjoy is perhaps not as icily contemptuous as Elsa imagines him to be is also related to the topic of literature. When she finds Seven Gothic Tales, a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection that Mr. Montjoy has been reading, she immediately begins reading it, too, while eavesdropping on the Montjoys' disagreement about the book, which Mrs. Montjoy finds confusing but her husband enjoys. The central "psychological theme" of the Tales is "the mysteries of identity" (Langbaum 96), and the passage that Elsa reads comes from the end of "The Dreamers," a tale about transforming identities. Mira, the old storyteller, is responding to the narratives that the other characters have been telling him about Pellegrina Leoni, a famous opera singer who, when she loses the glorious voice that has defined her identity, fakes her own death and then recreates herself by assuming a series of masks to change from one person to another (Seven 344,345, 347). Her transformations are so successful that she tricks three men into believing her to be three different women and falling in love with her. When Mira says, "I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart…" (355; qtd. in "Hired" 85), his emphasis on change and jokes defines the role of the storyteller or artist as the earthly representative of God, "the greatest mask artist of them all" (Johannesson 80). "The Incomparable Storyteller," a recent article about Munro, cites her comment about her participation in amateur plays near Clinton, Ontario: "With acting, I love the mask" (qtd. in Turbide 46). By quoting Mira from "The Dreamers," Munro is thus playing with a series of masks. Mira is a mask for another incomparable storyteller, Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen's pseudonym (Aiken 52), and behind this double mask in "Hired Girl" is a third mask, Munro's own.5 Her mask is Elsa the storyteller, who has just been redefining her identity by dramatizing it for Mary Anne.
16 However, this brief self-dramatization fails to protect Elsa against her invisibility during the August weekend promised in "Sunday Afternoon" and developed in "Hired Girl." By connecting the Homeric beach of Nausicaä with the Georgian Bay beach at the beginning of the story, Munro prepares us to read the beach scene on this weekend through the ironic prism of the Nausicaä episode in Joyce's Ulysses. After Ivan Hammond has suggested that Elsa swim in the nude, she goes for a swim off the dock with the "Nausicaä" sign. On her way she encounters some party guests who, like the guests in "Sunday Afternoon," do not actually see servants. They simply make "way for [her] body without looking at [her]" (87). But, in spite of Hammond's difficulty in remembering her name, she hopes that he will surprise her on the beach.
17 Then, just as Joyce's Gerty MacDowell, sitting on the "rocks along Sandymount shore" on a "summer evening," hears the sounds of a choir at a "men's temperance retreat" in
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a nearby church and fantasizes about an imaginary lover (346, 354), so Elsa, swimming off the rocks, hears "the sounds of the cocktail party" and fantasizes about Hammond ("Hired" 87). The ironic contrast between the temperance retreat and the cocktail party that is highlighted by the similarity of the setting and of the fantasizing girls alerts us to further intertextual ironies. After Leopold Bloom, who is sitting at a distance and who has kicked back the ball of some playing children, begins to watch Gerty intently, she focuses her fantasy on him. Soon she can "almost feel… the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips" (Joyce 366). The diction of Elsa's fantasies about Hammond is almost identical with Gerty's. She imagines a "first touch,… then kisses, hot pressures…" ("Hired" 87). Excited by Bloom's "passionate gaze," Gerty, pretending to watch fireworks exploding overhead, leans back on the rocks to expose her drawers, her legs and thighs in "wondrous revealment," and Bloom explodes in an orgasm (Joyce 362, 366). Similarly Elsa, excited by Hammond's skinny-dipping suggestion, not only takes off the top of her bathing suit but "even dare[s] to… bob… up and down and [rise] into the light like a mermaid, wet and gleaming, with nobody to see" ("Hired" 87).6 When she hears footsteps approaching the boathouse, she momentarily believes that now somebody will see her, that by exposing her breasts she has "actually entered the world of secret signals, lovers' meetings, ruthless desires," but instead of Hammond, the man in the boathouse is only old Mr. Foley, who "never notice[s] her presence" (87).
18 Comparing this scene to Joyce's Nausicaä episode calls attention not only to the disappointing absence of the hot male gaze that Elsa longs for to burn away her invisibility but also to the methods that she then uses to achieve the identity she wants. The first method is, once again, storytelling in which her imagination gives her control, both as heroine and author. "To hold [her] own against" the continuing drunken din of the party, after her swim she writes a letter to a friend (87). Unlike the letter that Alva writes to her mother in "Sunday Afternoon," this letter does more than just conceal reality. It transforms reality by creating a fictitious identity for Elsa. In her imagination, she escapes the servant's room in the boathouse loft to become desirable but virtuous. Instead of being ignored by Hammond, she is first "fondled… in the kitchen," then passionately pursued down to the beach, where he makes "a determined attack" but is driven away by her resistance (87).
19 The conclusion of this letter, however, introduces a significant tonal shift in which Munro assumes the tone of both Joyce and Dinesen to make a metafictional comment. "So hold your breath," Elsa writes her friend, "for the next installment---`The Kitchen Maid's Adventures,' or `Ravaged on the Rocks of Georgian Bay,'" which the young author later realizes should have been ravished ("Hired" 87). Although Elsa's letter as a letter pretends to be true, her assigning it alternate titles not only labels her letter as fiction but moves outside its textual boundaries to classify it as a certain kind of fiction. Her smiling self-mockery, intensified by the comically corrected malapropism, is doubly self-reflexive. By echoing Joyce's "burlesque of sentimental kitsch" in his narration of Gerty's florid interior monologue (Cohn 121), this metafictional comment distances not only Elsa from her novelettish narrative but also Munro from her earlier story. Stepping outside the limits of "Hired Girl," she pokes fun at Alva's imagination in "Sunday Afternoon." Like Dinesen's Mira, Munro the storyteller loves a joke, even a joke on her own early storytelling.
20 The second method that Elsa employs to insist on her identity involves storytelling in the sense of deliberately lying to Mrs. Montjoy. When Mary Anne tells Elsa about Jane's
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death, the child says that she does not believe her sister is in heaven. "She is just dead, she is nothing" ("Hired" 83). In the climax of the story, Elsa assumes a mask of ignorance to pretend to Mrs. Montjoy that she does not know who Jane was. Repeating Mrs. Foley's pathetic question for Mrs. Montjoy, Elsa asks, "Was Jane one of the girls who worked here some other summer?" (87). Until this scene Munro's narrator withholds a crucial fact: Mary Anne has already told Elsa the circumstances of Jane's death. Thus, when Munro completes this analepsis by having her narrator confess to us her prior knowledge of how Mrs. Montjoy accidentally killed her child, we understand the motive behind Elsa's disingenuous question. By pretending to believe that Jane was a former maid, Elsa forces Mrs. Montjoy not only to reveal and relive the tragedy of her life but also to pay attention to her maid. Thus, even though Elsa is a maid, she demonstrates that she is not nothing. Remembering her ambivalent reaction of "guilt" and "queasy triumph" after the success of this demonstration, the retrospective narrator severely criticizes her adolescent behavior :
21 Instead of making her too superior to be a servant, her literary knowledge makes her conceited and clumsily cruel.
22 This self-criticism is justified even further by the conclusion of the story, in which Mr. Montjoy shows that he does not consider Elsa nothing. Just before she leaves Nausicaä, he makes her a present of Seven Gothic Tales because he has seen her reading it and thinks she would enjoy it. His sympathetic understanding springs from his boyhood poverty. When his physician father died, Mary Anne has told Elsa, Mr. Montjoy had to work his way through college. But although surprised by this gift, Elsa is reluctant "to give anybody whose father had been a doctor credit for being poor" (88). Feeling as if Dinesen's book "had always belonged" to her (88), she joyfully begins reading it again. Sitting in the servant's room, she quotes a description of a gorgeously glowing and fragrant room in "The Supper at Elsinore" :
23 By echoing both the Homeric and the Joycean allusions to Nausicaä, Dinesen's mythological image completes the intertextual pattern. But, more significantly, this room sounds like the "other room" that Munro feels reading opens for her ("Scottish" 93). In the concluding paragraph, the retrospective narrator feels that entrance into this imaginary room has "rescued" her from the "shame" of her "nature" and "condition" through the magic of reading.7
24 The rescue in "Hired Girl," therefore, is effected not by the promise of future erotic excitement, as it is in "Sunday Afternoon," but by the excitement of reading. In "Sunday Afternoon" Alva is obsessed with her condition, whereas in "Hired Girl" the dual-voiced narrator criticizes Elsa's nature, her self-absorbed inability to recognize the reality of her employers' identities as well as of her own. In a characteristic paradox, Munro's adult narrator locates both her adolescent blindness and her developing artistic vision in her love of literature.
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BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Aiken, Susan Hardy. Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1989.
- "Double-Talking Devils: Alice Munro's `A Wilderness Station.'" Essays on Canadian Writing 58 (1996): 71-92.
- "What's in a Title? Alice Munro's `Carried Away.'" Studies in Short Fiction 30 (1993): 555-64.
