Journal of the in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

66 | Spring 2016 Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle, and Varia Guest Editors of the Special Section: Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1670 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 2016 ISBN: 978-2-7535-5056-8 ISSN: 0294-04442

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

General Foreword Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and Linda Collinge-Germain

Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle

Foreword to Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle Robert M. Luscher

Introduction: On the Stickiness of the Short Story and the Cycle Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam

To See the Lives of Others Through the Eyes of God: The Affectivity of Literary Aesthetics in the Short Stories of Edward P. Jones Daniel Davis Wood

“Preposterous Adventures”: Affective Encounters in the Short Story Cycle Rachel Lister

Yearning, Frustration, and Fulfillment: The Return Story in and Kissing in Manhattan Rebecca Cross

“The Young and Romantic Will Like It”: The Abolitionist Short Stories of Fiona McWilliam

Affective Atmospheres in the House of Usher Dennis Meyhoff Brink

The Affectivity of in ’s “” Kuo Chia-chen

Reading Structures of Feeling in Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” Rob Welch

Roundtable: Affect, the Short Story, and the Cycle

Varia

Is There a in the House? Rudyard Kipling’s Private Message to Arthur Conan Doyle in “The House Surgeon” Donna R. White

Liminality and the Epiphanic Spectrum in Joyce’s Dubliners and Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag Daniela Janes

The Geography of the Imagination: Benedict Kiely’s Dubliners Thomas O'Grady

Immigration, Ethnicity, and Race in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “Tony’s Wife” Timothy K. Nixon

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“Betch you’ bootsh!”: Jewish Humour, Jewish Identity, and Yiddish Literary Traditions in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl Brian Jansen

Housebreakers and Peeping Toms: Voyeurism in ’s Early Suburban Stories Yair Solan

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General Foreword

Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and Linda Collinge-Germain

1 This issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English is a double-volume featuring a general section as well as a special section entitled “Affect and the Short Story and Short Story Cycle,” the latter under the guest editorship of Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam. We thank them as well as Robert Luscher, specialist of the short story sequence and guest consultant for this special section, for their active involvement in contributing to research on the short story in English.

2 The general section of this issue begins with a study of Rudyard Kipling’s 1909 story “The House Surgeon.” In “Is There a Doctor in the House? Rudyard Kipling’s Private Message to Arthur Conan Doyle in ‘The House Surgeon,’” Donna White looks at the way in which Kipling seems to have not only written a story for the public, but also to have addressed a private message of hope and healing to his friend Arthur Conan Doyle after the death of his first wife, a hypothesis that resonates with this issue’s special section on Affect.

3 The two articles which follow both present comparative studies based on James Joyce’s Dubliners, attesting once again to the collection’s status as a landmark in the field of short story research. Daniela Janes compares Dubliners to the 1987 collection Tales from Firozsha Baag by the Parsi-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry. Reading both works as short story cycles, her aim is to demonstrate that the form of the short story cycle offers a “structural correlative” to the Joycean device of epiphany. Janes argues that the “epiphanic spectrum,” understood as a “gradual accumulation of awareness,” thus a process, has correlations with the structure of the short-story cycle, an accumulative genre.

4 Thomas O’Grady directs his attention to the locus of Joyce’s Dubliners as he compares the collection to Benedict Kiely’s Dublin-based short stories. Engaging with Guy Davenport’s notion of “the geography of imagination,” O’Grady argues that Kiely, as much as Joyce, pays tribute both to Dublin as a place and to Ireland as a literary .

5 Timothy Nixon and Brian Jansen focus in their respective articles on the topos of immigration in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States. Nixon encourages

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critics to read Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s story “Tony’s Wife” recalling the historical context of immigration and ethnic diversity in early twentieth-century New Orleans. In so doing, argues Nixon, they will perceive how the author engages with the ideas of race and racism in a story whose cast of characters is paradoxically only white.

6 “Yekl,” the story written by Abrahm Cahan and studied by Brian Jansen, is set in Yiddish New York during the same period. This paper argues that “‘Yekl’ is a text whose realist impulse and urge to interpret Yiddish-American immigrant culture for a wider audience is complemented and complicated by a knowledge of and engagement with non-realist Yiddish literary traditions: the folk tale, folk figures like the schlemiel, and a history of verbal, self-deprecating, anecdotal Yiddish humour.”

7 Finally, Yair Solan examines the suburban stories for which John Cheever has become so well-known, studying specifically what Cheever called the paradoxical “loss of privacy” in 1950s’ suburbia in comparison to the “liberating anonymity” of cities like New York. Nevertheless, argues Solan, Cheever’s suburban maintains a decidedly urban sensibility. “Peopled by exiles, suburban flâneurs, and exurban commuters, Cheever’s suburbia is hardly disconnected from the city,” concludes Solan.

AUTHORS

MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR

JSSE Editor

GÉRALD PRÉHER JSSE Associate Editor

LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN

JSSE Director of Publication

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Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle

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Foreword to Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle

Robert M. Luscher

1 I am pleased to have been asked by the editors to serve as the Designated Editorial Board Consultant to introduce this Special Section of JSSE on “Affect and the Short Story and Cycle.” Having devoted a significant portion of my career to studying the short story—especially its individual and collective behavior within the short story cycle—it is gratifying to see concerted attention devoted to the intersection of reader and text, particularly as it occurs in relation to the production of affect. The volume contains seven essays—three of which focus on the short story cycle and four of which analyze particular stories—as well as a first-time feature in JSSE: an electronic roundtable on a variety of questions related to the implication of affect in the study of these genres.

2 Guest Editors Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam precede their judicious selection of essays with an incisive introduction that utilizes the concept of “stickiness” to integrate the variety of concerns examined in the contributors’ essays and the concluding roundtable. This adhesive quality, they contend, can be applied to various intersections that occur in the autonomous story as well as within a linked collection: the convergence of reader and text, the relationship between characters and stories within the cycle, the effect of repetition, and the resonance produced by various narrative strategies. As Ardoin and McWilliam review the section’s contents, sketching the particular concerns of each essay, they provide a sense of the rationale behind the section’s arrangement and of its theoretical range and resonances. In doing so, they suggest that the section—like the short story cycle—creates a “stickiness” of its own through the accumulating affective value that binds it and generates an effect greater than the mere sum of its parts. A similar effect occurs as they provide a review of the main roundtable, attending to the comments of individual scholars and the threads that weave their remarks together.

3 The three essays focused on short story cycles take various critical approaches to examining the role affect plays across the wider canvas of the short story collection. Daniel Davis Wood’s essay on two cycles by African American writer Edward P. Jones,

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building on Charles Altieri, shifts focus from fiction as representation of affective experience to its role in generating affect aesthetically, especially during conscious moments of attentiveness. Both the modular form of the cycle and the repetition of affective triggers, Wood contends, create a spatio-temporal panorama with disquieting experiential significance built into geographic markers from the characters’ affective experiences. Rachel Lister, in contrast, examines moments of happiness, with Sara Ahmed’s theories of affect as her lens on story cycles by Katherine Ann Porter, , and Alice Munro that focus on the lives of marginalized female characters who move beyond the norms of their affective communities to experience moments of transformation or returns that move them beyond hegemonic notions of happiness. These cycles contain a more positive form of repetition, enabling acts of reclamation and renewed comprehension, most often through affective lyric moments. Rebecca Cross concludes the section, drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s narratological theories as she examines the return motif in story cycles by and David Schickler, both of which recursively utilize patterns of absence in a metanarrative fashion. Cross is particularly interested in the process of ideation and reconciliation that occurs affectively for the reader in the gaps between stories in a cycle, and her analysis draws attention to this undertheorized issue.

4 Fiona McWilliam leads off the section on autonomous stories with a study of Lydia Marie Child’s critically neglected “The Black Saxon,” analyzing Child’s strategy of sympathetic identification to demonstrate how the story displaces reader sympathy to the socio-political realm; nonetheless, as the story’s protagonist demonstrates, feeling does not always translate into the impetus for action. Dennis Brink closely studies the affective atmosphere of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” analyzing the relationship of interior and exterior generation of situational affect and the vicious circle of negative affect—one which becomes an allegory for the reading experience and utilizes its brevity to transmute affective infection to the level of affective possession. Kuo Chia-chen’s essay on Virginia Woolf’s “The String Quartet” focuses on the affective impact of musicality, both as it is represented in the story and as it functions stylistically and metanarratively to produce a kaleidoscopic effect that progressively transports both narrator and reader. Rob Welch concludes the section with a study of intersecting affective realms in Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel,” employing Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” to argue that the story’s affective dimension moves it beyond merely expressing determinism—an approach which he contends will similarly extend criticism of Crane’s other short fiction. The genre’s intensity, the accumulation of charged affective moments, the function of gaps, and the impact of juxtaposition and multiplicity are all repeated concerns in these essays.

5 The concluding roundtable reiterates and particularizes many of these concerns as applicable to affect in the autonomous story and the cycle, as well as in unjoined sequels to particular stories. Patrick Colm Hogan, Gerald Lynch, Justine Murison, James Nagel, Jane Thraikill, and Miriam Wallace engage in a wide-ranging exchange on form and affect, providing analyses of a number of particular stories in support of their positions in the longer section on the short story. Far more attention is paid to the short story than to the cycle, with the latter discussion providing numerous possibilities for further pursuit of issues of form and affective resonance that these

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scholars have the space to raise but not to pursue, providing an open-ended conclusion to the special section not unlike that of the story within a cycle.

6 Before readers begin their review of this issue’s contents, thanks are due to the other members of the JSSE editorial board who contributed their time and expertise to reviewing and refining these essays, to the editors of JSSE who assisted with the conceptualization and production of this special section, and to guest editors Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam for assembling and editing these essays and the roundtable, writing an eloquent introduction, and seeing this stimulating special section through to its conclusion.

AUTHOR

ROBERT M. LUSCHER University of Nebraska at Kearney Designated JSSE Editorial Board Consultant

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Introduction: On the Stickiness of the Short Story and the Cycle

Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam

1 The title of this introduction—“On the Stickiness of the Short Story and the Cycle”— refers to a number of concerns investigated in the roundtable and articles that make up the special section that follows: how stories in a cycle seem to stick together more cohesively than they do in other contexts, for example, and how and why the cycle form continues to stick around (in fact, even seems to be growing in popularity). This section aims to bring these questions of stickiness into conversation with another brand of stickiness—one that might be able to speak persuasively to the meeting of reader and cycle, or the meeting of characters within a cycle, or the meeting of different stories within a cycle. More broadly, the content in this section turns to short stories in general—the effects of their brevity and their necessary exclusions, their methods of making meaning (and of making readers make meaning), their historical and cultural roles. These concerns turn us toward the meaning of “stickiness” that has emerged in the context of studies of affect, emotion, and feeling—all concerns of this section, “Affect and the Short Story and Short Story Cycle.”

2 Sara Ahmed describes this brand of stickiness in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Emotions, in her reading, are not in people—they shape people: “Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations towards and away from others” (4). Her project seeks to “track how emotions circulate between bodies, examining how they ‘stick’ as well as move” (4) and to investigate moments of emotional impression. About impressions, Ahmed writes the following: Forming an impression also depends on how objects impress upon us. An impression can be an effect on the subject’s feelings (“she made an impression”). It can be a belief (“to be under an impression”). It can be an imitation or an image (“to create an impression”). Or it can be a mark on the surface (“to leave an impression”). We need to remember the “press” in an impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace. (6, emphasis in original)

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3 When one surface (of a body, for example, or a text) comes into contact with another (or within a “zone of proximity” as other thinkers might put it1), an impression is made, and the repetition of such impressions results in “stickiness.”

4 Stickiness, as conceived by Ahmed, is “an effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs” (90, emphasis in original); it is the outcome of repeated impressions. For an example in our relationship with art, we could think of hearing the same song in the same situation. In language, we could think of how when “a word is used in a certain way, again and again, then that ‘use’ becomes intrinsic” (92, emphasis in original). What we might as an emotion we feel in reaction to the word or the song in fact does not reside within us—it exists in the contact between us and the song, and its “stickiness is an effect” that emerges from “histories of contact.” The meaning of that emotion is and emerges from cultural and personal exchanges, and as those exchanges repeat, meaning and resonance collect, and what results is an “accumulation of affective value” (92): this is “stickiness.”

5 Through this perspective, we can imagine productive new ways to investigate both the short story and the short story cycle. In this section’s roundtable, for example, Justine Murison refers to the “affective loops and leaps” that necessarily take the place of exhaustive detail in the short story: might Ahmed’s framework help to explain how such loops become sticky, solidifying the resonance a story by Poe or Joyce has for readers? We might imagine the refrain of a musical work here, looping and repeating and returning and resonating. In one of this section’s articles, in fact, Kuo Chia-Chen asks us to imagine a Woolf short story through this image: music departs almost immediately as it is played, but the related affect continues to act on the audience.

6 These threads are also traced into entire collections of short stories. For example, multiple article contributors and roundtable respondents review the debated characteristics of the short story cycle form. Is it the repeated appearance of a character across stories that makes a collection a cycle? Is it a unifying theme or location? Each of these definitions—as our contributors point out—create their own complications. We might add one more possibility here, as an example of the potentially useful role to be played in such a debate by an attention to affect: perhaps a short story cycle can be defined by its stickiness. Perhaps the stories of a cycle impress upon the reader and upon each other. Perhaps this brand of impression is depicted inside a story. Perhaps an impression is created at the meeting of the reader and a character, or a theme, or a location. Perhaps the trace left by that meeting gains in meaning through repetition—another story, another instance, another meeting. (Roundtable respondent Miriam Wallace suggests as much when she writes, “It is in the reiteration of words, settings, names, and the differences among those repetitions that they invoke a kind of recognition that ascribes affective content to them.”) Perhaps that repetition grows “sticky,” accumulating an affective value that binds a simple collection into something more.

7 We hope that this particular collection—a special JSSE section on “Affect and the Short Story and Short Story Cycle”—manages to serve as a “something more” through its collection and arrangement of . The section begins with seven new articles that represent innovative approaches to issues surrounding the short story and the cycle. At the same time, these articles represent an array of approaches to the diverse field of Affect Studies, delving into affect, emotion, feeling, and sentiment, by attending, for example, to mood, atmosphere, and shock. The second part of the section is a sort of

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virtual roundtable, made up of respondents from the fields of the short story, form/ genre studies, narratology, and Affect Theory. Their discussions range across centuries and traditions of literatures, offering useful new close readings, histories, and provocations along the way, and suggesting (in the words of contributor Dennis Meyhoff Brink) that “short stories and short story cycles will undoubtedly be propitious objects for literary analyses inspired by affect theory.”

8 Daniel Davis Wood opens the first part of the section with his article, “To See the Lives of Others Through the Eyes of God,” a study of two particularly intriguing collections of short fiction, both by Edward P. Jones (and “structured synchronically”). Following Altieri, Davis Wood is interested in art’s ability to shock or disrupt audiences out of habit in a way that “escapes articulation and leaves the beholder with a sense of not knowing how to name exactly what he or she feels.” The more atypical the approach, the more “hostile towards conventional modes of representation,” the greater the degree of shock and the more “forcefully” the affective “experience is triggered.” Jones’s strange short story cycles provide a suitable (in fact, ideal) model here, in part because their interconnectivity expands to the point of challenging canonical definitions of the cycle and potentially rewriting “the short story cycle’s capabilities as an art form.”

9 Rachel Lister turns to more canonical figures in her “‘Preposterous Adventures’: Affective Encounters in the Short Story Cycle,” but she, too, pays special attention to moments that disrupt conventions. In this study of cycles by , Eudora Welty, and Alice Munro, Lister highlights successful moments that challenge the norms of “affective communities” and “defy the tyranny of linearity” by utilizing “a positive form of repetition.” We might think again of “stickiness”: here, a positive brand of repetition works to overcome a restrictive one. Lister highlights “representations of the kinds of women most likely to resist communal, hegemonic notions of happiness in favor of unlikely experiences that open them up to new ways of apprehending their lives and identities.” Ahmed again serves a linchpin, and the cycle again emerges as a particularly appropriate form, this time for depicting affective experience: the “cycle is the perfect vehicle for dramatizing” this content, in part because it “galvanizes the synchronic sensibility of the reader.”

10 Rebecca Cross is also interested in repetition, but in the case of her contribution, the repetitions under examination are “patterns of absence,” reached or reversed in pivotal “return stories” of cycles. Her article, “Yearning, Frustration, and Fulfillment: The Return Story in Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan,” focuses on contemporary cycles by Elizabeth Strout and David Schickler and the ways in which they work “to direct and influence the reader’s reaction.” Her project, then, serves to investigate questions of potential stickiness at the same time as it contributes to a repeated concern voiced in the roundtable about our affective expectations of the story reader. Cross argues that the reader is helped to identify the cyclical or circular structure of these texts’ cumulative themes and concerns through absences, repetitions, and sudden fulfillments located at key moments in the cycle. At the same time, these absences (for example) simultaneously work to remind us of genre and form, “prompt[ing] a reflection on the ways” and workings of the cycle.

11 The other four articles leave aside questions about the cycle in order to intensively focus on individual stories, though Fiona McWilliam’s essay “The Young and Romantic Will Like It” attends to the important roles of paratext and publication context in

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shaping reader response. In reading abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child, McWilliam returns to a brand of nineteenth-century literature that intentionally sought to both depict feeling and “manufacture” it in readers, in an attempt to spur them to political action. Her article examines Child’s correspondence in order to reveal a writer keenly attuned to likely reader response and willing to adjust her writing strategies with that response in mind: Child’s approach, we find, “is about feeling as or like the object of sympathy and more focused on directing readers’ sentiment outside the text.” Usefully, McWilliam also highlights the curious operation of feeling within one of Child’s stories, which itself focuses on the tendency of readers—both fictional and not— to feel for others (even if only fleetingly) through texts. Through a close reading of this story, “The Black Saxons,” McWilliam explores the emotional impacts of fact and fiction, and she investigates intersections between race and slavery, empathy and identification, and subjectivity and agency.

12 Dennis Meyhoff Brink remains in the nineteenth century, but his “Affective Atmospheres in the House of Usher” tackles an entirely different brand of affect at work in an entirely different brand of literature. Brink uses Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” to elucidate and expand discussions of affective atmosphere. Poe, of course, could not be a more appropriate choice: he makes of “the human skin […] a porous border that is perpetually crossed by affects,” and he requires that we expand our affective vocabulary to recognize elements like “affective emission, affective ecosystem, or affective possession.” Like Ahmed (and Brian Massumi), Brink reminds us that our emotion is rarely “ours.” Instead, following thinkers like Teresa Brennan, we should imagine affect as shared “in the air” and transmissible. Along the lines of Murison and others in this section, Brink suggests that the very shortness of short stories make them uniquely positioned to deal with such concerns: “Short stories seem, due to their very brevity, to be particularly disposed to highlight and examine shared atmospheres.”

13 Much of Kuo Chia-chen’s investigation seeks to address the question of the potential affective impact of the short story, “a genre in which scope and length are necessarily limited.” She also revisits a particularly modernist discussion about content and form through her Deleuzo-Guattarian argument about music in a single short story. Kuo’s “The Affectivity of Music in Virginia Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet’” argues that Woolf’s story is both about music and “accomplishes musicality as an affective writing style.” To support this claim, Kuo traces both the long influence of music on Woolf’s life and work and the long interest Woolf critics have had in that relationship. Ultimately, part of Kuo’s original contribution is to depart from many of those critics and reconceive of musicality as pre-conscious—“as audience members’ instantaneous experiences and synaesthetic sensations […] enveloped or whirled around.”

14 Though Kuo does not touch on the topic of the cycle, her view of musicality as Deleuzian “assemblage of multiple and diverse sensations” reminds us that Deleuze’s concepts might offer as intriguing a lens on the cycle as does Ahmed’s idea of “stickiness.” That is, might we reconceive of the long cited quality of the cycle to act as both one and many2 through Deleuzian terms like “multiplicity” and “assemblage”? Can we re-imagine the cycle’s curious position as neither collection nor through a Deleuzian lens of both-and? Is the moment when collection becomes cycle so difficult to pinpoint because we search for a moment, for a stable turning point, rather than attending to the productive movement of a mobile becoming-cycle?

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15 Rob Welch deploys a lens from yet another branch of affect studies in his article, “Reading Structures of Feeling in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Blue Hotel.’” Welch examines the intersection of narrative and the operation of felt human thought (and “feeling as thought”) through Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling.” Again, we could think of the cycle here, and its cultural and historical place and conditions, but Welch also shows the structures at work at the level of content. In “The Blue Hotel,” “incidental social structures […] attach themselves to the sharing of a drink or the profession of an acquaintance,” and a reading of this process might “provide the key to understanding” certain aspects of the story. While Welch’s excellent close reading surely stands as evidence that useful explication can exist alongside attention to affect, respondents to the roundtable that follows draw attention to other potential perils and suggest we temper our enthusiasm for the possibilities of affect theory.3

16 The roundtable, completed through a series of e-mail exchanges, presents a more direct conversation between thinkers, and deals with many concerns raised in the articles. Patrick Colm Hogan’s responses, for example, insist that narrative and emotion are inextricably linked—that, in fact, emotions actually “generate particular genres,” and stories are “guided by […] emotion systems.” James Nagel notes in response that the more recognizable of such systems are often sidestepped in the fiction of figures like Crane and Hemingway by brands of internal, psychological growth most effectively read through more traditional modes of literary scholarship. The two views both seem to note that some sort of affect is central to the event, or epiphany, or moment of being, but Hogan argues that emotion is what actually marks the bounds of the event, making readers or characters aware of the beginning or end of a narrative event.

17 The guarantee of reader awareness is a bit of a sticking point for some, including Nagel, whose responses attend to the unpredictable emotional reactions of the reader. Nagel suggests that misreadings complicate a reader’s affective exchange with a text in ways significant enough to undermine some of the very questions posed in the section. At the same time, he reminds us that “the history of serious commentary about the nature of the American short story begins with a concern for affect,” expressed by Poe.

18 Miriam Wallace also turns to history: her responses both historicize affect and use the concept of affect to help historicize the category of the short story and to expose what gets excluded from that category. Like McWilliam’s article on abolitionist fiction, Wallace’s commentary attends to stories that are “overtly calling for an affective response from the reader” and doing so through an attention to storytelling itself and a portrayal of sympathy. Turning toward how such intersections of emotion and literature operate in the classroom, Wallace evokes Ahmed by encouraging us to think “about how we evoke, use, or allow affect to circulate in the classroom and how textual bodies ‘stick’ to or even construe student bodies.”

19 Gerald Lynch’s responses turn to the particular advantages of the cycle form— especially its ability to order stories and to draw attention to that order, both of which work to train the reader, rather than necessarily expecting something from the reader. The cycle form, argues Lynch, guides a developing affective experience, one that is distinguishable from the experience of, for example, a novel. In response, Hogan extends Lynch’s perspective “to other forms of coherence,” as a way to contemplate “bodies of work by a single author that are not designed as story collections” but still cohere strongly or weakly (in Lynch’s terms) and still manage to train the reader.

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20 Justine Murison also notes an “inextricable” link between “affective work” and “generic work.” Attending to this link in the short story, argues Murison, can help expose the strategies we do not notice in , as well as the affective expectations readers bring to their engagements with novels. Elsewhere, Wallace points out that this approach might show us a way past the limited attention to what “characters or stories ‘have’ affect,” by showing us instead how stories “operate by creating affect to which attuned readers are called to engage, participate, or reject” (That quality of being “attuned” as a reader is important: Nagel, for example, notes that some readers “are stunningly obtuse, and have very little affective response” because of that). Importantly, Murison reminds us all to “mind the [various] gaps” at work in texts, whether between volumes, between stories, or between diegetic levels within frame narratives. These gaps provide “affective effects”—a term to which Wallace and Murison both turn. “Short stories,” argues Murison, “resonate and vibrate with affect,” far beyond the emotions and feelings they depict in their content.

21 Jane Thrailkill reveals the diversity of affective avenues we might travel by attending to elements like time, trauma, or humor in narratives. In her turn to the last of these, Thrailkill also returns to the affective response and role of the reader: the humor in a story by Charles Chesnutt, for example, “seems oriented” toward “helping readers think right about others’ feelings and affective investments.” While Nagel takes issue with the humor (or lack thereof) in Chesnutt by pointing toward the context of Chesnutt’s wider body of work, Lynch points to a different tradition, investigating the humorous work of Stephen Leacock. Thrailkill also returns us to the line of questions raised by Davis Wood’s study of paired short story cycles: she suggests that rare forms evoke rare experiences. The short story sequel, for example, has the possibility to complicate our narratological and affective experiences with texts. Interested, like Murison, in the gaps, or “dead centers,” created by sequels, Thrailkill demonstrates that there is room for much more discussion of the intersections of form and affect than allowed by a single issue of any journal.4

22 A single section in a single issue is all we have, though, so we will have to rely on the potential stickiness of the questions and claims at work throughout it to leave an impression. Our thanks to all of this section’s contributors, respondents, and reviewers, for providing the stimulating and the sticky. Our thanks as well as to the editorial staff of JSSE, as well as to the peer reviewers of the articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2014. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Print.

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Lynch, Gerald. The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Print.

NOTES

1. See various by philosopher of affect Gilles Deleuze, especially Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. 2. See, in particular, Gerald Lynch’s study of English-Canadian short story cycles, The One and the Many. 3. In The Forms of the Affects, Eugenie Brinkema offers a sort of checklist for describing useful applications of theories of affect: “Has the turning toward affect in the theoretical humanities engendered a more complex understanding of texts? Have accounts of affects produced more nuanced, delightful interpretations of forms in texts—and have they recovered the dimensions of being surprised by representation” (xii). Perhaps even more clearly, James Nagel suggests in this section’s roundtable that we remember to skeptically ask, “Is this kind of reading what affect studies has wrought?” 4. Brinkema reminds us, after all, that “the ‘turn to affect’ in the humanities is and has always been plural, a set of many turnings that are problematically lumped together in a false unity that imagines that one singular intellectual arc could describe them all” (xii).

AUTHORS

PAUL ARDOIN Paul Ardoin is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His work on affect and literature appears or is forthcoming in numerous venues, including the Counter/ Text; Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities; Journal of Modern Literature; and the edited collection Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives.

FIONA MCWILLIAM Fiona McWilliam is lecturer in English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She received her doctorate from Florida State University in 2014. Her work has appeared in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture and Studies in American Fiction.

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To See the Lives of Others Through the Eyes of God: The Affectivity of Literary Aesthetics in the Short Stories of Edward P. Jones

Daniel Davis Wood

I. Affectivity and Aesthetics

1 In one of the many responses to Ruth Leys’ bold analyses of affective experiences, Charles Altieri issues some provocative remarks on the intersections between affectivity and aesthetics. Making a distinction between “emotions and feelings,” Altieri suggests that “[e]motions lead agents to shape experience in terms of plots with points of incitement leading to projected action” whereas feelings consist of “states of sensation that involve the imagination but that do not enter into the structure of cause and consequence because the state of attention becomes an end in itself” (880). “When I identify as angry,” he writes by way of example, it follows that I identify a cause and desire to perform certain actions in relation to that cause. When I identify as fearful or joyful there will be other practical orientations. But is this the case when I suddenly recognize how a bird dips its or a color comes alive in relation to another color, as long as I attend to the concrete interplay among visual phenomena? (880)

2 For Altieri, then, there is something qualitatively unique—and circular—about an act of beholding beauty, an awareness of the arrangement and movement of parts within a striking whole, to which the beholder’s initial response is a dumbfounded attentiveness directed towards seeking out the means by which this very response has been produced. The more specific point Altieri proceeds to make is that “when artists evoke feelings that depend on what we might call the counter-conceptual use of signification, quintessentially in surrealist art,” this particular use of signification generates the attentiveness which comprises myriad inchoate and perhaps unnameable feelings and

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thereby renders the work of art an agent of an affective experience. “In many of his landscapes,” Altieri goes on, Paul Cezanne makes rocks virtually balloons that have no weight or mass. Then he has trees serve the counter-intuitive role of providing stability for the painting while insisting that this logic holds only because painting can define modes of vision to which we are blind in practical life. I submit that these trees and rocks elicit powerful feelings precisely because the stance of the painter and eventually the stance of the viewer recognize what cannot be coherently conceptualized except insofar as one honors the logic of the painting itself. And that logic is insistently particular in the sense that it holds only insofar as we see the painting as a distinctive event with qualities that depend on imagination rather than cognition. (880)

3 What Altieri advances, then, is a view of art that privileges not its capacity to represent the affective experiences of human subjects but its capacity to generate an affective experience for those who stand before it. The work of art is, or can be, an event through which its beholders are, in a sense, shocked out of themselves by having been made privy to a way of seeing the world that subverts or supersedes the norms of human vision. Insofar as this shock escapes articulation and leaves the beholder with a sense of not knowing how to name exactly what he or she feels, it amounts to an experience of affectivity whose origins lie in the realm of aesthetics.

4 Altieri is not alone in taking this view of the aesthetic wellsprings of affectivity. Eric Shouse, for instance, likewise contends that “the power of many forms of media,” artistic or otherwise, “lies not so much in their ideological effects, but in their ability to create affective resonances independent of content or meaning” (par. 14). Shouse’s point is that a text possessing unusual, unconventional, or somehow idiosyncratic formal properties forces its beholders to engage with it creatively, speculatively, in order to make it intelligible—a view that corresponds to Altieri’s sense that works of art “with qualities that depend on imagination” (880) are best able to generate an experience of affectivity. And, prior to drawing a response from Altieri, Ruth Leys takes Shouse’s work as a foundation for her exploration of affective experiences. “[W]e human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensities and resonances,” she writes, arguing that because these intensities and resonances “so decisively influence or condition our political and other beliefs,” “we ignore [them] at our peril” and ought to pay closer attention to the role that our “corporeal-affective dispositions” play in various modes of everyday thought (436). Given that affects are “nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning” (437), Leys continues, “the way to understand [the affective experiences of] fear or joy is that they are ‘triggered’ by various objects, but the latter are nothing more than tripwires for an in-built behavioral-physiological response” (438). In using the word “trigger,” of course, Leys aligns herself with Silvan Tomkins, whose groundbreaking Affect Imagery Consciousness (1962-1991) reserves the word “trigger” for the event that sparks an affective experience (656ff) and in turn “produces attention that brings its trigger into consciousness” (Nathanson xi). Thus, to draw Altieri’s view of aesthetic affectivity into the language of Tomkins and Leys, a work of art can be the trigger for an affective experience in its beholder, and the more counter- conceptual the work—the more formally elastic and hostile towards conventional modes of representation and capable of shocking the beholder out of his or her habits of corporeal cognition—the more forcefully that experience is triggered.

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5 Which other art forms besides surrealist painting might now be brought into the orbit of this notion? Which other artists might be identified as having produced work that triggers affective experiences as powerful as those triggered by the paintings of Paul Cezanne? The aim of this paper is to argue that at least one other artist deserving of attention in this context is the African American writer Edward P. Jones. Jones is perhaps most admired for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (2003), a harrowing exploration of slavery in antebellum America told from the perspectives of free black slave-owners, but the present discussion will focus on Jones’ two short story collections, Lost in the City (1992) and its pseudo-sequel All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006). My view is that each of these collections constitutes a short story cycle and that, crucially, the two cycles work together, in parallel or in a quasi-symbiotic relationship, so as to effectively expand the short story cycle’s capabilities as an art form and, in the process, to generate an affective experience which is in want of detailing although it may remain impossible to name.

6 Before turning to Jones’ work, however, some qualifications and clarifications are necessary. First of all, having until now relied on Altieri’s remarks on the “feelings” generated by aesthetics, it is important to note that affect theorists maintain a general differentiation between the affects and what we call emotions and feelings. “Feelings,” according to Eric Shouse, “are personal and biographical [and] emotions are social,” while “affects are pre-personal” because hardwired into human corporeality (par. 2). Yet, in context, Altieri appears to have used the word “feelings” more or less interchangeably with “affects,” discussing feelings of a very particular sort which emerge from an experience of mystification in the face of unintelligible or estranging phenomena—a mystification that is pre-personal until the imagination opens up to provide the beholder with a sense of intelligibility drifting towards conclusive resolution. Related to this is the proposition that affective experiences in general, and those triggered by art in particular, are inextricably bound to human corporeality. Resulting from what Miranda Burgess has called “the flow of energies among and through sensate bodies and between bodies and the world” (293), they constitute “the states and responses of individuated bodies” (290). It is important to keep this in mind because the thwarting of corporeality, of the habits of sensate bodies, is precisely the means by which counter-conceptual art, including the work of Edward P. Jones, triggers affective experiences.

7 Of course, given the autonomic nature of the affects and the individuated nature of affective experience, the very thing I hope to accomplish here may inevitably escape me. On the one hand, autonomic affectivity in its truest sense is fundamentally inarticulable. “Affect cannot be fully realized in language,” as Shouse points out, “because affect is always prior to and/or outside consciousness” and therefore amounts to “a non-conscious experience of intensity” (par. 5). On the other hand, even if articulation were possible, any single affective experience so articulated would not be applicable or transferable to others. As Burgess argues, an affective experience by definition “impossibly complicates any distinction between a perception and its object, or a stimulus and response,” or a trigger and a triggered response (293), and consequently the conditions of any given affective experience are, at bottom, irreducibly unique to the individual who owns the experience and are therefore beyond replication. Nevertheless, while the following cannot be expunged of all traces of my experiences with Jones’ work, the argumentative foundation of this essay remains

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Altieri’s notion that an affective experience can be triggered by a work of art whose counter-conceptual use of signification stimulates the corporeal basis of the affects, and it is on this foundation that I hope to show how the formal properties of Jones’ work spark exactly the sort of experience that Altieri has urged affect theorists to interrogate.

II. The Aesthetics of the Short Story Cycle

8 For a writer whose aim is to represent and convey the affective experiences of one or more characters, the art form of the short story possesses capabilities and conventions that make it well-suited to the task. Particularly in its contemporary incarnation as a vehicle for lyrical realism—chronicling some punctuation in the quotidian experience of a character whose inner turmoil, in the wake of James Joyce and , reaches its apogee with an epiphanic moment matched by an objective correlative—the short story, as Michael Trussler writes, tends to “give voice to hermeneutic incertitude; that is, characters in short fiction discover themselves in situations in which their personal experience and cultural knowledge prove ineffectual for grasping existential and ethical crises” (599). Examples abound, from Sherwood Anderson’s “The Thinker” (1919) to Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) and Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home” (1981), as well as almost anything by more recent writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yiyun Li, and . Insofar as these writers’ protagonists are typically left to founder in an inarticulable emotional intensity triggered by external stimuli, the experiences depicted on the page are to a large degree affective. Moreover, as Trussler points out, the conventional inconclusiveness of the contemporary short story routinely allows the form to escape the trap of reducing an affective experience to merely one emotional state in a causal chain of events: it “intimate[s] that translating events into a continuum potentially reduces the ‘meaning’ of an event to its relative significance within an ongoing series” (599) and thus respects the quality of irreducibility that makes an affective experience precisely what it is. In terms of strategies of representation, as James Nagel has observed, the situation differs only slightly when a series of short stories are in some way connected so as to form a cycle. When a cycle of interrelated stories advances multiple representations of the events in which various related characters are swept up, events that include the affective experiences of those characters, the events themselves obtain a dimension of “duplicative time” (37, 48, 176, 186) which emphasizes the irreducibility of an affective experience by allowing a portrayal of the reactions of characters who stand outside it.

9 Do the short story collections of Edward P. Jones as short story cycles? If we are to follow Nagel’s definition of the form, the answer is surely no. Nagel argues that, by definition, short story cycles must revolve around a single event or a single character (17) and neither one of Jones’ collections is so focused as to do that. The stories are recognizably related insofar as all of them are largely set in the African American ghettos to the north of the government district of Washington, DC, in the midst of what J. Gerald Kennedy and Robert Beuka call the “imperilled communities” of economically marginalized minority groups struggling under a neoliberal socio-economic order (10). Yet because, as Kennedy and Beuka go on to point out, Jones’ collections consist of “disparate stories” that do not feature “a recurrent protagonist or interwoven fictive

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lives” (11), they are perhaps a better fit for the definition of the short story cycle that Malcolm Cowley put forth in his introduction to Winesburg, Ohio in 1960. They take place against “a single background” and share “a prevailing tone,” as Cowley says the stories of a cycle must do—although he, too, finally insists that a cycle must focus on “a central character” (14), much as Winesburg does, and in that respect Jones’ collections again fail to fully meet the definitional criteria. More recently, however, Susan Garland Mann has articulated a less restrictive and prescriptive definition of the short story cycle, arguing that it possesses “only one essential characteristic.” The stories contained in a cycle, she writes, must be “both self-sufficient and interrelated” (15), and on those terms Jones’ story collections unequivocally qualify as cycles. “On the one hand,” Mann continues, describing the ideal story cycle, the stories work independently of one another: the reader is capable of understanding each of them without going beyond the limits of the individual story. On the other hand, however, the stories work together, creating something that could not be achieved by a single story. (15)

10 In fact, Jones’ two collections satisfy Mann’s definition of a short story cycle much more than a large number of others do. Many stories in many so-called cycles—Winesburg, Ohio included—are, after all, not so much interrelated as either simply sequential or connected in only a tangential way when, perhaps, the central character from one story walks on as a background figure in a later story. Jones’ stories, however, are tightly interrelated on both a narrative and a structural level. Jones is the type of writer that Madison Smartt Bell identifies as “a mosaicist,” a writer akin to a craftsman who “assembl[es] fragments of glass and tile to form what can be understood, at a greater distance, as a coherent, shapely image” (213). The work of such a writer, for Bell, achieves “[a] sense of integrity … by symmetrical arrangement of the modular parts” (214). Given its formal capacity for the symmetrical arrangement of individual stories, the short story cycle is the exemplary “modular” form of art, and all the more so when, as Bell writes, narrative elements are balanced in symmetry as shapes are balanced in a symmetrical geometric figure, or as weights are balanced on a scale... Modular design replaces the domino theory of narrative with other principles which have less to do with motion (the story as process) and more to do with overall shapeliness (the story as fixed geometric form). (214-15)

11 Jones’ two story collections appear to take Bell’s observations about structural symmetry almost literally. Each of them contains fourteen short stories, sequenced according to the age of the central character, so that each collection opens with the story that focuses on the youngest character and ends with the story that focuses on the oldest. Characters reappear throughout the two collections, as do specific features of and locations within the ghettos that give the stories their setting. More intriguingly, though, each story in each collection corresponds to its equivalent number in the other collection—the first story in Lost in the City is somehow connected to the first in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the second to the second, the third to the third, and so on—with the most recent story of any structural pair either focusing on a minor character from the earlier story or maintaining a focus on the earlier story’s central character in order to stand as a direct sequel. The overall effect of these features is precisely what Charles Altieri identifies as the aesthetic trigger of an affective experience: “the counter-conceptual use of signification” (880). The use of this signification seems to allow Jones to fashion, for his readers, a way of seeing the world that takes a step towards deification and so thwarts the reader’s corporeality as to

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generate an affective experience I think of as—because no other term suits it—an elevated estrangement from oneself.

III. The Aesthetics of Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children

12 By and large, the stories collected in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children adopt conventional subject matter and follow the stylistic and structural conventions of contemporary literary realism. They typically open in medias res as a character finds himself or herself faced with some sort of exceptional incident, some unintelligible rupture of daily routine, which triggers an affective experience that leaves him or her struck speechless and in a state of affective, and thus inarticulable, extremity: extreme misery, extreme fear, extreme bliss, and so on. They then usually proceed to a flashback that establishes the character’s social and personal context—a context that conveys the character’s personal experiences of social difficulties including systemic racial discrimination and the dissolution of a marginalized ethnic community—until a return to the beginning of the story brings the rupture of quotidian routine once more into the narrative foreground. Time and again, however, the character’s experience of this rupture, this affective trigger, remains strictly affective rather than developing into something more epiphanic in the Joycean sense, since the stories typically end abruptly, leaving characters mired in their various experiences and unable to draw lessons from them or arrive at some new understanding of their existence. When they undergo these sorts of experiences, Jones’ characters are plunged into states of attention that orient them towards the experiential trigger but “do not enter into the structure of cause and consequence because the state of attention becomes an end in itself” (Altieri 880).

13 “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” the first story in Lost in the City, stands as both an example of and a template for the structure to which the later stories adhere. A widowed father struggles to cope with his young daughter’s insistence on raising the small flock of pigeons she receives from a neighborhood friend. After a long flashback portrays the father’s own efforts to raise the girl following the sudden death of his wife, the story returns to its own beginning. The pigeons are devoured by a colony of rats, and the father, who never wanted to keep them in the first place, is plunged into an inarticulate state when faced with their tattered corpses. He arrives at no new insights into his relationship with his daughter or into her needs and wants. He is simply dumbfounded, triggered into paralysis by the carnage he beholds. This structural pattern holds true for other stories in both collections. In the title story from Lost in the City, a woman’s uncharacteristic behavior arises from an affective state triggered by news of her mother’s death; in “A Rich Man,” from All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a widower is bewildered and distraught by the behavior of a much younger woman who nearly marries him but then abruptly leaves him. Each individual story, then, is self-contained and therefore separable from the story collection as a whole, even as the stories collectively assemble a panoramic picture of a community and the affective experiences of its people in ways that correspond to Susan Garland Mann’s definition of a short story cycle: the stories are all “both self-sufficient and interrelated” (150).

14 As above, however, none of this is particularly unique to the work of Edward P. Jones. Much the same material can be found in the work of the classic lyrical realists as well as

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in the work of most of the writers examined by James Nagel. What makes Jones’ work unique, what enables it to extend the formal particularities of the short story cycle and to thereby constitute an aesthetic trigger for an affective experience, are the various ways in which the interactions of his characters cause his stories to interrelate. It is through these interactions that Jones advances the counter-conceptual use of signification which allows for a spatio-temporal view of his subjects that transcends human corporeality. Consider, first of all, the character interactions that occur by way of both the reappearances of characters throughout the various stories and the symbiotic structure of the two story cycles. In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” Betsy Ann Morgan, the young daughter of the widower Robert Morgan, receives her pigeons from a minor character named Miles Patterson, a middle-aged barber who lives with his elderly mother (12). The same Miles Patterson features as the central character in the first story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” which explores his abandonment by his birth mother and his chance adoption by the old woman in Lost in the City. Similarly, in “The First Day,” the second story in Lost in the City, the narrator is a child enrolled at Walker-Jones Elementary School, as is the narrator of “Spanish in the Morning,” the second story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children; and in “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Died,” the third story in Lost in the City, the doomed Rhonda attends Cardozo High School alongside several other girls including one Anita Hughes, whose story is told in full in “Resurrecting Methuselah,” the third story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. This interrelation of characters continues throughout the two story cycles and is supplemented by the recurrent appearances of minor characters, whose presence is noted in passing, in ways that do not depend on any two stories occupying a parallel position in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children. For example, in the title story from All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the fifth story in that collection, the narrator meets two women who used to go to school with his brother, and when their names are given as Mary Saunders and Blondelle Steadman (110), they are implicitly identified as the older, married versions of Mary Keith and Blondelle Harris, the two girls who appear together in only one sentence in “The First Day” (33), the second story in Lost in the City.

15 But these relatively simplistic character interactions are not the only means by which Jones interrelates his stories. The formal uniqueness of his story cycles is strengthened, and the affective experience they trigger is intensified, by other, more subtle interactions. These sorts of interactions take place without any regard for the temporal divisions amongst characters via the many specific geographical markers that appear in Jones’ stories. In all of his stories, as Kennedy and Beuka observe, Jones maps the terrain of African American Washington, DC, situating his narratives precisely in areas (Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest) defined by their compass relation to the “Washington they put on post cards,” the city centre that “the white people called the federal enclave.” (Kennedy and Beuka 11; Jones, Lost 72, 154)

16 The key word in this observation is “precisely.” In every single story in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Jones situates his characters in very specific real-world locations. Every day, he writes in “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day,” Madeleine Williams “pass[es] the apartment building at 427 M Street, Northwest” (Lost 126) while, in “Common Law,” “Carlos [wakes] in his bed at 450 Ridge” (Aunt Hagar’s 212). Caesar Matthews, the young thug in “Young Lions,” ends up in “the park at the corner of Pennsylvania and 16th” (Lost 72), while Roxanne in “Blindsided” is “able to catch the D.C. Transit bus heading down 14th Street, N.W.” (Aunt Hagar’s 293). These are only four

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examples of a device that Jones employs hundreds of times throughout his story cycles, and one might just as easily turn to any page of either of the two cycles in search of other instances of it.

17 Why does Jones so specifically direct the attention of his readers towards the geographic markers amongst which his characters evolve? His purpose may simply be to amplify the verisimilitude of his fiction—a verisimilitude geared towards encouraging readers to sympathize with his characters, to understand their troubles, and so, perhaps, to connect these to the real-world situation of the marginalized communities of present-day Washington, DC. For Kennedy and Beuka, the significance of the specificity of Jones’ geographical markers is first and foremost politically oriented. “Attentive throughout to sectors and boundaries, to unmarked yet unmistakable racial zones,” they write, “Jones reminds us that the geographical difference between ‘the land of white people’ (110) and the neighborhoods inhabited by his characters physically reflects the center-margin relationship of dominant and minority cultures” (11). Similar positions have been taken by Jessica Maucione, who argues that the possibility of a close-knit integrated community stands as a “lost world” for Jones’ characters; by Jessica Brown, for whom the architecture and urban planning of the neighborhoods portrayed by Jones bring a physical dimension to socio- economic segregation; and by Lorraine M. Henry, who sees the preponderance of public buildings and memorials that honor celebrated leaders of the struggle for civil rights as a bitterly ironic backdrop to Jones’ accounts of African American communal disintegration. Whatever Jones’ objectives may be, the immediate effect of his geographic specificity across his two story cycles is, if not quite apolitical, then at least pre-political in the sense that it precedes the advancement of an orientation towards a social power structure. His use of the location of 1st Street is emblematic of the effect he achieves. The narrator of “,” the fifth story in Lost in the City, makes a point of having grown up in the area of 1st Street and New York Avenue, “the area around Dunbar [High School]” (98). The nearby area of 1st Street and North Capitol, which New York Avenue intersects at an angle, is where the widower Robert Morgan considers abandoning his newborn daughter at the beginning of “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” (17), and the intersection of Pierce Street and 1st Street, just south of the New York Avenue intersection, serves as both the home of Blind Willie in “In the Blink of God’s Eye” (21) and a stopping point on the narrator’s journey to school in “Spanish in the Morning” (35), respectively the second and fourth stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. When a reader of “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” reaches the later stories, it is difficult to read them without noticing the ghost of Robert Morgan, frozen indecisively over the sleeping infant he intends to leave on the sidewalk, while the narrator of “The Store” walks past him on his way to work—and it is nearly impossible not to see Blind Willie coming and going between the ghosts of both those characters while the child walks to school through the wispy traces of all three of them.

