By Janet Frame

Home , A Suitable Boy, Caryl Phillips, Earl Lovelace, Jane Urquhart, Kerri Sakamoto

Commonwealth Essays and Studies

35.1 | 2012 Transparencies

Kerry-Jane Wallart (dir.)

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/5383 DOI: 10.4000/ces.5383 ISSN: 2534-6695

Publisher SEPC (Société d’études des pays du Commonwealth)

Printed version Date of publication: 1 September 2012 ISSN: 2270-0633

Electronic reference Kerry-Jane Wallart (dir.), Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 35.1 | 2012, “Transparencies” [Online], Online since 18 April 2021, connection on 23 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/ 5383; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.5383

Commonwealth Essays and Studies is licensed under a Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modifcation 4.0 International. Transparencies

Vol. 35, N°1, Autumn 2012

Transparencies

Kerry-Jane Wallart, guest editor • Introduction...... 5 André DoDeman • The Writer’s Quest for Clarity: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost ...... 9 Mélanie HeyDari-malayeri • Reviving the “Great Tradition” of the British Novel: Realism and Transparency in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy ...... 21 Pascale tollance • Screens in Janet Frame’s “The Secret” ...... 29 Kathie Birat • Transparency and Orality in Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories ...... 37 Alice Braun • “The enormous burden upon the I to tell all”: Metafiction as Unveiling in Janet Frame’sLiving in the Maniototo ...... 45 Héliane Ventura • Haunted by a Fantasy of Immortality: “Spirit” by Janet Frame ...... 55 Kerry-Jane Wallart • The Word and the Stage, or the Intermediate Transparency in The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard ...... 63 Marjorie amBrosio • Degrees of Transparency in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and After China ...... 73 Maria Pilar royo Grasa • (Un-)Settling Reconciliation in David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life ...... 83 Salhia Ben-messaHel • Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World: A Transparent Space of Darkness ...... 93 Reviews

Jane stafforD. Savage Songs and Wild Romances: Settler Poetry and the Indigene, 1830-1880. • By John O’Leary...... 103 Adnan maHmutoVic. Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures. • By Annalisa Oboe, and Shaul Bassi...... 105 Guy BeaureGarD. Transnational Poetics: Asian Canadian Women’s Fiction of the 1990s. • Ed. by Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, Belén Martín-Lucas, and Sonia Villegas-Lopez ...... 107 Christine lorre. The Postcolonial Unconscious. • By Neil Lazarus ...... 109

Contributors ...... 111

Introduction

It may seem unexpected, even paradoxical and possibly absurd to dedicate a volume of literary scholarship to the concept of transparency. Indeed the latter describes a visual phenomenon that hardly accommodates the obstacle that language necessarily constitutes. Such an obstacle is reinforced by the departure that literature makes by definition from standard language. If the realm of vision is well-known to weave- fas cinating patterns with literature it still seems that the critic tends to side with opacity, not transparency. And yet fiction constantly stages, represents and fantasizes its own encounter with reality, associating perception with pellucidity. The gap between signifier and signified can thus be read as a journey that is similar to that of the eye when traversing a screen. It transposes and translates our world “through the looking-glass” of textuality in a rather Carrollian way. Transparency poses further questions in the case of postcolonial literatures. The latter are written palimpsestically in the language of the former Empire, they are couched on the surface (or screen?) of other languages and cultures that remain partly indo- mitable by the words of the British Isles. Transparency becomes a double illusion but also an interrogation of the conditions of existence of those very texts that are, if only geographically, necessarily marginalized. Transparency may have to be seriously distrus- ted if one is to avoid a phenomenon of domestication as described by Homi Bhabha: In fact the sign of the “cultured” or the “civilised” attitude is the ability to appreciate cultures in a kind of musée imaginaire; as though one should be able to collect and appreciate them. Western connoisseurship is the capacity to understand and locate cultures in a universal time-frame that acknowledges their various historical and social contexts only eventually to transcend them and render them transparent. (208) The notion of diversity is charged here with being heir to the Enlightenment ideal of universalism behind an apparent relativism. In order to transcend such apparent irre- ducibility of cultures, Bhabha has coined the phrase of “third enunciation” and described it as a horizon, another space “which enables other positions to emerge” (211) in a spirit of difference, not diversity. Such a space is a metaphor for the voice of the writer, otherwise designated as an “enunciation” and it will come as no surprise that interrogations around the notion of enunciation swarm in every one of the ten articles presented in the volume. It is analyzed by all authors in terms of blurring, of differenti- ation and otherness, of instability and ultimately, opacity. Again, one veers towards the opposite of transparency. As a result, the idea of penetration expressed by the prefix “trans-” leads the investigations which deploy themselves in this volume to confront the artificiality and necessary obfuscation underlying the alleged transparency of the texts under scrutiny. The two opening papers call into question the tradition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century realism and its apparent claim to representational transparency. In both cases realism is actually yoked together with references that break the illusion from the very start. In A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth rewrites Jane Austen and George Eliot in 6 an Indian, post-Independence context. Mélanie Heydari-Malayeri recalls the definition of mimicry by Bhabha to posit such transparent transposition as both a resemblance and a menace. She argues for a reconsideration of Seth’s novel, one which has raised little scholarly attention, in the light of postcolonial attitudes. André Dodeman reads the influence of Modernism on Morley Callaghan as a Rousseauean attempt at clarity of vision. Intelligibility is upstaged in The Loved and the Lost in social but also aesthetic terms and its quest becomes the topic and structure of the novel. In those two novels the lending of a semblance of reality turns out to be both an illusion and an ideological stance. Four papers on Janet Frame’s works then investigate her complex and undeniable distrust of transparency. Pascale Tollance scrutinizes the encoding and impossible decoding of riddles, enigmas and secrets in The Lagoon and Other Stories. By looking at the “opposition and distribution between the visual and the verbal” she is led to draw fasci- nating conclusions as to the devouring metaphor in those short stories and the intertext of such tales as “The Gingerbread Man.” Kathie Birat singles out the same corpus and focuses on questions of orality in their relation with the shaping of our perception of reality. In a daring reading of the emulation of childish diction found in Frame’s stories, her paper goes to show that orality is transcribed on the level of sight and vice versa, and that our speech as well as that of others actually both transcribe and create our vision. The analysis draws on Jakobson and Dolar and reads the presence of nursery rhymes in a brilliantly convincing way. Alice Braun substitutes the arrow through transparency with what she calls a “line of flight” by bringing together the novelLiving in the Maniototo that stages a novelist and Frame’s autobiography. Braun questions the possibility for a writer’s autobiographical enterprise to be concerned with anything else than the act of writing, with all the tricks this entails. In a Foucauldian gesture, she links transparency with the positivist obsession with confession that dates back to the seventeenth century and aimed at casting light on deviant sexualities. Héliane Ventura reads “Spirit” as an answer to the metaphysical question of life after death but also as a metatextual re- flexion on the reincarnation of the hallowed English Canon texts in the Antipodes – or the “antipathies, ” as Alice calls them (8). The four essays adopt complementary angles to interrogate the tricks Frame plays on her reader even as she displays representations of “the author’s true self ” at a second remove. Like Alice in Wonderland, or the Che- shire Cat, the personae in both the novels and the short stories by Janet Frame all but disappear behind a consideration of the validity of language – the possibility for an empty orange marmalade jar still to be labelled “orange marmalade” (8). My paper on The Blood Knot, a play by Athol Fugard, transposes the question of transparency onto the stage and draws on the Brechtian use of the fable to scrutinize how transposition may be at work to denounce the workings of the South African apartheid regime and to reinvent an immediate shock in front of it. Three papers on Australian literature then hinge on hybridity, a notion which has been used since the earliest postcolonial criticism and is now revisited. Marjorie D’Ambrosio scrutinizes what she calls phenomena of “blurring” in two novels by Brian Castro that have never been compared systematically, Birds of Passage and After China. She shows how categories, origins, genres, tongues and language itself are used as a series of veils in order to diffract meaning and, in its wake, essence. Pilar Rojo Graso’s paper underpins a turn to more political concerns as she reads Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life in the light of Australia’s “Reconciliation.” She shows that this much criticized and possibly much misread novel 7 Foreword does stage a colonial Ovid and an oppressed wild Child, echoing the relation between the white settler and the Aborigine, but that such roles are also subject to change. Lastly Salhia Ben-Messahel takes Wonders of a Godless World as a case in point of how fantasy, the Gothic and fairy tales can be recast and transposed as a chronicle of modern Aus- tralia. Literary tradition becomes a “mode of concealment,” an optical illusion that eventually allows the reader’s gaze to see parallels that are no longer obvious – such as the one between natural and human histories. She concludes, as I shall do here, on the “transparency of the imagination” – a direction in which the sum of these essays gazes indeed.

Kerry-Jane Wallart, guest editor

W orks Cited

BHaBHa, Homi. “The Third Space.” Interview with Jonathan Rutherford. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 207-21. Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. 1897. New York: Norton, 1992.

The Writer’s Quest for Clarity: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost

Set in twentieth-century Montreal where discrimination and prejudice against Black Ca- nadians were obstacles to cultural exchange, Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost (1951) continues to illustrate the artist’s desire to see beyond ethnic barriers and question social propriety. Even though Callaghan was influenced by Western codes and Modernism, his novel foregrounds the importance of cityscape to investigate notions of Canadian culture and authenticity.

In Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost, the city is an opaque place where social, moral and language barriers prevent social classes as well as ethnic and linguistic groups from communicating with one another. Callaghan describes Montreal as a fragmented city where each social and ethnic group is enclosed within the borders of the geographical space it occupies and determined by specific languages and attitudes.The Loved and the Lost remains one of his major novels and is often seen as a turning point in his work in that he remained faithful to a realist tradition while accepting influences from the Modernist writers of the beginning of the twentieth century. The story is set in the cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic city of Montreal where Black and White Canadians live together but avoid contact. In his analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essays, Jean Starobinski writes that understanding the world and interpreting signs consist in unveiling, that is to say seeing through the disturbingly intermediate surface of things and attaining the truth beneath (187). This essay will study the various narrative techniques which lead the protagonist, Jim McAlpine, to explore a city of appearances and seek clarity of vision. In his preface to Pierre et Jean (1888), Guy de Maupassant, wrote that events had a deep, hidden meaning, and that it was the realist’s role to reveal it to the reader.1 Callaghan’s novel precisely foregrounds the character’s quest to find this hidden meaning in a world of obstacles and polished surfaces that blur the border between self and other. To begin with, Montreal is not depicted as a city of contrasts, but as a city where various walls and barriers mirror those of social convention and reputation. The protagonist becomes an explorer whose wanderings take him from the elite of Montreal society to the bars and clubs of lower Montreal where ethnic tensions often result in fights and public outbreaks of violence. Secondly, this paper discusses the protagonist’s quest for meaning and his love for Peggy Sanderson, a female character whose attempts to resist conventions and challenge barriers finally cause her demise. The relationship between the narrator and the narratee is based on the importance of clarity, and intertextual references to Greek mythology and Christian parables guide the readers through the text, helping them foresee the outcome of the story. Such a quest in the novel becomes extremely difficult insofar as the cacophony of Montreal society grows into an obstacle to the transparency that is central to the quest of the protagonist and to the reader’s interpretation of the text. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop

1. In his preface entitled “Le roman,” Maupassant stresses the importance of plausibility for the reader of the realistic novel (8-9) He acknowledged that realism consisted in creating an illusion of reality which aimed at tricking the readers into believing that the story was real. 10

Frye extensively discusses the tendency of realism “to throw the emphasis on content and representation rather than on the shape of the story,” (140) that is to say a tendency that encourages the readers to see through the written word and maintain their illusions concerning the reality or plausibility of the fictional world the novel seeks to represent. Finally, the very act of writing is a highly problematic question as the author gradually moves away from the transparent reading that is entailed by realism in order to acknowledge Modernist forms, explore language, and question the very notion of transparency. The writer considered Modernism as a new trend2 that expressed epistemological doubt and questioned the relationship between word and fact, signifier and signified. The Loved and the Lost is a quest narrative. Its protagonist, Jim McAlpine, attempts to see not only through the barriers of social convention but also beneath the surface of the character he falls in love with, Peggy Sanderson. The novel is made up of twenty- nine chapters, most of which are narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator. Before settling in Montreal to write a column in the Montreal Sun, Jim McAlpine is described as a man in his early thirties who had formerly worked as an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. The wealthy owner of theSun , Joseph Carver, invites Jim to Montreal and offers him a job. When entering the Carver house for the first time, Jim meets Joseph Carver’s daughter Catherine, who secretly falls in love with him and hopes to become his wife. The third-person narrator and the elements of romance which clearly characterize the beginning of the novel introduce the reader to a familiar world of tradition and heritage. The quest itself, which is a defining element of the mode of romance according to Northrop Frye (Anatomy 187), is triggered by Jim’s meeting Peggy Sanderson. She is an obstacle to Jim’s ambitions to become a well- known columnist, marry into a wealthy family, and make his way into the Montreal elite. As the incipit suggests, obstacles are inscribed in a topography that mirrors the social structure of the city: Joseph Carver, the publisher of the Montreal Sun, lived on the mountain. Nearly all the rich families in Montreal lived on the mountain. It was always there to make them feel secure. At night it rose against the sky like a dark protective barrier behind a shimmering curtain of lights surmounted by a gleaming cross. (1) The mountain in the background that works as a “protective barrier” is an illustration of the garrison mentality that dated back to nineteenth-century Canadian literature and consisted in seeking protection from a hostile landscape.3 Unlike Hugh MacLennan who, in his first novelBarometer Rising (1941), aestheticized the relationship between character and landscape so as to construct a cosmological correspondence between the country and its settlers, Callaghan shows to what extent the upper classes have artifi -

2. In her chapter on fiction in The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, Marta Dvorak notes that Modernism came much later to Canada and that the belatedness of Canadian Modernism was mainly due to the importance of literary realism in early twentieth-century Canada. Even though Hugh MacLennan, for instance, experimented with Modernist forms in the 1930s, he became a successful novelist only when publishing his first realistic novel,Barometer Rising, in 1941. 3. According to Northrop Frye, John Richardson’s Wacousta; or, The Prophecy: A Tale of the Canadas (1832) is an early illustration of the inception of a garrison mentality in pre-Confederation Canada, a sentiment that relied on binary op- positions between civilisation and a hostile wilderness. In his conclusion to the second volume of Carl F. Klinck’s Literary History of Canada, Frye also shows how the garrison mentality evolved with the growth of metropolitan society. This evolution seems to characterize the literatures of former white settler colonies and Diana Brydon’s study of Canadian and Australian literature extensively discusses the garrison mentality which encouraged settlers to reproduce a safer, En- glish-inspired environment in the wilderness: “Canadians and Australians tried to make their homes into little Englands, shutting out the alien landscape around them” (Brydon 279). 11 The Writer’s Quest for Clarity: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost cially superimposed topography and social barriers. In this respect, the city is depicted as a fragmented whole with each part representing a social class. Such a representation of the city is in keeping with Olivier Chadoin’s view that the city is the “symbolic expression” of a social system that includes and excludes at the same time.4 The social position of the Carvers, who live on the mountain, is best illustrated by the verticality of the city with the upper classes literally towering over and seeking protection from the lower classes of downtown Montreal. It is thus not surprising to notice that Calla- ghan chose an outsider from Toronto as his protagonist to offer the reader an external viewpoint on the city. His very name, McAlpine, suggests a quest to reach the summit of social hierarchy and subsequent resistance against social obstacles disseminated by the Carvers who have shaped Montreal society. The third-person narrator recounts Jim’s whereabouts in the city, namely the various bars and cafés he goes to. After having met Peggy Sanderson, Jim decides to go to the Café St Antoine where White and Black Canadians gather to listen to jazz music. The seventh chapter dwells on Jim’s desire to enter the café, a desire that remains unfulfilled in that his ethnic prejudices, most of which are endorsed by the Carvers who wish to include him in the family, prevent him from going through with the experience. Ins- tead, the narrator portrays a hesitant protagonist who at first remains on thresholds. However, the narrator describes what Jim sees when he finally decides to enter, in the following chapter: The foyer was done in pink, and a wide door opened into a crowded tavern. The ticket booth was there by the stairs which led up to the night club. Two well-dressed white men were ahead of him; he got a ticket and followed them up the narrow stairs. At the top, a hard-faced headwaiter, a mulatto, asked him to show his ticket, then pointed to one of the little tables with the metallic chairs around the small dance floor. A six-piece Negro band was playing. McAlpine declined the table. At the rear of the club was a bar, all nickel and pink leather, and he knew he would not be conspicuous there. (60-1) This passage highlights the importance of the threshold in the novel, as Jim is often located in an in-between or liminal space between two places and two cultures. The Café St Antoine, with its mixture of White, Mulatto and Black Canadians, is made to contrast with the ethnic uniformity of Westmount, the residential area of Montreal where only the wealthiest live. In fact, thanks to Jim’s perspective and his wanderings from one neighbourhood to another, the reader acknowledges the dialogism that characterizes the cosmopolitanism of the city and assesses the dominance of a monological, centralizing and garrisoned upper-class Montreal. This tends to exclude the wilderness insofar as it is more generally defined as the opposite of landscape. Jonathan Bordo, for instance, argues that “[l]andscape is typically understood in terms of the investments human beings make about the nature and the physical world to make somewhere their own. The wilderness negates […] such investments” (Bordo 152). The previous passage from The Loved and the Lost highlights what Bakhtin termed the “heteroglossia” of extraliterary languages which is thwarted by the dominant languages spoken within the confines of the garrison (Bakhtin 67). One of the social spaces of the novel where dominant and extraliterary languages interact is the Chalet Restaurant where Jim regularly meets with his white friends. The reader discovers that “[o]n the walls were pictures of

4. Olivier Chadoin has written much about the interaction between individuals, society and space in La ville des individus: Sociologie, urbanisme et architecture, propos croisés. 12 fighters and mocking caricatures of distinguished Montreal citizens” (51). In this case, the narrator draws the reader’s attention to the places where the centralizing discourses of the upper classes are constantly challenged by caricature and parody. The result is the representation of an ethnically and culturally fragmented city where social classes are deeply rooted in separate locales. The various analeptic passages regarding Jim’s childhood introduce the reader to the character’s ambitions to challenge social boundaries and become a member of the upper class. After playing croquet with his neighbours’ children all day, he runs off to retrieve a lost ball, but he is forgotten by the children at the gate. Even after waiting for several minutes, he realizes that they simply forgot he was ever there. Years later, when he is admitted into the Carver family and invited to a formal reception, the sight of Ernest Havelock, the children’s father, reawakens these painful memories and triggers the character’s critique of social divides: “But his father and mother had once stood outside this man’s gate. How could he now seem so unimpressive? he asked himself. As a gesture to his boyhood he wanted to speak to Havelock, but again someone touched him on the arm” (120). Once more, McAlpine is associated with in-betweenness and a threshold which is “the chronotope of crisis and break in a life” (Bakhtin 248). In the novel, thresholds function not only as spaces of hesitation and indeterminacy, but also as spaces which force the character to make choices. As a result, the character learns to overlook the barriers that keep communities separate and tend to trap individuals inside enclosures. Jim’s position on the threshold and his desire to transcend borders allow him to challenge pre-determined behaviours or what Bourdieu calls habitus, that is to say a set of learned attitudes which encourage individuals belonging to a given social class to act and react in a specific manner. Ultimately, he will break with the Carvers who represent social betterment and reconnect with Peggy and the Café St Antoine which Jim MacAlpine will gradually associate with authenticity. Progressively, the narrator portrays the character’s attempt to free himself from the social conventions of Montreal society. This explains why the writer resorted to a third- person narrator so as to transcend diegetic space and time as well as expose the thea- tricality of social conventions. In chapter 20, the character goes to a hockey game with Catherine Carver and, at the sight of a fight, Jim McAlpine realizes that each individual is asked to abide by socially-determined patterns: The florid man with the bag of peanuts sitting beside McAlpine, leaping to his feet, emptied the bag on McAlpine’s coat, then slapped him on the back and hugged him, and the French Canadian priest, both hands raised in rapture, burst into eloquent French. Everybody was filled with a fine laughing happiness. But McAlpine, staring at the ice in a dream, thought: “Yes, Catherine’s right. A beautiful pattern. Anything that breaks the pattern is bad. And Peggy breaks up the pattern.” (179) The crowd or mob emphasizes the power of social conventions over those who desire to resist them. Even though the crowd is defined by its ethnic diversity (there are French, English and Jewish faces), the hockey game remains accessible to the wealthy people who can afford tickets. The plot itself concentrates on the fate of those who resist such homogenizing forces and Peggy Sanderson is the woman whose demise is clearly announced at the outcome of the hockey game. Even though Peggy’s love is the purpose of McAlpine’s quest, it is McAlpine’s viewpoint that remains central to the story. Even though the narrator is omniscient, shifts 13 The Writer’s Quest for Clarity: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost in focalization are recurrent to mirror the phenomenological operations of perception and consciousness. The third-person narrator self-consciously dwells on acts of questioning as hermeneutic processes which call for resolutions and revelations. Paul Ricoeur defines the purpose of hermeneutics as a way to grasp the meaning of a text by exploring the connections between the unfolding of the plot and the diegetic world of the novel (153). In chapter 10, for instance, Jim tries to convince himself that his infatuation with Peggy is due to the fact that she appears as a mere problem to solve: “‘But this girl, Peggy. Well,’ he frowned, ‘she presents a problem, a problem in understanding’” (78). The narrator wrestles with the process that will lead the character to find solutions to the problem by first interpreting signs. When they take a walk around Montreal, Peggy takes him to see a church that is historically located between the Ro- manesque and the Gothic: The church hung there in the snow; it could sail away lightly like a ship in the snow. Then he turned and looked at Peggy’s lifted face, on which the snowflakes glistened and mel - ted, making her blink her eyes. He looked again at the church and then at her face. (36) In this example, the narrator stages hermeneutic processes by focusing less on the female character than on how she is perceived by Jim McAlpine. Starobinski argues that the act of interpreting signs is an obstacle to the ideal, immediate relationship between an object and how one perceives it (187). In this case, clear perception is thwarted by the necessity to interpret signs, and unanswered questions force Jim to come to terms with the impossibility of achieving a complete transparency. Much like the character, the reader is involved in the hermeneutic processes and is asked to interpret signs and reflect upon the validity of the character’s quest. The reader is gradually guided through the plot by means of a series of intertextual references which foreshadow the ending of the novel. In his Orpheus in Winter, John Orange shows to what extent Greek mythology plays an important part in the interpretation of the novel. Not only is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice explicitly referred to in the text, but the recurrent images of stairs recall the vertical separation between the two mythical characters that lose each other at the end. The references to the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea evoke the narcissistic passion that links the sculptor and his statue. Likewise, Jim desperately tries to change Peggy and make her fit into the requi- rements of Montreal society. For instance, dreams, considered in Freudian terms as manifestations in one’s consciousness, reveal Jim’s desire to remould Peggy and have her accept the social conventions of the upper class: “In his scheming dream of breaking her resistance and remolding [sic] her, he failed to see that he was putting himself against her; that he was justifying her instinctive resistance. He went on dreaming of her as she would be when she had yielded to him” (161). Not only does the narrator give the reader access to Jim’s dreams of harmonious solutions, but he also interferes and comments on what Jim “fails to see.” In fact, it is this failure, this obstructed transparency that will announce Peggy’s death in chapter 25. Unlike Galatea who was unveiled to embrace a life of love and marriage with Pygmalion, the attempted unveiling of Peggy is made impossible given her resistance to enclosed spaces and social conventions. In addition to Greek myths, Callaghan resorts to Christian imagery to associate Peggy with what Barbara Pell terms the “sinner-saint” in her theological approach to MacLennan’s and Callaghan’s works. In Pell’s words, Peggy is presented “through McAl- pine’s confused quest, as a dangerous and ambiguous sinner-saint” (95). The writer’s 14 friendship with the French philosopher Jacques Maritain5 had undoubtedly influenced his humanistic view of the world and his belief in a harmonious coexistence of the sacred and the profane. In keeping with the various Christian symbols in the novel, Jim McAlpine follows her, tries to save her soul by wanting to make her adhere to a more acceptable, upper-class society and he even goes as far as to deny knowing her three times before her death. When the landlady, Mrs Agnew, enters her room, Peggy’s dead body takes on a saintly, Christ-like appearance: Peggy’s wide-open eyes stared horribly at the ceiling and her mouth gaped. Around her throat were big bluish welts, and on her left breast was a heavy dark bruise. Her head was twisted a little to one side, her arms straight at her sides, the palms open and twisted back. She looked small, round, and white. Only her hair had any life in it, for the ceiling light touched the side of her head and there were gleams of gold in the fair hair. (227) The shift to internal focalization in this passage aims at expressing how Peggy’s death is perceived and interpreted from a subjective viewpoint. As reason fails to provide an explanation for her death, Christian imagery takes over to present her as a sacrificial victim whose fate was sealed by society. As an effect of the “ceiling light,” Peggy’s transfigurative glow gives her an aura which is underpinned by the plot itself insofar as the identity of the murderer is not disclosed to the reader. Just like the hockey game that starts in an orderly fashion and ends in chaos, the many voices of Montreal join in Jim’s mind only to become cacophonous and fill the character’s mind with doubt. The social structure of Montreal society progressively dissolves and turns into an indistinct chaos of voices echoed in Jim’s interior monologues. For instance, during Jim’s last conversation with Peggy, the narrator shows to what extent public opinion has taken over Jim’s thoughts to judge Peggy: “‘It’s a touch. Some have it with a woman. Yes, you knew he had it,’ he said softly. He had gotten her to admit something. But he had hardly heard what she said. The others were all in his mind yelling” (220). In this case, Callaghan scrutinizes the borders between individual consciousness and the collective unconscious exemplified by the mob. It is this final- he sitation between the subject and the impersonal, collective voice that Jim will eventually regret when he discovers that Peggy was raped and murdered later that same night. As a result, the writer’s quest for clarity depends on the ability of the subject to make sense of the heterogeneity of the world. The novel concludes with Jim blaming society and himself for her death, suggesting that Callaghan’s work was not only inspired by religious concerns, but also by certain historicist assumptions that events are caused by impersonal forces, forces which are an additional obstacle to the individual quest for meaning. The need to see clearly beyond the obstacles of reality was one of the preoccupations of the Modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his article “Modernism, Postmodernism, Fascism and Historicism,” Leon Surette asserts that Modernism partly originated from the inability of the individual to make sense of a world that had gone through significant epistemological changes when the Victorian period came to an end: Modernism – like most ideologies (if it is an ideology) – was not a force or entity that invaded men and women in the first half of this century (or in Periclean Athens!), but

5. Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) was a French philosopher and humanist who believed that the sacred and the profane were complementary. In Christianisme et démocratie, he argued in favour of a clear understanding between Christian beliefs and democratic principles. 15 The Writer’s Quest for Clarity: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost

a set of ideas, attitudes, procedures, and forms cobbled together in an effort to think through the cataclysmic philosophical, scientific, political, military and social changes among which these men and women lived. (Surette 488) Callaghan’s intellectual struggle with what Starobinski calls the opacity of the sign shows that he was familiar with the works of Modernist writers who tried to make sense of their time. His friendship with Jacques Maritain was not the only one to have influenced his intellectual development, as his friendship with Hemingway was also an important connection that inspired his work. As a novelist and journalist, Morley Callaghan was well aware of the intellectual debates that were stirring opinions at the time. His work for Toronto’s Star Weekly and The Toronto Daily Star in the 1920s was remembered for its unbiased style. Callaghan’s journalistic work influenced his writing; his novels of the 1930s,Such Is My Beloved and They Shall Inherit the Earth, illustrate the writer’s preference for a realistic mode which stressed the predominance of the subject matter over focalized viewpoint and novelistic experimentation. From a journalist’s perspective, a style which encouraged transparent reading, with a preference for content over form, was the best choice insofar as it aimed at placing the event above its perception and lessening the distance between word and fact. Callaghan’s encounter with Hemingway in 1923 was an opportunity for the Ca- nadian author to discover works by Modernist writers such as Ezra Pound and Ford Maddox Ford. These connections led him to question the very act of writing and the misleading transparency of the written word. Just like Rousseau who deplored the opacity of modern languages, which depend on signs and conventions, Callaghan reflec - ted upon language and its ability to appropriately represent human experience.6 He was also inspired by Pound’s Imagist movement of the early 1920s which aimed at challenging conventions that dated back to the Victorian period and its predominantly realistic forms. The Loved and the Lost is definitely one of the novels that best illustrate the influence of Modernism on the writer. Even though language remains referential in the novel, Callaghan foregrounds epistemological doubt and raises the question of the ability of the word to define a particular object. The writer’s quest for clarity leads him to look for alternatives to the written word and one of these alternatives in the novel is the drawing that Jim makes of Peggy: He watched while she picked up the drawing and studied it closely, then went to the mirror and looked at herself. “You’re pretty good, Jim,” she admitted. “It’s me all right. Me in overalls.” “Here. Give it to me. You need to be named, since we know at last what you are,” he said ironically, and he wrote under the drawing, “Peggy, the Crimper.” (89-90) Jim’s ironic statement about the title of the drawing highlights Callaghan’s concern with representation. The drawing is presented as an alternative to the text, even though the drawing also fails to attain its goal: the capture of the model. The drawing has a narrative function as well in that it allows Catherine Carver to discover Jim’s secret relationship with Peggy after her murder. Here again, Callaghan uses the drawing as a way to shift the reader’s attention away from the model and to how it is perceived by

6. In Starobinski’s analysis of Rousseau’s texts, modern languages are described as having a tendency to maintain a certain distance between the object represented by the conventional word and the immediacy of emotion (178). 16

Catherine. In other words, Peggy serves as a polished surface which foregrounds the perspective of the beholder. The image unveils the distress of the characters and en- hances the representation of subjectivity in the novel. In addition to the drawing, the narrator underlines the importance of impressionistic paintings which also dwell on the perception of reality and the effects of light. For the writer, the painting serves two functions depending on the observer. In chapter 11, the Carvers contemplate their most recent purchase, a painting by Renoir: After lunch they went into the drawing room, where Jacques, the plump little French Canadian who was Mr Carver’s man, had adjusted the Renoir on the chesterfield at the right angle to catch the light from the window. They contemplated the painting learnedly. It was a study of a girl at a piano. They drew back a little, they moved closer, they cupped their chins in their hands and nodded. (81) The discourse of the narrator in this passage discloses an elitist approach to art that is presented as typical of the upper class that considers art as a sign of social status. Renoir’s painting, “a study of a girl at a piano,”7 is a tribute to the bourgeois values of education and, at the same time, it remains loyal to an impressionistic representation of a scene by focusing on the effects of light on the models. Impressionism also had a tre- mendous impact on Modernist writers such as Katherine Mansfield since it emphasized the importance of light in the acts of seeing and observing. It is therefore not surprising to notice that the novel takes place in winter, a season where snow is presented as a soft surface that is best suited to reflect light. Chapter 25 begins with a description of Montreal before Mrs Agnew’s discovery of Peggy’s body: In the bright morning the whole city steamed and sparkled in the thawing sunlight. Ice- coated trees on the mountain made glittering, lacy patterns with their sunlit branches, and the banked, melting snow on the hills turned a thousand sidewalks into rivulets that twinkled and twisted in the sunlight on their way down the slopes. (224) The impressionistic representation of the city is rendered by the effects of the “sunlight” and the “ice-coated trees” on the cityscape. The narrator insists on the different variations of light which shape subjective perception; the light ceaselessly “sparkles,” “glitters” and “twinkles.” Montreal is portrayed here at a moment between two seasons, an in-between period of the year when the entire city hesitates between the solid and the liquid. Just like Peggy who is punished for transgressing ethnic boundaries and being ahead of her time, Callaghan represents the city as a place of constant change and transition towards a society that is more open to social and ethnic diversity. Peggy is therefore a transitional character whose strong desire to break social conventions and ill-intentioned hearsay is reflected in references to impressionism. Henri Ma - tisse’s work and the Fauvist movement of the beginning of the twentieth century are used by the writer to show that even though Fauvism helps to define a character, it also aims at illustrating Peggy’s intangibility or evanescence. In chapter 5, Peggy takes Jim to see a three-foot long wood carving of a leopard in a glass case: She studied the leopard, and he watched her grave face and steady eyes and wondered why it had such importance for her. The light overhead shone on her wet fair hair, and it was like standing with a child whom he had brought to the toy department.

7. In fact, the painting is Two Young Girls at the Piano and was submitted to the French government in 1892 to be exhibited at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. For a view of the painting, see 17 The Writer’s Quest for Clarity: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost

“It looks unbelievably fierce and powerful, doesn’t it?” she asked. “It’s really very good,” he agreed. “Quite a suggestion of power, of lurking violence. How did you know it was here, Peggy?” “Oh, I heard about it. Does it make you feel uncertain and watchful, too?” she asked in a whisper. (35-6) The leopard recalls the Fauvist painters who were known for their violent brush strokes and highly expressive uses of colour. Like many impressionists of the beginning of the twentieth century, the Fauvist painters, led by Henri Matisse, downplayed the representational purposes of the painting by emphasizing the importance of shapes, colours and internal composition. The leopard functions here as an objective correlative (a term that was first used by T. S. Eliot in 1920 to refer to a technique that would facilitate the reader’s direct access to emotion by means of an object rather than by resorting to language) which conveys a specific emotion and which, in this passage, expresses the awe and uncertainty one feels in front of the violence of the natural world, as opposed to the conventionality of human society. However, this does not necessarily mean that Callaghan’s work is Modernist as many critics have already argued. Linda Hutcheon has worked extensively on Postmodernism and its relations with Modernism and has reflected on texts by critics such as Kermode and Lyotard. InPoetics of Postmodernism, she writes that: Many critics have pointed out the glaring contradictions of Modernism: its elitist, classical need for order and its revolutionary formal innovations […]; its “Janus-faced” anar- chistic urge to destroy existing systems combined with a reactionary political vision of ideal order […]; its compulsion to write with a realization of the meaninglessness of writing (in the work of Beckett or Kafka); its melancholy regret for the loss of presence and its experimental energy and power of conception. (43) It is therefore difficult to assert that Callaghan fully partook in such a movement insofar as he did not seek to destroy existing systems but rather tried to see through them for what they were. Modernism, indeed, offered new ways of seeing as well as new ways of writing about the opaque, superficial nature of the world the writer attempted to understand. The very title of the novel, which was first inspired by Tennyson’sIn Memo- riam, alludes to the original simplicity of childhood. Starobinksi asserts that childhood is characterized by transparency and trust, while suggesting that the transitional moment from childhood to adulthood has much to do with losing one’s innocence and coming to terms with the opacity of the world. Whether it is Jim McAlpine who discovers the unfairness of social divides with the Havelock family at the age of fourteen, or Peggy who is forced to come to terms with the effects of ethnic segregation and the hypocriti- cal stance of the church at the age of twelve, Callaghan chose to write about characters whose childhood memories were rooted in an innocent world where such borders did not exist. The unveiling of social spaces through the critique of limits and interstices, along with the struggle against individual or collective obstacles, account for the novel’s reception as a major work of fiction in contemporary Canadian literature. When The Loved and the Lost was first published, it was read by many critics as an exclusively realistic novel and deemed to have failed to portray the female protagonist as a credible heroine. 18

It was only later that the novel was praised as a major work of fiction that represented a transition to the more Modernist features of Gallant’s and Richler’s novels.8 Many debates have arisen around Morley Callaghan’s intellectual influences and his ties with Modernism. Indeed, Modernist writers offered a new way of dealing with the fragmented perception of the world and The Loved and the Lost can therefore be read as a transitional novel which combines elements from both realism and Modernism. In Morley Callaghan and His Works, Gary Boire discusses Callaghan’s relationship with the Modernists and the Imagists and their desire to distance themselves from the readers so as to avoid influence from a public with specific expectations. Callaghan was definitely not a writer who tried to do so in that most of his early and later novels remain overtly didactic. As mentioned earlier in this essay, the writer investigates the hermeneutics of reading, and gradually guides the reader towards the outcome of the plot. The realist and Modernist form of The Loved and the Lost did not prevent the writer from discussing the major themes that he was preoccupied with, such as the loss of innocence, the possibility of redemption and questions of tradition and authority. Furthermore, even though Modernism had certainly made its way into Canada with poets such as Arthur Stringer, it did not find the public response it did in Britain or the United States. Like one of his contemporaries, Hugh MacLennan, who turned to a realist mode after trying Modernist techniques in the 1930s,9 Callaghan was well aware of European and Ame- rican Modernist experimentations after having read novels by such eminent figures as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, but such awareness did not impinge on his choice to write about a Canadian locale and experience.