Clark, Miriam Marty. "Allegories of Reading in Alice Munro's `Carried Away.'" Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): 49-61.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.
Dinesen, Isak. "The Dreamers." Seven 271-355.
- Seven Gothic Tales. New York: Vintage, 1972.
- "The Supper at Elsinore," Seven 217-70.
Johannesson, Eric O. The World of Isak Dinesen. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1961.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random, 1934.
Langbaum, Robert. Isak Dinesen's Art: The Gayety of Vision. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.
Munro, Alice. "Carried Away." Open 3-51.
- "A Conversation with Alice Munro." Journal of Canadian Fiction. With John Metcalf. 1 (1972): 54-62.
- Dance of the Happy Shades. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
- "Hired Girl." New Yorker 11 Apr. 1994: 82-88.
- "Jesse and Meribeth." Progress of Love. Toronto: McClelland, 1986.
- Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971.
- Open Secrets. New York: Knopf, 1994.
- "The Real Material: An Interview with Alice Munro." By J. R. (Tim) Struthers. Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts. Ed. Louis K. MacKendrick. Downsview, ON: ECW, 1983. 5-36.
- "The Scottish Ancestor: A Conversation with Alice Munro." Scotlands. With Chris Gittings. 2 (1994): 83-96.
- "Spaceships Have Landed." Open 226-60.
- "Sunday Afternoon." Canadian Forum Sept. 1957: 127-30.
- "Sunday Afternoon." Dance 161-71.
- "Thanks for the Ride." Dance 44-58.
- "Vandals." Open 21-94.
- "A Wilderness Station." Open 190-225.
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- Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: MacMillan, 1978.
Turbide, Diane. "The Incomparable Storyteller." MacLean's 17 Oct. 1994: 46-49.
NOTES
1. Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? (The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose in the United States) are both a series of linked stories about the same character. In Open Secrets., "Carried Away," "Vandals," and "Spaceships Have Landed" are stories about two generations of the same family. "Carried Away" also includes a character briefly mentioned in a much earlier story, "Thanks for the Ride" (See Carrington, "What's"555). However, none of these stories can be classified as sequels in the sense defined above. 2. Cf. Miriam Marty Clark's essay and Carrington, "Double-Talking" 73, 83. 3. Cf. Carrington, Controlling 104-5. 4. In "Jesse and Meribeth," a teenager brought up in "threadbare decency" and employed by Mr. Cryderman as a maid feels the same compulsion to "snip one little hole in his contempt" (Progress 168, 175). 5. For an earlier example of a character functioning as an authorial mask, see "A Wilderness Station" and Carrington, "Double-Talking," 89. 6. Because Munro's mermaid simile suggests an image of the bare-breasted statue of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, seated on a rock in Copenhagen harbor, this comparison is perhaps another allusion to the Danish Dinesen. 7. Cf. Clark's comment on the "liberatory… power of books and reading" in Munro's fiction (61).
RÉSUMÉS
La nouvelle "Hired Girl" d'Alice Munro, se veut une suite qui, non seulement complète "Sunday Afternoon" mais aussi porte un regard critique sur celle-ci en ayant recours à un point de vue plus complexe : d'une adolescente sur la défensive - l'héroîne de "Sunday Afternoon" - Munro passe à un narrateur adulte qui se penche sur son passé et s'adonne à une autocritique ; à travers l'ironie de l'intertexte, ce narrateur commente de manière metatextuelle les deux histoires mais aussi définit l'identité de Munro, l'auteur.
AUTEURS
ILDIKÓ DE PAPP CARRINGTON
Enseignante à l'Université de Northern Illinois, est l'auteur de deux ouvrages : Margaret Atwood and Her Works, et Controlling the Uncontrollabe: the Fiction of Alice Munro ; elle a publié plusieurs articles sur la nouvelle dans des revues comme Studies in Short Fiction, Canadian Literature, The American Review of Canadian Studies, Essays on Canadian Writing et The Women's Review of Books.
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Aldous Huxley : « Nuns at luncheon » ou les jeux du Je
Clémentine Robert
1 “Nuns at Luncheon” est la gourmandise inscrite au menu de la collection Mortal Coils parue en 1922.1 Son auteur est lui-même un gourmet confirmé : n’a-t-il pas déjà formulé son esthétique en 1918 en y mêlant saveur et savoir-faire ? “I have done an admirable short story — so heartless and cruel that you wd. scream if you read it. The concentrated venom of it is quite delicious.”2 Huxley, non sans malice, a défini d’entrée de jeu les options qu’il a prises au niveau du récit : il en a fixé le ton, “heartless and cruel”, la manière, “concentrated”, et l’effet recherché, “delicious”.
2 Bien que l’œuvre d’un jeune auteur, “Nuns at Luncheon” est un récit modèle. Ce petit chef-d’œuvre de virtuosité doit son exemplarité tant à l’originalité de sa conception qu’à l’habileté de son exécution. Cette nouvelle, unique au plan de la technique, a pour signataire, en effet, un artiste accompli qui, non content de nous montrer la narration s’élaborant, se permet d’en révéler les artifices et s’ingénie, suprême audace, à pasticher son art. Pour ce faire, Huxley a recours à deux médiateurs qui se partagent la nouvelle et se renvoient la balle au jeu dialogique auquel ils se livrent. Chacun surenchérit sur l’autre et de connivence avec lui : le récit devient alors une pièce montée qui se monte et se démonte à mesure qu’il se fait.
3 La structure de “Nuns at Luncheon” l’apparente à cet autre récit exemplaire qu’est “La Forme de l’épée” de Jorge Luis Borges2. Dans l’un et l’autre cas, il s’agit d’un récit à l’intérieur du récit, et là comme ici l’attente est focalisée sur la narration dans la narration : le récit emboîté constitue le corps du récit, tandis qu l’emboîtant lui tient lieu de support. Dans les deux cas, sont associés deux narrateurs, dont le premier, présentateur, se démet au profit du second, pressenti dès l’abord. Il s’ensuit une substitution des rôles, une inversion du rapport énonciatif initial, soit que l’objet de l’énonciation devienne énonciateur, comme on le voit chez Borges, soit que l’interlocuteur ait qualité pour être locuteur et soit donc invité à occuper l’espace illocutoire, comme il se produit chez Huxley. “Nuns at Luncheon” et “La Forme de l’épée” sont la parfaite illustration de ce glissement narratif attendu dès le départ, mais
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là où le récit dans le récit de Borges est déjà un récit fabriqué, celui de Huxley se fabrique ostensiblement sous nos yeux.
4 L’histoire, au niveau de l’information la plus élémentaire, se résume à peu de chose. Un écrivain (le Je du récit 1) retrouve au déjeuner une amie journaliste, Miss Penny (le Je du récit 3). Tous deux sont friands d’anecdotes et celles de Miss Penny, nous dit-on, sont de nature à régaler son entourage. La dernière en date a pour héroïne une nonnette dont la mésaventure — elle a perdu ses dents et sa virginité — est dégustée, comme il se doit, par nos deux connaisseurs. Pourtant, la matière au niveau du récit minimum est mince et tient du fait divers, mais c’est là, précisément, qu’est l’enjeu narratif : comment fait-on d’un fait divers un récit, comment passer de l’histoire au discours, quels sont les moyens mis en œuvre et quels seront les ingrédients incorporés, autant de questions de fond que se pose Huxley, à charge pour ses deux raconteurs d’y répondre. Ainsi l’histoire de la nonnette entre les mains de ses fabricateurs est un récit en confection et tout l’intérêt de l’entreprise porte sur le comment de la fabrication et le pourquoi du faire. Raconter, c’est inviter à la consommation, ce qui signifie que la délectation fait partie du contrat narratif. Aussi “Nuns at Luncheon”, plus encore qu’une anatomie du récit, est une recette de gastronomie.
5 Le titre a déjà de quoi nous mettre en appétit. Outre que l’indication circonstancielle “luncheon” est une mise en condition, le mets auquel on nous convie “nuns” ne manque assurément pas de piquant : croquer de la nonnette au déjeuner, voilà qui promet d’être croustillant. Comme si cela ne suffisait pas, pour mieux nous affriander, la nouvelle au départ du récit 1 s’ouvre sur une question apéritive : “‘What have I been doing since you saw me last?’ Miss Penny repeated my question in her loud, emphatic voice.” Cette question initiale est techniquement une invitation anticipatoire4. Elle a pour double fonction de solliciter directement Miss Penny tout en plaçant le lecteur dans l’expectative. La question incipit est donc à la fois une invite et une attente, une attente qu’il convient d’entretenir et qui demande à être agrémentée car elle ajoute au plaisir escompté.
6 Pour appâter le lecteur une première amorce est jetée sous la forme d’une allusion à un récit qu’a déjà servi Miss Penny ; la désopilante histoire du général russe épris de Miss Penny est un avant-goût de ce que nous réserve la suite :
7 Ce précédent alléchant nous renseigne sur les talents de Miss Penny : elle a déjà fait ses preuves en tant que narratrice et s’est taillé la réputation d’une “énonciatrice exemplaire” : “Miss Penny’s anecdotes were always curious. I looked forward to an entertaining luncheon.”