18 Each character is caught up in his or her own private drama, separated from the others sometimes by many decades, and yet, for the reader who is privy to all of their stories, the specificity of their locations at various points in their lives calls to mind the exploits of other characters who have undergone experiences in exactly the same places in earlier stories. In other words, the actions of Jones’ characters invest various geographical markers with experiential significance. For the attentive reader of both story cycles, the recurrent specificity of such markers has the effect of collapsing

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distinctions between different and disparate temporal moments. Jones’ uses of analepsis and prolepsis, the “deictic shifts” by which his stories leap backwards and forwards in time, have been examined in compelling detail by Christopher Gonzalez who focuses on these devices only as features of individual stories without looking towards their cumulative effect throughout both of Jones’ story cycles. As the actions of characters scattered across the stories transform these markers into signifiers of multiple events in the past and the future—that is, in the past and the future relative to any given story—the signifiers themselves the divergent temporalities of the story cycles. In doing so, they force Jones’ readers to focus on a specific location and to see, there, the actions of characters who cannot see one another. Consequently, the streetscapes of Washington, DC, modified by the actions of human characters who are largely strangers to one another, obtain identities as distinct as those of the human characters themselves.

19 In effect, each recurrent location becomes a “character” in William H. Gass’ infamous sense of the word. “A character for me is any linguistic location of a book toward which a great part of the rest of the text stands as a modifier,” Gass once declared. “Just as the subject of a sentence … is modified by the predicate, so frequently some character, Emma Bovary for instance, is regarded as a central character in the book because a lot of the language basically and ultimately goes back to modify, be about, Emma Bovary” (53). And just as a human being may constitute a “character” insofar as he or she stands as a linguistic location modified by other aspects of the text, Jones’ specific geographic markers constitute characters by virtue of having their signification modified by his human characters’ actions—modified so as to signify not only a particular site in an urban environment, but also an accretion of the experiences of the characters who, unlike the reader, remain unable to perceive the experiences of others in the very same place.

20 Countless examples emerge from Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children. Some of them are simple. The narrator of “The Store,” the fifth story in Lost in the City, passes by the house of a character named Mojo, near the intersection of Capitol and North Florida Avenue, while on his way to interview for a job that will change his life (87). The attentive reader can ‘see’ his ghost walking past Mojo’s window when the narrator of “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” visits Mojo in his home (Aunt Hagar’s 110), and both of those narrators linger in the background when Mojo is visited at home by Melvin Foster, a pivotal character in “Blindsided” (Aunt Hagar’s 213). Likewise, in “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day,” the seventh story in Lost in the City, Samuel Williams is arrested after murdering his wife, leaving his children in the care of his sister, Maddie, who seeks solace amongst her friends at Cleopatra’s Hair Emporium at the corner of 9th and P Streets NW (130), and one can sense a trace of Maddie’s emotional turmoil when the superstitious Laverne Shepherd retreats to the same place after an encounter with the Devil in the tenth story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children (273). Other examples are more complex and nuanced than these. In “Gospel,” the eleventh story in Lost in the City, the elderly Maude Townsend decides to join a gospel choir partly in order to escape the tedium of her daily life at a housing complex called Claridge Towers (194). In Jones’ oeuvre, the shabby apartments at Claridge Towers serve as something akin to a smaller scale version of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg or ’s Yoknapatawpha County. They reappear in “Marie,” the poignant final story in Lost in the City, when octogenarian Marie Delaveaux Wilson is visited at home by a student of sociology who persuades her to talk frankly about her harrowing past (233-34). They appear again in

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“A Rich Man” and “Bad Neighbors,” the twelfth and thirteenth stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. In “A Rich Man,” readers witness the dissolution of the marriage of Horace and Loneese Perkins, residents of Apartment 230 (323), followed by Loneese’s death and Horace’s new relationship with Elaine Cunningham, the friend of a daughter of another resident of Claridge Towers (330). In “Bad Neighbors,” the death of Arthur Atwell, longtime resident of 8th St NW, forces his widow Beatrice to move into Claridge Towers (367), and for readers of the previous stories, her arrival at the complex is marked by traces of Marie’s private tragedies and the lingering tensions between Horace and Elaine although Beatrice herself remains oblivious to them. Similarly, in the eighth story in Lost in the City, Lydia Walsh recalls how she spent her girlhood in the company of an old woman named Georgia Evans, who lived next door at 459 Ridge Street (155), and years later, in the eighth story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Georgia Evans remains the occupant of that house (207). Georgia’s favorite place in the city, however, is the corner of 5th and M Streets NW, the “lucky corner” where she once met her second husband (203-04). Readers who watch her reliving her fond memories of this place are made aware, by the specificity of the location, that the pivotal events of Georgia’s life have taken place only a stone’s throw from 427 M Street, where Agnes Williams will be murdered years later by her husband Samuel in “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day” (Lost 126), and 423 M Street, where Ike Appleton was murdered several years earlier in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” (Aunt Hagar’s 112). As in the stirring final pages of Jones’ novel, The Known World, readers are presented with a literary map of Washington, DC, in which “[t]he dead ... have risen ... [and] stand at the [places] where they once lived” (Known World 385).

21 To further engage the geographical aspects of Jones’ stories, something disquieting happens to the reader who uses these geographic markers as points of transition between the life of one character and that of another, instead of transitioning from story to story via the symbiotic structure of the two story cycles. A reader of “Gospel,” for instance, can locate Maude Townsend in relation to all of the other characters who are occupants of Claridge Towers—Marie in “Marie,” Horace and Loneese in “A Rich Man,” Beatrice Atwell in “Bad Neighbors”—and can then trace a path through all of Jones’ stories by following Maude as she joins a gospel choir whose members include, , Anita Hughes. Anita, in turn, is a friend of Rhonda Ferguson in “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Died” in Lost in the City. When she reappears in “Resurrecting Methuselah” in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, she is a middle-aged woman who finds herself driving aimlessly through the city, distraught by the absence of her husband, and noting her location as she passes the intersection of 7th Street and Massachusetts Avenue (64), which is where Betsy Ann Morgan steals candy from a store in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” in Lost in the City (26). Betsy Ann’s neighborhood GP is a man named Dr. Jackson (15) who reappears as the cousin of the narrator’s mother in “Spanish in the Morning,” from All Aunt Hagar’s Children (48). This specific narrator attends Walker-Jones Elementary School along with the orphaned Madeleine in “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day” (Lost 129), and with Carlos Newman in “Common Law” (Aunt Hagar’s 230). Carlos, as a young boy living at 450 Ridge Street, wins the affections of Georgia Evans (212), the same elderly woman who befriends the young Lydia Walsh (207)—Lydia who, decades later, learns of the death of her mother in the title story of Lost in the City and then, in a haze of confused thoughts, drives the streets of Washington at night, through the intersection of 5th Street and New York Avenue (154). This intersection is where the narrator of “The Store” suffers abuse and

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humiliation at the hands of a white policeman (85), before he tries to get his life back on track by taking his girlfriend on a date at the Howard Theater (97), which is also visited by the confused Roxanne Stapleton in “Blindsided,” from All Aunt Hagar’s Children (293). Roxanne lives at 708 10th Street (297), on the same block where the wayward Caesar Mathews grew up in “Young Lions,” from Lost in the City, and on the same street along which Caesar walks when he determines, with the toss of a coin, whether he should continue his life of crime or to attempt to reinvent himself (100-01). In this manner, on and on, alternating between the two story cycles practically ad infinitum, Jones’ readers can trace a path, and often multiple paths, through this piecemeal but cumulative representation of Washington, DC, webbing together each of the “self-sufficient” stories with the divergent and connective strands that form an “interrelated” network (Mann 15) of which the characters and the geographical markers taken together are the nodes.

22 To put this another way, even if a reader does not deliberately move through the stories in the manner outlined above, he or she will nevertheless find that the two cycles’ formal particularities force the stories to move towards the reader himself or herself. Whenever one’s eyes pass over a geographical marker charged with signification from the events of an earlier story, those events and the characters they involve are effectively drawn into a story that is not their own, where they tint or superimpose themselves over that story’s events. Every story is thus haunted by the characters of other stories, who hover into view not by virtue of having actually been placed in the story, but by virtue of having invested a particular geographical marker— at a different historical moment—with new significance. When I read about Roxanne Stapleton making her way home in “Blindsided,” for instance, I ‘see’ Caesar Mathews on a different night, in a different year, lingering not too far from her front door as he struggles to decide what to do with his life. Whenever a character is thus encountered in Jones’ Washington, DC, the specificity of his or her location allows the location to signify the presence of every other character who has been in the same place. Moreover, whenever the reader is reminded of those other characters, he or she is again brought into contact with the locations and the other people they encounter, so that, ultimately, almost any given location signifier includes a signification of its relation, through human characters, to other locations. Almost every character and specific location in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children is, by varying degrees of association, a signifier not only for itself but also for every other character and location in both story cycles.

23 That this feature of Jones’ story cycles exemplifies Charles Altieri’s notion of “counter- conceptual signification” (880) is clear insofar as a signifier that signifies both itself and specific elements of other texts, enmeshed within a collection of texts replete with signifiers of a similar nature, is commensurate to a landscape painting containing “rocks... that have no weight or mass” and “trees [that] serve the counter-intuitive role of providing stability” (880). Throughout Jones’ story cycles, it has the effect of countermanding human corporeality, affording readers something closer to a deified view of Washington, DC—a view that utterly disrespects the temporality of human experience, forcing readers to behold the convergence and conflation of past, present, and future events on almost every page as well as the causal connections they bear to other events in other stories. Crucially, this way of countermanding human corporeality becomes possible only by virtue of Jones’ exploitation of the formal

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possibilities of the short story cycle, and of two cycles structured synchronically, as distinct from the form of the single short story or that of the novel.

24 It is through this imposition of a sort of divine perspective on the reader that Jones’ short story cycles generate an affective experience in those who encounter them. Jones’ readers may or may not choose to pay sufficient attention to the details of the text in order to actually undergo this experience, but the details seem to me to have been selected so exactly and in such an elaborate way that some experience of this sort, above and beyond verisimilitude, must be their intended outcome. The experience is, as mentioned above, one for which I do not have a name but which I would describe as an uncanny sense of having myself estranged from myself, of becoming godlike, of being given knowledge of certain characters’ actions and of then having that knowledge reactivated in a way that is neither explicit nor intrusive. It is a sense of being afforded capabilities of sight and knowledge that transcend the human limitations of these capabilities, and of then being made aware, incrementally by the recurrent use of counter-conceptual signification, of the very fact of the estrangement without being able to pinpoint its precise trigger. It is in this sense, and on the basis of these qualities, that I would place Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children alongside the landscapes of Paul Cezanne as engines of affective experiences triggered by aesthetic means. This is not to downplay the political purposes of Jones’ stories or their achievements in the area of literary realism, but to note that if the connection between affectivity and aesthetics remains largely buried beneath unbroken ground, Jones’ stories should be some of the first jewels to turn up when this territory is mined.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Altieri, Charles. “Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys.” Critical Inquiry 38 (Summer 2012): 878-81. Print.

Anderson, Sherwood. “The Thinker.” Winesburg, Ohio. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919. 99-112. Print.

—. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919. Print.

Bell, Madison Smartt. Narrative Design: Working With Imagination, Craft, and Form. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Print.

Brown, Jessica. “Narrating Washington, DC, from the Margins: Urban Space and Cultural Identity in Lost in the City and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.” Berkeley Undergraduate Journal 23.2 (2011): 1-35. Print.

Burgess, Miranda. “On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form.” Poetics Today 32.2 (Summer 2011): 289-321. Print.

Carver, Raymond. “So Much Water So Close to Home.” 1977. What We Talk About When We Talk About . 1981. London: Vintage, 2003. 67-74. Print.

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Cowley, Malcolm. “Introduction to Winesburg, Ohio.” Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. 1919. London: Penguin, 1960. 1-20. Print.

Gass, William H. Conversations with William H. Gass. Ed. Theodore G. Ammon. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.

Gonzalez, Christopher. “Spatialization and Deictic Shifts in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children.” Edward P. Jones: New Essays. Ed. Daniel Davis Wood. Melbourne: Whetstone Press, 2011. 185-202. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” 1927. The First Forty-Nine Stories. London: Arrow Books, 2004. 259-63. Print.

Henry, Lorraine M. “Mr. Jones’s Neighborhoods: The Triad of Place, History, and Memory in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children.” Edward P. Jones: New Essays. Ed. Daniel Davis Wood. Melbourne: Whetstone Press, 2011. 161-84. Print.

Jones, Edward P. All Aunt Hagar’s Children. New York: HarperPerennial, 2006. Print.

—. The Known World. New York: Amistad, 2003. Print.

—. Lost in the City. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. Print.

Kennedy, J. Gerald and Robert Beuka. “Imperilled Communities in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City and Dagoberto Gilb’s The Magic of Blood.” The Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 10-23. Print.

Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011): 434-72. Print.

Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989. Print.

Maucione, Jessica. “Neighborhood as the New Lost World in Lost in the City.” Edward P. Jones: New Essays. Ed. Daniel Davis Wood. Melbourne: Whetstone Press, 2011. 75-91. Print.

Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. Print.

Nathanson, Donald L. “Prologue.” Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition by Silvan Tomkins. New York: Springer, 2008. xi-xxvii. Print.

Shouse, Eric. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8.6 (December 2005): Web.

Tomkins, Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition. 1962-1991. New York: Springer, 2008. Print.

Trussler, Michael. “On the Short Story and the Short-Story Cycle.” Contemporary Literature 43.3 (2002): 598-605. Print.

ABSTRACTS

Les études de l’affectivité dans le domaine de la littérature considèrent généralement la littérature comme un vecteur de représentation des expériences affectives de divers personnages. Cependant, en s’appuyant sur la conceptualisation de la relation entre affectivité et esthétique de Charles Altieri, cet article étudie la façon dont l’esthétique littéraire permet aux œuvres de produire une expérience affective chez le lecteur. Envisageant dans un premier temps les liens entre les propriétés formelles du cycle de nouvelles et la capacité qu’ont ces propriétés de déclencher une expérience affective, cette étude suggère que les deux cycles de nouvelles liés,

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Lost in the City et All Aunt Hagar’s Children, de l’auteur afro-américain Edward P. Jones, illustrent l’affectivité esthétique dont Altieri tente d’identifier les qualités définitoires.

AUTHORS

DANIEL DAVIS WOOD Daniel Davis Wood teaches literature at Arts Educational Schools in London. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne, focusing on concepts of frontier justice in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Cormac McCarthy. He is the author of a novel, Blood and Bone (Sydney: Xoum, 2014), and editor of Edward P. Jones: New Essays (Melbourne: Whetstone Press, 2011).

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“Preposterous Adventures”: Affective Encounters in the Short Story Cycle

Rachel Lister

1 In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed observes that hegemonic notions of happiness are associated both with a sense of belonging to a community and a sense of direction or “telos”: happiness is often figured as the “endpoint” of a unidirectional “path” (199, 32). Exposing the limitations of such paradigms, Ahmed explores other means of apprehending and defining happiness. Her model involves accepting happiness as provisional, as a feeling that “comes and goes” and is experienced in “moments” (219). If one accepts the dominant model, experience “becomes a question of following [happiness] rather than finding it” (32). This act of following requires other people, a community, that will provide narratives for the human subject seeking happiness: “If the same objects make us happy – or if we invest in the same objects as if they make us happy – then we would be directed or oriented in the same way.” If we are “affected in a good way by objects that are already evaluated as good,” this means that we become part of “an affective community” because “we align ourselves with others by investing in the same objects as the cause of happiness” (38). Happiness as thus defined, “creates its own horizon, as a horizon of likes.” However, accepting this definition carries a risk. If one embraces one’s place in this affective community, it becomes “possible to be surrounded by likes that are not your own, and by promises that haunt you in their emptiness” (76-7).

2 This article will examine how three twentieth-century women writers have used a particular literary form, the short story cycle, as a vehicle for challenging the norms of these “affective communities” and for dramatizing Ahmed’s model of “happiness” as something one finds for a moment, rather than something one follows. It will examine Katherine Anne Porter’s Miranda cycle (1939-44), Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples (1949) and two cycles by Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and The Beggar Maid (1978),1 focusing particularly on the “happiness” that springs from two kinds of

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moments that occur in these cycles: moments of potential transformation and moments of return to a site of past experience.

3 As contemporaries from America’s South, Porter and Welty spoke often of their admiration for each other’s work, praising each other’s ability to capture the complexity of a character’s internal world while preserving its “mystery.” Porter reserves particular praise for Welty’s story “A Memory,” “where external act and internal voiceless life of the human imagination almost meet and mingle on the threshold between dream and waking, one reality refusing to admit or confirm the existence of the other, yet both conspiring toward the same end” (Introduction xxi). In “Katherine Anne Porter: The Eye of the Story,” Welty notes that while “[m]ost good stories are about the interior of our lives, Katherine Anne Porter’s stories take place there” (30). Munro has cited both writers as influences, noting similarities between the “absolutely Gothic” nature of the American South and her childhood home, small-town, rural Ontario (Interview with Gibson 248). She has spoken frequently of the influence of the Weltian “vision” on her work: she was “mesmerize[d]” by The Golden Apples (Thacker 142). Her reflections on Welty’s influence have inspired several critical comparisons of their fictional worlds.2 When Munro has been invited to identify literary influences, she has included Porter in her list but she has not elaborated on this particular connection. In an interview for the Paris Review she states: “The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well […]. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Ann [sic.] Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal” (par. 128). Critics have noted similarities in their style and thematic concerns. In a review of Munro’s short story collection Open Secrets (1994), Ted Solotaroff identifies Munro as “a great stylist of 1920’s realism. A Katherine Anne Porter brought up to date” (665). In her illuminating study Alice Munro, Ailsa Cox makes a brief but intriguing case for a comparative reading of their work, noting thematic “echoes” of Porter’s story “Noon Wine” in the title story of Munro’s collection Open Secrets (3-4).

4 This article will focus on these writers’ representations of the kinds of women most likely to resist hegemonic notions of happiness in favor of unlikely experiences that open them up to new ways of apprehending their lives and identities: the kinds of “preposterous adventures” that excite the young heroine of The Beggar Maid, Rose (67). Ahmed notes that these are the kinds of women who are identified in their communities as “feminist killjoys”: they reject the idea that happiness for women requires the suppression of their imagination with its accompanying “narrowing of horizons” and sacrifice of “an interest in what lies beyond the familiar” (61). In my earlier article, “Female Expansion and Masculine Immobilization in the Short Story Cycle,” I argued that the story cycle is a particularly useful vehicle for the exploration of alternative, female quest plots. This article will take a closer look at the moments during these quests that seem to bring happiness to their heroines: a kind of happiness that transports them beyond the familiar.

5 The short story cycle is in many ways the ideal form for subverting hegemonic notions of happiness. By presenting readers with a series of beginnings and endings, it disconcerts preconceptions of character, time, and plot, decentering protagonists. As Karen Castellucci Cox observes in her article “Magic and Memory in the Contemporary

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Story Cycle,” readers of the form “may […] find that a seemingly central character has disappeared from the text without warning” (155). This is the case with The Golden Apples, where the focus shifts frequently both between and within the constituent stories: Virgie’s status as heroine emerges more as a result of her realizations in the final story than her dominance of the cycle itself. Porter’s Miranda remains in the background of several short stories in the collection The Old Order, as Aunt Nannie, Uncle Jimbilly and ‘the Grandmother’ take center stage. Munro’s cycles focus more consistently on a single heroine, although it is worth noting that the subtitle of The Beggar Maid is Stories of Flo and Rose and thus gives Rose’s stepmother equal billing. In each case, the form derails the kinds of teleological structures that have been repeatedly identified and embraced as routes to happiness and challenges received wisdom about the role of social norms in finding happiness.

6 For the heroines in these cycles, the determination to see beyond the familiar emerges in their very early years, in arguably naïve but telling ways. At the end of Porter’s first Miranda story, “Old Mortality,” the heroine returns home as a young woman and determines to find her own “truth,” taking some pleasure in the “sudden collapse” of the “old painful structure” underpinning the familiar discourses and conventions of Home (Collected Stories 221). In Welty’s The Golden Apples, the heroine, Virgie Rainey, vows to “butt her brains out against the wall” at school, leading her peers to envisage her moving beyond the “horizon of likes” that shapes her affective community and finding her own happiness: “she would go somewhere, somewhere away off, they said then, talking with their chins sunk in their hands” (43). In Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, Del Jordan rejects explicitly the “horizon of likes” for women that has been established by her affective community and involves marriage, domesticity, and childbearing: “I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon” (198, emphasis in original).

7 In To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and , Joanna Russ explores the strategies used by women writers who do not want to limit themselves to the narrative lines that are traditionally assigned to female characters. She suggests “lyricism” as a strategy for the female writer who “no longer cares” about narratives representing “How She Fell in Love or How She Went Mad” (87). By “lyricism” Russ means “a particular principle of structure [...] setting various images, events, scenes, or memories to circling round an unspoken, invisible center” (87). This “invisible center” defies representation in “available dramatic or narrative terms”: the lyric mode is “associative.” Russ draws on the fiction of Virginia Woolf to demonstrate the strategies, characteristics, and effects of “lyricism,” such as “repetitiousness” and “the gathering- up” of texts “into moments of epiphany” and “indirection” (87).

8 This associative approach is of course not limited to the work of female writers, although essentialist notions of “women’s writing” often point to these kinds of strategies as evidence of common aims and sensibilities. The cycles by these women writers suggest that female characters are more likely to find themselves framed by reductive narratives; other storytelling strategies are therefore required. In Lives of Girls and Women, the men and women of Jubilee use the insanity narrative to frame women whose behavior becomes unaccountable: Uncle Benny’s runaway wife Madeleine finds no fulfillment in marriage and so becomes “[t]hat madwoman!” to the people of the community when she abandons her husband (32). Russ’s theories are not restricted to the novel form, either. Her notion of the associative lyric mode will

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resonate with writers and readers who are familiar with the principles of the short story cycle, a form that galvanizes the synchronic sensibility of the reader by disrupting or muting the emphasis on linear progression and by dispersing networks of imagery and moments of epiphany across the cycle. Porter, Welty, and Munro deploy the kind of strategies that Russ identifies with the lyric mode in their navigation of a common thematic “center”: not the search for a male counterpart or the descent into madness or alienation but the quest for an authentic sense of “truth.” For the heroines of these cycles, happy endings constitute moments of clarity. It is by expanding their imaginations that they find this clarity.3

9 For the heroines in these cycles, finding one’s own happiness means resisting the easy repetition of established patterns. Ahmed notes that the narrative structures commonly associated with happiness “involve[…] the comfort of repetition, of following lines that have already been given in advance” (48). Many story cycle writers have used the form to highlight the dangers of this kind of repetition. The Golden Apples follows the lives of girls and women from Morgana, a fictional, small town in Mississippi. Jinny Love Stark, the daughter of a well-established Morgana family, repeats the line established for her by the older women of by marrying Randall MacLain, son of King, the town’s much-mythologized philanderer. With typical economy, Welty figures the limitations of Jinny’s life with a single image: her final moment in the cycle sees her “grimacing out of the iron mask of the married lady” as she tells Virgie Rainey that she must marry soon (255). In Porter’s Miranda stories, Miranda’s Grandmother and Nannie collude through their repetitive storytelling to form a reassuring and familiar picture of the future: “They talked about the past, really―always about the past. Even the future seemed like something gone and done with when they spoke of it. It did not seem an extension of their past, but a repetition of it” (Collected Stories 359). Miranda learns that she will have to account for any deviations from her family’s script. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, she dreams that she is back at her childhood home. Her dream self decides to leave the house before the rest of the family rises: she knows that, once day arrives, “faces will asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean?” (269). In Lives of Girls and Women, Del’s aunts take comfort in repetition, telling themselves “the same stories” so that “every word, every expression of the face, every flutter of the hands came to seem something learned long ago, perfectly remembered” (68). The writers of these cycles exploit the alinearity of the form to counter this kind of repetition. As each story ends, any sense of closure is undermined by the possibility of meeting characters again several stories later. These writers use the form to re-enact moments from different perspectives, whether through a shift in focalization or time, thereby relativizing representations of what has been presented as true: as Janet, the heroine of a mini cycle in Munro’s collection The Moons of Jupiter (2004), observes, “innumerable variations” lurk within the “innumerable repetitions” of ostensibly familiar stories (231). This relativizing poetic makes the story cycle a fitting form for the representation of Ahmed’s model of provisional happiness.

10 All of the heroines of these cycles experience a particular kind of repetition through the act of homecoming.4 In most cases this is a positive form of repetition, a crucial process that enables the heroines to achieve happiness, no matter how provisional, by gaining fresh insight into their pasts and seeing their communities anew. For Ahmed, finding happiness means “[e]mbracing possibility”: this entails “returning to the past,

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recognizing what one has, as well as what one has lost, what one has given, as well as what one has given up” (218). Both Munro and Porter have used the form to explore their interest in the kinds of awakening that can occur when we return to sites of past experience. Throughout her career Munro has maintained an interest in “what people don’t understand [...] [w]hat we think is happening and what we understand later on” (Interview with Hancock 204). Speaking to Barbara Thompson, Porter has observed that “we understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us” (Interview Thompson 39-40). This moment of delayed comprehension will be familiar to readers of story cycles: “[m]oving from one story to another, we may reach a fuller understanding of an earlier conflict, only partially resolved in its own section, or we may discover the narrative interests to have utterly shifted” (Karen Castellucci Cox 155). Paul Ardoin explores this dynamic in his reading of Jean Rhys’s Sleep It Off, Lady (1976). Ardoin reads Rhys’s work as a short story cycle and argues that the form “emphasizes” through its structure “the value of perpetual return and the inescapability of the past” (246). Acts of return are a common feature of the cycles by Porter, Welty, and Munro. All four close with moments of return that characters to confront feelings they have ignored or dismissed. The act of return, whether physical or psychological, generates feelings that defy full identification or expression but which leave readers and characters with a powerful, lingering sense of possibility. In her book Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai identifies such feelings with “affect,” a concept which she interprets as being “less sociolinguistically fixed” and “less formed and structured than emotion” (27, emphasis in original). As Ngai notes, this interpretation of affect differs slightly from others that view it as entirely without structure. Using Ngai’s interpretation, we will consider the affective nature of these moments of return: moments which seem to leave these heroines with the sense of possibility that, for Ahmed, remains crucial to achieving happiness.

11 Miranda Gay, haunted by memories of her home, makes several returns. The first occurs at the end of “Old Mortality” but is not a return of possibility, as any potential for growth is restricted by the heroine’s unqualified resistance to familiar discourses and patterns. Forced to listen to the nostalgic banter of her father and Aunt Eva, Miranda determines to separate herself from her family and find her own “truth.” This moment of resistance to easy repetition masquerades as one of empowering self- determination but is undercut by the narrative voice, which alerts us to Miranda’s naivety: Oh, what is life, she asked herself in desperate seriousness, in those childish unanswerable words, and what shall I do with it? It is something of my own, she thought in a fury of jealous possessiveness, what shall I make of it? She did not know that she asked herself this because all her earliest training had argued that life was a substance, a material to be used, it took shape and direction and meaning only as the possessor guided and worked it; living was a progress of continuous and varied acts of the will directed towards a definite end. (Porter, Collected Stories 220)

12 Miranda feels that she must reject her family’s particular narrative of happiness in order to find her own, but the narrative voice tells us that, despite her declaration of self-sufficiency, her vision is shaped by her family’s assumptions about the structures that will lead to happiness: she determines to choose a different kind of happiness but still sees it as a promise, a “path.” The narrative discourse characterizes her resolution

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as evidence of her “ignorance” (221). A sense of authenticity and “truth” will not emerge by dismissing the past entirely. It is only later in life that Miranda recognizes that she has been pursuing and preparing for happiness rather than seizing it. In the later story, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Miranda’s lover Adam asks her to tell him about her life as she lies ill with influenza. She responds: “There’s nothing to tell, after all, if it ends now, for all this time I was getting ready for something that was going to happen later, when the time came” (302).

13 It is in a shorter story, “The Grave,” that Miranda makes the kind of return that opens up previously unnoticed possibilities. This story dramatizes the last in a series of relativizing moments in the cycle that capture Miranda’s ongoing struggle to apprehend and accept her mortality. In “Death and Repetition in Porter’s Miranda Stories,” George Cheatham identifies Miranda’s preoccupation with mortality as the “obsessive center” of the cycle and delivers detailed readings of her encounters with death (610). In “The Grave,” nine-year-old Miranda goes hunting with her brother Paul and experiences a series of potentially epiphanic moments through their discovery of several potent symbols at an empty grave: a ring, usually interpreted as representative of marriage; a screw head that takes the shape of a dove, with obvious connotations of redemption and immortality, and a dead, pregnant rabbit, shot by Paul. Most critics seem to read Miranda’s confrontation with the rabbit’s dead foetuses as a moment of apprehension of her sexuality and the final of a series of childhood moments when she recognizes her mortality without fully exploring its implications. It is one of several “affective moments” in the cycle where Miranda struggles to find the language for what she is feeling: “looking at each other with pleased adventurous eyes, they said in solemn tones: ‘These were graves!’ trying by words to shape a special, suitable emotion in their minds, but they felt nothing but an agreeable thrill of wonder” (362).

14 Years later Miranda is transported back to this moment in the coda to “The Grave.” At the age of twenty nine—the oldest age at which we see her and therefore her final moment in the cycle—Miranda recalls this childhood day of discovery while walking through a market in a “strange country” and finally confronts the doubleness of her feelings about her mortality, awakened by the image of the dead rabbit and its foetuses twenty years earlier. In the market she sees some “sugar sweets” in the shape of rabbits and the memory of that day returns, this time as a “dreadful vision”: however, the vision takes on a double meaning, the “raw flesh” and “wilting flowers” of her immediate surroundings alerting her to the intermingling of “sweetness and corruption” in her childhood experience (367). It is another, forgotten feeling that emerges from this memory, however, as this vision is supplemented by the image of her brother Paul, “turning the silver dove over and over in his hands” with a “pleased sober smile in his eyes” (368). Most critics have interpreted the vision of Paul and the dove as a kind of reconciliation of the tensions that have worried Miranda throughout her young life. Unrue notes: “[o]nly with the intervening twenty years can [Miranda] regard the experience with a total perspective and know that in addition to the corruption of death and destruction which they discovered, they also found the sweetness of an affirmation of a life” (150). The double memory of the rabbits and her brother’s “sober smile” reveals the possibilities of the nine-year-old girl’s experience. It is a kind of clarity of vision that Miranda has desired from a young age: she has always “wanted most deeply to see and to know” (366). The other “endings” to the constituent

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parts of the Miranda cycle are qualified by the narrator’s ironic commentary. The ending of “The Grave” presents Miranda at her most happy and most true.

15 Strangely, in a cycle that explores and privileges the stories and voices of a range of family members, this is the first and only appearance by Miranda’s brother Paul. In a pattern commonly found in short story cycles, a character who was part of the heroine’s life all along enters the cycle in its closing scene to develop her vision. Like Porter, both Welty and Munro stage encounters with forgotten or marginalized figures in their final, homecoming scenes. By introducing or re-introducing these characters at this late stage, these writers give expression to the sense of possibility that Ahmed associates with happiness. These encounters work to expand the heroines’ imaginations by relativizing their preconceptions of happiness and authenticity and illuminating the possibility of finding connections with people who move beyond (albeit ostensibly remaining a part of) the communities that forged these preconceptions. Expounding her idea of happiness, Ahmed encourages us to: “think of those moments where you are brought to life by the absurdity of being reminded of something, where a sideways glance can be enough to create a feeling that ripples through you” (219). The marginalized characters in these cycles often rely on subtle, non-verbal gestures such as the “sober smile” or “sideways glance” to alert the heroines to these possibilities.

16 Ahmed draws on Virginia Woolf’s (1925) to examine modes of “community” that offer an alternative to those whose models of happiness hinge on the repetition of familiar narratives and manners. She examines the possibilities that emerge from the “odd intimacy” that Clarissa Dalloway experiences with strangers such as Septimus Smith, the shellshock victim whose suicide is mentioned at her party: “Clarissa, thinking of her ‘odd affinities’ with strangers ‘she had never spoken to,’ sits on the bus and wonders whether the ‘unseen part of us’ might provide a point of attachment to others and might even be how we survive through others, ‘perhaps – perhaps’” (72).5 “[O]dd affinities” such as these thrive in the short story cycle because the form accommodates multiple visions and sensibilities, including those of characters who reside in the margins of the text’s fictional world. As I have discussed, cycle writers often choose to close their cycles with a sense of promise furnished by a moment of renewed contact between the recurring character who is most familiar to the reader and a character who has featured only fleetingly or not at all. These kinds of characters abound in the cycles of Welty and Munro, in which the heroines experience the sense of possibility that Ahmed associates with happiness by responding to these presences.

17 The word “happy” rarely appears in The Golden Apples but it surfaces in the final story, when Virgie Rainey plays host to Morgana’s community for her mother’s funeral. Virgie has not moved away from Morgana permanently, as predicted, but has escaped the prescriptive narratives peddled by its citizens, the keepers of happiness who counsel marriage and domesticity. She did, however, run away from home when she was seventeen. It is the memory of this earlier return to Morgana that enables Virgie to retain this distance and find a kind of happiness that eludes her peers. After burying her mother in “The Wanderers,” the final story of the cycle, she reflects on the moment that she returned home after she ran away: … in that interim between train and home, she walked and ran looking about her in a kind of glory, by the back way. Virgie never saw it differently, never doubted that all the opposites on earth were close together, love close to hate, living to dying;

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but of them all, hope and despair were the closest blood – unrecognizable one from the other sometimes, making moments double upon themselves, and in the doubling double again, amending but never taking back. For that journey, it was ripe afternoon, and all about her was that light in which the earth seems to come into its own, as if there would be no more days, only this day […] She had always loved that time of day, but now, alone, untouched now, she felt like dancing; knowing herself not really, in her essence, yet hurt; and thus happy. (265)

18 Having identified happiness as an embracing of possibility, Ahmed refers us to Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety: “This possibility that is said to be so light is commonly regarded as the possibility of happiness, fortune etc. But this is not possibility…. No, in possibility all things are equally possible, and whoever has truly been brought up by possibility has grasped the terrible as well as the joyful” (qtd. in Ahmed 219). Ahmed argues that in order to embrace possibility, we must liberate our imaginations. Virgie’s moment of happiness, like Miranda’s, involves recognizing the proximity of ostensibly antithetical feelings. Her moment has inspired a welter of critical readings but Ruth Vande Kieft’s eloquent analysis is particularly relevant to this essay. Kieft argues that Virgie displays at this moment a kind of “imaginative wisdom” that takes the form of a “double vision” (518). As Howells has noted, “double vision” is characteristic of Munro’s work (31).

19 Munro has acknowledged Welty’s influence here: when asked to explain how The Golden Apples as a cycle has influenced her work as a reader and writer, Munro stresses “vision” over formal qualities: “I wouldn’t say that I was conscious of the structure being modelled on hers […] but I have to acknowledge an enormous debt to her … I think more in this matter of vision” (Interview with Metcalf 58, emphasis in original). In a brief observation in his book on Munro, W. R. Martin surmises that she “must have found” Virgie’s vision at this point in The Golden Apples “congenial” (204). A moment in Munro’s collection Runaway (2004), published eighteen years after Martin’s book, verifies his speculation. Runaway features a microcosmic story cycle: three linked stories about a woman named Juliet, who at one point expresses wonder at the closeness of apparently polarized feelings when she is reunited with the man she hopes to marry. Unsure of his response at her surprise arrival, she feels “flooded with relief” when he welcomes her: “assaulted by happiness,” she is “astonish[ed]” to find “[h]ow close to dismay” this feeling is (85).

20 Although Virgie does not leave Morgana for long and returns to live with her mother, she does make another kind of return in the final story. As I have noted, Virgie “embraces” the “contradictory” nature of her feelings for one of the community’s outsiders, her piano teacher, Miss Eckhart (Lister “Female Expansion” 47). Although Miss Eckhart sensed an affinity with her favorite pupil, Virgie did not fulfill her potential as a pianist and spurned her teacher’s devotion. By finally acknowledging the proximity of antithetical feelings, Virgie accepts the “horror” and “separateness” that is an integral part of the “love” that she felt for Miss Eckhart (275).

21 Vande Kieft observes that this reconciliation generates a feeling that defies language: it constitutes “more than [Virgie] can articulate” (533). In The Golden Apples those characters who bring others to a deeper understanding of life’s possibilities rarely do so through language. They share a performative sensibility. In the story “Moon Lake,” these possibilities are embodied by another outsider, the orphan Easter. On holiday with young girls from Morgana, Easter, who asserts that she is destined to become a singer, alerts Morganan Nina Carmichael to the possibility of transforming and finding

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a new kind of vision for her life. She does so with a single gesture: as she sleeps, her hand lies open, beckoning the night to join her and deliver its “fiercest secrets” (139). Looking at the hand, Nina Carmichael realizes that she has been “only thinking like the others” (138). In “Music from Spain,” it is the “most unexpected music” of the Spanish guitar player that frees Eugene MacLain from anxiety about the future and transports him to a “vast present-time […] affect[ing] him like a secret” (196-7). During a storm, Miss Eckhart plays the piano for her pupils Virgie, Jinny Love, and Cassie Morrison and generates a feeling that defies language, measurement, or even expression through the senses. The music comes from a place “where Virgie, even, had never been and was not likely ever to go” and causes the pianist to “assume[] an entirely different face […] the face a mountain could have, or what might be seen behind the veil of a waterfall” (56). The narrative voice hints at a kind of feeling that lies beyond everyday experience: “What Miss Eckhart might have told them a long time ago was that there was more than the ear could bear to hear or the eye to see, even in her.” Although the students are disturbed by the music, they find themselves asking Miss Eckhart to repeat the performance, “begging for the last thing they wanted” (58).

22 Alice Munro has repeatedly stressed her fascination with unaccountable feelings and responses. Both of her cycles end on moments when the heroines sense an “odd affinity” with a marginalized character that leads to an expansion of imaginative vision. Both Del from Lives of Girls and Women and Rose from The Beggar Maid return to their small home towns and encounter forgotten figures from their childhood.6 Like their literary predecessors, they have resisted the claims of societal norms. Miranda and Virgie dabble in scandalous behaviour in order to assert their independence from their communities’ codes and conventions, Miranda by eloping and Virgie by indulging in fleeting love affairs. Del distances herself from Jubilee through her writing, turning it into the setting of a Gothic romance. On her return, however, she recognizes that the tropes and structures of this genre cannot capture the mysteries of its everyday world: mysteries which “persist, in spite of novels” (Lives of Girls 274). In the closing moments of the cycle, Del is reminded of these mysteries when she is invited into the home of one of the town’s peripheral figures. Bobby Sherriff, an eccentric who is marginalized both in Jubilee and in Del’s sensationalist rendition of the town, has returned from the asylum and asks Del into his home. He remains elusive to her: “[t]here must be some secret to madness, some gift about it, something I didn’t know” (275, emphasis in original). This elusiveness is captured by his closing, enigmatic gesture: after wishing Del luck, Sherriff elevates himself “on his toes, like a dancer, like a plump ballerina” (276-77). Unable to decode this gesture, Del senses nevertheless that it has “a concise meaning, a stylized meaning,” like a letter or word “in an alphabet [she] did not know” (277). Like the open hand of Easter in “Moon Lake,” Miss Eckhart’s tempestuous performance and the “sober smile” in the eyes of Miranda’s brother, this gesture awakens the heroine both to “what she has learned and what she does not understand” (Howells 50).

23 In The Beggar Maid, two figures, both mimics, fulfill a similar function, introducing Rose to the possibility of resisting societal coding. Tolerated by his aunts and the community at large, town mimic Milton is labeled and dismissed as an eccentric and therefore free to ignore the etiquette required at the town’s social occasions. Like Miss Eckhart and Bobby Sherriff, he is “missing […] a sense of precaution,” the inhibition that keeps the rest of the town’s citizens under control (198). He is eventually sent to the county home, the final destination of Morgana’s Miss Eckhart. In the closing story

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of The Beggar Maid, Rose recalls how she and a boy at school named Ralph Gillespie used to mimic the people of West Hanratty. Rose is particularly impressed by Ralph’s impression of Milton Homer. When Rose re-encounters Ralph years later in the final story of the cycle, he is a wounded and seemingly defeated war veteran. Although they struggle to communicate verbally, Rose feels “the same silent joke, the same conspiracy, comfort” that characterized her relationship with Ralph years ago (209)—a closeness that has eluded her in her adult relationships with men. Earlier stories in the cycle trace Rose’s doomed marriage and ensuing love affairs, showing how she expected happiness to emerge from long-term, romantic relationships with men. As Ahmed notes, the marriage plot dominates notions of happiness for women in particular. Munro acknowledges the power of this expectation. In the story “The Beggar Maid,” Rose reflects on the reasons why she continually returned to her husband Patrick, attributing it to the desire to “bring him back his happiness” (98). The lure of the promise of happiness is clear: “she sometimes thought it had not been pity or greed or cowardice or vanity but something quite different, like a vision of happiness […] sometimes, without reason or warning, happiness, the possibility of happiness, would surprise them” (99).

24 In contrast, there is no model for her feelings for Ralph, which defy linguistic framing: Rose senses between them “a wave of kindness, of sympathy and forgiveness, though certainly no words of that kind had been spoken” (210). This sense of connection mutes the “peculiar shame” that has become associated with her work as an actor, although she senses the inadequacy of her performances and worries that “she might have been paying attention to the wrong things, reporting antics, when there was always something further, a tone, a depth, a light, that she couldn’t get and wouldn’t get” (209). Her potential mistakes lose their significance in Ralph’s presence and instead “[t]here seemed to be feelings which could only be spoken of in translation; perhaps they could only be acted on in translation” (210). Rose chooses not to pursue this act of translation, however, concerned that language cannot do justice to these feelings: “not speaking of them and not acting on them is the right course to take because translation is dubious. Dangerous, as well” (210). In Munro’s cycles, it is the marginal figures whose presences are felt by the characters, despite the lack of regular contact, who alert the “feminist killjoys” to the possibilities inherent in relationships edited out of hegemonic models of happiness.7

25 It is highly significant that both Ralph and Milton are accomplished mimics. Inspired by their craft, Rose ponders the possibility of transforming: “She wanted to fill up in that magical, releasing way, transform herself; she wanted the courage and the power” (204). As noted, Ahmed associates happiness with possibility: specifically, in these cycles, the possibility of transforming excites the imaginations of the heroines. After meeting the Morganans the day before her mother’s funeral, Virgie goes to the Big Black River for a dip and experiences a moment that transports her beyond the limits of her own body: “Virgie had reached the point where in the next moment she might turn into something without feeling it shock her” (249). In The Beggar Maid, a young Rose marvels at the prospect of transformation. At the end of the fourth story, “Wild Swans,” she reflects on a tale that she has heard from her stepmother, Flo, about a woman who booked into a hotel under a pseudonym and assumed a new identity for a weekend: “She thought it would be an especially fine thing, to manage a

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transformation like that. To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin” (67).

26 The night before Virgie Rainey leaves Morgana as an adult, a strange woman comes to her door with a gift: a night-blooming cereus. As Marrs notes in her biography on Welty, this plant is “an emblem of life’s beauty and its fragility” (45). The gift reminds the reader and Virgie of the provisional nature of her happiness. “[T]roubled” by it, she throws it away (267). In an analysis of The Beggar Maid, Ailsa Cox observes how “Rose’s life does not run in a straight line” but rather “embrac[es] contingency” (31, 33). She accepts that the comfort she feels alongside Ralph is fleeting. It will continue to resist any kind of framing. At the end of her cycle, Del accepts that the mysteries and secrets of Jubilee will continue to elude her. The contingency of these women’s lives is dramatized through the continual relativizing of particular moments. Howells compares the endings of the individual stories in The Beggar Maid and the cycle as a whole to Derrida’s concept of the “supplement”: the endings provide “some insight or additional detail of information […] which unsettles the carefully constructed narrative” (10). Juliet, the heroine of the later cycle that forms part of Runaway, most emphatically embraces contingency and relinquishes the expectations of how her life should develop. In the concluding story of the cycle, “Silence,” Juliet struggles to come to terms with her estrangement from her daughter Penelope but by the end accepts it, embracing a different kind of life from the one she foresaw. She hopes that Penelope will contact her but does not do so “in any strenuous way” (158). The mood of the closing paragraph of the Juliet cycle is one of contentment. She continues to study; she works in a coffee shop and would not leave even “if she could afford to”; she maintains some relationships, letting others go. Her friend Larry “continues to visit, and to make jokes” (158). The relationship with Larry is platonic: he “was not a man who wanted anything from Juliet but her friendship and good humor” (153). The relationship is not “going anywhere”: it is neither a path nor a promise. Like Welty’s Eugene, she exists in a “vast present-time.”