André DoDeman Stendhal University (Grenoble 3, CEMRA)

W orks Cited

BakHtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Boire, Gary. Morley Callaghan: Literary Anarchist. Toronto: ECW, 1994. BorDo, Jonathan. “The Wilderness as Symbolic Form – Thoreau, Grünewald and the Group of Seven.” Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries. Ed. Pascale Guibert. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. BourDieu, Pierre. Langage et pouvoir symbolique. 1982. Paris: Seuil, 2001. BryDon, Diana. “Landscape and Authenticity: The Development of National Literatures in Canada and Australia.” Dalhousie Review 61 (1981-82): 278-9. callaGHan, Morley. The Loved and the Lost. 1951. Toronto: Stoddart, 1993. —. Such Is My Beloved. 1934. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1957. —. They Shall Inherit the Earth. New York: Modern Age Books, 1937. cHaDoin, Olivier. La ville des individus: Sociologie, urbanisme et architecture, propos croisés. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004.

8. John Orange devotes an entire chapter to the critical reception of Callaghan’s novel in Orpheus in Winter. He quotes a reviewer for The Globe and Mail who wrote that Peggy Sanderson was “too confused to have heroic qualities” (17). 9. Before publishing Barometer Rising in 1941, Hugh MacLennan had experimented with Modernist techniques in his first two attempts at novel writing: So All their Praises in 1933 and A Man should Rejoice in 1937. Even though the critical reception of MacLennan’s unpublished work seems to confirm Robert Kroetsch’s assumption that Canadian literature evolved from Victorian to postmodern literature, Modernism definitely played an important role in shaping the Canadian novel. 19 The Writer’s Quest for Clarity: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. London: Penguin, 1957. ––. “Conclusion.” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Second ed. Vol. 2. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1976. 333-61. HutcHeon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988. maupassant, Guy de. “Le roman.” Pierre et Jean. 1888. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1959. oranGe, John. Orpheus in Winter: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost. Toronto: ECW, 1993. pell, Barbara. Faith and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1998. renoir, Auguste. Two Young Girls at the Piano. 1892. Oil on canvas (44 x 34 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ricoeur, Paul. Temps et récit: L’Intrigue et le récit historique. Volume 1. Paris: Seuil, 1983. staroBinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et l’obstacle, suivi de sept essais sur Rousseau. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. surette, Leon. “Modernism, Postmodernism, Fascism and Historicism.” University of Toronto Quarterly 60 (1990-1991): 476-92.

Reviving the “Great Tradition” of the British Novel: Realism and Transparency in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy

Published twelve years after Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) has received comparatively little scholarly attention. A prodigious feat of unmagical mimeticism, this massive novel marks a striking divergence from the bulk of postcolonial fiction: Seth reanimates the “Great Tradition” of the English novel as it is notably represented by Jane Austen and George Eliot, throwing into sharp relief the notion of transparency. This paper argues that Seth’s ostentatious resumption of the realist project of the nineteenth century does not by any means exhaust itself in an autotelic exercise or a docile reproduction.

Born in Calcutta in 1952, Vikram Seth occupies a highly original place on the postcolonial literary scene, owing to the dazzling variety of his work: “[f]or him, writing is partly a matter of creating genres, as if it’s not enough to create an oeuvre, but a whole tradition in miniature…” (Chaudhuri 508). Seth’s career has been one of restless rein- vention: skipping from economist to poet, to travel writer, to novelist-in-verse, to libret- tist, to translator and to children’s writer, Vikram Seth even tried his hand at biography in Two Lives. His writing thus displays a staggering versatility: every new book by Seth creates a fresh departure in genre and theme and moves seamlessly from one geographical and cultural location to another, revealing a distinct cosmopolitan sensibility that makes Seth’s affiliations and cultural moorings all but impossible to fathom. 1 The few critics who have delved into Seth’s impressive repertoire of writing have struggled in vain to pigeonhole it: Seth’s protean body of work proves miraculously immune to any definitive categorization. The striking generic heterogeneity of Seth’s work masks a hidden unity which lies in a deliberate use of literary reprise, as A Suitable Boy exemplifies. In this novel, Vikram Seth treats Western canonical genres as raw material in an ostensibly unfashionable attempt to go back to an earlier model of literary tradition defined by the line from Jane Austen to George Eliot. In The Great Tradition, a highly influential and contentious book, F. R. Leavis traces an essential continuity from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Leavis’s normative definition of the English canon has been decisive in shaping modern views of English fiction, and establishing English literature as a central discipline in the humanities. His passionate celebration of the vitality of the English language rests on a conception of literature as the life force of the nation and as a nationalizing force – which makes his position so problematical. A rewriting of the distinguished tradition delineated by Leavis, and more specifically of the novels by Aus- ten and Eliot, A Suitable Boy centers on a young woman’s search for a suitable husband: Lata, the young Hindu heroine, considers the claims of three rival suitors before making her choice in the closing pages. While the title of the novel refers to the Indian market of arranged marriages, this theme is treated in the Austen vein. Seth’s reappropriation

1. A linguistic chameleon, Vikram Seth adapts to the environment he explores with such ease that it becomes point- less to attempt to put a national label on him: he resorts to British English in An Equal Music (which is set in London), while he uses American slang in The Golden Gate (which follows the lives of a group of yuppies in San Francisco). 22 of the realist mode characteristic of the novels by George Eliot displays a rare confi- dence in the possibility of representational transparency: A Suitable Boy is characterized by a third-person omniscient narrator, strikingly linear chronology and psychologically consistent characters whose thoughts are rendered through the ubiquitous use of free indirect speech.2 The novel’s immense scope is contained within a seemingly transparent prose: although Seth uses a few words in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, the dominant mode is a feather-light example of idiomatic, standard English that betrays a desire for clarity and accessibility. This subtle, unobtrusive style reveals a clear-window aspiration that stands in stark contrast to Salman Rushdie’s pyrotechnic prose which often subverts the very morphology of the English language. The notion of transparency – both as clarity and referentiality – thus operates at a structural level in A Suitable Boy. Why does Vikram Seth strive to preserve the Great Tradition of the English novel so ostentatiously? Originality is a concern of the utmost importance for a whole literary tradition that deprecates imitation, believes in self- begetting and yearns for absolute originality. In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, a series of essays published in 1991, Jameson harshly criticizes pastiche, which he perceives as the symbol of a capitalist society where even culture has been integrated into commodity production. It was from architectural debates that Jameson’s conception of postmodernism initially emerged, but it came to encompass a mutation in the whole sphere of culture. For Jameson, pastiche is a neutral practice of imitation that marks the unfortunate collapse of personal style, defined as “what is as unique and unmistakable as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as your own body” (17). Thus, Jameson argues, the end of idiosyncratic, “inimitable” style in the realm of postmodern aesthetic production pushes society into a terminal repetition of emptied-out stylizations that epitomize the primacy of mechanical reproduction and are devoid of any political bite. I will argue that Seth’s unvarnished attempt to go back to the Great Tradition of the English novel does not by any means boil down to a mechanical or nostalgic repetition of always-already-written texts. Often described as “anachronistic” and downright “Eurocentric,”3 A Suitable Boy does not fit current expectations of the postcolonial: in the heyday of magic realism – an essentially hybrid genre which brings together realistic and imaginary elements, familiarity and strangeness, forcing one to constantly question one’s vision of reality – “[Vikram Seth] writes as if Salman Rushdie had never authoredMidnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses, firmly turning his back upon the unconfined imagination and dangerous fantasy” (Desai). Although Seth’s opus as a whole proves impervious to any definitive categorization, it must be noted that each individual work complies strictly

2. In Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn explores the complex technique of free indirect speech, which she calls “narrated monologue,” underlining the mutual dependence of narrative realism and imaginary psychology. 3. Seth’s embrace of the classical realist form has been seen by some critics as a throwback to the past, as the entry on A Suitable Boy in The Reader’s Companion to the Twentieth Century Novel illustrates: “Willfully anachronistic, it runs the risk of drawing attention more to its virtuosity than to its content, less to its substance than to its facsimile charm. Parado- xically, its great achievement is to revivify a dying form” (Parker 673). In La République mondiale des Lettres (1999), Pascale Casanova expresses her grave discomfort with this seemingly “Eurocentric” novel: “Loin d’être le signe d’une ‘libération’ littéraire et d’une accession des anciens colonisés à la grandeur littéraire, ce roman est au contraire la preuve irréfutable de la domination (presque) sans partage du modèle littéraire anglais sur son aire culturelle” (174). (“Far from furnishing evidence of some sort of literary liberation, or of the sudden accession of the formerly colonized to literary greatness, A Suitable Boy offered irrefutable proof of the virtually total domination of the English literary model over its cultural area.” Trans. by M.B. DeBevoise. 121-2) 23 Reviving the “Great Tradition” of the British Novel: Realism and Transparency with the distinct constraints and conventions of a specific literary genre.4 Amidst the prevailing postmodern skepticism towards realism, A Suitable Boy adheres to the salient features of mimetic realism Philippe Hamon analyzed in “Un discours constraint,” namely exhaustivity, consistency and readability. The exceptional length of A Suitable Boy reflects an essentially realist desire for exhaustivity: through Brahmpur – an imaginary chronotope representative of north India – this “large loose baggy monster” (James 4) provides an impressively detailed and documented reconstruction of India in the years immediately following Independence. Vikram Seth skillfully represents a society in transition in its multiple political, religious, cultural and communal ramifications: woven into the main plot is the story of the troubled times of the early 1950s, the rise of the Indian middle class, the internal workings of the Congress Party, the abolition of feudal land-holdings, religious strife, communal hatred and sectarianism, shoe-making, bureaucracy and academia, and a myriad of further issues of importance to the large gallery of characters. Focusing on the sprawling kinship networks of four Indian families (three Hindu, one Muslim), the author interweaves countless subplots into patterns of great intricacy. The recurrent use of the conjunction “while,” which entwines seemingly disparate plot lines into a consistent whole, highlights the tight structure of the novel. Thus, section 4.1, in which the reader first encounters Haresh – the rather uncouth but intelligent, self-made shoemaker Lata eventually settles for – begins with the following statement: “While Lata was falling in love with Kabir, a quite different set of events was taking place in Old Brahmpur, which, however, were to prove not irrelevant to her story” (205). The understatement “not irrelevant” stresses the striking internal coherence of the novel, which leaves no room whatsoever for chance. In com- pliance with Bersani’s analysis, A Suitable Boy is governed by an overarching structure of significance: “Thetour de force of realistic novelists from Jane Austen to the later Henry James is to combine a superficially loose, even sprawling narrative form with an extraordinary tightness of meaning” (52). Apparently isolated and trifling details are coerced into integrating a continuously meaningful chain of events: thus, the novel is strewn with foreshadowing devices (dreams, hints, prophecies, etc.) and repetitions, en- suring the utmost transparency of the message. Paradoxically, the realist novel negates the vicissitudes of reality: Seth’s transparent hermeneutics departs from reality, where nothing makes such consistent sense. The universe of ordered significance that governs A Suitable Boy is best epitomized by the figure of the family tree,5 a reassuring space of coherent identity that confers meaning upon the subject by defining his/her position in a symbolic structure enfolding and transcending the individual. The stabilizing, reifying verticality of the family tree is an apt metaphor for the realist text: “the realist space is concatenated (see Zola’s preparatory sketches for his novels) or arborescent (the family tree)” (Hamon 147, my translation).6 Through the character of Amit who, as the writer of monstrously garrulous historical novels, functions as the author’s surrogate, Vikram

4. A notable exception is Two Lives, a text that blends two distinct genres: biography and autobiography. Even the astounding hybridity of The Golden Gate draws from a specific generic model, the novel in verse exemplified by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Seth thus stands in stark contrast to Salman Rushdie or Amitav Ghosh, who constantly mix a variety of genres in their writing. 5. Seth follows the nineteenth-century novelistic convention of prefacing the narrative with family trees. These trees describe the intertwining lives of several generations of four representative families: the Mehras, the Khans, the Kapoors and the Chatterjis. 6. “l’espace réaliste est un espace emboîté (cf. les croquis préparatoires de Zola pour ses romans) ou arborescent (l’arbre généalogique).” 24

Seth overtly compares his work to a banyan tree: “it sprouts, and grows, and spreads, and drops branches that become trunks or intertwine with other branches. Sometimes branches die. Sometimes the main trunk dies, and the structure is held up by the supporting trunks” (524). This metafictional comment implies the slow and ample growth of an entity that acquires imposing dimensions through size and intricacy of design; it suggests that through all the digressions and diversions, the thread of the narrative is always maintained in A Suitable Boy. It is by no means coincidental that the metaphor of the tree should be re-employed by Dr Durrani, the mathematical genius: “You said, apropos the Pergolesi Lemma, ‘The concept will form a tree.’ It was a, er, a brilliant comment – I never thought of it in those terms before” (228). The metaphor, which unveils deep affinities between the realist novel and scientific discourse, revealsA Suit- able Boy to be an epistemological enterprise: Seth’s text reflects a holistic view of the novel and an optimistic attempt at deciphering the world. Contrary to what postmoder- nists hold, the novel suggests that reality can be deciphered and represented through the conventional lens of verisimilitude. This unshakeable belief in readability and intelligibility is potently evinced by the ruthless repression of chaotic forces within the novel. The main plot is provided by the doomed Hindu-Muslim romance of Lata and Kabir against a backdrop of communal tensions – a romantic topos that is integrated into the realist novel. Although disruptive forces are central to the development of the realist plot – if Lata had not fallen in love with Kabir, her mother would not have instituted a search for a suitable boy – Vikram Seth keeps fragmentation at bay, corroborating Bersani’s claim that “realistic fiction admits heroes of desire in order to submit them to ceremonies of expulsion” (67). Seth’s elimination of disruptive forces is further exemplified by the character of Rasheed, who nurtures socialist ideals and tries to ensure the land reform can take effect in his village so Kachheru, his family’s senior worker, can gain rights to the land he has been tilling for years. Having incurred the wrath of his family, and inadvertently provoked the ruin of the man he was trying to protect, he goes mad and commits suicide. As evinced by Kabir’s brutal dismissal and Rasheed’s suicide in the last chapters of the novel, the anarchic forces at work in the novel are duly eradicated, in an ostensible attempt to stage the ultimate triumph of rationality over the wild ecstasies of passion, and of sense over sensibility. In fact, the very title of Seth’s novel is an unveiled reference to the leitmotif of Jane Austen’s fiction – finding a suitable match or a “proper object” ( Emma 32). In A Suit- able Boy, reality effects are constantly subverted within the text by overt metafictional allusions to canonical English novels. A strand of self-references revolves around the character of Amit, the Bengali novelist and poet who stands for the author’s intradie- getic double: “Jane Austen is the only woman in his life” (415), Amit’s sister declares. Moreover, when summoned by a reader to justify the meandering structure of his novels – “as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist” (1370) – Amit states: “I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they’re bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they’re good, I turn into a social moron for days […]. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch” (1370-1).7 These somewhat wry gestures of filial tribute display

7. The reference to Middlemarch is not fortuitous: just as George Eliot examined the great political and social changes in an earlier England, so Seth writing in the 1990s recreates a bygone period of transition. Besides, the Middlemarch of 25 Reviving the “Great Tradition” of the British Novel: Realism and Transparency a mix of intimacy and irony, exposing Seth’s novel as a rewriting of the Great English novel. Transparency is achieved here, not through referentiality but through the ostentatious superimposition of one text over another. In fact, there are many mirror-effects in A Suitable Boy. Mrs Rupa Mehra’s lament – “I have to do everything in this house, and no one cares for me. […] I have slaved for you all my life, and you don’t care if I live or die” (405) – echoes Mrs Bennet’s endless wailing in Austen’sPride and Prejudice: “nobody is on my side, nobody takes part with me, I am cruelly used, nobody feels for my poor nerves” (76). Likewise, the glamorous Meenakshi is an Oriental version of Rosamond in Middlemarch: both women are characterized by their superb arrogance and breath-taking beauty; both marry a man from another caste or another class against their parents’ advice and end up indulging in adultery. In Middlemarch, the narrator’s descriptions of Rosamond are strewn with references to her gracious neck, a symbol of her vanity; therefore, it is not surprising that the depictions of Meenakshi in A Suitable Boy should stress her beautiful neck.8 Seth puts forth an elaborate system of intertextual connections, establishing complicity with the reader who is able to spot these playful reflections: “By revealing the makeup itself, the signer does not defraud the author whose work he exploits. Far from fooling the reader, he appeals to his complicity” (Jeandillou 119, my translation).9 In fact, the novel is dotted with subtle, strategically placed Aus- tenian moments. Thus, the passage in which Haresh looks at a photograph of Lata as he writes to her in section 18.18 mirrors a scene in the last part of Pride and Prejudice. As Elizabeth tours the estate of Pemberley with the Gardiners, she comes across a portrait of Darcy and realizes that her deep antipathy toward the young man has turned into more tender feelings: “There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original” (191). Seth reproduces this formula almost verba- tim to describe Haresh and Lata’s incipient love: “I have your framed photograph on my desk before me, and it brings to me tender thoughts of the original” (1411). The term “original” is crucial. Though on a first level, the substantive clearly refers to Lata, it also has a deeper import: through the notion of “original,” this passage openly posits itself as a translation of Jane Austen’s novels.10 Translation is an illuminating paradigm in A Suitable Boy: by transplanting the Great Tradition of the English novel to the Indian postcolonial context, Vikram Seth establishes difference at the heart of similarity. In the third part of the book, the description of the Barsaat Mahal operates at a metafictional level, revealing A Suitable Boy to be a distorting mirror: “its reflection in the water almost perfect, almost unrippled” (180). The adverb “almost,” which is repeated twice and further highlighted by the binary rhythm, echoes Homi Bhabha’s definition of “mimicry”: “almost the same, but not the title is, like Seth’s Brahmpur, a fictitious provincial city offered to the reader as typifying an actual society (another model for Brahmpur might be sought in that other imaginary city, Narayan’s Malgudi). 8. “stretching her long, tawny neck like a relaxed cat…” (10); “The long-necked Meenakshi” (69); “Meenakshi stro- ked the side of her neck with the long, red-polished nail of the middle finger of her right hand” (71); etc. In Middlemarch, references to Rosamond’s neck abound: “[…] said Rosamond […] with eyes swerving towards the new view of her neck in the glass” (113); “she […] turned her long neck a little” (160); “Rosamond […] gave a certain turn of her graceful neck” (344); “she gave her neck a meditative turn” (351); etc. 9. “En rendant perceptible le maquillage lui-même, le signataire ne dépouille point celui dont il exploite les œuvres, et, loin de berner son lecteur, il sollicite sa complicité.” 10. In The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge underlines the correspondence between literary reprise and translation: “One variety of literary translation in the wider sense is imitation, the production of a work that follows the stylistic and generic norms established by another work – a kind of translation into the same language” (74). 26 quite” (122). It is precisely in the light of this crucial concept that A Suitable Boy should be construed. Through mimicry, which “is at once resemblance and menace” (Bhabha 123), the novel exorcizes the inherent authority of the Great English novel as F. R. Lea- vis circumscribed it. This tradition was intrinsically bound up with the growth of Em- pire, serving as “a template for the denial of the value of the ‘peripheral,’ the ‘marginal,’ the ‘uncanonized’” (Ashcroft 3). The alienating power of the English classic is an acute concern for the postcolonial author who needs to define his origins and assert his ori - ginality in a tongue and a space/time in which the boundaries between same and other are problematic. In Figures du double: Du personnage au texte (2008), Nathalie Martinière assesses the value and purport of literary reprise in the postcolonial context. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s work but disputing his vision of literature as an autonomous, autotelic universe cut off from historical contingencies, she underlines the petrifying power of the classic for the postcolonial writer: “Today, anxiety takes the form of the already written text/novel, a petrifying Medusa,” and further on: “It is the relation to previous texts that reveals itself as alienating” (11 and 12 respectively, my translation).11 The most potent way for Seth to exorcize this “anxiety of influence” (to take up the title of Bloom’s famous book) is to hover endlessly between repetition and disparity. Though most critics have used binary paradigms (such as subjection/resistance, rejection/adhe- sion, etc.) to analyze A Suitable Boy, the novel’s relation to the Great Tradition cannot be seen as altogether complicitous or simply adversarial.12 The complex dialectic operating in A Suitable Boy stresses that it is by no means a “transparent” – i.e., identical, undistor - ted – reflection of the novels by Jane Austen and George Eliot. Although Seth’s text is seemingly disconnected from the postcolonial impulse, close examination of his prose reveals that this is in fact not the case. Seth’s prose features a “doubleness” (Atkins 58) which, while being immaculate En- glish, often espouses the movement and sentence structure of vernacular languages. The complexities of the Indian language mosaic raise issues that have concerned many Indo-Anglian writers: since most Indians master more than one language and constantly shift from one language to another, the depiction in English of a multilingual society will most of the time involve some degree of translation. When Seth’s narrator specifies the language in which a dialogue occurs – “‘I hope things are well with you, Meenakshi,’ said Mrs Chatterji, reverting for a moment to Bengali. / ‘Wonderfully well, Mago,’ re- plied Meenakshi in English” (427) – he posits himself as a translator, thus shattering the transparency of the realist text insofar as the text is not true to the original, though the message gets across the barrier of language without any distortion. However, Seth is not so much translating from vernacular languages into English as using various poetic devices to instill otherness into his prose and make his text read like a translation. For instance, when the courtesan Saeeda Bai reproaches the Raja of Mahr for not paying a visit to her, the ostensibly ornate, courtly quality of the prose signals she is speaking in Urdu: “How long it has been since these eyes last saw you. […] You have become as difficult to sight as the moon at Id” (131). The synecdoche “these eyes” and the

11. “En période contemporaine, l’angoisse prend la forme de cette tête de méduse pétrifiante qu’est le texte/roman déjà écrit,” and “c’est le rapport aux textes antérieurs qui se donne à voir comme aliénant.” 12. In Postcolonial Con-texts, John Thieme underlines the simplism involved in seeing the relationship between postcolonial texts and their canonical intertexts in terms of a purely oppositional model of influence: “the relationship between postcolonial con-text and canonical pre-text is invariably a complex and ambivalent one…” (2). 27 Reviving the “Great Tradition” of the British Novel: Realism and Transparency comparison with Eid-ul-Fitr – a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan and is determined by the sighting of the moon – introduce linguistic otherness into the heart of the English language. The same phenomenon is to be noticed when Saeeda Bai re- primands Maan for neglecting her: “Rumour has it, Dagh Sahib, that you have been in town for some days now. […] But the hyacinth that obtained favour yesterday appears withered today to the connoisseur” (871). The elegance of Saeeda Bai’s English, along with the striking imagery of these passages, function as a “symbolic” Urdu (Srivastava 871). Beneath its carefully polished surface, Seth’s prose contrasts Saeeda Bai’s sophisticated Urdu with the coarser Urdu spoken by peasants with little or no code-switching. Likewise, the types of English in A Suitable Boy range from the idiomatic British English of Lata and Amit to the more laboured schoolroom English of Haresh or the comi- cally mangled Babu English of other characters. A fascinatingly supple medium, Seth’s seemingly transparent prose thus encompasses a rich linguistic mosaic. In the above-cited excerpt, the beautiful image of the flower draws on the tradition of Urdu poetry, the ghazal. As the music that brings together Maan and Saeeda Bai – two of the main characters – this poetic form plays an important role in the novel’s plot. Through the character of Amit, who resorts to yet another comparison to describe the structure of his novel, likening it to the unfolding of a raga, classical Indian music is also given prominence in A Suitable Boy. Geetha Ganapathy-Doré has shown that Seth’s novel rests on an extensive transposition of the Hindustani musical modes: the first pages are a slow improvisation (alap) on arranged marriages, a theme that forms the novel’s “tonal” background. In fact, A Suitable Boy is strewn with the names of specific ragas (Bhairava, Todi, Ramkali, Darbari, etc.), which distance the average Western reader who has no knowledge of modal music and is therefore utterly unable to distinguish one raga from another. Likewise, the untutored reader is unlikely to grasp Ustad Majeed Khan’s outrage when one of his students wants to learn Malkauns, a late night raga, in the morning: “‘So you’ve come in the morning today,’ said Ustad Majeed Khan. ‘How can I teach you Malkosh in the morning?’” (315). The author does not mention a crucial distinguishing feature of modal music, namely that each raga conveys a specific sentiment which is attuned to a definite season or moment of the day: departing from the parameters set down for each raga is, as it were, a sacrilege. The ghazal and the raga thus serve as a potent reminder of cultural otherness. The issue of transparency casts powerful light on A Suitable Boy. Though Vikram Seth displays an unfashionable belief in representational transparency, his resumption of the realist project of the nineteenth century is so ostentatious – so transparent – that it shatters the referentiality of the realist novel, drawing attention to the text’s status as a translation of the Great Tradition of the English novel. A Suitable Boy does not by any means boil down to a servile replication of the novels by Jane Austen and George Eliot. In fact, by transplanting this novelistic tradition to the Indian postcolonial context, Seth establishes striking interrelations between same and other, injecting linguistic and cultural opacity into the heart of the Great English novel. Although many critics berate Vikram Seth for evading the politics of his own cultural, historical and political location because of the problematic assumption that realist writing is inherently less subversive and therefore less postcolonial than non-realist modes, Seth’s reproduction of the representational apparatus of the Great English novel actually has a profound critical and political dimension. Indeed, it is precisely literary reprise – this seemingly introverted 28

practice – that paradoxically brings about a direct confrontation with the problem of the relation of the aesthetic to a world of significance external to itself, rooting artistic productions in a historical context that cannot be left aside or forgotten. A Suitable Boy thus emphasizes that “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Bhabha 55).

Mélanie HeyDari-malayeri University Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle

W orks Cited

asHcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 1989. London: Routledge, 2002. atkins, Angela. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy: A Reader’s Guide. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2002. attriDGe, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2010. austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. ––. Emma. 1816. London: The Zodiac P, 1955. Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. BHaBHa, Homi. The Location of Culture. 1994. London: Routledge Classics, 2004. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. casanoVa, Pascale. La République mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Trans. DeBeVoise, M. B. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. cHauDHuri, Amit. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. London: Picador, 2001. coHn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1978. Desai, Anita. “Sitting Pretty.” The New York Review of Books (May 27, 1993). 12 January 2011. < http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1993/may/27/sitting-pretty>. eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871-2. London: Penguin, 2003. GanapatHy-Dore, Geetha. “Certain Notes in a Certain Pattern: Nuances of the Love Sentiment in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy.” Les Cahiers du Sahib 2 (1994): 75-94. Hamon, Philippe. “Un discours contraint.” Littérature et réalité. Ed. Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Seuil, 1982. 119-81. James, Henry. The Tragic Muse. 1890. New York: Penguin Classics, 1995. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. JeanDillou, Jean-François. Esthétique de la mystification: Tactique et stratégies littéraires. Paris: Minuit, 1994. leaVis, Frank Raymond. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. New York: G.W. Stewart, 1948. martinière, Nathalie. Figures du double: Du personnage au texte. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2008. parker, Peter, ed. The Reader’s Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel. London: Fourth Estate, 1994. rose, Margaret. Parody, Ancient, Modern and Post-modern. Cambridge: CUP, 1993. setH, Vikram. The Golden Gate. London: Faber, 1986. ––. A Suitable Boy. 1993. London: Phoenix, 1994. ––. An Equal Music. London: Phoenix, 1999. ––. Two Lives. London: Abacus, 2006. sriVastaVa, Neelam. Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English. London: Routledge, 2008. tHieme, John. Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon. New York; London: Continuum, 2001. Screens in Janet Frame’s “The Secret”

In “The Secret,” the safe world of childhood is shattered by an enigma far larger than all the small secrets it shelters, and yet the story reads like a little riddle: Myrtle who already sees herself on the screen as the next Ginger Rogers is in fact nothing but a Gingerbread girl. Far from introducing a reassuring logic, the subtext contributes to the uncanny nature of what is touched upon. What proves particularly powerful in this story, as in the rest of The Lagoon and Other Stories, is the paradoxical association of opacity and transparency: the imaginary is not a veil for the symbolic that can be lifted. There is no going behind the screen – even when one crosses to the other side. Rather, enigmas in Frame’s fiction write themselves on screens which, whether verbal or visual, are to be conceived both as barriers and filters.

There are in The Lagoon and Other Stories favourite words, words that recur with a striking regularity, and “secret” is one of them. When one takes a close look at the stories, it is clear that secrets vary enormously in nature. But the word itself always possesses the same particular charge. It marks a point where the signifier is felt to carry an excess, where it resonates with a special power and in doing so, foregrounds its resistance and opacity, screening off what it insistently offers to our attention. The effect is accentua- ted through repetition: at the end of “Swans,” the word “secret” multiplies like the birds who give shape to the dark, “like secret sad ships, secret and quiet” (65). At this point, we seem to witness both a dropping and a lifting of the curtain: “it was as if they were walking into another world that had been kept secret from everyone” (65). There is a clear sense of having crossed a threshold and yet of remaining on the edge, or rather of moving right in the middle of a landscape which one cannot truly enter. Christine Lorre uses an interesting simile when she describes the swans as “the negative image, in photographic terms, of the world” (92). What is rightly described as an epiphany draws its power mostly from a reversibility that alters the familiar picture of the world almost beyond recognition. But then the other side is perhaps not just a shadowy version of the world as we know it, it feels like a space drawn out of a secret wardrobe, a space outside space in which everything is intensely tangible and perfectly remote, both more real and more unreal. The impression of simultaneously hitting upon and hitting against something which disrupts spatial coordinates translates itself in aural terms: the “secret sea” that has “crept inside your head forever” is a “hush,” a noise that brings out the eerie silence surrounding the scene. In a collection of stories where writing can be approached to a large extent in terms of vision, it is on the role of screens that I would thus like to dwell. If a double for the artist is to be found in the child, for whom, in Blake’s words, “the doors of perception” do not need to be “cleansed,” one must insist that what children see in Frame’s fiction is largely what they make up. Intense and acutely physical as it may be, the relation of children to the world is highly mediated. In that respect, the verbal constraints which cramp the language of adults is not something of which they are entirely free. The fascination with which they listen to people being spoken rather than speaking is largely a fascination with words, with their enigmatic power, and not just an attempt to expose 30 the limitations of those who no longer hear themselves speak. The limits of what can be seen and said are set right from the start in “The Lagoon”: the first story of the collection revolves around a murdered man who has taken his secret with him to the bottom of the lagoon. What remains is shrouded in uncertainty. There is no skeleton in the cupboard, no irretrievable family secret in the second story, “The Secret.” On the contrary, the so-called secret comes out in full light, however awkwardly and inadequa- tely blurted out by the mother. But what words, one may ask, are suitable when it comes to telling a child that her adored sister suffers from a heart defect so severe that she could die at any moment? The story presents itself as the portrait of a radiant creature, a girl who is literally biting into life. But the picture is in some way altered by the menace hanging over the future, especially as we can suppose that what was merely a threat has materialised some time between the moment of revelation and the indeterminate moment of narration. Of course, it is crucial to read “The Secret” together with the next story, “Keel and Kool,” which opens with a photographic session in which a friend poses where a dead sister now called Eva formerly stood. In the diptych formed by the two stories, we can underline a form of chiastic effect: in “The Secret,” Myrtle who is very much alive is somehow already dead; in “Keel and Kool” Eva, who is no longer in the picture, is still there in many other ways. In both cases, the picture cannot be simple or single as it is caught in a time warp. Transparency is undermined by the invisible presence of time. Claire Bazin reminds us that in the chapter of the Autobiography devoted to the death of her sister, Frame dwells on a family photograph taken during a holiday to Rakaia where every member of the family has come out well, apart from Myrtle who, due to some freak technical mishap, “appeared transparent” on the photo (To the Island 105). We can suggest that the ghostly photograph which is left out of the fiction is not entirely absent. It can be made to stand, in both stories, for what is (already or still) there without being visible. It emphasises the presence of a blind spot or a blind field within the picture, of something which challenges the nature and reality of what lies in front of one’s very eyes. From the moment the invisible is not outside the picture but within it, woven into its fabric, from the moment transparency itself becomes deceptive, the secret that the image hoards can no longer be clearly defined. The neat division between what is hidden and what lies in broad daylight collapses. The pattern of concealment and disclosure, the notion that revelation depends on the lifting of a veil and is only a matter of time no longer operate. In the study he devotes to the secret, Le Seuil de la fiction, essai sur le secret, Richard Pedot makes a distinction between the enigma and the mystery on the one hand, and the secret on the other hand. According to Pedot, the enigma and the mystery are both based on the possibility of resolution or revelation, in a more or less distant future, here or in the world beyond. By contrast, what he chooses to name the secret has nothing to do with any form of dissimulation; it eludes the opposition between the veiled and the unveiled: “[the secret] ends up calling into question the antinomy between the veiled and the unveiled.”1 Christine Lorre, as for her, in a study entirely devoted to secrets in The Lagoon and Other Stories, makes a distinction between two kinds of secrets, the riddle on the one hand and the enigma on the other hand: whereas the riddle, in Paul de Man’s words, is “merely the deferment of a known secret,”