8 La “force illocutoire”5 de ses récits est donc un fait acquis, reste à présenter le personnage aussi truculent que ses récits sont succulents. Le portrait de Miss Penny, tel que sa verve et son rire chevalin la désignent et tel qu’il se dessine à travers les réflexions du narrateur, est un autre élément savoureux qui ne peut qu’aiguiser l’appétit du lecteur. Non seulement son accoutrement fait d’elle une redoutable excentrique — “Her long ear-rings swung and rattled — corpses hanging in chains” — mais sa voracité la prédispose au voyeurisme. Elle a la dent longue — “Thoughtfully she bit into the crust of her bread with long, sharp white teeth” — et le regard goulu d’une ogresse à l’affût de juteuses anecdotes. Il n’en faut pas davantage pour émoustiller le lecteur/auditeur et le tenir en haleine. La préparation du glissement narratif ainsi assurée sur la base de la jouissance anticipée, il ne reste plus qu’à ménager la transition entre les deux récits.
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9 Au seuil du récit 2, Miss Penny a trouvé son morceau de choix : “‘But of course,’ exclaimed Miss Penny suddenly. ‘I haven’t seen you since my German trip. All sorts of adventures. My appendicitis; my nun.’” Sitôt le morceau lâché, le premier narrateur — et le lecteur avec lui — saisit l’amorce avec avidité : “Your nun?” Et Miss Penny de surenchérir pour bien nous tenir accrochés : “My marvellous nun. I must tell you about her.” Voici la demande expresse de prise de parole aussitôt suivie du signe d’acquiescement “Do” qui, venant du premier narrateur, équivaut à la cession de son droit de parole. Autorisation est ainsi donnée à Miss Penny de répondre à notre attente et d’embrayer son récit. C’est donc ici que se fait la jonction entre la structure enchâssante et la structure enchâssée.
10 Deux temps sont à considérer dans le récit confectionné par Miss Penny. Un premier temps où celle-ci investie du monopole énonciatif est seule à occuper l’espace illocutoire qu’elle emplit d’éléments informants, circonstanciels et biographiques. Un second temps où le premier narrateur à présent informé est invité à collaborer à la mise en récit de ces différents éléments, ce qui lui donne un nouveau statut, celui de coénonciateur. Ce parténariat constitue la nouveauté de la nouvelle et son attrait pour la critique. Huxley nous apprend, en effet, que “le discours narratif ne devient signifiant qu’à partir d’un jeu (au sens mécanique, ludique et réglé du terme)”6, un jeu, qui plus est, qui se joue à deux. Que le partenaire ait un rôle actif, comme on le voit ici, ou, inversement, que sa contribution se limite à la fonction de récepteur, un récit est toujours un discours adressé, concocté pour quelqu’un, autant dire avec lui. En prenant pour scénario ce parténariat, Huxley met ainsi l’accent sur la complicité qui régit tout récit — complicité d’autant plus savoureuse ici qu’entre gens de métier il ne s’agit rien moins que d’une collusion. Son compère et sa commère étant tous deux des artistes du genre, il va de soi que leurs recettes d’atelier sont des plus instructives.
11 Que nous apprend en premier lieu la narration de Miss Penny ? Que la stratégie narrative se présente avant tout comme une recherche de l’effet à produire. En tacticienne avertie, Miss Penny sait fort bien qu’il lui faut retarder ses effets pour ménager son jeu. Aussi la voit-on s’attarder sur les préliminaires à l’ouverture de son récit : son voyage en Allemagne, ses reportages qui nous en disent long sur son opportunisme (elle est de ceux qui font feu de tout bois) — “‘What it Feels Like to be a Conquered Nation’ — sob-stuff for the Liberal press, you know — and ‘How the Hun is Trying to Wriggle out of the Indemnity,’ for the other fellows. One has to make the best of all possible worlds, don’t you find?”; ses impressions touristiques, son appendicite, enfin — “They whisked me off to hospital, and cut me open before you could say knife” — tout est savamment ordonné pour nous tenir en suspens avant d’en venir au fait. Pour fortuite que soit cette appendicite, elle n’a rien de gratuit ; introduite, en effet, par la formule, ou disons le signal, “One fine day”, caractéristique de tout énoncé inaugural, elle aura pour fonction d’enclencher le récit : “Still, the thing had its compensation. There was my nun, for example!” Chemin faisant, les digressions de Miss Penny, sans que rien n’y paraisse, ont orienté la narration.
12 Il n’est pas pour autant mis fin au processus de retardement. C’est ainsi que le discours de Miss Penny est entrecoupé de retours à la situation contextuelle : “‘Ah, here’s the food, thank Heaven!’”, ou encore, “‘Half a pint of Guinness,’ ordered Miss Penny. ‘And, after this, bring me some jam roll.’” Ces interférences ont un effet suspensif et créent en apparence un milieu dispersif qui semble différer l’entrée dans le vif du sujet. En réalité, ces interruptions sont un facteur de cohésion nécessaire à l’unité de la
Journal of the Short Story in English, 30 | Spring 1998 40
structure organique. L’énoncé de Miss Penny entrelardé de références alimentaires nous rappelle que la métaphore digestive sous-tend tout le récit, en même temps qu’il nous renvoie au titre de la nouvelle, “Nuns at Luncheon”. Si “le choix du pôle de départ et l’orientation du parcours narratif qui en découle permettent de caractériser l’axiologie du récit”7, la dévoration constitue bel et bien cet axe discursif, en tant que thème et système.
13 Ainsi l’histoire de la nonnette, au niveau de l’information, nous est donnée comme en pâture entre deux bouchées d’aliments. La séquence élémentaire, “the gist of it”, bien que recueillie par bribes, “in scraps and snatches”, par le premier narrateur à présent narrataire, se conforme en tous points au schéma canonique. On y retrouve, en effet, brossées à grands traits, les deux situations inversées que sont l’état final et l’état initial : au départ, une jeune et jolie nonnette à la vocation tout apostolique, en dernière instance, une morte vivante, démise de ses vœux, déchue de son habit et privée de ses dents. Entre ces deux états qui bornent le récit s’inscrit l’action proprement dite à l’origine de la métamorphose, l’événement qui compromet l’équilibre initial et qui engage irréversiblement le procès dramatique et transformationnel. Mais le quoi, le pourquoi, le comment de cette mutation, la péripétie, la crise et le dénouement qui constituent à proprement parler la trame du récit nous sont encore une inconnue, puisque Miss Penny fait durer le plaisir et n’a pas l’intention de couper court à notre attente.
14 L’histoire elle-même est restituée de façon parcellaire, à la façon précisément dont Miss Penny a grappillé ses rudiments d’information. Il ne s’agit encore que d’une intrigue embryonnaire :
15 Ces quelques données qui nous sont consenties vont servir de base au récit mais n’en sont toujours pas l’énoncé. On remarquera que la narratrice ne se dessaisit de cette amorce ignitive que pour éveiller notre activité cognitive et qu’elle sait l’art d’effleurer son sujet sans pour autant le déflorer.
16 Pour s’exercer, l’opération narrative va devoir s’appuyer sur ce modeste canevas qu’il convient d’étoffer avant de broder sur les faits. Il faut, en premier lieu, combler les trous de l’information lacunaire — “I filled in the details bit by bit” — ingérer les dires et ouï-dire et, le cas échéant, inférer les non-dits. Or, Miss Penny a des talents de détective et s’y entend pour mener une enquête : “My nurse, the doctor, the charwomen — I got something out of all of them. I always get what I want in the end.” Ensuite, il lui faut cibler cette information pour que se dessine un schéma global, car il ne suffit pas d’aligner des faits, encore faut-il leur injecter du sens. Associé à cette démarche que refait pour lui Miss Penny, le narrataire voit se préciser le portrait du héros, son visage — “I got a photograph of him” — et son image extrapolée — “I see him as one of those innocent, childlike monsters of iniquity who are simply unaware of the existence of right or wrong”; vu par Miss Penny, ce repris de justice, italien de surcroît, a les traits, l’art et la manière du parfait séducteur. Ainsi paré des attributs du héros romanesque — “there’s a sort of Renaissance look about [him]” — le personnage est bien l’agent de la complication requis par le récit ; il sera le convertisseur de qui voulait le convertir :
17 Sister Agatha, with her known talent for saving souls, was given him as his particular attendant. But it was he, I’m afraid, who did the converting. […] Yes, it was young Kuno who did the converting. Sister Agatha was converted back into the worldly Melpomene Fugger she had been before she became the bride of holiness.