27 Ahmed writes that “[h]appiness might not simply provide a sense of possibility; it is a sense of possibility” and that “[t]o turn happiness into an expectation is thus to annul its sense of possibility” (220). Freeing oneself from this expectation means that “other things can happen” and one might develop “a certain kind of openness to the possibility of an encounter” (220). It is this freedom that the feminist killjoys of Porter, Welty, and Munro sample in the closing moments of their cycles. It is this openness that they develop. In her essay “Some Notes on Time in Fiction,” Welty writes of the “arbitrary, bullying power” of “clock time” and shows us how writers might use fiction to outdo it (Eye 165). All of the moments of truth, happiness, and fulfillment that conclude these cycles debunk teleological models of happiness. When Miranda sees the animal-shaped sweets, she is overwhelmed by the way that the memory of “that far-off day leaped from its burial place before her mind’s eye” (367). As Virgie Rainey floats in the river, she senses that she is beyond time, “suspended in the Big Black River as she would know to hang suspended in felicity” (249). Rose’s intense identification with classmate Ralph Gillespie and Del’s apprehension of the unending mysteries of her old, everyday life in Jubilee defy the tyranny of linearity. These moments enable the heroines to reclaim abandoned or suppressed feelings and sensations and to comprehend what they did not initially understand. In her celebratory essay on Porter, Welty identifies “[s]eeing what is not there, putting trust in a false picture of life” as “one of the worst nightmares that assail her characters” (Eye 35): it is this nightmare

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that haunts all of the women in these cycles. The story cycle is the perfect vehicle for dramatizing the freedom and vision that these writers associate with happiness, as it provides multiple escape routes from preordained plots but also provides the possibility of returning and looking anew. Ahmed writes of the transience of happiness: “We can value happiness for its precariousness, as something that comes and goes, as life does. When I think of what makes happiness ‘happy’ I think of moments. Moments of happiness create texture, shared impressions: a sense of lightness in possibility” (219, emphasis in original). In a letter to Morton Zabel, Porter concurs, writing of happiness as transient and particular to the individual human subject: “Trust your happiness and the richness of your life at this moment. It is as true and as much yours as anything else that ever happened to you” (468).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

Ardoin, Paul. “The Un-happy Short Story Cycle: Jean Rhys’s Sleep It Off, Lady.” Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 2013. 233-48. Print.

Cam, Heather. “Learning from the Teacher: Alice Munro’s Reworking of Eudora Welty’s “June Recital.” Span: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language 25 (October, 1987): 16-30. Print.

Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois P, 1989. Print.

Cheatham, George. “Death and Repetition in Porter’s Miranda Stories.” American Literature 61.4 (1989): 610-24. Print.

Cox, Ailsa. Alice Munro. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004. Print.

Cox, Karen Castellucci. “Magic and Memory in the Contemporary Story Cycle.” College English 60 (1998): 150-72. Print

Harrison, Suzan. Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1997. Print.

Howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. Print.

Kelley, Margot. “Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel in Stories.” American Women Short Story Writers, ed. Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1995. 295-310. Print.

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Anxiety. Trans. R. Thomte and A. B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Print.

Lister, Rachel. “Female Expansion and Masculine Immobilization in the Short Story Cycle.” Journal of the Short Story in English 48 (2007): 43-58. Print.

---. “The Short Story Sequence in ‘The Homeland of the Novel’: A. S. Byatt’s Matisse Stories.” Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 3.2 (2013): 221-233. Print.

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Mann, Susan. The Short Story Cycle: A Companion and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989. Print.

Marrs, Suzanne. Eudora Welty: A Biography. Orlando, FL: Houghton, 2006. Print.

Martin, W. R. Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1987. Print.

Munro, Alice. “A Conversation with Alice Munro.” Interview with John Metcalf. Journal of Canadian Fiction 1.4 (Fall 1972): 54-62. Print.

---. “Alice Munro.” Eleven Canadian : Interviewed by Graeme Gibson. Ed. Gibson. Toronto: Anasi, 1973. 237-64. Print.

---. “Alice Munro Interview.” Interview with Geoff Hancock. Canadian Writers at Work. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.

---. “Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction.” Interview with Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson. The Paris Review (Winter 1995). 21 May 2014. Web.

---. The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose. London: Vintage, 1991. Print.

---. Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1998. Print.

---. Lives of Girls and Women. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print.

---. The Moons of Jupiter. London: Vintage, 2004. Print.

---. Open Secrets. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.

---. Runaway. London: Chatto, 2004. Print.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.

Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1979. Print.

---. Introduction. A Curtain of Green. By Eudora Welty. 1941. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1979. xi- xxiii. Print.

---. Interview with Barbara Thompson. “Katherine Anne Porter.” Women Writers at Work. Ed. George Plimpton. London: Harvill, 1999. 27-50. Print.

---. Letter to Morton Zabel. 29 November 1954. Letters of Katherine Anne Porter. Ed. Isabel Bayley. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 467-68. Print.

Rhys, Jean. Sleep it off, Lady. London: André Deutsch, 1976. Print.

Russ, Joanna. To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1995. Print.

Solotaroff, Ted. “Life Stories.” Rev. of Open Secrets by Alice Munro. The Nation 259.18 (1994): 665. Print.

Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing her Lives: A Biography. Toronto: McLelland, 2005. Print.

Unrue, Darlene Harbour. Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2008. Print.

Vande Kieft, Ruth M. “The Vision of Eudora Welty.” Mississippi Quarterly 26 (1973): 517-42. Print.

Welty, Eudora. The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. London: Virago, 1979. Print

---. The Golden Apples. San Diego: Harcourt, 1975. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: , 1925. Print.

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NOTES

1. Porter’s sequence of Miranda Gay stories traces the maturation of its central heroine but is in some ways more fractured than other variations on the sequence form, as it stretches across several texts. It consists of two long stories, “Old Mortality” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” separated by the unrelated “Noon Wine” and published collectively as Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), and a sequence of short stories published as The Old Order in the collection The Leaning Tower (1944). It is perhaps owing to this unconventional publication process that commentators on the short story sequence rarely include the Miranda stories in their studies. Only Susan Mann includes The Old Order, “Old Mortality” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” in her list of short story sequences in The Short Story Cycle: A Companion and Reference Guide, page 203. 2. Readers and critics have drawn connections between the works of Welty and Munro, often focusing on similarities in theme and content between Welty’s story “June Recital,” from The Golden Apples, and two stories by Munro: “Dance of the Happy Shades” from the collection of the same title and “Changes and Ceremonies” from Lives of Girls and Women. See for more on this, works by Coral Ann Howells (28-30) and Heather Cam. 3. Margot Kelley explores the short story cycle or “novel-in-stories,” her preferred term, as a site for female experience in “Gender and Genre: the Case of the Novel-in Stories.” 4. I have noted briefly the prevalence of homecomings in story cycles and their yielding of connections with marginalized figures in the articles “Female Expansion and Masculine Immobilization in the Short Story Cycle” and “The Short Story Sequence in ‘The Homeland of the Novel’: A. S. Byatt’s Matisse Stories.” Ahmed writes about the “myth” of the “happy family” and the power of “happy objects” that come from the family home and promise of continuity. She quotes from Simone de Beauvoir: “The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house... Within its walls the family is established as a discrete cell or a unit group and maintains its identity as generations come and go; the past, preserved in the form of furniture and ancestral portraits, gives promise of a secure future” (qtd. in Ahmed 46). The writers of these cycles, however, do not focus exclusively on reunions with family members or a return to a family house but a return to relationships with people who are from the community’s margins. 5. Suzan Harrison’s highly illuminating book Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre and Influence offers detailed analysis of the dialogue between these writers. She notes that the novels of both writers “seek out the private realities lying beneath the social fabric and foreground the tension between the two realms” (3). 6. Howells writes that The Beggar Maid is “obsessed with homecomings” (63), and Carrington observes how “many” of Munro’s characters return to their home towns, despite their “intense ambivalence” towards them (209). 7. Carrington writes in illuminating detail about the significance of acts of watching from the periphery in Munro’s fiction in her book Controlling the Uncontrollable.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article explore l’utilisation de la forme du cycle de nouvelles par trois écrivaines du vingtième siècle pour développer des récits défiant certaines notions hégémoniques du bonheur. S’appuyant sur le domaine des études de l’affect, cet article analyse la manière dont Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter et Alice Munro utilisent les cycles pour représenter des modèles

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alternatifs d’épanouissement pour les personnages féminins. Sont appliquées à ces cycles les théories de Sara Ahmed, afin de démontrer la façon dont elles ouvrent à des récits et des espaces au-delà des « communautés affectives », qui ont tendance à construire et perpétuer des modèles de bonheur féminin. Ces lectures apportent une analyse détaillée de types de moments particuliers qui interviennent dans les cycles des trois auteurs, moments produisant la sensation fugace de possibilité qu’Ahmed associe aux notions affectives du bonheur. On compte parmi ces moments : la rencontre furtive avec une figure marginalisée ayant trouvé le bonheur au-delà de l’« horizon des semblables » instituée par sa « communauté affective » ; des moments de transformation inattendue ; et des moments de retour vers les « communautés affectives » familières.

AUTHORS

RACHEL LISTER Rachel Lister teaches part time at Durham University, England, specializing in modern American Fiction. She is the author of books on the novels of and on ’s . She has written articles on the short stories of Katherine Anne Porter, A. S. Byatt, and Grace Paley and on the films of Nicole Holofcener and Sarah Polley.

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Yearning, Frustration, and Fulfillment: The Return Story in Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan

Rebecca Cross

1 The use of absence in the short story cycle is an overlooked but vital element of the genre.1 It contributes to the way that cycles can manipulate the focus in their stories, using developed patterns of absence to influence the reader’s response. The technique of the return story is identified by Gerald Lynch in his 2001 book The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. He describes the return story as the final story in a cycle which returns it back to its origins, spiralling back in on itself to create a meaningful connection to its starting point, often by referencing characters and events which occur throughout the stories (32). Both Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler are short story cycles which use absence to develop patterns to direct the focus back into the preceding stories through the contrast presented in the return story.

2 In relation to the structure of the short story cycle, I use the term “absence” to represent elements of the text which are not physically present but which, regardless of their lack of presence, have a noted and significant effect on the cycle as a whole. Absence functions both as an abstract concept that describes the interaction between the reader and elements that are left out of a text and also as a focus of the content of the stories. The cycles present characters who experience a void in life, and the stories describe the characters’ respective searches to fill these voids. The two cycles lend themselves to a study of absence within the genre because of this interaction between the structural absences and the absences presented in the content.

3 These absences create the affective experiences of yearning, frustration, and fulfillment for the reader. The absences construct these emotional reactions, which become affective reactions to the text. The repetition of this absence in both texts appears on the surface to be the factor which allows the cycles to influence the focus of

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the reader. However, this article explores the way that the pattern of absence is built up throughout the cycles to explain how it becomes so significant. When the return story is reached, the contrast created within it directs the focus back to the previous stories, effectively drawing together the individual stories so that they are conceived of as a cohesive whole.

4 Olive Kitteridge is comprised of thirteen short stories, seven of which are told from the character Olive’s perspective, whilst the remaining six stories are told through different characters that intersect with Olive’s life in varying degrees. The stories are set in the small town of Crosby, . Olive is a middle-aged wife to Henry and mother to Christopher. She is a retired high school mathematics teacher and avid gardener. She is portrayed throughout the cycle as an unfriendly and often unkind woman who feels an absence of understanding in her life. The stories describe significant events in the characters’ lives, such as Christopher’s wedding, Henry’s flirtation with his young and naive pharmacy assistant, and the terrifying night when Olive and Henry become hostages in a hospital hold up orchestrated by two men looking for drugs. Olive’s negative memories and thoughts about the absences in her life are often associated with black imagery. She is extremely unhappy in her life and yearns to be understood within her relationships. This metaphor of blackness is repeated throughout the stories, in particular the stories that are told from Olive’s point of view. The repetition gradually strengthens the association between the black imagery and the absence that Olive feels within her life. The development of the pattern of this metaphor becomes representative of Olive’s desire to be explicitly understood.

5 The final story of Olive Kitteridge, “River,” portrays a change in Olive’s mental state. Instead of yearning to be understood, she begins to feel unconditionally loved. This story is set after Henry’s death and describes her new relationship with Jack Kennison, a man she meets on one of her daily walks by the river. Olive and Jack’s relationship is characterized by openness and truthfulness. The imagery of clearness and blueness to describe Olive’s feelings which is used in this story contrasts with the prevailing imagery of blackness. The change in imagery highlights the contrast between Olive’s positive feelings in this story and her negative emotions in the previous stories, emphasizing the association between the images of blackness and the absence she experiences in her life.

6 Throughout the cycle Olive’s yearning to be understood takes different forms. Olive and Henry have been married for many years and have a strained and distant relationship but ultimately love each other. Olive has a tense relationship with their son Christopher, who divorces his first wife Suzanne after only a year of marriage. Shortly afterwards, Henry suffers a stroke and never recovers. He is put in a nursing home in a nearby town and Olive assumes the role of the dutiful wife, visiting him twice daily until his death, which is disclosed in “River.” Her relationship with Christopher is further tested when he remarries and only informs her of the existence of his new wife, Ann, after his marriage to Ann takes place. After Henry’s death, Olive begins a relationship with Jack. He helps Olive move on from repeatedly dwelling on her mistakes from the past and to begin to accept herself for the sharp-tongued but well- meaning woman she is.

7 Although absence functions in Kissing in Manhattan through the repetition of expectations, its use in the return story has the same effect of drawing attention to the cycle as a whole and the way that the stories build upon each other. This cycle is

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comprised of eleven short stories which are told from the point of view of nine different characters whose lives become intertwined. The stories are set in New York and focus on the Preemption Building, which becomes a connecting image throughout the cycle. James Branch, one of the dominant characters of the cycle, has three stories told from his perspective and appears in four other stories. He is a lonely man who works in finance and imagines himself eventually meeting his dream woman, who has specific “honey-colored hair.” The expectation and temporary absence of fulfillment of this expectation that James will eventually meet such a woman is developed through the repetition of this phrase. Rally McWilliams, a character featured in several stories, matches this description, further strengthening this expectation. The repetition of the phrase “honey-colored hair” becomes a form of present absence in the cycle which creates a desire for James and Rally to become a couple.

8 In “The Green Balloon,” the return story of Kissing in Manhattan, the anticipated relationship between James and Rally finally occurs. Although James and Rally meet several times throughout the cycle, nothing ever comes of these meetings. This piece of information alters the desire for the relationship to occur to a sense of satisfaction that the anticipation has finally been released. The sudden change from anticipation to satisfaction directs the focus back into the preceding stories, where the anticipation is developed. The contrasting sense of satisfaction prompts a reflection on the ways that this anticipation is gradually built up throughout the cycle through the repetition of the phrase “honey-colored hair.” The individual stories are brought together as a whole through this renewed focus and reflection on the ongoing patterns.

9 Both Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan are examples of the recent surge in popularity of the short story cycle.2 However, this increase in popularity has not been matched with an increase in critical attention. Very few recent studies focus entirely on the genre. Two of the most notable contemporary contributions are Victoria Kuttainen’s Unsettling Stories: Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite, which focuses on the way the short story cycle can be used to present settler postcolonialism and its ongoing effects on society today, and James Nagel’s The Contemporary American Short- Story Cycle, which considers the genre in comparison with aspects of ethnicity in America and explores the representation of minorities in cycles and the paradigms implicit in this representation. These studies use Forrest L. Ingram’s foundational 1971 work Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century, which is the first critical work to name and describe the genre; however, none of these critical works places emphasis on the significance of absence to the genre.3

10 One of Ingram’s central arguments is that repetition in the short story cycle leads to “patterns of recurrence and development” (20), which become integral to the establishment of a sense of unity throughout the cycle. These patterns become more discernible and they strengthen as the cycle progresses, unifying the individual stories into a larger work. I suggest that these “patterns of recurrence and development” do not only encompass elements which add a straightforward sense of continuity and unity to the cycles but can also be comprised of elements which draw the cycles together through absence. Both Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan contain a return story that draws together the preceding stories through its contrast to the prevailing pattern of absence. In Olive Kitteridge, the repetition of blackness gradually becomes a metaphor for the absence in Olive’s life, whereas the repetition of “honey-colored hair” in Kissing in Manhattan creates absence through its pattern of repetition.

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11 My analysis of the return story uses Lynch’s definition as its base, extending the concept to suggest that the return story uses absence to create its movement. This encourages the reader to return to the stories that have come before and re-evaluate their content in light of the cycle as a whole. While the use of extended metaphor and phrase repetition are not the only factors that contribute to the effect of the return story, I argue that in each of the texts under study this kind of repetition is the factor that most strongly influences the reader’s feelings of anticipation and satisfaction. There are many different elements that make up a short story cycle, several of which could be used to discuss the return story; however, these other features are beyond the scope of this essay.

12 In addition to providing the basis of the return story, Lynch’s work is also useful because it initiates conversation about the elements of a cycle which detract from the sense of unity. He argues that the genre “is a form that allows for a new kind of unity in disunity, reflecting a fragmented temporal sense, and incorporating a more authentic representation of modern sensibilities” (18). The tension between “the one and the many,” between the individual stories and the cycle as a whole, allows short story cycles to encompass both unity and disunity. Using his idea of being able to find “unity in disunity,” I argue that the movement created by the patterned absences throughout the cycles leads to a consideration of the text as a whole.

13 My analysis of Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan focuses on the recurrence and development of different kinds of absence in each text—absence through metaphor and absence through repetition. Beginning with Olive Kitteridge, I demonstrate that the significance of absence functions twofold in this cycle. The images of blackness that pervade Olive’s mind and body throughout the first twelve stories become physical representations of absence, while the movement back into the stories after the return story highlights the connection between Olive’s yearning to be loved and her bodily blackness, revealing the way that absence in Olive’s life creates connections between the stories. The images of blackness become an overarching metaphor in the cycle and its sombre tone affects the cycle as a whole.

14 My analysis of Olive’s blackness is focused on three of the stories told from her perspective: “A Little Burst,” the fourth story in the cycle; “Tulips,” the eighth story; and “River,” the thirteenth and final story. The first two of these stories have been chosen because they exemplify the recurrence and development of the images of blackness. This understanding of the extended metaphor can then be used to demonstrate the effect of the return story and the contrast of the images of blueness that are included in it. The images of blackness presented in “A Little Burst” and “Tulips” occur in conjunction with descriptions of Olive’s feelings and take the form of squid ink, sludge, and black fingers. A connection therefore develops between the negative connotations of the images of blackness and the absence of understanding Olive feels in her life and her close relationships. Contrastingly, when Olive meets Jack in “River,” positive images of blueness—brightness and sunshine—are used to describe their relationship.

15 In “A Little Burst,” squid ink becomes aligned with the lack of openness in Olive’s life. This story occurs before Henry’s stroke and depicts Christopher’s first wedding, which is held at his house in Crosby. At the end of the day Olive feels overwhelmed by the event and goes to rest on Christopher’s bed, where, through an open window, she overhears her new daughter-in-law Suzanne telling some of her relatives, “He’s had a

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hard time you know” (70). Olive makes the assumption that Suzanne is referring to her and is faced with recurring guilt surrounding Christopher’s childhood. She laments that “deep down there is this thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven’t wanted to be this way, but so help me, I have loved my son” (71). The “blackness” of the ink of the squid represents the desperation of Olive’s yearning for Christopher to understand how much she loves him and for their relationship to be closer. The violent bodily invasion of the squid ink adds the idea of mental and physical permanence when it is shot inside Olive’s body, indefinitely staining everything it touches.

16 This first example of the connection between Olive’s yearning for more openness in her life and the recurring metaphor of blackness is strengthened in “Tulips,” where the bodily invasion of blackness is further described. This image of blackness builds on the squid ink, taking the form of sludge. In this story, which occurs after Henry’s stroke but before his death, Olive feels disturbed after visiting Louise Larkin, a neighbour who is suffering a mental illness and whose son has been convicted of murdering a woman with whom he was romantically involved. Olive longs to talk to Henry about the visit, which “sat inside her like a dark, messy injection of sludge spreading through her body. Only telling someone about it would get it hosed out” (157). The sludge provides a negative image of covering and concealment. The unpleasant and dirty connotations that accompany the word “sludge” add another layer of complexity to the image of blackness. Like the squid ink, the sludge too is an unwilling invasion of Olive’s body, demonstrating the control that the blackness, and by extension, her yearning, has over her emotional state.

17 The idea that the blackness becomes the vehicle through which the reader is able to understand the absence in Olive’s life can be further understood through an analysis of the structures in the text that are used to create and signal this absence. In On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, Brian Boyd discusses the way that the reactions of the reader can be anticipated through the content of a text, arguing that “[f]iction can design events and characters to provoke us to reflect on, say, generosity, or threat, or deception and counter-deception. And it efficiently evokes our intense emotional engagement without requiring our belief” (193). The connection between Olive’s yearning to be implicitly understood in her relationships and the images of blackness that are associated with her state of mind provokes a reflection on the development of the metaphor and the way that it works to tie different stories together. The recurrence of the images of blackness expands into representations of the absence in Olive’s life, demonstrating how this reflexivity is prompted by the absence in the cycle.

18 The metaphor of blackness is further extended in “Tulips,” where a reference to “black fingers” builds upon the image of the squid ink and the sludge, strengthening the connection between blackness and lack of fulfillment. After her disturbing visit to Louise, Olive rings Christopher, wanting to speak to him about her experience, but he claims he is too busy to talk to her. She then decides to visit Henry and on the drive to the nursing home finds that she yearns for her son to unconditionally love her, but she is also plagued again by an unrelenting guilt about her relationship with him: “It was shame that swiped across her soul, like these windshield wipers before her: two large black lone fingers, relentless and rhythmic in their chastisement” (160). This sentence creates a double link between the black fingers and the previous examples of the images of squid ink and sludge. The “two large black lone fingers” exist both as the

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shame in Olive’s mind and the windshield wipers on her car, providing a mental and physical representation of her yearning. The description of the shame that is swiped through Olive’s body with the two large black fingers links to the sludge that she cannot hose out of her body when she is unable to speak with Henry through the comparable actions they describe, which strengthens the link between Olive’s desire for more understanding in her life and the blackness that seeps inside of her.

19 These connections made in the mind of the reader through the repetition of the metaphor serve to link the different stories together, creating an overarching image of blackness throughout the cycle as a whole. Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading explores this idea of the relationship between what is left out of a text and the reader. He discusses the function of gaps in a text, arguing that silences constructed in texts invite the reader to create his or her own meaning in the gap. The inclusion of gaps in a text means that “the reader is forced to try to find connections between the hitherto familiar story and the new, unforeseeable situations” (192). While there is no way of definitively ascertaining every reader’s reaction to this search for connections, which Iser refers to as the process of “ideation,” the process itself reveals the significance of gaps or absences in a text, positioning the reader to become part of the meaning- making process.

20 The process of ideation is particularly significant to the return story because it provides a way to begin to understand how the text prompts an attempt to reconcile the stories that have come before and how the reader is thus sent back into the stories to re-evaluate their content. Iser argues that ideation leads to an imaginative act whereby the reader becomes part of the text in the process of filling in the gaps (168). The sense of continuity developed through the different images of blackness illustrates the role of the reader to recognize and draw together the absences presented in Olive’s life. The images do not simply repeat themselves throughout the cycle but take slightly different forms.

21 Ideation works to draw these images together through the gradual build-up of connections between blackness and Olive’s yearning in her life, positioning the reader to recognize the connections between the images. For example, the continuous swiping movement of the windshield wiper fingers further develops ideas of negative growth that become familiarized through the other recurring images of blackness and invoke connotations of lack of control, suggesting that Olive cannot keep down the blackness inside of her. Her inability to restrict this blackness signifies that she is likewise unable to gain control over the emotional and physical absences in her life. The repeated use of verbs to describe actions which increase the size of the blackness means that they become explicit physical representations of Olive’s implicit desires. Like the image of the squid head which “swells” inside her and the sludge “spreading” throughout her body, the black fingers that are “swiped” across her soul provide another example of the increasing nature of the blackness, familiarizing the connection between growing absence and Olive’s feeling of lack in her life.

22 My analysis of the significance of the connections between these images relies on understanding how the text influences the response of the reader. In addition to Iser and his discussion of the role of gaps, more recent critics have built upon this work to further theorize the ways that readers use elements of texts to make sense of narrative worlds. The establishment of cognitive narratology, for example, is attributed to Manfred Jahn, who introduced the term in his article “Frames, Preferences, and the

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Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology.” He argues that word and phrase choice can be used to analyze hermeneutic processes in texts.4 For instance, the analysis of hermeneutics reveals how the use of absence creates and maintains the expectations of the reader. David Herman extends this early model, suggesting in his article “Narrative Theory and the Sciences of the Mind” that the process of closely analyzing texts provides “a finer-grained account of textual patterns discoverable in the story” (427) and reveals how these patterns can be used to anticipate reactions. Herman demonstrates that narratological principles can be used to “illuminate the way interpreters use textual designs to fill out storyworlds, to the extent required by their engagement with a given narrative” (433). His analysis shows how the text creates the reaction of what he calls the interpreter, and what I refer to as the reader. Cognitive narratology discusses how a text can influence or affect a reader and in the context of absence and the short story cycle can be used to explain how the effects of yearning, frustration, and fulfillment are created in the mind of the reader.

23 Through the use of verbs of growth, the images of blackness position the reader to become aware of the depths of Olive’s yearning. Not only do these images build on each other to develop a stronger sense of the depth of the metaphor of blackness and hence the depth of absence in Olive’s life, they also initiate the hermeneutic process of searching for meaning behind the patterns. The description of the squid shooting blackness through Olive’s body creates an image which is paralleled in other descriptions of blackness. The ways that the sludge is injected into her body and the fingers swipe relentlessly across her soul describe blackness as something that is inserted into and spread throughout Olive’s unwilling body. The consistency of the forceful actions used in conjunction with images of blackness familiarizes the connection between the ideas, encouraging links to be made between these consistencies in the stories. The alliteration of the /s/ sounds in these forceful actions becomes another type of repetition. The repelling imagery of sludge spreading, squid ink shooting, and black fingers swiping in Olive’s body becomes a weighted sound, making the absence associated with blackness more present and familiar in the stories and highlighting the repugnance of Olive’s emotional state.

24 The images of blackness form a significant recognizable pattern throughout the stories that encourages the reader to realize Olive’s mental darkness. The importance of recognizing these patterns in texts and the effects that they can have on the reader is discussed by Herman in the introduction to Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. He suggests that analyses of texts should ask “not just about story structure as such, but about the patterned, non-random ways in which readers and listeners tend to impute structure to certain strings of events presented in discourse” (8). The patterns of absence anticipate the impact of the movement of the return story through their development in the cycle. Herman’s suggestion to consider the effect of these patterns on the reader can lead to a greater understanding of how they work to instigate movement of the reader’s focus.

25 The recognizable and established pattern of images of blackness is stopped in “River,” where contrast is created through the sudden change to images of blueness. Olive’s emotional reaction to her relationship with Jack is accompanied by positive images of blueness and sunshine. They are presented along with Olive’s new sense of fulfillment and openness. The change in imagery creates an unforeseeable but immediately recognizable break in the established metaphor, highlighting the effect of the previous

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prevailing images of blackness. The break in the familiar imagery invites a reflection on the effect of the accumulation of the images of blackness and the way that these images, as representations of absence, work to create connections in the cycle.

26 The unforeseeable change in imagery highlights the familiarity of the images of blackness through the confronting effect of the images of blueness. This confrontation occurs even though the new imagery is associated with positive emotions; the disruption to the pattern creates this effect. The first image of blueness occurs after Henry’s death when Olive has begun her daily walks by the river to fill her mornings. One morning Olive sees Jack lying on the side of the path and the first thing she notices about him is that “his eyes were open. His eyes were very blue” (253). Jack’s blue eyes become a recurring image throughout “River,” described in this same way eight separate times (253, 254, 255, 260, 263, 268, 269). Like the images of blackness which implicitly represent Olive’s yearning, the images of blueness also reveal Olive’s emotional state, this time her feelings of fulfillment. The change in emotional state is uncovered through the contrast in imagery.

27 The reflection on the familiarity of blackness and its absence and the subsequent movement back into the other stories of the cycle is created by the recurrence and development of the blue imagery in “River.” When Olive admits to hitting Christopher as a child, she is afraid that Jack will reject her. However, Jack admits to Olive the guilt he feels at his rejection of his lesbian daughter, trusting that Olive will not judge his past, which then encourages her to do the same: “He sighed and shook his head, the sunlight from the windows catching his eyes, making them very blue. ‘Anyway, Olive, you can tell me anything, that you beat your son black and blue, and I wouldn’t hold it against you’” (268). This moment of truthfulness and acceptance in their newfound relationship includes references to both sunlight and blue eyes, demonstrating the association between these images and the sense of trust and fulfillment Olive feels in her relationship with Jack. The reference to “black and blue” places the two major recurring images of the cycle next to each other. In this instance the images of blackness that are perpetuated through the previous stories are accented by the contradicting image of blueness. The confrontation that occurs as a result of this contrast reveals the prevalence of the familiar metaphor of blackness, highlighting the way that its repetition has come to be expected whenever Olive’s mental state is described. The contrast focuses on the recurrent patterns in the cycle, which creates the return movement back into the previous stories to reconsider the significance of these patterns.

28 The ideational activity anticipated by the contrast in “River” relies on the recurrence and development of the images of blackness throughout the stories of the cycle. The absence of blackness and its juxtaposition with blue reveals its prevalence and highlights its representation of Olive’s emotional state. In contrast, Kissing in Manhattan uses absence in the form of repetition of the same image to create the effect of the return story. Where in Olive Kitteridge the absence is a feature of the recurring imagery, in Kissing in Manhattan absence becomes the recurring imagery. The expectations that are created in Kissing in Manhattan through the repetition of the phrase “honey-colored hair” are finally fulfilled in the return story. As in “River,” this return story is created through contrast. However, in this case the contrast exists through the expectation of the reader, who no longer anticipates a relationship between James and a woman with honey-colored hair but now feels satisfaction that it has occurred. The sense of

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satisfaction created is achieved through the recurrence and development of the expectations throughout the previous stories. Although Olive Kitteridge uses the repetition of metaphor and Kissing in Manhattan uses the repetition of a phrase to create the return story, the effect remains constant; it returns the focus to the previous stories and highlights the connectedness of the cycle.

29 In my analysis of the phrase repetition in Kissing in Manhattan, I focus on three stories which provide strong examples of the way this repetition occurs throughout the cycle —“The Opals,” the fourth story; “Kissing in Manhattan,” the fifth story; and “Telling It All to Otis,” the ninth story—before demonstrating the satisfaction created through “The Green Balloon.” James Branch’s desire for a woman with “honey-colored hair” is introduced in “The Opals.” This story is told from James’ point of view and describes his habit of eating at a restaurant called Flat Michael’s for dinner. The story follows the events that occur one October night when he arrives at the restaurant later than usual after work and unexpectedly has to wait an hour to get a table. While waiting for his table, he wanders into a sex shop by accident and uses the excuse that he needs to use the bathroom to get away from the pushy saleswoman. He is directed downstairs, where on the way to the bathroom he finds a very old wooden door inscribed with the words “John Castle’s Nomadic” on the front in pink letters. Intrigued, he opens the door and unpredictably finds a jewellery workshop complete with a man working in it. The mysterious jeweller invites James to imagine which piece of jewellery he would choose if he had a woman to give it to: “James got a glimpse in his hand of a woman with warm skin and hair the color of honey. He pictured opals against her skin” (79). This is the first instance of the phrase in the cycle.

30 In addition to this first glimpse of James’ imaginary ideal woman, anticipation about this woman is also created through the rest of the conversation between James and the jeweller. When giving James his choice of opal earrings, the jeweller says to him, “Keep them somewhere safe. You’ll know when to give them to her” (79). James tries to explain that there has been some mistake because there is no such woman, but the jeweller confidently replies, “There will be soon” (79). This proclamation initiates the expectation that James will soon meet his woman with “hair the color of honey.” It increases the sense of anticipation for a romantic relationship for James and positions the reader to begin to actively search for clues that might hint at who this woman could be. The text initiates this search through the suggestion that the woman will soon come into James’ life. This is one of the ways that the repetition of the phrase influences the reader’s reaction to the stories.

31 This same image is repeated several other times throughout the stories, increasing the sense of anticipation through its salience. Immediately following the confident declaration from the jeweller, James thinks “of the woman who’d just popped into his mind, the one with the honey-colored hair” (79). The repetition of the image of the woman with “honey-colored hair” signals that there is a potential future relationship for James. The repetition of the phrase positions the woman to be seen as a real person rather than an idea, which increases the anticipation for the relationship.

32 The significance of the repetition of this phrase can be better understood through an analysis of the way that it influences the reader’s reaction to the cycle. Through its manipulation of the reader’s expectations of what will eventuate in the stories, the repetition of “honey-colored hair” draws the reader into the cycle, so that he or she becomes an active part of its structure. This kind of involvement of the reader is

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discussed by Alan Palmer in his article “The Construction of Fictional Minds.” He suggests readers undergo a process by which they construct “the plot by means of a series of provisional conjectures and hypotheses about the embedded narratives of characters” (42). The patterns in a text can prompt the reader to make assumptions about its content. These patterns guide the reader’s reaction. In the context of the phrase “honey-colored hair,” its repetition guides the reader to come to expect that it will hold significance in later stories and to wait for a relationship between James and Rally, the woman with honey-colored hair, to eventuate.

33 The following story, “Kissing in Manhattan” solidifies this presumption when it introduces a woman who fits James’ description. Rally is described as having “stunning honey-colored hair that tumbled to her waist and got her free drinks” (84). The repetition of the phrase in another story means that it becomes a marker in the cycle, suggesting a connection between James and Rally that is not yet established. The possibility of this connection extends the anticipation to surround both their characters. These expectations seem to be about to be realized when James and Rally meet by accident. However, nothing eventuates and the two quickly go their separate ways. This meeting occurs in “Kissing in Manhattan,” in the Cloister’s Museum tapestry hall, when the man next to Rally starts talking to her about the tapestry they are both looking at. He is described as “a slender young man with sleepy blue eyes and straight teeth” (99), but his name is never mentioned.

34 The knowledge that the stranger is James requires the involvement of the reader and demonstrates how phrase repetition holds importance in the cycle. The realization that it is James is based on a description of him that is included in the first story of the cycle, “Checkers and Donna.” In this story a man and a woman go on a blind date and eat at Flat Michael’s. James is described in this story as “a regular customer, a young accountant named James Branch, dining alone at a table far from the bar. He had sleepy blue eyes and straight teeth” (9). The exact phrase repetition of “sleepy blue eyes” when James is described in the museum becomes the indicator that it is the same character.

35 However, even if James’ identity in the museum is not realized in “Kissing in Manhattan” through the repetition from “Checkers and Donna,” the cycle presents another opportunity to make this connection. In “Telling It All to Otis,” James is again introduced, this time as someone who is “slender and quiet, with sleepy blue eyes and straight teeth” (178). This verbatim repetition of the phrase again suggests the connection between James and the unknown man at the museum, prompting another opportunity for recognition of the significance of the meeting in the museum with Rally. The expectation that James and Rally will begin a relationship is challenged when they walk away from each other with no more significance than a simple chat with a stranger in a museum.

36 In addition to drawing the reader into the cycle to use knowledge to make further discoveries about the stories, the repetition of James’ description also increases the anticipation that James and Rally become a couple. In turn, this heightens the sense of frustration experienced when James and Rally’s chance meeting comes to nothing. The withholding of their relationship until the return story further increases both the desire for it to eventuate and the frustration felt when it does not occur, which maintains reader engagement. The cycle influences this reaction through the way it positions the reader to make connections between the patterns of phrase repetition.

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37 This influence can be seen clearly in “Telling It All to Otis,” where some of the anticipation is finally fulfilled. In this story James and Rally meet for the second time. The anticipation that has been built up through the phrase repetition is released when James unexpectedly finds a naked woman tied up in his housemate Patrick Rigg’s bedroom during a house party. Here Rally is lying “spread-eagled on her back on top of the covers, with her ankles and wrists bound tightly with black neckties to the four bedposts. She had honey-colored hair, cut razor short, like a cadet’s” (196). Rally is in an unhappy and confusing relationship with Patrick that she has been trying to end. She has been left by Patrick tied up in this position for the entirety of the party. James is initially embarrassed to speak to Rally but eventually the two strike up a friendship in this unlikely situation. Even though it occurs in an absurd situation, this final repetition of “honey-colored hair” solidifies the sense of anticipation that James and Rally will become a couple because it occurs after they have met.

38 This meeting between James and Rally develops into a relationship in “The Green Balloon,” a return story that releases the peak of anticipation and positions the reader to reflect on the ways that the anticipation is built up throughout the stories. The commencement of James and Rally’s relationship satisfies the yearning that is developed through phrase repetition. The story opens with a description of a date, where James is at Flat Michael’s with “Rally McWilliams, his new love” (259). This is the first piece of evidence that James and Rally’s meeting in “Telling It All to Otis” has developed into a relationship. The story then goes on to create a direct link between the expectations set up in the previous stories and the fulfillment of those expectations in this story. The narrator explains that during their dinner at Flat Michael’s, James “wanted to give her a pair of opal earrings that had long been in his possession and even now were in his pocket” (259). The repetition of the opal earrings that James received in “The Opals” solidifies the connection between the stories and positions the reader to reflect back on this story. This movement in focus highlights the way that repetitions of “honey-colored hair” work throughout the stories to develop the sense of anticipation of a relationship and the fulfillment that is experienced in the return story.

39 The actualization of the relationship between James and Rally releases the tension surrounding the expectation of their relationship and replaces it with a feeling of fulfillment. The contrast between anticipation and satisfaction creates the movement back into the previous stories. The sudden release of tension highlights the significance of the phrase repetition and the way that it directs the reader’s expectations throughout the cycle. This encourages the reader to consider not only the effect of this repetition but how it is perpetuated throughout the cycle to create this effect. The return movement in “The Green Balloon” is created through the contrast between anticipation and satisfaction and highlights the way that reader engagement is encouraged through phrase repetition in the stories.

40 Although the return stories of Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan use different techniques to return the focus of the cycle back to the stories as a whole, both utilize contrast to create this movement. The return stories demonstrate how absence creates an affective response in the reader. The reliance on this response for the cycle’s meaning and sense of wholeness is a unique feature of the genre. Absence is used to manipulate the focus of the texts, encouraging the stories to be viewed as a cohesive whole rather than as separate short stories. The juxtaposition present in the return

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story dissipates any remaining feelings of yearning or frustration and replaces them with a sensation of fulfillment. This change highlights the significance and impact of absence within the cycle—both as an abstract concept which represents elements of a text which are left out and as a concrete element of the plot which describes the feelings of lack that certain characters experience in their lives. In Olive Kitteridge this occurs through the change in imagery, from blackness to blueness, whereas in Kissing in Manhattan it is instigated through the fulfillment of expectations created through phrase repetition. Both return stories use contrast to return the focus to the previous stories, drawing attention to the structure of the cycle as a whole and the change from yearning and frustration to fulfillment. The return stories demonstrate how absence can function in the short story cycle and provide initial analysis that can be used to theorize the way absence constitutes a significant structural feature of the genre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atwood, Margaret. Moral Disorder. New York: Anchor Books, 2006. Print.

Barth, John. The Book of Ten Nights and a Night. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Print.

---. The Development. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2010. Print.

Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Print.

Crane, Elizabeth. All This Heavenly Glory. New York: Back Bay Books, 2006. Print.

Cronin, Justin. Mary and O’Neil. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. Print. Print.

Cullen, Patrick. What Came Between. Carlton North: Scribe, 2009. Print.

Díaz, Junot. This is How You Lose Her. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.

Dormen, Lesley. The Best Place to Be. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print.

Dunn, Maggie, and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. New York: Twayne, 1995. Print.

Eder, Jens. “Narratology and Cognitive Reception Theories.” What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin: de Gruyer, 2003. 277-301. Print.

Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. London: Constable & Robinson, 2010. Print.

Fulton, Alice. The Nightingales of Troy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.

Glass, Julia. I See You Everywhere. New York: Anchor Books, 2008. Print.

Herman, David. “Introduction: Narratologies.” Narratologies: New perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999. 1-30. Print.

---. “Narrative Theory and the Sciences of the Mind.” Literature Compass 10 (2013): 421-36. Print.

Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Print.

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Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1978. Print.

Jahn, Manfred. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology.” Poetics Today 18 (1997): 441-68. Print.

---. “‘Speak, friend, and enter’: Garden Paths, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Narratology.” Narratologies, New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999. 167-96. Print.

Kennedy, Gayle. Me, Antman & Fleabag. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007. Print.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Introduction: The American Short Story Sequence – Definitions and Implications.” Modern American Short Story Sequences. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. vii-xv. Print.

---. “Toward a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle.” Journal of the Short Story in English 11 (1988): 9-25. Print.

Kuttainen, Victoria. Unsettling Stories: Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Print.

Leane, Jeanine. Purple Threads. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2011. Print.

Luscher, Robert M. “The American Short-Story Cycle: Out from the Novel’s Shadow.” Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture: Companion to the American Novel. Ed. Alfred Bendixen. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2012. 357-72. Print.

---. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. USA: Louisiana State UP, 1989. 148-67. Print.

Lynch, Gerald. The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Print.

Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Print.

McKenzie, Elizabeth. Stop That Girl. New York: , 2006. Print.

Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. Great Britain: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003. Print.

Munkara, Marie. Every Secret Thing. St Lucie: U of Queensland P, 2009. Print.

Munro, Alice. The View from Castle Rock. New York: Random House, 2006. Print.

Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. Print.

Palmer, Alan. “The Construction of Fictional Minds.” Narrative 10 (2002): 28-46. Print.

Rachman, Tom. The Imperfectionists. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 2011. Print.

Rossiter, Richard. Arrhythmia. Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2009. Print.

Schickler, David. Kissing in Manhattan. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 2001. Print.

Shirm, Gretchen. Having Cried Wolf. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2010. Print.

Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge. London: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print.

Vreeland, Susan. Girl in Hyacinth Blue. London: Headline Book Publishing, 2002. Print.

Winch, Tara June. Swallow the Air. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2006. Print.

Winton, Tim. The Turning. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

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NOTES

1. I would like to express my gratitude to Debra Dudek and Anne Collett for their comments on a preliminary version of this article. 2. For example, many well-known authors have recently published works which form part of the genre, including Girl in Hyacinth Blue (2002) by Susan Vreeland; Mary & O’Neil (2002) by Justin Cronin; Cloud Atlas (2003) by David Mitchell; The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004) by John Barth; The Turning (2004) by Tim Winton; Swallow the Air (2006) by Tara June Winch; The View from Castle Rock (2006) by Alice Munro; Moral Disorder (2006) by ; All This Heavenly Glory (2006) by Elizabeth Crane; Stop That Girl (2006) by Elizabeth McKenzie; Me, Antman & Fleabag (2007) by Gayle Kennedy; The Best Place to Be (2008) by Lesley Dormen; The Nightingales of Troy (2009) by Alice Fulton; What Came Between (2009) by Patrick Cullen; Every Secret Thing (2009) by Marie Munkara; I See You Everywhere (2009) by Julia Glass; Arrhythmia (2009) by Richard Rossiter; The Development (2010) by John Barth; A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) by ; Having Cried Wolf (2010) by Gretchen Shirm; The Imperfectionists (2011) by Tom Rachman; Purple Threads (2011) by Jeanine Leane; and This is How You Lose Her (2012) by Junot Díaz. 3. While the significance of gaps in the genre remains under-theorized, many studies into the short story cycle focus on the limits of the genre or explicitly name its features. For example, Susan Garland Mann’s The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide gives a detailed history of the progression of the genre and provides an annotated listing of twentieth century examples of cycles. Robert M. Luscher’s book chapter “The Short Story Sequence, An Open Book” focuses on the reader and his or her reaction to a sequence, arguing that this is one of the predominant features of the genre. His subsequent book chapter, “The American Short-Story Cycle: Out from the Novel’s Shadow,” differentiates the genre from the novel, arguing that the cycle involves “active cocreation on the part of the reader” (360). In the introduction to Modern American Short Story Sequences Gerald Kennedy outlines the American contributions to the genre and his article “Toward a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle” discusses the different ways connections between the stories can be created. In The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition, Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris suggest that the genre shares more similarities with the novel than the short story or the collection of short stories and should be viewed as a contemporary version of the traditional novel. 4. Many other cognitive narratologists also suggest the significance of utilizing reception theory in conjunction with more recent narratological theories. For example, Jens Eder in his book chapter “Narratology and Cognitive Reception Theories” uses the intersection of these theories to determine the ways that texts can use language structures to anticipate specific cognitive and emotional processes (291). Additionally, Manfred Jahn, in his book chapter “‘Speak, friend, and enter’: Garden Paths, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Narratology,” suggests that placing emphasis on how reactions are created and not just on what the reactions are will allow narratology to expand its scope to include a greater focus on the role of the reader (168).

ABSTRACTS

Cet article explore le rôle du lecteur dans le cycle de nouvelles, en se concentrant sur ce que Gerald Lynch nomme « le récit de retour ». Y sont exploités les récits de retour d’Olive Kitteridge d’Elizabeth Strout et Kissing in Manhattan de David Schickler afin d’expliquer l’importance de ces

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récits pour la structure des cycles. S’inspirant d’éléments de narratologie cognitive ainsi que des théories de Wolfgang Iser sur l’implication du lecteur dans le texte, cet article étudie le rôle de l’absence dans ces deux cycles. L’emploi d’absences à motifs tout au long d’Olive Kitteridge et Kissing in Manhattan amène à une reconsidération du texte dans son ensemble dans le récit de retour. Cette analyse montre dans quelle mesure l’absence forme un élément structurel décisif du cycle de nouvelles contemporain.

AUTHORS

REBECCA CROSS Rebecca Cross is a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her dissertation focuses on the contemporary short story cycle and the techniques used to engage the reader. Her research explores the way that the specific structure of a short story cycle can encourage the reader to become an integral part of the meaning of the text.