1. “[Le secret] arrive à en remettre en question l’antinomie du voilé et du dévoilé” (52, my translation). 31 Screens in Janet Frame’s “The Secret” an enigma “does not necessarily have a definite answer” (Lorre 87). What is brought to the fore once again, despite the difference in the choice of the terms, is the existence of a secret that does not await disclosure. Basing her analysis on Derrida and on Ginette Michaux’s study of the secret in his philosophy, Lorre suggests that this particular secret is best approached through the notion of the “illegible” rather than through the “invisible” – the invisible being too pregnant with the notion of something hidden from sight and thus always ready to be disclosed, whereas the illegible suggests something simultaneously cryptic and undecipherable. It is in fact this opposition and distribution between the visual and the verbal which I would like to examine in The Lagoon and Other Stories and more particularly in “The Se- cret,” where I feel the terms can very easily be turned around. Here one might say that the visible harbours an enigma that makes all notions of unveiling irrelevant, whilst the narrative does read like a riddle that calls for some decoding. Of course, it also becomes apparent that riddles themselves can be screens, games that barely conceal the presence of what cannot be worded, so that they too become contaminated by the power of the enigma. What matters then is to see how screens themselves, whether verbal or visual, are not to be conceived simply as barriers preventing access to something beyond, but become the site of paradox: what is impossible to grasp or locate is nothing but what lies here, tied in the fabric of the text or the image. To take things from the start again, let us remember that before anything is said about Myrtle’s faulty heart, she is depicted as the picture of health. She is also the girl who dreams of a golden future and fancies herself as the next Ginger Rogers. Unlike what happens in the story entitled “The Pictures,” we are led to understand that Myrtle does not simply take refuge or live vicariously in front of the cinema screen. Myrtle the dreamer is also a doer. In fact, in all respects she appears as a living paradox. Myrtle is girly and yet a bit of a tomboy, she is still a child and yet she already behaves like a woman, she is now tender, now cruel – a demon with “curly golden hair” (11) who also admires Jean Harlow (the blonde who, in Hell’s Angels, is not the angel she may be thought to be). But it is mostly the impression she gives of living in a world of her own whilst being intensely involved in “this” world which strikes the reader. With the mother’s revelation, the figure of paradox is nevertheless jeopardised by the figure of irony. Like paradox, irony feeds on what is double and ambiguous but irony divides; it exposes blindness, resting on the tacit assumption that it knows better. Thus a gap appears between what is thought to be known and what is not yet known: when Myrtle faints after a swim, an ominous sign to say the least, she is hugely excited at the idea of having looked “pale and deathly” (14) in the arms of the doctor. Irony also threatens to blot out the plural with a singular. We are told in the first lines of the story that Myrtle has come back from down south “full of secret smiles,” which gives her plenty to hide or share with her sister and “confidante” (11). But “the” secret which gives the title its name seems to cancel the newly acquired experience or awareness in matters of love and sex, replacing it by the knowledge that death awaits and undermining the complicity between the sisters: now that Nini knows, what are all the little secrets she shares with her sister compared to “the” secret, the one and only, the one she cannot tell for she has been sworn to secrecy, or at least told not to tell? Of course irony’s greatest resource lies in its ability to play on words. On second reading, the whole story appears to be strewn with hints of what is to come, such as when Nini says that Myrtle’s romance with Vin- 32 cent “died what they call a natural death” (12). But the most powerful irony lies in the description of the mother “baking ginger bread” (15) and “sticking on raisins for eyes” (16) just as she is about to tell Nini that her sister “may go at any time” (16). Myrtle cannot be the next Ginger Rogers for the simple reason that she is a just a Gingerbread girl. She may think that she is too fast to catch, but like the gingerbread man who “ran, ran, laughing and singing,” she is sure to be caught in the end. She may be literally biting into life, but she is the one who will get eaten before she knows it. If myrtle leaves are one of the symbols of Venus, the plant is also prized for its berry fruit, which, when dried, can be used as a substitute for pepper. One may reread the whole story looking for possible inscriptions or reminders of the story of the Gingerbread man. One of them lies in the fact that Myrtle dies swimming; the gingerbread man gets eaten by the fox which, in some versions of the story, has carried him on its back across the water. There is no fox in “The Secret,” but on their long way back from down town the partying girls come across a “fox terrier” chained up; the sisters also stop at Mrs Feathers on their way back from town – we may remember that one of the creatures which threaten to eat the Gingerbread man is a chicken. If this sounds slightly too far-fetched, what cannot be overlooked is the inversion of the motif of eating into being eaten. The narrator points out that kind Mrs Feathers is always ready to treat the girls to a “chocolate fish with pink inside” (despite the bills the family runs at a time when their father does not “see how he [is] going to keep the wolf from the door” 14-5). Having just mentioned Mrs Feathers’ generosity with the chocolate fish, the narrator immediately proceeds to inform the reader about Myrtle’s skills as a swimmer: “Myrtle taught me to swim too. She was good at swimming […]. You’re like a fish the people said. Isn’t she like a fish” (15). Let us also remember that the first paragraph which mentions Myrtle’s holiday and romantic interlude in the south presents us with an orchard where “the fallen apples go squelch squelch under- foot” (11). Myrtle’s appetite for life includes boys and she gives every sign of promising to become a bold and ruthless man-eater; she certainly makes no bones about ridding herself of Vincent after “observing him in the intimacies of eating and drinking and going off to the bathroom for an abortive shave” (12). Little does she know that she is the one who is going to be prematurely cast out and devoured. It is possible to explore this process of ironic inversion further but at this point it is perhaps more important to try and assess its value, the division it introduces within the same story between two tales, one of which seems to work as a screen for the other. One could crudely oppose the realm of the Imaginary – the screen on which Myrtle projects her life as if she were already a Hollywood actress – and the realm of the Sym- bolic where words obey an implacable logic of their own, and where the letter always gets the better. But the fact that Myrtle’s death reads like a riddle is potentially more dis- quieting than reassuring. Play turns out to be entirely at the service of death, and death conversely encroaches upon the territory of childhood, borrowing its games. There is something eerie in the very ability of words to take on a life of their own, in meaning the opposite of what they mean, or in meaning exactly what they mean. The fact that Myrtle’s death should be spelled out in no uncertain terms finally makes room for -so mething opaque, an opacity which actually translates in visual terms. Even before we 33 Screens in Janet Frame’s “The Secret” get to the last scene, where for some critics, “a quasi fantastic”2 mood or mode prevails, there is something slightly disturbing in the picture of the mother sticking her raisins into the gingerbread man, and in the very crude and cruel relevance of the little tale. Ac- cording to Claire Bazin and Alice Braun, tales in The Lagoon and Other Stories offer refuge into a parallel imaginary world in moments of anxiety.3 To illustrate this – what they have more particularly in mind is fairy tales – they quote the description of the mother in “The Secret” just before she is about to confide in Nini: “My mother looked sad and helpless like the princess in the fairy tale when she has to empty the sea with a thimble or spin a room full of thread in a night or find the lost ring lying at the bottom of the lake” (88). If the fairy tale works as a stopper to the child’s anguish, it is important to remark that it first brings it out and makes it intensely tangible. In that respect it remains perfectly ambivalent. One might add that the anxiety does not lie just outside the picture here, i.e., in the gravity of what Nini perhaps senses her mother is about to say. It is the vision of the mother itself, a mother “sad and helpless like a princess” which introduces something uncanny – something which makes the situation either ridiculous and laughable or “funny” in a more disturbing way (needless to say, this ambiguity is also crucial in Frame’s fiction). “Sad” is another special word inThe Lagoon, another word charged with meaning, and meaning more than it means. At that moment, the mother looks strange, almost unrecognisable, especially as she is pictured in one of those sce- narios that belong to dreams or rather, nightmares. On second reading the fact that she should also be baking at that very moment – i.e., made to play, unwittingly, a more than ambiguous part in another tale – adds to the remote and potentially unsettling quality of the scene: the mother who is shuddering at the thought of death is the maker of the gingerbread, the giver of life but also of death. We can identify in The Lagoon a pattern where the flight into the imaginary is sanctioned at the end by a violent return to reality (“Treasure,” which Bazin and Braun quote to support this point, is probably the best example of this). But we get a different story here: for a moment the imaginary is closely woven into something which one might, precisely, call real. The screen at this point simultaneously hides and conceals; it is not just a barrier, but a filter which both stops and allows something of the unspeakable Real, in this case in the form of anguish, to come through. Just like at the end of “Swans,” this duality gains power in the last scene, as darkness materialises into shapes, and as the familiar bedroom turns strange. It is as if Nini had to accommodate the so-called “secret” and accommodate herself to it, having first tried to fend off the veiled truth contained in the mother’s euphemisms with what you might call direct words: “That meant die and death, but Myrtle couldn’t die. Gosh we had fun together” (16). The shadow of the tree outside actually enters the room and the objects within also make “fantastic shapes of troll and dwarf ” (17). But in the midst of all this there is another shape, much closer and much more familiar but which has started to alter and to become less recognisable. Within a story which can loosely be called a portrait, the last scene constitutes a close-up, a vision made sharper by stasis and silence. However, what the narrator sees is not a face but the slumbering form of her sister; what she sees is in fact one of her father’s old shirts that Myrtle is wearing as a nightie.

2. See Sambamoorthy. 3. “In The Lagoon and Other Stories, fairy tales provide […] a parallel imaginary world in which children can seek refuge, in moments of anxiety in particular” (87, my translation). 34

This small detail is all the more arresting if we think of the next story where Winnie is left with her dead sister’s clothes: “It was so funny at home with Eva’s dresses hanging up [...] But it was good wearing Eva’s blue pajamas […] But it would have been better if Eva were there to see” (“Keel and Kool” 24). In “The Secret,” the shirt that does not belong and that hides the body already announces the dress that will hang empty or the pajamas which will be worn by somebody else in “Keel and Kool.” In the dark, the only thing that shines is not Myrtle’s eyes, as they are closed, but the “pearl buttons” of the father’s shirt, small unseeing eyes. We may find here a last reminder of the Gingerbread man whose eyes are, in fact, no different from the buttons of his coat. Rather than simply vanishing before the larger enigma, the riddle reveals perhaps one last time its eerie potential. Nini simultaneously sees and does not see what lies in front of her, as she is not just gazing but gazed at – to paraphrase the title of Georges Didi-Huberman’s Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde – by something opaque. One may remember at this point another little “funny” detail mentioned earlier when Nini, lying in bed next to Myrtle, shares her own dreams with her: “I would be an opera star, I said, or a blind violinist” (14). We are enlightened in the next sentence about this odd pronouncement when the narrator adds that she was once moved to tears by a violinist who came to play in their town and happened to be blind. There is something both quirky and comic in the process through which “blind” becomes attached to “violinist” to form a sort of compound, as if it designated a separate, clearly identified category. Yet the theme of blindness takes on a new, sharper relevance in the last scene. The comic effect is gone but what remains is a paradoxical association, a simultaneous sharpening and cancelling of the power of the senses: in the darkness of the room, the sister who lies next to Nini has started to become invisible, and yet Nini has perhaps never been so much in touch with the enigma of life and death. Finally it seems that seeing – or not seeing – becomes too unsettling: Nini calls her sister to try to wake her up, but gets no response. She then listens to her sister’s heart at the same time as she reaches for the shape next to her. The emphasis which is placed on all the senses throughout the story helps establish that Myrtle is not just a product of the imagination, a shadow on a screen: how could anyone doubt that Myrtle is alive when she pinches you so hard (no need to “pinch yourself,” as the phrase goes, to make sure that you are not dreaming) or when she actually “smells alive”? The thick “lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dud” of her heart in the last scene seems to have the power to dispel the shadows and to shut out the threat of death. Nini’s final gesture can be read as a form of escapism or denial, but as one knows, denial is double-edged. Just as the sound of the sea at the end of “Swans” is a “hush” that brings out the silence, the drum-like “lub-dub,” the only fragile assertion of life in the quiet of the room, may bring home to the reader (if not to the child) the threat that this heart could stop at any minute. The ambiguous nature of what is now a vocal screen is even more apparent at the end of “Keel and Kool,” where Eva is now truly invisible, gone for ever (it so happens that “ever” is the last word of the story and it reinforces a “never”). A difference of mo- dulation in the same cry allows Winnie to make two voices out of one, to imagine two gulls which would bear the names of the sound they each produce: as she sits alone, it is something that connects her with her sister, shields her from absolute solitude and sheer absence. But the piercing sound, now a call, now a mere cry, now a name, now just one of nature’s noises, also allows something of that absence to filter and sharpens 35 Screens in Janet Frame’s “The Secret” its power. The end of the “The Secret” restores and consolidates the duo or duet that breaks apart in the last sentence of “Keel and Kool.” Having checked that her sister’s heart is beating, Nini thinks: “tomorrow there’ll be a ripe plum on the plum tree, Myrtle and I will eat it” (17). In this sentence which reverses one last time the motif of eating / being eaten, the reader may hear a need for reassurance: the repetition of the word “plum,” the consonance produced by the plosives and the choice of the rounded vowel which echoes the “u” in “lub-dub” all underline the desire to recreate the happy bubble that was burst by the mother’s news. But what is not entirely clear is how this vision of fullness and ripeness should be read. In other words, whether this is yet more fodder for irony, or whether paradox might not have its place after all in Nini’s “tomorrow.” In spite of many differences, I find here a form of ambiguity and complexity which is not unlike that which prevails in the last sentence of Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”: “But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still” (105). The vision which can be thought to cast a cruel light on Bertha’s earlier happiness could also mean that not everything has been blighted, that the moment she shared with another woman in the contemplation of the tree has left something which cannot be destroyed. As I pointed out earlier, the singular in Frame’s title cancels or conceals a plural: the mother’s secret potentially overrides all other secrets, but in this story which brims over with the fierce energy of life, one may ask whether “the secret” could not just as well be Myrtle’s secret gift for happiness, or the force of a “for ever now” (“Swans” 61) which opposes its resistance to “the never ever” throughout The Lagoon. I have suggested that riddles cannot simply be opposed to enigmas in The Lagoon but can be contaminated by the power of the enigmatic, shattering the secure world of childhood where one delights in talking in code or cracking codes. However, what is no longer available at the end of “The Secret” or “Keel and Kool” is not just a code or a cipher; it is the possibility of relying forever on a very special bond, which is perhaps what the trading of secrets is mostly about. You “keep” secrets or you “trust” someone with them, you might “betray” them, but you can also “share” them – none of these apply either to riddles or enigmas. In the various attempts at definition one can make, it seems that this is a key distinction. “The Secret” marks a moment when the world becomes opaque, not just because it ceases to be legible but also because a vital tie is suddenly broken. Nini’s mother does not so much share a secret with her daughter as she relieves or unburdens herself on her. Simultaneously, she makes her the bearer of a secret that cannot be shared. The sense of solitude with which “The Secret” leaves us is even stronger at the end of “Keel and Kool” where the screen formed by the sky turns into a kind of mirror in front of which Winnie stands alone. Whilst mirrors are not that frequent in The Lagoon and Other Stories, such mirror effects sharpen the impression that “the antinomy between the veiled and the unveiled” is always ready to collapse – that what appears as single or simple is not just double, but potentially shaped or distorted by a blind spot which remains outside the frame. In an article called “Through a Glass Darkly: Reading the Enigmatic Frame,” Jan Cronin concentrates on the double translation which is given in The Adaptable Man of the famous passage in St Paul’s “Letter to the Corinthians.” The first translation offered is: “For now we see through a glass darkly” and the second: “Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror” (Cronin 13). Cronin insists on the importance of stressing that “glass” is to be read as “mirror” and on the relevance of the correction as far as Frame’s 36 fiction is concerned, as her novel points to “a flawed closed system rather than a flawed route to the transcendental and the absolute” (19). This motif already finds a translation in several stories of The Lagoon, and most clearly in an image which is to be found at the beginning of the first story, “The Lagoon”: “sometimes at night there is an underwater moon, dim and secret” (3). The moon comes both from above and from below, it is both a reflection and an emanation from another world. Unfathomable reflection can prove more puzzling than unfathomable depth, as it causes a disruption of space. The uncertainty that results from this dis-location suggests a “flaw” in the “closed system” which in fact makes it not entirely closed, or potentially both closed and infinite. In this flawed world “to see through a glass darkly” sounds potentially as a good synonym for having “the wrong way of looking at life” (“My Last Story” 183), Frame’s closing line in The Lagoon and Other Stories. Both phrases should invite us to think, or rethink, what it may mean to be a “visionary.”

Pascale tollance University Lumière-Lyon 2

W orks Cited

Bazin, Claire. “‘Keel and Kool’ or Autobiografiction?” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 29.2 (Spring 2007): 19-28. Bazin, Claire, and Alice Braun. Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories: Naissance d’une œuvre. Paris: PUF/CNED, 2010. cronin, Jan. “Through a Glass Darkly: Reading the Enigmatic Frame.” Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame. Ed. Jan Cronin and Simone Drichel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 3-23. frame, Janet. The Lagoon and Other Stories. 1951. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. ––. To the Island, Autobiography 1. 1983. London: Paladin, 1987. lorre, Christine. “Secrets in The Lagoon and Other Stories.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 33.2 (Spring 2011): 87-97. peDot, Richard. Le Seuil de la fiction, essai sur le secret. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 2010. mansfielD, Katherine. “Bliss.” 1920. The Collected Stories. London: Penguin, 2007. samBamoortHy, Ahila. “The Fantastic as a Mode of Writing in Janet Frame’s Stories.” Deep South 3.2 (1997). 8 December 2010 . Transparency and Orality in Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories

This article explores Janet Frame’s use of effects of orality in her stories to create a semblance of transparency which both masks and reveals the tensions underlying her fictio - nal world. By imitating the speech patterns of children, Frame creates a vivid contrast between the perception of the adult narrator and the voice of the child which can still be heard within that of the adult. She makes it possible to measure the impact of acquired speech habits embedded in social convention and cliché. Her use of nursery rhymes can also be understood in terms of orality; they offer clues to the often paradoxical relation between sound and sense and allow the reader to link the emotional dilemmas faced by the characters to the cultural substratum that structures human experience.

The importance of language and of Frame’s sensitivity to the social uses of language has been the subject of a number of studies bearing on Frame’s fiction. What I would like to examine specifically in this paper is the effect of her use of a simulated orality in her short stories as a vehicle for an exploration of the effects of speech in social situations. I wish to demonstrate how through a well-calculated exploitation of effects of orality Frame uses her narrators to emphasize the way in which our vision of the world is shaped by the speech of others, how in a sense we “see” the world through what others “say” about it.1 Whether the narrators are homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, their use of an apparently oral discourse creates a simulacrum of transparency and immediacy, as well as a presumed proximity with the reader, which masks the forces of exclusion and distancing which are at work in the texts. This use of orality belongs to the traditional mechanisms of the genre, and Frame’s use of this device is certainly a reflection of her reading and of what she learned from the masters of the form. Frame refers explicitly to William Saroyan, a well-known Ame- rican writer, in her autobiography, and as Gina Mercer points out, “She follows Sa- royan’s advice, providing an overtly subjective record of the simple, the everyday, that which is so often not recorded” (2). Liliane Louvel and Claudine Verley explain in their discussion of the short story that the place of orality in American short fiction reflects its roots in the tall tale (26). While in the tall tale, or yarn, orality is often related to exaggeration, the use of effects of orality in the recounting of seemingly commonplace events makes it possible to expand the gap between an overt simplicity and the emotional horror that often lies underneath. It is in this gap that the American short story has often created its effects, as can be seen in the works of writers like Ring Lardner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, to name only a few of the best-known. There are two aspects of Frame’s writing that I would like to study from the angle of orality. I will first of all try to show how the presence of lexical items and syntactic structures characteristic of oral delivery affect the way in which events and their impact are perceived, making it possible to understand how Frame’s characters experience a

1. See Alice Braun’s study of this aspect of language. 38 world shaped by the speech of others. I will then look at the question of sound and its relation to sense, as suggested in the references to nursery rhymes. In order to understand how effects of orality contribute to the impact of the short story, it is important to see the role it plays in the economy of the form. In using effects of orality, the writer emphasizes the need to retain the interest and attention of the reader, who, within the fictional frame, is positioned as a listener. The narrator therefore exploits the assumptions shared with the reader, adopting linguistic shortcuts in order to gain time and leave sufficient space for the elements he wishes to emphasize. The tendency to simplify syntactic structures and to have recourse to commonly used verbs like “to have,” “to get,” and “to take,” serve as marks of orality. But they are also signs both of haste and of a temptation to streamline the telling of the story in order to give greater impact to the salient features of the narrative. They serve to characterize a speaking voice, making it audible to the reader, at the same time that they appear to gloss over the distance between speaker and listener, revealing the narrator’s desire to create a space of shared assumptions in which he or she will be able to impose their vision of events. The irony perceived by the reader lies in the gap between the discourse of the narrator and the readers’ interpretation of events; in their reading they will unconsciously rectify the omissions, repetitions, and approximations which function as traces of the narrator’s subjectivity, thus producing their own internal narration of events. In order to grasp the meaning of the story, they must listen both to the story carried by the narrative voice and to the alternative stories suggested by other voices that can be heard within that of the narrator or by the traces of subjectivity that can be detected in the narrator’s own voice. Orality thus also extends the framework of verbal exchange beyond the conver- sational universe of the characters, blurring the line between the voice of the narrator and those of the people who inhabit her world and memory. It is through her use of the voices of children and of the mentally disturbed that Ja- net Frame draws attention to the functioning of orality and its effect on narration. The speaking voices of her child narrators in stories like “Child” and “My Cousins – Who Could Eat Cooked Turnip” are, of course, double to the extent that a mature narrator is looking back on her past, mixing the imaginative projections of childhood with the distance of the adult. But the perception of the child re-emerges through characteristic speech patterns, giving them greater weight through a contrast with adult uses of speech. The verb “to have” acquires a particular significance, for its use reflects the child’s perception of time and pace, his way of organizing the world. For the narrator of “Child,” all dimensions of reality fit into the binary relation of having and not having, transforming events in time and space into a series of attributes governed by the verb “to have.” Having a dress with a cape collar or button-up shoes is placed on the same plane with having or not having a mother and father. Speaking of her own mother, the narrator says, “I felt ashamed of having her” (81). The conversation about having a best friend (“Who’s your best friend” 82) links the child’s use of the term to that of adults, reflecting the way in which social experience is often perceived as -“ha ving” or “not having” relationships with others. But it is the child’s persistent use of the verb to classify her experience that draws attention to the way speech patterns express subjectivity. A close connection is also established between language and a child’s physical experience of the world. In the story “Child,” the control imposed by the teacher, Miss Richardson, through breathing exercises represents by metonymy her censorship 39 Transparency and Orality in Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories of their self-expression. The narrator’s friendship with Minnie Passmore is sealed when the girls refuse to count up to ten while breathing out, as the teacher has instructed them to do: “The class breathed in slowly and quietly and breathed out counting up to ten, except Minnie Passmore and me who got as far as fifteen” (79). The girls’ refusal to submit to Miss Richardson’s authority is punished by strapping, demonstrating the violence expressed by the narrator’s use of the verb “to take” in talking about the teacher: “She took us for poems in the morning” (79). The language used by adults, with the authority that it conveys, is experienced in the body, and the relation between speaking and the use of physical force is revealed. The syntactic structure of the sentences also betrays the way in which the logic of the represented world is subordinated to the necessities of narrative. When the narrator mentions her friend’s grandfather, she adds, “We had a grandfather once, we had two grandfathers” (83). The presence or absence of grandparents is reduced, in grammatical terms, to a direct object, or rather to two direct objects. The same speech patterns can be found in “My Cousins – Who Could Eat Cooked Turnip,” a story which begins, like “Child,” with a series of references to what the cousins have or do not have. In addition, this story uses temporality in ways characteristic of the oral practice of children, who tend to classify events through categorical terms like “always” and “never.” The first sentence of the story, “For a long time I could never understand my cousins in Inver- cargill” (43), thus creates a humorous overlapping of the adult’s perception of time in terms of duration with the child’s binary notions of “always” and “never.” In these stories, the traces of children’s oral speech patterns serve, of course, to highlight the specificity of the child’s perception of reality, giving the reader a keen sense of the distance between the world of children and that of adults. The insistent use of the verb “to have,” for instance, reveals the selfishness that characterizes human nature but that is later buried beneath layers of social convention. Recreating the linguistic habits of children is a way of giving emphasis, by contrast, to the role of convention in shaping adult speech habits. Strictly speaking, the verb “to have” signifies a link of possession between the speaking subject and the objects and actions designated in the utterance. Frame extends the use of the verb beyond narrations involving children. Its prevalence can be considered as a mark of orality, since it serves as the foundation for a wide range of idiomatic expressions in addition to its function as an auxiliary in the construction of compound verbal tenses. Like the verbs “to be” and “to get,” “to make” and “to do,” it permits the formation of the simple sentences that are commonly found in oral narration. However, a semblance of informality can also be used to emphasize the patterns of exclusion and social isolation that characterize Frame’s fictional world. A particularly clear example of this pattern can be found in the story “A Beautiful Na- ture.” The narrator of this story is extradiegetic, but the marks of oral delivery stand out clearly, giving the narration the tonality of gossip and generating the expectation of a climax that will confirm the exclusion of the person who is the butt of other people’s humor and sarcasm. The story takes place in a boarding house, the perfect setting for situations where people sit around talking about other people. The narrator adopts the gossipy tone of the characters, painting verbal portraits of the characters, adding details in a seemingly casual way, quoting the words of others and occasionally correcting his or her own tendency to stray from the topic, all of which constitute techniques for staging a scene and drawing the listener into a form of complicity with the boarding house 40 gossips. Liberal use is made of expressions based on the verb “to have”: “ If he had time…” (109); “Let’s have a real old sing-song” (109); “he’s had a hard life” (110); “he had a stepmother” (111); “hello, Edgar, had a hard day?” (111); “he didn’t have any real friends” (112); “he had his gramophone” (112); “he had the sack” (112); “you also had morning and afternoon tea” (113); “some of the cards had robins in the snow” (114) and finally, “He has a beautiful nature” (114). The most interesting use of the verb can be found in the opening sentence: “Edgar was a tidy man to have in a boarding house” (109). The use of an impersonal construction draws attention to the problematic status of the verb and to the narrator’s unwillingness to take responsibility for the statement. What does it mean to have a person in a boarding house? This is clearly the crux of the matter, for the boarders would prefer not to have Edgar, with whom they are obliged to share a bathroom, although he is useful as a scapegoat. The oral tone of this story serves a specific purpose; the use of verbal constructions based on the verb “to have” highlights the implication of the speaker in the narration; the speaker clearly asserts that this is her story: “But my real story is about Edgar,” she says at one point (110); furthermore, it reveals the extent to which undermining others and what they do or do not have is a way of affirming one’s own superiority. This is, of course, the essential function of gossip. By linking the treatment of Edgar to the narrator’s preoccupation with having a story to tell, Frame shows to what extent the social conventions of ordinary speech serve to establish patterns of inclusion and exclusion. In using effects of orality in this way, Frame is exploiting spoken language as a reservoir of acquired habits, a form of collective unconscious which reveals the nature of our relation to others. Her use of nursery rhymes can be analyzed in the same perspective. The meaning of many nursery rhymes is buried in a distant cultural past, but their sound patterns are still a part of the acoustic world in which children grow up. The pre-eminence of sound over sense in nursery rhymes can be exploited as a way of drawing attention to the world of speech, sound and voice and their impact on both the human psyche and the body. In the same way that fairy tales point to the fluid boundary between fantasy and reality in the child’s imagination, nursery rhymes reveal the porous and problematic frontier between sound and speech. While the repetition of sounds in nursery rhymes may have a humorous or reassuring effect, it can also emphasize the absence of a correlation between sound and meaning, thus disturbing the child’s sense of logic. The lines of “Tinker Tailor,” a rhyming game found in “Keel and Kool,” with their relentless trochaic metre – “Boots, shoes, slippers, clodhoppers, silk, satin, cotton, rags” – run the gamut of vestimentary possibilities in a way that underlines the role of chance in determining the destinies of those who play the game (26). In stories like “Keel and Kool” and “Swans,” sounds also play an important role in conveying the anxiety associated with an unfamiliar setting, suggesting the influence of fairy tales with their frightening settings. In “Keel and Kool,” Winnie’s anxiety at seeing her father go off down the river to fish “like a man in a story walking away from them,” is associated in her mind with the “roaring noise” made by the river, which she describes as “deep and wild” (22). In “Swans,” the fear generated by the absence of other bathers is reinforced by the sound of the sea: Why wasn’t everyone going to the Beach? It seemed they were the only ones, for when they set off down the fir-bordered road that led to the sound the sea kept making for ever 41 Transparency and Orality in Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories

now in their ears, there was no one else going. Where had the others gone? Why weren’t there other people? (61) The narrator’s adoption of the term “for ever” confers on the space/time framework the absolute otherness that has already been identified as a characteristic of children’s perception. “The desolate crying sound of sea” (61) referred to further on reinforces the children’s impression of entering a world that has been emptied of all human contact and meaning, and prepares the reader for the reference to “the wrong sea” that severs the experience from all that is known and comforting. In opposition to the frightening sound of the sea, the voice of the parents provides security and familiarity. It is in this context that the memory of being bounced on the father’s knee to the sound of “This is the House that Jack Built” takes on a particular significance: I wish today is always but Father too, jumping us up and down on his knee. This is the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow. – Totty, it’s my turn, isn’t it, Dad? – It’s both your turns. Come on, sacks on the mill and more on still. Not Father away at work, but Father here making the fire and breaking sticks, quickly and surely, and Father showing this and that and telling why. (64, italics in original) The father’s presence is associated not only with the reciting of the nursery rhyme and being bounced on his knee, but also with his physical dexterity and his capacity to explain things, all of which elements are reinforced by the rhythm and rhymes which make sound dominate over sense. And yet one has to admit that there is a curious tension, even irony, between the sound of the nursery rhyme and its meaning, for it is Jack that builds the house just as it is the father who seems most able to deal with the world in the story. The nursery rhyme presents the maiden as “all forlorn,” a choice dictated by the rhyming pattern, without giving an explanation for her sadness. Although the sound of the nursery rhyme may be comforting, the poem does not necessarily offer the promise of a world that will conform to the desires of the little girls.2 The children internalize the sound of the poem as it is recited by their father without reflecting on its meaning. Nursery rhymes reveal the tension between sound and sense and, therefore, are a particularly appropriate vehicle for exploring the role played by sound in a child’s attempts to come to terms with the mysteries of the adult world. What Mladen Dolar says about proverbs in his discussion of Jakobson’s Six leçons sur le son et le sens is equally applicable to nursery rhymes: “I am tempted to say that, on the whole, proverbs make more sound than sense” (147). Janet Frame, in her use of nursery rhymes, is clearly exploiting the meaningful tension between the sounds heard in childhood and the sense that an adult narrator attributes to these sounds. The distance between the voice of the child and that of the adult narrator is precisely the gap between perception and understanding to which Dolar refers in talking about Freud’s theories of fantasy: There is a voice which constitutes an enigma and a trauma because it persists without being understood, there is a time of subjectivation which is precisely the time between

2. The ways in which this nursery rhyme has been parodied attest to the negative perception of the series of events that follows the building of the house, a series reflecting the relationship between predator and prey. During World War I, British Propaganda circulated a parody that included the following line: “This is the gun that killed the Hun who dropped the bomb that fell on the house that Jack built.” . Accessed 19/04/2011. 42

hearing the voice and understanding it – and this is the time of fantasy. The voice is always understood nachträglich, subsequently, retroactively, and the time-loop of the primal fantasy is precisely the gap between hearing and making sense of what we hear, accounting for it. (136) Dolar, and of course Freud, are talking about the way in which a child tries to make sense of his parents’ sexuality; while the sounds Frame’s narrators are hearing may not seem to be directly related to the primal scene, one needs only to think of the story “The Lagoon” and the narrator’s remark about the lagoon never having “a proper story” to realize that the primal scene is very close to the surface in Frame’s stories. One might also object that the repeating of nursery rhymes in stories like “Swans” represents a reassuring use of sound rather than the troubling memory of sound referred to by Freud. However, to the extent that nursery rhymes like “This is the House that Jack Built” present a world in which sound seems to determine the relation between cause and effect, hearing nursery rhymes, as I have shown in the example of “Swans,” simply reactivates an unresolved contradiction between sound and sense. Nursery rhymes can also be used very effectively in the short story because they represent highly condensed forms of cultural narrative. They reflect multiple layers of cultural memory, triggering a complex series of reactions that are sensory, emotional and social as well as intellectual. One of the most interesting examples of this use of nursery rhymes can be found in the story entitled “The Birds Began to Sing.” The first line of the story is not the first but rather the sixth line of the nursery rhyme entitled “Sing a Song of Sixpence.”3 The way in which the narrator fits the reference to the birds into the nursery rhyme demonstrates the power of such rhymes to structure our experience of the world. She backtracks from her experience of sound to her memory of a nursery rhyme that, like many of them, is enigmatic, but that imposes its pattern through the acoustic power of childhood memories. The reader is drawn into the process by his own memories of the nursery rhyme, demonstrating another way in which orality creates a space shared by narrator and reader. Upon encountering the words, “There were four and twenty of them,” he cannot avoid the necessity of mentally filling in the blanks, providing the missing lines of the poem. A number of explanations have been offered as to why the nursery rhyme tells of living birds being baked in a pie, but it is easy to perceive parallels between the situation of the birds and that of the narrator, if one places her among the mentally disturbed. Yet what seems most important is the functioning of the nursery rhyme as a synecdoche for language itself in its organization of the relationship between sound and sense. The narrator interrogates the birds in order to find whatout they are singing. Her own capacity to give written form to her experience is linked to understanding the song of the birds: “So I said what is the name of the song, tell me and I will write it and you can listen at my window when I get the finest country musicians to play it” (158). The reference to country musicians shows to what extent the narrator has placed herself within the frame suggested by the nursery rhyme. The way in which she finds herself trapped in the inexplicable logic of the nursery rhyme reinforces rather than clarifies her relationship to language as a tool for articulating her own experience. Once again, a cha-

3. The use of this nursery rhyme is also discussed in Mortelette (40). 43 Transparency and Orality in Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories racter is trying to make sense of sounds as a way of solving the riddle of her existence. At the end of the story, silence takes over and the birds stop singing. A somewhat different use of nursery rhymes can be found in “Keel and Kool.” The same fear of inarticulate sound that is present in “Swans” can be found in “Keel and Kool,” where Winnie is frightened by the roaring noise made by the river. The sound of the river reinforces her fear that her father will not come back from fishing, just as her sister Eva has died and will never return. The dead sister’s friend Joan teases and frustrates Winnie by implying that she played rhyming games with Eva. Joan boasts that Eva showed her “some new bits to Tinker Tailor” (26). This nursery rhyme, which has already been discussed, presents a number of interesting characteristics in addition to its use of sound. It refers, of course, to a past world, and the reference to “tinker” as an occupation is a particularly strong reminder of this. Furthermore, alliteration and rhyme as well as meter create acoustic patterns that remain in the mind, explaining why “Tinker Tailor” is so often used as an intertextual reference. But it is used, furthermore, as a game by girls to foretell their futures, to predict whom they will marry, how they will live. It possesses therefore, like all games, a social role, distributing gains and losses in the form of husbands, professions, wealth, houses, clothing and so on. The nursery rhyme comes to life only by being reactivated in an exchange involving at least two people. Joan proves to be doubly malicious in referring to Tinker Tailor, for Winnie is excluded not only from playing the game, but also from knowing all the lines that must be remembered if one is to be included in the game. Social exclusion is reinforced by linguistic and cultural exclusion. The relations of power suggested by the jingle itself are compounded by the power conferred on the person who is able to use the poem for his or her own purposes, as Joan does in the story. The complexity of Frame’s use of effects of orality shows to what extent she saw the spoken forms of everyday language as a reservoir of acquired habits in which people are easily trapped. The surface transparency of speech in her stories hides, like the murky lagoon in the opening story, the depths of ambiguity that characterize human relations. Like the great masters of the short story, she creates a complex tension between the narration, which relies for its effects on complicity with the reader, and the intricate folds of human perception, which escape the grasp of language. She furthermore exploits nursery rhymes, like clichés, as a particularly potent form of collectively acquired speech habits. In her use of nursery rhymes she is relying on the intimate relation between sound and memory to suggest that her narrators are still trying to solve emotional and social issues which have their roots in childhood experiences. Anyone who has read Frame’s autobiography can clearly see the relevance of this perspective. Frame’s narrators, like the narrator of An Angel at my Table, are indeed listeners in the sense that Dolar attributes to listening in the distinction he makes between hearing and listening: To be brief: hearing is after meaning, the signification which can be linguistically spelled out; listening is, rather, being on the lookout for sense, something that announces itself in the voice beyond meaning. We could say that hearing is entwined with understanding – hence the French double meaning (double entendre!) of entendre, entendement […] while listening implies an opening toward a sense which is undecidable, precarious, elusive, and which sticks to the voice. (148) 44

Frame’s narrators are indeed also listeners, constantly on the lookout, like the narrator of “The Lagoon,” for the sense that is as elusive as the lagoon itself.

Kathie Birat University of Lorraine

W orks Cited

Braun, Alice. “‘Wear wise saws and modern instances like a false skin’: Dominant Language at Play in Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories.” Chasing Butterflies: Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories. Ed. Vanessa Guignery. Publibook, 2011. 97-106. Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. frame, Janet. The Lagoon and Other Stories. 1951. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. louVel, Liliane, and Claudine Verley. Introduction à l’étude de la nouvelle. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 1993. mercer, Gina. Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions. Dunedin: U of Otago P, 1994. mortelette, Ivane. “L’Arrière-plan culturel et littéraire de The Lagoon and Other Stories.” The Lagoon and Other Stories and Beyond. Ed. Claire Bazin and Alice Braun. Paris: PU de Paris Ouest-Nanterre-la Défense, 2011. 33-45. “The enormous burden upon the I to tell all”: Metafiction as Unveiling in Janet Frame’s Living in the Maniototo

Janet Frame’s 1979 novel Living in the Maniototo, which features an artist not unlike Frame herself as its main character, raises questions about the representation of the self in a work of fiction and the relationship between metafiction and autobiography. What does it mean for an artist to say ‘I’? Does speaking in the first person require one to be truthful?