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18 Au terme de ces prolégomènes au récit, reste à brosser le portrait de l’infortunée héroïne. Le retournement de situation annoncé assure à Miss Penny sa transition; aussi, dès la dernière bouchée — “Miss Penny finished off the last mouthful of the ginger pudding” — nous met-elle enfin dans la confidence entre deux bouffées de cigare. Nous avons droit à un portrait rétrospectif où tous les traits font signe, où tout détail est le maillon d’une chaîne indicielle. On y voit émerger deux lignes convergentes : de la première on retiendra que le sujet de l’énoncé, orpheline de mère, devait aller du manque à sa compensation — la privation du giron maternel menant tout droit au giron de l’Eglise dans la logique des choses et pour les besoins de la cause. De la seconde il ressort que ce processus fut accéléré par un accident, celui d’être à dix-sept ans l’objet des privautés du vieux professeur de Latin — “an old friend of the family’s, who combined, it seems, great erudition with a horrid fondness for very young ladies”. On devine aisément la suite agencée de manière univoque : de la contrition de la chair à la Charité réparatrice, le trajet obligé s’inscrit dans le droit fil de l’énoncé.
19 C’est ici que prend fin l’histoire en sa dimension épisodique. On en connaît à présent les tenants et les aboutissants — reste à façonner le récit dont la dimension configurationnelle est déja suggérée par la corrélation qui vient d’être établie entre la religion et la sexualité. La narratrice a rempli son contrat narratif en livrant sa matière en données corrigées : en nous cédant cet avoir, ou disons ce savoir, elle nous a du même coup conféré son pouvoir. C’est donc ici que s’interrompt le discours monologique de Miss Penny pour laisser place à la dialogie du récit. Et c’est ici à l’occasion de cette passation des pouvoirs que se situe le temps fort de la nouvelle de Huxley. Le récit devient alors un espace ludique, à la fois créatif et récréatif. Narrateur et narrataire y vont dialoguer à plaisir, illustrant, ce faisant, le pacte implicite et constant conclu dans l’acte énonciatif entre les deux instances8.
20 Ce compérage prend la forme ici d’un partage tant des attributions narratives que des contributions qui s’ensuivent, Miss Penny se faisant maître d’œuvre, à charge pour son co-locuteur d’assurer la mise en œuvre. Si l’on admet qu’un narrateur est censé assumer deux fonctions, une fonction de représentation et une fonction de régie, on comprendra que la narratrice a tout simplement délégué la première :
21 Que nous présente Huxley par le biais de la fiction du narrateur éclaté sinon le dédoublement de la fonction narrative ? Un dédoublement qui n’est pas gratuit mais qui fait l’objet d’un troc entre les parties concernées. Miss Penny, en effet, propose à son acolyte un marché : “My terms are a ten per cent commission on the American sale.” Ce mercantilisme, au plan de la métaphore, signifie que la narration n’est jamais désintéressée : on en attend toujours un avantage en retour car toute activité de communication est un donnant donnant. Le récit devient alors une “monnaie d’échange” au sens même où l’entend Barthes dans S/Z et ce qu’il perçoit de Sarrasine de Balzac s’applique à la lettre à la nouvelle de Huxley :
22 Or, justement, Miss Penny se ravise et renonce à tout avantage en espèces : “Incidentally there won’t be an American sale. Poor Melpchen’s history is not for the chaste public of Those States.” C’est dire — et voilà de quoi valider la théorie de Barthes — que l’avantage en nature qu’elle attend du récit n’est autre que le récit lui-même : “But let me hear what you propose to do with Melpomene now you’ve got her on the castle bastions.” A la question posée “contre quoi échanger le récit”, Huxley répond en proposant le récit de l’échange.
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23 En renonçant à ses “droits d’auteur”, Miss Penny fait la preuve de la double appartenance du récit à un “Je” et à l’Autre et de la qualité d’intervenant reconnue à cet Autre. De même, en plaçant au cœur de sa nouvelle un échange, Huxley objective et met en situation l’ouverture dialogique de toute narration, fût-elle écrite et littéraire. Cette implication du narrataire jusque dans la construction du récit rejoint le principe énoncé par Bakhtine : “Toute œuvre littéraire est tournée en dehors, non vers elle, mais vers l’auditeur lecteur, […] elle anticipe, en une certaine mesure, ses réactions éventuelles”10. Ici, elle anticipe et sollicite et le récit devient à livre ouvert une co- construction. Mieux, quand les deux instances en présence sont comme ici deux comploteurs avertis de tous les secrets de l’art, le récit devient alors un délit d’initiés pour le plus grand bonheur des parties concernées.
24 La délectation dans le délictueux va donc inspirer, pour ne pas dire informer, la mise en récit. Une opération qui, pour être probante, devra s’appuyer sur toutes les recettes assurant l’effet-de-récit. La mise en forme, ou mise en œuvre, s’accomplira donc au grand jour pour donner lieu, suprême ironie, à la mise à plat du récit, dont les dessous sont dévoilés à mesure qu’il prend corps. Quoi de plus audacieux que cette mise à nu, quoi de plus gratifiant pour nous, lecteurs, que d’entrer de plain pied dans la conspiration ?
25 Partant du principe que l’espace illocutoire est par le fait interatif, autrement dit, que le discours est concours, Miss Penny attend une réponse à la question/invitation qu’elle a lancée : “Let me hear what you propose to do…” La demande, dans sa formulation, “what you propose to do”, trahit ouvertement au départ ce que Genette appelle l’arbitraire du récit, “cette liberté vertigineuse qu’a le récit, d’abord, d’adopter à chaque pas telle ou telle orientation […] ; ensuite de s’arrêter sur place et de se dilater par l’adjonction de telle circonstance, information, indice, catalyse…"11 Et c’est précisément cet arbitraire que Miss Penny se réserve le droit d’arbitrer — “Let me hear” — au nom de l’opérativité du récit.
26 Voyons ce que lui soumet son comparse en réponse à son attente. De la littérature, une belle page d’écriture qui permet à Huxley, chemin faisant, de se gausser de la verbosité. Non pas qu’on doive exclure tout effet littéraire — que l’on retiendra notamment pour créer l’atmosphère et pour donner le ton à l’entrée du récit — mais il ne faut pas sacrifier à la facilité. Le dosage est le secret de la réussite, comme il l’est de toute bonne recette, et par son approbation mitigée — “Very nice. But…” — Miss Penny nous rappelle que le récit est soumis à des règles, à commencer par la règle de quantité. Plus expressément encore, elle nous rappelle cette règle essentielle qu’est “la visée de pertinence”12 qui, seule, assure au récit sa cohérence et son suivi, autrement dit, sa lisibilité : “But how are you going to bring the sex problem and all its horrors into your landscape?” Question qu’il faut interpréter comme un signal, un appel à la production du texte en fonction de sa ligne axiale et au moyen des ingrédients qui s’y rapportent et qui, de ce fait, la supportent. Bref, il s’agit d’œuvrer à l’isotopie du discours en l’alimentant d’éléments convergents univoques et codés.
27 Parmi les ingrédients qu’il conviendra d’incorporer, le tout premier, le levain du récit est la sexualité choisie pour être l’impulsion du texte et son inexorable compulsion. Autant dire que chaque séquence, ou proposition majeure, aura du sexe pour liant structurel et pour déterminant. Il faut cependant veiller à la manière de travailler sa matière et, là encore, on peut inférer de l’approbation réservée de Miss Penny — “And very nice, too. But…” — qu’il faut savamment mitonner son affaire et que la solution
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avancée par son partenaire, un chahut d’étudiants par une chaude nuit, est peut-être un peu crue. Toujours est-il que ce premier tableau amorce un processus et remplit du même coup son office :
28 Suite à ce début d’érotisation du discours, il importe à présent d’introduire un second élément, corollaire du premier dans le schéma global, et c’est bien entendu le ferment religieux qui ancre le récit dans son ambivalence. Ainsi la sexualité, posée comme étant l’inducteur du récit, en sera le fil conducteur en concordance avec la religion :
29 Déjà le récit s’épaissit et il apparaît opportun de l’assaisonner d’un brin de psychanalyse. Complexe de culpabilité, auto-punition, refoulement, sublimation — tous les mécanismes sont là pour satisfaire au goût du jour et pour acheminer le récit jusqu’à la conversion de l’héroïne et son entrée dans les ordres.
30 Plus tard, à mi-parcours, on introduira dans le discours une pincée d’ironie dramatique pour accompagner le retournement de la situation
31 — de quoi plaire au lecteur lettré, heureux d’être d’intelligence avec les dieux, de quoi, aussi, garantir au récit son succès commercial : “You can write pages about Destiny and its ironic quacking. It’s tremendously impressive, and there’s money in every line.” Nous rirons donc avec les Parques dont le ricanement ponctue le trajet insidieux conduisant à l’irréparable inversion de la conversation initiale : “And now you see the Geschlechtsleben working yeastily and obscurely, and once again the quacking of the Norns is audible.” Et nous nous réjouirons en toute impunité de la réversion opérée par la chair et des pieux alibis qui l’autorisent et qui la justifient.