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“The Young and Romantic Will Like It”: The Abolitionist Short Stories of Lydia Maria Child

Fiona McWilliam

1 The title of this essay derives from a letter written by Lydia Maria Child to friend Maria Weston Chapman regarding “The Quadroons,” Child’s literary contribution to that year’s The Liberty Bell, an annual anti-slavery gift book for which Chapman served as editor. In her letter, Child tells Chapman, “You and [Chapman’s sister] Caroline will laugh at it heartily, and even little Anne will give it a patte de velour; but the young and romantic will like it” (Collected Correspondence 12/292). Carolyn L. Karcher reads these comments as evidence that Child “wryly predicted” her “pathetic tale of victimized racial outcasts” would capture “the sympathies of readers who wanted romance, not dreary fact” (“Rape” 71). Focusing heavily on what she considers to be the story’s failure and Child’s apparent acknowledgment of that failure in her letter to Chapman, Karcher writes that the story “did not reflect the political consciousness” of antislavery activists—that is, the story’s “romantic” aspects undermined its political potency (“Rape” 64). The focus of my own essay, however, is not on the success or failure of “The Quadroons”; rather, I look at Child’s self-reflective comments as an entry point to discuss the affective strategies surrounding her abolitionist writings. By “affective strategy,” I mean both an awareness of audience and an intent to encourage sympathetic identification between reader and text. Child’s statement makes clear that her story does not align with her personal aesthetics or even her usual authorial voice: she continues, “It sounds, in sooth, more like a girl of sixteen, than a woman of forty” (Collected Correspondence 12/292). But at the same time, the tale is directed not at abolitionist stalwarts like Chapman or Child herself but at those who will be drawn in by the story’s “much love-making” (12/292) and will, hopefully, embrace its abolitionist message. Furthermore, Child rightly recognizes that “the reader” is not a conglomerate but is composed of myriad individuals with myriad tastes.1 “The Quadroons” is directed at a particular audience by utilizing particular tropes and techniques.

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2 Because Child’s use of sentimentality is clearly not mere thoughtless parroting of literary expectations, it becomes apparent that her awareness of convention indicates not only an attempt to prevent reader rejection but also to reach a different type of reader than those like Chapman (whom Child expects to laugh at the tale) and potentially spur those different readers to action. Child, for example, had a history of indifference to earning the approbation of literary aesthetes as well as to the idea of literary popularity. Her political writings resulted in public scorn and broken friendships. Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) famously resulted in the Athenaeum cancelling her membership and in the loss of the wide readership she had gained through her popular and mainstream writings (Karcher, “Introduction” 14). But at the same time, Child recognized that the anti- slavery movement could not be effective without a growing number of supporters.

3 Print media provided one such way to reach a large number of people, and as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Child sought to do just that. However, her editorial judgment was apparently not political enough for the (notably fractured) abolitionist community; while serving as editor, she lost the support of even her close friends, including Maria Weston Chapman, when she refused to use the paper as a mouthpiece for abolitionist in-fighting.2 In an 1843 letter to close friend and fellow abolitionist Ellis Gray Loring, Child reiterates that she took the position with the Standard “expressly on conditions that I would have nothing to do with fighting and controversy” and that as editor her concern laid “more at reaching the people than at pleasing abolitionists”—a sentiment that surely played into her fiction in addition to her editorial judgment (Selected Letters 193, emphasis in original). While there is no question that the Standard was always an anti-slavery paper, Karcher explains that Child “had formulated her editorial policy precisely with the aim of recruiting subscribers from this pivotal group [middle-of-the-road abolitionists] and then cultivating a true abolitionist consciousness in them” (First Woman 278). Overall, Child seems exasperated with those who, in her opinion, “ought to have sense enough to be aware; that they cannot have a paper to fight with abolitionists of all stamps but their own, and at the same time to find its way generally among the people” (Selected Letters 194, emphasis in original). Though she had only taken up editorship in 1841, she resigned by 1843—a decision that signaled a long break from abolitionist politics altogether (Karcher, First Woman 290-94).

4 Even when Child’s earlier writings (such as her widely successful novel Hobomok) won her popularity with what she referred to as the “Boston fashionables,” her description of the limelight was not exactly positive. For instance, she describes life amongst Boston literati to literary critic Rufus Griswold in a letter from 1846 as being trapped “like a butterfly under a gilded glass tumbler; I can do nothing but pant despairingly, or beat all the feathers off my wings, thumping against the glittering wall of limitations” (Selected Letters 232). We see a continued indifference to mass popularity when she responds to an 1859 letter from Mrs. Mason, wife of Senator James M. Mason of Virginia, in which Mason attacks Child for her support of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and threatens a boycott of Child’s works in the Southern states. In her response, which was published in that year’s Liberator, Child states that since publishing her Appeal, “I have labored too earnestly for the slave to be agreeable to slave-holders. Literary popularity was never a paramount object with me, even in my youth; and, now that I am old, I am utterly indifferent to it. But, if I cared for the exclusion you threaten, I should at least have the consolation of being exiled with honorable company” (Letters

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135-136). In regularly noting a difference between popularity and the potential to impact readers in a political direction, she makes clear that literary reputation is of much less importance than laboring “earnestly for the slave.”

5 In light of Child’s commentary on her own political and artistic priorities, this essay explores Child’s use of affective strategies in “The Black Saxons” (1841), one of her early abolitionist short stories from The Liberty Bell. Unlike Child’s other two Liberty Bell stories from the 1840s, her romantically pleasing “The Quadroons” (1842) and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes: A Faithful Sketch” (1843), “The Black Saxons” has received little attention from scholars and critics. The two more popular stories have drawn interest for their use of the “tragic mulatta” type, for their depiction of the sexual exploitation of female slaves, and for their depiction of violence against the black body. While “The Black Saxons” is unarguably less sensational and more concerned with the development of its white protagonist than the African American characters, who fall into the background, the story provides fascinating insights into the workings of sympathetic identification. Child’s fiction appears almost a decade before Harriet Beecher Stowe famously tells her readers to “see, then, to your sympathies in this matter!”—that is, the matter of slavery—by “feel[ing] right” (452). But where Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin utilizes scenes of suffering, or what Marianne Noble calls “sentimental wounding” (131-32), to make readers feel for the slave by re-experiencing their own pain (that is, the reader’s own pain), Child resorts to a different strategy, which is less about feeling as or like the object of sympathy and more focused on directing readers’ sentiment outside the text as well as outside the self.

“Being on a kindling volcano, without knowing it”

6 In many ways “The Black Saxons” can be summarized as a story absent of action. The narrative is set around Mr. Duncan, a South Carolina slaveholder who spends his free time reading about his once-great Saxon ancestors who, thanks to the Normans, were reduced to “base Saxon churls” (20). So preoccupied is he with reading Augustin Thierry’s History of the Norman Conquest that he is oblivious to the fact that he has written every single one of his slaves a pass to attend the same Methodist evening meeting. Though described as a “proverbially indulgent master,” Mr. Duncan ultimately becomes suspicious of this newfound religiosity amongst his slaves and one night decides to follow them to one of their meetings. What he discovers is a slave master’s worst nightmare. Rather than a religious meeting, Duncan finds a large group of slaves, including those from neighboring plantations, debating the question “what shall we do with our masters?”—in other words, should they kill their white masters (31). But despite this momentous discovery, Child does not provide her readers with an equally dramatic response, for after much debate, the slaves decide against the use of violence and will therefore not murder their masters. Mr. Duncan, though startled by the discovery of the meeting, remembers his Saxon ancestors, who fought fruitlessly against their Norman conquerors, and in making a parallel between the two groups ultimately decides to not report the slaves for plotting an insurrection. Child writes that, despite the fact that Mr. Duncan chooses not to report the slaves, his moment of realization “did not, so far as I ever heard, lead to the emancipation of his bondmen” (43).

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7 Much of the scant critical conversation surrounding the “The Black Saxons” centers on the story’s use of Saxon history, the depiction of insurrection, and the various implications of slave violence. Karcher comments that the story both “refuses the myth of the loyal contented menial” and serves as a reminder that the slave, like Duncan’s Saxon heroes, remains “ready to lead a strike for liberty” (Karcher, First Woman 333, 335). María Carla Sánchez approaches the story from a different angle, instead focusing on the story’s depiction of reading, specifically Mr. Duncan’s reading of Saxon history, as “crucial to both a civil society and the reform of its uncivil flaws” (171). Sánchez argues that it is Duncan’s habit of historical reading that enables him to make a sympathetic connection with the would-be insurrectionists, which directly results in Duncan’s decision to not report the slaves. For Sánchez, though it does not result in Duncan freeing his slaves, it is a “small moment of mercy” (171).

8 In “The Black Saxons,” Child provides a theory of sympathetic identification between the white reader and the slave subject, played out through Mr. Duncan and the slaves, who question whether violence is necessary to ensure their freedom. Through the character of Duncan, Child provides a window into the affective processes of a man who, like the reader, encounters the slave subject not simply as “slave” but as an individual with desires and motivations. But, like the reader, Duncan’s reaction to this encounter is not a given: not all who read a sad story will weep, not all who recognize the humanity of the slave will act. Using third person limited narration, focalized through Mr. Duncan (that is, up until the second to last paragraph, where the perspective shifts to the first person), the text grants the reader access to Duncan’s thoughts and reactions as he attempts to make sense of the actions and motivations of his slaves. In this way, the story’s narrative structure is integral in that it both sets up and dictates the ways in which Mr. Duncan interacts and identifies with the slave characters. Meanwhile, the slave figures themselves remain distanced; the reader encounters the various African American characters at the same time as Mr. Duncan. But there are no prolonged scenes that allow the reader to get to know any of the black characters as individuals. When Duncan listens to the characters debating violence, the reader is listening in beside him. Child walks the reader, step by step, through the manner in which Duncan attempts to connect or identify with the slave subject.

9 In addition, the limited nature of the text’s perspective is extended to the story’s very title, “The Black Saxons.” Specifically, the title’s relation to the narrative hinges on both Mr. Duncan’s particular background and his interaction with the slaves. Thus, the title is both personal and contextually specific since the slave conspirators are “Black Saxons” not in earnest but only in the mind of Mr. Duncan, to whom Saxon history means a great deal and with which he closely identifies. The title is so contextually dependent, in fact, that it only makes sense in relation to Duncan. Saxon history itself means nothing to the men in their swamp, deciding the direction of their future freedom and not realizing that a white infiltrator is watching them. Nor would a reader without a view inside Duncan’s mind have any idea of the relationship between the slaves and the Saxons.

10 The story’s focus on Mr. Duncan creates a sense of distance between the African American characters and the reader, in that the reader’s view is largely dependent upon Duncan. In this way, Duncan’s identification with the slaves crucially models identification for the reader. Yet the mode of sympathetic identification in the story is layered, complex. Consider, for example, the moment when Duncan realizes that his

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slaves have duped him and the anxiety he feels when he considers the possibility that they are in league with Big-boned Dick, a runaway slave who is said to be the leader of a maroon colony in the nearby swamps. Duncan is initially furious that his slaves are associated with Dick, who is suspected of being responsible for the recent disappearance of food and livestock from the surrounding plantations. But before anger can take hold of Duncan, something strange happens: he is “arrested by a voice within, which […] at once struck up the lively ballad of Robin Hood” (24). “Like Banquo’s ghost, unbidden and unwelcome,” the image of Big-boned Dick comes “into incongruous association with his spontaneous sympathy for Saxon serfs, his contempt for ‘base Saxon churls,’ who submitted to their own fate, and his admiration of the bold outlaws, who lived by plunder in the wild freedom of Saxon forests” (24). Duncan finds himself unexpectedly consumed by associations of Saxon history. But the “incongruous association” he experiences is thoughtless and involuntary; it is both “spontaneous” and fleeting. The image of Big-boned Dick comes into contact with the complex range of emotions Duncan feels toward the historical Saxons: sympathy, contempt and admiration. This moment of realization quickly fades, however. “The admonition of awakened conscience gradually gave place to considerations of personal safety,” writes Child, and even “the skillfullest soldering of casuistry could by no means” fuse Duncan’s Republican sympathies with “the system entailed upon him by his ancestors” (24-25). Though certainly a key moment in the story’s plot, this moment also vitally details the failure of sympathetic identification. Caught off guard both by the surge of emotion and by the fact that it was apparently triggered by the image of a fugitive slave, Duncan is incapable of bridging the gap between the two. He cannot transfer his sympathies to the slave subject—and cannot, therefore, identify with him—because he does not feel for Dick but feels for the Saxons he so reveres. Once Duncan begins to process his own reaction, the potential for sympathy fades.

11 Indeed, once Duncan can consider the implications of his slaves’ actions without the interference of unwanted emotions and associations, he decides to follow his slaves into the swamp, to the so-called religious meeting. In order to avoid discovery, he dons “a complete suit of negro clothes” and “a black mask well fitted to his face” (27). Though within the realm of the story it seems completely logical for Duncan to seek out a disguise, it is at the same time important to pause and consider the implication of Mr. Duncan’s “black mask.” In following his slaves into the swamp Duncan feels his safety, if not his life, is at stake and seeks to protect himself by wearing a disguise. But if we press further, we see there is a duality to the mask (as there is to all masks) in that it becomes a tool for both identification and misrecognition; in other words, the mask prevents Duncan from being identified by his slaves while at the same time it masks his whiteness and identifies him as black to the other meeting-goers. In this moment, then, Duncan looks through his black mask, apparently indistinguishable to his own slaves. But the mask is a disguise that can obscure but cannot alter his identity: while he may look like his slaves he does not share a likeness of sympathy. One can be sure, for instance, that Duncan does not agree with the proposition to kill the masters or “ravish wives and daughters before their eyes, as they have done to us! Hunt them with hounds, as they have hunted us!” (31). But at the same time donning the “black mask” and wearing “negro clothes” grants Duncan access to the slave-controlled space of the swamp and to slave testimony.

12 Child’s theory of sympathetic identification becomes clear here in that the reader, in order to identify with the slave subject, must also wear a “black mask”—sympathy

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demands, as Glenn Hendler writes, that the reader feel simultaneously both like the object of sympathy “but in a way that maintains a degree of difference” and with the object of sympathy “in order to transform partial sameness into identity” (5).3 Yet if sentimental fiction asks readers to imagine themselves both like and with the object of sympathy (in this case the slave), what then does it mean that Mr. Duncan is dressed and masked as a black man as he listens to the various speeches and debates and compares the men to “Robin Hoods”?

13 Although Duncan can put on a black mask to access the testimony of the slaves, he can also take off his mask whenever he chooses. It is interesting that the mask—to Duncan as well as to the reader—is always within reach, easily purchasable. We might, in fact, make a parallel between Duncan’s purchase of the outside markers of black identity and his purchase of black bodies in the slave market. The ease and availability of black identity is itself reminiscent of Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of the fungibility of the captive body, which, according to Hartman, “allows one to make the suffering of the enslaved his/her own” (19). Duncan, as slave owner, of course has access to his slaves’ bodies, but more importantly he functions as the owner and author of his slaves’ identities: he can “[make] the captive body speak the master’s truth” (38) and declare his slaves happy, contented, or troublesome without any need to connect these declarations and their actual psychic states. Hartman extends this analysis to include a (perhaps unexpected) exploration of empathy, which I argue is useful in understanding the dynamic of sympathetic identification in Child’s text. Hartman explains that, “properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better understand the other or ‘the projection of one’s own personality into an object, with the attribution of the object of one’s own emotions’” (19). The problem with empathy has to do with what she calls its “slipperiness”—that is, when we make another’s suffering our own, we begin to feel for ourselves “rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach” (19). This pitfall (or even narcissistic impulse) is a risk present in all moments of empathy, but Hartman argues that it is the commodity status of the slave that makes the issue of empathy so “slippery” in the first place. Hartman continues, “by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery” (19). In other words, when the black body simply becomes a vehicle for white self-exploration, empathetic identification mimics the very dynamics it attempts to undermine. Because the captive body was historically more or less permanently marked as commodity, even moments of empathetic identification where, for example, a white speaker imagines him or herself as a slave, have the power to occlude and supplant the suffering of the other. While Duncan slips on the black mask, enters the swamp, and listens to the first-hand accounts of the slaves, he is indeed shaken by what he sees and makes an attempt to grapple with its meaning, but these experiences do not change the way he understands his relationship to his slaves.

14 As the debate regarding what should be done with the white masters concludes with the decision against the use of violence, Duncan finds himself once more haunted by the echo of Saxon history and, so, filled with questions; he asks himself, “was the place I saw to-night in such wild and fearful beauty, like the haunts of the Saxon Robin Hoods?” (43). Scott Peeples provides a reading of this moment, and suggests that the story’s conclusion “realistically suggests that moral suasion, the empathy symbolized by Duncan’s putting on a black mask, was insufficient. Duncan’s slaves refuse to kill their

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master; Duncan, at least momentarily, identifies with his slaves” (44). But I disagree that putting on a mask enables Duncan to truly empathize, primarily because it is clear that his feelings do not extend directly to the slave. Instead, they are mediated or filtered through “the brave and free-souled Harolds,” the “fair-haired Ediths,” and “Robin Hood and his bold followers” (20). The story of the noble Saxons overtaken by Norman conquerors acts as a type of intertextual conduit for Duncan that allows what could be described as a displacement of sentiment; he does not feel for his slaves (or any of the slaves in the swamp for that matter) but for the enslaved Saxons who act as a stand-in. This is most evident in the moment when Duncan asks himself, “Who shall so balance effects and causes, as to decide what portion of my present freedom sprung from their [the Saxons] seemingly defeated efforts?” (43, emphasis added). Even after this bit of self-reflection, he cannot empathize because he can only understand the significance of the moment in relation to himself; when he wonders how much his “present freedom” resulted from the seemingly hopeless efforts of the Robin Hoods he has read about, he connects his present status with the actions of the past through Thierry’s text. It becomes clear, then, that Duncan does not feel either like or with the slaves but instead is only able to feel in relation to them. After the meeting, Duncan returns to a particular thought that struck him when reading Thierry’s History: “he remembered he had thought that troubled must be the sleep of those who rule a conquered people” (42). This seemingly ominous line, here repeated for the second time in the story, is perhaps less ominous when we consider that Duncan does not seem to fully recognize that he is amongst “those who rule.” Duncan at this point, too, remembers thinking but does not actually think this thought—as Child writes, he “remembered he had thought.” In this way, Duncan accesses a previous sentiment associated with Saxon history but does not seem fully capable of extending and applying it to the black men meeting in the woods.

15 Despite this sustained moment of thought and reflection, Duncan is not significantly moved; according to the narrator, “these cogitations” (43) did not result in the emancipation of his slaves. It is significant, however, that this moment of prolonged reflection is not described in emotional or sympathetic terms; rather Duncan cogitates on the subject before deciding to effectively do nothing. Of course, Child makes clear that Duncan’s inaction still has the potential to effect a type of change—his decision to not report the meeting will prevent the deaths of hundreds of African Americans while at the same time potentially creating a ripple effect that will influence the future of all African Americans. In lieu of freeing his slaves or even reporting the conspirators, Duncan instead “contented himself with advising the magistrates to forbid all meetings among the colored people” (44). Child writes, however, that his decision was not an easy one, that it was rife with “painful conflict between contending feelings and duties” (43). Despite his so-called “painful conflict,” the decision he makes is rather self- serving: it quells his conscience while preserving his economic interests.

16 But how, then, does Duncan’s apparent failure translate to the reader? Child’s own comments might provide particular insight into the affective workings of the story. In a November 1841 letter to Maria Weston Chapman, Child complains of “The Black Saxons” that she “was not satisfied with the motto to that story. I wanted something about being on a kindling volcano, without knowing it,” and adds “If you find anything better, change it” (11/285). The sentiment Child hopes to create is a powerful one; it indicates both a desire to startle, due to its sheer power and magnitude, as well as the desire to encourage movement, action—for what could one do upon discovering a

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“kindling volcano” but get out of its way? Child desires to begin the story with such an ominous “motto,” perhaps forewarning readers of what is to come.

17 Of course the plot of the story similarly depicts Duncan’s realization that all is not well with his seemingly contented slaves and the slave population near the surrounding plantations. Duncan is unable to realize that his own slaves might also be wearing a type of mask. We can refer back to a particularly performative moment when Jack, Duncan’s house slave, asks him “in wheedling tones” whether “massa be so good as gib a pass to go to Methodist meeting?” (21). Duncan takes him at his word and simply warns Jack about staying out late (to which Jack replies “oh no massa”), completely unaware that Jack is deliberating an insurrection that might result in Duncan’s own murder (21). Duncan, as well, seems unaware that Jack is even capable of the act of deliberation. He is completely comfortable with writing pass after pass for his slaves to meet in the woods while at the same time fully absorbed in the thought of Robin Hood and his “bold” followers roaming the free forest, attempting to usurp Norman power— never assuming, of course, that his slaves might have similar motivations as the Saxon rebels. Additionally, it is perhaps ironic that the slaves are metaphorically “unmasked” to Duncan at the same time as Duncan is, himself, wearing his black mask. If we reflect upon Child’s dissatisfaction with the story’s motto, though, it becomes unclear whether she was searching for an epigraph that reflected the story’s plot—that is, Duncan’s discovery—or whether she was looking for one that would engender her audience’s own realization.

18 Yet looking back at her letter to Chapman, we notice that Child’s comment never actually mentions any type of discovery or realization, but rather emphasizes the absence of recognition. We might ask if Duncan, in his failure to not just free his slaves but also to fully sympathize with them, ever really sees the “kindling volcano” stirring beneath his feet. Discovering the meeting and thinking about the Saxons pushes Duncan in contradictory ways: he will not report the slaves who met that night, but he will request more stringent laws regarding slave meetings, thus restricting the already severely limited freedom of the enslaved. It appears that Duncan’s historical perspective—which prompts him to align the history of his Saxon ancestors with the present day reality of those he enslaves—ultimately fails him. He valorizes the Saxons who fought fruitlessly against the Normans, but is unable recognize that his current position is more in line with the Norman conquerors than with the “brave outlaws of the free forest” (20). But his greatest failure might lay in the fact that he attempts to single handedly shape the future of the enslaved without regard to forces larger than himself. For if one such meeting occurs, surely there are others, or have been others, or will be others. Duncan’s (in)action is small, fruitless: he can recognize the trees, but cannot see the forest. On the other hand, the reader can see inside and outside of Duncan’s mind—can comprehend the size and power of the volcano while Duncan, limited to his own perceptions and thoughts, does not even realize the volcano exists.

19 In depicting Duncan’s failure, Child indicates to the reader both the limits of sentiment and the various ways in which sentiment works. Duncan’s displaced sympathy does not prompt him to act in a radical way, and while he likens the missions of the slaves to his Saxon ancestors, he himself does not feel like the slaves. However Duncan’s failure— whether it be a failure to form a sympathetic bond between himself and the slaves, or simple cowardice—makes a pointed statement. The reader has the potential to act as a type of corrective to Duncan, who cannot bridge the gap between himself and the slave,

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not to mention the gap between passive and active empathy. Yet if we consider that Child hopes to create societal change via the private reading experience, we arrive upon the much larger question of how one transforms private sentiment into public action. “The Black Saxons” attempts to move readers in that very direction in its final sentences, where a first-person speaker (the first time this perspective is used) claims the story—which has up until this point functioned under the guise of fiction—is based in fact. Part of Child’s strategy, then, includes a blurring of the line between fact and fiction in her story, in claiming that her (fictional) story has a truthful basis.

Beyond Fact and Fiction

20 The truth claim, or the claim made by an author that the events of a work of fiction are truthful, is not uncommon in abolitionist fiction. These claims go beyond defending the veracity of published works against pro-slavery supporters; indeed, Justine S. Murison writes that abolitionists—“already branded religious enthusiasts and fanatics”— attempted to “eschew these connections through their claims to be sober, realistic writers, not prone to the enthusiasm of the era” (129). Child herself tackles the question of factual fiction and fictional fact in her response to the controversy surrounding the Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (1838) for which prominent American and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier served as amanuensis (a fact that only added fuel to the fire).4 The narrative’s success turned into a scandal when the Alabama Beacon published an editorial challenging its veracity. Accordingly, abolitionist Lewis Tappan issued a public response in the New York-based Emancipator; the Beacon fired back with evidence and the American Anti-Slavery Society ceased printing the narrative that year (Cohen 113-17). Child writes of the on-going controversy in an 18385 letter to Theodore Dwight Weld: “To you and I, who look on the foundations upon which slavery rests, it is of the slightest consequence whether James Williams told the truth or not.” Yet she also concedes that “the doubt thrown on his narrative is doing incalculable mischief” (105, emphasis in original). These remarks are interesting for several reasons. Child admits that, personally, the veracity of Williams’s narrative is inconsequential because —regardless of whether Williams “told the truth”—his narrative speaks to slavery’s violation of “eternal principles, which embrace the rights and happiness of every human being” (105). Her reaction indicates a belief that both fact and fiction have the potential to communicate truth. At the same time, she recognizes that fact is important to the reading public, and that fiction masquerading as fact has the potential for “incalculable mischief,” in that it could potentially result in anti-slavery texts (and the cause as a whole) being dismissed as lies purposely manufactured by radical abolitionists (105).

21 Yet, while a false slave narrative may contain foundations of truth, Child acknowledges that there is an unarguable emotionally persuasive power to fact. Earlier in that same letter, Child relates a story of a slave forced to wear an iron mask with only a few holes bored out for his eyes and mouth because he was suspected of attempting to escape. Child says to Weld, “I have often wished you could collect the variety of instruments of torture used, and deposit them at the A.S. [American Anti-Slavery Society] office. I believe such a collection would do a vast deal of good” (104). But even these “instruments of torture”—which seemingly serve as incontrovertible evidence of

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slavery’s barbarism—do not have the power to end slavery, but only to do a “deal of good” in the ongoing fight. Like most things, fact must be utilized properly in order to make the greatest emotional impact.

22 Given her stated ambivalence, it may seem strange, then, that Child chooses to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction in her stories, especially when we consider her recognition of the mischief that could follow such a move. I argue, though, that understanding this move is critical to grasping Child’s depictions of sympathetic identification. The final sentence of “The Black Saxons” has a first-person narrator assuring readers that she has “told it [the story] truly,” with only the “additional garniture of language and the adoption of fictitious names” (“Saxons” 191), which moves the story and its characters from the realm of fiction to the realm of fact. Nowhere else in the story does the narrator make any such claim—and indeed nowhere else in the story is the first-person narrator present but in the final two paragraphs. Child uses this tactic again, albeit in varying forms, in “The Quadroons” and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes,” her two other stories that appeared in the 1842 and 1843 issues of The Liberty Bell. “The Quadroons” ends with the narrator’s famous declaration, “Reader, do you complain that I have written fiction? Believe me, scenes like these are of no unfrequent occurrence at the South”6 (“Quadroons” 141). Though the narrator here does not claim the story is “fact,” the narrator also refuses to concede that it is wholly fiction. Indeed, the narrator’s voice asks the reader to “believe” in the truth of the story. “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes,” a story about the rape and murder of a slave woman named Rosa and the execution of her lover, George, ends with fictional newspaper accounts of the story’s tragedy: the Georgia paper that announces, “The black demon [George] was caught and hung; and hanging was too good for him” and the Northern paper which merely “copied this version” (“Pleasant Homes” 160). Here Child questions the very nature of the evidence we rely on for fact. She writes that despite these “official” accounts, “no one was found to tell” of Rosa’s rape and murder, and “not one recorded the heroism” of George’s actions: “His very name was left unmentioned; he was only Mr. Dalcho’s slave!” (“Pleasant Homes” 160). Ironically, the only source that “reports” on George and Rosa’s story is “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes”; therefore the voice of the narrator becomes inherently more reliable than the newspapers, and the line between fact and fiction becomes difficult to distinguish.

23 It is no coincidence that the move from fiction to fact occurs at the close of each of these stories. Up until the individual conclusions, each story’s universe is established and stable. However, Child strategically utilizes the final paragraph in each story to disrupt that universe by alerting readers to the fact that the story’s universe is apparently the same one in which the reader exists. Such a move functions to displace the readers’ sympathies, moving them from the fictional-textual realm to the political- social realm. That is, before this point, readers feel for Rosalie and Xarifa, or Rosa and George, as tragic characters in tragic plots. Child, though, effectively pulls the rug out from under the reader by connecting these stories to the real world. In doing so, she attempts to make clear that the reader should not merely feel for the characters per se but feel for all those whom the characters represent. If the reader feels for and identifies with, say, George, then s/he feels for the real slaves who exist in the readers’ (real) world. To go back to Child’s comment regarding “The Black Saxons,” it is the reader who realizes they are “on a kindling volcano,” that this oncoming event is not contained within the pages of a story but outside his or her own front door.

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24 The facto-fictional legacy of “The Black Saxons” extends beyond its initial publication in The Liberty Bell.7 The same year as it appeared in the Bell it was reprinted in several newspapers, including the Liberator. In 1846, it appeared in Child’s short story collection Fact and Fiction; and in 1855, it was republished in African American abolitionist William C. Nell’s The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, noted for being “the first comprehensive work of African American history” (Eiselein 311). More curious, though, is the fact that the story appeared in the July 25, 1861 issue of the Independent—exactly 20 years after its original appearance in The Liberty Bell—with the following prefatory note from the newspaper’s editors: The following story, which is very suggestive at this crisis, is strictly true. The Southern gentleman, who visited the swamp in disguise, and heard the speeches of the slaves, repeated them, as nearly as he could recollect, to a friend of Mrs. Child, and she committed them to writing. The incidents occurred during the war of 1812, when the probability of the British landing on our coasts was much talked of. (6)

25 Though it is not clear whether this editorial note was inserted with Child’s permission, there is some evidence that it (or at least the sentiment) may have been approved by Child herself, who wrote to Independent editor Theodore Tilton regarding the story’s publication: I agree with Mrs. Stowe that the publication of the story at this time will help the formation of public opinion in the right direction. … It seems to me very desirable to manufacture public opinion fast now, that it may be in readiness to make suitable use of the crisis, which the madness of the South, under the guiding hand of Divine Providence, is bringing upon itself. (389, emphasis in original)

26 At the time Child agreed to have the story appear in the Independent, Harriet Beecher Stowe was regularly writing for the paper and one of the paper’s founding editors was Stowe’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher. By this time, Child had witnessed the astounding success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the potential for fiction to sway millions of readers. Furthermore, at the time of the story’s re-publication in the paper, the country had been at war for three months and the Union had very recently suffered a startling defeat at the Battle of Bull Run—a mere four days before the story’s publication.

27 In light of the shifting cultural context, perhaps simply hoping readers would be moved was not enough; perhaps insisting on the story’s veracity through the prefatory note and the concluding paragraph was a type of last-ditch attempt to grab readers’ attention. In her letter to Tilton, Child acknowledges the necessity of garnering public support as well as the power of fiction to encourage and create that support. Like her comment almost twenty years previous regarding her work’s success among “the young and romantic,” Child acknowledges not only the author’s power to reach audiences but more importantly the author’s potential to influence how the reading public thinks. Child straightforwardly states that she wishes to “manufacture” public opinion—that is, to both create and shape affect in a way desirable to the antislavery cause. Interestingly, in her comment to Tilton, Child does not appear to distinguish between public opinion and sentiment, though few would consider the two to be interchangeable terms. We could imagine, however, that at this point in the country’s history, “The Black Saxons” is not needed to make its readers aware of the “kindling volcano,” but instead to direct readers to the appropriate action. Of course, as “The Black Saxons” demonstrates, not all who read will feel, and not all who feel will act. In Mr. Duncan, and in the reading audience in general, the productive power of sympathy is not always a guarantee.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Child, Lydia Maria. “The Black Saxons.” The Liberty Bell. Ed. Maria Weston Chapman. Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, 1841. 19-44. Print.

---. “The Black Saxons.” The Independent … Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts 13.660 (25 July 1861): 6. American Periodicals. Print.

---. The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817-1880. Eds. Patricia G. Holland, Milton Meltzer, and Francine Krasno. American Philosophical Society. Microform.

---. Letter to Ellis Gray Loring. 6 Mar. 1843. Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880. 192-97. Print.

---. Letter to Maria Weston Chapman. 21 Nov. 1841. The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817-1880. (11/285). Microform.

---. Letter to Maria Weston Chapman. 1 Dec. 1841. The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817-1880. (12/292). Microform.

---. Letter to Mrs. M.J.C. Mason. 17 Dec. 1859. Letters of Lydia Maria Child with a Biographical Introduction by John G. Whittier and an Appendix by Wendell Phillips. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883.123-37. Print.

---. Letter to Rufus Griswold. Oct. 1846. Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880. 231-33. Print.

---. Letter to Theodore Dwight Weld. 29 Dec. 1838. Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880. 103-05. Print.

---. Letter to Theodore Tilton. 21 July 1861. Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880. 389-90. Print.

---. Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880. Eds. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1982. Print.

---. “The Quadroons.” The Liberty Bell. Ed. Maria Weston Chapman. Boston: Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Fair, 1842. 115-41. Print.

---. “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes: A Faithful Sketch.” The Liberty Bell. Ed. Maria Weston Chapman. Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, 1843. 147-60. Print.

---. The Stars and Stripes: A Melo-Drama. Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery. New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2005. 443-75. Print.

Cohen, Laura Langer. The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. Print.

Eiselein, Gregory. “Nell, William C. (1816-1874).” The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 310-11. Print.

Gardner, Eric. Introduction to The Stars and Stripes. Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery. New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2005. 437-40. Print.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

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Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiment: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001. Print.

Karcher, Carolyn. L. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. Print.

---. “Introduction.” A Lydia Maria Child Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1-19. Print.

---. “Rape, Murder, and Revenge in ‘Slavery’s Pleasant Homes.’” The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America. Ed. Shirley Samuels. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 58-72. Print.

Lehuu, Isabelle. Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. Print.

Leonard, Thomas C. “Antislavery, Civil Rights, and Incendiary Material.” Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives. Ed. Jeremy D. Popkin. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1995. 115-35. Print.

Murison, Justine S. The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.

Peeples, Scott. “Love and Theft in the Carolina Lowcountry.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 60.2 (2004): 33-56. Print.

Sánchez, María Carla. Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth- Century America. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2008. Print.

Stewart, Anna. “Revising ‘Harriet Jacobs’ for 1865.” American Literature 82.4 (2010): 701-24. Print.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

Weld, Theodore Dwight. American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. New York: the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839. Print.

NOTES

1. This goal could be connected to the function of gift books—ornamented and aesthetically pleasing books that were meant to be given as rather than purchased for oneself. Since these books were given away (or at least intended to be), there was potential to reach a different type of reader. According to Isabelle Lehuu, “the act of offering giftbooks was part of an economy of sentiment, an exchange of beautiful luxury goods for memory and love” (78). In this way, the sentimental power of the gift book is not limited to the texts within but exists within the book itself, which served as what Lehuu calls a “leaflet of memory” (76). 2. Child felt pressure from “Garrisonian” abolitionists, or abolitionists who aligned themselves with Liberator editor (including her friend Chapman) to use the paper to denounce those who opposed Garrisonian politics and policies. Compared to the Standard, Garrison’s Liberator had a much smaller circulation. Child, who sought to increase the reading audience of the Standard, feared that using the paper to publicize abolitionist in-fighting might alienate both current and future readers, reduce circulation numbers and ultimately, like the Liberator, “repel all but a limited number” (Selected Letters 194). 3. We can also make a connection between this moment, in which wearing the “black mask” enables sympathetic identification, and Child’s only dramatic work, The Stars and Stripes: A Melo- Drama (1858). Like “The Black Saxons,” Child’s drama was published in the abolitionist gift book

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The Liberty Bell. Eric Gardner notes that it “may have been designed for either or both closet drama/novelistic reading or small amateur (family or social) theatricals” (440). The play, whether performed or read aloud within the space of the home, asks those participating to (like Duncan) “wear a black mask” by both performing the roles of and in imagining themselves as the slave characters. Furthermore, that Child’s “melo-drama” appears seventeen years after the publication of “The Black Saxons” perhaps suggests a sustained belief in (or prolonged hope for) the power of sympathetic identification as a tool to change the hearts and minds of the public. 4. For more on the Williams controversy as well as an interesting take on the racial politics of fabrication, see Cohen (101-32). 5. The very next year, Weld published American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, which uses southern newspapers and first-hand accounts from slave owners, clergymen, overseers, and professors for evidence. Weld goes beyond merely convincing readers of slavery’s evils: “Reader, we know whereof we affirm, we have weighed it well; more and worse WE WILL PROVE” through the “scores and hundreds of eye witnesses” (9, emphasis in original). American Slavery turned out to be immensely popular; according to Thomas C. Leonard, it sold 100,000 copies in its first year, making it “the most popular item on antislavery lists until Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in 1852” (121). 6. The final line referenced above only appears in the version published in The Liberty Bell. The version of the story in Child’s short story collection, Fact and Fiction (1846), has the last line removed. 7. In addition to the above, a thoroughly revised version of the story appeared in The Freedman’s Book with a new title, “A Meeting in the Swamp.” The Freedman’s Book, for which Child served as editor, was “developed to help freedmen and women become literate and make a life for themselves in a country still divided over their very status” and included pieces by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Frances E.W. Harper, and Harriet Jacobs (Stewart 701).

ABSTRACTS

Cet article s’intéresse à l’attention portée à l’affect par Lydia Maria Child, écrivaine populaire du XIXe siècle et fervente abolitionniste, dans sa nouvelle peu étudiée « The Black Saxons » (1841), publiée pour la première fois dans le gift book abolitionniste The Liberty Bell. En parcourant les correspondances personnelles et publiques de Child, il apparaît clairement qu’elle était tout à fait consciente de l’impact que la fiction pouvait avoir sur le lectorat américain, impact qui pouvait être utilisé à des fins de réforme sociale. En particulier, “The Black Saxons” offre un point d’entrée productif dans l’utilisation que fait Child de l’affect : la description d’une compassion inhabituelle qui figure dans cette histoire illustre un sentiment arbitré ou filtré, plutôt qu’elle ne dépeint des personnages en proie à la compassion ou à l’empathie. En outre, la stratégie de Child vise à déplacer la compassion du lecteur du domaine fictionnel et textuel vers le domaine politique et social.

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AUTHORS

FIONA MCWILLIAM Fiona McWilliam is lecturer in English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She received her doctorate from Florida State University in 2014. Her work has appeared in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture and Studies in American Fiction.

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Affective Atmospheres in the House of Usher

Dennis Meyhoff Brink

Theoretical introduction

1 We tend to think about emotions in accordance with the basic grammatical structure of our language: when we say that the person X feels Y, we implicitly define emotions as predicates belonging to subjects. In this way our language encourages us to think of emotions as phenomena that belong to subjects—to grammatical subjects as well as to human subjects. My feelings are mine, I might say, and they belong to me, because they occur in me. The presumption of subjective ownership of emotions is thus often intertwined with a presumption of the interiority of emotions. We think of emotions as residing inside our soul, our consciousness, our subconsciousness, our psyche or in some other interior container that is more or less co-extensive with, but not identical to, our body. As Sara Ahmed has put it: “if I was thinking about emotions, I would probably assume that I need to look inwards, asking myself, ‘How do I feel?’ Such a model of emotion as interiority is crucial to psychology […] In a psychological model, I have feelings, and they are mine” (Cultural Politics 8).

2 The rise of affect theory in recent literary and cultural studies can be seen as an attempt to circumvent these prevailing presumptions of interiority and ownership. In fact, the very concept of affect is often foregrounded as part of an endeavor to advance a vocabulary with which we can talk about partly exterior and not entirely ownable aspects of what we have traditionally referred to as “our emotions.” Judith Butler, for example, has argued that we always participate in a “circuit” of affect that is larger than any individual and thus partly exterior to all of us. According to Butler, “our affect is never merely our own: affect is, from the start, communicated from elsewhere […], and we can only feel and claim affect as our own on the condition that we have already been inscribed in a circuit of social affect” (50).

3 As this and similar examples indicate, the concept of affect is often used to mark a distance to our “everyday language of emotion” which, according to Sara Ahmed, “is

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based on the presumption of interiority” (Cultural Politics 8). Here, however, we must be careful not to exaggerate for while it is surely true that some structures and phrases of our everyday language encourage us to think of emotions as interior phenomena, our everyday language of emotion is not based on this presumption in its entirety. We actually often use expressions that refer to affective phenomena residing “in the air,” as the saying goes, rather than in some interior container. This applies, not least, to expressions about the “atmosphere” of a room. For, as Teresa Brennan has asked: “Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’?” (1). As a phrase used in everyday speech, “feeling an atmosphere” refers to the perception of an exterior, shared intensity that surrounds and affects us without belonging to any one of us. When we feel the atmosphere of a room, our bodies register how affect is communicated from elsewhere. Therefore, our everyday language is not only an obstacle to thinking about affects; it is also a resource that is abundant in expressions that bear witness to the fact that we all sometimes perceive affective phenomena as exterior and shared rather than interior and personal.

4 Another expression from everyday speech that refers to the exteriority of affective phenomena is talking about being in a certain mood. As Rita Felski and Susan Fraiman have emphasized, “we think of ourselves as being in a mood (and not the other way around); we are enveloped or assailed by a mood” as if we found ourselves in “a kind of affective atmosphere” (vii). According to Martin Heidegger, such enveloping moods, or such affective atmospheres, are neither optional nor transient. On the contrary, as human beings we are always already in some mood or another. Heidegger could therefore note, “it seems as if, so to speak, a mood is in each case already there, like an atmosphere, in which we are steeped and by which we are thoroughly determined. It not only seems as if this were so, it is so” (qtd. in Dreyfus 171).

5 Following Heidegger’s association of moods and atmospheres, we can note that just as there is no moodless way of being, there are no atmosphere-free environments. As inhabitants of urban environments, we move through a series of perceptible atmospheres every day. While one atmosphere prevails in the workplace, another prevails at home, and a third in the theater. What Heidegger described as Dasein’s being-in-the-world (53ff.), we may therefore now, by dint of contemporary affect theory, translate into our bodies’ being-in-atmospheres. For as bodily beings we always already find ourselves in some atmosphere or another. As Lauren Berlant has emphasized, our “bodies are continuously busy judging their environments and responding to the atmospheres in which they find themselves” (15). This does not imply that we are always conscious about our atmospheric conditions or know how they affect us. Often atmospheres only emerge in our consciousness when we recall a certain situation in which a particular atmosphere prevailed. But we only have such memories because our bodies registered these atmospheres while we were in them, i.e. because our bodies were busy judging and responding to them.

6 Although we are always immersed in atmospheres that affect our mood, most of us find it difficult to describe the precise character of a certain atmosphere or to explain exactly how it affects us. According to Peter Sloterdijk, this is so because “we live in a culture that is practically incapable of talking about […] the atmospheres in which we move” (Sonne 142, my trans.). He has argued that European culture—and we can safely expand this to hold for Western culture in general—is characterized by a comprehensive oblivion of atmospheres:

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Because the nature of atmospheres is neither of the same kind as that of objects nor as that of information (and because atmospheres seemed impossible to master), they were left aside by the ancient as well as the modern European culture of rationality in its long march into the objectivization and informationalization of all things and states of affairs. (Sphären II 145, my trans.)

7 Due to this leaving aside of the atmospheres in which we move, we have no tradition, at least no long tradition, for atmospherology. Nevertheless, at the margins of our Western “culture of rationality,” numerous literary works have examined the characteristics of shared atmospheres, described what makes up their “tone” or “color,” considered how they are generated and circulated, and narrativized the ways in which they affect the people they envelop and assail. In a culture where the examination of our atmospheric conditions has generally been left aside, literature may therefore turn out to be a treasure chest of atmospherological insights.

8 Although we can find insights about enveloping moods and affective atmospheres in literary genres as diverse as the epic of Dante and the realist novels of Balzac, short stories seem, due to their very brevity, to be particularly disposed to highlight and examine shared atmospheres. Compared to the novel, the short story is not particularly well suited for representing the psychological “depth” or development of a character. As Charles E. May has noted, “the very shortness of the form prohibits the realistic presentation of character by extensive detail” (176). Knowing this, writers of short stories have mostly invested their ingenuity in other aspects of narrative. According to Susan Garland Mann, this applies to the short story cycle as well. She has thus observed that “as far as character is concerned, there is much less emphasis on a protagonist in the short story cycle than is generally the case in other fiction” (xii). Rather than describing the depth or development of a protagonist, short stories and short story cycles tend to describe particular situations—mostly shared and affectively charged situations—in which some crucial event occurs. Rather than observing the inner emotions of a single character, they attend to the affective circumstances of more characters.1 Like affect theory, short stories are generally more interested in intersubjective vibrations, shared atmospheric conditions, or circuits of social affect, than in the private emotions of a solitary subject. For this reason, many short stories and short story cycles will undoubtedly be propitious objects for literary analyses inspired by affect theory.

9 The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is a propitious object for such an analysis. Theories on affects and atmospheres are—this is my basic thesis in the following—extraordinarily productive for an analysis of Poe’s story: on the one hand they can help us understand the many descriptions of affective atmospheres, and, on the other hand, the text itself can help us develop new concepts and revise existing ones in order to contribute to the ongoing theorization of affects and atmospheres. Apart from affect theory and new phenomenology, I have included some Poe studies focusing on atmospheric phenomena, although they have generally been less helpful in this specific context— not because Poe scholars have failed to notice the atmosphere enshrouding the House of Usher, but because they have neither had nor developed the conceptual tools necessary to theorize it.2

10 In the following, I will make use of related concepts such as affect, atmosphere, mood, and climate, and propose new concepts such as affective emission, affective ecosystem, and affective possession. This profusion of concepts has two main reasons: first, some

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concepts are simply more accurate or helpful than others in specific contexts; second, we need to expand our critical vocabulary in order to overcome the incapability of talking about atmospheres. Only such an expansion can help mend the lack of a “cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect” to which Brian Massumi, not unlike Sloterdijk, has pointed (27).

11 In this specific context, the concept of “atmosphere” has turned out to be particularly productive. Not only because Poe’s story explicitly refers to the “atmosphere” of the House of Usher, but also because the term “atmosphere” refers unambiguously to the kind of shared, exterior phenomenon under investigation in Poe’s story, whereas a term like “mood,” according to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, can also refer to “an inner feeling so private it cannot be precisely circumscribed” (3). Furthermore, the phenomenon under investigation in Poe’s story is, strictly speaking, an atmosphere rather than an affect. For although the two concepts share a family resemblance, they are not identical: an atmosphere is confined to a specific location and has an unbroken spatial extension, whereas an affect can be more dispersed and circulate via signs pertaining to specific groups whose members are scattered.