Transparency is a problematic notion in Frame’s work, as it is often linked with the question of truth and truth-telling. In her novels, which are all concerned with the experience of marginality and exclusion, telling the truth is represented as a normalising imperative, an injunction to confess that is addressed to those who do not conform and stray instead from the rules of accepted behaviour. In the novels that deal with Frame’s experiences in psychiatric hospitals, the notion of truth is associated not only with the disciplinary imperative of not telling lies,1 but also with the writer’s responsibility to report what she has seen and to restore some form of dignity to her fellow suffe- rers, the “faces in the water” that can be beheld on the other side of the dividing line between reason and madness.2 Other novels by Frame, such as Owls Do Cry or Scented Gardens for the Blind, feature characters who are summoned to account for their actions or whose privacy is intruded upon in the name of conformity, as if difference could be normalised through explanation. In her later novels, such as A State of Siege or The Carpathians, Frame questions the cannibalistic impulse for knowledge that drove the enterprise of colonisation, and persists today in the practice of modern-day tourism, as a global commodification of entire cultures. Transparency is therefore exposed as a destructive imperative that rests upon the rationalistic dualism which opposes clarity, rationality and scientific truth – notions traditionally valued as positive – to their negative pendants, such as opacity, secrecy, and even mendacity. Yet Frame deconstructs and even short-circuits these binary representations by confronting them with the logic of fiction which draws a line of flight across the divide between truth and lie. Is the act of writing fiction the same as the act of telling lies? Or does writing mean creating another truth altogether? Frame herself was a victim of the tyranny of transparency, which partly prompted her to write her three-volume autobiography, a response, by her own admission, to the intense public scrutiny to which she was subjected throughout her career, and which was characterised by a particular and sometimes unhealthy focus on her years spent in psychiatric hospitals. Frame described her autobiographical project as a re-establishment of the truth, a way of regaining control over the representations of her self: “my

1. Michel Foucault shows that the modern-age psychiatric treatment is based on the re-establishment of truth, equated with reason, over the lies of madness (132-3). 2. See an extract from Faces in the Water: “Listening to her, one experienced a deep uneasiness as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who, walking at night along the banks of a stream, catches a glimpse in the water of a white face or a moving limb and turns quickly away, refusing to help or to search for help. We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; we can neither forget nor help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighbourhood of light we see our own face” (150). 46 say,” as she famously claimed in an interview (Gordon & Harold 114). Although this appears to be in blatant contrast with her usual mistrust of truth imperatives, she explains in another interview: I am always in fictional mode, and autobiography is found fiction. I look at everything from the point of view of fiction, and so it wasn’t a change to be writing autobiography except the autobiography was more restrictive because it was based in [sic] fact, and I wanted to make an honest record of my life. (Gordon & Harold 137) Frame here dispels any kind of illusion as to the possibility of writing a transparent autobiography in the tradition of Rousseau, who claimed in the introduction to Les Confessions that his intention was to write a purely honest and uncorrupted account of his life.3 Frame does away with the tradition of Rousseauean autobiography as a genuine unveiling of the self by affirming both the precedence of fiction over fact and the cen - tral role of the imaginary in the shaping of the raw material borrowed from experience into the literary text. In many ways, Frame therefore breaks the autobiographical pact, to the dismay of many of her critics who were overtly hoping for more transparency.4 The question that she really asks in her autobiography is not so much the Romantic, ontological “who am I?” but rather “what does it mean to be a writer?” The quest for a definite, clearly shaped identity is what led to her catastrophic internalisation, as she explains how she took on the part of the schizophrenic for no other reason than to escape the terrifying void of being nobody, to fit her being into an existing narrative. Only later in her life did Frame realise that she could take charge not only of her existence, but also of the narrative of her existence, by becoming a writer. The autobiography can therefore be read as an ars literaria as well as a life narrative, focusing on the artifice rather than on the supposedly transparent transmission of information. These questions are at the heart of Living in the Maniototo, the novel that Frame wrote in 1979 immediately before she embarked on her autobiographical project.5 The plot of the novel revolves around the character of Mavis, a writer who has been lent a house in Berkeley by her patron friends, the Garretts, who wish to help her write a new novel. The first part of the narrative recounts certain events at various stages of Mavis’s life that led up to the summer she spends in the house in California. After the sudden death of its owners, Mavis finds out that the house was bequeathed to her, but she is soon joined there by friends of the Garretts who draw her attention away from the novel that she had originally set upon to write. The novel offers its own allegorical reading: Mavis is in fact alone in the house of fiction, which the novel dubs “the house of replicas,”6 because of the large number of artwork reproductions that it contains, and her guests gradually turn out to be characters born out of her imagination. This two-fold structure provides a basis for the metafictional aspects of the novel, as it exposes not only the

3. “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself ” (17). 4. See Mercer. 5. Janet Wilson also evokes the possibility that the writing of the autobiography may have had an influence on Frame’s last two novels, especially in terms of the representation of the self (129). 6. The recurring motif of the replica has turned many critics’ attention towards the theory of Jean Baudrillard on the “precession of simulacra,” as in the article by Chris Prentice, for instance. The motif of the replica has also informed many debates regarding the novel’s affiliation to postmodernism: see During and Wilson. For Mark Williams, the motif of the replica is not so much borrowed from Baudrillard as a re-writing of Plato’s myth of the cave in The Republic, which he claims Frame is using by “borrowing his concepts and terms but rescuing a function for the poet as ‘maker’ whose fictions tend towards a higher kind of truth, that of the mere realist or imitator of the outward forms” (48). 47 “The enormous burden upon the I to tell all” rules of fiction-writing,7 but also the very mechanisms of the imaginary, by staging the alchemical process through which “real-life” material is incorporated and transformed into fiction, diffracted as though through a prism.8 The stroke suffered by Mavis’s husband in the first part of the novel is thus echoed in the second part when the character of Theo, one of the guests in the house of fiction, falls victim to the same fate. Meta- fiction makes the novel-writing process visible, almost transparent, albeit “in fictional mode,” thus placing the figure of the author at the centre of the stage by making her an actual protagonist. Like the autobiography, Living in the Maniototo can be read as a reflection on the condition of the artist, trapped between her need for privacy and the necessary self-disclosure that is part of any form of artistic expression. The novel nevertheless offers a way out of this aporia by foregrounding the logic of fiction: what if metafiction were the ultimate form of autobiography? What if the only thing an artist had to reveal about herself was precisely the making of her art? My contention here is that metafictional unveiling necessarily entails a reflection on what it means to be an artist. Marc Delrez argues that the novel is “centrally concerned with the sacrificial dimension inherent in all fiction writing” (77), and while we do find elements of the traditional representation of the artist as sufferer and slave to her art, we will see that it is itself also one of the replicas of the original, a fiction of the real. The artist figure that emerges from the novel is no longer that of the lonely misfit found in Frame’s earlier novels, but rather a multifaceted trickster whose self is dissipated into her fiction rather than aggregated into one character. In many ways, Living in the Maniototo can be read as a reflection on the praxis of the imagination. However, Frame’s purpose is not to formulate a theory on the topic, but rather to elaborate her own idiosyncratic representations of it. Imagination alternates in the novel as a shape, a place and an object, but all these representations are related to the question of the writer’s condition and of her relationship with the imaginary. One of the first representations of the imaginary is the hypotenuse. A discreetly recurring image in the novel, it usually appears in those passages which are concerned with the opposition between the real and the fictive. In one such passage, Mavis is musing on her husband’s job as a debt-collector and his unquenchable desire to make people pay: Life on earth is so arranged that you may be granted each day, day after day, for a lifetime, and avoid making payment – a secondary avoidance. The primary avoidance is in being unable to see that the desire to pay is essentially one untroubled by petty calculations and is not even dependent upon having been given, having received, bought, or stolen. It is in not recognising that in a world of replicas the original cannot be matched in value, and the real fact is often a copy of the unreal fiction, and perpetual human joy and suffering lie in the yearning, not only to pay, but to identify the original as itself apart, not as real or unreal or as opposite or adjacent; paying for it in the sense that the blossoms pay for the spring by flourishing within it as a part of it. (64-5) Frame confronts the capitalistic logic of debit and credit with a vision of paying as creating, a way out of the binary structures that make up our relationship to the world and to one another, a segue to Turnlung’s “I have what I gave” in Frame’s earlier novel

7. This being the definition Patricia Waugh gives of metafiction: “In novelistic practice, this results in writing which consistently displays its conventionality, which explicitly and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice, and which thereby explores the problematic relationship between life and fiction” (4). 8. This is actually an idea explored by Chris Prentice: “The text diffracts its material as light is diffracted through a prism” (160). 48

Daughter Buffalo (212). This alternative modality of being in the world, over and above the simple logic of loss and gain, is only accessible to the artist, who creates from nothing, borrows from the unreal and short-circuits the hierarchy between original and replica, symbolised by the opposite/adjacent divide, by assuming the role of the hypotenuse. Judith Dell Panny identifies the figure of the hypotenuse with the author herself (193), although it extends beyond her individual self and rather serves as a figuration of her imaginary. This tripartite representation of the imagination has obvious similarities with the theory that Coleridge develops on the subject in his Autobiographia Literaria (167) and that Frame claims, in her autobiography, to have learnt by heart before quoting it extensively (163). It is also close to Wolfgang Iser’s theory of the imagination in The Fictive and the Imaginary, where he replaces the usual binary opposition between fiction and the real with a triad composed of the real, the fictive and the imaginary: “The fictive, then, might be called a ‘transitional object,’ always hovering between the real and the imaginary, linking the two together” (20). The function of the fictive is close to that of the hypotenuse whose personified voice is heard in a poem in the middle of the narrative: I am Hypotenuse. Here burdened by the weight of opposite and adjacent proved equal to others, never to myself. I square with myself for the satisfaction of others who count more than I who lie as thin as a garden line in my fleshless body who lie and square and cube and carry and join. I am Hypotenuse. I close in a shape that is nameless without my prison. (89) Much like Iser’s dimension of the fictive, the hypotenuse is the shaping impulse which makes representation perfect. However, this poem’s true focus is the pain endured by the Hypotenuse which is both “burdened” and imprisoned by its task9 and condemned to strip itself of its individuality, this suffering hinting at a sacrificial dimension in the writer’s work. Another figuration of the imagination in the novel is the manifold. An image borrowed from the Kantian theory of cognition, it refers here to the store of experience that the writer collects before lending a shape to its elements. In the following extract it also enters into a tripartite relationship with replicas and originals, as Mavis describes her life in the house of fiction: “I found myself beset upon, not knowing what to do, in a whirl of avoiding, haunted by the manifold, the replicas, and the originals” (137). Here the writer appears confused, under the spell of the manifold, a word which, uncoinci- dentally, also refers to a notebook. Once again, the imaginary is represented as an escapist force (“a whirl of avoiding”). This representation gives the writer no choice but to attend to its demands, just as the hypotenuse is “burdened by the weight of opposite and adjacent.” The writer is condemned to self-effacement and even transformed into a mere insect, a fly on the wall. “A writer, like a solitary carpenter bee, will hoard scrapes from the manifold and then proceed to gnaw obsessively, constructing a long gallery, nesting her very existence within her food. The eater vanishes. The characters in the long gallery emerge” (154). In other words, the writer’s self must disappear in order for the characters to thrive, and thrive they do in the house of fiction as Mavis gradually

9. Dorothy Jones picks on the usually ambiguous nature of the shelter in Frame’s work, both protecting and en- trapping (185). 49 “The enormous burden upon the I to tell all” retreats to her office, and all but disappears from the house that the guest characters now have all to themselves. The house of fiction itself is a common enough representation of the locus of the imagination, yet it is doubled in the text by another mysterious space called the Manio- toto, which also appears in the title of the novel. There is an apparent paradox in that while this imaginary region is mentioned once in the text, Mavis, for all her travels in the narrative, never actually goes there. This could mean that the title is deceptive – assu - ming it has a descriptive relationship with the text. The Maniototo is the region where a famous New Zealand writer is supposed to have lived all his life. Its description is multifaceted and contradictory, marked by possible or imaginary violence and suffering. What was the Maniototo? people asked. Where was it? Not everyone in the north knows the geography of the south, and even some in the south did not know. It was a high plain, they were told, in Central Otago – you know, where the air is known to be rare, where apricots grow, and there’s a scheme to drown the land and the towns. Central Otago with its battle-place names – Naseby, Glencoe, Cromwell – and the Maniototo itself where Peter Wallstead lived, didn’t it mean plain of blood after the battles fought there? But wasn’t it a place where patients went to be cured of their sicknesses? (75-6) The final reference to a place where sick people go creates an echo not only within the novel with Mavis’s experience in psychiatric hospital, of which she gives an account in her novel The Green Fuse, but also outside the novel with the writer’s own experience. For Janet Wilson, the Maniototo can be construed as a metaphor for the author’s imagination, which reveals the missing link between the title and the text (122). Yet the deserted, inhospitable and possibly violent nature of this space also hints at suffering in the condition of the writer, once again condemned to exile and solitude. These descriptions of the imagination draw a picture of the artist’s condition as one fraught with pain, her life selflessly devoted to her writing. Several artist figures appear in the text, often fleetingly, as if flashing through the narrative, like Beatrice, a writer that Mavis claims to have met in New York and whose story reads almost like an allegory. Suddenly unable to find warmth despite the blanket that Mavis gives her as a present, Beatrice ends up drowning herself in the East River: “The purple blanket might have warmed her, but in the end there was no room left in her hibernating, winter heart for further cold seasons” (252). Herself a writer, Mavis understands her artist friend’s need for protection; it is as if being an artist meant exposing oneself, at the risk of death by exposure, and being transparent as one strips off one’s own skin. The story of Beatrice can be read as a parallel with the description of another artist that appears earlier in the text and that Mavis refers to as “the famous poet” from her Auckland suburb of Bleinheim: some said that he was wearing his skin inside out and it must have hurt even to have the air touch it, and that he’d been born that way, with his skin put on the way we taught our children to put on their socks – outside in, then quick-flip, and the warm side is in and the ridged side out, and there’s no hurting, but with the poet something went wrong in the putting on, a ridged side was there for life, inside and hurting. (75) This description insists both on the inadequacy of the artist’s condition and on the existential pain that he is condemned to suffer. The word “wrong” and the idea that the poet was wearing his skin “inside out” draw a picture of the artist as different, maladap- ted. The reference to the children’s socks creates a humorous contrast and points to the 50 over-dramatic quality of this representation, as yet another cliché about the artist and his proverbial suffering. Another representation of the artist in the novel is that of the ghost who haunts the streets of the different cities where Mavis stays in the novel, just as the artist is obsessed with the manifold. Blenheim, the Auckland suburb where Mavis lived before going to the US, is also haunted by a “black fantail,” an avatar of “the famous poet” who is rumoured to have “collapsed in the street and died” (40). In Baltimore, where she then stays before moving on to the house in Berkeley, Mavis reads about a ghost who is believed to manifest itself in the guise of a “howling wolf ” and to have been the inspiration for one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories: I was reminded that Edgar Allan Poe collapsed and died in the streets of Baltimore. The howling dog (surely the sound I heard, the cry of the wolf?), the fluttering black fantail, the piwakawaka: two poets dying in the streets of two cities and becoming a part of each city and a responsibility and pride, and changing it in untold ways. (49) Artists in Living in the Maniototo are often fleeting presences, “fluttering” like the black fantail: they appear only to disappear quickly afterwards, sometimes even literally, like Tommy, the artist jeweller from Baltimore, who is simply erased from the narrative by the sheer power of a detergent called the Blue Fury (57). The artist is always already elsewhere, ghost-like, his presence diffuse, yet ungraspable, his self an unnecessary ap- pendage to his work. Yet even beyond the question of representing the artist, Living in the Maniototo focuses on the question of the self and its representation in a narrative. Throughout her fiction, Frame illustrates her fundamental distrust in the notion of identity which, she shows, is essentially constructed and maintained by discourse, and more particularly in the myths we elaborate about ourselves. In her last novels, Frame takes her radical critique of the self to a metafictional level by questioning not only the nature of the characters’ selves,10 but also the inscription of the writer’s self within the text. The guest characters in the novel all claim to have a separate, distinct identity, yet they are easily confused with one another. They all try to counter the feeling of their own unreality by engaging in lengthy autobiographical monologues. The boundary between the character’s actual discourse and the fictional text is blurred, as all of them say they intend to write a book about themselves while they are already being written about without knowing it. They are all moved by a desire for absolute transparency and by the same impulse to “tell,” a verb which carries the weight of its own ambiguity in the novel, in that it means not only to relate or confess, but also to report mischief, as when a child “tells on someone.” However, all that the characters succeed in communicating is the artificiality of their own telling, the artificiality of their own discourse. Roger Prestwick, who is one of them, is painfully aware that he is “transparent,” the term here alluding both to Roger’s unprepossessing personality and to his very fictionality as a character. Here, the metafictional and the autobiographical collude once again: “I have said that I am a man without secrets. I should say that my one secret from most people is the fact of my life’s being the shadow of a conventional well-documented reality. I am what the scholars call a ‘textbook’ person” (160). Roger’s fictionality is inscribed within

10. For Patricia Waugh, the metafictional laying bare of the artificiality of characters is often a reflection on the myths around our identity, and poses the question of the referentiality of the literary text in the most acute fashion (93-4). 51 “The enormous burden upon the I to tell all” his own personality and his own discourse on it; like any other fictional element in the novel, he is but a replica of something else existing outside the realm of the narrative. Roger is aware too that his desires are themselves replicas of other desires, shared by a whole generation: “I too will write a book. Another book. I know that our age has been propelled, blackmailed into becoming the Age of Explanation” (164). Indeed, in the novel, the characters’ compulsion to tell their stories is interpreted in cultural terms as a phenomenon related to the egotism of their age and is humorously dubbed “the Great Californian Confession (the GCC)” (174). Here, Frame is deriding the drive for self-disclosure as a major aspect of the New Age culture which flourished in the United States and more generally in the Western World in the 1970s. The use of upper-case letters as well as the acronym hint at the growing popularity of this practice, which for Frame is turning into a cultural imperative. In the first volume of hisHistoire de la sexu- alité, entitled La Volonté de savoir, Michel Foucault shows that the injunction to talk about oneself is not recent, but dates back to the seventeenth century, when science became a discourse in itself and imposed the necessity to confess, mostly in matters relating to sexuality (29). Foucault is particularly critical of the contemporary period which has dis- guised this hygiene-related imperative into a possibility for release and even liberation. Frame makes a similar point in her description of experimental workshops dedicated to self-disclosure: If it hadn’t been for the practice known as The Great Californian Confession (the GCC) I might not have gleaned so much about my guests. At that time, as a requisite of the Age of Explanation, the GCC was at its peak, especially in California, and even Brian, usually taciturn, had stayed at experimental centres where guests, stopping only for sleep and food, poured out their hearts to one another, like sacks of coal (which burns) or wheat (which sprouts), and when their hearts were emptied they did indeed appear like empty sacks and may have been as desolate had not the owners or carriers realised that sacks are of the material which, in other circumstances, can be woven into fine linen, embroidered with bright flowers, birds of paradise, fish, castles, places and symbols of an age of imagination. (175) This passage shows the extent to which we have internalised truth imperatives which are transformed into therapeutic paths of self-discovery. However, Frame wants to draw our attention away from the truthful content of those confessions by focussing instead on the sacks that contain them. In other words, the shaping of the life-narratives matters more than their substance, as the line of flight of fiction lies in seed, waiting to stem (“sprout” or “burn”) from the sacks that have been discarded as one sheds one’s skin. As an antidote to these monolithic discourses about the self, Frame opposes the multiple identities of the narrator, whose self is divided into several personae. The narrator has successively been “Mavis Furness, Mavis Barwell, Mavis Halleton” (29),- ha ving “buried two husbands,” a sentence that she quotes ironically and that is presented as the epitome of the type of clichéd discourse one is likely to produce about oneself. However, Mavis is not the only narrator: there is also Violet Pansy Proudlock, “an ex- pert in near, near-distant, and distant ventriloquism” (31), and Alice Thumb who has “‘turned to’ eavesdropping and gossip” (31). Each of these three avatars of the narrator is alternately in charge of the narrative, and the trinity that they form could be read as another materialisation of the tripartite representation of the imagination, along with the group formed by the three locations where Mavis successively stays in the novel 52

(Blenheim, Baltimore and Berkeley). The “I” in the novel, which refers to three distinct representations of the narrator who together relate a single narrative, is therefore a device illustrating the necessity for the artist to dilute her identity in her writing in order to “seize control of all points of view,” to quote Dinny Wheatstone, another trickster narrator, who appears in Frame’s later novel, The Carpathians (85). Mavis gradually retreats to her office as her house is taken over by the guest-characters, and she is replaced by her alter ego Alice Thumb, the eavesdropper, who is always on the other side of the par- tition and records the guests’ confessions. Living in the Maniototo destroys the myth of the almighty yet suffering artist at the centre of his creation and replaces it with an image of the artist as mere entertainer, a label that Violet Pansy Proudlock claims for herself: “You might think it strange that I choose to be a ventriloquist, to be in a narrow path on the margin of creation and recreation when I could go to the centre, but I choose to be here, as an entertainer” (31). As creation becomes synonymous with recreation, the mystique of the marginal artist is replaced by a representation of decentring as empowerment. Metafictional unveiling inLiving in the Maniototo allows us readers to take a peek into the writer’s chamber within the house of fiction, and what we discover is that the writer is never only in one place – she is always already elsewhere, her presence diffuse, discreet and unobtrusive. She does not stand at the centre of her art, but rather dwells in its margins, which remain for Frame the ideal location from where to write. As a corollary to the representation of the author within the literary text, Living in the Maniototo asks another fundamental question: who says “I” in a first-person narrative? And how much of him/herself does the pronoun reveal? Before she embarks on the writing of her novel, Mavis attends a writing class where her teacher, an American writer named Howard Conway, instructs her never to use the first person. “I might have been surprised by his tidy air of caution had I not realised that a skintrapped ‘I’ could have no place in the writing of such a roving omniscient as Conway” (81). Two principles of writing are brought into opposition here: on the one hand, the first-person narration, which restricts the perspective to the point of view of the author, and on the other, the all-encompassing vision of the omniscient. Mavis is ambivalent about writing what she calls an “I-book” and is worried about “the enormous burden upon the ‘I’ to ‘tell all’ while viewing through the narrow I-shaped window that restricted the vision and allowed only occasional arrows to be fired with no guarantee that they would pierce the armour of ‘otherness’ worn by the characters of the book” (81). While Mavis is afraid to remain confined in the fortress of her self, with only an arrow slit through which to observe the world outside, Howard Conway, a double of the “con artist” that her debt-collector husband is chasing, writes “in a kind of blowaway tradition – women with streaming hair and eyes, horses with flowing manes, and trees and men with flowing seed, set in storm and hurricane country” (75). It is tempting to adopt an elitist reading of the character of Howard Conway as a figure of censorship of authentic artistry, his writing a mediocre example of the literature that appeals to the masses; however, he is also comparable to Violet Pansy Proudlock, in that she too is “a mere entertainer.” However trite his style may seem to Mavis, it has a fluidity and ease of movement that she lacks, “skintrapped” as she is in her own point of view. It is only by reaching beyond her own self, just as the hypotenuse extends into infinity, that Mavis will succeed in welcoming the characters into the house of fiction. However, she can only do so at the cost of reality. Thus her escapist flight of fancy comes to a brutal halt when she 53 “The enormous burden upon the I to tell all” makes a discovery that she has hitherto been avoiding: that of her best friend’s death. Although the news is diffracted within the house of fiction through the sudden death and resurrection of the Garretts, it remains out of reach and outside the narrative until the very last pages of the novel, outside the opposite, the adjacent and the hypotenuse.

Alice Braun University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre-la Défense

W orks Cited

BauDrillarD, Jean. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée, 1981. coleriDGe, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 1817. London: Everyman’s Library, 1965. Dell panny, Judith. “Opposite and Adjacent to the Postmodern.” The Ring of Fire: Essays on Janet Frame. Ed. Jeanne Delbaere. Sydney: Dangaroo P, 1992. 188-98. Delrez, Marc. “The Missing Chapter in Janet Frame’s Living in the Maniototo.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 24.1 (2006): 73-93. DurinG, Simon. “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?” Landfall 39.3 (1985): 366-80. frame, Janet. Faces in the Water. 1961. London: The Women’s P, 2000. ––. Daughter Buffalo. New York: George Braziller, 1972. ––. Living in the Maniototo. 1979. Auckland: Random House, 2006. ––. The Complete Autobiography. 1990. London: The Women’s P, 1999. ––. The Carpathians. Auckland: Random House, 1988. foucault, Michel. Le Pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France 1973-1974. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2003. ––. Histoire de la sexualité I: La Volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. GorDon, Pamela, and Denis Harold, eds. Janet Frame: In Her Own Words. Auckland: Penguin, 2011. iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Jones, Dorothy. “The Hawk of Language and the Plain of Blood: Living in the Maniototo.” Delbaere. 177-87. mercer, Gina. “‘A Simple, Everyday Glass’: The Autobiographies of Janet Frame.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 11 (1993): 41-7. prentice, Chris. “Janet Frame’s Radical Thought: Symbolic Exchange and Seduction in Living in the Maniototo and The Carpathians.” Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame. Ed. Jan Cronin and Simone Drichel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 155-80. rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. WauGH, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.London: Routledge, 1993. Williams, Mark. Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists. Auckland: Auckland UP, 1990. Wilson, Janet. “Post-modernism or Post-colonialism? Fictive Strategies in Living in the Maniototo and The Carpathians.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 11 (1993): 114-31.

Haunted by a Fantasy of Immortality: “Spirit” by Janet Frame

This essay provides a close analysis of one story by Janet Frame, “Spirit,” from her first collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories, and argues that it figures the accomplishment of a desire to achieve accommodation with death. The story purports to answer the question: “What is it that happens to mankind after death?” and provides a dead-pan answer in which polysemy, paronomasia, and onomastics reveal an interaction with multiple intertextual sources which subtend a fantasy of immortality.

The story entitled “Spirit,” which is part of The Lagoon and Other Stories, stands out from the rest of Janet Frame’s first collection of short stories, if only because it radi- cally diverges from the codes of verisimilitude or social realism. It has been variously envisaged as an example of “modern fabulation” (Weiss 47), or “an amusing dystopian fable” (Delrez 15), the latter two adjectives “amusing” and “dystopian” being somehow paradoxical since dystopias are commonly deemed to provoke sentiments of dislike and discomfort. Dystopian universes are remarkably unpleasant: they are places where one is submitted to the oppression of some kind of dictatorship, and this does not generally make for comedy. Yet the art of Janet Frame lies in her handling of humour in a story which could also be defined as a “fantasy,” if we are to take up the subtitle of her second volume of short stories published in 1963: Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies. A fantasy is “a general term for any kind of fictional work that is not primarily devoted to realistic representation of the known world” (Baldick 81-2). It describes imagined worlds in which a number of impossibilities are accepted through the willing suspension of disbelief. The word “fantasy” is polysemous and not limited to its literary or musical significance. It is used in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis because it is linked with desire and the unconscious. The definition given by Laplanche and Pontalis for “fantasy” as “fantasme” is worth quoting in extenso to try and understand its relevance to the study of literature: Fantasy: imaginary scenario in which the subject is present and which figures, through more or less displaced processes, the accomplishment of desire and in the final analysis of an unconscious desire; fantasy presents itself through various modalities: conscious fantasies or daydreams, unconscious fantasies such as the ones uncovered by analysis in the shape of structures underlying a manifest content, original fantasy. (Laplanche and Pontalis 152, my translation)1 “Spirit” is not a fantasy about origins; it is not a fantasy in which the author is directly or indirectly present as an immediately identifiable persona. It presents itself as a -li terary scenario which indirectly, through displacement onto a male character, figures the accomplishment of a desire to achieve accommodation with death. It tones down its destructive power and it endeavours to domesticate the frightening unknown. The

1. “Fantasme : scénario imaginaire où le sujet est présent et qui figure de façon plus ou moins déformée par les pro- cessus défensifs l’accomplissement d’un désir et en dernier ressort d’un désir inconscient ; le fantasme se présente sous des modalités diverses : fantasmes conscients ou rêves diurnes, fantasmes inconscients tels que l’analyse les découvre comme structures sous-jacentes à un contenu manifeste, fantasme originaire.” 56 unnameable is turned into a down-to-earth reality that is made acceptable through the use of wry humour. The imagined scenario provided by the short story transforms the passage from life to death into a bureaucratic process destined to tame death through simultaneous matter-of-factness and derision. The desire to come to terms with death manifests itself through the use of polysemy, paronomasia, and onomastics, and finally through the powerful intertextual echoes which resonate hauntingly throughout the story and subtend a fantasy of immortality. The story provides an imaginary solution to the mystery of death. It tames death by making it ordinary and it shows that the process of entering the world of the dead is not harmful. There is no supplementary damage attendant upon the passage. The story takes up the example of an ordinary man, Harry, who has just died accidentally while “sunning himself in the garden” (90), and is about to discover what looms ahead, now that he no longer lives. So the story purports to answer the question: “What is it that happens to mankind after death?” And it provides a dead-pan answer. The transformation of death into a commonplace occurrence makes it possible to do away with the concepts of damnation and salvation. The man who has just died is not thrown into the abyss of Hell, he is not made to atone in some kind of Purgatory, and he is not rewarded with an entrance through the pearly gates of Paradise. His life is not assessed in terms of the sins he has committed or the virtue he has manifested. The warden he is coming up against is not concerned about reckonings and retribution. The scenario is completely devoid of religious trappings because the sacred has been repu- diated. The angels have been replaced with an administrative staff. The warden to whom Harry speaks sounds like a man in charge of an allotment bureau who is asking the dead a few questions before allocating a space to him for all eternity. The sacred has given way to a bureaucracy that is not as frightening as Kafka represents it in The Trial or The Castle. The bureaucrat is not sympathetic or empathetic. He interrogates the dead with impassivity and in a neutral, non-aggressive fashion, and considers him as a client whose needs deserve to be attended to, with as much efficiency and pragmatism as possible. The transformation of the sacred into the bureaucratic is a deflation which creates the conditions for humour, as there is nothing baleful about death: what is painful or disturbing about it has been eliminated. There is an eradication of das Unheimliche through the imposition of bureaucratic norms. Harry is given a number instead of a name, “Spirit 350,” and he is integrated within a system of classification. The story has reduced the passage from life to death to a classifiable occurrence which can be dealt with rationally. It has been brought down from the level of divine retribution to that of administrative procedure. The newcomer finds himself in a crowded environment and an empty lot must be attributed to him, as if he were an immigrant in a new land. He is coming to a foreign country where the administration is in charge of finding a vacant lot for the newcomer, a lot that will be in keeping with his needs as he represents them through the narration he makes of his previous life. Since his account is inadequate and conveys a vision of his past life as a second-class citizen, he is allocated a sub-human lot. This scenario constitutes a satire about the immigrant’s progress in a foreign land, the land of the dead, and his failure to come across as a fully accredited human being in his new environment. This fantasy about man’s lot after death implicates a sophisticated wordplay with the figurative and literal meaning of “lot.” The enigma about man’s lot is translated into 57 Haunted by a Fantasy of Immortality finding a literal place for him: a lot which is allocated to the dead person for all eternity. And this lot is a leaf which makes the recipient indulge in a series of puns: “A leaf. A leaf. But I am a man. Men can’t live on leaves” (“Spirit” 91). We discover here several instances of paronomasia which are humorous and meant to attenuate death, to trans- form its painful evocation into a playful one. “A leaf. A leaf ” (91) resonates with “Alack, Alack” which is an archaic expression of surprise or regret and highlights Harry’s disappointment with his lot. Given the playful dimension of the exchange, it can also be interpreted as antiphrastic: “lief ” is an archaic adverb which means “willingly,” “gladly,” and the homophony between “leaf ” and “lief ” ironically underpins Harry’s unwillingness to settle for a “leaf.” Another element of polysemy linked with “leaf ” must be taken into account. The juicy leaf allocated to Harry is a literal allusion to the lush vegetation of the world of the dead but, given the metafictional context of Janet Frame’s stories, one cannot help thinking of the leaves of a book. The eternal leaf can be envisaged as a humorous allusion to a topos of poetry which dates back to at least Dante’s Divine Comedy, the idea that man’s destiny, man’s lot, is written in the leaves of the book of the universe.2 Through the polysemy of “leaf,” the facetious image of the dead man transformed into a worm sliding down his leaf co-exists with an elevated vision of man’s destiny written out in the all-encompassing Book of God, and the discrepancy created by the juxtaposition of two discordant worldviews contributes to the humour of the scene. Humour can be envisaged as self-directed and self-deprecating: Frame amuses herself by conjuring up the innocuous fantasy of Harry’s leaf, and simultaneously derides her own power to confer immortality upon her creation. By couching Harry’s eternal life on a leaf on the “eternal” leaves of the book she has published, she highlights the process of immorta- lization performed by the written word but implicitly sets her own achievement against canonical accounts of eternal life. Hers and Harry’s are mere green leaves, written by greenhorns, a far cry from Dante’s book of the universe. The playfulness of the exchange between Harry and the warden in the last lines of the story is also enhanced by the alliterative pattern which is used. Harry is advised in a very condescending way to “eat and sleep and slide” up and down the leaf. The asso- nance between /i:t/ and /sli:p/ and the alliteration between /sli:p/ and /slaid/ trans- form the experience of life after death into a playful peregrination, similar to children’s games on a slide, in a playground. There is a sense of eternal enjoyment, as if the dead were allowed to return to the age of innocence, and to remain in that stage of pleasu- rable carelessness for the rest of their “death span.” Humour derives from the transformation of the dead adult into a creature who is up and kicking (or down and sliding) but there is a strong element of satire in this dwin- dling or shrinking process. Harry is reduced to the stature of a worm since, by sliding up and down the leaf for all eternity, he will leave a silver patch of his own on the juicy leaf, the type of silver patch that is usually left by crawling invertebrates. The element of satire does not simply derive from the diminution of his stature but also from the polysemy of the word “worm” which alludes to an unpleasant kind of person, someone who does not deserve respect. The reduction of the dead man’s stature to that of a slug

2. See for instance the end of Dante’s Paradise: “Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna / legato con amore in un volume / cio che per l’universo si squaderna” (XXXIII, 85-87). The English translation goes, “In its depths I saw that it contained bound with love in one volume that which through the universe is scattered” (quoted in Nuttall 35). 58 may eventually be interpreted as a particularly “dispiriting” experience and the title of the story might be regarded as ironically antiphrastic. The activities in which “Spirit 350” will indulge for all eternity are meant to be “spirited” but have nothing “spiritual” about them and some critics have gone as far as suggesting that “Spirit” found its place “among the most satirical items in Frame’s corpus, which ruthlessly expose what she views as a spiritual deficit consequent upon the lazy materialism of Western societies” (Delrez 17). Onomastics are equally humorous, if not satirical, and deserve special attention, all the more so as proper nouns seem to be absent from the world of the dead. The warden is surprised to hear Harry mention his wife’s name: “Emily Barker? Do you have names?” (90). The name of Harry’s wife happens to encapsulate the first and the last names of two women writers: Emily Brontë, whose family Janet Frame strongly identified with,3 and Mary Anne Barker alias Lady Barker, who published in 1870 her first book entitledStation Life in New Zealand, which became a classic of New Zealand literature. We may legitimately assert that Janet Frame did not use these writers’ names innocently. The story of Harry’s eternal lot is very much concerned with immortality and posterity. Harry informs the warden that living people are “always trying to leave their mark on the world” and the warden comforts Harry by telling him that he will be able to make “a little permanent silver patch” of his own on his juicy leaf. By allusively encapsulating the names of two female writers in her own story about Harry’s taking leave from the world to settle on an eternal leaf, Frame humorously and self-reflexively points in the direction of her own leaves, and leave-takings, which may also “leave” a mark upon the world. In addition to this playful allusion to two female writers’ names, another collocation must be taken into account. Lady Barker’s letters to her sister in England were published under the title Station Life in New Zealand, a specific reference to life on a farm, since in Australia and New Zealand a “station” is a large farm with animals. In Frame’s short story, we recognize an account of “Station Life after Death.” The deceased is represented as a pioneer colonizing a juicy country and finding his “station” on a leaf which he exploits for eternity. His reduced circumstances may be regarded as a satirical response from Janet Frame writing back to deride the greed attendant upon juicy colonization. The other names which appear are equally facetious or satiric. The warden challenges the fact that people should be given names. He questions their validity and seems to imply that a name is not necessary. In response to the warden’s challenge, Harry tries to establish the legitimacy of names and their individuality. To do so, he paradoxically resorts to names which are not individualized but on the contrary multiple and unspecific. He explains: “I was Harry and there was my brother Dick and my sister Molly” (Frame 90). This enumeration closely resembles the collocation “Tom, Dick, and Harry” which is used to refer to any male in the world. With “Tom” being replaced with “Molly,” the collocation is partly appropriated and partly modified, creating a sense of departure from linguistic norms and ironic discrepancy. Frame is drawing attention to the arbitrariness of names and to the dispossession of identity that institutions are