32 Enfin, pour éviter que l’intérêt ne se relâche après l’irréparable outrage, autrement dit, pour éviter que le récit ne périclite après son apogée et qu’il ne se dédramatise entre la crise et la résolution, on prendra soin de rehausser le dernier tableau d’horreur et de macabre. La rétribution, de ce fait, revêtira l’aspect d’un rite inquisitorial sous la forme d’une cérémonie funèbre en présence et à l’intention de la réprouvée qui, soit dit en passant, n’a plus lieu d’exister une fois sortie du cadre du récit. Dans ce décor de chapelle ardente où rien ne manque à la mise en scène, l’épicurien de l’horreur redécouvrira pour son plaisir tout le sinistre appareil du roman gothique :
33 Voilà qui, sans nul doute, réjouira le lecteur anglais de tradition anti-papiste et le confortera dans son sectarisme atavique.
34 Tous les ingrédients, les épices et les excitants à présent connus, voyons comment la narratrice a régi l’opération narrative en fonction de la seule opérativité du récit. Par souci d’efficacité, sans doute aussi eu égard à la division quinaire de la tragédie classique, elle a choisi de privilégier cinq moments qui constituent les macropropositions narratives. Cinq moments qui sont de deux sortes et qui correspondent aux “deux types d’épisodes” dont parle Todorov : “Ceux qui décrivent un état (d’équilibre ou de déséquilibre) et ceux qui décrivent le passage d’un état à l’autre”13. Elle a choisi pour situation initiale à l’entrée du récit un univers troublé par la lubricité du vieux professeur de Latin. La première scène imaginée sur les ramparts du château décrit l’état de choc et de déséquilibre consécutif à ce pénible incident survenu dans l’avant-récit et sert de tremplin narratif en engageant le processus qui mène à la première d’entre les conversions :
35 On remarquera l’habileté de la narratrice à faire coïncider ses macropropositions narratives et la série des conversions. Son récit, délibérément sélectif, progresse, en
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effet, d’une conversion à une autre. Aussi la voit-on recourir au blanc textuel que constituent les pointillés pour embrayer sur la suivante :
36 Conversation qui noue l’intrigue et qui prélude à la pseudo-conversion de l’agent subversif :
37 Sitôt la complication introduite et l’action enclenchée, le récit irrévocablement programmé s’accélère jusqu’à ce point de non retour qu’est le retournement de situation. Aussi le prochain segment narratif voit-il la conversion de Sœur Agathe à l’amour et son inéluctable dévoiement. On passe elliptiquement sur la stratégie déployée par le dévoyeur et sur les péripéties qui conduisent à la transgression : “whatever the means employed, the engineering process was perfectly successful. Love was made to find a way. On the afternoon before Kuno was to go back to prison, two Sisters of Charity walked out of the hospital gates…” Or, si le processus incriminatoire est un raccourci narratif, c’est qu’il faut aller au plus vite à la consommation du crime. L’abandon de Sœur Agathe à l’amour est l’enjeu auquel a tout à la fois souscrit et sursis le récit, et c’est pour nous, ses lecteurs et co-producteurs, l’acte jubilatoire escompté, sinon prémédité.
38 L’exploitation de la scène d’amour porte l’arbitraire à son comble. C’est ici que fantasme et fiction se rejoignent et qu’il est donné libre cours à cette “liberté vertigineuse” observée par Genette, ce droit que s’octroie le récit de subordonner les faits à l’effet. Le mot devient alors un excitant de l’imagination et l’exhortation répétée, “Imagine… Imagine…”, met le lecteur en situation d’ingérence autorisée et lui permet, qui plus est, d’user à discrétion de son indiscrétion, autrement dit, d’être voyeur et jouisseur :
39 Une fois son objectif atteint — celui de combler notre attente et d’y trouver largement son compte — nul doute que Miss Penny n’ait hâte d’en finir avec son récit. N’avait-elle pas déjà dit “Let’s get to the end of this dingy anecdote as quickly as possible” pour accéder au plus tôt au seuil maximal du récit, summum de son plaisir ? A présent que c’est chose faite, il lui tarde d’en venir à bout. Reste pourtant ce dernier segment de la narration qu’est le dénouement, l’heure où la dysphorie succède à l’euphorie et où la sanction conclut l’action. Etape incontournable que ce temps de la déploration qui délivre la sentence et fait ainsi partie du circuit obligé avant => pendant => après.
40 Pour éviter que le récit n’en vienne à basculer dans le genre larmoyant et que l’immunité de la distanciation ne s’en trouve affectée, la narratrice a recours à la commodité du comic relief qu’elle emprunte à Shakespeare et qui n’est pas sans rapport avec ce que Genette appelle un “intermède de détente”. Suit donc une scène bouffonne en prélude au finale, au cours de laquelle deux rustres ahuris, faisant figure de pitres, découvrent l’héroïne édentée, incongrûment spoliée de son dentier. Nous voici prémunis contre la compassion : l’éploration tourne à la farce et l’avancée du récit s’effectue dans le plus total inapitoiement.
41 Quant au dernier tableau qui clot la séquence argumentative inhérente à la tradition punitive, s’il emprunte au Gréco son dessin émacié et sa palette austère, c’est qu’il mise sur l’effet de choc exercé par l’image. A noter, cependant, qu’il ne nous est brossé qu’à grands traits, étant entendu que l’imagination supplée la narration. Aussi sont-ce avant tout des consignes que nous laisse en partant Miss Penny : “Don’t forget”, nous enjoint- elle en alignant ses directives, à charge pour nous de lécher le tableau, et surtout libre à nous de nous en pourlécher. L’équilibre ainsi réalisé entre les prescriptions textuelles et les concessions faites à quiconque y souscrit exemplifie le compromis sur lequel un
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récit repose entre un droit de tutelle (le sien) et un droit de regard (le nôtre). Droit que l’interprétant continuera d’exercer à loisir indépendamment du signal suspensif de celle qui fut notre meneur de jeu : “Good-bye!”
42 Nouvelle étonnante que celle-ci dont le sujet n’est pas tant l’histoire de la nonnette que le récit du récit. Quoi de plus singulier, dira-t-on, que de faire de la manière sa matière ? Originale, audacieuse, “Nuns at Luncheon” surprend par sa modernité : ce parti qu’elle a pris de poser le récit en tant que produit de consommation qui se négocie sans cesse entre producteur et consommateur. L’auteur n’a-t-il pas mis les artisans de ce négoce à table et fait de leur table de restauration une table de jeu ? Jeu que l’on joue cartes sur table pour mieux satisfaire à la loi de l’offre et de la demande. Jeu qui se pratique aussi pour le plaisir de la gageure : cette mise à plat du récit pour en faire apparaître les tractations et les trucages, en un mot, le trafic, n’est rien d’autre, en définitive, qu’une mise en question de la littérature.
43 Bravade ou bravoure, cette remise en cause de la littérature occupe une partie du texte qui s’interrompt, s’interroge et feint de se livrer à son autocritique. Littératurer, comme il ressort de cette leçon, c’est fabriquer du factice à coups d’artifices et de remplissage. “You know how to tick these things off”, ou encore, “You can write that up easily and convincingly enough”, s’entend dire celui dont le rôle est de rallonger la sauce à des fins commerciales. “Money”, Miss Penny ne mâche pas ses mots et porte bien son nom, “money in every line”. Pour un peu Huxley nous ferait croire que cette mise à nu des fins et des moyens de la littérature est un autodafé :
44 En réalité, cette autocensure est un clin d’œil à notre endroit et ne fait qu’ajouter au plaisir que nous avons d’être de la partie. Huxley a beau jeu de mettre en joue la littérature à si bon compte — avec et pour notre agrément.
NOTES
1. Aldous Huxley, “Nuns at Luncheon,” Mortal Coils: Five Stories (Londres : Chatto & Windus, 1922), pp. 199-229. Pour la traduction française, “Nonnettes au déjeuner”, voir Aldous Huxley, Le Banquet Tillotson, introd. et trad. Clémentine Robert (Paris : Le Livre de Poche, 1989), pp. 88-139. 2. “La forma de la espada”, écrite en 1942, parut dans Ficciones (Buenos Aires : Editorial Sur, 1944) ; Fictions, trad. P. Verdevoye et N. Ibarra (Paris : Gallimard, coll. La Croix du Sud 1, 1951). 3. Lettre à Juliette Baillot, 10 octobre 1918. Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (Londres : Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 165. 4. On doit à Francis Jacques d’avoir mis en lumière le rôle de la question initiale dans Dialogiques (Paris: P.U.F., 1979), pp. 159-66. 5. Terminologie empruntée à J.-M. Adam, Le texte narratif (Paris : Nathan, 1985), p. 182. 6. J.-M. Adam, p. 6. 7. Ibid., p. 143. 8. Dans la terminologie de Grice, “the Co-operative Principle”, “le principe conversationnel de coopération”. Voir H.P. Grice, “Logique et Conversation,” Communications, n° 30 (1979), pp. 55-72. 9. Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970 ; Paris : Seuil, coll. Points 70, 1976), pp. 95-96. 10. Mikhail Bakhtine, Esthétique et théorie du roman (Paris : Gallimard, 1978), p. 397.