12 Unsurprisingly, my focus on the atmospheric circumstances in Poe’s story implies that several themes will be left aside. For example, the following essay neither interprets the entombment of Madeline Usher nor tries to explain why the House of Usher falls in the end. Instead, it starts out by examining the narrator’s descriptions of the atmosphere that pervades the House of Usher (II) and then investigates the ways in which he is affected by it and how he tries to identify its sources (III). Next, it demonstrates that although the narrator turns out to be sensitive to the atmospheres of artworks (IV), he rejects the other main character, Roderick Usher’s, mystic interpretation of the atmosphere as evidence of the sentience of things (V). Finally, it argues that the narrator cannot express his growing feeling of being possessed by the atmosphere in a disenchanted, scientific language (VI), and thus concludes that Poe’s story mirrors a contemporary conflict between a disenchanted, scientific worldview and a re-enchanting, mystic worldview, neither of which were able to understand the nature of affective atmospheres (VII).

The atmosphere of the House of Usher

13 To begin with, we may observe that “The Fall of the House of Usher,” like most short stories, does not describe its characters in extensive detail.3 The three characters—the unnamed homodiegetic narrator, his boyhood friend Roderick Usher, and Roderick’s twin sister Madeline—are all rather thinly sketched, and we hardly get any information about their “inner life.” Although the narrator does tell about his impressions and the feelings they evoke in him, he only tells about his impressions of the present situation, i.e. he only describes his bodily responses to the affective atmosphere in which he finds himself. The two other characters, Roderick and Madeline, are both observed from the personal point of view of the narrator, so we have no privileged access to their inner life. Instead of describing the depth of its characters, however, Poe’s story focuses on the affective atmosphere in which they are all immersed. This is undeniably a central theme right from the beginning. Thus, as the narrator, at the beginning of the story, approaches “the melancholy House of Usher” (397), in which he intends to stay for

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“some weeks” (398) in order to visit Roderick Usher, he immediately registers the atmosphere that seems to hover over the place: About the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity―an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn―a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. (399-400)

14 Occurring at the very beginning of the story, this description brings a phenomenon which mostly exists as a faintly registered background into the foreground—a maneuver that is reinforced by the conspicuous repetition of the word “atmosphere.” Usually, atmospheres are background phenomena. According to Sloterdijk, they constitute a “mute background ambience” as long as they are not made explicit (Sphären III 65, my trans.). 4 Unlike sudden emotions of, for instance, fear or rage, atmospheres can easily exist without coming to our attention. Similar to Sianne Ngai’s descriptions of “moods like irritation and anxiety,” atmospheres “are defined by a flatness or ongoingness” that is “less dramatic” than instinctive emotional responses to, for example, immediate danger or obvious injustice (7). According to Martha Nussbaum, we react instantaneously to objects that cause, for instance, fear or rage, and she has therefore claimed that emotions are “closely connected with action” (135). Atmospheres, however, are less dramatic, less object-oriented, and less goal-directed than the emotions Nussbaum examines. They do not call on any specific action. Instead, as a background ambience, they linger on and seep into you. Hence, the atmosphere does not make the narrator act in any particular way. At first, he just registers and describes the melancholic, gloomy, gothic atmosphere that seems to hang over the place. Rather than giving it a name and adding it to the catalogue of classic emotions, he associates it with multiple adjectives that point to its tone and color: decayed, gray, silent, pestilent, mystic, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

15 Rather than being directed at objects, this multifarious atmosphere is generated by objects. The “pestilent and mystic vapor” that enshrouds the House of Usher is not a passing cloud but a phenomenon that continuously “reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn.” The atmosphere surrounding the House of Usher is thus confined to specific objects and a specific place and therefore has a relatively well-defined spatial extension. Although it may not have a clearly demarcated border, it nonetheless distinguishes an inside from an outside: it is “peculiar” to the “mansion and domain” and “their immediate vicinity” and has “no affinity with the air of heaven.” It constitutes a specific air region or pneumatic zone which is defined by a prevailing mood. Poe’s description thus seems to anticipate Gernot Böhme’s definition of atmospheres as “spatial carriers of moods” which “fill the space with a feeling tone, somewhat like a fog” (22, 29, my trans.).

16 The vaporous atmosphere that surrounds the House of Usher is paralleled by a less vaporous but equally object-generated atmosphere inside the house. The atmospheres outside and inside may be separated by the walls of the house but they seem to be identical in kind. One continuous atmosphere seems to pervade everything. Thus, after the narrator has entered the House of Usher, a valet conducts him to a room which he describes in the following manner: The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. […] Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around […]. Dark draperies hung

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upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all. (401)

17 Inside the House of Usher, the atmosphere is generated by manmade things: draperies, furniture, books, and instruments bathed in “feeble gleams of encrimsoned light.” We usually think of such things as self-contained. According to our inherited ontology, things have a certain extension and a number of properties. Certain properties however, in particular so-called secondary properties such as smell, color, and sound, transcend the extension of the things to which they belong. This is what Böhme has called “the ecstasy of things” (31, my trans.). We might thus think of smell, color, and sound, not as properties contained in a thing, or as co-extensive with that thing, but as ways in which that thing is present in a room and adds tone and color to it. In other words, whenever smells, colors, or sounds (including silence) are present in a room, there are always also affects in the air. Reading Poe’s tale with this in mind, we may think of the objects as generating a certain feeling tone that seems to saturate the air in the room. The smell of the dark draperies, the color of tattered furniture in the encrimsoned light, and even the absence of sound from the abandoned instruments— all of this adds up to “an air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom” which makes the narrator feel he is breathing “an atmosphere of sorrow.”

Feeling the atmosphere

18 Although neither the outer nor the inner atmosphere of the House of Usher provokes any immediate action on the narrator’s part, this does not imply that they do not affect him. On the contrary, as soon as he approaches the House of Usher, his body begins to judge and respond to the atmosphere in which he finds himself. He describes how “with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit […] There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart” which “unnerved me” (397). His heart immediately responds to the atmosphere as if it was a suspended string that was touched by it—a metaphor that is suggested by the opening epigraph by Pierre- Jean de Béranger: “Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne” (his heart is a suspended lute; as soon as it is touched, it resounds).

19 The German word Stimmung—“of which the English ‘mood’ is but a pale and one- dimensional equivalent,” according to Fredric Jameson (38)—implies this meaning: the connected verb stimmen thus means to tune an instrument as well as to put somebody in a certain mood. When used about humans, stimmen, and especially gestimmt werden (to become tuned or to be put in at certain mood), suggests that we are like suspended strings that resound in a certain tone color as soon as they are struck and begin to vibrate. Some of this may be captured in the English term “attunement” which is sometimes used to translate Stimmung although it has somewhat stronger connotations of harmony and accord than the German word.

20 Far from being harmonious, however, and from being associated with any aesthetic enjoyment, the atmosphere into which the narrator enters assaults and unnerves him. He is pervaded and overpowered by it. He does not even feel the “delightful horror” which for Edmund Burke was the “truest test of the sublime” and occurred if one was at “certain distances” to a terrifying object, so that one did not feel threatened by it (24,

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86). There is nothing delightful about the “terror” (399) the narrator feels. On the contrary, he is overpowered by a “dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime” (397). Far from being an object of aesthetic enjoyment, the atmosphere hits his body and evokes a kind of mimetic response in which the exterior atmosphere is translated into an interior “iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart.”5 The initiator of the so-called New Phenomenology, Hermann Schmitz, has frequently described such mimetic, bodily responses to felt atmospheres.6 Defining feelings in general as “borderless outpoured atmospheres” (Gegenstand 296, my trans.), he has, for example, suggested the following explanation: Feelings [i.e. borderless outpoured atmospheres] touch by means of bodily impulses which they impose on those who are affected by them. Sorrow, for instance, becomes mine […] by sitting on my chest or depressing me in some other perceptible way. The melancholy or serenity of a landscape becomes my feelings when something in me (one often says: my heart) opens up or shuts off, contracts or expands, in a bodily perceptible way. (Gegenstand 303-4, my trans.).

21 The atmosphere in which Poe’s narrator finds himself affects him in a similar way: it seems to be an exterior intensity or force that flows into him, turns his blood to ice (“there was an iciness”), makes his heart heavy (“a sinking”), and nauseates or infects him (“a sickening”). Like sorrow that sits on one’s chest or melancholy that makes one’s heart contract, the atmosphere of the House of Usher has a bodily perceptible influence on the narrator in spite of its vague, airy, impalpable character. This may not be easy to explain within the framework of a culture of rationality—to the narrator it appears to be “a mystery all insoluble” (397)—but the perceptible influence of the atmosphere is nonetheless undeniable.

22 While the narrator is deeply affected by the atmosphere he enters, Roderick Usher, who has lived in it his entire life, is thoroughly determined by it. It even appears to have had a physical impact on his appearance. The narrator, who has not seen him for “many years” (398), registers that he has altered “terribly” (401): the “now ghastly pallor of the skin,” the “miraculous lustre of the eye,” and “the silken hair” with its “wild gossamer texture” makes it impossible for the narrator to “connect this Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity” (402). Roderick ascribes his terrible condition to the “condensation of an atmosphere” which, he claims, had resulted “in that silent yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of , and which made him what I now saw him―what he was” (408, emphasis added). As the word “influence” indicates, Roderick feels that something has “flown into him” from the outside. This is what Sara Ahmed has called an “outside in” model of emotion (Cultural Politics 9), and what is going on when we “feel an atmosphere.” The reverse model, however, which Ahmed calls an “inside out” model of emotion (Cultural Politics 9), is also at work in the House of Usher. After the narrator for some time has tried to alleviate the melancholy that tortures Roderick, he gives up this endeavor because he realizes that Roderick, far from just being a passive victim of the influence from the atmosphere, also contributes to generating, or at least to maintaining, it: As a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and the physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom. (404-05)

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23 Just as sorrow seemed to pour forth from the things in the House of Usher, “darkness,” according to the narrator, “poured forth” from Roderick “in one unceasing radiation of gloom.” He too exudes sorrow. He too emanates darkness and melancholy. Just as the things that surround him, he permanently transcends his body’s spatial extension and adds tone and color to his surroundings. If the air that he breathes is pestilent, dull, sluggish, stern, and saturated with irredeemable gloom, then it is partly because he has contributed to making it so himself. It is, in other words, partly his own affective emissions that fill the air and give it its dark feeling tone. Poe’s story therefore seems to anticipate Teresa Brennan’s claim that “we are not self-contained in terms of our energies” because “energetic affects […] enter the person, and the person’s affects, in turn, are transmitted to the environment” (6, 8). Such transmissions of affect are described throughout “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Read through the lens of affect theory, Poe’s story thus tells us that the human skin is a permeable membrane or a porous border that is perpetually crossed by affects: from the inside moods unceasingly pour forth, and from the outside affectively charged air continuously flows in. What came first in the case of Roderick—the “terrible influence” of the atmosphere on him (Ahmed’s “outside in” model) or his own terrible contributions to the atmosphere (Ahmed’s “inside out” model)—remains uncertain. The only thing that is certain is that the circulation of negative affect in the House of Usher has turned into a vicious circle.7

24 Drawing on the notion of climate as synonymous with atmosphere, Sloterdijk has described the circulation of affects as follows: on the one hand we are all “weather- makers” who “continually practice rain- and sun-magic” and on the other hand we all live in “antropic climates” (i.e. climates generated by humans) that “impregnate its inhabitants” (Sphären II 148, 143, 149, my trans.). Something very similar is going on in the House of Usher: Roderick continuously practices a kind of rain-magic which contributes to the dark and vaporous climate which then, in turn, impregnates them all and triggers an “iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart” in the narrator. Like all human beings, the characters in Poe’s story are both producers and recipients of the “antropic climates” in which they live. Like all human beings, they participate in a “circuit” of affect that is larger than any one of us, as Butler stressed.

25 As participants in the local circuit of affect in and around the House of Usher, the characters are influenced by the saturated air they breathe in a conspicuously direct and unmediated manner. Poe’s story therefore seems to contradict Ahmed’s claim that “it is the objects of emotion that circulate, rather than emotion as such” (Cultural Politics 11). In the House of Usher, affects circulate as such. Here, “air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom” emanates from the things themselves, just as darkness pours forth from Roderick as if it was “an inherent positive quality,” and in return the affectively charged atmosphere enters directly into the characters. Within the confines of the spatially delineated atmosphere of the House of Usher, affects do not need objects (or signs) to be transmitted between different elements, and they do not circulate as parts of an “affective economy” in which the circulation of objects generates “affective value” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 44-49). Instead, they circulate as parts of a coherent affective ecosystem in which affects circulate as such.

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The mystery of atmospheric phenomena

26 The narrator is generally mystified about the influence this affective ecosystem has on him. How can anything so powerful come out of thin air? What is it exactly that affects him so? Can it be anything other than a figment of his imagination? Already when he first arrived at the House of Usher, he felt confronted with “a mystery all insoluble” for “while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth” (397-98). Nevertheless, in order to come to grips with his bewilderment, and in an attempt to understand the intangible and illegible power under whose influence he seems to be, this is exactly what he tries to do: to analyze it. He begins by scrutinizing the landscape from which it seems to derive: I looked upon the scene before me―upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain―upon the bleak walls―upon the vacant eye-like windows―upon a few rank sedges―and upon a few white trunks of decayed tress―with an utter depression of soul. (397)

27 Rather than indulging in the overall impression of the scene before him, the narrator goes through its separate elements. The many dashes in the text as well as the conspicuous repetition of “upon […] upon […] upon […] upon” underscores the cut-up process of his investigation and mimics linguistically the step-by-step movements of his analytical gaze. Like a good scientist he is dissecting the landscape in order to identify the cause of the “utter depression of soul” which for some inexplicable reason has come over him. But he does not find the cause for his misery. His method is blind to the phenomena he is in search of. For an atmosphere does not reside in any particular detail of a landscape. Atmospheres are holistic in character. Otto Baensch has described the holistic and atmospheric character of the mood of a landscape in the following way: The landscape does not express the mood but has it; the mood surrounds, fills, and permeates it, like the light in which it shines, and like the fragrance that effuses from it; the mood belongs to our total impression of the landscape and can only be distinguished as one of its components by a process of abstraction. (2, my trans., emphasis added)

28 As Baensch points out, the atmospheric mood of a landscape can only be perceived as a totality. Atmospheres will not appear under an analytical gaze that moves from one detail to the next. The devil may be in the detail, but the atmosphere is not. Applying the wrong method, the narrator thus cannot read the atmosphere, and the mystery remains unresolved.

29 However, when it comes to art, the narrator proves to have a better sense of atmospheric phenomena. As he spends more time with Roderick and listens to “the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar,” he notices a “certain singular perversion and amplification” which Roderick adds to “the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber” (405). This “wild air,” which is perverted and amplified by Roderick, belongs to the narrator’s total impression of Weber’s Last Waltz, not to any particular detail in it. It is an attempt to verbalize what makes up the overall atmosphere of the musical composition. And like the mood of a landscape, the “wild air” of Weber’s Last Waltz cannot be reduced to its elements. As Mikel Dufrenne has emphasized, all artworks have an “atmosphere” or an “affective quality” which cannot be decomposed: “We cannot reduce to their element the melancholy grace of Ravel’s Pavana pour une enfante défunte, the glory of Franck’s chorales, or the tender sensitivity of Debussy’s La Fille aux

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cheveux de lin” (327). Like the moods of landscapes, the atmospheres of artworks are undividable affective totalities.

30 An even more revealing example of the narrator’s sensitivity towards the atmospheres of artworks occurs in the succeeding scene in which he inspects some of Roderick’s paintings and feels “an intensity of intolerable awe” arising out of them (405). One painting in particular captures his attention, and he goes on to describe it in more detail: A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceedingly depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernable; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor. (405-06)

31 Like the “wild air” of Weber’s Last Waltz, the “intense rays” of Roderick’s painting do not belong to any particular detail in the artwork, and they are certainly not depicted in it; they belong to the total impression of it. As the text explicitly states, the “intense rays […] bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor” (emphasis added). This impression of the totality of the painting is, of course, an effect that is produced by its individual parts, but these parts can only produce the total effect by transcending themselves, or by being “more” than they are according to traditional ontology. The parallel to the room in which the narrator first registered the interior atmosphere of the house is hard to miss: just as the things there transcended themselves, added tone and color to the room, and thus generated “an atmosphere of sorrow” (401), the individual elements of Roderick’s painting similarly transcend themselves and generate a mysterious “flood of intense rays” that “bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.” In both cases materials transcend themselves and generate an atmospheric totality or intensity that affects and mystifies the narrator.

32 Theodor W. Adorno has defined “the atmosphere of the artwork” as “that whereby the nexus of the artwork’s elements points beyond this nexus and allows each individual element to point beyond itself” (Aesthetic 369). According to this definition, the artwork is not literally beyond itself, but it does point beyond itself, and in that sense it transcends its tangible here and now. However, we might also say that the nexus of the artwork gives each of its elements the ability to radiate or emanate—and that pointing beyond oneself and radiating affect are not mutually exclusive processes. In fact, Adorno sometimes did describe artworks as radiating. Thus, he wrote about Kafka’s writings that “each sentence is literal and each signifies. The two moments are not merged, as the symbol would have it, but yawn apart and out of the abyss between them blinds the glaring ray of fascination” (Prisms 245). Not unlike this “glaring ray of fascination,” Poe’s narrator perceives “a flood of intense rays” arising out of Roderick’s paintings.

33 Finally, in one of Roderick’s rhapsodies, entitled “The Haunted Palace,” the narrator notices “the under or mystic current of its meaning” (406). It seems to point beyond its literal meaning while simultaneously giving the impression that a “mystic current” flows beneath its surface and thus gives it an air of enigma. Like the “flood of intense rays” that “rolled” through Roderick’s painting, some intensity seems to flow through the rhapsody. To the narrator, the atmospheres of all these artworks are as enigmatic as the atmosphere he first encountered in the landscape surrounding the House of Usher:

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just as it was a “mystery” to him that the “combinations of very simple natural objects” could “have the power of thus affecting us” (397-98), so it is equally a mystery that the combinations of tones, colors, or words can generate wild air, intense rays, and mystic currents. In other words, the artworks participate in the affective ecosystem of the House of Usher and thus contribute to its mysterious character. What the art interpretation scenes add to the narrator’s education in atmospherology is the insight that atmospheres are not necessarily natural or unintended phenomena but can also be artistically created. In this way, the three art interpretation scenes make up a transition, approximately in the middle of the text, which prepares the narrator (as well as the reader) for Roderick’s strange interpretation of the atmosphere of the House of Usher as artistically created—an interpretation that will be examined in the following section.

Between science and mysticism

34 Succeeding the art interpretation scenes, the narrator describes how suggestions arising from Roderick’s rhapsody “led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher’s” (177), which he goes on to describe in the following manner: This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. (408)

35 If all vegetable, and even inorganic, things have sentience, then they must also be able to feel the atmosphere. Roderick thus seems to regard the things around him as being caught up in the same vicious circle as he is, being simultaneously a cause and an effect of the dark and pestilent atmosphere. They are all part of the same affective ecosystem in which negative affects circulate through all elements. And just as he, as a result, is about to wither away, so are they. What made the things sentient, according to Roderick, is explained in the following way: The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones―in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them and of the decayed trees which stood around [...] Its evidence―the evidence of the sentience―was to be seen, he said […] in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. (408)

36 Roderick here reads his surrounding environment as an artwork: just as the “nexus” or interconnection of the artwork’s elements generates an atmosphere, a wild air, a flood of rays, or a mystic undercurrent that runs through it, like blood in veins, and gives it a certain vivacity or “life” which is present in each individual element, so the “method of collocation” of the stones of the House of Usher and the “order of their arrangement” as well as that of the trees and fungi give it a certain vivacity or “life” which is present in each individual element as sentience. Seeing the House of Usher as an architectural artwork, created by some absent master, Roderick ascribes a kind of mystic life to it—a life that is similar to that of the music, painting, and literature he has produced himself. In a review published less than two years after “The Fall of House of Usher,” Poe similarly compared the literary artwork to a building: “It may be described as a building so dependently constructed, that to change the position of a single brick is to overthrow the entire fabric” (qtd. in May, Theories 65). Therefore, the entire story may

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also be read as an allegory of reading: just as the narrator enters the mysterious atmosphere of the House of Usher, the reader enters the mysterious atmosphere of the literary construction.8

37 Whether we interpret the house literally or allegorically, Roderick fails to make a crucial distinction: to him there is no critical difference between the mysterious atmospheres of artworks and a mystic life of things. He therefore slides tacitly from the realm of aesthetic experiences into a mystic worldview where things have sentience and respond to affective atmospheres. This is clearly a fallacy: while things and plants may be said to give off affect, they do not take in affect. As Ben Anderson puts it, “affective atmospheres” may “occur […] across human and non-human materialities” (78), but they are not felt on both sides of that distinction. Plants neither feel nor grow better because you talk to them. Only humans (and some other animals) feel affective atmospheres. By cancelling this distinction, Roderick drifts off into a mysticism that is nourished by reading writings by authors such as Swedenborg, Robert Fludd, Campanella, and others (409).

38 The narrator quickly rejects Roderick’s mystic interpretation of the atmosphere as “fancy” (408). As his dissecting analytical gaze has already revealed, he is a child of the Western culture of rationality. From the beginning, he has been skeptical even towards his own perception of the atmosphere of the House of Usher, which he calls “a strange fancy” caused by “the rapid increase of my superstition” (399). After describing it, he is furthermore “shaking off […] what must have been a dream” (400). Nevertheless, it seems undeniable that there is something in the air, and his perception of the atmosphere thus gets in conflict with his scientific outlook. He is caught up in this ambivalence throughout the story, and he accordingly describes Roderick’s opinion about the sentience of things as one of his “fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (410).

39 Although he cannot subscribe to Roderick’s mysticism, he cannot entirely resist it either, and towards the end of the story he begins to feel infected by it, even though Roderick seems increasingly far away: There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified―that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions. (410)

40 What the narrator interprets as the burden of “some oppressive secret” or the “vagaries of madness” we might also interpret as an expression of Roderick’s increasingly unveiled mysticism: if there is a secret life of things that is not noticeable by the ordinary use of our senses, then Roderick might, educated by mystical literature, try to use his “sixth sense” to access it or try to “become one” with it through a kind of meditative attention. The scientifically inclined narrator does not notice this, but he does feel “infected” and “terrified” by the “condition” Roderick is in. This affective infection paves the way for an even more dramatic affective possession. What first appeared as a “less dramatic” background atmosphere (Ngai 7) thus turns increasingly dramatic.

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Affective possession and the language of superstition

41 The narrator’s infection can be described by dint of the concept of affective contagion, which has recently been taken up by a number of scholars. Anna Gibbs, for instance, has argued that “bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear” (1). According to Ahmed, however, “the concept of affective contagion does tend to treat affect as something that moves smoothly from body to body, sustaining integrity in being passed around” (Happiness 39). This is not the case in Poe’s story. When the narrator “catches” Roderick’s affective emissions, he does not simply reduplicate his feelings one-to-one. They do not sustain their integrity. At this moment, Roderick is far from being in a state of terror, but his “condition” nonetheless terrifies the narrator. It may do so because he fears that Roderick is turning insane or because he feels that his “impressive superstitions” are infecting him like a virus. In any case, he does not reduplicate Roderick’s feelings one-to-one. In the House of Usher affective contagion does not imply that human beings simply take over the feelings of others but rather that they take in their affective emissions.

42 In the narrator’s case, the affective infection seems to weaken his power of resistance significantly. While he has hitherto been able to keep some distance to the influence of the atmosphere, the infection makes him increasingly defenseless and vulnerable. What was initially felt as “an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart” now turns into a feeling of being outright possessed by a foreign force: Sleep came not near my couch―while waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me […]. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. (411)

43 By referring to an incubus, which is a kind of demon, the narrator not only evokes the then famous painting by Henry Fuseli entitled The Nightmare (1781), but also associates his condition with that of one who is possessed by a demon.9 He thus refers to the world before “the disenchantment of the world,” as Max Weber has famously called it, that is, to a pre-modern world filled with spirits, demons, and other “mysterious incalculable forces” (155, 139). This was a world that fascinated many romantic and gothic writers and also inspired Fuseli’s painting, but it was also a world that was imbued with magic and superstition. It was, for instance, common in the centuries preceding the Enlightenment to believe that demons could actually possess human beings—a belief which lay behind many witch trials insofar as witches were considered to be either possessed by, or have some other, often sexual, intercourse with demons (Muchembled 52f.).

44 The implications of the image of the demonic incubus can be illuminated by a distinction introduced by Charles Taylor: drawing on Weber, he has distinguished between the “buffered” self of the modern disenchanted world and the “porous” self of the earlier enchanted world (37-38). While our modern “buffered” self is viewed as a relatively sealed off, self-contained, and autonomous self, the earlier “porous” self was felt to be open to all kinds of invasive forces: “The porous self is vulnerable, to spirits, demons, cosmic forces” and its “porousness is most clearly in evidence in the fear of possession” (35, 38). After his infection, the narrator of Poe’s story is in a similar situation: he too feels porous and vulnerable. He feels fear-ridden and hag-ridden by

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some alien force sitting upon his “very heart,” and the pre-modern way of interpreting such feelings offers him a palpable image to understand and express his feelings, namely the image of an incubus or demonic spirit, which, not unlike a possessing affect, is a being that resides in the air but nonetheless can influence (literally: flow into) people and take over their normal self.

45 Thus, if affective contagion causes an either pleasant or unpleasant feeling of being infused and permeated with another person’s affect, the affective possession, which the narrator perceives, causes an unsettling and frightening feeling of being taken over and losing all control. In order to express his feeling of being possessed, the narrator draws on the imagery of the “fantastic yet impressive superstitions” that prevailed in the enchanted world, that is, before the Enlightenment. To him, this seems to be the only imagery available for understanding and expressing the unsettling feeling of being taken over by some exterior affective force. In other words, even the analytically and scientifically inclined narrator has to resort to the old language of spirits and demons in order to explain (even to himself) how the atmosphere affects him. He may reject Roderick’s mysticism as superstitious, then, but his own fantasy is equally permeated by the imagery of superstition.

46 With the rejection of the doctrines of demonology in the course of the Enlightenment, perceptions of air-borne forces were generally rejected as figments of the imagination— and not reinterpreted as affective atmospheres. As the notion of the buffered, self- contained, autonomous individual gained in strength during the 17th and 18th centuries, it not only liberated new generations from the fear of being possessed by demons but also occasioned a repression or oblivion of the experiences of affective atmospheres, which—although misinterpreted—were still present in the earlier ideas about spirits and demons.10 As a consequence, hardly any new imagery and new conceptualizations were developed in order to understand and express perceptions of affective atmospheres by means of a disenchanted vocabulary. As a result, the narrator visualizes and verbalizes his feeling of being taken over by an affect that is communicated from elsewhere by means of a language from a superstitious past.

A sundial and a resource

47 Towards the end of the story, the discrepancy between Roderick’s mystic or imaginative worldview and the narrator’s more scientific or rationalistic outlook comes to the fore as the atmosphere suddenly seems to turn visible: The under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion. “You must not―you shall not behold this!” said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. “These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon―or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn.” (412-13)

48 Two models of explanation are in conflict here: According to Roderick, “the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls” is “the evidence of the sentience” of things (as quoted above), and if this atmosphere now turns “distinctly visible” his fanciful theory seems to be confirmed. According to the narrator, however, there must be some rational, scientific explanation, be it that the

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atmosphere is some “electrical phenomena” or be it that it is a result of the “rank miasma of the tarn.”11 One of these explanations may in fact be true in this particular case, but at the same time, they also reveal the problematic character of the narrator’s attitude towards the atmospheric phenomena he perceives. Although he does not always succeed in his endeavor, he generally tries to rationalize or explain away all atmospheric phenomena: he either reduces the atmosphere in which he moves to a purely physical phenomenon that can be explained away by the already existing means of science, or he reduces it to a product of his imagination. He repeatedly rejects his own bodily perceptions of the atmosphere as dream, fancy, or superstition, and when the influence of the atmosphere grows too strong to be denied, he can only picture it by means of the outdated imagery of spirits and demons, which only increases his suspicion.

49 If we regard Poe’s story as a part of a larger historical context, we may observe that the discrepancy between the two main characters of the story mirrors a contemporaneous discrepancy between two contrasting worldviews, or two conflicting frames of interpretation, prevalent in Poe’s time. On the one hand, the heritage from the Enlightenment is clearly present in the narrator’s suspicious, analytic, and scientific attitude: within his frame of interpretation, even his own bodily perceptions of affective atmospheres are stubbornly rejected as figments of the imagination for which there must be some better, some rational, explanation. On the other hand, contemporaneous currents of Romanticism are obviously present in Roderick’s imaginative, re-enchanting, and mystical attitude: within his frame of interpretation, bodily perceptions of affective atmospheres are naively taken to be an evidence of a mysterious life of things.12 With the narrative elaboration of this discrepancy, Poe’s story acts out his contemporaries’ inability to understand the nature of the affective atmospheres in which they live. Having at their disposal only the poor choice between a narrow-minded culture of rationality and an unchecked culture of fantasy, they either deny the very existence of affective atmospheres or misinterpret them as indications of a mystic life of things.

50 In this way, Poe’s story simultaneously reflects and criticizes the contemporaneous culture from which it only seems to be detached by taking place in a distant and apparently secluded mansion far away from civilization. The fact that the story does not represent contemporary society in a realist manner does not mean that it is disconnected from it. On the contrary, the elaboration of two antagonistic frames of interpretation, embodied in the story’s two main characters, narrativizes a larger intellectual antagonism between two prevailing worldviews and reveals the blindness inherent in that antagonism. In spite of its apparent detachedness, Poe’s story is what Adorno once called “a philosophical sundial telling the time of history” (Notes 46): on its very surface, that is, in the collision between the rationalist narrator and the imaginative Roderick, we can read the historical moment. Regarded as a historico- philosophical sundial, Poe’s story shows us that contemporary culture was split in two conflicting worldviews, neither of which was able to comprehend the nature of their atmospheric conditions.

51 Reading Poe’s story like this contradicts the established way of interpreting the short story’s relation to its sociocultural context. Normally, short stories are considered to be extraordinarily detached from society. Frank O’Connor has thus argued that “the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community―romantic,

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individualistic, and intransigent” (21). On a more general level, Charles E. May has noted that “the form’s disengagement from a contemporary cultural background has, much to chagrin of social critics, always been a perceived characteristic of the genre” (175). I believe, however, that we must be careful not to interpret short stories’ seeming “disengagement” from their “cultural background” naively. As “The Fall of the House of Usher” demonstrates, even short stories that seem to have little to do with their sociocultural context may actually be scenes upon which significant contemporaneous antagonisms are acted out and revealed.13

52 Reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a historico-philosophical sundial does not imply, however, that the story is only a critique of contemporary blindness towards our atmospheric conditions. For Poe’s short story is also an instructive example of the fact that literary works have often examined the characteristics of affective atmospheres, considered how they are generated and circulated, and narrativized the ways in which they affect the people they envelope and assail. Poe’s story thus indicates that literature, and perhaps short stories in particular, may be one of the best resources we have for developing an informed, theoretical atmospherology. For as Poe’s story shows, literary works can not only inform us about the imagery and vocabulary available for understanding and expressing perceptions of enveloping, assaulting, or possessing atmospheres at different historical periods; they can also contribute to the ongoing theorization of affects and atmospheres. Stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” contain numerous meticulous descriptions of anything from affectively saturated situations to the aesthetic atmospheres of artworks, and they abound in narratives informing us about the ways in which our affective emissions contribute to the affective ecosystems in which we live. If we lack a vocabulary for describing, and reflecting on, affects and atmospheres, as Sloterdijk and Massumi have argued (as quoted above), then literature seems to be a good place to find inspiration for developing such a vocabulary. Examining literary works can help us develop new concepts (such as affective emission, affective ecosystem, or affective possession) and refine already existing ones (such as affective economy or affective contagion), which is what I have tried to do in this essay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. Print.

---. Notes to Literature. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Print.

---. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Print.

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print.

---. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

Anderson, Ben. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009): 77-81. Print.

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Baensch, Otto. “Kunst und Gefühl.” Logos 12 (1923-24): 1-28. Print.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.

Böhme, Gernot. Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. Print.

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Print.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful: And Other Pre- Revolutionary Writings. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998. Print.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Print.

Dufrenne, Mikel. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Trans. Edward S. Casey, Albert A. Anderson, Willis Domingo, and Leon Jacobsen. Evanston: Northwester UP, 1973. Print.

Elmer, Jonathan. Reading at the Social Limit. Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.

Felski, Rita, and Susan Fraiman. “Introduction.” New Literary History 43.3 (2012): v-xii. Print.

Frank, Adam. Transferential Poetics. From Poe to Warhol. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. Print.

Gibbs, Anna. “Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect.” Australian Humanities Review 24 (2001). Web. 2 June 2014. Print.

Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich. Atmospheres, Moods, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature. Trans. Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Rev. Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State U of New York P, 2010. Print.

Hoffmann, Gerhard. “Space and Symbol in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.” Poe Studies 12.1 (1979): 1-14. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso, 2013. Print.

Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989. Print.

May, Charles E., ed. The New Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994. Print.

---. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in his Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Print.

---. “The Short Story’s Way of Meaning: Alice Munro’s ‘Passion.’” Narrative 20.2 (2012): 172-82. Print.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Print.

Muchembled, Robert. A History of the Devil: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Print.

Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. Print.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.

Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavels of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

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O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Cleveland: World, 1963. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Eds. Thomas Mabbott et al. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1978: 392-422. Print.

Schmitz, Hermann. Der Gefühlsraum. Bonn: Bouvier, 1969. Print.

---. Der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand. Bonn: Bouvier, 2007. Print.

Sloterdijk, Peter and Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs. Die Sonne und der Tod. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001. Print.

---. Sphären II: Globen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. Print.

---. Sphären III: Schäume. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Print.

Spitzer, Leo. “A Reinterpretation of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Comparative Literature 4.4 (1952): 351-63. Print.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

Taylor, Matthew A. “Edgar Allan Poe’s (Meta)physics: A Pre-History of the Post-Human.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62.2 (2007): 193-221. Print.

Timmerman, John H. “House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Papers on Language and Literature 39.3 (2003): 227-44. Print.

Walker, I. A. “The Legitimate Sources of Terror in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Modern Language Review 61 (1966): 585-92. Print.

Weber, Max. “Science as a vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Eds. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1991. 129-56. Print.

NOTES

1. According to James Nagel, this applies to the short story cycle as well: “Although the cycle can be used for the Bildungsroman […] just as frequently it lends itself to the exploration of a family or a community […] rather than the internal life of a single individual” (16-17). 2. One of the first to thoroughly investigate the atmosphere in “The Fall of the House of Usher” was Leo Spitzer, who linked Poe’s story to “ideas concerning milieu and ambience which were being formulated at his time” (359). I. A. Walker has since linked it to contemporary theories of “Febrile Miasma,” that is, to the gases from stagnant water or decayed matter (588). Gerhard Hoffmann has interpreted it as a literary description of a “mood-invested space” (2). And more recently Matthew A. Taylor has interpreted the story’s atmosphere as a force “which might actually reside in things and then possess persons” which means it undermines the idea of our “putatively autonomous self” (214). Inspired by affect theory, but without examining “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Jonathan Elmer has argued that Poe’s writing opposes the sentimental novels of his time by producing an “ambiguous affect” in the reader (108). Also inspired by affect theory, Adam Frank has argued that Poe’s stories “produce ‘Passions’ in the reader” in accordance with his “well-known poetics of effect” (51). 3. As Adam Frank has recently pointed out, this is typical to Poe’s stories in which “the persons […] tend to have nothing readers skilled by realist writing would recognize as three-dimensional or well-rounded characters, as Poe’s writing is not interested in delineating idiosyncratic surface features to index buried or ingrained character traits” (54). 4. Peter Sloterdijk has argued that our atmospheric conditions have been increasingly foregrounded during the 20th century, not primarily due to new theories but due to technical “air

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design” and other kinds of practical “explication of atmospheres” (Sphären III 177, 126, my trans.). As prominent examples, Sloterdijk describes the use of gas during WWI and the development of air-conditioned indoor environments in the 20th century (Sphären III 89-260). 5. Matthew A. Taylor has argued that “the house’s ‘atmosphere’ quickly becomes the narrator’s own” (214). I believe, however, that it is more accurate to talk about the narrator’s mimetic response to the atmosphere than to assume a one-to-one reduplication of the atmosphere in him since he is not fully determined by the atmosphere but also brings his own skeptical-analytical mood. 6. The book in which Hermann Schmitz first developed his theory of bodily perceptible atmospheres is Der Gefühlsraum (1969) which was published as volume 3.2 in his System der Philosophie (1964-1980). 7. Leo Spitzer has claimed that Poe’s story was “determinism made poetic, ‘atmospheric,’” i.e. that it was a “poetic expression” of the idea that the atmosphere determines its inhabitants (360). He thus stresses what Ahmed has called the “outside in” model in Poe’s story while neglecting the equally present “inside out” model. 8. Without unfolding its implications, Charles E. May has similarly suggested that the opening scene “simulates the process by which the reader enters into the patterned reality of the artwork […] what he perceived is what short story writers such as Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen have called the ‘atmosphere’ of the story” (Poe 104). 9. The sexual connotations often associated with incubi are not present here. According to Robert Muchembled, incubi were thought, especially from the twelfth century onwards, “to seduce human beings, usually by appearing to them in the form of a handsome young man or beautiful young woman” (29). 10. Teresa Brennan has similarly argued that “after the seventeenth century the concept of transmission lost ground” and that “the earliest Western records of the transmission of affect […] make them demons or deadly sins” (17, 97). 11. I. A. Walker has argued that Poe was familiar with theories about the influence of gases from stagnant water and decayed matter and that the mental state of the characters can be “traced back to the stagnant tarn and its miasmic ‘atmosphere’” (589). This is, I believe, a reductionist interpretation which reduces the many sources of the atmosphere to one single, physical source that can be explained by the means of traditional science. 12. John H. Timmerman has similarly proposed “to relate the story to a larger conflict that Poe had been struggling with for some time: how to balance Romantic passion with Enlightenment order” (238). However, whereas Timmerman argues that “Poe sought nothing less than the delicate symbiosis between the two” (239), I argue that he sought primarily to demonstrate how the split between the two resulted in a particular blindness towards affective atmospheres. 13. Similarly, though without elaborating it, Jonathan Elmer notes that ”Poe’s ostensibly psychological tales […] are in fact profoundly responsive to social reality” (20).

ABSTRACTS

Les intensités émotionnelles ne relèvent pas uniquement de la « vie intérieure » des individus ; elles peuvent également se trouver, d’après le dicton, « dans l’air », c’est-à-dire en tant qu’atmosphères partagées qui nous enveloppent, nous pénètrent et nous affectent. De telles atmosphères affectives sont omniprésentes dans la nouvelle « La Chute de la Maison Usher »

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d’Edgar Allan Poe (1839). La Maison Usher est non seulement explicitement voilée d’une atmosphère qui lui est propre ; l’intrigue tout entière est centrée sur la manière dont cette atmosphère affecte les personnages de l’histoire et la manière dont ils interprètent son influence. Par conséquent, les travaux récents sur l’affect et l’atmosphère dans les études littéraires et culturelles sont extraordinairement productifs pour une analyse de la nouvelle de Poe : d’une part, ils peuvent nous aider à comprendre les nombreuses descriptions des atmosphères affectives, et d’autre part, le texte peut nous aider à traiter des théories existantes et développer de nouveaux concepts afin de contribuer à la théorisation en cours sur l’affect et l’atmosphère. S’appuyant sur un certain nombre d’analyses approfondies de Poe, cet essai propose en conséquence de nouveaux concepts tels que l’émission affective, l’écosystème affectif et la possession affective. En outre, il s’agira d’avancer que la nouvelle de Poe révèle la raison pour laquelle ses contemporains furent incapables de comprendre la nature de leurs conditions atmosphériques.

AUTHORS

DENNIS MEYHOFF BRINK Dennis Meyhoff Brink teaches comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen where he is also leading a research group on affect theory. His fields of research cover theories of affect, the history of religious satire in Europe, and the role of fiction in society. He has published articles on these subjects in Scandinavian journals such as Kritik, K&K, Passage, and Chaos.

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The Affectivity of Music in Virginia Woolf’s “The String Quartet”

Kuo Chia-chen

Music and Woolf

“All great writers are great colorists, just as they are musicians into the bargain.” Woolf, “Walter Sickert” 199

1 Virginia Woolf had an intricate relationship with music. She and her sister Vanessa had some music lessons in their youth: governesses were hired to teach them how to sing and play the piano (Bell 27). Although Virginia could not play any instrument nor professionally comprehend music (Bell 149), music became her lifelong interest. From her diary entries and letters, we know she was a regular concert-goer. She often attended several music performances in a single week, and her short story “The String Quartet” was inspired by the Schubert piano quintet to which she listened in Campden Hill, on March 9, 1920 (Woolf, Diary v.2 24). When attending musical performances seemed a distraction to her literary project, gramophone became a suitable substitute. The Woolfs usually listened to it after dinner and Virginia enjoyed the “snatches of divine loveliness” (Letters 286) that the music provided. Mozart and Beethoven were two of her favorite composers; Wagner did not win her favor. These composers’ names and opuses appear in her works from time to time: Rachel Vinrace plays a Beethoven piano sonata which is assumed to be “unattainable” for women in ; a reference to Mozart’s opera is utilized to criticize the patriarchal structure of society in Night and Day; and Woolf embedded her reprimand against Wagner’s anti-Semitism through her account of Siegfried in .

2 Since as early as “Street Music” (1905), “The Opera” (1906), and “Impressions at Bayreuth” (1909), Woolf’s writing has dealt with music. In numerous essays, reviews, diary entries, and letters, Woolf claimed the influence of music on shaping the

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aesthetics of her prose writing and the importance of the intermediary role that she had to play between music and literature. In a famous letter to Elizabeth Trevelyan, Woolf expresses her excitement that her friend has compared her work Roger Fry to music: “Its [sic] odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them” (Letters 426), and in a letter to Ethel Smyth, Woolf encourages Smyth to write on her own favorite composers just as she would like “to investigate the influence of music on literature” (Letters 450). Thus, in “The Narrow Bridge of Art” (1927), Woolf seems to envisage a new form of literature: “It will have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play” (18), and the writer who wants to compose the new style of fiction must have “the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of color,” so that he or she can represent “an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed” (23).

3 Yet, despite the seemingly mutually inspirational and flirtatious relation between music and literature, Woolf also found great tension, if not animosity, between them. As a writer aspiring to represent the transience of life through words, Woolf felt pushed by music to acknowledge how circumscribed she felt by words, and how mediated words are in comparison to the instantaneousness of music. In “Impressions at Bayreuth,” Woolf admits “the difficulty of changing a musical impression into a literary one” (291). Since the sensation that music transmits is beyond the tether of words, “[w]hen the moment of suspense is over, and the bows actually move across the strings, our definitions are relinguished [sic], and words disappear in our minds” (291-92). In other words, since music is wordless, what troubles Woolf in this essay is “her inability to render music adequately by words” (Jacobs 243).

4 In this light, bearing in mind Woolf’s sometimes delighted and sometimes agonized responses to music, many literary critics1 have aimed to excavate the musicality inherent in her fiction. To them, (1931) offers a clear analogy between fiction and music. For example, as early as 1992, Robin Gail Schulze, in “Design and Music,” argues the parallel relation between The Waves and Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone musical structure. In a 2000 essay, Melba Cuddy-Keane describes Woolf’s fiction as a Schaefferian and Cagian chorus. And even more recently (2005), Elicia Clements suggests that The Waves is a truly Beethovenian symphony. However, most literary critics have confused musicality (a concept) with music (an art form), as Émilie Crapoulet argues, so that The Waves seems to be a product influenced by divergent musical composers and by different musical genres at the same time (“Voicing the Music” 80). In Crapoulet’s demonstration, musicality in Woolf refers to “a new musical order” (87), and music as an art form shapes pattern and repetition, a rhythmic order which features in most of Woolf’s prose writing (87). By examining the hidden pattern behind the “cotton wool”2 in and several passages from Woolf’s full- length novels, Crapoulet argues that there is “a musicality which transcends individual styles and pieces, and is essential to our understanding of the world in terms of pattern” (89).

5 However, if we carefully examine the examples of pattern and repetition that Crapoulet cites, we find that they correspond to those characters’ perceptions and frames of mind. In other words, Crapoulet resorts to the musical analogy to argue to what extent Woolf’s characters’ streams of consciousness can flow like music and to what extent her writing is structured like music. Musicality in her argument refers to the writing order

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that Woolf develops—the —and, according to Crapoulet, this happens on the narrators’/characters’ conscious level. Thus, in “Beyond the Boundaries of Language,” an essay mainly focusing on Woolf’s short story “The String Quartet,” Crapoulet discusses the parallel relation between music and words by focusing on the narrator’s conscious and intentional endeavor to verbalize this intensive musical experience and how this leads to her final despair, dismay, and dissatisfaction with words (210).

6 Crapoulet’s arguments certainly lead us to further examine the relation between Woolf and music. The first concern is, if the influence of music on Woolf is as strong and violent as Woolf claims in her numerous writings, she must have been enveloped by its intensive influence and acted on by its strong sensations. Before she even could find the proper words to describe it, these strong and violent musical sensations must have taken place on the pre-cognitive level; otherwise, Woolf would not have claimed that when the music is played, “our definitions are relinguished [sic], and words disappear in our minds” (“Impressions” 291-92). Then, if Woolf still attempted to render music perceptible through words, what kind of transformation does writing have to undertake in order to catch up with the transient art of music, which vanishes at the moment when it comes into existence? Can we conceive of musicality, a writing style, not as the pattern and repetition that shape Woolf’s stream of consciousness novels as Crapoulet argues, but as audience members’ instantaneous experiences and synaesthetic sensations, especially when they are enveloped or whirled around by the strong sensations of music? If so, can “the musicalization of fiction” (to borrow the term coined by Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point3) be achieved through a short story on music, given that the short story is a genre in which scope and length are necessarily limited?