3. “In the autobiography her construction of herself as a writer is clearly an intertextual activity, this construction being primarily the result of the interaction of the Self with literary others. […] It is marked by an early identification of the young Frame sisters with the Brontës; Janet seeing herself as Charlotte, and all three of them setting out to write novels” (Oettli-van Delden 73). 59 Haunted by a Fantasy of Immortality liable to perform: a situation which she encountered herself as a patient in a psychiatric hospital and which is reconfigured and revivified here, as Harry comes up against his eternal lot, a lot which is partly that of Tom, Dick, and Harry and partly his own. Critics have much commented upon the “Trojan horse strategy” used by Janet Frame in her stories and more specifically on her capacity to insert powerful intertexts in a covert way through absorption, disguise, and displacement (Dvorak 145). Allan Weiss has investigated Frame’s debt to Edgar Allan Poe, in particular to his apocalyptic tale “The Conversation between Eiros and Charmian” in which two characters discuss the manner in which the world ended when a comet hit the planet Earth. Poe’s tale, which is included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, takes place in an imaginary “Aydenn” after the world has come to an end. Despite the fact that Poe’s protagonists display much more empathy towards each other than Harry and the warden do, the overall frame, that of a dialogue between dead people, is the common fact which links both stories and, in Dvorak’s words, “imparts upon the readers the awkward task of eavesdropping” (145). By secretly incorporating this apocalyptic dialogue within her own story, Frame does not only achieve a complex act of “frame-breaking” and “a heteroglossic stratification of voices” (Dvorak 146); she allows her characters to live (and to die) in a referential world which is simultaneously located on a longer temporal axis and a narrower spatial plane, thus heightening the satirical torsion of her revision based upon a process of derision and debunking. Through her reconfiguration of Poe’s version of the Apocalypse, Frame’s story sweepingly reaches back and forward to the original biblical account of the final cataclysm while reducing its span to a silver trail on a juicy leaf. As noted by Dvorak, Weiss and Delrez, the last part of the story makes an intertextual reference to one of the most well-known stage dialogues in the history of drama: that between Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Harry tells the warden: “But I tell you I was a human being, a man in form and moving how like an angel” (90). This is an allusion to: What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither. (II, 2, 307-13) When Hamlet is speaking to the courtiers, his sincerity is in question. He explains his melancholy but, as commentators concur, he might very well be putting on an act, “an antic disposition” (I, 5, 171), making the courtiers believe that he is mad. By simultaneously aggrandizing man’s status and reducing it to a handful of dust, Hamlet lays the emphasis on the biblical theme of vanity: vanity of vanities; all is vanity.4 Frame litera- lizes the resulting process of devastation when she makes Harry shrink to the level of a slug. The allusion to Hamlet also makes the reader cast a retrospective glance at the story and at Harry’s account of his life, which contains an unmistakable element of melancholy. He had high aspirations for himself, which are presented in a humorous way: he wanted to be “an inventor or explorer or sea captain” (89), and he puts the three possibilities on the same level, erasing social hierarchies. None of his dreams came true, and

4. Ecclesiastes 1:2. The Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate) renders it as “Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas.” 60 he found himself fenced in an alarmingly limited existence. The depiction of Harry’s life approximates Hamlet’s confinement in a degraded kingdom, which he calls a prison. Harry felt caught in the prison-house of routine: “we are creatures of habit. Lived in a little house…” (90). He felt threatened by the common enemy, death: “a big black death swoops down from the skies to carry us away” (90). His death rescues him from death: he is safe because he is dead. As the warden tells him: “and remember no blackbirds to bother you” (91). Death is represented as a protection through a major ironic twist which reconfigures life-in-death as nonsensical, and claustrophobic. In the closing paragraphs of the story, immediately after quoting Shakespeare, Harry also exclaims: “I’ve wept and laughed and fallen in love” (91). It is difficult not to hear in this sentence an echo to the poem by T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the words of Marta Dvorak, this sentence “ventriloquate[s] the well- known lines spoken by T. S. Eliot’s persona Prufrock, “I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed” (Eliot 16), in turn containing a Biblical ring (2 Samuel I, 12)” (Dvorak 146).5 The last words which Harry is allowed to utter are borrowed ones. To express his disappointment with the restrictions of his lot, he is left without words of his own and uses those derived from Shakespeare, Eliot, and the Bible. The citational process is highly ironic because it is predicated upon a discrepancy between the glory of the embedded sources and the diminutive nature of the embedding narrative: one of the shortest short stories in the first collection of a short story writer from the most -dis tant periphery in the English-speaking world annexes and incorporates some of the most acclaimed sources in the English Canon. By placing her Everyman (Tom, Dick, and Harry) on the same axis as Hamlet and Prufrock, not only does Frame ironize him but she also ironizes herself by implicitly aligning her short story with a canonical tragedy and a canonical poem. Through the partial quotation of Prufrock’s lines, and the misquote from Hamlet, Harry is simultaneously granted and denied such affiliation with his grand predecessors. Like Prufrock exclaiming: “No, I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be,” Harry is submitted to a process of denial, which reinforces his illustrious lineage. He is simultaneously aggrandized and debunked by being allowed to ventriloquize a canonical madman and a canonical fool. In this very short short story, Frame is ironically incorporating some of the major master narratives of the Western world. Not only does this create a “dialogical cultural continuum” (Dvorak 146), it also paradoxically illustrates a postcolonial strategy of appropriation and recycling based on a poetics of ironic debunking. Frame annexes the canon to write a counter-narrative organized around reduction – a reduction of the size of the narrative as well as a- re duction of the protagonist’s legitimate expectations, of his aspirations, of his activities, of his space, of his stature. Frame’s narrative is diminutive and her hero is a sub-man who crystallizes the frustrations and emptiness of an infra-ordinary existence. Never- theless the story is a far cry from despair and hopelessness; despite its ironic deflation or possibly on account of it, it manifests the desire to leave “a mark on the world some sort of a trail” (90). The trail is reduced to “a little permanent silver patch,” with the preposterous association of “little” with “permanent.” This association might be regarded as a metafictional comment pointing in the direction of the accomplishment of desire. The reconciliation of “little” with “permanent” reinstates the modest short

5. The second Book of Samuel: “They beat their breasts and wept, because Saul and Jonathan his son and the people of the Lord, the House of Israel, had fallen into battle.” 61 Haunted by a Fantasy of Immortality story in the permanence of literary genres. It gestures towards immortality through the imperishable work of art. Frame’s fantasy about coming to terms with death might be ultimately read as a defence and illustration of the act of creation under the guise of a recreation, in which a slug is allowed to turn into a silkworm so as to renew with silver threads6 the eternal fabric of fiction.

Héliane Ventura University of Toulouse 2 Le-Mirail

W orks Cited The New English Bible. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970. BalDick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Barker, Mary Anne. Station Life in New Zealand. 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970. Delrez, Marc. “The Literal and the Metaphoric: Paradoxes of Figuration in the Work of Janet Frame.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 33.2 (Spring 2011): 10-20. Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. 1963. London: Faber & Faber, 1974. DVorak, Marta. “Frame-breaking: ‘neither separate nor complete nor very important.’” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 33.2 (Spring 2011): 137-49. Frame, Janet. The Lagoon and Other Stories. 1951. London: Bloomsbury, 1991. ––. An Autobiography. 1989. London: The Women’s P, 1980. laplancHe Jean, and J. B. Pontalis. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. Paris: PUF, 1967. Nuttall, Anthony David. Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992. Oettli-Van DelDen, Simone. Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness. Wellington: Victoria UP, 2003. SHakespeare, William. Hamlet Prince of Denmark. Ca. 1604. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Weiss, Allan. “The Form and Function of the Modern Fable in Janet Frame Short Stories.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 33.2 (Spring 2011): 43-55.

6. See the analysis of the genealogy of the silkworm image in Frame’s work developed in Delrez 17-8.

The Word and the Stage, or the Intermediate Transparency in The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard

By staging the confrontation between two brothers, one black and one white, in a South African apartheid context, Athol Fugard complements traditional dramatic interrogations on the artificiality of social roles with a compelling political question. This paper focuses on the function of fables used as a Brechtian distancing device in order to transpose one story, one situation, one conundrum, into another. Such transfers are working towards associating a shock effect with understanding.

In The Empty Space, Peter Brook – the director who has staged Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead at the Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris (2007) and whose filmMeetings with Remarkable Men (1979) casts the South African playwright – states that theatre is the art that makes the invisible visible.1 Visibility does not entail anything obvious. Indeed, drama does rely heavily on masks and costumes, and not only in European traditions. Theatre, an artform that derives etymologically from the realm of sight, can be sketchily defined as an attempt to interrogate appearances on the one hand, and their specific hermeneutics on the other. Put differently it calls into question the relation of perception and interpretation. If theatre is performed in real time and in the real world, what is shown on stage reaches us through a series of screens, lenses and filters, through a distance that no avant-garde experiment could fully abolish. There is the gap between actors and the audience but also that of language, between signified and signifier.2 More perhaps than any other art, theatre allows us to understand the link between sight and knowledge that is betrayed by such expressions, often to be heard on Athol Fugard’s stage, as “you see,” hinting not at sight but at comprehension. They could suggest that such “visual” understanding be immediate, while the duration and diffraction that drama implies tell another story. If all art is a supplement to nature,3 the stage is both using and denouncing a closeness unequalled by any other artistic practice. The layers of artificiality and all the self-designation never completely suppress the feeling that the table, the chair, the bed and above all the body on stage are taken from real life, however the latter may be defined. Peter Brook’s statement applies all the better to the plays by South African playwright, novelist and film director Athol Fugard since the gaze is not hindered by all the bour - geois clutter of things that belong to the “Deadly Theatre” (Brook 11-46). There is actually not much to see in his plays whose stage is not physically crammed to say the very least. In The Blood Knot, as in quite a lot of other plays by Fugard, there are two actors and scant stage business. Like the Beckettian have-nots who are more or less their contemporaries4 Morris and Zach make do with very little, and when Morris – whose name, suggesting “more,” is highly misleading – ungainly thinks of leaving the confron -

1. The definition of the “Holy Theatre,” also called “The Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible,” is that “the stage is a place where the invisible can appear” (47). 2. This paper excludes the marginal, but thrilling, experimentations in utterly speechless theatre (Samuel Beckett’s Breath e.g.). 3. The now common notion of supplement needs to be traced back to Derrida 144-5. 4. As he was writing The Blood Knot, Athol Fugard was also directing Waiting for Godot (Fugard Notebooks 65). 64 tation5 that constitutes the entire play, he merely takes his Bible, his “other shirt” and his alarm-clock (7, 84).6 The mention of the Bible is here of crucial interest because it introduces a central intertext, that of the fable of Cain and Abel. Zach and Morris are brothers who are both bent on murdering the other in metaphorical terms. The “other shirt” sends us back to the game of identity theft that launches much of the action in what can largely be read as a comedy of errors, the two brothers impersonating each other in turn in post-Shakespearian manner. Lastly, the alarm-clock represents not so much time as delay, procrastination, an extension of duration that characterizes much of what takes place in the play. The opposite conception and representation of time, immediacy, would designate the instantaneity with which light goes through a transparent obstacle, an absence of deformation that is a constant and ever protracted horizon for Morris and Zach. Such visual dereliction makes room for what is mostly there to be seen without any apparent screen, i.e., the difference in skin colour. Although they have the same parents, Morris looks white whereas Zach looks black. From such immediate impressions there derives a social, cultural, political identity in an apartheid society. I shall attempt to show that Fugard tries to revive the immediacy of the perception through an avoidance of such constructed identities, mostly by using Brechtian devices of fabulation and transposition. Here is a brief overview of the plot: the brothers spend days and, increasingly, nights, talking about both past and future until Morris suggests that Zach write to a pen-friend. The latter, Ethel Lange, turns out to be a white woman. She becomes both a fantasy and a threat, the object of a legal crime in apartheid South Africa.7 She never appears in the flesh but becomes the prism through which each brother projects the existence of the other one. There is no possible reliance on appearances in the play, only diffractions and refractions. Ethel is not the only ghost that works as a filter. There are Minnie, a friend of Zach’s; Connie, his former girlfriend; an employee at a gas station; a man briefly seen on a road and last but not least their mother, an absence that creates more and more mediation and which remains a mystery for the spectator. All of these spectres are projections of the two brothers who lend them various attributes when they are not borrowing them. A game of mirrors, appearances, masks and criss- crossing roles8 is introduced that creates a whirlwind of representations for which the bareness of the stage and the physical dereliction of the protagonists had not prepared the spectators. The existentialist screen would seem to foreclose the very possibility of transparency while multiple and variable identities pile up under our very eyes. Such a paradox is redoubled by the opposition between faux-semblants in the plot and the concreteness of theatre.

5. The verbal struggle between the two brothers recalls as much Beckett as Sartre and even more so Albert Camus, a distinct influence on Athol Fugard to which the Notebooks recurrently attest (56, 61, 73, 82, 94, 104-7, 156, 195). The Notebooks are a precious source of information since the first hundred and fifty pages are largely concerned with the writing, performing and reception of The Blood Knot. 6. All references to the play will include the scene and page numbers between brackets. 7. The notorious Immorality Act, a hallmark of the apartheid apparatus, deemed any relationship between Whites and “Coloureds” a crime. 8. This dimension of the play provoked the scathing criticism of Dennis Walder: «The idea that humiliation and role-playing are essential for survival permeates Fugard’s plays» (62); The« Blood Knot [...] suggest[s] an acceptance of inhumanity and prejudice as permanent features of life. Fugard’s own sense of the individual’s relationship into society and to history is fundamentally pessimistic” (100). My argument here is that “role-playing” is highly unstable, preventing any such “sense of the indiviual’s relationship into society.” 65 The Word and the Stage, or the Intermediate Transparency in The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard

This paper focuses on the ways in which the stage is used in The Blood Knot to denounce the extent to which the racist, undemocratic, apartheid-ridden South Africa has rendered vision highly problematic or even impossible. It interrogates the onrush of affects, feelings and emotions in social dealings. In The Blood Knot, emotions are often mediated but the playwright is seeking an immediate response from the audience. My concern will finally be to explore in which ways such immediacy can paradoxically be reached through language, through its connotative – as opposed to its denotative – value. The point is that if theatre traditionally and theoretically relies on the transparency of the stage and the opacity of the word, in The Blood Knot, the “real” has become highly problematic, forcing transparency to find a provisional shelter in language. The two protagonists, Morris and Zachariah, are all but reduced to their skin colour, something which actually launches the dramatic action. The conventional cha- racterization that goes through the elements of the well-made play inherited from the European nineteenth century (e.g., social class, age, last name, profession, connections, past occupations) are all carefully avoided all the better to highlight the opposition between a black and a white man. The relationship of domination and submission, the scheme of the pen friend revolve around skin colour. This being said, roles have a tendency to migrate. The play is actually much about trying on the other’s identity – in South African English, one is said to “try” for white. While Morris, who looks white, is coming back to his childhood township from a year spent among whites literally to put on Zach’s clothes (1, 21) and experience life as a Coloured, Zach corresponds with Ethel by pretending to be white, which is her colour and the only one acceptable and legally possible for her pen-friend.9 It turns out that being black or white is largely the prerogative of outfits and appearances, in the first case, and of literacy in the other. The Sartrian recognition of the master by the slave becomes that of the white by the black – a configuration that was, after all, much scrutinized by the father of existentialism in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The play pinpoints the impossibility for black and white to remain what they are, just colours. The crime of South African colonialism is enacted throughout the play in various forms, including a financial one. Morris, indeed, takes the money earned by Zachariah, and plans to buy a farm with it, thus performing the land dispossession at stake on a national scale during apartheid but also before and after. Moreover, the play introduces the tragic transgression, or hubris, through the semi- nal biblical fratricide of Abel by Cain. Such a crime may be seen on a first level as the epitome of the apartheid regime where the white brother killed the black one and stole his belongings. The Scriptures are actually quoted by Morris while Zach is sleeping, Abel-like indeed. He returns to the table, picks up the Bible, and after an inward struggle speaks in a solemn, “Sunday” voice. And he said: “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me!” Morris drops his head in an admission of guilt. Oh Lord! Oh Lord! So he became a hobo and wandered away, a marked man, on a long road, until a year later, in another dream, He spake again: Maybe he needs you, He said. You better go home, man! Pause (1, 19)

9. A watershed in Fugard’s production, The Blood Knot was also a landmark in South African drama since it brought a black and a white actor together on the same stage. This was innovative and was declared legal only four years later along with non-segregated audiences (see Wertheim 18). 66

Here, after the symbolical murder of Zach who has unexpectedly fallen asleep, and thus assumes the motionlessness of death, the role-shifting is between Morris and no less than God, since he utters the very words the Lord addresses to Cain. If Morris poses as a murderous brother he also speaks “as” God, as is made obvious on stage by his counterfeit voice, a cheap and comic reproduction of the idea commonly conveyed of “God’s voice.” He then goes on in the same role but decides this time to write the cue himself rather than rely on the Scriptures. The whirl of role-shifting is further propelled by the disjunction between a pastiche of the English the King James version Bible had been penned in (“he spake”) and the very words of God, whose register is quite colloquial (“hobo,” “man” as an apostrophe and expression of familiarity). God is now speaking like Morris, and Morris like God. This comes in blatant contradiction with the stage direction where Morris “admits” his guilt. It thus seems that the stage does not lie when words do. The gestures of Morris (the “inward struggle,” the dropping of the head) point to his symbolical murder of his black brother while his tone and his cues attempt at obfuscating the identity of the culprit, even as apartheid was based on an obvious but unsayable inversion where the murderer ruled, including the law, while the victim remained oppressed. I wish, however, to interrogate the status of the fable, or parable, in the play. It is a technique that has been frequently borrowed from Bertolt Brecht, such a major influence that Athol Fugard had named his first company “The Circle Players,” a tribute to the Caucasian Chalk Circle.10 A fable can be defined as the deployment of a story that clearly echoes another context and that requires from the reader or spectator a systematic act of transposition. If the “admission of guilt” shown on stage by Morris seems telling, it is only through the mediation of the story of Cain and Abel that the spectator spontaneously adapts to what is on stage. Thus, the status of the stage and its semantic, non-linguistic signs can be seen as intermediate, oscilla- ting between immediacy and mediation. Like the transparent lens, it lets meaning come through without major distortions though it provides for a gap and a delay. Transparency is the filter of the fable that helps us decipher the action. It is a world of false appearances that point to some truth having to do with the tragedy of racial selves in apartheid South Africa. Colours prevail, disregarding the true identity since the two men have the same mother and father, and thus share the same genetic makeup. Yet even those appearances happen to morph constantly, suggesting that there is no such thing as a true identity. The versatility of roles is briefly denied by Zach: “Because from now on, I’ll be what I am. They can be what they like” (4, 63). Such a statement is followed by a problematic decision to stand apart mingled with outrageous eugenic statements: “I don’t want to mix. It’s bad for the blood and the poor babies. So I’ll keep mine clean, and theirs I’ll scrub off, afterwards, off my hands, my unskilled, my stained hands” (4, 63). Meanwhile, a more realistic – as it were – Morris reminds us of his own complicated, opaque identity: “I asked his name. Kleinbooi. But he didn’t ask mine. He wasn’t sure, you see. So often in my life they haven’t been sure, you see” (4, 63). The un - derstanding that ought to follow from visual evidence is seriously called into question.

10. The play was rehearsed by Fugard and his actors in 1964 before the performance was delayed by the arbitrary and violent arrest of the actor playing Azdak, Norman Ntshinga, a black school-teacher who would spend two years in jail (most of that time in the notorious prison of Robben Island), accused of supporting the banned African National Congress. This episode partly inspired The Island, a later play by Athol Fugard. On Brecht’s influence on Fugard see e.g., Kruger 215-79. 67 The Word and the Stage, or the Intermediate Transparency in The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard

In the play the white brother, Prospero-like, reads to his illiterate black brother but, on the other hand, he is the one who stays home, cleans the house, mends torn clothes and bathes the black brother’s feet after a day of hard work. This migration of roles finds metatheatrical echoes in the way Athol Fugard was known to work. He belonged to a tradition of workshop plays where the black actors would contribute to the process of writing, and where the usually white stage director would sometimes climb on the stage to play a role (Crow 100-1). What is left, importantly, in terms of stability, is the Sar - trian notion of “for the other,” the idea that we behave according to the other person. As early as the opening stage directions, a happy Zach modifies his expression upon seeing Morris smiling: “He frowns, pretends to think, and makes a great business of testing the water with his foot” (1, 3). I shall now argue that such versatility is linked to time, revealing not so much that we are never the same as time goes by as the fact that history has stopped, leaving no possibility for meaning to stabilize. The intermediate clarity of transparency is made impossible by the very distance it carries along. A few minutes after the beginning of the play its two protagonists embark upon a lengthy evocation of a certain Minnie, a man they used to know. The name can be heard as a distortion of “me,” that impossible self, while the central and double “n” call forth ideas of negation. It so happens that the memory of Minnie is fully and obsessively entwined with temporal notions: not only is he a person they no longer see but he would “sit all night” (1, 7), “come every night” (1, 7) or just on Fridays (“Friday nights it was,” 1, 8), he knew “the good times” (1, 8), could play the guitar “non-stop” (1, 8). He comes with “Golden Moments at two bob a bottle” (1, 9) in his hand – thus designating a time that is precious and cheap at once, a contradiction in terms. He stands there and says, “tonight is the night” (1, 9). Furthermore, the stage directions indicate that the end of this speech coincides with the ringing of Morris’ alarm clock. The memory is strong enough in Zach’s mind for him not to be able to listen to the plans of Morris, who is thinking about their future farm. From that point onwards, the entire action of the play is filtered through the screen of what has already happened and what could take place, none of it being staged in front of us. Incidentally, the treatment of time, in Morris’s conception, also entails space, since he wished to buy “large, blank spaces” (1, 10) in order to start a farm. The comedy of errors that is unfolding in front of us is thus dependent on the passing of time – Morris, who used to pass himself as white, and no longer does, is one blatant example thereof. This is another instance where the apparent reliability of the stage, its concreteness, is belied. Like colour, time has been made deceitful in apartheid South Africa because the regime has rewritten a past that never existed, foreclosing any possibility for change, political, social and otherwise. I suggest that this is the reason for the blatant absence of context in the play. Athol Fugard’s skill as a playwright is to do away with history: in this profusion of time indications, there is a puzzling and very Beckettian absence of dates in the play with absolutely no element allowing us to situate the play in time, let alone any precise reference to the apartheid system. Time is frozen or else described in terms of delay, belatedness, the better to represent the state of a country where the catastrophe has taken place without there being any hope. The following exchange addresses questions of identity and links them systematically to notions of time and, more particularly, of duration and delay: 68

ZACHARIAH Wait, Morrie! MORRIS It’s late. ZACHARIAH I want to have a good look at you, man. MORRIS It’s a bit late in the day to be seeing your brother for the first time. I been here a whole year, you know. ZACHARIAH Ja. But after a whole life I only seen me properly tonight. You helped me. I’m grateful. MORRIS It was nothing... ZACHARIAH No! I’m not a man that forgets a favour. I want to help you now. MORRIS I don’t need any assistance, thank you. ZACHARIAH But you do. A man can’t really see himself. Look at me. I had an odd look at me in the mirror - but so what? Did it make things clearer? No. Why? Because it’s the others what does. They got sharper eyes. I want to give you the benefit of mine. Sit down. (Morris sits) (4, 64) Delay is associated with negations (“nothing,” “not a man,” “I don’t,” “a man can’t”), as in the case of “Minnie.” In the Notebooks, Athol Fugard goes as far as saying that we are witnessing the death of both characters on stage: “The blood tie linking them has chained them up. They are dead or dying because of it” (10).11 The oscillation between a completed action and an action in progress is rendered by the gerund that reinforces the idea of duration and the belatedness of events. The foregrounding of a delayed, never-ending temporality has consequences on the generic level, as Athol Fugard has himself analyzed and deplored in reflections sprung from a screening of A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller: Why has the tragic dimension been lost in modern playwriting, where has it gone? [B]ecause of our assault on our concept of finality, the end – FINIS. [...] By trying to eliminate “THE END” I have unwittingly assaulted the tragic dimension. (Notebooks 76) Indeed and despite the tragic hubris of a metaphorical fratricide, both brothers keep projecting onto their imaginary screen the dream of a new view, a new beginning: “I reckon it’s one of the hard things in life to begin again when you’re already in the middle” (1, 14). If Morris describes autumn, its yellow dust, the absence of birds, he also steels himself by saying it is “only the beginning of the end of another year” (1, 20). I shall now argue that the play The Blood Knot actually operates a return to the tragic genre and structure through Brechtian defamiliarization. As a result, life literally seems to end with the intrusion of certain images that cannot be transparent if they are to produce an effect. Their function has to do with the obstacle but also consequently and not so paradoxically with earnestness. On this page about tragedy Fugard contends that it is involved with retrieving one’s own conscience and truth, and he denounces Eddie’s “self-deception,” his meaningless words. The paradox is that for truth to appear one needs “the dark shadow of tragedy” (Notebooks 76). Through images the playwright attempts to render the first shock, that of the apartheid to an outsider. If skin colour is already deep-rooted in prejudice and has become transparent, no longer seen for what it is but as what has been constructed behind it, images reactivate a shock effect. The result is one of defamiliarization, another point where Fugard draws on Brecht’s theories. In the final scene, during which Morris and Zachariah actually play at being respectively the white master and the black servant, Morris declares:

11. This death-in-progress was experienced by the author who recalls writing The Blood Knot in a small flat on Bird Street, Port Elizabeth, while his father was agonizing in the other room. Meanwhile, his wife Sheila was going through another sort of duration, since she was expecting (see Fugard Notebooks 41). 69 The Word and the Stage, or the Intermediate Transparency in The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard

You see, you bothered me as I passed. Moments of recognition, you know, at first sight, and all that. So I’ll take this road. I mean ... I’ll have to get away if I want to admire the beauty, won’t I? Yes. It’s a good road. (7, 90, italics mine) He thus expresses the necessity for distance and delay in the “admiring” of sights, here the road. His words link ideas of disturbance (“bothered”) with knowledge (“recognition”), again connected with sight (“you see”). They string together vision (“at first sight”) and confusion (“and all that”), and they create a metaphor for defamiliarization (“I’ll have to get away”). Central in this passage is the ellipsis, a paradoxical trope which is transparent and opaque all at once: the speaker and the audience ought to understand the same thing without there being any need to speak, or alternatively, the speaker does not even know what the apt word may be. What follows these lines is a reinforcement of the idea of distance: “It’s going places, because ahead of me I see the sky. I see it through the trees ... so I’m climbing up the hill in this road, putting miles between us; and now, at last, there ahead of me is the sky, big blue.” (7, 90)12 The character’s vision runs against the grain of the very idea of theatre, since it cannot be staged and shown to the audience. It is also a passage about distance, “miles between us” and filters “through the trees.” More than anything, it expresses a desire to see the world anew and to provoke the spectators into thinking about man in terms that are not racial. Images thus seem to function as a counterpoint to the betrayal of stage semantics in the play. There are Eliotesque images such as “the sadness of shoes without socks, or no shoes at all” (4, 62), binding human emotions and objects or human parts. Feet happen to be frequently mentioned in the play, especially in the following quote where Morris is reading Ethel’s letter to Zach, MORRIS (reading) “Dear Zach, many thanks for your letter. You asked me for a snap, so I’m sending you it. Do you like it? That’s my brother’s foot sticking in the picture behind the bench on the side...” ZACHARIAH She’s right! Here it is. MORRIS “Cornelius is a ... policeman” (3, 41) A metonym for movement, the foot can be linked to the distance previously identified. It has also been the attribute of tragedy ever since Oedipus (and his “twisted foot” after the manner in which his parents are said to have hanged him from a tree in order to kill him in his infancy) so that the playwright hints here that the policeman might not be representing so much a social justice as a dramatical one. The play features other transpositions (a foot for a face, a man for a woman) but more importantly, Cornelius represents another brother. In any case, the allusion confirms and heightens the atmosphere of fear that prevails in the play and that is first and foremost the one that each brother arouses in the other: “I got a fright” (1, 12), Zach says upon Morris’s arrival. This photograph encapsulates the paradox delineated previously: it requires the transparency of a lens but also a lapse of time, a delay, in order to develop (even though it is taken in a “snap”). Photography also plays an important role in Sizwe Banzi is Dead, and despite (or through) the notion of delay that it carries in its wake, with the very death

12. Such – obviously impossible – final vision comes full circle with the road, leading nowhere, evoked in the first scene by Morris, “City streets lead nowhere ... just corners and lampposts” (1, 10). 70 of the eponymous character and his pictorial reincarnation, it is precisely the place of the audience’s most immediate reaction, as noted by Fugard: After watching the first few seconds of the operation [putting Sizwe’s photograph into Zwelinzima’s pass] in stunned silence a voice shouted out from the audience: “Don’t do it brother…” Another voice responded “Go ahead and try. They haven’t caught me yet.” That was the cue for the most amazing and spontaneous debate I have ever heard. As I stood listening to it all, I realized I was watching a very special example of one of theatre’s major responsibilities in an oppressive society: to break the conspiracy of silence. The action of our play was being matched by the action of the audience. A performance on stage had provoked a political event in the auditorium. (Notebooks 31-2) It seems both problematic and crucial that the audience should react with such passion at a moment when what is being scrutinized (a photograph) cannot be seen by them. I wish to link this moment with the close analogy that Peter Brook draws between a theatrical experience and the picture in the pages he dedicated to what he calls “Immediate Theatre”: I know of one acid test in the theatre. It is literally an acid test. When a performance is over, what remains? [...] The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell – a picture. [...] When years later I think of a striking theatrical experience I find a kernel engraved on my memory: two tramps under a tree, an old woman dragging a cart, a sergeant dancing, three people on a sofa in hell13 – or occasionally a trace deeper than any imagery. (Brook 152) The picture of Cornelius’ foot may be seen as a metatheatrical representation of the effect of the whole play onto the audience, encapsulating the terror inspired by the apartheid regime as well as its truly tragic dimension. As opposed and by contrast to the audience’s impressions, knowledge is not immediate on stage, to the utmost despair of both characters. Zachariah thus exclaims, quite ungainly as he well knows, “What I want to know now, right this very now” (12). The substantification of time and its adverbs (“this very now” where one would expect “this very minute”) displaces onto the linguistic plane what is impossible from a pragmatic point of view. Whereas the signs from the stage cannot free the spectator from a viewpoint inherited from the apartheid regime, language can cross such borders. Changing the categories of grammar only further defamiliarizes us spectators from the world as it stands. Language, on the contrary, reaches into the affect and the human body that is otherwise too caught in processes of understanding. I wish to show in the last part of this paper that if images offer an immediate perception, language represents a mediation which is still efficient in dramatic terms. Linguistic distance can be found in the ubiquitous polyglossia in Athol Fugard’s works. A line in the introduction to the play warns that “an important element in my own writing is this question of ‘translating’ from Afrikaans to English” (xx). One could also dwell on the importance of names in the apartheid society where one findsbaas a or baasie, and on the other hand bantoes, capie, hotnot, meid, kaffer, all of which are to be heard at one point or another in the play, so that roles come with a name and only exist through linguistic categories. What I would like to scrutinize now is the way in which the extension of time alluded to earlier is also filtered through language, as in this statement,

13. As in life there are no coincidences on the stage and the reader will have recognized three playwrights who appear in this paper, Beckett, Brecht and Sartre. 71 The Word and the Stage, or the Intermediate Transparency in The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard

“A whole year of spending tonights talking, talking. I’m sick of talking. I’m sick of this room” (13). This is a metatheatrical discourse on acting, a description of the actor trapped on stage at night and expected to speak. It also agrammatically declenses the adverb “tonight,” turning it into a noun. Language is so linked to time that it becomes its only measure. If the play extends over several days the stage directions remain vague (“a few days later,” etc.). The only measure is that allowed by the going back and forth of letters between Zach and Ethel Lange (her name evoking both language and time). Her being found in the newspaper is another inscription of text in temporality – a newspaper ar - ticle being a text written on a given day and whose validity is thus guaranteed. With Ethel’s letters as with the photograph, we cannot see what the characters do. The resulting opacity is once more linked with delay but fails to hide the ultimate absence of meaning, as in the following: ZACHARIAH (bluff indignation) Burn this letter! What’s wrong with this letter? MORRIS Ethel Lange is a white woman! ZACHARIAH Wait ... wait ... wait ... not so fast. I’m a sort of slow man. [...] Think of Ethel, man. Think! Sitting up there in Oudtshoorn with Lucy, waiting ... waiting ... for what? For nothing. (3, 43-4) The waiting is geared towards the end and the town of Oudtshoorn sounds singularly close to “Outa,” or “old man” in Afrikaans. As in Beckett’s plays, the beginning and the end are conflated with the second cue starting with “Last night,” including an adverb that also points to duration, and the last stage direction showing Morris moving to his bed, in the attitude he had when the curtains were first raised. Past and future constantly fuse into each other while the few attempts to avoid such contagion are doomed to failure. One of them is the amazing scene 6, a monologue by Zach (81-2) that expresses the ideal of a transparent language, one that would be wrenched away from temporality. Unfortunately, it is fictitious on at least two grounds, one being that is an imaginary dia - logue with their mother, the second that he is actually pretending to be Morris. MORRIS You look tired tonight, old man. (Zachariah looks at him askance) Today too long? I watched you dragging your feet home along the edge of the lake. I’d say, I said, that that was a weary body. Am I right, old fellow? ZACHARIAH What’s this “old fellow” thing you got hold of tonight? MORRIS Just a figure of speaking, Zach. The shape of round shoulders, a bent back, a tired face. The Englishmen would say “old boy” ... but we don’t like that “boy” business, hey? ZACHARIAH Ja. They call a man a boy. You got a word for that, Morrie? MORRIS Long or short? ZACHARIAH Squashed, like it didn’t fit the mouth. MORRIS I know the one you mean. ZACHARIAH Then say it. MORRIS Prejudice. ZACHARIAH Pre-ja-dis. MORRIS Injustice! ZACHARIAH That’s all out of shape as well. MORRIS Inhumanity! ZACHARIAH No. That’s when he makes me stand at the gate. (3, 35, bold characters mine) The length of the day becomes that of the word, underpinning the link between the mediation of time and that of racial oppression. Like a Shakespearean conceit, the body itself becomes an alphabet of the injustice at stake in South African society, the “thing” 72 that no other human language could express. Even language is objectified (“this ‘old fellow’ thing”). What else is there? Sister. Sissy, they say, for short. Like something snaky in the grass, hey? But we never had one, so we can’t be sure. You got to use a word a long time to know its real meaning. That’s the trouble with “Mother”. We never said it enough. (He tries it.) Mother. Mother! Yes. Just a touch of sadness in it, and maybe a green dress on Sundays, and soapsuds on brown hands. [...] But brothers! Try it. Brotherhood. Brother-in-arms, each other’s arms. Brotherly love. Ah, it breeds, man! It’s warm and feathery, like eggs in a nest (1, 19) Thus scattered in the play are clues to the pre-Saussurean idea and ideal of a natural language. Such transparency is unattainable because language, let alone reality, acts as a strong filter that literally shapes the world. The play primarily catches the moment when language is still an emotion, just like the foot on the picture may be, even after history and human monstrosity have prevented us from seeing the other for what he or she is. Words are associated with a feeling, an affect, an impression – an image, after all. As an optical phenomenon, transparency describes a crossing, a trajectory, that of light through something that does let it through. Transparency implies distance, however short. It entails temporal and spatial extension. The indefatigable quandary in The Blood Knot is that of the use of such distance in order to reactivate our perception of apartheid as a moral scandal, both through images and words. The art of the theatre appears here as both a solution and a complication: a solution, because its very nature allows a discourse on masks better to be deployed and a complication since it acts as yet another screen. It might, however, be a very appropriate medium to translate the nature of transparency, both a promise of clarity in our vision and an awareness of misleading appearances. A committed play “cluttered with the debris of thirty years of cowardice, brief courage, blindness, deafness” (Notebooks 44) The Blood Knot combines the immediacy of sight and the mediation of the letter to re-activate senses and re-in- vent common sense.