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11. Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et Motivation,” Figures II (1969 ; Paris : Seuil, coll. Points 106, 1979), pp. 92-93. 12. Terminologie empruntée à François Flahault, “Le Fonctionnement de la parole,” Communications, n° 30 (1979), p. 75. 13. Tzvetan Todorov, “La Grammaire du récit,” Poétique de la prose (Paris : Seuil, 1971), p. 121. 14. Souligné par nous.
RÉSUMÉS
Published in 1922, at the start of Huxley's career, "Nuns at Luncheon" is unique of its kind in its bold conception and faultless execution. Its supreme achievement lies in the fact that it is not so much a ready-made story as a story in the making, whose point is not the what but the how, the modus operandi and its finality. Significantly, the author of this challenging piece is less concerned with the narrative as finished product than with the narration as process and play activity. In this sense, "Nuns at Luncheon" exemplifies Huxley's modern approach to fiction. In the hands of two professionals -a writer and a journalist- who exchange roles and are alternately narrator, and narratee, the story develops as a facetious master class in narratology. The to and fro of the dialogue between the two protagonists objectifies in the best comic vein the "Co- operative Principle" inherent in the narrative process. While displaying his most sophisticated technique, Huxley lays bare all the tricks of the trade and ultimately questions the very value of literary art. As an example of dexterous playing with his craft, an ingenious intellectual game, "Nuns at Luncheon" could hardly be better.
AUTEURS
CLÉMENTINE ROBERT est Maître de Conférences à l'Université de Paris III. Spécialiste de Huxley, elle est l'auteur de Aldous Huxley: Exhumations. Correspondance inédite avec Sydney Schiff (1925-1937), Paris : Didier, 1976, et la traductrice du bilingue Aldous Huxley, Le banquet Tillotson, Paris : Le livre de Poche, 1989. Elle a également collaboré à Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage, Londres/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
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Mystery, magic, and malice: O’Connor and the Misfit
Gary Sloan
1 Throughout her brief but celebrated career, Flannery O'Connor groused that she must write for people "who think God is dead"1 and who are therefore impervious to the Christian mysteries. Her own theology was impeccably Athanasian : …. all my own experience has been that of the writer who believes, … in Pascal's words, in the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and not of the philosophers and scholars." This is an unlimited God and one who has revealed himself specifically. It is one who became man and rose from the dead.2
2 Her devil, too, was no wispy abstraction, diffusing into metaphor, but, like the one in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, palpably "precise" and indefatigably afoot. The devil, she insisted, is a "real spirit" with a "specific personality for every occasion," not "simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy" (M&M 117, 168).
3 While in her fiction O'Connor eschewed overt homily, her intent was ultimately proselytical. O'Connor, as Jill Baumgaertner notes, thought "God used her and her talents as an instrument" of divine revelation, that she was a "channel for God's grace and the Holy Spirit's breath" (10). As a conduit of divinity, she felt morally compelled to disseminate the sacramental vision to a benighted world ignorant of the ways of God to man. "The novelist," she said, "doesn't write to express himself, he doesn't write simply to render a vision he believes true, rather he renders his vision so that it can be transferred, as nearly whole as possible, to his reader" (M&M 162).
4 Transplanting her vision of God, let alone of Satan, was a procedure benetted round with difficulty because "religious feeling," she thought, "has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental" (M&M 161). Liberal theology had dissipated into secularism, for it operated on the precept "that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention" (HB 479). Since the church colluded with science to mythicize Jehovah, to transmogrify him and his adversary, Satan, from self-existent
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beings into vaporous figments of imagination, her Christ-haunted heroes were dismissed as nugatory buffoons : When you write about backwoods prophets, it is very difficult to get across to the modern reader that you take these people seriously, that you are not making fun of them, but that their concerns are your own and, in your judgment, central to human life. It is almost inconceivable to this reader that such could be the case. (M&M 204)
5 Had O'Connor lived longer (she died in 1964), she might have been compelled to reappraise the sensibilities of her audience. For readers, at least those who publish, have proved ingratiatingly receptive to her "prophet-freaks." In the grisly den of secularism, the university, critics have on the whole taken them as seriously as did O'Connor. Occasionally, the solemnity intumesces into the grandiose.
6 The response to The Misfit, the mass murderer and prophet manqué in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," is instructive. He is, in the eye of one beholder or another, reminiscent of Oedipus (Scouten 63), Job (Johansen 38), Ulysses--Dante's--(Donahoo 32), Hamlet, Raskolnikov (Marks 26), Calvin, (Carlson 255), Pascal (Cobb; Hoffman 41), Baudelaire and Eliot (Currie 144-46). Abetting O'Connor's visionary conception of her art, critics have elucidated The Misfit's tutorial function. He sees "what is important in life and what is not" (Kaplan 120) and insists "on the plain truth against a more pleasing rearrangment of reality" (Renner 128). He has "credibility and authority" (Orvell 132), a keen "religious view of reality" (Desmond 92), a "scholarly awareness of alternatives" (Montgomery 12), and the wisdom to see that a concept of sin is essential to human significance (Currie 145). He is a "universal man" (Nisly 28) "who asks hard questions of life" (Johansen 38), poses "morally serious questions about human experience," and is "connotative of the eternal misfit, Christ" (Bonney 347). He is "admirably designed as an agent of divine wrath" (Marks 24). With his ministerial thunderbolt, he galvanizes the spiritually negligent: "In real life, the reader, who now wears the grandmother's shoes, cannot plead innocence. If he had not been shocked into knowledge before he read the story, then the story should be his education" (Currie 154). The Misfit is also an edifying exemplar of divine chastening: "The agony of The Misfit's entanglement in the maze of life should bring the reader to an understanding based on faith in the love of God for man, faith in the manhood of Christ and the resurrection of His body" (Carlson 256).
7 Oddly muted in the prolific commentary is the hostile or indifferent response O'Connor expected. The chorus of praise suggests grace may be more abundant than she thought.
8 Had O'Connor conceived The Misfit as nothing more than a wry bumpkin in the Faulknerian mode, some bad seed in a Bundren-like clan, one could, with spirit unperturbed, savor his countrified black humor ("Lady, there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip"), terse lethality ("She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life"), and aw-shucks candor ("Nome, I ain't a good man, but I ain't the worst in the world neither.") In reality, O'Connor imagined her felonious rube gifted with the high perception, contemptuous finally of the low enjoying power. She considered him superior to the educated "Liberal"3 because The Misfit has no interest in humanistic or even humane schemes of salvation. Not only is he indifferent to sociopolitical forms of remediation but, more importantly for O'Connor, he broods on Jesus Christ. In O'Connor's fictive domain, compulsive angst concerning Jesus, even when, or especially when, it begets indignation and violence, signals heroic integrity4. She, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, likes a
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man man enough to be damned. She had no use for what Stephen Crane called "obvious" Christians, all patter and simpering complaisance. She preferred point-blank ferocity--fierceness being equated, in her mind, with spiritual profundity. In "The Art of Fiction," Henry James says "We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it." What does O'Connor make of The Misfit? Does he, in James' word, "fructify"?
9 In a sense, yes. At the dramatic center of the story is the grandmother, an obvious Christian who, before her encounter with The Misfit, has proceeded on the assumption that the examined life is not worth living. Through his stark delineation of the moral rigors that devolve on disciples of Christ ("it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him") and his untender mercies to her family, The Misfit teases the grandmother into thought. After momentary skepticism--"Maybe He didn't raise the dead"-- she is primed for her moment of grace5, connects with The Misfit, and dies redeemed.6 Viewed as a catalyst for the grandmother's epiphany, The Misfit is a fruitful device.
10 He is considerably less fructifying when approached as a reflective agnostic or a rebuke to infidels. Many commentators have deemed The Misfit a logician of no mean wit. He is invoked as a modern Pascal who wagers wrong (Cobb), a rigorously empirical doubting Thomas (Scouten 63), a mental "thoroughbred with a curious and active nose" (Currie 149), an instinctive scholar plumbing "the nature of reality" (Jones 837), a thinker "recalling age-old debates about theodicy" (Johansen 38), a rationalist who "has to know `why'" (Feeley 75), one whose course of violence is pursued with steadfast "lucidity" (Gossett 81), his existential philosophy sharply etched (Feeley 73). O'Connor herself seems to have fancied him a thinking-man's skeptic. The grandmother's "wits are no match," she said, "for the Misfit's" (M&M 111).