7 The second question is: if the formal structure of Woolf’s short story is thus fragmented, or to put it in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s terminology, if it is “deterritorialized” into a multiplicity in order to contain diverse sensations, what about the characters and the narrator in the story, especially when the text is about their direct and personal musical experiences? Will not the audience member also be “deterritorialized” by the strong sensations of music? Will not the musicality of fiction which features in the form of expression as Woolf’s writing style also permeate the content to the extent that the subject/audience member is passively acted upon by the strong affectivity of music?

8 This paper intends to answer these questions by using Woolf’s “The String Quartet.” I argue that the affectivity of music penetrates the narrator as audience member, and since the affective sensations that music unleashes are far beyond the tether of words, musicality—a writing style which now dispenses with the normal mediation of language—is also brought to light. Thus, the first half of this paper will take a short detour to discuss the philosophical concept of affect that Deleuze and Guattari put forward. Affect in their oeuvre refers to the body’s capacity to affect and be affected and can also be further related to the concept of “becoming” which refers to the subject’s condition of de-subjectification when he or she is transfixed by a non-human or trans-human force. The second half of this paper will examine how these conceptions of affect and becoming emerge in “The String Quartet” when the content is transformed to be expressive of the intensive affectivity of music whilst the form of expression partakes of musicality: it contains certain non-linguistic and pre-personal

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properties as fiction’s affective style. I will argue that “The String Quartet” is—with Woolf’s intent—a collage of diverse musical sensations. In other words, what I want to argue in this paper is that music is a possible sister art to influence Woolf’s writing so that her fiction has been “musicalized” in order to render the strong and violent musical sensations perceptible. Through the musicalization of her fiction, Woolf worked to transform her readers into audience members who seemed to sit in the same auditorium and to enjoy the same music with her.

The Affectivity of Music

9 Brian Massumi, the English-language translator of Deleuze and Guattari’s monumental A Thousand Plateaus, clearly defines affect as “an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (Massumi xvi). According to Massumi, affect is a prepersonal force and a non- human or trans-human intensity. When it is acting on the subject, he or she is “whirled around” for being passively “enveloped” by the strong affect. In Deleuze and Guattari, affect determines not only to what extent the subject’s capacity to act can thus increase or decrease, but also how his/her body has been transformed from one state to another. In their conceptualization, “Affects are becomings” (Plateaus 256), with “becoming” being another term for the transformation of the body as such. More specifically, both terms designate not the transformation of the body, but the great intensity of force which triggers the deformation of the “organic” form of the body. Thus, this experience caused by affect is definitely real, not imaginary or hallucinatory.

10 Furthermore, becoming is always double. Just as Captain Ahab is becoming-whale, Moby Dick also experiences a becoming. According to Deleuze and Guattari, it is “becoming whiteness” (304) insomuch as it is no longer a giant whale that Captain Ahab and the crew are hunting for. It has become a tremendous “white wall” ahead of them, announcing their final outcome. The symbiotic emergent unit of transformation formed by the double becomings is pushing our present infrastructure of knowledge about the body ever further, because “it is the set of the affects which are transformed and circulate in an assemblage of symbiosis, defined by the co-functioning of its heterogeneous parts” (Deleuze, Dialogues 70).

11 Deleuze and Guattari further expound the concept of becoming-music, and it has everything to do with music’s transient nature. Despite its potentially lasting influence, music’s materiality (the sound) vanishes into the air almost as soon as it comes into existence. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, music maximizes the tension between life and death: Whenever a musician writes In Memoriam, it is not so much a question of an inspirational motif or a memory, but on the contrary of a becoming that is only confronting its own danger, even taking a fall in order to rise again: a becoming- child, a becoming-woman, a becoming-animal, insofar as they are the content of music itself and continue to the point of death. (Plateaus 299)

12 Thus, when the audience member is transfixed by the great intensity of music (i.e., when they are becoming-music), the transient nature of music rather brings to light the confrontation of music to its own death: music is becoming-molecular. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “The molecular has the capacity to make the elementary

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communicate with the cosmic: precisely because it effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse longitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and slownesses, which guarantees a continuum by stretching far beyond its formal limits” (308-09).

13 Besides elaborating on how music can connect to the most delicate and minute particles of the world (with music’s becoming-molecular) in the above quotation, Deleuze and Guattari make two more points clear. The first point is that the way to distinguish multiple affects is through the diverse relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness which constitute each of them. The second point is that the affective cartography constituted by “diverse longitudes and latitudes” will cause the dissolution of subject’s self-consciousness, and the most extreme condition of self’s dissolution as such has been envisaged as “becoming-imperceptible” by Deleuze and Guattari, since “The imperceptible, [is a] common characteristic of the greatest speed and the greatest slowness” (Deleuze, Dialogues 45). Put another way, Deleuze and Guattari attempt in their oeuvre to map out a possibility where there is no more the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” but the complete dissolution of the ego and the overall disappearance of even the first person singular, “I,” in language. As they say, “To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think… To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied” (Plateaus 3). Or as Laci Mattison writes, “For Woolf [and] Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘I’ paradoxically becomes a marker of imperceptibility” (568).

14 The “becoming-molecular of music” certainly reminds us of the analogy between writing and atoms in Woolf. In “” (1921), Woolf encourages writers to record impressions on the mind as atoms because “[f]rom all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” (154). In other words, a new writing style must emerge in contrast to the rigid styles of H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. The becoming-molecular of music as atoms falling on the mind of the becoming-music of audience members can only be captured in and by Woolf’s newly experimental writing. We may call this new writing style “atomic writing,” because as this term suggests, this writing style attempts to capture the affective moment when the audience members are “pierced” by strong musical impressions as atoms falling on their minds. In a diary entry dated November 28, 1928, Woolf writes, “what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes… I want to put practically everything in; yet to saturate” (Diary v.3 209-10). Just as the becoming-molecular of music will bounce off from death or from the bottom, Woolf’s intention to “saturate every atom” can be interpreted as creating resilience in her writing by satiating it with life force. Not unlike Ezra Pound and his famous dictum to “Make it new!,” through her famous saying “On or about December 1910, human character changed,” Woolf encouraged coeval writers to jump out of the boundary of genres and techniques set up by the Edwardian writers. Of course, Woolf’s modernist project is not about music, but about writing, yet we discover in her numerous texts resplendent musical notes as atoms falling on and hitting audience members’ minds. We can argue, then, that the instantaneous and piercing affectivity of music inspired Woolf to revolutionize writing.

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15 In this light, and through a new attention to audience members’ and readers’ becoming-music and music’s becoming-molecular, we can have a better understanding of Woolf’s writing. From first-hand information about Woolf’s nearly ten year experiment on the proper form for her writing (“Modern Fiction” was published in 1921 while her diary entry is dated 1928), we know that music rather urged her to develop writing so as to express its molecular and instantaneous affectivity. Despite the diverse interpretations that literary critics have about the writing style that Woolf develops during this period,4 we can still term this new writing style as “musicality.” It is an affective style which emphasizes how music’s strong and intensive force transfixes both the content and the form of expression in Woolf. As a writer, she not only has to record music as “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” that her mind receives, but also to transform the formal structure of her writing, so that her readers of this short story can be transformed into audience members who were transfixed by and satiated with music in the same auditorium with her. In Woolf’s musicality as affective style, “content becomes expressive and expression becomes material” (Hughes 60). In this way of thinking, we can argue that, composed in this new writing style, the text will be nothing but an assemblage of diverse sensations, since content is the direct presentation of characters’ multiple becomings while the form is where the materiality of language and the erratic movement of the body are made present. To put it in a Deleuzian way, we can argue that both form and content in Woolf have been deterritorialized, and her job, as a writer, is to render music perceptible by words.

Musicality as Affective Style in “The String Quartet”

16 Compared with other ambivalent or even controversial short stories collected in , “The String Quartet” rather aroused many of Woolf’s friends’ and coeval critics’ positive appraisals. In her diary entries, Woolf was delighted to know that Lytton Strachey’s response to “The String Quartet” was “‘marvelous’” (Diary v.2 109), and she was even thrilled to record that T. S. “Eliot astounded me by praising Monday & Tuesday! This really delighted me. He picked out the String Quartet, especially the end of it. ‘Very good’ he said, & meant it, I think” (Diary v.2 125).

17 Yet undeniably, “The String Quartet” remains unknown to many contemporary readers and by extension, it receives less critical attention than her more famous short stories. However, there are still some critics who have pointed out how music has provided Woolf with a possibility to imagine something different. For example, Crapoulet argues that in this short story, Woolf suggests a better world can be envisaged through music, for it can help to create a “new way of seeing things which is the very essence of the musical experience” and “to determine the creative modalities of a consciousness which can itself shape the world differently” (“Beyond the Boundaries” 211). Peter Jacobs claims that “a nourishing sense of unity and belonging” is created through “the eery world of art” (sic, 244), while Werner Wolf argues that music provides a sense of positivity when “society [is] forcing so many distractions on the individual and detaining him from more essential things” (155). In other words, a sense of unity and rebirth can be envisioned through the above literary criticism on “The String Quartet”: music provides a pacifying comfort to counterbalance the agony and trepidation prevailing in society. Yet, as argued earlier, I want to demonstrate that Woolf tries to render the strong affectivity of music in “The String Quartet.” It is a short story

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composed entirely in and by musicality as an affective style: the affectivity of music is so strong and intensive that it has transfixed the narrator/audience member and permeated Woolf’s formal structure.

18 Before the commencement of the musical performance, the narrator’s stream of consciousness is still logical and well-organized: she5 looks through the room to observe the traffic outside, which is “weaving threads from one end of London to the other” (132), and her thoughts are randomly and freely associated with public current events (the Treaty, the weather, the housing, the influenza), and with her own private affairs (the leak in the pantry, the glove she left in the train) (132). Just as a pebble dropping into a pond causes many ripples, one thought sprouting in the narrator’s mind arouses other relevant but still unimportant thoughts. Even she admits the pointlessness of her rambling thoughts: If the mind’s shot through by such little arrows, and… no sooner is one launched than another presses forward; if this engenders heat and in addition they’ve turned on the electric light; if saying one thing does, in so many cases, leave behind it a need to improve and revise, stirring besides regrets, pleasures, vanities, and desires —if it’s all the facts I mean, and the hats, the fur boas, the gentlemen’s swallow-tail coats, and pearl tie-pins that come to the surface—what chance is there? (132)

19 With this string of chaotic thoughts in the narrator’s mind and with other audience members’ mumbling conversations, the whole auditorium is congested with cacophony: “It becomes every minute more difficult to say why, in spite of everything, I sit here believing I can’t now say what, or even remember the last time it happened” (132). It is a room full of meaningless babble.

20 Nevertheless, no sooner is the music played than the narrator is pierced and acted on by the strong affectivity of music. With four short and rapid-fire words and an exclamation point—“Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst!” (133)—we know to what extent music has transformed and transfixed the narrator. Suddenly, she is becoming-fish right in the very beginning of the first movement: The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet; drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and deep, race under the arches, and sweep the trailing water leaves, washing shadows over the silver fish, the spotted fish rushed down by the swift waters, now swept into an eddy where—it’s difficult this— conglomeration of fish all in a pool… (133)

21 For Crapoulet, it is Schubert’s “Trout” Piano Quintet “which obviously provided Woolf with the idea of the fish and the river narrative” (“Beyond the Boundaries” 207). As shown earlier, Crapoulet contends that the relation between words and music is parallel, and the short story is “an indication of the narrator’s dissatisfaction with her own expressive and linguistic powers and her failure to verbalize the intensity of her experience of the music” (210).

22 Yet I want to argue that when the narrator is being enveloped and whirled around by the strong and vigorous rhythm of the first movement, only the strong affectivity which is violently acting on the narrator remains. In other words, the narrator is no longer a Cartesian thinking thing because she is forced to move and vibrate erratically along with the rhythm of music. And if this intense musical experience happens on the pre-cognitive and pre-linguistic level, neither comparison nor analogy/parallel can be drawn to render it. Put another way, Woolf does not imagine a similarity between the narrator and the fish; instead, the narrator is becoming-fish in this movement. Although the narrator is not “physically” transformed into a fish, the strong affectivity

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unleashed by music has still inaugurated her body’s capacity to act and to feel: by fluctuating with the rhythm of the first movement, the narrator is “sensationally” becoming-fish as if to jump along with the melody in a river. Such a strong affectivity can explain why most literary critics agree that the difficulty of verbalizing musical experiences is the main theme in this short story (Jacobs 243, Crapoulet “Beyond the Boundaries” 211). It is because this is a moment of affectivity: “It [the material of art] provokes fear or desire in the ones who are involuntarily drawn into it, and constituted by it as no longer viewers or readers” (Hughes 71).

23 Moreover, in the first movement, instead of becoming just “one” particular fish, the narrator is involuntarily drawn into a “conglomeration of fish all in a pool” (133) which shares a similar affectivity with music. For Deleuze and Guattari, in contrast with “Oedipal animals” as family pets and “State animals” as national myths (Plateaus 240), there are “pack or affect animals” (241) whose undomesticated wildness signals the violent intensity they cause. In the first movement, the narrator is becoming-fish as if to jump, splash, and dive with other fish in the river, and the great intensity of being involved in a pack of fish reaches a certain degree of ecstasy. Deleuze and Guattari thus say, “Virginia Woolf experiences herself not as a monkey or a fish but as a troop of monkeys, a school of fish, according to her variable relations of becoming with the people she approaches” (239).6 In other words, since “every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack. . . . It is at this point that the human being encounters the animal” (239), then in this musical cartography weaved by strong affectivity, the narrator is becoming-fish as if to jump and dive along with other fish in the river of melody. And if affect as becoming is always double, then the narrator is becoming-fish whilst the school of fish are becoming-sonority: in the first movement, the leaping and splashing of the fish is transformed into the diverse jumping of the notes in the melody. With fish “leaping, splashing, scraping sharp fins” (“The String Quartet” 133), we know these fish are churned topsy-turvy by the strong current: “such a boil of current that the yellow pebbles are churned round and round, round and round” (133). Yet while they are “free now, rushing downwards, or even somehow ascending in exquisite spirals into the air; curled like thin shavings from under a plane; up and up. . . . [sic]” (133), we cannot distinguish whether the words are meant to describe the jumping of the fish in the current or the melody which is sprinkled with convivial notes. It is because “affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (Plateaus 240).

24 In further contrast to the fast and vigorous first movement, the pace in the second movement becomes rather slow. If this movement is the low point in the whole performance, Woolf creates two “becomings” of the music to strengthen the extent to which her narrator is completely drawn into the intensive affectivity of music and is fiercely pierced by it. Such a de-subjective condition has been announced in the beginning of this movement: “The melancholy river bears us on” (“The String Quartet” 134). Thus, the first becoming happens when the music is becoming-river because it shares the same frequency as the waves: the wave of sounds has been transformed into the wave of the river. On the one hand, the whole movement is composed by the slow and tranquil rhythm of the river so as to present the melancholy melody of “sorrow and joy” (135), while on the other hand, despite its seemingly tranquil surface, we still can feel that this river has a very rapid current underneath (perhaps with some dangerous vortexes). In order to achieve this contrast, Woolf embeds several very short but powerful words and phrases into some long and complicated sentences so as to

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create a sensation of collision, as if these short but strong words were the splash of sounds that something, like a stone in the river, creates while hitting the riverbed or bank. As the narrator says, “For me it [a wraith in the river] sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in this pattern, this consummation, the cleft ones unify; soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy” (134). In other words, by creating the sounds and rhythm of the river, the narrator has been immersed into the wave of the music and has been drifted along to fluctuate with it. Especially the last eight words―“soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy”―not only make us oscillate with the wave of sounds by using many occurrences of alliteration, but the syntactic rhythm also makes us feel that the current beneath is about to surge and disrupt the tranquil surface of the river.

25 The second becoming in this movement is the becoming-fabric of the music: the flow/ river of the music is further transformed into a firm and solid fabric or net in which the narrator, as a musical note, is becoming thread or yarn that is tightly spun on the musical score.7 In this short story, Woolf uses several sewing-related verbs to indicate how the narrator has been “woven” into the whole musical performance. As the narrator says, “[sorrow and joy are] Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow—crash!” (134). When the song reaches its lowest point in this movement, the narrator is immersed into the music as if she were lying and watching the falling of rose leaves above. As argued earlier, if the extent of affect is determined by the relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness, here we have a spellbound narrator in rest who is in contrast to the falling leaves in movement. As she says, “Falling. Ah, but they cease. One rose leaf, falling from an enormous height, like a little parachute dropped from an invisible balloon, turns, flutters waveringly. It won’t reach us” (134). This contrast suggests that the great tension of music is waiting to be unleashed after this moment of delicate suspension. We can also argue that a contrast between heaviness and lightness is used to maximize this dynamic moment: the (almost) weightless rose leaf is dragged down by the whole gravity of the earth. Perhaps the narrator is sensitive enough to notice that the great climax of the third movement is about to come after this momentary suspension, so she murmurs to herself: “Very strange, very exciting” (134).

26 In the third movement, we have an exciting elopement narrative. The narrative’s first half is an ordinary dialogue between the lovers, but the rhythm in its second half is accelerating so as to demonstrate how desperate and anxious the lovers are when their secret is discovered. There are several words starting with “s,” and words ending with “-ing” or “-ly,” with the potential to create the effect of a musical rhythm or a musical wave in this paragraph. As the narrator says, The gentleman replies so fast to the lady, and she runs up the scale with such witty exchange of compliment now culminating in a sob of passion, that the words are indistinguishable though the meaning is plain enough—love, laughter, flight, pursuit, celestial bliss—all floated out on the gayest ripple of tender endearment— until the sound of the silver horns, at first far distant, gradually sounds more and more distinctly, as if seneschals were saluting the dawn or proclaiming ominously the escape of the lovers… [sic] (135)

27 We have to read this narrative with bated breath. The first reason is because it is composed of so many rapid-fire words. The second reason is because the dashes and ellipses are used to make us glide swiftly along with the sensations that the narrator

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feels. The third reason is because of numerous occurrences of alliteration (so, scale, such, sob, celestial, sound, silver, seneschals, saluting) and two types of rhymes (one of which ends with “s”: replies, runs, words, bliss, gayest, horns, sounds, seneschals, lovers; the other with “-ly” and “-ing”: lady, witty, culminating, meaning, gradually, distinctly, saluting, proclaiming, ominously) are used to emphasize how the narrator is pierced and whirled away by the strong affectivity of music.

28 Without any further delay or hesitation, we are then forcefully drawn into the finale. To continue the fast rhythm and dynamic sensations in the third movement, there is a “chaosmos” where everything is dissolved and mixed up together in the fourth movement. In Deleuze and Guattari, chaosmos is the combination of “chaos” and “cosmos,” referring to a temporary order that art helps to establish. When “[f]rom all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday” (“Modern Fiction” 154), art becomes a protective umbrella, so we will not be harmed by the chaos directly from which those atom showers emerge. And since this umbrella is not entirely intact—there are certain fissures on it, we can still have a peep at what is out there in chaos. As mysterious yet attractive as chaos is, art, as a chaosmos, becomes the only mediation in-between. As Deleuze and Guattari say, “Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes … a chaosmos, a composed chaos—neither foreseen nor preconceived” (What Is Philosophy? 204).

29 Thus, in this chaosmos of the fourth movement, all of the sensations that the narrator had in the previous movements (the becoming-fish, the interweaving of river and the wave of sounds, and the dangerous escape) are molecularized to become fractions of the chaosmos created by the string quartet: “The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars. ... [sic]” (“The String Quartet” 135). Not just the images but also the sounds, like the horns, trumpets, clarions that the narrator had previously heard and “Tramp and trumpeting. Clang and clangor” (135) that she hears in this movement are also dissolved and mixed together. No sooner are all the sounds and images molecularized and commingled indiscernibly than a deserted city emerges. Regardless of its “Firm establishment. Fast foundations,” only “Confusion and chaos trod to earth” so “Leave then to perish your hope; droop in the desert my joy; naked advance” (135). For Werner Wolf, this paragraph is “a triumphant note,” indicating “a climax of meaningful positivity” of music (157), while for Crapoulet, this image rather signifies how inadequate Woolf is in the face of words and how insufficient words are to describe this musical experience (“Beyond the Boundaries” 210). Nevertheless, I want to argue that this seemingly negative image of a deserted city in a barren desert rather indicates the extreme dissolution of the narrator’s self-consciousness. In this paragraph, the organic body of the narrator has disappeared; she is somehow transformed into an enormous eye, shuttling back and forth in this deserted city and observing it as a whiff of hot air. We can notice her transformation, or more precisely, her deformation especially in the following sentences: “But this city to which we travel has neither stone nor marble; hangs enduring; stands unshakable; nor does a face, nor does a flag greet or welcome... Bare are the pillars; auspicious to none; casting no shade; resplendent; severe” (“The String Quartet” 135).

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30 In this short paragraph, the narrator does not “visit” the city as a tourist; instead, her body has been molecularized or shrunk into becoming an enormous eye. Unlike other human perspectives embedded in this short story, this nonhuman one is rather close to that of a camera, zooming in and out with a perception and consciousness of its own. This is especially the case in this sentence: “Bare are the pillars; auspicious to none; casting no shade; resplendent; severe” (135), we are not sure who sees this vision for we cannot consolidate the origin of this perspective, nor can we ascertain whether words like “resplendent” and “severe” are used to describe the pillars, or the solemn effect they create. In other words, this is a nonhuman landscape into which the narrator is involuntarily drawn, so that she no longer has an organic body nor does she possess any individuated self-consciousness. This inhuman and imperceptible perspective is close to the Deleuzian notion of “a fourth-person singular”8: it is impersonal (not emanating from, nor can it be consolidated by any specific subject) and it is infinitive (with a tremendous power lurking beneath the verb). According to Deleuze, it is “a becoming in itself which constantly both awaits us and precedes us, like a third person of the infinitive, a fourth person singular” (Dialogues 65). Such a fourth-person singular perspective further connects us to a similar Woolfian comparison: walking in the winter when the shops are closed and when her protective shield has been discarded, the narrator in “Street Haunting” is also transformed into “a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye” (22). This eye, which can only squirm with its own “wrinkles and roughnesses” (22), indicates that the vigilance of the narrator’s receptivity has enlarged and reached its most extreme degree of all. Once again, analogy no longer prevails. Transformed into a pure receptive organ, the becoming-eye of the narrators in both stories manifests the complete dissolution of their ego.

31 In this light, we might reach the conclusion that, in this short story, Woolf tries to envisage a condition in which the subject is no longer the master of his/her own; rather, s/he has to vibrate with, and to become with, the music. Thus, when the narrator is continually being pierced by the affectivity of music, the states she experiences are no longer the slow-paced free associations that she previously had (from public affairs to personal matters), but the ones in which she is being tossed around dizzily in such a rapid-fire assemblage of images, sounds, and thoughts. So in the first interval, the narrator starts muttering or stammering: “But the tune, like all his [Mozart’s] tunes, makes one despair—I mean hope. What do I mean? That’s the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine… Hah, hah! I’m laughing. What at?” (“The String Quartet” 133). With the accelerating rhythms and tempos of the music which sweep her away, she appears to wake up from her dream when someone talks to her in the second interval: “No, no. I noticed nothing. That’s the worst of music—these silly dreams. The second violin was late, you say?” (134). And when the performance is over, after being drawn and whirled around by the violent and synaesthetic affectivity of music, the narrator is stunned so much so that she is “eager no more, desiring only to go” (135).

Conclusion

32 With the deformation and multiple becomings of the narrator, Woolf has successfully rendered music perceptible in this short story. The four movements in “The String Quartet” can be compared to a kaleidoscope within which multiple sensations like

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multicolored confetti fall apart and are recombined. Different rhythms and themes in each movement form a continuum of variation in this string quartet. The result is that the listening narrator has to vibrate along with the music, and the text is fragmented in order to record “the incessant showers of atoms” falling on the narrator’s senses. In other words, the short story is composed of and assembled by fragments. In Woolf’s musicality-as-writing, there is “no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style” (“Modern Fiction” 154). Only the string of sensations consecutively sewn by the affectivity of music remains.

33 Furthermore, if we put this short story in a broader picture, we can see how the atomic writing that Woolf developed in this period prepared her for the later stream of consciousness novels; i.e., musicality as an affective style which features in how the audience member is transfixed by the strong affectivity of music is transferred and further used in Woolf’s novels in order to capture the evanescent yet entrancing moments of affectivity. We just have to bear in mind that the length of time is not the point, but the intensity within is. Not only is Mrs. Dalloway’s walk an act of weaving into the city of London as if she were a thread or a yarn, but the intensity that this walking emits in one day is just as strong and fierce as Orlando’s four hundred years of life. In like manner, since the six characters in The Waves have their own distinct personalities, the novel as an assemblage is thus constituted by six different rhythms and variations. In other words, musicality in my argument rather points out that the text, whether it is a poem, a short story, a , or even a play, already is an assemblage of multiple and diverse sensations. Even though the text as such is loosely structured, what we can discover in it is where “content becomes expressive and expression becomes material” (Hughes 60).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1972. Print.

Clements, Elicia. “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.” Narrative 13.2 (2005): 160-81. Print.

Crapoulet, Émilie. “Beyond the Boundaries of Language: Music in Virginia Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 50 (Spring 2008): 201-15. Print.

---. “Voicing the Music in Litterature: ‘Musicality as a Traveling Concept.’” European Journal of English Studies 13.1 (2009): 79-91. Print.

Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality.” Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Pamela Caughie. New York: Garland, 2000. 69-96. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Print.

---. What Is Philosophy? Trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Print.

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Deleuze, Gilles, w/ Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Print.

Gillespie, Diane Filby. The Sisters’ Arts: Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1988. Print.

---. Ed. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Colombia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1993. Print.

Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. “‘Across the Screen of My Brain’: Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Cinema’ and Film Forums of the Twenties.” The Multiple Muses of. Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane Filby Gillespie. Colombia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1993. 148-79. Print.

Hughes, John. Lines of Flight: Reading Deleuze with Hardy, Gissing, Conrad, Woolf. Scheffield: Scheffield Academic P, 1997. Print.

Huxley, Aldous. Point Counter Point. London: Chatto, 1963. Print.

Jacobs, Peter. “‘The Second Violin Tuning in the Ante-Room’: Virginia Woolf and Music.” The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane Filby Gillespie. Colombia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1993. 227-60. Print.

Manhire, Vanessa. “Not Regularly Musical”: Music in the Work of Virginia Woolf. Dissertation. Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 2010. Print.

Marcus, Laura. “The Shadow on the Screen: Virginia Woolf and the Cinema.” The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 99-178. Print.

Massumi, Brian. “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements.” In Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. xvi-xix. Print.

Mattison, Laci. “Virginia Woolf’s Ethical Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari’s Worlding and Bernard’s ‘Becoming-Savage.’” Deleuze Studies 7.4 (2013): 562-80. Print.

Roe, Sue. “The Impact of Post-Impressionism.” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Roe and S. Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 164-90. Print.

Rohman, Carrie. “A Hoard of Flying Monkeys: Creativity and Inhuman Becomings in Woolf’s Nurse Lugton Story.” Deleuze Studies 7.4 (2013): 515-36. Print.

Ryan, Derek. “‘The reality of becoming’: Deleuze, Woolf and the Territory of Cows.” Deleuze Studies 7.4 (2013): 537-61. Print.

Schulze, Robin Gail. “Design in Motion: Words, Music, and the Search for Coherence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Arnold Schoenberg.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 25.2 (1992): 5-22. Print.

Skeet, Jason. “Netting Fins: A Deleuzian Exploration of Linguistic Invention in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.” Deleuze Studies 7.4 (2013): 475-95. Print.

Sutton, Emma. “‘Putting Words on the Backs of Rhythm’: Woolf, ‘Street Music,’ and The Voyage Out.” Paragraph 33.2 (2010): 176-96. Print.

Tissen, Paul. “The Shadow in Caligari: Virginia Woolf and the ‘Materialists’’ Responses to Film.” Film Criticism 11 (1986-87): 75-83. Print.

Varga, Adriana, ed. Virginia Woolf & Music. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2014. Print.

Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Print.

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Woolf, Virginia. The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950. Print.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. A. O. Bell and A. McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1977. Print.

---. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Print.

---. “Impressions at Bayreuth.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. 288-93. Print.

---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6. Ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Print.

---. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader: First Series. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1953. 150-58. Print.

---. Monday or Tuesday. London: Hogarth Press, 1921. Print.

---. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego: Harvest, 1985. Print.

---. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. London: Vintage, 2004. Print.

---. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Granite and Rainbow. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958. 11-23. Print.

---. Night and Day. London: Duckworth, 1919. Print.

---. “The Opera.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. 269-72. Print.

---. Roger Fry. London: Hogarth Press, 1940. Print.

---. A Room of One’s Own/. London: Penguin, 1993. Print.

---. “Street Haunting.” . New York: Random House, 1975. 16-22. Print.

---. “Street Music.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. 27-32. Print.

---. “The String Quartet.” The Complete Shorter Fiction. London: Vintage Books, 2003. 138-41. Print.

---. The Voyage Out. London: Duckworth, 1915. Print.

---. “Walter Sickert.” The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950. 187-202. Print.

---. The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1931. Print.

---. The Years. London: Hogarth Press, 1937. Print.

NOTES

1. On the subject, see the recent essays in Adriana Varga’s collection Virginia Woolf & Music, released after this article’s submission. 2. In Moments of Being, “cotton wool” refers to those banal “moments of non-being”: “A great part of every day is not lived consciously” (70), argues Woolf. For her, great writers such as Jane Austen, Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens, and Tolstoy are capable of portraying both moments of

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being and moments of non-being clearly, while she humbly claims that she can only do one moment at one time (70-72). 3. For Huxley, “musicalization of fiction” designates how the musical elements, like themes, modulations, and variations, can shape the structure of fiction. According to Vanessa Manhire, Huxley “is interested in the technical elements of composition, the formal and structural attributes of music which can be studied and translated into the medium of literature” (7). Some literary critics have sought to investigate this brand of musicalization/musicality of Woolf’s fiction. For example, Emma Sutton argues in “‘Putting Words on the Backs of Rhythm’” that rhythm has charted Woolf’s fiction since its very early stages, and Crapoulet (“Voicing the Music”) elaborates on the concept of musicality in terms of pattern and repetition. 4. The writing style that Woolf develops and the short stories published in this period are generally acknowledged as the prefatory experiment to her later and more mature stream of consciousness novels. Regarding which art form inspired Woolf to proceed with such a writing experiment, some critics focus on the deep connection between Woolf and painting (Roe, Gillespie), while some others turn to connect Woolf with cinema (Hankins, Tissen, Marcus). I join those who seek to demonstrate that music is among the most important forms of inspiration for Woolf. 5. While Woolf does not clearly identify the narrator’s sex, for convenience’s sake, I will use the singular female pronoun throughout this essay. 6. Derek Ryan builds a strong connection between Woolf and pack animals. Not only is “a troop of monkeys” connected to Woolf’s personal life (and the alternately singular and plural childhood nickname, the Apes), but Ryan also argues that the fish assemblage which emerges in The Waves indicates how the life of these six characters have been mingled together, when Bernard describes himself and his friends as “‘only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle’ in the ‘cauldron’ of life” (540). 7. Woolf likes to use the imagery of thread and fiber to indicate how delicate and transitory affectivity is. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway, there is a paragraph describing how vulnerable and passive Septimus Smith is when he is attacked by anxiety: “It was the heat wave presumably, operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of evolution. Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was macerated until only the nerve fibers were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock” (59). So it becomes understandable that not only are Woolf’s characters becoming-thread/yarn/fiber stitched into the affective sensations, but her writing which is to render present these sensations is also transformed into a textile/assemblage to weave/contain diverse threads/becomings together. As the narrator in A Room of One’s Own says, “fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves” (38). Furthermore, in Carrie Rohman’s “A Hoard of Floating Monkeys,” by investigating Woolf’s oft-neglected children’s story about Nurse Lugton, Rohman argues that sewing is just as creative as writing and that both of the art forms have to be regarded as the unfolding of life’s potentialities. 8. According to Jason Skeet, Deleuze adopts this term, “fourth-person singular,” from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s novel Her to manifest the degree to which this is an inhuman and imperceptible perspective: “and now in the fog a permanent hole, a hole I knew, the seeing-eye of the fourth person singular that saw everything and understood nothing, yet still saw, the eye that saw and understood everything but myself, not able to see that in which it was itself imbedded” (qtd. in Skeet 493n9).

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article utilise la nouvelle “The String Quartet” de Virginia Woolf pour avancer que, selon Woolf, la musique n’est pas une simple distraction. La musique lui inspire non seulement une révolution de la structure formelle du langage, mais crée également un environnement de l’affect (une sensation non-humaine et dé-subjective) qui subjugue le public. Cet article s’appuiera sur la conception de l’affect de Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari pour démontrer la manière dont le membre du public/narrateur est pénétré par la forte affectivité de la musique, à tel point que la structure formelle est fragmentée en une multiplicité afin de traduire la musicalité. En d’autres termes, avec la forte affectivité de la musique dans “The String Quartet”, Woolf atteint la musicalité en tant que style d’écriture affectif. Ce style d’écriture ne cherche pas à étudier dans quelle mesure la fiction peut être structurée comme de la musique (comme dans la « musicalisation de la fiction » d’Huxley), mais plutôt la façon dont le contenu est transformé afin d’exprimer l’affectivité intensive de la musique alors même que la forme d’expression produit certaines propriétés non-linguistiques et pré-personnelles. Il s’agira ici de montrer que la musicalité est corrélative à l’«écriture atomique » de Woolf, que cette dernière expérimente dans cette nouvelle.

AUTHORS

KUO CHIA-CHEN Kuo Chia-chen is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Tamkang University, Taiwan. Her articles on Virginia Woolf and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze have been published in several academic journals.

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Reading Structures of Feeling in Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel”

Rob Welch

1 Among the American literary naturalists, the writing of Stephen Crane has always stood out for its unique poetic quality. Critics have long debated the degree to which it might be appropriate to apply the visual term “impressionist” to the author. In the past, studies have sought to find definite links between Crane and the plastic arts in order to justify representing his style as a kind of painting with words. A glance at the opening paragraph for The Red Badge of Courage hints at the motivation behind the desire to make this connection. The richness and depth of description contained in those four sentences is only enhanced by the sense that all that is mentioned—trees, road, river, fog, mud, and army—is equally organic to the narrator’s view. Each is simply a component within the frame of vision, and each may freely signify upon the other, crafting a statement through this specific combination of their parts. Crane uses the paragraph to provide a backdrop that at once reflects the characters to be introduced and creates anticipation by implying the absence of the human by blending the framed elements together as mise en scène. This symbolic practice―the building of impressions for the reader through the narrative voice―has resulted in critics overlooking how much Crane’s writing depends on the interchange of impression between characters. The act of defining an impression requires the dissection of contextualizing information and the feelings that adhere to it through cultural conditioning. Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” (1898) is a story in which the narrative is entirely based on how the mismatched impressions of the characters toward each other result in extreme conflict. Using Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling” as a critical tool, this interaction can be broken down and observed. More, however, understanding the interiority in this sample of Crane’s writing lends itself to explicating Crane’s work on a broader scale.

2 Raymond Williams’ most succinct definition of structures of feeling appears in his 1972 Marxism and Literature. While addressing the difficulty of theoretically understanding any moment, he struggles with the problem that has beset philosophers for millenia: the proper relationship between the subjectivity of individual experience within the

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social discourse that encompasses all experiences. Williams writes: “We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind” (132). That which is experienced in any moment is molded by myriad forces which bring a uniquely nuanced meaning to that moment, different for each individual.1 Yet, individuals exist in a social continuity which is a central shaping force of that experience. Williams notes that this complex appreciation of what it means to know gets no less complex when focused on the fictional events depicted in literature since literature is not a static object; it is only literature as it is experienced within the mind of the reader (129). So, for instance, the setting in Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” is Romper, Nebraska. The Oxford English Dictionary shows a relatively consistent usage for the word “romper” over the past two centuries, indicating those who move energetically, especially children; sometimes it is applied to the clothes which such dynamic people wear. Yet, on encountering the name Romper and becoming aware that the premise is that this is a placename, the reader might feel an ever-so-slight tug towards the positive or the negative in how they feel about their personal connotations to the word. These might be discerned through questions. Would I like to live in a place called Romper? What sort of people name a place Romper and then live there? Are they child- like and boisterous? Is that a good thing?

3 What Williams indicates is that such acts of judgment occur over and over as we encounter such facts, moment by moment, in life, in literature, and in thought, but that individuals tend to adopt patterns which are common to their social construction of identity, allowing the understood values of a social set to stand in the place of the reasoned values which overt questioning might develop. The individual settles with his/her impression. If I am well-educated, well-cultured, I may automatically assume a superior attitude to that which advertises its physical boisterousness. Alternately, if I am surfeited with education and culture, I may find the concept of a place named Romper naively refreshing. In neither case am I likely to ponder this, but merely to instantly accept the “normal” feeling I have toward Romper and move on into the story despite the fact that this feeling is one of the critical blocks to how the rest of the story will be received and interpreted. The narrative progresses, and word after word adds its own nuance to this one, each an unheard but not unfelt note in the symphony of “The Blue Hotel.”

4 The choice of example for this affective method within Cultural Studies is not coincidental. “The Blue Hotel” is a classic instance of American literary naturalism, a genre which Donald Pizer notes “is rich with social implication […] ripe for re- examination along the lines of this new approach” (226). Because the movement of literary naturalism developed in response to the advent of Darwinian perspectives during the nineteenth century, it is strongly concerned with dramatizing the conflict between exterior social forces and the individual. Since this is the very problem that Raymond Williams struggles with, naturalism seems to offer an artistic appraisal of the situation that Williams attempts from the view of the critic. Meredith Farmer observes that “a concern that is predominant in Crane’s work [is that] set meanings are problematic” (69). This impressionistic quality is precisely the feature that the structures of feeling lens exploits, seeking the meaning between meanings, that moment of transition in the dance from one stance to another. “The Blue Hotel” is frequently read so that it simply demonstrates themes of determinism, the helplessness

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of the individual in the face of societal pressures. However, when the story is addressed as being about how the characters’ own impressions of their situation, their attempt to reconcile structures of feeling, “The Blue Hotel” shows something beyond fatalism.

5 During a blizzard in the central plains, three travelers noted as the Easterner, the Cowboy, and the Swede take shelter in a hotel run by the Irish immigrant, Scully. The odd man in the scenario, the one who does not fit in, the Swede, meets the very violence that he enters the stage fearing. In the tradition of the Western plot, he catches one of his chance companions cheating at cards and satisfaction is obtained through physical confrontation. Adjourning from the hotel to a nearby saloon, the Swede carries his belligerence with him, this time confronting a man who responds by escalating the violence and leaving the Swede dying on the barroom floor. Richard Lehan, in a typical critical observation, restates the deterministic theme: “The point of the story is not that he becomes the victim of the Old West codes but that each character acts true to his temperament and the combined result is inevitable” (236). My suggestion is that perceiving a character being “true” to a temperament continues the pattern observed in the first paragraph of The Red Badge of Courage, where the human is conflated with the natural, with the inanimate. While this device is clearly in evidence, seeing it as the sole motif Crane uses to address character glosses over the author’s very real efforts to represent and explore situational dynamics.

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6 The narrator opens the scene in “The Blue Hotel” by observing the outward appearance of that structure, drawing attention to its color. The description contains characteristics common to naturalism, a multifaceted approach to the significance of the human in relation to nature. It calls upon the reader to recognize the cultural meanings that nature has acquired through romantic themes. At the same time, it also forces the reader to reconcile the grotesque “nature” of human works in comparison to the ideals that underwrite romance. The result is a constant duality of perception where the meaning of each element evades any static determination. By examining the exterior of the hotel, Crane implies by extension the as yet unknown interior, establishing the motif by which characters will be examined, on the merits of their experientially observable appearance and actions. In addition, he presents the first element of his story which has variable affective possibilities, the color blue. This color is immediately associated with a natural one, “the shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron,” which is justified by explaining that the color serves the same function for both bird and building, as advertising for others to find it (179). Shortly, however, the name of the eponymous building is disclosed, the Palace Hotel, making a social connection between color and nobility, suggesting that the hue is intended as a royal blue. For the reader, the color is one thing, and, at the same time, it is another. This split is mirrored within the text, as well. Easterners passing through Romper regard the gaudy brightness of the edifice with more than distaste, evincing “shame, pity, horror” (179). Simultaneously, the citizens of rural Romper swell with pride because of the singularity, the originality of their local landmark.

7 If this duality was observable in this single instance alone, it would still be worth remarking on in terms of a demonstrable usage of structure of feeling. However, Crane incorporates such duality into the entirety of “The Blue Hotel.” The Easterner never

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discloses his origins to the other characters, and because it is stated that he does not look like someone from the East, there is no reason to suspect that anyone other than the narrator and the audience is aware of this. The Easterner, then, is an Easterner to the reader, but not necessarily to Scully or Bill, the Cowboy. The farmer who passes time with Scully’s son Johnnie at the hotel is noted for having “both gray and sandy whiskers,” pinning this transient character as both old and young (180). Ultimately, the Swede is characterized through the first part of the story as being threatened, while he spends the latter half as the one who threatens all. Even the solid world described in the parlor of the hotel, by virtue of its centrality, is paired over and again with matching opposites: Scully’s room upstairs, the haven from the wind outside where the fight is settled, and eventually, the completely separate setting of the saloon in town. When Scully returns to the parlor, having pacified the Swede with whiskey, he astonishes the other guests and his son by seeming to be in perfect sympathy with the Swede. However, at the first chance, he drops this façade and relays the information that the Swede thought Scully was trying to poison him. The current appearance of Scully’s complicity with the Swede is merely a front which the hotelkeeper justifies by virtue of his chosen profession. Regardless of this rationalization, the fact remains that Scully is in two positions at once, a fact carried through the fight sequence where he must be both referee and father to one of the combatants.

8 The multiple roles of Scully provide one of the most obvious ways in which Crane utilizes structures of feeling through categorizations acknowledged by characters within the story. As a hotelkeeper, he feels that he has an obligation to keep the peace within his chosen domain, no matter the personal cost. His explanation of this to his son and guests impresses them as admirable. However, this correlation of identity and function is by no means unique. The guest, Bill, is known for the bulk of the narrative as the Cowboy. Johnnie’s original partner at cards when the scene first opens on the hotel parlor is simply labeled as the farmer. The bartender in the closing scene is primarily just that and, only at the last instant, the man named Henry who runs into the night seeking help. Crane does not employ epithets as suitable pronouns to substitute for characters’ names in order to provide variety in his diction. Rather, he implies a layering of character, a differentiation between the self that is known only to the individual and the self that participates in social processes. Each of the characters, like each reader, enjoys multiple levels of interaction with the world, and yet, each has chosen (or had imposed upon them) a particular frame by which they are known. In the American tradition, this frequently equates to profession: a person is that which they commercially produce.

9 Scully’s role as hotelkeeper carries many assumptions that society has paired with it as a profession. In “The Hospitality Code and Crane’s ‘The Blue Hotel,’” Ronald McFarland takes these assumptions in two directions, a perspective that parallels the split in the individual. First, he establishes the provenance of the concept by relating the hospitality in Romper, Nebraska to the hospitality accorded Odysseus on the isle of Phaeacia, establishing the near archetypal traditions in western culture that delineate how outsiders are treated. Scully clearly refers to a higher calling when he cites his duty to his guests. McFarland points out, however, that Scully is not engaged in a ritual exchange with a possibly noble or divine stranger; he is the proprietor within what is termed the “hospitality industry.” What he does, he does for money, not to remain in accord with social customs. This obvious fact is brought painfully to the forefront as he attempts to sway the Swede to accept his welcome within the Palace Hotel. Attempting

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to leave, the Swede demands to know what he owes the hotelkeeper, drawing from his pocket a handful of change. Scully refuses the cash, but both freeze in place at the foiled exchange. Crane writes: “they both stood gazing in a strange fashion at three silver pieces on the Swede’s open palm” (188). Why does the businessman in Scully refuse to take payment for his inconvenience, at least for the meal already consumed by this guest? The answer is the one that he provides to the other guests. In his capacity as hotelier, the service of value that Scully provides is not simply shelter but the seeming adherence to the traditions of hospitality, which require that the guest be kept safe by the host. By not acknowledging that safety, the Swede invalidates the service that Scully believes he is providing, reducing the transaction from a lofty one built upon tradition, to the purely commercial one which it masks. The meaning of hotel has connotations to Scully which the Swede refuses to recognize. The intersection of the structures of feeling for the two men on the subject of the hotel do not match, leading to antagonism on both sides. Acknowledging outright the business nature of their relationship voids Scully’s pretense of actually adhering to an ancient structure of feeling and exposes how this structure has now been transformed into a commodity. McFarland notes in his analysis the “artificiality of Scully’s behavior” (449). Extrapolating from that point, however, demonstrates how intricately intertwined this duel position is for the hotelkeeper. Keeping up the lofty pretense of his position is not merely a matter of stroking his own ego about the worthiness of his profession; the Easterner and the Cowboy both immediately concur with Scully about the correctness of his doing so. The fact is that it is simply good business to retain such a point of view, to make guests like the Easterner and the Cowboy feel as though they are being treated special, not merely as customers with money. At some level, each knows that cash is the thing around which their stay at the hotel revolves, but both host and guest are willing to subscribe to a mythical understanding of their position which makes each feel better about the exchange. In this action, the Easterner and the Cowboy and Scully are demonstrated to partake of the same structure of feeling, while the Swede remains exterior to it.