Kerry-Jane Wallart University of Paris-Sorbonne

W orks Cited

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. CroW Brian with Chris Banfield. “Athol Fugard.” An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 96-111. DerriDa, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. FuGarD, Athol. The Blood Knot. 1963. Cape Town: Oxford UP, 1992. ––. Notebooks 1960/1977. Ed. Mary Benson. London: Faber, 1983. ––. “Sizwe Banzi is Dead.” A Night at the Theatre. Ed. Ronald Harwood. London: Methuen. 21-33. Jeyifo, Biodun. “The Reductive ‘Two-Hander’ Dramaturgy of Athol Fugard: Aspects of the Art and Society Dialectic.” The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama. London: New Beacon, 1985. 98-104. KruGer, Loren. Post-Imperial Brecht, Politics and Performance, East and South. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. WalDer, Dennis. Athol Fugard. London: Macmillan, 1984. WertHeim, Albert. The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard, From South Africa to the World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2000. Degrees of Transparency in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and After China

This essay intends to highlight how Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage (1983) and After China (1992) waver between transparency and opacity. It explores some of the techniques employed – among which a blurring of categories and a questioning of narratorial reliability – in order to create what Roland Barthes calls a “text of bliss” – one which challenges the limits of language as a means of communication.

Transparency can be defined as a property linked to the quantity and quality of light transmitted by and through an object. The adjective derived from it can be taken in the sense of “easily seen through or understood, […] not blurred, without distortion” (OED 3373). This prism can be applied to any literary work since the very aim of a text – and by extension of any communicative enterprise – is to convey a certain meaning. Brian Castro’s works are a direct questioning of literary transparency, since they present more opacity than apparent, easy understanding, and lead the reader to question his or her relation to language. Brian Castro is a Hong Kong-born Australian writer of European and Chinese descent. His novels, mostly set in Australia and featuring at least one character of part-Chinese origin, play with the notion of transparency not only through the complexity of the identities presented but also through an elaborate use of literary techniques that tend to complicate the act of reading. Indeed Castro’s books are characterized by a construction and content that create feelings of strangeness and estrangement, placing the reader in a paradoxical position both of understanding and puzzlement. This essay intends to focus on his first novel, Birds of Passage and his fourth novel, After China. These two novels present similarities in their treatment of categorisation and are a good illustration of the variety of Castro’s literary techniques. Among his early novels, they present his interrogations as a writer and reflect the creation of his specific style. In Birds of Passage the reader discovers two main characters, Lo Yun Shan and Seamus O’Young, whose stories are respectively set during the 1850s Australian gold- rushes and a century later. The narration alternates between the two characters’ stories for the most part. We follow Shan through the difficulties and racism he encounters on the goldfields. Seamus, an orphan whose origins are most probably part-Chinese and who was adopted by an Australian family, finds a certain number of pages from Shan’s journal and starts translating them from Chinese into English, progressively entwining his own quest for identity with that of Shan. After China presents a Chinese architect, You Bok Mun, who lives in exile in Australia. He meets a woman writer who is never named and is terminally ill. The narration alternates between the stories You tells the writer – a mingling of his own story and of traditional Chinese ones – and You’s exchanges with the writer, creating a web of tales that questions the limits of fiction, memory and truth. These two novels have received considerable attention, particularly concerning the major theme of racial and literary hybridity,1 as well as the role of translation in Birds of

1. See Deves and Brun on the connection between racial hybridity and Castro’s aesthetics. 74

Passage (Nikro 74-84) or the role of female characters in After China (Sorensen 778-83). Many critics have evoked the opacity they perceive in Castro’s novels, linking it to the complexity of his writing. Yet the subject has not been tackled in any specific article, nor have those two novels been discussed in parallel, which is what I now intend to do. In order to understand how transparency is turned into opacity in Castro’s novels I will focus on two specific techniques: a blurring of literary and racial categories, and the com - bination of the mechanisms of narrative construction and de-construction. In the end, these devices de-construct the reliability of categories, but more generally of language as a means of communication, and as I will attempt to explain, they turn these novels into what Roland Barthes characterises as “texts of bliss” in The Pleasure of the Text. Something is immediately disturbing in Brian Castro’s works. What could be a transparent, easy reading actually seems to be blurred, as if there were layers of veils obs- curing the text. In order to create this impression of estrangement, the first technique Castro uses is to break the usual boundaries of literary categories, that is to say to blur the limits between different genres. Brian Castro has most recently used this technique in Shanghai Dancing. The novel resorts to different genres – autobiography, novel, biography, memoir, epic tale for example – which rendered its publication problematic since it was hard to label for publishing houses.2 The two works under scrutiny here are more easily defined as novels, yet some passages differ from the structures usually encountered in novels. For instance in After China, an entire chapter (47-52) is devoted to the epistolary sub-genre with the correspondence between You and his wife, who had stayed in China while he went to Paris to teach. A letter is also used in Birds of Pas- sage (99-100). The novel also gives way to potential playscripts with the use of direct speech and the typography that accompanies them (87-8, 124-6). The accumulation of other external materials conjures the idea that this novel is actually more of a notebook in which the narrator(s) collect(s) ideas, fragments of dialogues and personal notes. We can for instance note the use of passport entries (3, 58), a warning notice against Chinese miners (118), an extract from a racist song (83), a poem (74) that we can relate to Shan, although we cannot be sure of its source. Although those fragments are taken from “daily life” – in terms of their nature – they do not appear more transparent to the reader, who does not necessarily expect such a mingling of materials in a novel. This device makes it difficult at times for the reader to follow the narration, since it surprises his or her expectations and questions the roles of those fragments of information in creating a complete picture. The multiplicity of points of view and voices departs from linearity and echoes with the diversity of subjectivities that co-exist in real life, hence the difficulty to be sure of anything. Castro further blurs the picture by inserting historical landmarks, thereby questioning the part of fiction and reality in the two novels. InAfter China, for instance, there are references to the T’ang and Ming Dynasties (96). In Birds of Passage, the historical background stages the Lambing Flat Riot of June 1861 (133),3 and the shipwreck Shan survived on “the second day of February 1857” (63) corresponds to the histori-

2. It created what Brian Castro calls “the annoying effect of innovation” (Castro “Danser Shanghaï”). 3. The Lambing Flat Riots were a series of anti-Chinese demonstrations. They occurred on the goldfields in the Burrangong region (N.S.W.). They were called after the events that took place on 30 June 1861, when a mob drove the Chinese off the Lambing Flat and destroyed their belongings. 75 Degrees of Transparency in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and After China cal shipwreck of the Phaeton.4 Other references point to socio-historical realities such as the racist ideology against Chinese migrants underlying the Australian gold rushes: “They say that we dirty the water. Thus we are dirty. […] We are accused of spreading diseases. [...] Diseases are seen as evil; thus we are evil” (110). Yet, Castro’s interest does not lie in the fidelity to the events related or in reflecting the spirit of an age. These references function as a tool to create a setting for the characters to evolve in, and therefore turn into an unsettling device. The status of stories is questioned as those fictional events are connected to historical ones. Simultaneously the reliability of history is also put under scrutiny through the underlining of its nature as a discourse. Castro therefore prevents the readers from being caught up in the fictionality of the novel and continually leads them to interrogate the genre of the texts, the limits of labels and categories, and our role in creating them. Creating categories is an old human endeavour, as can be seen in the attempts at categorising people according to many different criteria. Castro questions this very process and the transparency of racial categorisation by inviting the reader to encounter characters in search for a definition of their identity, but who do not fit into any pre- existing category. In Birds of Passage, the main characters are linked by their search for identity – an identity complicated by external factors as well as by their own reflections on identity in general. Seamus is an orphan who was adopted by an Australian family of Irish descent – hence his name – although he looks part-Chinese. This physical appearance weighs on his self-perception and the way others see him. He therefore has difficulty defining who he is, as can be seen in this extract from the very beginning of the novel: Seamus O’Young. It’s not my real name. I’m not Irish. I am in fact an ABC; that is, an Australian-born Chinese. [...] It was a classification which straddled two cultures. Yes. ABC. I am a refugee, an exile. My heart and my head are in the wrong places. There was no country from which I came, and there is none to which I can return. (8) In this passage, we can feel the power of categories as well as the need to belong to a definite group, but the impossibility of such an ideal because of Seamus’s double cultural lineage. Much critical work has been concerned with the feeling of displacement migrants experience and the need and difficulty – if not the impossibility at times – of be - longing.5 Simultaneously unable to go back home and to adapt to their place of arrival, they tend to create an idealized concept of their former home – what Salman Rushdie labels “imaginary homelands”6 – which no longer corresponds to reality. Throughout the novel, Seamus therefore tries to reconcile his present and his past by investigating Shan’s life, which is also a life of cultural estrangement and a quest for answers. These semi-opaque identities can be found in After China, as You the architect experiences exile having left China under difficult circumstances to migrate to Australia. He feels

4. The Phaeton was sailing from Hong Kong and was shipwrecked at Port Robe on February, 1st 1857, carrying 260 Chinese passengers who landed safely the next morning. For further information concerning the shipwrecks at Port Robe, see 5. See for instance Tseen Khoo & Kam Louie or Chambers. 6. A phrase Rushdie uses in relation to his own experience of exile from India: “It may be that writers in my position, exile or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, event at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (10). 76 alienated and is seen by others as “a curiosity from the ancient past” (68), as if there were a veil upon his identity, creating a sense of mystery and foreignness that keeps him apart from the others. Though exiled and isolated, the two protagonists are not the only characters whose identities are far from being clear. In Birds of Passage, almost every secondary character has foreign origins. Some of them have a foreign name, like the Spanish worker Carlos, or Fatima whose real name is Fatiminha, although her mother was Portuguese (68). It is Seamus who tries to define her by saying that she is Australian because of her accent, which she does not deny. Other characters are said to speak with a foreign accent, like the Irishman who offers to lead Shan and the other Chinese men to Ballarat and robs them of £50 (78), or the alleged German gold-digger who attacks Shan and his com- panions, accusing them of stealing the Australian gold. The German accent seems to be associated with material success, a connection which is particularly present in the character of Mr Gold, Seamus’ first boss. This character presents a further level of caricature since his real name turns out to be Abraham Feingold, therefore underlining the stereotype connecting Jews with money. Here is the first conversation between Mr Gold and Seamus: “My name is Seamus O’Young. I’ve come about the job.” “Oh, yes. Va ist you say your name?” “Seamus O’Young.” “Such a funny name for a Chinese.” “I’m Australian.” “Really. Hum. You haf some Chinese blood. I can see that. Your fater ist Chinese? Your mutter?” “I don’t know. I’m Australian.” “That ist unfortunate... but ve try you out chust the same.” (23-4) This extract shows how misleading physical appearance is when categorizing people, since Mr Gold employs Seamus because he looks Chinese and is expected to work hard if one believes stereotypes, although he does not, and will in fact quit his job after a few days. On the contrary, Mr Gold, in keeping with his name and position, is supposed to embody both the material success of Australians and the anti-semitic stereotype associating Jewish people with wealth. His is a position of power, which is not limited to employing and firing people, but extends to judging and categorizing them. Since Mr Gold is actually of foreign origins, his legitimacy in categorizing others as non- Australian is undermined. Moreover, the definition of what it means to be Australian7 seems even more vague, particularly since Seamus, who looks part-Chinese though he is Australian, speaks better English and could pass as an Australian more easily than his employer, whose accent betrays his origins. Therefore, using blurred identities that belie the stereotypes we associate with origins questions the very act of characterizing. As Fatima underlines when she asks Sea- mus if she can paint him, “the process or references of which the subject is part” (69)

7. Concerning the definition of a nationality, Bhabha underlines that “[i]f the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the ‘totalization’ of national culture, then its positive value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct the field of meanings and symbols associated with national life” (3). Therefore, the very definition of the term “national” contains a “conceptual indeterminacy, [a] wavering between vocabularies” (2) which is questioned through the opening of meanings contained in language. These two novels reflect that “[t]he ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what is outside or beyond it” (4). 77 Degrees of Transparency in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and After China is made opaque when the subject is positioned in-between categories. As she points out to Seamus: “what would the painting of you be saying about time, or about race, or memory?” (69). Such a painting – and in Castro’s case such a novel – shows that characteri - zation appears more complex than it seems and cannot be limited to races or origins. An underlying opacity affects it, preventing the reader from reaching clear-cut definitions and explanations, therefore dismantling another level of categories. This questioning also affects the reader in a more personal way, since his or her very position as creator or subject of stigmatization is put under scrutiny, while the power of language as well as its limits are highlighted. The disruption of definitions goes hand in hand with another technique of obfuscation: the association of the antagonistic notions of a meticulous construction and de-construction – in the sense of undermining the process of construction – of this very same narrative structure. In order to reach this effect, Castro employs repetitions and parallels which lead the reader to question the reliability of the narrators. In Birds of Passage reiterations seem to be intended as signposts for the reader. From one narrative to the other, there are many echoes in the descriptions of places. For instance after the section relating Shan’s experience of the storm when he is on the boat to Australia, Seamus describes a room in Edna’s house as being “like a cabin of a storm-tossed ship” (43), or even words or phrases (for example “smoke” (102), “bunched” (126-7), “Then it happened one summer’s day” (147) paralleled with “It happened suddenly one evening” (149), “the sound of petals dropping” and “A hundred petals about to fall at once” (32)). Recurring phrases tie together both stories, building a bridge between the two spaces and periods of time. All of this creates a feeling of familiarity and connects the two stories together, tightening the bond between the two men as the story goes on. Yet, this apparent transparency is in fact blurred by the very process that constitutes it. Indeed, the repetitive use of this technique tends to create a feeling of strangeness, as it foregrounds the artificiality of the narrations. As Xavier Pons underlines, repetitions distort reality: The novel is in fact based on series of coincidences, of echoes from the past that are awa- kened by the present, of recurring incidents and characters […] The two basic narratives are like mirrors held up to a single reality which is reflected, and occasionally distorted in them. […] These recurrences are in a sense irrational and anomalous. (470-3) Shan himself notices the oddity of so many echoes when he says: “But such coincidences were impossible. His mind was exhausted, his imagination stretched by the strange twists and turns of his journey” (130). This self-reflexive passage catches the attention of the reader and the stability originally created by the repetitions erodes, leaving a feeling of strangeness which prevents any willing suspension of disbelief.8 These artificial devices therefore arouse a feeling of doubt on the part of the reader, which is reinforced by the use of secondary characters. Indeed, most of them appear in both narratives with the same names and common characteristics – for instance Clancy of the goldfields, actually called Fitzpatrick, seems to be connected to Bill Grove, “also known as Fitzpatrick, or ‘Clancy’” (15); likewise Fatima Feingold (Seamus’ wife) seems to run along parallel lines with Fatima the prostitute in Shan’s story, and hints at Abra-

8. Coleridge coined this phrase in his Biographia Literaria, defining the “willing suspension of disbelief ” as a device that enables the reader to reach “poetic faith” during the process of reading (5). 78 ham Feingold too. This tends to arouse the suspicion of the reader who starts questioning the reliability of what is related. The reliability of the narration is further questioned through the examination of the narrators themselves. Indeed, the shift of narrators in Birds of Passage and of narrative times in After China represent a desire to blur the boundaries between voices and times, creating a feeling of misunderstanding and even, at times, of disorientation, as the reader can no longer ascertain who is talking, which makes it difficult to trust the narrator. In Birds of Passage, the reliability of mingled narrative voices is further questioned since, as the reading goes on, Shan’s first-person account of his own experiences turns into a third-person heterodiegetic narration, before we finally find out that it is being transla - ted by Seamus. Translation implies a mediation through Seamus’ own perception and understanding of Chinese, as well as his own fantasies. He appropriates Shan’s story, and adds more and more fiction to it, while he puts his own life aside – he starts living a monastic life locked up in his room (87-8, 126) – in order to concentrate on Shan’s- re cords. As Shan is erased little by little, the narration gives way to two dialogues recorded by an extradiegetic narrator in which doctors try to understand what is wrong with him (87-8, 124-6). No answer is given to the reader, and further doubts are raised concer - ning Seamus’s reliability since the reader now starts questioning his mental health. The narrators – or narrator – cannot therefore be trusted, and the reader is left adrift in the narration, unable to get a clear view of the story and its narrator. In After China, the reliability – and even the sanity – of the narrator is questioned as another veil of opacity is thrown over the existence of the character of the writer. Indeed, the writer You meets is never given a name in the story, but simply called “she” or “the writer.” Their exchanges mainly consist of dialogues and stories that You tells her. Still, this character is often addressed as if she were not a real person. She can be interpreted in many ways. She could be a figment of his imagination, a fantasy he creates in order to have some company during his exile. The writer could also be a metaphor, the personification of a work in progress You might be writing. The writer would therefore not be a real character, but some sort of disembodiment of a part of You, re-embodied in an unreal companion – a fellow writer – he created for himself during the process of writing his own book. This can be seen in the content of the different conversations they have together, which corresponds to what You would need in order to write his book: a part of personal history – i.e., the passages when You tells her his own memories –, a fragment of personal fiction – when You invents or re-arranges his past to fit the story he wants to tell her – and a fragment of collective fiction – when You uses ancient Chinese legends and tales to create his stories. This idea also gains credibility with the ending of the book, since her death corresponds to the birth of the book itself. Moreo- ver, the writer’s funeral is described as a literary event – as if You, after having completed the book, finally offered it to his readership for the first time: “He didn’t know of her fame until her funeral. A couple of hundred of people chatting about her achievements. It became something of a literary conference” (142). The character of the writer is thus more complex than it initially seemed and offers many other interpretations, all pointing to the fact that the narrator cannot be entirely trusted since even the reality of one of the main characters cannot be taken for granted. This omnipresent unreliability unsettles the enunciative structure. The transparency of the narrative is blurred, and the techniques employed in order to construct a sense of order turn against themselves. 79 Degrees of Transparency in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and After China

Therefore, everything that seems constructed, from plot to narration, is in the end de-constructed, twisted and rendered opaque by Castro. This oscillation between construction / de-construction finds its embodiment in the hotel You is building Af-in ter China, which functions as a metaphor. Indeed, You’s hotel was designed in order to incorporate constant change and even to self-destruct (Brennan 72), bearing what You calls “a negative potential” (107) as it collapses into the sea at the end of the novel. We can compare this to the structure of the novel itself: on the one hand, it is a very dense, tightly-knit narrative structure, and on the other hand, this very structure is constantly questioned, broken and de-constructed. A further level is added to the oscillation between construction and de-construction in After China by framing the text between two paratextual quotations as if to remind the reader of this central preoccupation. The epigraph, taken from Primo Levi’s essay “A Bottle of Sunshine,” defines mankind in terms of its architectural propensities: “... man is a builder of receptacles; a species that does not build any is not human by definition” (Levi 30). And the novel ends with an afterword taken from Joedicke’s Architecture since 1945 defining what “metabolist architecture” is. This particular type of architecture – which resembles the structure of the book itself – reclaims the need for mankind to accept on-going processes of change and destruction: “Metabolism consisted in the integration of constant change into a system of design […] which teaches eternal change in all things […]. The Metabolists constructed their theory on the Ise Shrine which is demolished and rebuilt every twenty years” (145). It is mainly concerned with flexibility and the fact that structures must be expandable in order to emulate the organic growth found in nature. Consequently, the novel is not a fixed entity with a definite meaning but a malleable, evolving, ever-changing material reflecting life itself. The key to reading Castro’s book is therefore given to the reader, yet only at the very end of the novel, which strengthens the devices used by the narrator(s) in order to create this surrounding opacity. Readers must thus expect both construction and de- construction, transparency and layers of opacity, to coexist in a reciprocal, antagonistic way within the same structure. The creation of a veiling and unveiling of things can also be felt through the use of language. Foreign words are deliberately used, which may create a feeling of estrangement. The words are nevertheless always accompanied by an explanation or translation and therefore never completely alienate the reader from the text. Most of the time, they are either inserted into the text and translated afterwards, or associated with their equivalent in English and do not really imperil the transparency of understanding. The very beginning of Birds of Passage illustrates this point, since the first sentence contains the name of the main character in Chinese, followed by its signification in English: “My name is Lo Yun Shan. I take my name from Tai Mo Shan, which is the Big Mist Mountain” (1). This opening immerses the reader into the foreign landscape set up, while leaving some familiar landmarks. However, the most interesting borrowings from foreign languages are achieved through plays with sonorities and meanings. Indeed, at times the narrators employ a foreign word which sounds like an English word and by associating the two of them, a further level of meaning is deployed, thus widening the ranges of possible meanings. This technique is present in After China, as can be seen when You plays with the French term “draguer” and the English one “to drag out.” He says: “I liked dragging things out. The French have a nice word for it: draguer: To be on the prowl. To tell sto- 80 ries. To seduce” (10). By putting these two terms side by side the narrator relates two very different notions and hence adds a further meaning to the first word. “To drag out” is what You is indeed doing by telling stories to the writer, trying to prolong her life. At the same time, he is also trying to seduce her, flirting with her, thanks to his words. Drawing the reader’s attention to these words and their nuances also raises questions about what the author is actually doing. Indeed since we, readers, are told a story, we could also feel that the author is flirting with us, which can be related to the argument Barthes develops in The Pleasure of the Text. Using the French verb draguer, Barthes states that the author has to play with his reader, that is quite literally cruise him, in order to create a “site of bliss” (4). The critic subsequently defines two different kinds of texts: Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts [...] unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language. (Pleasure 14) Castro’s texts could therefore be described as “texts of bliss,” as they toy with language and destabilize fixed meanings. Castro’s novels create effects of “defamiliarization,” a process in art which, Chklovsky explains, consists in making the form of the object more obscure in order to raise the difficulty and time of perception. This results in the creation of a feeling of strangeness – ostranenie – which enables the audience to free their perception from automatisms (Chklovski 75-99). This idea is confirmed in one of Castro’s essays playfully entitled “Just Flirting”: “Flirtation then, is for unsettling positions, for re-invention. It is not for commitment or possession. It is providing a constant desire by frustrating ‘knowability’ and the safe harbours of unquestioned loyalty” (37). “Flirting” with the text gives the reader the awareness of the different degrees of transparency and opacity layering the reading experience. The reader is therefore left with a feeling of estrangement or lack of familiarity which leads him or her to participate actively in the elaboration of a meaning that is simultaneously contained and hidden in these “writerly texts.”9 Words do not mean anything just by themselves but carry another level of understanding which draws us closer to what Barthes calls “signifiance”Pleasure ( 82) – defined as the meaning which is sensually produced (Pleasure 61). Indeed, it is not only – or not any more – a signification that Brian Castro’s readers are looking for, but a “signifiance”. By the term “sensually,” Barthes does not only mean sensuality, but also and more importantly the use of our senses. Castro’s use of language is therefore far from being what the critic Richard Brad- ford labels “ordinary language” or “non-poetic language” (Bradford 3)10 but it allows what Bradford calls “a double pattern” (45). Indeed, this language contains a poetical dimension in addition to its common denotative use, and “creates unusual relationships between words” which encourages the reader to become aware “almost simultaneously of the object and the medium that makes the object available” (30). The self-referenti-

9. “Writerly texts” question the stability of “readerly texts” that present a familiar, conventional style and content. Writerly texts offer a multiplicity of meanings, hence destabilize the reader’s expectations and lead him or her to interpret the text according to Nietzsche’s use of the term, that is to say to encounter its plurality and not try to find a single interpretation to it (Barthes, Pleasure 4). 10. According to Bradford, “non-poetic language” is concerned with the efficiency of the exchange of information, whereas “poetic language” is further concerned with the processes and materiality of language. 81 Degrees of Transparency in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and After China ality of the poetical text thus creates a feeling of defamiliarization from common language. This effect is reached by “creating an interplay between words and phrases that no longer pays adherence to the general rules of clarity and coherence” (4-5). In order to bring forth a sensory experience for the reader, Castro adds lyricism to common descriptions. In Birds of Passage the lyrical qualities of words are put forward in numerous passages, which often brim over with alliterations. From the very beginning, Chinese rain is described with an abundance of alliterations that create a highly evocative atmosphere, as if moisture could actually be felt through the pages: I sat snug in my rocking sedan chair and listened to the squelching steps of the coolies, the box emitting a not unpleasant perfumed mustiness in contrast to the humid air outside, the harsh wetness glistening on the long poles and bare, heaving torsos, redolent of sweat. (2) In After China, alliterations are further reinforced by repetitive and accumulative devices which create a perceptible movement and rhythm on the page. For instance when You remembers his father’s life, the reader whirls along with him down the thirty-six lines of a paragraph finishing – or rather left unfinished – with three dots, punctuated by seven “you wouldn’t think so” (64-5). In this way, the time of the reminiscence becomes even more powerful and haunting, since the reader follows the waltz of his father’s glory and decay until his final fall. Other passages offer a visual experience to the reader through the moments in which the narrator pauses to muse, describing scenes as if they were paintings, their details almost real, their meanings evasive, yet appealing to the senses of the reader: Nightwork is writing. Nightwork is pure joy, when the brush sweeps into the ideogram and the character discovers that its being is as fragile as tissue and as perfect and eternal as a vein of jade. Look how the ink finds its flight, its departure from meaning in the whiskers of the Dragon and the flames of the Phoenix. (97) This excerpt from After China underlines the image created through comparison. The sensuality of the movement of the brush leads to a “departure from meaning,” which is also what the reader experiences since this passage seems to transcend mere description. The sensorial quality of language therefore adds a further level of meaning thanks to this emotional and sensory experience. While this adds depth to the transmitted message, it also tends to complicate the reading by opening up the possibilities of understanding through a multiplicity of interpretations. Brian Castro’s use of language is far from being transparent and sometimes borders on opacity. The techniques he employs, the veils he uses in order to blur boundaries and conventional understanding place us in the presence of “texts of bliss” which ask the reader to participate in the creation of meaning, however personal and unstable it may be. By inviting the reader to construct his or her own meaning, Brian Castro manages to challenge limitations and categories in general. He also – and more importantly – foregrounds the endless possibilities of language and its power to create new realities. As Castro underlines in his essay “Making Oneself Foreign,” a complete transparency cannot – perhaps fortunately – be reached: “Art is actually what resists full comprehension” (8).

Marjorie amBrosio University of Avignon and Pays de Vaucluse 82

W orks Cited

BartHes, Roland. S/Z. 1970. Paris: Seuil, 1973. ––. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. BHaBHa, Homi, ed. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation.” Nation and Narration. 1990. London; New York: Routledge, 1995. 1-7. BraDforD, Richard. Poetry: The Ultimate Guide. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Brennan, Bernadette. Brian Castro’s Fiction: The Seductive Play of Language. New York: Cambria P, 2008. Brun, Marilyne. “Playful Ambiguities: Racial and Literary Hybridity in the Novels of Brian Castro.” Université Toulouse-le Mirail and The University of Melbourne, 2010. Unpublished PhD thesis. castro, Brian. Birds of Passage. 1983. North Ryde: Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1989. ––. After China. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. ––. “Just Flirting.” Australian Book Review (June 1995): 36-40. ––. “Making Oneself Foreign.” Meanjin 64.4 (2005): 4-14. ––. Shanghai Dancing. 2003. New York: Kaya Productions, 2007. ––. “Danser Shanghai: Dancing to Difficulty: The Origins of a Novel.” (19 March 2010). Confucius Institute of Lyon Website. 13 August 2012 . cHamBers, Ian. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. 1994. London; New York: Routledge, 1995. cHkloVski, Victor. “L’art comme procédé.” Théorie de la littérature: Textes des formalistes russes. 1965. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Seuil, 2001. 75-97. coleriDGe, Samuel Taylor. Biographica Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, vol. 2. Ed. John Shawcross. London: Oxford UP, 1967. DerriDa, Jacques. “Différance.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 1999. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 278-99. DeVes, Michael, “Brian Castro: Hybridity, Identity, Reality.” Land and Identity: Proceedings of the 1997 Conference Held at the University of New England Armidale NSW, 17-30 September, 1997. Ed. Jennifer McDonnell and Michael Deves. Toowoomba: U of Southern Queensland P, 1998. 220-5. kHoo, Tseen, and Kam Louie, eds. Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2005. leVi, Primo. “A Bottle of Sunshine.” Other People’s Trades. New York: Summit Book, 1989. 30-4. nikro, Saadi. “Translating Passages: Experiencing Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage.” Southerly 59.2 (1999): 74-84. ouyanG, Yu. “Brian Castro: The Other Representing the Other.” Literary Criterion 30.1-2 (1995): 30-48. pons, Xavier. “Impossible Coincidences: Narrative Strategies in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage.” Australian Literary Studies 14.4 (1990): 464-75. port roBe council WeBsite. “Port Robe and Shipwrecks.” 13 August 2012 . rusHDie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1992. rutHerforD, Jonathan. Identity: Community, Culture and Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. sorensen, Rosemary. “Women in Water.” Meanjin 52.4 (1993): 778-83. tHe neW sHorter oxforD enGlisH Dictionary. Vol. 2, Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993. (Un-)Settling Reconciliation in David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life

David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life has been praised for its anti-colonial and ethical treatment of alterity. However, this paper argues that Ovid appropriates the Child’s mysticism as a tool to soothe his pain of unbelonging. In this sense, the novel brings to mind the current debates about the Australian project of reconciliation and the white settlers’ opportunist engagement with Aboriginal mysticism and spirituality.1

Reconciliation is a contentious term in the historico-political and literary context of Australia. In 1991, the enforcement of the “Aboriginal Reconciliation Council Act” established reconciliation as a national official project whose main aim was the creation of “a united Australia which respect[ed] this land of ours; value[d] the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage; and provide[d] justice and equality for all” (Council 1). Despite these apparently good intentions, the ambitious reconciliation project has had an unsettling effect in Australian society. It forced Australian settlers to confront their involvement in the nation’s violent colonial past. The outbreak of the history wars, the 1992 Mabo decision, and the publication of the Bringing Them Home Report in 1997 opened a debate on different and contradictory interpretations of Australian history, unmasked the embarrassing and dark history of the country, and abolished the Terra Nullius policy upon which white settlers had legitimized their possession, i.e., occupation of the land. As a consequence, the white settlers suddenly became the outspoken illegitimate inhabitants of the land, the perpetrators, while the Aborigines’ legitimacy became reaffirmed. The settler Australians underwent a feeling of loss of a sense of identity premised on their sense of belonging (Gooder and Jacobs 234-5).1 Conservative settler Australians – the so-called “assimilationist settler nationalists” (Moran “Psychodynamics” 681) – responded to these events by denying their guilt and showing attitudes of resentment, envy and racism against Indigenous Australians. They considered the acknowledgement of guilt an attack against the prestigious image and unity of the nation, and those who dared to blame them came to be perceived as the “enemies within” (Moran “Psychodynamics” 685). By contrast, other settler Australians advocated a more reparative and open attitude towards Aborigines and their long-dimi- nished culture. Gooder and Jacobs call them the “Sorry people” (232), and Moran labels them as the “indigenizing settler nationalists.” They regarded the reparation of the wide gap unfairly separating the non-Indigenous from the Indigenous populations as a pres- sing necessity which needed to be addressed so that the ill-state of the nation could be healed (Moran “Psychodynamics” 682, 689-90). It is this view of reconciliation as “a nation-building project” that has led some thinkers and Aboriginal activists (see Moran; Gooder and Jacobs; Nettheim; and Foley) to regard reconciliation with suspicion. For them, it is imperative that the Aborigines’ claims be listened to and reconciliation be accompanied by reparation. Otherwise, reconciliation and the embracing of the indi-

1. The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H05), and the FPU programme of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (AP2009-1257). 84 genous become a process whereby white settlers egoistically seek self-absolution and the maintenance of a status quo where their lost legitimacy and sense of belonging is reaffirmed (McGonegal 75-80). In the literary context, David Malouf has been an author whose “language of reconciliation” has been reiteratively praised for its transformative potential. Bill Ash- croft celebrates this language as one that successfully undermines the prejudices and hegemonic binaries on which imperial discourses rely, and which block any possibility of building a future together (Post-colonial Futures 47). Similarly, other critics highlight Malouf ’s virtuosity in creating imaginative spaces of negotiation where the boundaries between self and other, civilization and wilderness, centrality and marginality, the Indi- genous and non-Indigenous collapse (see Ramsey-Kurtz; Byron; McGonegal). Malouf ’s positive embracing of Aboriginal mysticism in his novels has also been praised for offering an alternative discourse which revalues the colonized Other (Postcolonial Futures 58) and unsettles the sovereignty of whiteness (Burrows). However, his novels have also been shadowed by the debates that surround reconciliation, especially those that are concerned with the settlers’ appropriation and subsequent erasure of the Indigenous. Marc Delrez exposes Malouf ’s The Conversation at Curlow Crew as an example of “neo- colonial gesture of cultural confiscation” (3). He observes that this novel appropriates Aboriginal mysticism as a way to reaffirm its white settler characters’ lost legitimacy over the land, while the Aboriginal characters’ knowledge of it is devalued (6-7). Si- milarly, other critics are somehow skeptical of the figure of Gemmy or, in Ashcroft’s terms, “the authentic hybrid indigene” (Post-colonial Futures 61) of Remembering Babylon. Burrows criticizes the depiction of a white Eden at the end of the novel (131), and Jo Jones warns against the depiction of equivalent forms of Aboriginal knowledge and pain as a tempting strategy of self-indigenization (73). My paper will try to contribute to this debate by sowing a grain of skepticism in some of the readings that have engaged with Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life. As is well known, the novel drew much scholarly attention in the 1990s. Although critics such as Nettlebeck interpreted Ovid’s encounter with the Child as problematic, many others celebrated this encounter as yet another example of ethical and responsible reconciliation between self and other (see Griffiths; Veit; and Taylor). One decade later, the impact of the Australian reconciliation process led many critics to re-consider An Imaginary Life. In tune with the most optimistic interpretations of the novel, these critics emphasized the novel’s anti-imperialist discourse and the transformative possibilities that it offered through its depiction of Ovid’s openness towards the other (see Post-colonial Futures; Byron; Randall; and Herrero). In the present-day moment of Australian post-apology, the lack of a treaty and the backlash to paternalist and discriminatory policies, such as the Northern Territory Intervention and the Stronger Future Legislation, prompt a critical reflection on the grounds and delusions of the reconciliation process. My contention that Ovid’s approach to the Child is triggered off by his own interest calls into question the poet’s alleged feelings of responsibility for him. My main aim is to discuss Ovid’s relationship with the wild Child as an example of the co-opting of the indigenous in the contemporary Australian context. Although An Imaginary Life is set in Europe during the Augustan Empire, the novel’s focus on Ovid’s life in exile invites us to take the novel as an allegory of the Australian national myth of expulsion and exile. The Roman poet’s experiences, anxieties and 85 (Un-)Settling Reconciliation in David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life description of the landscape introduce an analogy between Tomis and Australia. Like the British convicts who were sent away from their motherland to the confines of the British Empire, Ovid is relegated to the remotest part of the Roman one as a punish- ment for daring to contradict Emperor Augustus. In Tomis, he undergoes an experience analogous to the white settlers’ pain of unbelonging recurrent in Australian literature. Germaine Greer defines this pain as the feeling undergone “by those who have no -ho meland and no diaspora, who do not belong where they are, and don’t belong anywhere else either” (x). Many Australian first settlers, whether convicts or fortune-seekers, suf - fered a similar pain. They had to face up to the ontological crisis due to their geographical and cultural exclusion from their motherland and their subsequent struggles to re-root themselves in what, for them, was an alien and harsh landscape (Collingwood- Whittick xiv-xv). In Tomis, as his reflections on language convey, Ovid experiences a similar sense of loss and pain. In tune with Greer’s words, the poet laments: “I sniff and sniff and there is no news from out there, and no news from in here either. I am dead. I am relegated to the region of silence” (Malouf 27). In Rome, Ovid occupied a privileged position he ceases to enjoy as soon as he arrives in Tomis. His words had a relevant impact on the social and political life of Rome. However, once in Tomis, he has to learn how to cope with a different situation. Since he is “expelled from the confines of the Latin tongue” (26), which is the only language he knows, Ovid loses all possible contact, not only with his family, friends, readers, but also with any member of the host community. His language deficiency isolates him to the point that he identifies with the spiders (20). But most importantly, it makes him feel completely stranded in the lands - cape, which strengthens his sense of rootlessness. Like the first white settler Australians, Ovid feels imprisoned in “a vast page whose tongue [he is] unable to decipher” (17). Ovid adopts a colonial attitude towards place.2 His description of Tomis as an empty land, where there is “no flower” and “no fruit” (15) indicates that his first contact with the area is an act of erasure. Yet, it should also be noted that he immediately clarifies his statements about “the desolateness of the place” by affirming, “I am describing a state of mind, no place […] I am in exile here” (16). Although his self-reflexive comments on the very subjective and constructed nature of place contribute to undermining the hegemony of any discourse of place, he nevertheless soothes his pain of unbelonging by adopting a colonial attitude towards place. His discovery of a scarlet wild poppy – “flower of [his] wild childhood” (31) – makes him aware of the power of naming to control and tame the desolate landscape to the extent that he asserts: “I shall make whole gardens like this” (32). The fact that his new garden seems to include only those flowers which he associates with his family and farm suggests that his first movement is, as Herrero remarks, “a movement of return” (183).3 Like the first white settlers, who imposed their own Eurocentric vision on the Australian landscape (Collingwood-Whit- tick xvii), Ovid tries to build a simulacrum of his Roman home.