11 The Misfit, argues Robert Brinkmeyer, constituted a therapeutic self-examination for O'Connor : … The Misfit tests O'Connor's religious faith by forcing her to work through the challenges that his rebellion poses. O'Connor faces her religious doubts and questionings in her interplay with The Misfit. … The Misfit's religious doubts, which are extensions of O'Connor's own, are those that she must not only acknowledge, but also respond to, and in the interchange learn and grow. (162)
12 If Brinkmeyer is right, O'Connor's inner agnostic seems to have been an intellectual cream puff. A sophisticated skeptic can marshall evidence against Christian theism undreamt of in The Misfit's callow philosophy. His philosophy is in fact rather muddled. At times, he seems to lose track of his discourse and to wander into a quagmire of contradiction. The reader's own tracking is hampered by O'Connor's penchant for allegorical methods. Some of The Misfit's comments work better on the anagogic level than the literal--for example, his inability to remember why he was imprisoned7, his seeing neither cloud nor sun in daytime (127), and his homogenizing all crimes (130-31). Still, beneath the anagogic elements, as through a glass darkly, one can descry a real toad in the allegorical garden. While The Misfit has been associated with postlapsarian Man, doing time in penal-colony Earth (Marks; Montgomery; Eggenschwiler), the link will not bear much strain. The Misfit, as his father told him, is a different breed of dog from [his] brothers and sisters" (128).
13 The putative breed is Faustian seeker: "… it's some," his father said, "that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy
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is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything" (128-29). The paternal prognostication, as it turned out, was hyperbolic. Although in his wanderlust The Misfit sees much and does much, he does not learn as much as he thinks. He remains a lapsed Fundamentalist locked into incarnational models of deity. Had he been into Biblical scholarship, he might have mulled observations like the following, broached centuries ago: "The doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalized until the fourth century," and "Jesus himself certainly never claimed to be God" (Armstrong 81). Had The Misfit known that "detailed theories about the crucifixion as an atonement for some `original sin' of Adam did not emerge until the fourth century" (Armstrong 87), he might have concluded that his imprisonment for a crime he could not remember was a mistake after all. He might have pondered an "allegedly loving Father" who "pretended to love his mortal children while preparing for them a hell sadistic beyond belief; who ordained all things in advance, yet held humans entirely responsible for the errors he knew they would make, who talked of love and ruled by fear" (Walker 8). Had he whiffed the writings of Symeon, a medieval abbot, he might have ruminated on the observation that "God [is] not an external, objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal enlightenment" (Armstrong 224). Gnostic authors like Monoimus would have told him the same: "Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. … [Y]ou will find him in yourself" (Pagels xix-xx). While from such sources, he might not have learned why it is, he would have learned what it is. He might have begun to suspect he had been theologically shortchanged by a reactionary author who thought the times were out of joint because people were sloughing off ancient superstitions.
14 As it is, The Misfit remains shrouded in them. His conception of God is circumscribed by a primitive mindset: He thinks deity is authenticated by magic feats. Like Hazel Motes, his cousin in eschatological literalism, he thinks the theological crux is whether "what's dead stays that way." What impresses him about Christ is that he could raise the dead. Had The Misfit, granted his wish (132), been contemporaneous with Jesus, the Prince of Peace might have reviled him with other vipers who would not believe without a sign (Matthew 12:38-39). Nothwitstanding his "scholarly look," The Misfit's professed affinity with Christ ("It was the same with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime" [131]) has not, it seems, impelled him to scrutinize the gospels or to seek out commentary. True to his boast, he needs no help: In his cultural milieu, the wisdom of the wise is foolishness. A thaumaturgic bent, fine as a characterizing device, becomes suspect when it subserves an authorial vision of universal Truth.
15 Reports of The Misfit's skepticism have been greatly exaggerated. Belief is the dominant gene, doubt recessive, almost nil. He acknowledges the miraculous efficacy of prayer while disavowing any need for it : “If you would pray," the old lady said, "Jesus would help you." “That's right," The Misfit said. "Well then, why don't you pray?… "I don't want no hep," he said. "I'm doing all right by myself." (130)
16 In response to the grandmother's mindless imploration "Jesus, Jesus," he tacitly affirms his belief in the historicity of an immaculate Christ. "Yes'm," he mused, "Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same with him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime…" (131).
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17 His reputedly agnostic sentiments are problematic since they are appended to an unequivocal declaration of belief : "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead." The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw everything away and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can--by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him." (132)
18 Since The Misfit is a devout practitioner of meanness, the alleged inexorable consequent of a mendacious Jesus, one might suppose--many have--that he has wagered against the existence of a wonder-working Jesus. If so, he is hedging his bet. Since his apologia begins with a querulous assertion of belief (Jesus did what he should not have done), his either-or proposition8 sounds like a rhetorical contrivance to justify his obdurate criminality. Like Hazel Motes, The Misfit wants to believe "Jesus is a liar," but cannot. He is fettered to a literalistic paradigm.
19 The ambiguity extends to his peroration. His words can mean either he wishes he had proof Jesus raised the dead, the usual interpretation, or the obverse: he wishes he had evidence Jesus did not : "Maybe He didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled… “I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there" he said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." (132)
20 In the infernal reading, The Misfit wishes to persist in a life of crime without fear of divine retribution. O'Connor characterized The Misfit's shooting of the grandmother, when she touches him and calls him one of her "babies," as "a recoil, a horror at her humanness" (HB 389). He may be recoiling even more from his own humanness. The murder is perhaps a vicarious attempt at self-slaughter: He seeks to destroy his compulsion to believe because, in his moral computations, belief cannot be squared with pleasure.
21 Given The Misfit's confusing (and confused) protestations, the question irresistibly arises: Was O'Connor, notwithstanding her disavowals (Hawkes 400), on the side of the devil without knowing it? Instead of strengthening her faith by surmounting challenges to it, in the way that Brinkmeyer outlines above, was she, rather, through an unholy alliance with The Misfit, venting a pleasurable meanness of her own? Throughout her fiction, notes John Hawkes, one of her frequent correspondents, "there are numerous examples to indicate that the author's view of `everybody else' is exactly the same as her devil's view" (403). In a provocative psycho-sketch, Josephine Hendin portrays O'Connor as a prisoner of Southern womanhood, a resentful Miss Manners, outwardly accommodating and benign, inwardly smoldering, who loosed her retaliatory rage on fictional surrogates for her mother, the proximate deputy of etiquette, custom, and constraint. Hendin concludes : If [O'Connor] set out to make morals, to praise the old values, she ended by engulfing all of them in an icy violence. If she began by mocking or damning her murderous heroes, she ended by exalting them. Flannery O'Connor became more and more the pure poet of the Misfit, the damaged daughter, the psychic cripple--of all of those who are martyred by silent fury and redeemed through violence." (155)
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22 While the analysis is speculative, it is as illuminating as the standard model, constructed by O'Connor herself. According to it, her prophet-freak Misfits are scourges of God, unwitting ministers of grace whose violent visitations shock the hypocritically complacent into recognition of their black and grainéd souls and thus mediate their redemption. Her emissaries of violence, in O'Connor's words, lay "a good deal of groundwork that seems to be necessary before grace is effective" (M&M 117). In the devil's version, the grace is subordinated to the violent groundwork. Grace emerges as more convenient than prevenient, a ruse to validate the obliteration of Yahoos.9 O'Connor's letters provide copious hints that she was not predisposed to be edified by charity. Offended, she could sting like a wicked wasp of Milledgeville. The letters are sprinkled with animadversions on "lousy" reviewers, "moronic" critics, "stupid" magazines, literary "dopes," "bearded intellectual delinquents," "tiresome" and "pompous" students, "lunatic" fans--a litany of crankiness.10 Her cameos of her "maw" depict an obtuse boor : "Who is this Kafka?" she says. "People ask me." A German Jew, I says… He wrote a book about a man that turns into a roach. "Well, I can't tell peoplethat," she says. "Who is this Evalin Wow [Evelyn Waugh]." (HB 33) My mamma asked me the other day if I knew Shakespeare was an Irishman. I said no I didn't. She said well it's right there in the Savannah paper. (HB 58) I reckon my mother is now convinced that a child can be born in Europe. I think she thought forin [sic] children could but not regular children. (HB 80) SHE: "Mobby Dick…" ME: "Mow-by Dick." SHE: "Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called Idiot. What's it about?" ME: "An idiot." (HB 56)
23 Though couched in a tone of jocular indulgence, such vignettes hint at bottled acrimony. They are at best patronizing.
24 Psychoanalysis aside, O'Connor's rearguard vindication of Fundamentalism lacks cogency. The Misfit's sniveling befuddlement and skewed ethics need not attend the abandonment of Mystery. When The Misfit pontificates that "the crime don't matter," that tire theft is neither better nor worse than murder (130-31), he is anagogically enunciating O'Connor's belief that a sin is a sin is a sin. Historically, the view has been used to justify the most heinous cruelties.