10 Scully, however, is the one who makes heroic efforts, commercially inspired or not, to bridge the gap between the Swede’s perspective and the one understood commonly between the rest of the guests. Entering, and finding the Swede violently estranged from the others in the parlor, the Swede declaring that the others mean to kill him and that he is leaving, Scully howls in his brogue, “What does it mane?” (186). When no one can satisfy him as to what event or interaction he has missed that can account for this situation, he assumes that whatever it was must have been of such dire proportions that it cannot be spoken, and he sets about assuaging the feelings of the Swede. Following this guest to his room, Scully first offers the intelligence that the hotel is located within a broader setting, one that, for all of its remove from the East coast, is still part of the system of progress effecting the civilized world. Electric lights and streetcars are only a year away in the Nebraska town, he posits as proof that it is not a place where murderers and ne’er-do-wells congregate, but a normal, modern outpost of society, and he indicates that to think otherwise is madness. The Swede, however, responds with a tangent to this assessment. He says, “There are people in this world who know pretty nearly as much as you do” (149). Here, Lehan observes that since the Swede has recently removed from a stay of many years working in New York, the fact that he is not soothed by signs of progress is significant (235). The Swede’s fear of the wildness of the West is a premise which drives the beginning of the story, yet he has

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made the trip away from the urban, so it may be inferred that while we see him trepidatious in this setting, perhaps the setting he has left fills him with even greater dread. Scully’s offering of the images he associates with security and stability may have an opposite meaning to the Swede. With the suggestion of material progress, however, the Swede offers his payment at this point, and Scully sees the dead-end of this line of reasoning and moves to his next gambit. He takes the Swede into his own compartment, ushering him physically into a personal space in order that he might understand the vulnerable openness of the host. There, Scully points out pictures of his children. This serves the purpose of removing Scully from the role of hotelier and, instead, demonstrates his role as a family man, presumably with the intention of establishing a bar to measure a standard experience between himself and the Swede.

11 Significant about this decision to reach the Swede are the subjects of the material objects which Scully offers as his new proof. Scully first shows a portrait of a daughter who died in childhood, using a hook baited with pathos to snare the Swede. Failing that extreme emotional appeal, the subject of loss introduced by the Swede’s talk of murder is transformed into a personal awareness of the effects of death. Scully is informing his guest that he is well aware of the presence of death in the world, but that while it is sad and perhaps sudden, it is not the lurking, immediate danger that the Swede apprehends. The proof in this is in the next portrait he offers for the inspection of his guest, that of his son who is a successful lawyer in Lincoln. Scully seems to offer a wide spectrum for the possibilities that the world might have to offer, with a seeming subtext that these possibilities occur within the lives of all, even a simple man like himself, without the presence of rogues and villains to intercede. Further, Scully demonstrates the ethereal bonds that extend out, unseen, from each human. This is emphasized by his choice of evidence. The pictures are of his children, now absent, one by misfortune, one by success. However, these absent children are not the only children that Scully has. His son Johnnie sits by the stove even as they speak, and his other daughters tend to the next meal in the hotel kitchen along with Scully’s wife. By pointing to images, signs, of those who are not present, Scully does more than demonstrate the literal meaning of each, he gestures toward what lies between himself, as a man, and these conceptualized people. He is nodding to his understanding of a particular structure of feeling, trusting that it should have meaning to any other man.

12 This example of familial relationship may be intended as the proper substitute for the adversarial expectations with which the Swede has imbued his view of the world. The Swede, however, is far too engrossed in keeping a watch over his shoulder to invest himself in the subtle suggestions of the host. Having failed to influence the Swede by bringing him into his personal space and introducing him to his personal experiences, Scully resorts to yet another structure of feeling, one that he supposes is the most basic possible between those that are seeking to find common ground, the sharing of a drink. His error in this is in supposing that the Swede will, in the end, regard this effort in a positive light. Scully passes the whiskey bottle to the Swede, but the effect is far from positive. The Swede drinks, but “he kept his glance burning with hatred upon the old man’s face” (189). Flushed from the cover of his own subjectivity, the Swede at last begins to interact with the structures of feeling that he has been offered, but he does so with a relentless disregard for their meaning. The primary lesson he has learned is that these structures require his assimilation, and he is determined from this point on, to aggressively enforce each structure of feeling that he encounters. All others must conform in their demonstration of good faith in them, as he has been forced to do. On

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re-entering the parlor, he becomes the board-whacker in the card game, appropriating the part previously played by the Cowboy. When Johnnie oversteps the rules, nothing will do but that they settle the dispute by fists, as a commonly understood precept. Finally, the Swede sails away from the hotel to the saloon, but he carries with him the same resolve to make others conform, as he was made to conform. The sharing of the drink becomes the symbol of that conversion into a particular structure of feeling, and when he attempts to forcibly impose it upon the Gambler, the Swede dies at his hands. Crane closes that scene by writing: “The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon, had its eyes fixed upon a dreadful legend that dwelt a-top of the cash-machine. ‘This registers the amount of your purchase’” (209). The full irony of those words is only available with the recognition of the failure of exchange between the structures of feeling of the characters involved.

13 Incidental social structures that attach themselves to the sharing of a drink or the profession of an acquaintance provide the key to understanding how each of the characters in “The Blue Hotel” identifies himself, and how the reader can come to know and understand the characters and their actions. This instance of application of structures of feeling, however, can be used as a way of explaining more than the interactions of Scully and the Swede. In fact, it may prove to be a useful tool for understanding other works by Stephen Crane.

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14 Once it is discerned that the relative perspective between characters is the basis for the story told in “The Blue Hotel,” it is particularly tempting to extend this affective technique to Crane’s other writings. His famous western tale, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” falls easily into similar patterns. Here, characters experience real schisms to parallel those built up by emotional and experiential contexts. Jack Potter, sheriff of a Texas border town, takes an unannounced journey to San Antonio to acquire a wife whom he has met through correspondence. The story centers on the events that occur during his return trip via train with his bride; one part follows the newlyweds while the other details events in Yellow Sky, where former desperado Scratchy Wilson has gotten drunk and spoils for a fight. As in “The Blue Hotel,” physical interiors mirror the interiority of the psyche. The bulk of the story finds the Potters located within the railcars. The sheriff, an archetypal figure of the frontier, feels himself alien to the elegance that he experiences amid the “sea-green figured velvet, the shining brass, silver, and glass, the wood that gleamed as darkly brilliant as the surface of a pool of oil” (214). That this interior is unknown does not keep the newlyweds from attempting to appropriate the splendor as a metaphor for the transition they have lately undergone through marital union. Crane writes of them, “This was the environment of their new estate” (214). As happens in “The Blue Hotel,” payment for service extends beyond the superficial; the couple has paid for transportation from one location to another, but they regard the trip as much more. That Potter is able to proffer some claim to this interior must contrast sharply with the tacit story of his original trip to San Antonio, a stealing away from his responsibilities and the social relationships of his home. That journey is suggested by the unease Potter feels on his return. Further, the proprietorial attitude of the Potters is immediately challenged by the structures of feeling that are arrayed against them by all around. The rustic couple is sized up with “careless scrutiny” by fellow passengers, and the Potters find themselves patronized

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and bullied by the native denizen of the railcar, the porter (213). Through it, the newlyweds remain unaware of any special derision, the awkward self-consciousness of two strangers entering married life drowning out any awareness of exterior judgment. Potter does expect judgment on returning home, but it is only significant to him within the context of his home, the potential for shame acting as the real indicator of the place of belonging for the sheriff.

15 As they speed toward their home together and, uncomfortably for the sheriff, toward the inevitable revelation of his new marital status to his neighbors, another interior is explored back at Yellow Sky at the Weary Gentleman saloon. The situation of characters here resembles that found in Romper’s Palace Hotel. Among the Texans, a single drummer stands out, talking and doing so quickly, setting himself in opposition to the laconic westerners. Business has brought him to an unfamiliar location, but since sales is based upon social interaction, he is engaged in entertaining his fellows. Like Scully, he counts on a shared understanding of social constructs to smooth his way. The interiority of the scene is suddenly highlighted by the approaching danger on the street. A young man calls the warning: “Scratchy Wilson’s drunk and has turned loose with both hands” (218). With that, the door is barred, the windows shuttered, and all talk ceases as the men shelter from the storming rage of the bad man. The drummer’s experience has not prepared him for a setting that bows to a drunken rowdy, and his disconcertion is evidenced by his questions that seek assurance from the locals. Jack Potter is mentioned, the foil to Scratchy Wilson, and this reveals the gap between the expectations of the drummer and the reality of Yellow Sky. When told that it is Potter who keeps Wilson in line through direct physical confrontation, the salesman dabs away his nervous sweat and exclaims, “Nice job he’s got” (220). Surely, law enforcement anywhere in nineteenth-century America would be expected to do as much, so the surprise and anxiety displayed by the drummer have more to do with the direct necessity of intervention that Yellow Sky takes as normal. The drummer has entered a scene and imposed his expectations upon it; only when he is shut into the saloon does he realize that Yellow Sky and its people are not synchronized with those expectations. Similarly, the newlywed Potters have intersected with the Southern Railway and extended their excitement and the change in themselves out to the glamor of the railcar, understanding its luxuriousness in relation to their feelings. Both are aware of something new, but each misjudges the distance involved in such appropriation; it cannot be meaningful to others in the way that it is for them.

16 Importantly, the experience of the characters, always dancing between social and personal perspectives, always negotiating meanings as they apply to multiple spheres, mirrors the experience of the reader, making the story an invitation to participate in the narrative. This parallel of exteriority and interiority is supported in both “The Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” through the device of the train. Crane explicitly suggests the existence of an audience that is at once exterior to the insular settings and at the same time has easy accessibility to them. In “The Blue Hotel,” Crane mentions the attitudes of those who never stop in Romper, the masses of mobile Americans in “great transcontinental expresses, long lines of swaying Pullmans” (179). In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” these same sophisticated travelers view the Texan newlyweds with the identical mixture of amusement and pity that they apply to judging the Palace Hotel. These travelers present the reader with a proxy allowing for physical proximity to this place, to these people, suggesting authentic tangibility to the

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reader, a sensory awareness of settings and characters that is supplemented by the readers’ intellectual, abstract awareness. Paul Sorrentino’s historicist examination of “The Bride” offers insight into the multiplicity of contexts available to the audience of McClure’s in 1898. Sorrentino gives numerous possible valences of reference to the selection of the sheriff’s name, Potter, allowing that these show how “Crane relies on America’s growing awareness of a commonly shared pop culture” (52). In looking for sources and allusions in Crane’s work, Sorrentino lists more than half a dozen figures in nineteenth-century history and fiction that are particularly associated with the Texas frontier. He suggests that the motifs associated with east and west are not place- specific binaries, but exist in common, in conversation. “The Blue Hotel,” has its diverse characters with diverse occupations that relate to east and west. Romper is situated in Nebraska, a very western location relative to the New York origin of the Swede, but not so very western in relation to the broad United States. Likewise, in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” the expected boundaries for understanding Yellow Sky are undermined by Crane for comedic effect. The description of Scratchy Wilson, “last one of the old gang” who cows the entire town with his threatened violence, repeatedly connects Wilson to the east (221). Crane’s narrator mentions that Wilson’s dark red shirt “made, principally, by some Jewish women on the east side of New York” (221). Wilson’s boots are showy, “of the kind in winter by little sledding boys on the hillsides of New England” (221). Each of these inanimate accessories works to reflect on the nature of Scratchy’s persona as a cultural construction, and it is through recognizing it as a façade that the audience finds humor, as the narrative progresses. However, the anxiety over how far Scratchy will go in his embodiment of the desperado is left unresolved until the ultimate confrontation with Potter. As has been demonstrated in “The Blue Hotel,” Crane uses multivalenced, symbolic interaction between the inanimate and the human to develop the reader’s impressions of characters within specific situations. However, the impressions between characters drive Crane’s narratives.

17 The gorgeous imagery that enlivens the fiction of Stephen Crane is certainly a holistic element of his style. We learn much from the things that are of and about the characters. So, the “funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand” at the end of “The Bride” seem to speak of the inevitable flow of time, suggesting that progress has made Scratchy Wilson obsolete (225). Yet, at the same time, Crane has included evidence indicating that Scratchy already lives an existence in communication and exchange far beyond the frontier. In “The Blue Hotel,” as the angry men exit to fight, the tireless wind courses into the parlor, and “some of the scarred and bedabbled cards were caught up from the floor and dashed helplessly against the further wall” (197). The reader gets the sense that the Swede and his antagonists are caught in a dispassionate flow of events, as helpless as the playing cards. However, as has been shown, each possesses a form of awareness, and like Scully, each is actively engaged in trying to negotiate the meaning of their interaction. This is brought home, especially, in the epilogue to “The Blue Hotel,” where the Easterner reveals the choices he made that evening, concealing his knowledge that would have supported and justified the Swede in his argument with Johnny. In this instance, Crane offers an additional reflection that allows insight into how his characters acknowledge the structures of feeling that guide them. Yet, in the works that provide no such reflection, the same patterns can be seen at play, deepening, informing, and driving the narratives of Stephen Crane.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crane, Stephen. “The Blue Hotel.” 1898. The Red Badge of Courage and Four Stories. New York: Signet, 2011. 177-210. Print.

---. “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” 1898. The Red Badge of Courage and Four Stories. New York: Signet, 2011. 211-25. Print.

---. The Red Badge of Courage. New York: Signet, 2011. Print.

Farmer, Meredith. “‘This Registers the Amount of Your Purchase’: The Price of Expectation, the Force of Context.” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 8.1 (2007): 69-80. Print.

Lehan, Richard. “Literary Naturalism and Its Transformations: The Western, American Neo- realism, Noir, and Post-modern Reformation.” Studies in American Naturalism 7.2 (2012): 228-45. Print.

McFarland, Ronald E. “The Hospitality Code and Crane’s ‘The Blue Hotel’.” Studies in Short Fiction 18.4 (1981): 447-51. Print.

Pizer, Donald. “Jack London’s ‘How to Build a Fire’: How Not to Read Naturalist Fiction.” Philosophy and Literature 34.1 (2010): 218-27. Print.

Sorrentino, Paul. “Stephen Crane’s Sources and Allusions in ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky’ and ‘Moonlight on the Snow.’” American Literary Realism 40.1 (2007): 52-65. Print.

Williams, Raymond. “Structures of Feeling.” Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. 128-35. Print.

NOTES

1. The example that Williams provides regards the crown of Restoration England. The crown exists as an object, one that rests on the head of King Charles II. Previous supporters of Cromwell have learned the social attitude that this crown represents godless tyranny. Royalists view the crown as a sign of stability and normality. There is just the crown, but the affective meaning of crown is split.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article analyse le conflit dans « The Blue Hotel » de Stephen Crane, le définissant comme un non-alignement des attentes socio-culturelles. Le concept de « structures de sentiment », que l’on doit à Raymond Williams, et qui fut adapté en tant que motif fondateur dans certaines branches des études de l’affect, est utilisé pour expliciter ce conflit. Il s’agit de démontrer qu’en s’attardant sur la dynamique d’interaction personnelle, l’histoire peut être considérée comme plus qu’une simple manifestation du déterminisme par un naturaliste de renom. Une fois ces éléments établis, cette étude démontre en outre que cette méthode d’interprétation est utile

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pour comprendre les grandes lignes de l’œuvre de Crane. En conclusion, ces structures de sentiment s’ouvrent à « The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky », qui illustre ce point.

AUTHORS

ROB WELCH Rob Welch turned from a career in industry and technology to a vocation in education. Applying affect theory to naturalist fiction is a meshing of two beloved interests for him. He currently teaches composition at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Criticism.

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Roundtable: Affect, the Short Story, and the Cycle

The Roundtable

1 The editors of this special section asked a panel of experts to weigh in on questions related to the short story, the short story cycle, genre and form, emotion, affect, and effects on the reader. The roundtable is divided into two sections, the first of which deals with connections between genre, form, and affect, and the second of which deals with the short story cycle. Biographies of the contributors follow:

2 Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor in the English Department and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of seventeen books, including works on narrative theory (The Mind and Its Stories [2003], Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Identity, and Cognitive Science [2009], Affective Narratology [2011], and Narrative Discourse [2013]) and a book-length, narrative poem (The Death of the Goddess [2014]).

3 Gerald Lynch was born in Ireland and grew up in Canada. In 2001, the University of Toronto Press published his second book of criticism, The One and the Many: English- Canadian Short Story Cycles, and then in 2002 the compilation Leacock on Life. He is also the author of Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity (1998) and of numerous essays and short stories. He has published five books of fiction, including two short story cycles, Kisbey and Troutstream, the frame tale One’s Company, and the novels Exotic Dancers and Missing Children. He has been the recipient of a few prizes for his writing, including the gold award for short fiction in Canada’s National Magazine Awards. He is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, where he has taught since 1985.

4 Justine Murison is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. She is currently working on a book-length project on secularism, slavery, and American fiction from the Revolution through the Civil War.

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5 James Nagel is the Eidson Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia and a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College. He is the president of the international Society for the Study of the American Short Story and a former president of the international Ernest Hemingway Society. Early in his career he founded the scholarly journal Studies in American Fiction and the widely influential series Critical Essays on American Literature. Among his twenty-four books are Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism, Hemingway in Love and War, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, Race and Culture in Stories of New Orleans, and Handbook of the American Short Story. He has published some eighty articles in the field and lectured on American literature in fifteen countries.

6 Jane Thrailkill is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She works on the relationship between literature and science, widely construed. Her first book is Affecting : Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism, and she is finishing a second monograph on Alice, William, and Henry James. She is director of the graduate program in Literature, Medicine and Culture at UNC and co-founder of Carolina’s Medical Humanities Lab.

7 Miriam Wallace is professor of English at New College of Florida and Director of Gender Studies. She has written extensively on literature and politics in late eighteenth- century Britain, from Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel to an edited collection, Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing Enlightenment: British Fiction 1750-1830. With A. A. Markley, Wallace co-edited the first collection of essays dedicated to the autodidact playwright, , and organic intellectual, Thomas Holfcroft (Re- viewing Thomas Holcroft, 1745-1809). She has also published on Virginia Woolf, gendered subjectivity, and Woolf’s debt to the eighteenth century.

Section 1: Genre, Form, and Affect

1. Affective Operation, Length, and Structure

8 Could the short story be reasonably defined as much by its affective operation on readers as it is by its length or structure?

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9 NAGEL: The simple answer to this question is no, although the formulation of the question is critically loaded. No one has argued that length and structure are the two key elements in defining a short story. There is much more to it than that. As to length, it would seem true that there are some outer limits (not very precise) to length. No one has argued that there is a short story over 500 pages in length, for example, and normally the dividing line between story and novella is regarded as being roughly 60-70 pages. Structure is a good thing to be aware of in reading a story, but it is not a definitive element. A reader who confronted “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” without seeing the differences among the three sections of the story would have missed something important, including the three different narrative techniques with varying levels of reliability.

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10 As this example demonstrates, the “formal” study of fiction yields some of the key aspects of short fiction that an intelligent reader should consider. Narrative stance is central, since a sensitivity to the motive of the speaker in telling the narrative is fundamental. A determination of whether the voice is imperious, confessional, coldly rational, or emotionally involved is a preliminary step to understanding what is told. The narrator could be searching for the truth or hiding something, or both. Time is also a factor. A first-person retrospective narrative stance necessarily involves two time periods: the time of and the time of the action. Events can have different values in the two time periods. A story about a dog playing fetch in a field can present a joyous moment in present time, but if it is told years after the dog was tragically killed by a truck, and the narrator is aware of the conclusion, there is also an overlay of poignant memory. A sensitive reader would have a double affect. But some readers will be oblivious to the complexity of the dual time, and have no affective response to it at all. That is a measure of the reader, not the story, and that is one of the weaknesses of evaluating according to this brand of affect.

11 Beyond narrative methods, stories also have some sort of plot line, sometimes implied. The short narrative “Not thinking, I poured two glasses” portrays a simple action but implies much about a previous relationship, perhaps a romance, that is no longer. Some readers will say, “I don’t get it.” Most stories have much more action. Most have characters, dialogue (or monologue), patterns of imagery, structural juxtapositions, incremental thematic development, and a conclusion. A reader who misses the imagery of savage beasts attacking each other in a polite Henry James tale about a tea party in a London drawing room will miss much of the social commentary in the story.

12 Some readers are intelligent and sensitive, and their responses deserve respect and consideration. Some like or dislike aspects of a story without being able to say why. Other readers are stunningly obtuse, and have very little affective response. A fair majority of the human population has little capacity for an empathetic involvement with the characters in a story, but others are profoundly moved by the events, feeling that these things have happened to them. Many readers felt that about Dreiser’s “The Second Choice” or Ruth Suckow’s “A Start in Life,” particularly after the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, when people identified with poverty and the limitations it placed on the lower class. This conception of affect is very unreliable as a measure of the quality of a work of literature.

13 That being said, it is important to acknowledge that the history of serious commentary about the nature of the American short story begins with a concern for affect. In his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales in 1842, Edgar Allan Poe postulated that a well-wrought story is fashioned to bring about “a single effect” on the reader, one resulting from the rigorous artistic control of the writer: “In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design” (243). The implications of Poe’s fundamental theory reach into nearly every dimension of the genre of the short story, beginning with the dictum that it be of such length that it can be read comfortably in a single sitting. Although, to be sure, people read at varying speeds, and type face, page size, and other variables make it difficult to establish a precise length in numbers, still a general range for length eventually emerged in the nineteenth century that short fiction would normally run no more than roughly sixty pages. Works longer than that—

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Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, for example—would seem to fit into the French tradition of the novella and would appear as a separate volume.

14 Beyond the simple matter of length, however, Poe’s ideas presented a difficult standard for writers in the form, for they suggested that the genre required both artistic coherence and thematic congruence, even down to a single word. A work thus constructed, he suggested, could best control the affect of the reader of the tale, sustaining tone, mood, and idea from the beginning to the end. The best demonstration of the efficacy of this theoretical construct comes in his own tales, many of which have never been surpassed for the rigor of this standard. Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” can be taken to be a case in point. The point of view is consistently first-person retrospective, told by Montresor, who is looking back many decades. Why he is willing to tell about the events is not certain, but his motivation would seem to be either a desire for confession, to tell someone about a murder he committed in hopes of relieving his conscience, or a desire to gloat about a well-executed plan that succeeded in its objective. The tone throughout is consistently kindly and gentlemanly, an ironic stance that heightens the severity of the punishment about to be meted out. The style, too, is elevated, sophisticated, the language of a cultivated class. In short, all aspects of artistry and theme work together.

15 In terms of affect, the strategy would seem to be one of intriguing the reader with a lighthearted tale of satisfying revenge, and the mood of the events darkens consistently until the victim, Fortunato, is permanently walled up beneath a Venetian villa. The emotional impact is either one of progressive horror or of rational satisfaction in enjoying the slow revelation of such a clever and deadly stratagem, depending upon the perception or emotional construct of the reader.

16 HOGAN (on Nagel): I very much appreciate Professor Nagel’s comments. They bring to mind some possible relations with drama. The “single sitting” criterion is the most obvious. But there are some suggestions of drama’s emotional impact as well.

17 One of these is the possible relation of the “twist” to Aristotelian reversal and recognition (cf. responses to question #3 below). That may seem to be a purely cognitive alteration (from ignorance to knowledge). But the point of the change is that it alters emotion, often fear and pity. Such a parallel suggests a perhaps greater generality to Aristotle’s analysis, as I am sure other writers have noted previously. This in turn sets a task for researchers in literature and emplotment—to explain why something along the lines of reversal and recognition would be emotionally effective. Reasons would include the relative immunity to habituation, where emotion becomes dulled through familiarity. The reversed and recognized situation would be new in individual cases even if the processes of reversal and recognition become common. The relatively limited time span of a short story or drama may further limit the possibilities for such habituation. An additional reason for emotional effectiveness would be the enhancement of emotional intensity due to the gradient of change from a prior emotion—also perhaps enhanced by the limited temporal scope.

18 Another area of possible convergence comes from the Sanskrit tradition of dramatic theory. From the ancient Nāṭyaśāstra, this tradition centered on what we would now call the empathic emotion of the spectator. Moreover, in line with Nagel’s (and Poe’s) reflections, this tradition has emphasized the unity of emotional orientation for any given work. Significantly, the dramatic practice associated with the tradition stressed an overall emotional unity, but allowed each act in a drama to have its own dominant

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emotional tone, with other subdivisions as well. Thus emotional unity was not reduced to emotional uniformity. How this may occur no doubt requires further study. But the Sanskrit theorists suggest some possible directions for research.

19 MURISON: In his recent evaluation of the pleasures and challenges posed by Herman Melville’s most famous short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Jonathan Elmer writes that it is “both very sad and very funny, but criticism on it is largely humorless” (25). Elmer locates in this a telling critical discomfort: “I suspect finally that our mistrust of the narrator lies less in his compromised morality than in the pleasure he takes in telling his story” (26). According to Elmer, “Bartleby” is, in this way, about literariness, about “an attempt at literature” (27). I open with Elmer’s insight as a wedge into the intricate relation of the short story form to affect. The affective work in the narrative, including its humor, and the generic work of the short story are inextricably linked. To put this differently, in its very shortness, a short story often depends upon affective loops and leaps in place of exhaustive detail: there simply is no room to spin a totality. “Bartleby” shows us how this works.

20 To return to the opening paragraphs of Melville’s story reminds us that the Lawyer- narrator is concerned, above all else, with choosing his form. He begins by noting that there is nothing yet written about scriveners, and that, if he wanted to, he could write many “divers histories.” Yet he waives writing the “complete lives” of those other scriveners in order to offer “a few passages in the life of Bartleby,” the “strangest” scrivener he “ever saw, or heard of” (3). He cannot, he repeats, provide a “full and satisfactory biography,” a circumstance he calls an “irreparable loss to literature.” The archive of “original sources” is lamentably small. He then ends with a methodological and formal statement: “What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report, which will appear in the sequel” (3). In this way, the opening paragraph recurs to form. The Lawyer is writing a “Story of Wall Street” (as the subtitle of the story has it) in lieu of a “full and satisfactory biography.” He offers only a “few passages” and a “sequel” rather than a “complete life.” In other words, this tale will be short. But it’s more than that, because the archive is suffused with the Lawyer’s affective orientation: Bartleby is the “strangest” of scriveners; the archive is mainly composed of the Lawyer’s own “astonished” eye-witness account.

21 This astonishment drives the narrative. “Bartleby” seems to be about, as Sianne Ngai puts it, “the interpretive problems posed by an emotional illegibility” (Ugly Feelings 10). As with the opening paragraph, the story itself is recursive: the continual staging of encounters with Bartleby’s “emotional illegibility.” We might not be astonished, then, that the ending returns to the question of form and is equally imbued with the narrator’s wonder, though tragically cast. Before the Lawyer declares “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” he notes: “ere parting with the reader, let me say, that if this little narrative has sufficiently interested him, to awaken curiosity as to who Bartleby was, and what manner of life he had led prior to the present narrator’s making his acquaintance,” the Lawyer wishes he could satisfy it (45-46). Again flagging the story as a “little narrative,” the Lawyer offers the sequel that is based on another short genre, “one little item of rumor” (46): that Bartleby had been employed at the Dead Letter Office in Washington, DC. This story is “little.” Its sequel, if I may be allowed, is littler.

22 From a few passages to little narrative to rumor—these are generic shifts so slight they are not necessarily notable, though they all suggest the form of the short story. In the gap between little narrative and sequel, visibly marked on the page by a line break, we see

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how formal structure and affect work together in Melville’s story. The Lawyer expands upon the rumor about the Dead Letter Office, and, in doing so, he offers the reader an invitation: “Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?” (46). Conceive a man. Is this sequel about Bartleby? Is he the “man” we conceive at the end? How do we get from “Conceive a man” to “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”? The narrative certainly does not get us there; our affective investment in Bartleby as an inscrutable character does. Our desire to understand a “man by nature prone to a pallid hopelessness” turns hypothetical at the end of the tale; in other words, it moves away from the “real” and provides readers a space to engage the affective weight of the story. The sequel seems to fill in the logic of Bartleby, but, looking closely, it merely depends on an affective leap on the part of the reader and narrator: we must assume that the “man by nature prone to a pallid hopelessness” is Bartleby.

23 The sequel to “Bartleby” thus asks us to consider what the relation between short form fiction and affective reading is. If the short story must deftly convey a world, it operates under constraints strikingly different from the realist novel, the form it grew up with in the nineteenth century. While the realist novel seeks to represent a totality, a whole world, the short story must convey something else. With “Bartleby” we see how circulation and recursion bridge the gap between story content and affective weight, all within the confined space of the short story. Yet the story can only gesture toward affective fulfillment. Just as the final instruction in Melville’s tale prompts us to “conceive a man,” short stories often refuse affective completion. Instead, they bring forward the mechanisms that create this sense of fulfillment, the very literariness that longer novels can obscure as they strive toward representational totality.

24 WALLACE (on Murison): Murison reminds us, following Elmer’s insight, that Melville’s “Bartleby” “is […] about literariness” in the sense that it demonstrates how readers respond to the narrator’s questionable pleasure in telling the sad and inconclusive story. She suggests that “The affective work in the narrative, including its humor, and the generic work of the short story are inextricably linked. To put this differently, in its very shortness, a short story often depends upon affective loops and leaps in place of exhaustive detail.” This is a terrific wedge indeed, particularly because it avoids focusing on characters as the possessors of emotions or on affect as something to be found in readers (generically) as they respond, but rather that affect is something produced in and by the narrative. Murison is suggesting that particularly because of its truncation, the short story operates in part through the suggestion of something like affective cathection, an interesting response to Nagel’s observation that while some readers are deeply and immediately empathetic, others “are stunningly obtuse, and have very little affective response.” Might Murison’s way in help us to suggest not that characters or stories “have” affect, but that they operate by creating affect to which attuned readers are called to engage, participate, or reject?

25 THRAILKILL (introducing the humorous short story): Michael Trussler in his work on the short story addresses the connection between genre, singularity, and mood. He suggests that the short story’s emphasis on the focal “event,” as opposed to the novel’s insistence on temporal unfolding, produces “the genre’s austere—indeed often melancholic—sensibility.” Quoting Frank O’Connor’s “The Lonely Voice,” he points to “the short story’s tendency to engage thematically ‘loneliness’ and psychological exile:

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‘always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society’” (Trussler 562). An affect of melancholia, a thematic of loneliness, an emphasis on the unique event, a focus on an isolate exile—these seem a plausible set of characteristics for the contemporary short story.

26 But: what are we to make of the humorous short story, a sub-genre that would appear to trouble each one of these elements? Nineteenth-century U.S. writers were well known for writing in this mode, with Mark Twain as its most celebrated practitioner. His “How to Tell a Story” (1897) offers an early theorization of the genre: “there are several kinds of stories,” he writes, “but only one difficult kind—the humorous” (7). According to Twain, the humorous story is uniquely American, and depends for its effect on the manner of the telling. First, the narrative is characteristically digressive and wayward; it must “be spun out… and may wander around” (7). Second, the narrative voice must convey “innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness,” though Twain hastens to add that the naïve perspective is “perfectly simulated,” a “performance” (11). This sets up the ending: “the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it” (8). Twain gives the example of another American humor writer, Artemus Ward, who “when the belated audience caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wondering what they had found to laugh at” (8). Twain concludes, “This is art and fine and beautiful, and only a master can compass it” (11).

27 Twain doesn’t describe the affective tone of the humorous story, but I’d argue that Henri Bergson articulates what Twain—in his emphasis on art and technique—leaves unstated. In “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic” (1900), Bergson argues that “the absence of feeling” is a defining feature of laughter (10, emphasis in original). He doesn’t mean that humor emerges from, or catalyzes, mean-spirited feelings like anger or revenge. (Bergson disagrees with Freud’s psychological account, in which humor masks aggression.) Bergson’s point is that feeling as such kills comedy: “give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy” (10-11). A “wide fellow-feeling with all that is human” is, to quote George Eliot, the work of the nineteenth-century novel (507). The humorous story operates in a different register, setting aside affective concerns in favor of something else altogether.

28 So what is that something else? Whereas Trussler aligns the short story genre with the affective and the solitary, the comic spirit for Bergson is cognitive and social: “In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter” (10). Laughter arises, he argues, at the spectacle of an elastic human being acting mechanically: “Several have defined man as ‘an animal which laughs.’ They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at” (10). For Bergson (and Twain), at the core of the comedic is the essential incongruity of humans acting like things, or things taking on the appearance of the human.

29 To shift from humor to history, the vexed relationship between persons and things was the defining problem of the nineteenth century in the United States, whether we think of the rise of consumer culture, the proliferation of factory work, or the legal existence of chattel slavery and the persistence of racial inequality under Jim Crow. At mid- century, the fictional form most explicitly concerned with slavery was the sentimental

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novel. By century’s end, the humorous short stories of Charles Chesnutt take up the question of race, producing an immanent critique of the affective premise of sentimental fiction. “The Passing of Grandison” (1899), set in antebellum Kentucky, sets up a comedic plot, in which the indolent son of “the Colonel,” a rich plantation owner, tries to win the love of a morally exacting young woman named Charity through the noble act of freeing one of his father’s slaves. The story begins on this note: “When it is said that it was done to please a woman, there ought perhaps to be enough said to explain anything” (168). The apparent butt of the joke is Dick, and his love of Charity (a pun). He gets the idea to free a slave from a story of great “melancholy interest” (169): the tale of a young Ohio man, “moved by compassion for the sufferings of a certain bondman,” who is convicted of “slave-stealing” (168) and dies in prison, infected by cholera while “nursing stricken fellow prisoners” (169). Dick, too, aspires to be a man of feeling.

30 Sentiment and romance give way, however, to the conceit of a gambling bet. The Colonel wagers Dick that his loyal slave Grandison is “abolitionist-proof” and will refuse to escape (182). The narrative follows Dick’s attempts to get rid of Grandison, first taking him to New York (where Grandison doesn’t join the abolitionists Dick introduces him to) and then to Canada, where Dick in frustration hires kidnappers to free him of his “ebony encumbrance” (193). Weeks later, the weary traveler Grandison appears back on the Kentucky plantation, explaining that he’d been abducted by abolitionists, from whom he’d barely escaped.

31 The humor of the story is broad to the point of minstrelsy, casting Grandison as slavishly unshakable and therefore “gumming the works” of Dick’s bid to impress his beloved. Yet the very qualities that frustrate Dick confirm the Colonel’s sense of the man’s servile nature. The Colonel sees Grandison in Bergsonian terms, as a machine or automaton. The enlightened, post-13th amendment reader laughs at Dick, the man so ineffectual he can’t even free one of his own slaves; and laughs at the Colonel’s absurd outrage at Grandison’s abductors: “Just think of their locking the poor, faithful nigger up, beating him, kicking him, depriving him of his liberty, keeping him on bread and water for three long, lonesome weeks, and he all the time pining for the old plantation!” (199). To a northern sensibility—presumably Chesnutt’s readers—the white characters are risible for their thoughtlessly callous, slavery-inflected world view. Grandison is merely culpable for his “innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness” (Twain 11).

32 But of course, these are Twain’s terms for the comic narrator, the seemingly guileless figure who is actually driving the plot, whose meanderings are merely preliminary to the “snapper” (8). Twain calls this figure “a master” of his art, and in Chesnutt’s story, the master turns out to be the slave. The story’s punchline is as surprising to the reader as it is to the Colonel. Three weeks after his return from Canada, Grandison disappears for good—along with his wife, parents, brothers, and niece. The penultimate paragraph describes the Colonel’s cross-country search for the —“so much valuable property could not be lost without an effort to recover it” (201)—and the last sighting of on a ferry to Canada.

33 So, as it turns out, the reader who was laughing at them, is in fact not so different from the Colonel, or Dick: The moral problem of slavery (mistaking a human being for a thing) is writ small in the story, in which the reader mistakes a human being for a comedic object.

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34 We can discern in “The Passing of Grandison” a meta-commentary on the characteristics of the short story with which I began: an emphasis on mood over meaning, on an event rather than a complex unfolding, on an isolate figure rather than a social milieu. The story’s ending upends these notions, favoring meaning, complexity, and sociality. The snapper provokes a cognitive realignment, forcing recognition that Grandison is the hero, not by virtue of a lonely quest but by being a family man successfully playing the long game and effecting an intricate collective escape. Only after reading the last sentence does the reader realize that the story’s first sentence actually gave up the game: “When it is said that it was done to please a woman, there ought perhaps to be enough said to explain anything.” The woman is not Dick’s Charity, but Grandison’s wife Betty—who is only named at the end of the story. Snap!

35 Cognitive scientist Matthew Hurley explains that “humor works as a social corrective because it points out mistakes” (293) and helps transform “our model of the world” (139). “The Passing of Grandison” points out the baseline mistake of both antebellum and Jim Crow America: the denial of the full range of human affect and experience to another. The key “event” is less a single happening in the story world than a reverberative, cognitive event in the reader world. Harriet Beecher Stowe famously urged that readers of the sentimental novel could “see to it that they feel right.” Emulating the structure of a joke, Chesnutt’s story seems oriented to a different end: helping readers think right about others’ feelings and affective investments.

36 NAGEL (on Thrailkill): I’d suggest that Thrailkill’s reading of “The Passing of Grandison” is misleading. She describes it as a “comedic plot” that ends in a snapper when the slave, Grandison, comes back to the plantation. First of all, the stories in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories are not at all comedic but rather standard Realistic stories dealing with ethnicity in protagonists of both races. The dilemma faced by the protagonist in “The Wife of His Youth” is rather similar to that of Silas Lapham: he can deny his former slave wife and marry the beautiful, wealthy, young woman he is now engaged to or affirm that, as a slave, he was married to the bedraggled old woman who stands before him in poverty. His moral choice is the key focus of the story. It is hardly comic. In “The Sheriff’s Children,” the sheriff is confronted with his mulatto son, who has come back to see him and is mistakenly charged with murder. The son commits suicide in his cell. This is comic? But Thrailkill does even worse by “Grandison” by leaving out the last two pages of the story. Rather than return to live on the plantation, as Thrailkill would have it, Grandison has come back to get his family so that they can all escape to Canada, which they do in the conclusion. In fact, they are on the boat crossing the river, looking back at the colonel on the shore, in the final paragraph. Grandison is certainly not guilty of “innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness” at all. Rather, he executes a clever plan to get his entire family out of slavery, and it works. There is no humorous snapper. There is no comedy. Is this kind of reading what affect studies has wrought?

37 THRAILKILL (on Nagel): Professor Nagel, thank you for your thoughtful response. You raise an important point, which is the placement of the short story “The Passing of Grandison” within its context in a collection. The two stories you mention, “The Wife of His Youth” and “The Sheriff’s Children,” indeed exemplify William Andrews’s important point that, “For an American reading audience which had seen its racial problems trivialized in popular fiction to yield the horselaugh, the nostalgic sigh, or the sentimental tear, Chesnutt’s moral fervor and his disquieting attention to half-

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concealed racial tragedies must have made for an unsettling and unwelcome reading experience” (120).

38 My argument is that “The Passing of Grandison” does exactly that, though it unsettles in a way canny and subversive, less “unwelcome” and therefore perhaps more effective. I should be more clear about how I situate my analysis, which is to read Chesnutt’s story as engaging explicitly with the nineteenth-century literary tradition: centrally, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To use Andrews’ useful framework, “Grandison” employs the comedic mode in order to surface the racial tragedies at the core of Stowe’s novel—the violent sundering of African-American families and love relations—without the comfort of a white Northern sensibility that sheds a sentimental tear, or feels pious outrage, at white Southern callousness. Rather, in allowing his readers to smile at Dick’s fecklessness, and shake their heads at the Colonel’s risible racial stereotyping, even as they too are taken in and surprised by Grandison’s scheme of mass family escape, Chesnutt employs a comedic mode Sacvan Bercovitch described as that of the “Trickster … wearing the Comedic Mask.”

39 Here is the salient passage from Bercovitch’s magnificent article, “Deadpan Huck: Or What’s Funny about Interpretation”: So here’s the Trickster set-up, American-style… the deadpan artist is Mark Twain, wearing the Comic Mask, doing his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there’s anything grave, let alone sinister, about his story—and he succeeds famously. Then, as we laugh, or after we’ve laughed, we may realize, if we’re alert, that there’s something we’ve overlooked. We haven’t seen what’s funny about the fact that we’ve found it all so funny. This Trickster has conned us, somehow diverted our attention away from the real point, and we have to go back over the story in order to recognize its nub. (10)

40 In Bercovitch’s account, the reader of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the ultimate “butt” of Twain the Trickster, the con-man—with Huck and certainly Jim as pawns in the author’s dark satirical enterprise. In my reading of “The Passing of Grandison,” by contrast, the Trickster is Grandison himself, but with a twist. Unlike Twain’s authorial manipulations, Grandison’s comedic achievement requires not merely an elaborate theory of mind—Henri Bergson famously wrote that the comic spirit worked in the absence of feeling, in the realm of pure intelligence—but also affective motivation (aka love) to free an entire family rather than an isolate self. Chesnutt in creating Grandison offers a character with the emotional depth and nobility of spirit of Uncle Tom and Jim —with the shrewdness and ability to manipulate an audience, characteristic of both Twain and, frankly, Stowe.

41 Chesnutt—in a story that stands out in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories for its kinship with folk traditions of storytelling—charts a course between the Scylla of Stowe’s sentimentalism and the Charybdis of Twain’s ultimately nihilistic satire (most evident in Twain’s later works). Prof. Nagel is exactly right to note that Grandison, under the Colonel’s nose but also under the reader’s, “executes a clever plan to get his entire family out of slavery, and it works.” My argument is simply that the story works, too. Its comedic structure ends not in a death but in a marriage, or really a “marriage- plus”: an entire family liberated to the “green world” of Canada to live and love as they choose. This collective escape is the snapper that startles the reader—if he “gets” the ending (and I’ve found that not every student reading the story does)—into a more capacious theory of mind than he had going in. In this, I would argue, Chesnutt achieves a realism of the highest order, by producing an ingenious work of literature

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that represents the world as it is while also laying the (non-pious, non-prescriptive) groundwork for a better one.

42 LYNCH (on Thrailkill): I was already thinking how the humorous-satiric short story is exceptional to much of what is said theoretically about the story and affect, and Thrailkill’s remarks above got me thinking further about the exceptional Stephen Leacock, Canadian master of the humorous short story, and for the period roughly 1915-25 the English-speaking world’s most popular writer of comic short stories. Along with writing some of the major works in the genre in that heyday of the story and essay, Leacock also published critical biographies of Dickens and Twain, his two major influences, a book titled How to Write, and two books on the purposes and techniques of comic writing (among some 80 books and pamphlets on everything from the economics of nickel to pressing America to join both world-war efforts). His own short stories, as distinguished from the early Twain’s and Ward’s et al., are determinedly humorous rather than satiric. Their philosophical-political basis is conservative rather than liberal. And their affective appeal is to sympathy, identification, and humanity, which is not to say that Leacock couldn’t be satiric when need be (see his Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich of 1914, a story cycle and the companion volume to 1912’s local-color story cycle Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town). If I remember rightly, Bergson’s Le Rire is one of the main studies of the comic referenced that is spared Leacock’s reflexive anti- academic dismissal. Understandably so: Bergson viewed the comic spirit as serving a socially normalizing function, which is essentially how Leacock’s humorous short stories work. They appeal to the humane emotions in humorously satirizing the eccentricities of materialism, individualism, capitalism, romance, religion, politics—in short, everything we’re not supposed to talk about in polite society. In the introduction to Thomas McCulloch’s early nineteenth-century story cycle, The Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (ser. 1821-23), observed that “the prevailing tone of Canadian humor ever since” Thomas McCullough has been “deeply conservative in a human sense” (ix). Frye added that Canadian humorous writings of the nineteenth century were distinguished from the American by providing not just “a series of jokes” but a “vision of society” (ix).

43 On the didactic or moral tale

44 WALLACE: The origin of the short story in the British tradition is conventionally located in the later nineteenth century, reaching a high point in the early twentieth- century moment of high . But one could make an argument for earlier candidates. Might attending to affective impact and function give us another way to think about earlier short fiction’s claim to belonging beyond merely circumscribed length? As a scholar working primarily in the long eighteenth century, I’m even more interested in how earlier concerns for affect or that older yet suggestive term “emotion” might engage contemporary critical considerations. Valerie Shaw reminds us that there was little inclination to apply the new term ‘short story’ to indigenous products that had been around for centuries. This places the genre in a rather curious position. ... an aesthetic for the British short story seemed to develop simultaneously with the genre itself, label and object emerging alongside each other. (3)

45 So one might begin in part by questioning this collusion between naming and object— and turning to affect writ large is one way to do this.

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46 Looking back historically is another, where “affect” points back to multiple terms now out of favor, but that differently map the resonance between body and psyche such as “sensibility” or “passion,” or that insist on the social quality of emotions like “sympathy” (later under German influence distinguished as “empathy”).

47 Very briefly then, I’d like to ask what thinking about affective effects, or even emotion, not as an attribute of persons, but as something produced in the interaction between writer, reader, and text, might help us make of a particularly troubling form of fiction, the didactic or moral tale. Certainly we do not associate the moral tale with high modernism, and yet, I would suggest this older form does persist from the eighteenth century through the line of Woolf and into twentieth-century authors like Alice Walker, and for some of the same reasons. Must the definition of the ‘short story’ as something highly wrought, torn between anecdote and lyric, rely on a aesthetic that would refuse to include didactic or satirical writing, or rather, writing with designs on its reader? What gets excluded if we do that, and particularly what are the politics of that exclusion?