2. Ovid’s colonial attitude towards place can be linked to Bill Aschroft’s description of “colonial place” as “palimp- sestic,” that is to say that it is built upon the processes of erasure, re-inscription, naming and narration. According to him, the Australian policy of Terra Nullius was the colonial “first act of erasure” Caliban’s( Voice 77, 79). 3. Dolores Herrero’s use of the term “movement of return” is based on Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of place and alterity. The French philosopher describes the self’s encounter with alterity by distinguishing two types of movements: the movement of return and the movement without return. While the former is a movement of the self towards the same, the latter is a movement in which the I is always in a process of becoming towards an other, beyond which, due to the other’s very alterity, s/he cannot control or possess. This movement is said to represent the I’s “radical generosity” and responsibility for the other (Levinas 348-9, 353). 86

Ovid’s subsequent openness towards the wild Child may be celebrated as his departure from a colonial self-enclosed identity. Herrero describes Ovid’s approach to the Child as “non-premeditated” and “anti-colonial” (175). Yet, it can also be argued that Ovid’s transformation is compelled by need. At first, Ovid nostalgically thinks that Latin is “that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken, even pronouncements of exile” (21). This idea seems to be corroborated by the joy the poet feels after having discovered that first poppy, which relieved his pain of unbelonging. However, the suc- cession of epiphanies which he experiences after this discovery shows that he is unable to mitigate this pain. Latin is not enough. The scarlet wild flower also makes him realize that a further step needs to be taken so that he can feel totally satiated and at peace with himself: “I had to enter the silence to find a password that would release me from my own life […] Now I too must be transformed” (32-3). Further in the novel, Ovid seems to be more and more integrated in the Tomisian community. As is argued by Griffiths (67) and Herrero (184), this integration is suggested by his choice to teach the Child the Getae people’s language. Right after this decision, Ovid asserts: “I belong to this place now. I have made it mine” (95). It could thus be stated that Ovid has finally succeeded in rooting himself in his host community. However, as happened before, this glimmer of hope and satisfaction soon vanishes. He sets himself a further aim: “Ister is the final boundary” (136). Ister bears striking similarities to the Australian horizon, which further supports the interpretation of the Roman outpost as an allegory of Australia. Like the latter, it has an ambivalent value: it is both Arcadian and dystopian, a source of desire and terror (Devlin-Glass 8). Ovid perceives the conquest of Ister and what lies beyond as his elixir of life / death: “the border beyond which you must go if you are to find your true life, your true death at last” (136). On the one hand, the spaciousness of Ister is a symbol of opportunity: “what else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings […] pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams” (135). On the other hand, these words also imply some kind of sorrow and strangeness. As can be deduced from the following passage, Ister’s liberating possibilities become undermined by the terror which the unknown and boundless inevitably imply: The river is now our protection. But two months from now it will become a bridge of ice and the hordes from the north will come pouring across it, plundering, raping, burning. My people here are only relatively savage. The real barbarians I have yet to see. I have only dreamt of them. (23) Soon afterwards, Ovid has a dream in which he is afraid of being attacked by a group of centaurs that tell him: “Let us cross the river into your empire. Let us into your lives. Believe in us. Believe!” (24). Interestingly, these oneiric creatures are not the demonized barbaric figures depicted in folklore that want to destroy the town. Instead, they regret the gap that separates them from the community: their cries are not “of malice, [Ovid] think[s] but of mourning” (24). Their pleading words clearly represent an appeal to break that barrier of ungrounded fear which blocks any open encounter between them because, as is suggested at the end of Ovid’s dream, and as Herrero remarks (180), it is only when the self opens up to the other that this encounter can take place. However, to become totally open to the unknown also means entering a world which you cannot control; it is precisely this ignorance that turns it into a threat. Like the Australian hori- 87 (Un-)Settling Reconciliation in David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life zon, Ister represents “the ‘psychic line’ of the imagination of place” (Devlin-Glass 8). In other words, it stands for that which resists representation. It is the point where any notion of time and space converge, and any attempt at applying Roman logic fails (144). Thus, if Ovid wants to conquer that shoreless “vast page,” as he described it earlier, he needs to find the language to decipher it. He needs a tool to tame and conquer the fear that unsettles him. Ister is “the Child’s world” (143). Contrary to Ovid, the Child embodies perfect harmony between his mind and his body, between himself and nature. His living away from civilization and instinctive knowledge of nature relates him to the figure of the enfant sauvage. In contrast to the Roman poet, whose language marks a breach in relations between humans and nature, as expressed by the impersonal sentence “it thunders,” the Child’s utterance of the same sentence testifies to an alliance between them: “I am thun - dering” (96). The Child’s complicity with natural phenomena proves to be his empowe - ring feature. As Ovid reflects, “I have to wrap up against the wind [...] though the Child still goes naked, and seems unaffected either by wind or cold” (98). Furthermore, the Child’s language is a state of being: “his self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, among leaves, water, grasses, clouds, thunder – whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit” (95-6). It is his communion with nature that endows him with a sense of belonging that allows him to see life in a world which remains barren for Ovid, as the Child’s lessons to the poet at the swamp land demonstrate. Bearing in mind Ovid’s sense of rootlessness, it could be argued that, if Ovid wants to relieve his pain and conquer the “Child’s world” (143), he needs to re-cover that language. In Ovid’s words, this is “a language […] which would, [he] believe[s], reveal the secrets of the universe to [him]” (98). It will be then, as the end of the novel suggests, that Ovid will again belong to that formerly alien landscape. The Child accordingly becomes the prey, which turns Ovid into “a hungry predator” (Root 201). This image is enhanced by the poet’s participation in two hunting expedi - tions. For Herrero, “before being captured, the Child’s curiosity and attraction for the other is as strong as Ovid’s” (183). She justifies this assertion by referring to Ovid’s perceptions and reflections, when he affirms: “He [the Child] feels some yearning towards us […] Does he guess that some part of us, at least, is of his kind?” (60). However, throughout the text, the poet’s utter contradictions turn him into an unreliable narrator. It seems undeniable that Ovid strongly wishes to demythologize the frightening view of wolves found in European imagery. Ovid reverses this negative image and compares the “kindly” nature of wolves with the aggressive behaviour that some humans show against them: “What was frightening was the way the head had been hacked off, with ropes of dark blood hanging from it and the fur at its throat matted with blood” (10). As Randall sees it, Ovid’s emphasis on human behaviour helps deconstruct the misre- presentation of these animals, which are thus depicted as the victims of human violence (21). Similarly, there are two occasions on which Ovid seems reluctant to participate in this ritual of butchery. The first one takes place when he breaks the circle formed by the Tomisian hunters to place a bowl of food for the Child (60). On the second one, Ovid has a dream in which he becomes a “pool of rain in the forest” (61) from which a deer and the Child drink. These examples could be said to represent a vulnerable and generous Ovid who seems incapable of inflicting any cruelty on the Child. One is thus 88 tempted to believe the Roman poet when he affirms: “next year there will be no need to hunt [the Child]. He will seek us out” (63). In fact, the Child is captured on a second hunting expedition, for which Ovid is partly responsible. Ovid approaches the Child in order to catch him. Like a true hunter, he shows perfect command of the camouflage technique to approach his prey. His command of rhetoric and the Tomisian language are his weapons to convince the old man of the tribe, and by extension the rest of the Getae people, to keep on searching for the Child: “I argue that he is just a boy, a male Child as human as ourselves […] But in fact I am deceiving him” (66). Similarly, he tries to catch the Child’s curiosity by pretending to have a mystic relationship with the land: “I feel that if we could sit like this long enough, cross-legged on the leaves, so that we seemed like another part of the wood […] he would come to us” (59). The use of the verb “seem” implies that Ovid’s mysticism is faked. His main aim is to gain the Child’s trust: “my stillness is for fear that we may, even with the lifting or the catching of a breath, startle him into flight” (59-60). However, when the Child approaches him again “in a state of utter panic, exhausted, half-crazed” (68), Ovid does not give him any help, does not let him drink from himself as he did in his dream. Instead, Ovid lets the shaman sing “the wildness from” the Child. All this is done against the will of the Child who is “trussed like a pig” (69). In short, Ovid’s words may convince us of his good intentions towards the Child, but the fact remains that Ovid collaborates in the capture of the Child and thus cannot be trusted. Ovid behaves as a true hunter in disguise. As previously stated, Ovid’s choice to teach the Child the Getae language instead of Latin represents his first step away from the self-containing circle of empire. His transformation from teacher to pupil suggests his deviation from, and discarding of, any colonizing or assimilationist attitude towards the Child. He stops being the one who tries to impose his knowledge on the other to listen to the Child’s voice (Herrero 176). According to Randall, the interchange of languages between both characters makes them mutually subject to the other’s mode of apprehending and expressing the world. Moreover, since the English word “text” comes from the Latin word texere (to weave), the fact that the novel uses the expression “weaving in circles” (68) to describe the ri- ders’ movement to hunt the wild Child, together with Ovid’s association of the activity of net-weaving with poetry, may be read as Malouf ’s suggestion that “text-making” is a way of apprehending or capturing the other. Hence, once they start learning each other’s language, their unequal power relationship is breached: “both are fishers, both are fish;” they become “mutually netted” (Randall 24). It is worth noting, however, that this transformation is also triggered off by Ovid’s own interests: Ovid needs the Child’s language in order to relieve his pain of unbelonging. Their exchange of languages may thus be read as a mere economic transaction, in which Ovid consumes the Child for his own profit. This interpretation is reinforced by the novel’s use of images of cannibalism which, in tune with Root’s ideas (8-12), symbo- lize this appropriation. Before capturing the Child, the parallelism established between Ovid’s mental process, whereby he wonders about the Child, and his actual consuming of a deer, suggests a cannibal relationship between Ovid (the cannibal) and the Child (the prey): “I think this all the time. I am chewing the thick deer steaks and sucking my fingers clean” (52). A figurative cannibalism is often suggested in the novel: the more Ovid understands the Child, the weaker the latter feels. Once in Ister, Ovid recognizes 89 (Un-)Settling Reconciliation in David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life the Child as “the leader.” Yet, this empowering of the Child is not as straightforward as it first appears. The Child embodies the tracker at the service of Ovid’s needs. As if he were his servant, the Child provides him with the seeds and roots of his world so that Ovid can consume them and feel stronger. Just as Ovid fantasized about “chewing the thick deer steaks” (52), so he now “chew[s] and swallow[s]” these roots (143). In this light, the teacher-pupil relationship could be seen as a consumerist relationship, whereby Ovid takes possession of the Child and his world. By the end of the novel, Ovid steps into Ister. This move into the unknown points to his utter generosity and openness towards the Child. Herrero argues that Ovid’s crossing of Ister is compelled by the other’s appeal, and affirms that Ovid decides to escape with the Child in order to save him from being attacked by the Getae people (186-7). His incursion into Ister provokes the immediate weakening of his senses, as in “the noise is deafening” or “we can see nothing” (137). He becomes completely lost and dependent on the Child’s directions. His is thus an act of total trust in the other. Besides, Ovid shows a different and more open relationship with the land. Unlike the self-possessive poet of the beginning, who tried to relieve his pain of unbelonging by imposing his Roman identity, the final reconciled Ovid is one that refrains from nostalgic impulses and restricted because constructed images of the other’s world – “the merest figments of our imagination” – to freely embrace the world which is “out there” (138). In tune with the Child’s apprehension of the world, Ovid does not impose himself on the land, but adapts and remains open to it: his spirit fuses with the landscape (142), he adjusts his movements to that of the insects (143), the empty land becomes full of new creatures (146), and the earth stops being a hostile entity to become warm and caring (146). As Ovid puts it, he becomes “entirely reconciled” (147), his body is willing placidly to dissolve and become “continuous” with the land (147). The novel ends with Ovid’s evocation of his childhood memories and the final sentence: “I am there,” (152) which seems to replace the sentence “the Child is there” (9, 151). This may lead us to think that Ovid returns to the beginning. However, as Randall convincingly explains, the use of the first person with the adverb “there” opens a gap between the position of the I at the moment of enunciation and the position to which the adverb there refers. This distance implies that at the moment of the utterance the I is not yet there but irretrievably here. The Ovid of the beginning cannot be confused with that of the end. This sentence therefore suggests Ovid’s willingness to go a step beyond, that is, “there.” It points to his willingness to become a “further being,” that is, one who remains totally open to the other, to the unknown; who is not afraid of crossing borders and undergoing a state of perpetual transformation (Randall 27-8; Herrero 187-8). Consequently, Ovid’s final reconciled identity would be closer to that of the postcolonial, that which generates dialogue between different perceptions of place (Aschroft, Caliban’s Voice 94): the here and there; past, present and future. Randall lays great emphasis on distinguishing “further being” from the notion of the appropriation of the other. He argues that Ovid succeeds in relieving the anxieties of his exilic condition because he ends up understanding that life, like Ister, cannot be controlled (27). As he and Herrero (187) argue, the Child keeps his utter otherness until the very end of the novel, when Ovid continues to wonder about the Child’s origins and identity (149). Ovid cannot have completely appropriated that which cannot be comple - tely known. In opposition to these optimistic conclusions, it is my contention that the 90

Child’s perpetual otherness may be read as yet another act of erasure. The Child always occupies a marginal position: when he was on the farm, Ovid confesses at the very beginning of the novel, he never acknowledged his existence (11). Similarly, he keeps him away from the Getae people. Besides, the Child’s human nature is only partially recognized – “there is an intelligence, I feel it” (80) – and remains dependent on Ovid’s judgment until the very end: “I have tried to induce out of the animal in him some notion of what it is to be human. I wonder now if he hasn’t already begun to discover in himself some further being” (150). Herrero’s argument that Ovid’s liberation of the Child is disinterested, and thus utterly generous can also be contested. Root defines appropriation as “not only the taking up of something and making it one’s own but also the ability to do so” (70). Bearing these words in mind, one cannot help wondering why Ovid does not set the Child free much earlier. It is only when Ovid feels that his life is also at risk that he decides to escape with the Child (134). Furthermore, the crossing of Ister is presented as Ovid’s main aim. It is said to be his fate: “I think of my dreams. Of all those nights when I made my way out there in sleep to scratch in the earth for my own grave […] I am going out now into the unknown, the real unknown […] and am, I believe, following the clear path of my fate” (135). Ovid is referring to the dream in which he entered some kind of competition with a group of wolves which, like him, were digging in search of his tomb. In this dream, the wolves were perceived as rivals by an anxious Ovid who thought: “I must discover before them, or I am lost” (18). The fact that their reward was Ovid’s grave is of particular significance, since it suggests that Ovid fears that his own identity is at stake. It could therefore be argued that Ovid’s escape might as well be compelled by his own interest: Ister is presented as the place where Ovid hopes to find peace. By the end of the novel, he states, “the fullness is in the Child moving away from me” (152). Again, this statement could be seen as a generous act on Ovid’s part; discarding egotistic behaviour, Ovid finds joy in giving. On the other hand, this behaviour could also be equated with that of the consumer who gets rid of a commodity once it has stopped being useful. It is only when Ister has stopped being a threat to become the place where Ovid can live and die in peace that the Child is allowed to move away. In what might be seen as some kind of neo-colonial gesture, Ovid succeeds in overcoming his fear of the unknown and recovering his sense of belonging at the expense of the Child, who is again relegated to a marginal position. What is more, Ovid never acknowledges his guilt for his capture of the Child. He even justifies it as a civilizing mission: “I no longer ask myself what harm I may have done [the Child]. He too has survived his season among men. Some new energy is in him” (148). With these words Ovid is implying that the Child should feel some gratitude towards him. This feeling redeems him from any guilt he might have felt for having re- tained the Child against his will. It reduces both Ovid’s supposedly generous lessons to the Child in the woods and the Child’s subsequent concerns for him in Ister to a mere economic transaction, since, as Levinas argues, gratitude predisposes the expectancy of a recompense for the good given (349). In keeping with this idea, Ovid implies that he somehow deserves the diligence which the Child is showing him in exchange for the care which Ovid took of the Child when they were in the village and the swamp: “the Child hunts, feeding me now, out of his world as I once fed him out of ours” (148). Ovid’s attitude consequently is that of the appropriator, who always feels entitled to take possession and never asks for permission (Root 72). Viewed in this light, Randall’s 91 (Un-)Settling Reconciliation in David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life celebration of a possible re-encounter between the Child and Ovid sounds premature. While Ovid’s renewed and more generous identity may indeed facilitate this occasion, the Child’s wish for it remains uncertain. Like Ovid, he has also undergone his own transformation. As Nettelbeck points out (36), the Child was forcefully wrenched from his world to enter a world where he found difference, captivity, rejection and exclusion. The Child taught Ovid the language of the imaginary, that is, of harmony and communion, while the Getae language put his life at risk. Though Ovid is a reshaped being, will the Child be willing to form part of his original world again? Can Ovid’s reconciled identity make up for the inequalities and suffering the Child underwent? Bearing all of these ideas in mind, celebrating Ovid’s relationship with the Child as an example of reconciliation between self and other seems premature. Malouf ’s novel brings to the fore many of the suspicions that, as has been argued in the opening arguments, regard the Australian reconciliation project as a white deceitful strategy. On the one hand, the novel’s depiction of Ovid’s progressive transformation from his self- contained Roman identity to a more receptive and open relationship with the Tomisians and the Child places him far away from the racist and imperialist attitudes adopted by the assimilationist settler nationalists. His final reconciled identity points to the need to transgress the boundaries of fear and prejudice so that the gap that blocks any possible encounter and dialogue between self and other can be bridged. His embracing and learning of the Child’s language suggests that Ovid succeeds in bridging that gap. However, far from establishing a relationship with the Child based on equality, responsibility and generosity, as is defended by Randall and Herrero, Ovid’s attitude echoes that of the en- vious white settler. This idea is corroborated by his unsatisfied hunger for belonging, for conquering the unknown, which leads him to hunt the Child, and establish a possessive relationship with him. Although the Child may be seen as just an instinctive enfant sauvage, it is nonetheless tempting allegorically to relate him to the figure of the Australian Aborigine: the Child’s language evokes the mystic connection Aborigines keep with the land, whereby they feel as “co-equal partners” with nature (Cowan 27), and on which they base their sense of belonging (Bird 121-2). Significantly enough, it is the Child’s empowering mystic relationship with the land that turns him into Ovid’s instrument to soothe his sense of rootlessness. The figure of Ovid could thus be related to that of the indigenizing settler nationalists, who strived to heal their sense of unbelonging by embracing Aboriginal knowledge. Ovid finally enjoys a feeling of absolute freedom and no guilt whatsoever, while the child remains the eternal other. Now Ovid can joyfully affirm, “I am there” (152), yet the question remains whether the Child will be able to enjoy the same freedom. It is for this reason that Ovid’s final reconciled identity cannot be said to illustrate generosity but a delusional bridge of that gap of which Ovid seems to be the only beneficiary.

Maria Pilar royo Grasa University of Zaragoza

W orks Cited

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BirD-rose, Deborah. Dingo Makes us Humans. Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. BurroWs, Victoria. “The Ghostly Haunting of White Shame in David Malouf ’s Remembering Babylon.” Westerly 51 (2006): 124-35. Byron, Mark. “Crossing Borders of the Self in the Fiction of David Malouf.” Sydney Studies 31 (2005): 76-93. CollinGWooD-WHittick, Sheila, ed. “Introduction.” The Pain of Unbelonging. Alienation and Identity in Australian Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, Cross/Cultures 91, 2007. xiii-xliii. Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. Addressing Key Issues for Reconciliation. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1993. CoWan, James. Mysteries of the Dream-Time: The Spiritual Life of Australian Aborigines. Liensfied: Unity P, 1992. Delrez, Marc. “The Myth of White Earth in Uncanny Australia.” (2009) Open Repository and Bibliography. University of Liege. 27 November 2012. . DeVlin-Glass, Frances et al. Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature. Adelaide: ATF P, 2009. Foley, Gary. “Reconciliation: Fact or Fiction?” The Koori History Website. 12 November 2012. . ––. “Duplicity and Deceit: Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations.” Melbourne Historical Journal 36 (2008) The Koori History Website. 12 November 2012. . GooDer, Haydie, and Jane M. Jacobs. “‘On the Border of the Unsayable’: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2.2 (2000): 229-47. Greer, Germaine. “Preface.” The Pain of Unbelonging. Alienation and Identity in Australian Literature. Ed. Sheila Collingwood-Whittick. Amsterdam: Rodopi, Cross/Cultures 91, 2007. ix-xi. GriffitHs, Gareth. “An Imaginary Life: The Post-Colonial Text as Transformative Representation.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 16.2 (1993): 61-9. LeVinas, Emmanuel. “The Trace of the Other.” Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986. 345-59. Herrero, Dolores. “‘I know now that this is the way… the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in’: The Ethics of Place in David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life.” On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English. Ed. Bárbara Aritzi and Silvia Martínez. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 170-90. Malouf, David. An Imaginary Life. 1978. New York: Vintage International, 1996. McGoneGal, Julie. Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. Moran, Anthony. “Aboriginal Reconciliation: Transformations in Settler Nationalisms.” Melbourne Journal of Politics 25 (1998): 101-31. ––. “The Psychodynamics of Australian Settler-Nationalism: Assimilating or Reconciling With the Aborigines?” Political Psychology 23.4 (2002): 667-701. NettelBeck, Amanda. “Imagining the Imaginary in An Imaginary Life.” Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays 26.1 (1993): 28-38. NettHeim, Garth. “Reconciliation and Unfinished Business in Australia.” Reconciliations. Ed. Ágnes Tóth and Bernard Hickey. Netley: Griffin P, 2005. 3-39. Ramsey-kurtz, Helga. “Lives Without Letters: The Illiterate Other in An Imaginary Life, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 34.2-3 (2003): 115-34. RanDall, Don. “‘Some Further Being’: Engaging with the Other in David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41.1 (2006): 17-32. Root, Deborah. Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder: Westview, 1996. Veit, Walter. “‘In Australia, we Read it Differently...:’ Interculturality and the Theory of Literary Criticism.” Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations. Ed. Sneja Gunew and Kateryna Longley. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992. 129-45. Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World: A Transparent Space of Darkness

Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World (2009) explores consciousness, reality and madness through the main viewpoints of two odd and mysterious characters. Set in a psychiatric ward reminiscent of Bentham’s panopticon, the story is an eye-opening journey into a transparent society characterized by the singular connections it makes between the visible and the invisible. Dreams and fantasy delineate spaces of otherness that call forth questions of perspective and reliability. The multi-layered narrative combines strategies of invisibility with the staging of the self so that while transparency normally implies openness, communication, and accountability, it can also operate in such a way that it becomes difficult to ascertain the characters’ actions.

Since his very first and much celebrated novel Praise, a semi-autobiographical account of a doomed, drug- and alcohol-fuelled relationship in the state of Queensland, Andrew McGahan’s writing has been preoccupied with social, cultural and political issues from the last phase of the twentieth century onwards, to suggest that Australia is no longer the egalitarian society and land of plenty securing the principle of fair-go and opportunities that illustrated the formation of the nation since the beginning of colonization. McGahan’s novel The White Earth tackled land rights and ownership at a particular moment in Australian history, when the government was clearly refusing to address the issue of land rights and reconciliation with the indigenous past. Underground extended the novelist’s critical response to the neo-conservative discourse of the Federal Government, weaving an absurdist satire to criticize the more extreme manifestations of the War on Terror in Australia. In this novel, McGahan interrogates the tenets of mul- ticulturalism in postcolonial Australia, wondering about the incorporation of Australia’s indigenous population and migrant others within the country’s multicultural framework. Wonders of a Godless World focuses on the notions of land as a territory of meaning and as a process of transformation. Such a concern prevalently rests upon the interplay of diaphaneity and opacity, translucency and haziness. The story ironically relates to the importance of a spiritual environment throughout various stages of humanity, the amazing things the natural world has designed without man or the Holy Spirit, and thus oscillates between the obvious and the unsaid, precision and ambiguity, prompting questions of viewpoint and reliability. Fantasy operates as a natural and rational means of expression so that images allow perception to pass through and so that objects behind, like the earth, can be distinctly seen. The novel focuses on environmental issues and the centrality of the land in people’s lives to explore consciousness and madness, suggesting that human beings are alienated from the soul of the earth and that one’s experience of the world swings between extremes, a commitment to the spiritual environment and the desire to exploit natural riches for capitalistic purposes and the idea of progress. Set in a gothic hospital – with the psychiatric ward in lieu of a castle – sitting in the shadow of a volcano on an unnamed tropical island, the story develops as a fable about human intervention on geology and the weather, human folly, immortality and madness. It starts in medias res with the ordinary perception of the main female character 94 known as “the orphan” and the arrival of a new patient known as “the foreigner.” As soon as the patient is able to communicate with the orphan, speaking to her from his comatose state, a bizarre relationship develops between both that involves out-of-body journeys through time and space: One part of the orphan could feel that she was still sitting by the bedside, and that her fingers were still clasped around the foreigner’s passive hand. But another part of her felt cut loose. Weightless. Floating. A shadow self. And the shadow self was being pulled forward by a hand far more compelling. The foreigner was leading her on, a shadow too it seemed, a ghost form with no more substance than mist – but in control of her. (66) Thanks to the foreigner, the orphan is able to discover “the wonders of a godless world,” a transparent world where the natural environment takes precedence over man and where she can fully connect with her other self. She is able to look at the centre of her soul from the earth and the surrounding elements, just like the foreigner. The environment is clearly posited as a substratum for both the outside reality and the imaginative world of the two main characters, encapsulating spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there and that can be simultaneously physical and mental. The development of the story triggers a multiplicity of viewpoints which render representations of the world and society more complex and chaotic and which seem to rely on magic realism. Indeed, in the context of postcolonial writing, the use of magic realism points to the inherent problems created by the imposition of a bizarre and unreal Western world-view onto the local reality of the other; it is the way of approaching truth by other means, by combining mutually exclusive thought systems.1 Yet, while Wonders of a Godless World seems to suggest some of these ideas, it also clearly verges on fantasy as a liminal space to examine historical, political and social events that take place in reality. From the opening pages of the novel, McGahan uses elements found in myth or fairy tales, such as demons, royal figures, witches, angels and a virgin girl, displacing the main story and sub-stories to far-away, distant and unknown places that recall the position of Australia as an island on the periphery of other centres (68-9). The arrival of the new male patient, the foreigner, is illustrated by a growing expectation and sense of omen discernable through unstable weather conditions and strange, telluric manifestations. The character’s presence seems to partake of the movements of the earth, especially with an erupting earthquake that seems to interact with the orphan’s own sexual pleasure: Her own madness was alive too. She could feel beneath her feet, trembling and quivering. It was as if, far below in the earth, a giant machine hummed. The vibrations buzzed against her heels, running right up between her legs, and she couldn’t decide if it felt bad or if she was on the edge of an orgasm where she stood. But something was about to happen, she was sure. And by chance she was out the front – emptying her mop bucket in the drainage ditch – when the arrival took place. (2) The throbbing environment mysteriously liberates the character from the constraints of her “retarded reason” in a flow of emotions sustained by divergent forces and elements. Place functions as heterotopia in the Foucauldian sense (46-9) so that it creates both a space of illusion and a real space – a space that is other. The ordinary life and daily

1. “Magic Realism” has several possible definitions and is understood, in the novel, as the genre combining reality and surreality on the same plane. It is a way of raising the world’s political, economic and social problems by attempting to reach out to a lost and glorified past. 95 Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World: A Transparent Space of Darkness boredom of the orphan are disrupted by the eerie presence of the comatose foreigner, whose identity and origin remain mysterious: he does not seem to belong anywhere; he is neither a local nor a tourist and does not seem to be related to any living soul on earth. Despite his apparent unconsciousness, the foreigner provides the catalyst for most of the action. He is almost like a God to the orphan, speaking directly to her from his coma, a translucent space beyond reality, a space where strange phenomena occur and where the orphan can evolve from being a speechless, inanimate, sexless ugly duckling to an active and attractive “goddess of fertility” (259). Both characters voyage through physical and mental spaces to examine the world, its peoples and cultures. The foreigner embodies the encounter of the real and the unreal in that he claims he is cursed with immortality, being more than a century old and recounting five deaths, each followed by a painful rebirth. He is intimately acquainted with the blind forces that bind together dual matters: rock and ocean, soil and sunlight, opaque and transparent components. The orphan is guided by his voice to a translucent space where she can see the world as an interconnection between the past, the present and the future. The foreigner’s voice claims that he went through time and space and was able to see through the earth and that he, a geologist by training, raped the Earth, then sought to save it, and then succumbed to a final indifference towards it. His telling of his own experiences through eternity seems at first to be justified by a desire to expose man’s destruction of the earth. But in fact, it operates as a theorizing of social space which harks back to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea that science and education condition the position of man as an agent (53-5). According to the sociologist, the social sphere consequently becomes dependent upon divisions and rivalries, upon the position of dominant v. dominated, orthodox v. heterodox – binaries that social agents acknowledge as legitimate and that they reproduce as self-evident. The foreigner’s account of his personal history uncovers an evil world triggered by man’s never-ending violence and greed: I saw the knowledge I possessed had other uses. Colleagues of mine were being taken up by wealthy companies searching for oil and gas and minerals. There was a growing demand for these things in the more modern countries, and huge amounts of money to be made. […] I decided I may as well get rich. I hired myself out to mining companies at first, surveying. I had an instinct about the earth, and an uncanny talent for uncovering its hidden riches. […] I expanded into oilfields and power stations and refineries, too. It was the perfect time for such investments. Another world war was looming, and the demand for resources would soon be insatiable […] It was intoxicating that wealth. I felt invulnerable. Powerful. Virtually immortal. (118-9, emphasis in the original) The character insists that he has extensive knowledge about the manifestations of the earth and the ways in which man can possess natural riches, even temporarily so. But he considers he is neither a guardian angel nor a supernatural being; he insists that he is “nothing” compared to the orphan (87) whom he says is a wonder (88) in a godless world. The very setting, the psychiatric hospital situated on the verge of the main town which is itself dominated by an active volcano, accounts for a heterotopia enclosing the lives of patients who drift between the daily reality and imagination. The hospital clearly juxtaposes the many psychological spaces that the main characters inhabit outside social norms. The integration of the foreigner in the psychiatric ward is soon followed by a series of bizarre murders throwing the lives of the patients and the island’s inhabitants into a spiralling turmoil, bringing awe and terror, suggesting that the place is inhabited by evil forces and that the foreigner, despite his coma, is no stranger to the uncanny pheno- 96 mena. Moreover, the orphan’s personal development and incursions into the foreigner’s many histories are marked by magical events which are linked emotionally and psychologically not only to her but also to four other patients from the psychiatric ward identified as “the duke, the witch, the archangel and the virgin” (17). The respective stories of the duke and the witch encapsulate elements from classic fairy tales but such elements are inverted in the course of time, the characters going from riches to rags, being doomed to madness and living unhappily ever after. Born in a long line of colonial property owners, and once destined to a wealthy and promising future, the duke lost his status and fortune after the departure of the colonial authorities, when a mob managed to take the upper hand on his family property. Once an innocent girl, the witch lost her sanity casting magic spells to overcome her own poverty and doom. The interaction of such peripheral characters and stories emphasize the orphan’s own extraordinary ascent from her dull reality to the marvellous and uncanny reality of the earth – the axis of the multi-layered narratives. Thus, the main story encapsulates two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality, and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural and apocalyptic tale as prosaic reality. As a result, the extraordinary exploration of consciousness, reality and madness, becomes the orphan’s eye-opening journey into the elements: water, wind, rock – even outer space and the workings of the solar system. The main characters’ experience suggests that transparency originates in the darkness of the earth, in the interplay between the obvious and the unsaid. Such a journey is marked by the orphan’s constant wondering whether she is experiencing real events, bringing to the fore questions of viewpoint and reliability: She turned a slow circle, her head tilted to the empty slopes. It was all so alien that she didn’t feel afraid. Was she dreaming? Had she fallen over and hit her head? That could explain it. And yet she had never dreamt anything like this before. Her dreams were about the hospital, about places and people she knew, distorted perhaps, and bizarre, but still recognizable. There was nothing she recognised here. […] Perhaps it was her madness, then. She knew what it was when people saw things that weren’t there. The nurses called it hallucinating. But surely hallucinations weren’t like this. Not so concrete. (35, emphasis in the original) Fantasy expresses the reality of the orphan’s inner world, making visible her secret interrogations, fears and doubts. The character’s thoughts and interrogations suggest that the supernatural and natural are contiguous and interacting spaces, so that the unreal manifests itself as part of her reality. The unexpected alteration of reality is no longer displayed as questionable. Thus, while the reader may consider that the rational and irrational are mutually exclusive, their merging is not as disconcerting as one would expect because the supernatural is integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and characters in the fictional world. The nameless orphan’s biography gives a perfectly ordinary explanation for her mental retardation and for the foreigner’s voice lodged inside her mind. She can see through the insanity of the patients, she can read through the weather with uncanny prescience, and even sense the volatile geology at work inside her island home’s restive volcano (51-2). The story combines strategies of the orphan’s invisibility from the perspective of the hospital staff and townspeople with the staging of the self and the visibility of otherness. The orphan, who is depicted as the innocent other, is ironically able to provide some transparency on the state of the world. The character leads an isolated and strange existence with no experience of the world beyond the island, and she gradually becomes connected to the environment and 97 Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World: A Transparent Space of Darkness the foreigner’s past lives. She is endowed with the power to travel through time, to see through place and people. She is able to see through the surrounding natural elements and to express a view on the state of the many worlds she experiences through the mystical power of the foreigner’s voice: The vibrations – they were real! … The ground shook … She saw that a giant fist of grey smoke has appeared from nowhere and was rising into the sky … She reached out and felt the earth. Sensations filled her head. Pressure… She could picture it down there almost as if the earth was transparent. (30) The sense of space and connection with the natural elements is associated with the character’s consciousness of being in the world. The eruption of the volcano marks the orphan’s separation from her past life, and her newly acquired sense of existence. The centrality of the earth, and the way in which it animates human beings is somehow reminiscent of the romantic approach of German poet Novalis with the deification of Nature, the demand for the Absolute and the idea of spiritual birth or rebirth. In fact, Gaston Bachelard’s comments on Novalis may well illustrate the orphan’s many voyages through time and her inner sensations considering that she, like all characters, is tied up to the earth and that the latter animates the human heart and soul. The foreigner’s accounts and the orphan’s integration in his psychological meanderings through an opaque time and space provoke the orphan’s need to penetrate, to go to the interior of things, to the interior of beings; a need which is one attraction of the intuition of inner heat. Where the eye cannot go, where the hand does not enter, there where heat insinuates itself. This communion at the interior will […] find its symbol in the descent in the depths of the mountain, into the grotto and the mine. It is there that the heat is diffused and equalized, that it becomes indistinct like the contour of a dream. (Psychoanalysis of Fire 40) In fact, the orphan’s participation in the foreigner’s re-enacting of his past lives is sup- ported by her curiosity and desire to enter other people’s lives through the manifestations of a vibrating environment – the anthropomorphized landscape which seems to provide her with unknown sensations, sexual and spiritual ecstasy, and thus femininity. Landscape is at the centre of the characters’ personal story and imagination, encapsulating a prophetic truth which is perceived through the characters’ respective madness. The story rests upon a never-ending negotiation between the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary,” the “personal” and the “public,” the “physical” and “metaphysical,” “reality” and “illusion,” (314-5) so that readers are encouraged to look beyond the sur - face of things. Fantastic elements design a sub-world which discloses the otherness of the world. The fairy-tale and fantastic effect is, in fact, a mode of concealment which gradually leads to the reality at the centre of the characters’ respective emptiness. In the course of events, the foreigner seems to have lived as a wandering Jew in a forever changing world devoid of spirituality while the orphan appears to be drifting in a mental no-man’s-land. The novel intertwines bizarre, magical and phantasmagorical elements with a rational view of the world, so that the extraordinary conveys truth and reality while the ordinary exposes the orphan’s and the world’s failure in perception: She hung poised in space. Alone. In reality, the orphan knew, she was asleep. In reality, she was still tied to the bed in the locked ward, the drugs stupefying her. In reality the foreigner was recuperating in the 98