25 O'Connor was by temper an obscurantist, disdainful of empirical modes of verification and rules of evidence. She preferred the evidence of things unseen to the seen, the inexplicable to the explicable. She thought Christ's words on the cross superior to those of Oedipus at Colonus because, while the sentiments are similar, "Oedipus' words represent the known while Christ's represent the unknown and can only be a mystery" (HB 212). As her letters show, no argument, however logical--no evocation of fact, no psychoanalyzing of motive, could shake her. She was impregnably ensconced in what she called Mystery and the unbeliever calls dogmatism. She seems never fully to have grasped that opposition to Mystery can be principled and courageous rather than vain, froward, and evasive. "That which Agnostics deny and repudiate as immoral," said Thomas Huxley--anticipating Camus, Sartre, Russell, and other twentieth-century humanists--is "that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence, and that reprobation ought to attach" to disbelief. Words of that sort O'Connor put into the mouths of her educated fools, like Rayber, the
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neurotic schoolteacher in The Violent Bear It Away, or Joy-Hulga, the snide, insecure Ph.D. in "Good Country People."
26 The truth," O'Connor once remarked, "does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally" (HB 100). To that pungent aphorism, one must assent.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Armstrong, Karen. A History of God. New York: Ballantine, 1993.
Bandy, Stephen C. "`One of My Babies': The Misfit and the Grandmother." Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 107-117.
Baumgaertner, Jill P. Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring. Wheaton, Ill: Harold Shaw, 1988.
Bellamy, Michael O. "Everything Off Balance: Protestant Election in Flannery O'Connor's `A Good Man Is Hard to Find.'" Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 8 (1979): 116-124.
Bonney, William. "The Moral Structure of Flannery O'Connor's `A Good Man Is Hard to Find.'" Studies in Short Fiction 27 (1990): 347-356.
Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. The Art & Vision of Flannery O'Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.
Carlson, Carlson, Thomas M.. "Flannery O'Connor: The Manichaean Dilemma." Sewanee Review 77(1969): 254-276.
Cobb, Joann P. "Pascal's Wager and Two Modern Losers." Philosopy and Literature 3 (1979): 187-198.
Coulthard, A. R. "Flannery O'Connor's Deadly Conversions." Flannery O,Connor Bulletin 13 (1984): 87-97.
Currie, Sheldon. "A Good Grandmother Is Hard to Find: Story as Exemplum." The Antigonish Review 81-82 (1990): 147-156.
Desmond, John F. "Sign of the Times: Lancelot and the Misfit." Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 18 (1989): 91-98.
Donahoo, Robert. "O'Connor's Ancient Comedy: Form in `A Good Man Is Hard to Find.'" Journal of the Short Story in English 16 (1991): 29-40.
Eggenschwiler, David. The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor. Detroit, Wayne State UP, 1972.
Feeley, Kathleen. Flannery O'Connor: Voice of the Peacock. New York: Fordham UP, 1982.
Gentry, Marshall Bruce. Flannery O'Connor's Religion of the Grotesque. Jackson, Miss.:UP, 1986.
Gossett, Louis Y., ed. Violence in Recent Southern Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1966.
Hawkes, John. "Flannery O'Connor's Devil." Sewanee Review 70 (1962): 395- 407.
Hendin, Josephine. Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.
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Hoffman, Frederick J. "The Search for Redemption: Flannery O'Connor's Fiction." The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor. Ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson. New York: Fordham UP, 1977. 32-48.
Kaplan, Carola. "Graham Greene's Pinkie Brown and Flannery O'Connor's Misfit: The Psychopathic Killer and the Mystery of God's Grace." Renascence 32 (1980): 116-128.
Johansen, Ruthann Knechel. The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 1994.
Jones, Madison. "A Good Man's Predicament." Southern Review 20 (1984): 836-841.
Marks, W. S. "Advertisements for Grace: Flannery O'Connor's `A Good Man Is Hard to Find.'" Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1966): 19-27.
Montgomery, Marion. "Miss Flannery's `Good Man.'" The Denver Quarterly 3.3 (1968): 1-19.
Nisly, Paul W. "The Mystery of Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Gothic Power." Flannery O'ConnorBulletin 11 (1982): 25-35.
Ochshorn, Kathleen G. "A Cloak of Grace: Contradictions in `A Good Man Is Hard to Find.'" Studies in American Fiction 18 (1990): 113-117.
O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971.
- The Habit of Being. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979.
- Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.
Orvell, Miles. Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1972.
Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.
Renner, Stanley. "Secular Meaning in `A Good Man Is Hard to Find.'" College Literature 9(1982): 123-132.
Scouten, Kenneth. "The Mythological Dimensions of Five of Flannery O'Connor's Works." Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 2 (1973): 59- 72.
Vipond, Diane. "Flannery O'Connor's World Without Pity." Notes on Contemporary Literature 20.2 (1990): 8-9.
Walker, Barbara G. The Crone: Women of Age, Wisdom, and Power. San Francisco: Harper, 1985.
NOTES
1. Habit of Being, p. 92. Hereafter referred to as HB. 2. Mystery and Manners, p. 161. Hereafter referred to as M&M. 3. In O'Connor's lexicon, a Liberal is anyone who thinks "that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own efforts" and who thinks evil "is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all mysteries will eventually be cleared up" (HB 302-03). 4. cf. O'Connor's comment on Hazel Motes: "That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to" (Preface to Wise Blood).
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5. For O'Connor, as Baumgaertner observes, disbelief was "the necessary starting point of faith" (12). O'Connor reminded one of her correspondents that the founder of the Church, Peter, had "denied Christ three times" (HB 307). In another letter, O'Connor says "all good stories are about conversion" (HB 275). 6. Several commentators think the grandmother's conversion is implausible because it happens without adequate preparation. Ochshorn believes the grandmother dies "without comprehension" (116). Vipond goes further: "There has been no sudden insight, no wisdom learned; she remains a manipulator to the very end, more concerned with her own survival than the fate of her children and grandchildren" (9). (See also Bandy; Bonney; Carlson). Modernist O'Connor critics have readily accommodated Pauline grace to profane standards of credibility. The grandmother's sudden tenderness toward The Misfit is described as "quite within the purview of rationalistic psychology" (Jones 841). The grandmother's epiphany "can be read with no sacrifice of resonance as the dramatization of one of the basic themes of modern literature"-- namely, that people want "to connect" (Renner 131). To O'Connor, grace was not foreshadowed by a causal sequence of events because, by its nature, it was an unearned, unmerited, and inexplicable mystery. 7. The Complete Stories, p. 130. Subsequent references to the collection are indicated by page number alone. 8. The "stark polarities" in O'Connor's fiction Michael Bellamy attributes to a Protestant strain, which, he contends, is counterpoised by the via media of her Catholicism (124). 9. Marshall Bruce Gentry, with the assistance of Mikhail Bakhtin, tries to save O'Connor from herself by pitting her characters against her authoritarian narrators, who represent a debased religiosity. In the internecine combat, the characters emerge victorious, psyches liberated, secular redemption secured. 10. O'Connor was intermittently repentant of her imperfections. She told her correspondent confessor "A" that "Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin. I find it in myself and don't dislike it any less" (HB 131). O'Connor confessed also to "garden variety" sins: "pride, gluttony, envy, sloth" (HB 92).
RÉSUMÉS
Flannery O'Connor regretta tout au long de sa carrière de devoir écrire pour un public laïcisé et indifférent au Mystère chrétien. Eut-elle vécu plus longtemps, elle aurait alors dû réévaluer la sensibilité de son lectorat, car celui-ci, ou du moins sa composante universitaire, a fait preuve d'une réceptivité croissante à l'égard de ses "Monstres Prophètes". Leur réaction à l'Inadapté, le meurtrier et prophète dilettante de "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" ("De la difficulté de trouver un homme bon") est à-propos. On le considère souvent comme un logicien de bonne volonté, un libre penseur. En fait, son raisonnement est inconsistant, brouillon et relève du sophisme. Un scepticisme réfléchi peut rassembler des preuves contre le théisme que la philosophie de l'Inadapté ne conçoit même pas. Si l'on considère la façon ambiguë dont O'Connor traite l'Inadapté, il semble qu'elle se fasse l'avocat du Diable sans en avoir conscience. En effet, ses lettres nous fournissent de nombreux indices laissant à penser qu'elle n'était pas prédisposée à être édifiée par la charité. Toute considération psychanalytique mise à part, sa défense d'arrière- garde du fondamentaliste religieux manque de force : la confusion larmoyante de même que l'éthique inversée de l'Inadapté ne servent en rien l'abandon du Mystère. O'Connor ne semble
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pas avoir appréhendé dans sa totalité le fait que la réticence à la Révélation puisse être courageuse et émaner de principes plutôt que défensive et synonyme de fuite. (Traduit de l'anglais par Jérôme ARNOUX)
AUTEURS
GARY SLOAN Professeur au département d'Anglais à l'Université de Louisiana Tech à Ruston (Louisiane). Il a publié des articles sur le style et l'écriture dans les revues telles que College English, College Composition and Communication, et English journal. Il est également l'auteur de publications sur la littérature américaine parues dans Studies in the Novel, Studies in short fiction, the Explicator, Notes on Contemporary literature.
Journal of the Short Story in English, 30 | Spring 1998