empty crematorium, and there was no way she could have travelled into space of her own. This was only a dream. But she knew too that it was more than that. It was something that was going to happen. For real. Somehow she was seeing into the future. She was floating in the void, and had been placed as a spectator, safely out of the way, but with a perfect view. For here it came – the earth. […] All those people, in the towns, in the hospital. What would they see if they looked to the sky? The sun would be on the horizon, but overhead would be a shining white portend of the end, terrifying. (293-4) The orphan’s incursions into the foreigner’s personal history, and the history of the world, mark the collapsing of the psychic boundaries of self and other, life and death, reality and fantasy. The foreigner’s spell on the patients and on the orphan stems from a transcendental power that binds reality to an imaginary world unleashed by natural (real) forces; a transcendental space where they can all become other (127). The seeking of transcendence through the novel has been a strong element in Aus- tralian fiction ever since Patrick White suggested inThe Tree of Man that God was in a “gob of spittle” (476). White’s own use of landscape as the space of visionary revelations and truth, as a reaction against normative structures and colonial perceptions of space, still holds a central place in Australian writing. Indeed, McGahan’s writing uses space as a central feature of the dramatized image of the environment and of the history of people, as a site of anxiety and the place where the characters simultaneously belong and do not belong. Thus, in the novel, the definition of space incorporates Gaston Bachelard’s idea that space is affiliated with the question of when and how an observant (the fictional character and / or narrator) is situated in a given place, and how this place is related to the larger space of which it forms a constituent element. In the novel, McGahan stresses the link between space and identity formation, pointing out in the Bachelardian sense that “space contains compressed time,” that one is in fact unable to relive duration, that one can only think of it in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness (Poetics of Space 8-9). The orphan’s thoughts suggest that reality relies on shifting perspectives so that the foreigner’s past is rendered more plausible and real not when both he and she voyage back in time but when they come out from their respective limbos, since at that particular moment in time the present reality becomes unreal. In fact, the orphan gradually becomes a marvellous emblem of a world devoid of spirituality, humanity and wisdom, since she can see through the imaginative (and unreal) story of the foreigner when he explains that the outbursts of the volcano and the earthquakes reflect the physical violence that people inflict upon others or themselves: “She felt that a façade had been fractured. The volcano erupting, the duke’s attack, the witch’s self-inflicted injuries … each of those occurrences had sent ripples of apprehension through the wards” (251). The novel balances the logic of science with the imagination but above all, as McGa- han argues, it uses the mythical or fairy-tale effects to address its central purpose which is the wonders of the earth: Originally, I was trying to come up with a story that involved no human characters at all, instead using only the forces of nature interacting in a kind of wordless planetary drama. I couldn’t make that idea work, but then the orphan and the foreigner emerged. The orphan – a girl freakishly in tune with the planet and its processes, but so out of tune with humanity that she can’t talk or even remember her own name. And the foreigner – a man utterly out of tune with the planet and doomed time and time again to die in natu- 99 Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World: A Transparent Space of Darkness

ral disasters, and yet whose own outrage always brings him back to life. From there, all the weird and interesting stuff about Earth that I originally wanted to explore could be played out in the relationship between these two. (Case) Some critics claim that McGahan’s apocalyptic vision takes James Lovelock’s Gaia hy- pothesis to recast it as an ecological parable about global warming, which McGahan de- nies in his interview with Jo Case. Instead, I would argue that, rather than simply using Lovelock’s suggestion that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on earth are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions of life on the planet, Wonders of a Godless World suggests that natural history and human history are inextricably bound together. The displacement of the two main characters back into the past not only assesses that climate change altered human history, but also that human beings are geological agents living in a world that historian Dipesh Chakrabarty would define as “the age of the anthropocene” (197-222) – an age in which man has become a dominant force shaping the planet to such an imaginative extent that the planet strikes back and imposes its own destructive laws on man’s life. McGahan’s novel is composed of divergent but contiguous stories that verge on fantasy to provide some clarity on the state of the world and reality. The novelist’s interest in the surreal interrogates realism but is also related to a cultural ecology advocating a vital in- terrelatedness between culture and nature. The foreigner’s statements naturally suggest that everything in human history is rooted in the earth, and that urban development is devastating to man’s cultural legacy and history. The exploitation of natural resources in mining and oil-drilling schemes defines human greed, vanity and insanity, as the expression of “cold reality” (118), a reality which extends to the re-enacting and recounting of the colonizing practices of the Western world including land deprivation, the ignorance of indigenous identity and beliefs, economic expansion; practices that may recall the colonization of Australia (121). Yet, the discourse about the land and the primacy of natural elements should be interpreted as a plea for the environment and for the individual’s need to come to terms with otherness, suggesting that even though they can be anywhere the characters are indeed trapped in a global consciousness. The encroaching of fantasy and reality opens up a vista onto current global environmental issues, natural disasters that occurred in reality and extend to the imaginary world of the orphan and the foreigner, as McGahan himself asserts in an interview with Peter Mares: Yes, they’re all notifiable events that you can check up. But it was important to root all the fabulous stuff […] back into real science, because otherwise if they’re just floating around out there where they could do anything and there’s [sic] no rules that apply to them, then that gets pretty boring fairly fast. You’ve got to have some reality around fantasy otherwise it’s just made-up nonsense in the end. So for all the weird stuff that goes on, it’s always tied back to reality, and they always come back to reality. The characters’ experience of the world swings between extremes, unification and fragmentation, peace and turbulence. It is marked by their exposure to global warming, pollution, natural catastrophes – modern plagues and processes by which the wrath of the earth expresses itself and impacts on people’s lives. The foreigner insists that the earth negates the Self and that it is the Tellus Mater that delineates the history of men and evolution of the world; that the earth is, in fact, the topography of intimate being: 100

Looking down I saw beauty, yes, but not the beauty of an eggshell jewel – I saw the beauty of an im- mensely powerful beast. I saw the hard carved faces of the continents and the inexorable currents of the oceans flowing. I felt the atmosphere humming with electricity, and the inside of the planet bursting with suppressed heat. I sensed what a savage thing the world really is – strong, hot, and driven by systems so vast that they dwarf mankind and all his works to nullity. (237, italics in the original) Like the psychiatric hospital, the outside is defined as a heterotopic entity creating a space of illusion that constructs otherness. The foreigner and the orphan respectively embrace the earth as a metaphor for the duality and contradictions of the world, but also as a physical representation of a utopian world where they can exist. Rather than implying something unreal, illusion prompts the decentring of reality, and the persona constructing various worlds and various meanings so that the reader is able to perceive, like the orphan, that what lies beyond the foreigner’s history is a natural and supernatural explanation of the events: “Everything had been intertwined. All his tales about his many lives and deaths, all his stories about how the world worked…” (312). The foreigner, who is depicted as the angel of destruction (289), acts as an evil des- troyer of the witch’s, the duke’s and the virgin’s life, being able to control their respective fates. He is also the author of the cautionary tale allowing the orphan to understand all the mysteries which have been hidden from her view. Yet, he is unable to mastermind the orphan’s evolution and her subsequent escape from his imaginative world and space. The orphan evolves from being the symbolic unwanted, unloved and needy character to a strong-willed figure challenging the foreigner, even though she cannot entirely escape from the strict dictates of his tale: The foreigner’s attack broke anew, a mad hammering at her mind. And the blows told. A certain numbness was creeping over her, a dislocation between thought and action. She was weakening. But she made herself move forward into the tube. It was black in there, yet her eyes could see. She carried the foreigner inwards for a distance, and then set him down on the rocky floor. Fifty paces behind her was the opening, and fifty paces ahead the tube ended in a blank stone wall. (321) The orphan attempts to fight against the central presence of the comatose foreigner as soon as she considers that he is an agent of evil. As the story unfolds, she gradually becomes a “counter-narrator” to the foreigner who initially seemed to be the legitimate story-teller, pondering on his statements, questioning the reality of his history and giving the reader a transparent access to his obscure nature. The story subverts the idea of awareness via the orphan’s imagination and madness. Characters are “trapped in a shadowy limbo” (208) and the foreigner’s supernatural powers and discourse can only be expressed through the orphan’s imagination: “I am free to roam with my mind, but to affect reality, to shift flesh and bone, that’s not something I can ”do (245). The foreigner expresses anger and confusion at the way he has been “creating illusions” (209) through his many lives (which he sees as a gift of eternity) but he also insists that reality and the sense of otherness or being are conditioned by dreams: I did not want to wake from those dreams. It was no help to tell myself that the ocean was less than one- thousandth of the world’s mass. It was still vaster than anything I had encountered before, a wilderness beyond any other. And the pulse of the currents was endlessly hypnotic. Like blood in arteries, like a mother’s heartbeat to a child in the womb. I had only to close my eyes at night and I was entranced. (207, italics in the original) The foreigner’s direct addresses to the orphan operate through the power of the orphan’s imagination; his voice interacts with the orphan’s as well as with the voice of the 101 Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World: A Transparent Space of Darkness narrator. Indeed, throughout the novel the opening-up of a narratorial hybrid space, in the Bakhtinian sense of dialogised heteroglossia, rests upon the idea of transparency. Such an idea stems from the alternating of the girl’s stream of consciousness, in normal script, with the external commanding voice of the foreigner, in italics. Thus, the dual narrative makes it difficult to conceive the “real” as a single world. McGahan’s dual -nar rative associates what is not visible in the real world with the staging of the self in imagination so that events are open to interpretations and never restricted in their meaning: Shoving the chair through the fence, the orphan began the long climb. She had expected protests from him. She had expected anger, and some kind of struggle, a grappling of her mind, an attempt to turn her from her course. […] His body flopped against the seat, passive, a dead weight. And when finally he did break his silence, it was merely to ask a question. Quietly. Thoughtfully. Orphan, have you ever wondered if any of this is real? Real? What did he mean – real? Well, you live in a hospital for the insane, after all. And you’ve always imagined strange things about yourself. That you can predict the weather, for instance, and that you can overhear people’s thoughts. So maybe… Ha. Was she imagining the volcano erupting? I don’t mean the volcano. I mean you and me. All we’ve done together. Are you sure any of it actually happened? (308-9, italics in original) In this passage, fantasy dovetails with the theme of mental instability and the interrogation of real experience and imagined reality so that the orphan – and the implied reader – cannot answer the foreigner’s direct question. The text thus remains purely fantastic. The orphan suspects the foreigner of entering into malicious communion with the patients, awakening their dormant madness and appropriating their inner space. She also wonders about his evil nature and lack of morality, seeing in nature no purpose or intent and seeing the earth as nothing but a collection of complicated systems on which life or men had no special claim (181). She naturally becomes an allegorical subject standing for the human soul and opposing the destructive design of the foreigner. Her consciousness develops as a site of difference and anti-social possibility, she becomes the embodiment of mimesis and alterity so that, contrary to the foreigner who in his fifth and final life is “imprisoned within the four walls of the globe” (231), she is able to escape and to free herself in a symbolic moment when she recovers her own memory and voice, crying out to the outside reality: And something was rising in her throat, pushing against vocal cords that had never formed a word, something incredible. The rock filled the night sky. She could still step back and let it miss her, she knew. She could still withdraw her choice and return to what she had been. There was still time. Why, everlasting life, if she wanted. But the thing in her throat was bursting. “Ha!” cried the orphan, out loud. And stepped forward. (327) The orphan’s interjection openly marks her becoming a voice of conscience, her step- ping back into reality. At that very moment the character becomes the object of a narrative that encodes and preserves the world’s otherness, the otherness of the other and the otherness of the self to oneself. At the end of the story, the character magically recovers her voice and identity after she has undergone a series of ordeals, one of which is to record every single element in the infinite multiplicity of the foreigner’s lives as a means of existence. She virtually loses her initial sense of nothingness to achieve a state of being and a potential future through the transgression of the imaginary world of the foreigner – a transgression that establishes a relation between language and reality and that again interrogates the nature of consciousness and reality. Through such a vivid 102

scene and tangible reality, what was extraordinary then appears more plausible although the explanation for such a recovery still appears strange and illogical. McGahan’s novel propose an idiosyncratic history in a modern society through the inclusion of fantastic elements. Wonders of a Godless World suggests that history is a prophecy and that once we, readers, accept the fait accompli and enter the fantastic world of the main protagonists, the story can unravel with logical (im)precision. We, readers, are made to understand that the imagination is encapsulated in reality and that it is through the transparency of the imagination that reality can best be grasped.

Salhia Ben-messaHel Charles-de-Gaulle University (Lille 3)

W orks Cited

BacHelarD, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Trans. Alan C. M. Ross. London: Routledge, 1964. ––. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon P Books, 1994. BourDieu, Pierre. Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Seuil, 1994. BakHtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in The Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-422. Case, Jo. “An Interview with Andrew McGahan.” Victoria Readings. 1 October 2009.. cHakraBarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197-222. Holt-Jensen, Arild. Geography, History & Concepts. London: Sage, 1999. foucault, Michel. “Dits et écrits 1984, Des espaces autres (conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967).”Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (octobre 1984): 46-9. loVelock, James. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. New York: Norton, 1995. mares, Peter. Interview with Andrew McGahan. The Book Show. ABC Radio National. 19/10/2009. mcGaHan, Andrew. Praise. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. ––. The White Earth. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. ––. Underground. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006. ––. Wonders of a Godless World. 2009. London: Harper & Collins, 2010. WHite, Patrick. The Tree of Man. London: Penguin, 1984. Reviews

Savage Songs and Wild Romances: Settler Poetry and the Indigene, 1830-1880. By John O’Leary. Cross/Cultures 318. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. ISBN (hb): 978-90-420- 3399-3, €45, US$61.

Reviewed by Jane stafforD

STRIKE HIM WITH THE BLOOD OF CIRCUMCISION! STRIKE HIM WITH THE TUFT OF EAGLE FEATHERS! STRIKE HIM WITH THE GIRDLE, THE paltando! STRIKE HIM WITH THE manga, THE kundando! So wrote Australian William Cawthorne in his 1848 work The Legend of Kuperree; or the Red Kangaroo, a retelling with extensive embellishments of an Aboriginal myth from South Australia that Cawthorne had heard from a German missionary. The work is eclectic and not exactly scholarly in a modern sense; the lines quoted are from a spell for hunting dingoes Cawthorne had recorded some years earlier and attached – for literary effect one supposes – to the Port Lincoln Dreamtime legend. There is nothing odder than the body of poetry Cawthorne’s work belongs to – extensive both in volume and in geographical spread – written by settler poets about their indigenous others. From the early empire until worryingly recently, authors in North America, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand have attempted to engage with the material they found around them in a manner that, as far as they understood, represented the literature that existed prior to their arrival and at the same time fitted the standards and aspirations of Victorian poetics. Their intentions were, as John O’Leary demonstrates, various. Some believed themselves to be quasi-translators, conveying with as much accuracy as their art could ac- complish the songs, chants and mythologies of their adopted home. Some acted as proto-ethnographers, tabulating the oral literary possessions of the cultures whose material and social structures were beginning to be the object of the study which became anthropology. Some had a more immediate focus, ventriloquising the utterances of an often fancifully conceived and dramatically conveyed indigene to articulate a specific wrong or further a particular political cause. This verse is hedged around with ideology. Eighteenth-century notions of the noble savage still have force as do Enlightenment distaste for civilisation. An assumption that the originators of this material are on the point of extinction is a given, and a handy settler pretext for the appropriation of not just literary and cultural material but the land that sustained it. Darwinian racial hierarchies intrude in the latter part of the period, while the anti-slavery activity of authors such as Thomas Pringle mean that the rhetoric of this movement carries over into the post-emancipation literature after 1833. As Victorians, these authors see sentimentality not as a weakness but as a validating force within their texts – crying mothers, lost children abound. But, also as Victorians, these authors see themselves as part of Thomas Richards’ imperial archive with a responsibility to the scholarly record. 104

How should a modern reader or critic approach this material? Few of these authors register on any global notion of the nineteenth-century canon, though some – Pringle and Domett, for example – are of interest to local national literatures. Many of the authors and works that Savage Songs discusses are unknown, published once often by obscure colonial presses, not reprinted and read little since (hence the usefulness of O’Leary’s appendixes). The positions that their poetry seems to represent could be more easily subjected to a severe postcolonial critique than any nuanced appreciation of what such earnest scholarly and sympathetic figures as the Schoolcrafts, Lydia- Si gourney, George Rusden or Eliza Dunlop were trying to achieve, but this would be pat and reductive. O’Leary is cautious about the way he approaches his material. He notes its implicit and explicit racism; he makes no claims for literary standing; he is perhaps overly apolo- getic. The very fact that there was such a huge body of material of this kind justifies its inclusion in any consideration of the literature of Empire. We do not need to reprove the past. We need to pay attention to it. If the pre-contact indigene is now difficult to access, these texts, hedged though they are with the obstacles of translation, framing ideologies and perspectives, encoded in poetic registers that bear no relation to their original form, and moreover to us now expressed in unfashionably Victorian diction, are a way of drilling back. 105 Reviews

Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures. By Annalisa Oboe, and Shaul Bassi. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 366 p. ISBN (hb) 978-0415591911, ISBN (pb) 9780415591928, ISBN (ebook) 9780203828922, 49.95$ (pb). Reviewed by Adnan maHmutoVic

Freedom, according to the editors of the volume, is “one of the central narratives of our late modern society” (3). The key word here is “narrative,” because freedom is a sto - ry which began in many different places and histories as an expression of peoples’ local concerns, and in some cases, such as the Greek polis, resulted in the development of the notion of citizenry. Freedom-as-narrative, apparently volatile and open to any practitio- ner, has now gone global and became commodified. For this reason, the authors of this rich array of articles, highlight the need to rethink freedom, to (re)experience it, to (re) narrate it, and (re)assert it. Most importantly, through all these gestures that arise from diverse ways of articulating and living life, there is a need to liberate “freedom” itself. The articles in this volume cover a wide range of topics related to the issue of freedom, and they are representative of many contemporary postcolonial studies of literature. The authors relate to many postcolonial places and histories. Africa is the most represented continent – we find analysis of topics related to Uganda, Biafra, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Sudan etc. – but there are articles about South America, the In- dian subcontinent, Afghanistan, an even some work on America and global Islamism. Such diversity of approaches and analyzed materials shows the import of the study of literature as a way of liberating freedom from commodification. In relation to overly theoretical articles, the analyses of literary works – including a few reflections by postcolonial authors such as Caryl Phillips and Anita Desai – show how literature still brings to crisis our common myths and ideologies, even the notion of freedom itself. The editors correctly point out that literature has often been used as the embellishing of theory, but the variegated articles inadvertently display a positive resistance of the materials analyzed to academic discourses. In fact, the numerous gaps opened up in/ by diverse analyses show a resistance in “freedom” itself as a subject of analysis as well as its fragility. No critic in this volume, regardless of the discipline, divests freedom of its discur- sive import. The notion of “trying freedom” – meaning both attempting to achieve it and to put it on trial, as the editors put it – makes freedom posit itself “as an essential constituent of the human experience in its manifold declinations” (6). This is in part done through a discourse on the entangled relationship between freedom and rights, freedom and resistance, freedom as movement, freedom as a deferred utopia, and freedom as creative engagement in the arts. Achille Mbembe reminds us of Nancy’s argument that freedom is everything but an “Idea,” that freedom is fragile insofar as it is used as if it were the Idea or a mere praxis geared towards a preconceived telos. The praxis of freedom may not be, in the final analysis, teleological. Many authors in this volume show that to be able to use freedom synonymously with rights, resistance, and utopia presupposes the facticity of freedom. By discussing freedom in relation to these other important political concepts, they reveal constraints of traditional thought against which freedom can be thought. However, these collected analyses often produce some sense of nostalgia and past-orientation. They mostly deal 106

with what Robert Young calls the safe past instances of freedom-praxis (such as resistance). Through their insistence on freedom as praxis or performativity, what some may miss to question is the un-threatening freedom of academic discourse itself. Young’s deconstruction of resistance feeds into the paradoxes of freedom that some articles seem to articulate, either deliberately or as a side effect of other arguments. Resistance helps us realize freedom, but resistance as praxis-of-freedom is also a limitation of it. Freedom as praxis, rather than Nancy’s facticity, is its own resistance. Instead of clashes of civilizations and ideologies, we may even speak of clashes of freedoms. The four sections of the volume, albeit appropriately split, show a number of conflicts within the history, practice, and narration of freedom, conflicts which both create freedom as the Idea and undermine it as such. Although I would like to see a conclusive chapter that pinpoints the creative paradoxes of freedom which loom large through most articles and across the borders of different sections, I find that the strength of the present volume lies in the fact that the articles were not written for the sake of cohesiveness of a book on freedom. The strong-yet-loose ties between the articles, which all deserve to be read, in the final analysis open venues of (re)thinking, (re) experiencing, (re)narrating, and (re)asserting freedom. 107 Reviews

Transnational Poetics: Asian Canadian Women’s Fiction of the 1990s. Ed. by Pilar Cuder- Domínguez, Belén Martín-Lucas, and Sonia Villegas-Lopez. Toronto: TSAR, 2011. 167 p. ISBN (pb): 9781894770682, CA$ 21,72. Reviewed by Guy BeaureGarD

While literature written by Canadians of Asian ancestry dates back to the late nineteenth century (notably by the Eaton sisters writing under the pen names of Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna), the self-conscious organization of such texts into the category of Asian Canadian literature is a more recent historical phenomenon intimately connected to community-based movements in Vancouver and Toronto and elsewhere in the 1970s. Some of the most widely discussed Asian Canadian literary texts, such as Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) and SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), emerged from these movements and have in different ways engaged with the histories of Asians in Canada, including but not limited to the state-directed dispossession and forced relocation of Japanese Canadians and the impact of Chinese exclusion on Chinese Canadians. While the authors of Transnational Poetics readily acknowledge the significance of this earlier work, their study focuses on what they call “the new generation of Asian Cana- dian women writers who started publishing in the 1990s” (xi). In so doing, they read and discuss, with evident commitment, a wide range of fictional texts by Shani Mootoo, Rachna Mara, Anita Rau Badami, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Evelyn Lau, Larissa Lai, Lydia Kwa, Hiromi Goto, Kerri Sakamoto, and others – a list that will likely be at least partially familiar to readers of Commonwealth Essays and Studies as some of these authors have been regional winners of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book Award (Goto in 1995; Sakamoto in 1999) or regional winners of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award (Baldwin in 2000; Badami in 2001). And although one may note a gap between what the subtitle of Transnational Poetics promises (that is, a focus on “fiction of the 1990s”) and what it eventually delivers (a discussion of texts published in the 1990s, of course, but also of numerous texts published well into the 2000s), one might also read this temporal slippage as an attempt to track what could be called “the long 1990s” of Asian Canadian cultural production. There is much to admire about this critical project, not the least of which is the way the authors readily acknowledge their reading positions in Spain and the glimpses they provide about the material circulation of these texts as they have become visible through the mechanisms of translation, publication, distribution, and reception. This sort of materially grounded criticism is not, however, consistently sustained throughout this study, which instead attempts an ambitiously broad overview of a field subdivi - ded into three chapters – focusing, respectively, on writing by “Indo-Canadian” wo - men, Chinese Canadian women, and Japanese Canadian women – with each chapter supposedly representing “one ethnic constituency within Asian Canada” (xiii). Leaving aside this conceptually dubious understanding of “ethnic constituenc[ies],” one may reasonably question the limits of such a field coverage project, however diligently- exe cuted: writers from Quebec (notably Ying Chen) are almost wholly disregarded, as are some prominent attempts to narrate histories that cut across various Southeast Asian locations (notably in the fiction of Madeleine Thien; Lydia Kwa’s narratives interlinking Singapore and Canada are addressed but subsumed into the category of “Chinese Ca- 108

nadian”). One may also rightfully wonder why the authors elected to foreground the terms transnational and poetics in the title of their study without even a cursory attempt to theorize or explain their use of either of these key terms. The authors conclude their introduction by asserting that “[they] are certain that Asian Canadian writers of this younger generation [i.e., the writers discussed in Tran- snational Poetics] have an important contribution to make, if only we listen to their words intently” (xvi). While this point might be read as an expression of respect for the au - thors and texts under discussion, it also sounds remarkably similar to a critical position put forward by King-Kok Cheung nearly twenty years ago in Articulate Silences (1993), a study of Asian American and Asian Canadian women writers in which Cheung attempted to contribute to “a conversation in which no one is hushed and to which everyone can listen” (23). At the level of argument, then, readers should not expect a radical repositioning of critical inquiry – a point that is further underlined by the fact that the publication years of the critical sources cited in this study for the most part stop roughly around 2007. Such a time lag, while possibly unavoidable in this sort of co-authored book, nevertheless limits the usefulness of a 2011 publication as an up-to-date engagement with contemporary critical debates. These limitations cannot be willed away. But when viewed with an eye on the future, the conditional clause quoted above – “if only we listen to their words intently” – raises fundamental questions about how such a condition could in fact be fulfilled as well as additional questions concerning the adequacy of existing institutional arrangements that make such “listening” (im)possible. In this way, Transnational Poetics not only directs our attention to the 1990s and to Asian Canadian work produced during and after that time; it also points to the future and to critical work that remains undone. 109 Reviews

The Postcolonial Unconscious. By Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. x, 299 p. ISBN (pb): 9780521186261, £18,99. Reviewed by Christine lorre

The “unconscious” in Neil Lazarus’s title refers not to Freudian theory, but to a form of social forgetting analysed by Fredric Jameson, notably in The Political Uncon- scious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), which Lazarus’s own title alludes to, and which involves, for example, the “effacement of the traces of production” of an object (107). Lazarus’s point is to call, along with Jameson, for a “return of the repressed” elements of culture, and therefore a reshifting of paradigms in postcolonial criticism. In a long first chapter entitled “The politics of postcolonial modernism,” Lazarus starts from a double, related observation: that the corpus of works examined in the field of postcolonial studies is “woefully restricted and attenuated” (22), and that this is due to the often inadequate theory that scholars rely on when developing their analyses of literary works. Here Lazarus is targeting continental theory and the postcolonial theory it inspired in Anglo-American academia that, in Lazarus’s terms, gave rise to the “exaltation” of such prevalent concepts as “migrancy, liminality, hybridity, and multi- culturality” (21). Drawing on Raymond Williams’s writings Lazarus establishes a parallel between modernism and postcolonial criticism to argue that in both cases, a “selective tradition” has been defined and presented as universal while it is actually biased. In response to this situation, Lazarus lists and starts investigating a few major guidelines to develop a new approach to postcolonial literature: “mode of production and class relations,” “land and environment,” “state and nation,” and “structures of feeling.” His approach is leftist, and he is unapologetic about the Marxist metaphor of base and superstructure or the Williamsian concept of “cultural materialism” that underlie these guidelines. In his third chapter, “‘A figure glimpsed in a rear-view mirror’: the question of representation in ‘postcolonial’ fiction,” Lazarus starts by observing how, inspired by the pioneering ideas exposed by Edward Said in Orientalism in 1978, postcolonial scholars have produced work analysing “Western” conceptions of the “non-West” that keep feeding the debate over representation in postcolonial studies. Lazarus moves on to comment on the divergences between postcolonial literature and postcolonial criticism, which to him are two forms of discourse that are often at odds, and suggests paying extra attention to three motifs in particular: the critique of “Eurocentric” representation – faced with the looming question of truth in history, how are postcolonial writers to unwrite and rewrite the colonial archive? The critique of “representation itself ” (as Eurocentric): the previous consideration has been made increasingly difficult to address as post-structuralist theory challenged concepts of truth and ideology. Finally, the other notion worthy of attention is subalternity, that is to say the need to restore subjectivity to people usually presented as pure victims. Lazarus thus maps out various points at which the theory is not attentive enough to the literature, which calls for a renewed approach. The other three chapters reconsider three major figures that have influenced postcolonial theory. In “Fredric Jameson on ‘Third-World Literature’: a defence” (chapter 2), Lazarus focuses on two major essays of Jameson’s, “Third-World Literature in the Era 110

of Multinational Capitalism” (1986) and “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984). Lazarus argues that Jameson has been mis-read as a postmo- dernist, while in fact he was focusing on the struggle of colonial societies to become nations; and that, early on, he pointed to the emergence of a new capitalist paradigm that was subsequently analysed as globalisation. Lazarus himself, in his introduction, characterises the emergence of postcolonial studies as a response to globalisation – a response that needs to be reconsidered and criticised. In “Frantz Fanon after the ‘postcolonial prerogative’” (chapter 4), Lazarus insists on the need to contextualise Fanon’s writings, which developed as a reaction against the old (colonial) world order, one that Lazarus considers is not so different from the new world order, making Fanon’s work contemporarily relevant. Lastly, “The battle over Edward Said” (chapter 5) challenges the widespread notion that Said’s Orientalism was heavily influenced by Michel Foucault’s work, a claim that aims at shifting our reading of Said’s perspective away from theory and its disavowal of nationalism, towards a more energising form of leftism. The Postcolonial Unconscious reads as a “post-theory” book, one that turns away from abstract, deterritorialised, post-national perspectives, towards a reconsideration of more immediate issues and the way they are rendered in literature. Yet the breadth of the literary works referred to by Lazarus, whether through close reading or through ample lists of further examples, and the scope of the postcolonial world they represent, lead to an enlargement of vision of these issues. It is the role of postcolonial theory to challenge what postcolonial means, and that is what Lazarus does in this book. Contributors

Marjorie Ambrosio is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Avignon. Her research focuses on the works of Brian Castro, and her interests include contemporary literature, postcolonialism, migration and identity, and aesthetics.

Guy Beauregard is an Associate Professor at National Taiwan University and the founding director of the Empire and Overseas Literature Project. He is the co-editor of “Pacific- Ca nada” (a special issue of Amerasia Journal published in 2007) and “Asian Canadian Studies” (a special issue of Canadian Literature published in 2008). His most recent work has appeared in the International Journal of Canadian Studies and West Coast Line.

Salhia Ben-Messahel is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Charles de Gaulle University – Lille 3. Her research area is on place and cultural identity in the field of Australian and postcolo - nial studies. She is the author of Mind the Country: Tim Winton’s Fiction, the first book-length critical study of one of Australia’s major authors. She has edited Des frontières de l’interculturalité and has published articles in books and literary journals such as Antipodes and Commonwealth.

Kathie Birat is Emeritus Professor of American, Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean literature at the University of Lorraine. She has published in all three areas of study with recent emphasis on fiction from the English-speaking Caribbean. Articles devoted to Caribbean fiction include work on Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar, Sam Selvon, Earl Lovelace and Robert Antoni. She has also devoted a number of articles to the subject of voice and its relation to effects of orality in the works of Caryl Phillips, Robert Antoni and Sam Selvon. A publication of selected papers given at the conference entitled Dislocation culturelle et construction identitaire, co-edited with Brigitte Zaugg and Charles Scheel, recently appeared.

Alice Braun has been a Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La-Défense since 2009. She has written several articles on the works of Janet Frame, as well as a book on The Lagoon and Other Stories, co-authored with Claire Bazin. She has also been working on the representation of the gendered self in autobiographical works written by women.

André Dodeman is a Senior Lecturer at Stendhal University in Grenoble. He wrote his thesis on the Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan and his novels. He has published articles on Hugh MacLennan, Mordecai Richler, Farley Mowat and David Adams Richards and he is currently working on contemporary Canadian literature.

Mélanie Heydari is a former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Hu- maines (Lyon). She has completed her PhD dissertation on Vikram Seth’s protean literary production under the supervision of Marc Porée (Paris 3) and Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas (Rennes 2/CNRS). She is currently a visiting scholar at New York University, New York, USA.

Christine lorre is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her field of research is postcolonial literatures, recent work including publications on the short fiction of Janet Frame and Alice Munro, Asian American and Asian Canadian writers, and postcolonial and globalisation theory.

Pilar Royo grasa is a Research Fellow at the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza. She is currently completing her PhD on Australian writer Gail Jones. Her main research interests are contemporary Australian fiction, trauma and postcolonial studies.

Jane stafford is an Associate Professor and lectures in English at Victoria University of Wel- lington. With Mark Williams, she is the co-author of Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872- 112

1914 (2006) and co-editor of The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature (2012) and The World Novel to 1950, forthcoming.

Pascale Tollance is a Professor at the University of Lyon 2. She is the author of a doctoral thesis and several articles on Malcolm Lowry. She has also worked on contemporary British literature (Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, A. S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson and Rachel Seiffert). She published Graham Swift. La Scène de la voix in 2010. Her current research interests include the question of voice and the body in the work of J. M. Coetzee.

Héliane Ventura is a Professor at the University of Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail. Her area of spe- cialization is the postcolonial short story with a special focus on the re-writing of myths from Antiquity and the relationship between word and image. More recently she has devoted her work to literary migrations from Europe to North America and the early narratives on Aboriginal people as well as by Aboriginal writers from Canada. She has recently edited The Short Stories of Alice Munro in The Journal of the Short Story in English (2010) and co-edited with Marta Dvorak Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre (2010). Kerry-Jane Wallart is a Senior Lecturer at Paris-Sorbonne and a specialist of Caribbean literature. After writing her doctoral thesis on trickster figures in Derek Walcott’s drama, she has published a number of articles on the works of Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, David Dabydeen, Claude MacKay, Fred D’Aguiar, Pauline Melville, Wilson Harris and V. S. Naipaul. She has recently started to work on African playwrights such as Athol Fugard and Wole Soyinka. Her research concerns itself more generally with the migrations and muta- tions of genre in post-colonial literatures.