48 Richard Steele’s short tale in The Spectator of Tuesday, 13 March, 1711 raises some of the questions Edgar Allen Poe implied by conceiving of the short story as focused on “a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out” (cited in Shaw, 9). Arietta, a woman “in that time of Life which is neither affected with the Follies of Youth or infirmities of Age” and whose “Conversation is so mixed with Gaiety and Prudence, that she is agreeable both to the Young and the Old,” is offended by a visitor who, thinking to be witty, tells the tale of the Ephesian Matron. Her response is a counter-tale of an Englishman, Thomas Inkle, who is the sole survivor of a party seeking financial wealth in the new world, rescued and hidden by a native maiden, Yarico. Told very briefly in two paragraphs, Yarico hides Inkle and cares for him until “the Lovers … had learn'd a Language of their own” and Inkle communicates his desire to take her to his country, dress her in silks, and care for her in turn. Yarico then discovers a European ship, signals it successfully, and the couple are taken aboard. The narrator, Arietta, explains that “When a Vessel from the Main arrives in that Island, it seems the Planters come down to the Shoar, where there is an immediate Market of the Indians and other Slaves, as with us of Horses and Oxen”—and in short, Inkle decides to reward his lost time by selling Yarico and pocketing the proceeds, “notwithstanding that the poor Girl, to incline him to commiserate her Condition, told him that she was with Child by him But he only made use of that Information, to rise in his Demands upon the Purchaser.” The tale is overtly didactic—overtly calling for an affective response from the reader: “I was so touch’d with this Story, (which I think should be always a Counterpart to the Ephesian Matron) that I left the Room with Tears in my Eyes.” In short, the proper response to one story is another, and the proper social emotion called for through the multiple frames (Mr. Spectator, Arietta, the tale itself) is one of sympathetic tears.

49 We might see this kind of sympathetic bodily response (tears of sensibility) as terribly old-fashioned (and dangerously self-indulgent). Yet the call for a socio-political response is echoed in a story from a major figure of literary modernism whose short stories are known for expressive indeterminacy and floating affect, Virginia Woolf. In Woolf’s “A Society” from the collection, Monday or Tuesday, a group of women at tea, praising men, are interrupted when one of their members who is compelled by her father’s Will to read all the books in the London library bursts into tears. She confesses that her reading demonstrates that contemporary books—literature, history, poetry—

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are all execrably badly written—that while the women have been producing the babies, the men have failed to produce the art and knowledge the women have entrusted with them. Since they agree the purpose of life is to produce good people and good books, the women determine to form a society, visiting different male enclaves (Navy, Oxbridge, etc.), and reporting back; they refuse to bear children until they are satisfied. But their plan is short circuited when one of them, Castalia, returns pregnant, and finally fully interrupted when war is declared, though none of them knows for what. The tale ends years later, post-war. Castalia’s daughter is, to her mother’s distress, already learning how to read, and so the remaining members name her the President of the Society of the future, upon which the child bursts into tears.

50 Both Steele’s moral anecdote and Woolf’s satirical short story have designs on the reader. Steele’s is older and different in structure and tone while Woolf’s is from the height of the modernist short story, yet both have a satirical bite and both aim to provoke intellectual thought in the reader. Both are in some sense didactic, rather than lyrical or compressed expressions. While as Christine Reynier, in “Virginia Woolf’s Ethic of the Short Story” notes, “emotion is foregrounded” in Woolf’s conception of the short story (and in Steele’s framing narrative), the kind of emotion that is foregrounded here isn’t the floating affect of some of Woolf’s or Mansfield’s other stories (like “Kew Gardens” or “Bliss”). Rather, what is highlighted here is affective knowledge that is less a property of a person and more social, but also explicitly instructive.

2. Form and Affect

51 This special section is organized, in part, around an interest in the relationship between form and affect (or perhaps between form, genre, affect, and effect). One widely-held view of affect studies sees its approaches as tied to anything (psychoanalysis, phenomenology, reader response, feminism, queer theory, and so on) but traditional literary ideas of form. What does a focus on affect have to teach us about more formally oriented theories—narratology, for example?

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52 THRAILKILL: The short story is good at leveraging gaps, and for some critics, this aspect is its defining characteristic: “Unlike the novel, the short story does not attempt to embrace the whole of experience with its complex fabric of causal processes or elaborate temporal durations; instead it presents ‘slices’ or ‘snapshots’ of reality” (Pâtea 11). The short story cycle, with its “patterns of recurrence and development” (qtd. in Lynch 25), similarly lends itself to what John Dewey identified as the aesthetic nature of experience: “Because of continuous merging, there are no holes, mechanical junctions, and dead centers when we have an experience. There are pauses, places of rest, but they punctuate and define the quality of movement” (Dewey 36). The interspersing of slices, pauses, snapshots, and places of rest is arguably the sine qua non of this short narrative form.

53 On the sequel

54 I’ve been thinking about a short story mode that includes a significant “pause” that exists outside the diegetic frame: I refer to the sequel. Pairing two stories in this way produces an intriguing extra-textual gap, in which a single work—which upon initial

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publication is presented as complete, giving no indication of an impending follow-up— is then finished or concluded by a second. The appearance of a sequel creates a “book- end” effect, with the production of new, temporal spaces between the two, existing both in the reader’s world (e.g. one year between publication dates) and, discrepantly, in the story world (e.g. 50 diegetic years between the first story’s events and those depicted in the sequel). To use Dewey’s terms, the arrival of a sequel produces precisely a “hole” or a “dead center” in an imagined, larger narrative.

55 To put this a slightly different way: a sequel doesn’t just conclude the original story; it produces a phantom novel. Two instances from the late nineteenth century come immediately to mind. Stephen Crane’s story “The Veteran” (1896) appeared the year after the publication of the story it concludes, The Red Badge of Courage. Kate Chopin wrote “The Storm” five years after “At the ‘Cadian Ball” (1893); five years also pass in the characters’ story world. In both instances, a publication gap becomes an occasion for what Jennifer J. Smith calls “extra-textual maturation,” marked in each sequel by the arrival of a new generation.

56 Crane’s “The Veteran” picks up roughly 50 years after Red Badge, with Henry Fleming now a grandfather reminiscing about his youthful Civil War experiences. Chopin’s “The Storm” focuses on the lives of two couples of different social classes, now married with children, whose marital trajectory had almost been deflected five years earlier when—as depicted in “At the ‘Cadian Ball”—the Creole planter Alcée had flirted with the sexy Cajun Calixta. Between Red Badge and “The Veteran” hovers a ghostly bildungsroman; between “At the ‘Cadian Ball” and “The Storm” lies a virtual domestic novel.

57 My question is, can we determine an affective structure that correlates with the unexpected, unrepresented narrative gap associated with the short story sequel? Like the vase that is implied by the outline of two sketched faces in profile, this story configuration—a concise original paired with an even more succinct sequel—calls attention to the empty yet determinative space in between: an absent presence of that which has been elided or “missed.” As those familiar with the work of Cathy Caruth will know, this describes how some critics have theorized trauma, as a “missed encounter” with events that can only be retrieved after the fact, never directly experienced. Caruth expands this structure to encompass “the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness, of historical experience” (203). Trauma for Caruth inheres “solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 3; italics in original).

58 What is interesting about the two sequels I’m considering is that the action of the reader mimes that of the characters. Just as the central characters are “possessed by an image or event” from the past—Henry Fleming, along with Alcée and Calixta, spends time in the sequel re-narrating the first story—so is the reader put in shadowy touch with the events of the prior stories. To further turn the screw: both Red Badge and “At the ‘Cadian Ball,” the original stories, have at their center a “missed” event, a primal experience that didn’t happen despite the characters’ persistent bodily sense it would: death, in the case of Henry Fleming; and sex, in the case of Alcée and Calixta. Whether or not the reader has read the original, the effect is arguably the same. The sequels would appear to set in motion the operations of traumatic memory, insofar as they

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attempt to reclaim an event—the original story, as well as the elided “gap years” between the stories—that are both unnarrated and unnarratable.

59 Is this a matter of genre, though? We could of course simply see the affective structure of “missing” an event as a characteristic theme of the two authors. Crane and Chopin both wrote in the American naturalist tradition, with an eye to the effects of unassimilated experience. For Crane, the naïve point of view of a “green” soldier provided a window into the shock and dislocation of war; for Chopin, the naïve point of view of a romantic young woman provided a window into the inevitable disillusion (and frequent dissolution) of marriage. Both writers are known for their distinctive irony, a rhetorical device that at once narrates and produces distance from that which it describes. Both sequels, moreover, describe characteristically traumatic events: a barn fire in “The Veteran,” and a violent storm in Chopin’s story.

60 Yet it is precisely by narrating these events with a difference, I want to suggest, that Crane’s and Chopin’s follow-up stories work to repair the thematic and formal gaps (what Caruth might call the wounds) expressed by the paired stories. (In Dewey’s terms, the “dead center”—whatever transpired between stories—becomes an animating absence that allows for transformation.) As an elderly man, admired in his rural community, Henry Fleming admits to his cowardice, something that remained unspoken and unacknowledged in the equivocal ending of Red Badge. “He was a man” is the keynote at the end of the original story; “The Veteran,” by contrast, begins with Henry saying in public, to a laughing, appreciative audience, “‘You bet I was scared! […] So I run!’” When the fire in the barn breaks out, Henry again runs: this time, into the burning structure, repeatedly, saving terrified animals until the roof falls in. The last paragraph describes the “funnel of smoke” that rose, “as if the old man’s might spirit, released from its body—a little bottle—had swelled like the genie of fable.”

61 In “The Storm,” a lashing rain causes Alcée to take shelter in a small cottage, where he finds Calixta, whose husband and son are caught elsewhere in the storm. “At the ‘Cadian Ball” concluded with the two couples newly betrothed, but its ironic ending pointed to the unstated anti-romance of Alcée’s being tricked into engagement and Calixta’s subsequent peevish acceptance of her “dull-looking and clumsy” suitor’s marriage proposal. “The Storm,” by contrast, narrates a luxurious sex scene between Alcée and Calixta, but afterward depicts them (as well as their spouses and children) in laughing domestic scenes feeling—for very different reasons—“nothing but satisfaction” with their marriages. The sequel’s last line is delightfully comedic: “So the storm passed and everyone was happy.”

62 So it seems to me that, while the structure of the short story sequel could lend itself to the affective structure of trauma, Crane and Chopin gesture to another possibility. In their hands, the sequel becomes an artful means for supplying the missing event from the first story: a heroic death for an elderly Henry (rather than a cynical “red badge of courage”) and happy sex for married Alcée and Calixta (rather than a destructive moment of passion). Both stories end with an ironic acceptance of life’s messy gaps, slices, and snapshots, as well as its surprising pauses and places of rest. And the reader is satisfied at the outcome: a good death for an old man, and good sex for two people young enough to enjoy it and old enough to not let it spoil good marriages. To my mind, these sequels call attention to the work of art, in the Deweyan sense: to produce moments of “consummatory experience” rather than to serve as vehicles for trauma.

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63 LYNCH (on Thrailkill): I am thought-provoked by much in this, but here it must suffice to observe that Thrailkill’s intriguing analysis of the function of gaps in paired sequels of stories (neither of which particular sequels I’d known, so thanks for that, too) complements my recent thinking about the function of gaps between and among the stories of a cycle. As Wolfgang Iser first led me to think, such gaps throughout short story cycles enable much creative work between writer and reader (contra the continuities of the conventional novel) and, as Thrailkill suggests, imply a metafictive strategy at work in such a narrative structure. I have no further thoughts (yet) on how this might work affectively or traumatically in short story cycles because, with respect to those critical-theoretical approaches, there are great gaps in my knowledge… (of course an ellipsis)

64 On story organization and affect

65 HOGAN: In The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion and Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories, I have argued that stories are fundamentally organized by simulations of character emotions, developed in such a way as to provoke and sustain recipient—reader or viewer—emotions. The process is straightforward. Paradigmatic stories concern agents trying to achieve some goal. That goal is necessarily defined by some motivation system, which is to say some emotion. Recipient responses may be parallel (thus empathic) or complementary (roughly, anti- empathic). This is often a function of group identity, such that we assume a parallel stance toward characters we categorize as ingroup members and a complementary stance toward characters we categorize as outgroup members (though there are complications here).

66 The basic structure of stories, suggested in different forms by a range of narratologists, follows from this, along with some basic principles of cognitive and emotional processing. Roughly, stories begin with the establishment of the motivation and end with the achievement of the goal or the loss of the goal. The middle of the story commonly involves the intensification of the opposite of the ending. This results from the operation of our emotion systems, such that the outcome emotion tends to be intensified by a sharp gradient of change from one emotion to a contradictory emotion. Happiness is intensified when there is a sharp change from sorrow; grief is intensified when there is a sharp change from joy.

67 Beyond this basic structure, specific motivation systems generate particular genres. For example, the system of attachment bonding produces the family separation and reunion plot. The combination of the attachment and sexual desire systems in romantic love produces the romantic genre. Complications in the genre structures are bound up with emotion systems as well. For example, emotional relations involved with romantic love yield some standard complications in romantic tragedy and tragi-comedy. For example, the negative effects of jealousy may guide the development of a love triangle in the middle of the story; conflict in attachment feelings is part of the reason why the lovers’ separation is often caused by parents; the relation of person attachment and place attachment fosters the motif of exile. (The list could be extended.)

68 A set of such genres recurs across cultures with different degrees of frequency. In addition to the familial and romantic genres just named, the heroic genre is particularly common. It is based on pride, both individual and bearing on some identity-group, as well as the emotional orientations that are part of outgrouping. Structurally, this genre involves two common sub-sequences. One treats social defense

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against enemy invasion; the other treats an attempt to usurp legitimate authority within the identity ingroup.

69 Before going on, I should note that not all stories follow the cross-culturally recurring genre forms. Moreover, the preceding list of such forms is itself incomplete. However, stories often do fall into the recurring genres even when they are not prototypical of those genres. In other words, stories are often guided by the same emotion systems or combinations of emotion systems (attachment, pride, and so on), even when the precise development of the sequence of events is non-prototypical.

70 When Paul Ardoin invited me to take part in this exchange, I thought I should read more short stories in English—since I tend to be deficient in familiarity with short stories generally and those in English particularly. Being, like everyone, short on time, I thought I could listen to some stories on audiobook. Though perhaps not the favorite of academics, O. Henry is undoubtedly one of the most loved American short story writers. I settled on him.

71 Listening to the collection selected for the audiobook, I was struck by the degree to which the stories take up the prototypical genres. The first story on the recording, “By Courier,” is about romantic separation and reunion. It focuses on the love triangle part of the plot and includes the motif of the lover’s exile. The second story, “Jimmie Hayes and Muriel,” takes up and varies the invasion/defense section of the heroic plot, with a young man fighting against bandits crossing the border with Mexico. The third is romantic, focusing again on the love triangle sequence. The fourth, “Roads of Destiny,” is a story of three different timelines, dependent on the protagonist’s choice of which path to take at a fork in . The first timeline concerns parental interference in marriage (with some surprising twists). The second involves a usurpation sequence from the heroic plot. The third timeline (the suicide of a failed poet)—thus, in effect, the sixth story in the collection--is the first that does not fall into one of the (emotion- defined) genre categories.

72 NAGEL (on Hogan): I should say a few things about the nature of the short story in response to Hogan’s comment that narratologists generally agree that stories are structured on the motivation of a character and either the achievement of that goal or the loss of it. I rather like that observation, but it is important to remember the formulation by literary historians that stories basically present a conflict and a resolution, which, psychologically, may be essentially the same point. I discuss many of these matters in my new book, The American Short Story Handbook (2015), where I also differentiate among types of short narratives: tale, yarn, anecdote, parable, myth, and others. With the inception of Realism in the nineteenth century, however, another narrative pattern was added to the tradition: a structure based on internal cognitive growth or alteration. I discuss these matters at some length in the introduction to Anthology of the American Short Story (2008), and I give a related remark here.

73 In Stephen Crane’s “An Episode of War,” a young officer has his arm amputated after he is shot while dividing coffee into two equal portions for the men. He does not see who shot him, and there is no military response. The plot does not rest on his fight with anyone. Rather, when he returns home his mother sees that his arm is missing and bursts into tears. He says, in the concluding line of the story, that it doesn’t matter as much as all that. This narrative line does not match either of the standard definitions of a story. Similarly, Ernest Hemingway built his stories on internal growth within characters, not on conflicts between them. In “Indian Camp,” for example, a young boy,

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Nick Adams, is taken by his father, an obstetrician, to a Native American shanty to perform a Caesarean delivery of a child. Dr. Adams has been fishing and has no medical equipment with him. He uses his skinning knife for the incision and a gut leader for the sutures. The surgery is thus done without anesthetic, and the woman screams throughout it. Dr. Adams tells his son, who is disturbed by it, that her pain does not matter. When the child is born, Dr. Adams celebrates a successful delivery. Then he sees that a man, presumably the father of the child, has committed suicide by slitting his throat in the nearby cot. Nick takes in the ghastly sight. In the conclusion, while they cross the lake again in a boat, Nick asks his father why the man killed himself. Dr. Adams says he does not know but that he guesses that he “couldn’t stand things” (19). Nick asks if dying is hard. Dr. Adams says he does not know.

74 There are several important psychological issues here. The first is that the man is presumably so shocked by the pain his wife endures that he kills himself. He may also be humiliated that traditional tribal medicine is not adequate to save his wife and child, and that Dr. Adams, using European methods, is needed. In other Nick Adams stories, he often treats the local Chippewas, as did Hemingway’s father. The Native Americans portrayed in these stories are a people in cultural transition, resisting changes to their traditions and yet needing and accepting some aspects of White society. Those who come to get Dr. Adams come in a rowboat, an artifact of White culture, rather than in a canoe. Of course, the economic disparity between the two races is quite dramatic. There is no adequate explanation in the published story of why Dr. Adams would bring his son on a medical call certain to be ghastly at best. Manuscript research, however, reveals in a discarded opening that earlier Nick was alone in the darkness of the tent while his father and uncle were out fishing. He is terrified at being alone, so he fires an emergency three shots with the gun his father left out for him, and the two men come in from the lake. Dr. Adams realizes his son is afraid of the dark. At that moment the Indians arrive, requesting that Dr. Adams come to their village. He brings Nick along.

75 Now, then, affect studies would have done nothing to provide that information, nor would any of the other recent theoretical approaches. Read as an artifact, there is no explanation in the story for Dr. Adams’s decision to bring his son along. In traditional scholarship there is, in the manuscript deletion, although such an interpretation rests on the complex assumption that deleted material can play a legitimate role in interpretive study. That is a complex, questionable proposition. My sense is that the story is best read both ways, especially in the classroom. There, in studying the Nick Adams group of stories, it is clear that Nick suffered emotional damage in “Indian Camp,” and he never sleeps well again and needs a light for the night. He is continuously concerned with death, which he saw at too early an age. The story also has a significant moment for Dr. Adams. Just as he is celebrating his great surgical achievement, his son asks him questions he cannot answer. Certainly the great doctor should be able to deal with the interrogatives of a young boy, but he cannot. He is quiet the rest of the journey. That psychological line is too often forgotten in Hemingway scholarship. In short, there is a good deal of internal drama in the story, but not along the lines of conflict and resolution, or goal and fulfillment.

76 We face similar limitations when we read stories or cycles outside of important cultural contexts. My recent book Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories—which explores four story cycles, one each by Chopin, George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson—argues that without an understanding of the cultural traditions of

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French colonial Louisiana, it is impossible to fully grasp the issues of these stories. Of special importance are the Code Noir, the plaçage tradition of quadroon mistresses, the Spanish introduction of the slave contract, the French appreciation of social status by birthright, and the general issue of ethnicity in a society that had twelve gradations of privilege based on racial mixtures. People who do not know these things miss much in reading these four authors, and whatever feelings the stories provoke, the affect of the fiction, would be misguided if they are read as simply part of the American South.

3. Affect Theory as a Set of Tools for the Study of the Short Story

77 Given the interest that theories of the short story and theories of affect share in what we could call the event (or the moment), does affect theory offer a set of tools particularly relevant to reading the short story? And does the short story offer a particularly productive illustrative capacity for thinking about the operation of affect? At the most basic level, does the shorter tale potentially offer a more productive opportunity to deal with, say, the moment of being (or the moment of insight, or the moment of time, or the epiphanic moment) as affective moment (or moment of transition from affect to emotion, or from affect to action)?

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78 WALLACE: I really like the emphasis here on what Woolf called “moments of being” or Joyce identified as “epiphany” (although I’m not convinced they are precisely the same affective experience, Woolf’s often running through a particularly gendered experience and Joyce’s inflected with religious and philosophical weight). However, I want to turn the question slightly differently to think about pedagogy and affect. What if we conceive of the pedagogical interaction itself as fundamentally affective along the lines of “moments of being”?

79 As someone located at an undergraduate teaching-centered institution, I am interested to note when affect and short stories intersect in some rather specific and important ways. Take for instance Katherine Mansfield’s famous 1918 short story, “Bliss.” The story itself is about the difficulty of articulating an affective experience—one that displays itself in the body as Bertha searches for ways to name an embodied experience “as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of the afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle”—hampered by a sense that bodily display itself is inappropriate (or inappropriated?), that the body must be “shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle” (143). This story is overtly about affect—and about the difficulty of communicating affective experiences between persons, minds and bodies.

80 At the level of the story’s content, the story can be read like an O. Henry “twist,” revealing that Bertha’s admiration for Pearl is not only shared by her husband, but that in fact he has preceded her in taking his attraction forward into an erotic relationship. But at the level of embodied “sympathy,” the story suggests that Bertha and Pearl are connected affectively, joined through their mutual gaze at the pear tree in the moonlight and reflected for the reader in color and dress (Bertha’s green, Pearl’s white/silver) and their general appearance. The pear tree in “Bliss” then suggests a more profound connection between the two women outside or beyond or before language. Language, in fact, repeatedly fails Bertha in the story.

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81 For student readers, reading carries affective import that is experienced as emotion, a personal experience that is also at the same time shared. Students attuned to lesbian erotic desire, for instance, tend to refuse the O. Henry-esque reading that the story seems to offer and feel the charged atmosphere emphasized through imagery, color, and language choices. Even more importantly, pedagogy is tied to constructing a shared affect in the classroom, so that what might be experienced as one’s proper emotions is articulated as belonging to the tale or to the work of analysis that is shared. Teaching is importantly linked to emotion, and as the activity that arguably most of us spend most of our time on, it seems ethically compulsory to ask about how we evoke, use, or allow affect to circulate in the classroom and how textual bodies “stick” to or even construe student bodies.

82 HOGAN: In Affective Narratology, I have argued that pure causal analysis does not isolate events. Rather, events are a function of emotion system arousal applied to (experienced, simulated, or inferred) causal sequences. What gives us a sense that an event has begun or ended—or that a complex of events forming a story has begun or ended—is not a matter of causes and effects as such, since causes and effects precede any “beginning” and follow any “ending.” The sense of beginning and ending is, rather, a function of the arousal of our emotion systems.

83 I doubt that short stories are special in their capacity to represent or illuminate events. Indeed, I illustrated my initial argument with a segment from a narrative that is far from being a short story—Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. However, it does seem to be the case that many short stories involve a particular sort of cognitive-emotional “twist.” Specifically, there is often an incident that serves to make the reader come to a realization shortly before the story ends. This moment of realization commonly involves both a cognitive reorganization of prior occurrences in the story and, crucially, a change in one’s emotional orientation toward those occurrences. This sort of thing is hardly confined to short stories (think of Oedipus the King). But the combination of cognitive and emotional change seems to be particularly characteristic of the short story, at least short stories of a certain kind.

84 The obvious case of this is the Joycean epiphany. The idea applies straightforwardly to O. Henry as well. In “By Courier,” we learn at the end that the woman had strong evident reason for jealousy, but that her construal of the man’s behavior was misguided; crucially, this changes not only our understanding of both characters, but our emotional response to them. In “Jimmie Hayes and Muriel,” a brief incident at the end tells us that Jimmie was not a deserter, as we and his companions had imagined, but rather a hero. As such cases illustrate, the reader’s realization and emotional reorientation often parallel the realization and emotional reorientation of a character. This need not be the case. For example, in some of Joyce’s stories—“Eveline” comes to mind—there may be a sudden cognitive and emotional change in a character, but it is hardly the same change as the one that occurs in the reader.

85 Sometimes the reorientation fostered by the incident is merely factual, and both the incident and its effects are easy to summarize. That tends to be the case in O. Henry. Sometimes the incident and its implications are sociological or psychological, as often occurs in Joyce. Cases of this sort are far more difficult to articulate and explain. Sometimes there is something more like a metaphysical element, and here too one struggles to express its singular impact.

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86 I think, for example, of Alice Munro’s “Dimensions,” from Too Much Happiness. Doree’s husband, Lloyd, murdered his and Doree’s children. He was subsequently institutionalized. At a certain point, Doree realizes that this murder, though it has of course separated the husband and wife, has also given them an ineradicable bond. Part of that bond is the result of emotion sharing. Indeed, while Lloyd killed the children, he is also the only one who can provide Doree any comfort for their loss. This partial emotional reorientation in the realization of the character prepares us for the conclusion of the story, with its incident reorienting the reader’s emotions. Specifically, the story ends when Dorree is going to visit Lloyd and there is an automobile accident. Remembering something Lloyd taught her, Doree—in a sort of variant of the familial separation and reunion narrative—saves the life of a young boy, then stays with him, waiting for the ambulance. What the reader is likely to understand differently is not the main story event itself (the murder), but the larger trajectory of its consequences, the larger story. What the reader is likely to feel differently about is also not the murder as such, but the overall life of the main characters and that of the people with whom they come into contact. Indeed, the point resonates beyond the confines of the storyworld.

87 THRAILKILL: From Ian Watt to Nicholas Daly, critics have described the ways in which the novel is a literary form geared to the linear temporality of modern life. Watt described this as the depiction of “life by time” (he was quoting E. M. Forster). For Ian Watt, the novel’s formal cohesion lies in the concatenation of causes and effects, which in turn allows for the coordination of individual lives with collective histories.

88 The question I address in this response specifies the association of narrative and temporality. When did clock-time—in the sense of minutes, and not just hours—make its arrival into the short story, and to what effect? Mechanical timepieces have existed for centuries, and at least since Edgar Allan Poe, clock-time references have played a role in short story narration. An early example is Poe’s hoax-story “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Phall” (1835), which ticks off no fewer than 18 specific hours. The narrator, purportedly recording his journey into outer space in a hot air balloon, marks his progress this way: “At nine o’clock I had again lost sight of land” and “at six o’clock, I perceived a great portion of the earth’s visible area.” Time notation here adds an absurdist element of faux accuracy to a story making fun of scientific reports.

89 My sense, however, is that significant reference to highly specified time does not appear until later in the nineteenth century, in the context of literary realism. Daly, writing about the Victorian novel, argues that clock-time begins to structure the sensation novel (and the fabric of English social and economic life) only after the advent of railway timetables and the widespread coordination of accurate timepieces. In the U.S., precise clock-time makes an early literary appearance in Ambrose Bierce’s collection of Civil War short stories, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). As Paul Juhasz has argued, “Bierce prefigures the fixation with time that would become such a significant theme for many modernist writers” (par. 3). Bierce’s brief story of a Union sniper’s deadly mission across enemy lines, “One of the Missing,” includes an ironic twist that depends on the precise 22-minute gap marked by 6:18 and 6:40.

90 Before discussing Bierce’s story, however, I’d like to back up to situate this question historically. E. P. Thompson in his iconic essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Modern Capital,” described a pre-modern “disregard for clock time” (59). Until the end of the 18th century, village clocks in England—notoriously, unproblematically inaccurate—had

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a single hand. What artisan needed to know by the minute when to finish a project; what farmer needed a minute hand to know when to sow or when to reap? Thompson lists an array of culturally distinct ways of marking time without calibrated time pieces: In Madagascar time might be measured by “a rice-cooking” (about half an hour) or “the frying of a locust” (a moment)… while [in Europe] the cooking-time of an egg could be judged by an Ave Maria said aloud. (58)

91 As Thompson describes it, pre-modern time revolves around “task-orientation,” with “the working day lengthen[ing] or contract[ing] according to the task” (60). Jesse Matz uses the term “real-world temporalities” to express this heterogeneity. Clock-time, by contrast, subsumes the diversity of time experiences into a one-way line marked by evenly-spaced minutes: it “collapses the temporal manifold, sets only a given pace, and thereby limits possibility” (Matz 274). For most pre-industrial laborers, “the work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives” (Thompson 73).

92 Ironically, the orientation toward a task—along with the “alternate bouts” of respite and focused exertion—also marks the work of a soldier. Here is the perspective of a young recruit in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895): “There were moments of waiting. […] He was at a task. He was like a carpenter who has made many boxes, making still another box, only there was furious haste in his movements” (23). The kinship between the pre-modern work of carpentry and the work of modern warfare is doubly ironic. First, as a task-master, the military leaves its “workers” the least control over their lives, which are not just temporally constrained but also in mortal danger. Second, the Civil War—far from harking back to a pre-modern agrarian social structure —was a watershed moment for plunging the United States into technological modernity.

93 Bierce’s “One of the Missing,” published just a few years before Crane’s Red Badge, explicitly plays with different ways of marking time. Taking as its central character an “incomparable marksman” in the Union army, the story pits the task-orientation of subjective experience—in which time stretches, shrinks, jumps, stands still—against a deterministic understanding of time as objective, linear, and inexorable. Private Jerome Searing, known for his pre-modern skill set (“his extraordinary daring, his woodcraft, his sharp eyes, and truthful tongue”), volunteers for a perilous task: sneaking past his own entrenched front-line soldiers to discover the position of the Confederate troops beyond. The narrative follows Jerome’s excruciating, slow motion trek and his reflections on his task: “‘It seems like a long time,’ he thought, ‘but I cannot have come very far; I am still alive.’ He smiled at his own method of measuring distance” (265). The marksman calibrates his experiential sense with objective ways of measuring space and time.

94 In an abrupt shift, the narrative departs the marksman’s grounded perspective, zooming to something like a god’s point of view: “But it was decreed from the beginning of time that Private Searing was not to murder anybody that bright summer morning…. For countless ages events had been so matching themselves together in that wonderful mosaic to some parts of which, dimly discernible, we give the name of history.” Turning from description to exposition, the narrative condenses a vast swath of causes and effects into a long paragraph, followed by a sudden return to the present moment of the story and the explosion of a Confederate-launched shell. Jerome is pinned under a collapsed wooden structure, delirious with shock. Presently he steadies

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himself, once again calibrating his experience with an implied clock-time: “his term of unconsciousness… had probably not exceeded a few seconds, for the dust of the wreck had not wholly cleared away as he began an intelligent survey of the situation” (268).

95 The story takes a surprising turn. In sensory terms that echo the intensity of Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” the narrative lyrically expresses the intense physical and psychological pain of the dying man: “The world had passed away —not a vestige remained. Here is immortality in time—each pain an everlasting life. The throbs tick off eternities” (272). Clock-time dissolves, for character and for the reader, in the pulsing body-time of profound subjective suffering.

96 Yet a timepiece equipped with a minute hand appears in the story’s brief coda. Told from another point of view altogether—that of the marksman’s higher-ranked brother —the narrative unexpectedly shifts (back) to the moment the shell hit. Positioned at the line of battle his brother had crossed, Lieutenant Adrian Searing hears the “confused rumble” and “mechanically looked at his watch. Six o’clock and eighteen minutes” (273). The brother leads his troops forward, and they pass a corpse pinned beneath a wooden beam. Here is the last paragraph of the story: “‘Dead a week,’ said the officer curtly, moving on and absently pulling out his watch as if to verify his estimate of time. Six o’clock and forty minutes” (274).

97 In pairing the two brothers, the story juxtaposes two ways of experiencing time. The officer’s more official perspective, tied “mechanically” and “absently” to clock-time, marks a double misrecognition: he misjudges the barely deceased body to be “dead a week,” and fails to recognize that the dead private is Jerome. For the reader, this combination of mistakes is disorienting and incoherent, almost to the point of illegibility: readers are often left puzzled and uncertain by the story’s end.

98 By contrast, when tied to the perspective of Jerome Searing, the narrative’s temporal dislocations stage what Matz has called the “temporal diversity” that is flattened by a dependence on clock-time. “One of the Missing” displays the narrative resources of the short story, expanding to embrace a cosmic view and shrinking to the span of a last heartbeat. Jerome’s perceptions, with which the narrative unevenly overlaps, are discrepant with clock-time. To use Bierce’s terms for the man so good at hitting the mark, the story itself reveals a “sharp eye” and a “truthful tongue” in marking the alternate shifts and flows of time understood phenomenologically.

99 Given this apparent valuing of temporal diversity, it’s fair to ask why the narrative shifts from the scene of dying to the ironies marked by Adrian Searing’s watch. Tied to the perspective of the clock, we learn that Jerome Searing’s final task on earth took just a little more than 22 minutes—roughly the time it takes the reader to finish “One of the Missing” in its entirety. The short story, as a literary form, has something in common with a pre-modern task orientation: though it’s hard to pin down its formal specifications in terms of precise length, characteristic themes, or distinctive affects, the short story is nonetheless keyed (as Poe famously observed) to the variable experiential frame of a single sitting.

100 The short story as a narrative mode and form of entertainment, however, is also highly compatible with the pace of modernity and the limited allotments of leisure time—even the equivocal idleness produced by modern warfare. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell notes that the U.S. Civil War was the first “in which really large

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numbers of literate men fought as common soldiers” (157), many of whom brought reading material into the trenches.

101 It’s worth returning briefly to Nicholas Daly’s argument about the literary complicity of nineteenth-century narrative forms and other powerful institutional structures associated with modernity: “the [sensation] novel,” he writes, “threatened to couple the reader to its mechanism.” By way of Bierce we might conclude that, at the turn of the twentieth-century, something a little different appears: a literary form (the short story) well suited to couple with the jumpy temporalities—not to mention the variable attention spans—associated with the “mechanism” of modernizing human minds and bodies.

102 LYNCH (on Thrailkill): A brief response, only to say that I cannot think of a short story in which narrowing, funneling time—from seasons to days to times of day to hours to minutes—passes more oppressively than it does in Joyce’s “Araby.” Time there weighs on the unnamed adolescent narrator as heavily as does his repressive Irish-Catholic Dublin culture. At one particularly stressful point he is simply staring at the ticking clock, waiting for his drunken forgetful uncle’s return and his own release towards a precisely timed, crepuscular epiphany. Of course: “Araby” is a rite-of-passage/ initiation story, and so essentially invested in the passage of time. But it was always already too late for Joyce’s boy.

4. Feeling-based Judgments of Literary Forms and Genres

103 In Our Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai highlights a connection between form and affect (or formal styles and feeling-based judgments) in categories such as the “zany,” the “cute,” and the “interesting.” Do literary forms and genres inherently attract their own particular brand of feeling-based judgments? Is the short story (or the short short story, or “microfiction,” or “nanofiction”), for example, cute? Is the short story cycle “interesting”? Is there something “zany” about the story made to perform the work of stand-alone text and contextual text? (The same story, for example, may appear in a cycle, in an author’s collected works, in a magazine issue, in an anthology, and alone. Might the short story, then, easily fall prey to a particular aesthetic judgment because of its flexibility and performance of multiple roles?) Are there other terms that might help us to understand our feeling-based judgments of literary forms and genres?

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104 HOGAN: This is a complex question, from which I would like to select out one small part —the bearing of interest. “Interest” has at least two distinct uses in relation to short stories. We might refer to these as “immersive” and “retrospective.” A story may be interesting in the sense that it sustains our engagement while reading or in the sense that it provokes our reflection and reconsideration after reading. Both rely on some degree of unexpectedness. Unexpectedness involves properties of the work and properties of the reader (which are to some degree shared, but to some degree idiosyncratic). Specifically, a story is unexpected to the extent that it does not fit the cognitive structures activated by the topic. For example, for me, both O. Henry’s “Christmas by Injunction” and Alice Munro’s “Dimensions” take up cognitive structures bearing on parent/child separation and reunion. However, they vary the

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structure considerably, thus in ways that provoke immersive interest. In addition to unexpectedness, a story is interesting to the extent that it activates emotion systems that motivate us to follow through the story. To some extent, this occurs simply through novelty alone. But often—and necessarily in those cases where we care about the outcome—other emotion systems, such as (empathic) attachment, are involved.

105 One obvious feature of academic writing about literature is that it entails repeatedly revisiting literary works. One result of this is that academic scholarship tends to value works that sustain retrospective interest. This is often the case with works that turn on an incident involving sociological, psychological, or metaphysical reorientations in thought and emotion, particularly reorientations that are difficult to articulate. In contrast, works that rely on more readily explained factual realizations may be less retrospectively interesting. This is one reason why academics are (at least in my experience) likely to value Joyce or Munro above O. Henry. Indeed, the contrast extends beyond retrospective interest to the immersive interest of subsequent re-readings. Munro’s “Dimensions” and Joyce’s “Eveline” bear re-reading in light of the ending in a way that O. Henry’s stories often do not. Indeed, the somewhat elusive quality of the ending in the cases of Munro and Joyce may mean that our experience of that ending changes on subsequent re-readings—leading to further developments in our next experience of the text, and so on. Such a cyclical process seems far less likely to be the case with O. Henry.

106 WALLACE (on Hogan): Hogan notes that “academic scholarship tends to value works that sustain retrospective interest,” and surmises that “works that rely on more readily explained factual realizations may be less retrospectively interesting,” pointing to academic neglect of the work of O. Henry. I think that O. Henry presents a curious case, not only because of his popularity. If it’s true that his stories do not call out for re- reading and deep reflection, they are nevertheless favorites for re-encountering in the sense of sharing with others or next generations. This urge to re-encounter includes a film realization of selected stories that is regularly re-broadcast. The very familiarity of stories like “Gift of the Magi” or “The Last Leaf” (dramatized in 1952 as part of the collection O. Henry’s Full House) and rehearsed repetition where the ending is foreseen and expected is indeed part of the pleasure. This seems a different kind of affective effect than short stories with more ambiguous endings that encourage different readings and different reading experiences as Hogan delineates. Perhaps part of the pleasure of O. Henry and O. Henriesque stories is that they seem to work more communally—even my students seem to know the plot twist of “Gift of the Magi”—so that it functions as a kind of shared cultural affect that can be used as a short-hand to refer to the feeling of other situations or to construct a sense of a shared experience.

5. The Feeling of Form

107 Many theorists of affect have investigated the consequences and potential of less celebrated (or unpleasant or unpopular or uncomfortable) affects, feelings, and emotions. (See Ngai on “ugly feelings,” Sara Ahmed on unhappiness, Jonathan Flatley on melancholia, or various projects by Lauren Berlant, Jacques Rancière, and others.) Can we imagine happy or unhappy forms and genres (the short story as truncated novel, for example, or the cycle as a refusal of a perceived narrowness of focus in the novel)? Does affect theory allow a way to reimagine the feeling of form?

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108 MURISON: Perhaps the best-known statement about the relation of the novel form to happiness came from Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (1). In this much-quoted opening line, Tolstoy makes a formal claim: the novel is about unhappy families. Nineteenth-century novels such as Anna Karenina, Bleak House, or Sister Carrie sprawl, exploring different unhappy families, and presumably different ways to be unhappy. If, as Sara Ahmed claims, happiness is “a form of world making” that “makes the world cohere around, as it were, the right people” (13), nineteenth-century novelists relentlessly show how, too often, happiness is wielded to enforce social expectations.

109 There may be no novelist who better explored the oppressiveness of “happiness” than Henry James. If James’s novels explore varieties of unhappiness, I would contend that his short stories about novelists, particularly “The Lesson of the Master” and “The Figure in the Carpet,” explore the affective experience of being consumed by, finding an obsessive happiness in, such novels of unhappiness. Both of these stories are about novelists and their fans. The main characters of both are, to borrow a slang term, fanboys; they are consumed by and make life-changing decisions based on their objects of desire. In similar fashion, the female fan in “The Lesson of the Master” is quite literally named Marian Fancourt. James’s formal choice of the short story to explore cultural obsessiveness seems to indicate its diminutive status. Fandom rates a short story: intense but not substantive.

110 But to turn the association of short with diminution on its head, the short story also allows James to consider how our love for long novels and their authors can concentrate and then curdle. In “The Figure in the Carpet,” the narrator begins the story besotted with the author Hugh Vereker, having just reviewed the novelist’s latest. When they meet at a country house, the narrator experiences a mixture of elation and pain. While he overhears Vereker dismiss his review of the novel, he also still measures himself by Vereker’s standard, even before Vereker challenges him to find the “figure in the carpet”—the trick that runs through all of his works. By the end of the story, having neither discovered the secret nor having wrested the secret from the friends who have discovered it, George Corvick and Gwendolyn Erme, the narrator’s appreciation of Vereker’s works has soured, so much so that the only pleasure he can extract is by sharing his unhappiness with Erme’s second husband, Drayton Deane. He tells Deane (after Erme’s death) that she never trusted him with this secret either: “I may say that to-day as victims of unappeased desire there isn’t a pin to choose between us. The poor man’s state is almost my consolation: there are really moments when I feel it to be quite my revenge” (313). If the narrator can no longer be content with enjoying Vereker’s novels, he now finds a perverse happiness in destroying others’ contentment.

111 The short story form, as “The Figure in the Carpet” suggests, allows James to consider what perverse expectations of happiness readers bring to the consumption of novels. The form signifies how these affective pulses—between reader and author or between reader and book—sit on uneasy expectations that are undermined quickly and replaced by negative feelings of rage, discontentment, and revenge. The choice of the short story, then, is more than a relegation of cultural fandom to the unimportant; in fact, the diminutive is also the concentrated, a tight, constrained realm that nonetheless explains the psychological role of (to quote James again) those “large, loose baggy

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monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary” (Preface to The Tragic Muse 1107). Perhaps the greatest formal irony of all is that the short story can, in this way, come to encompass the novel’s affective, queer realm, explaining its functions in deft and acute ways.

Section 2: The Short Story Cycle

6. The Independence of Individual Stories in a Cycle

112 Forest Ingram defines the short story cycle as “a set of stories linked to each other in such a way as to maintain a balance between the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit” (15). Susan Garland Mann writes that “there is only one essential characteristic of the short story cycle: the stories are both self-sufficient and interrelated. On the one hand, the stories work independently of one another: the reader is capable of understanding each of them without going beyond the limits of the individual story. On the other hand, however, the stories work together, creating something that could not be achieved in a single story” (15).

113 Both of these definitions preserve the independence of each short story in a cycle. Ingram refers to the “individuality of each” story. Mann insists on each story’s independence and individuality. Does this critical hedging shortchange the effects (and affects) of the cycle as cycle? Is excerpting a short story from its cycle (or releasing a single track from a song cycle, for another example)— regardless of whether the piece can “stand on its own”—always an act of affective disruption, interruption, subtraction? Short story cycles often seem to celebrate a capacity to transmit affect from one story to the next (and then to transmit a sort of cumulative affect to the reader). Based on this, should we rethink the common description of the cycle as a collection in which the stories can work both independently and in concert? Doesn’t the existence of the cycle indicate some insufficiency of its individual stories (at least in the face of the larger whole)?

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114 NAGEL: In an earlier response, Thrailkill discussed an intriguing concept related to the story cycle that she calls the “sequel.” In The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, I emphasize the interrelationships among such stories when in a single volume, either supplying motivation for action in a subsequent story or in giving the final consequences of actions given in an earlier story. For example, in Love Medicine, has Henry Sr. commit suicide by standing in front of a railroad train. No explanation is given in that story for such a ghastly event. However, in the surrounding stories it is evident that his wife, Lulu, has had several children by other men while married to Henry. His humiliation, his sense of betrayal, his constant reminder in his interactions with his children that they are not his own would provide a motivation for taking his own life. In “Accident,” part of Susan Minot’s Monkeys, Mum is also killed by a passing train, one that comes behind her house at the same time each day. Mum has an unfulfilling relationship with Dad and enters into an affair with Mr. Kittredge, whom she seems to love desperately. Baby Minnie would seem to have been fathered by Kittredge. After she sees him with a beautiful young blonde, she commits suicide. The motivation, and the consequences, of the suicide come in other stories. That is often the case in the story cycle.

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115 LYNCH: Well (to answer the concluding question—“Doesn’t the existence of the cycle indicate some insufficiency of its individual stories?”—conclusively), no. Canadian author Duncan Campbell Scott published the first modern short story cycle in English, In the Village of Viger, in 1896 (if in the same year as American Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs). Throughout his life Scott refused all requests to publish any of its stories separately. There are many reasons why Viger should be experienced only as an artistic whole, and they are true of all great short story cycles (Joyce’s Dubliners, Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?, etc.). Most obviously each story gains meaning in the context of the whole cycle, which does not imply any lack as a discrete story but rather highlights the advantage of the story cycle form. Moreover, a true cycle’s first and last stories are best understood in those key positions; and thus the aptness of cycle: the cyclical work begins and ends this way, then begins again. The stories of a cycle, like plucked guitar strings responding to others of its strings, gain much distinctively in resonating not only within the whole cycle but from proximity to—in relation to—the other stories, individually and collectively, whatever their place in the cycle. Not least, the integrity of the whole cycle as conceived by its author—the work of literary art—“dead” or otherwise, should be respected and maintained (which is not to say that the whole should not be sampled in anthologies, only that the complete work should always be made known as the primary context).

116 Forest Ingram was indeed the first critic to recognize the strong emergence of this new genre in the twentieth century (though Frank O’Connor had seen something like it shaping up in Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches). I would revise the categorizing aspect of Ingram’s pioneering work somewhat (and have done so elsewhere, particularly with respect to his classifying of cycles in terms of how they were composed), but his recognition of the essential idea of the short story cycle remains the most reliable starting point. Story cycles are defined by the corresponding relationships of equality among each complete story within the context of the whole cycle. That essential idea of the short story cycle illustrates the meanings to be unpacked from what hyper- rationalist critics tried and failed to dismiss as the hermeneutic circle. The short story itself is first and sometimes finally defined as a story that is short (as per Poe), and the short story cycle is dependent upon the reciprocal relations among stories and the whole they create.

117 NAGEL (on Lynch): The modern story cycles Lynch cites—In the Village of Viger and The Country of Pointed Firs—are worthy books, to be sure, but we should note that there were, in fact, numerous texts published in America prior to 1896 that qualify as story cycles, as I chart out in some detail in The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle. A few volumes deserve mention: Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Georgia Scenes (1835), Eliza Buckminster Lee, Sketches of a New England Village, in the Last Century (1838), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories (1871), George Washington Cable, Old Creole Days (1879), Grace King, Balcony Stories (1892), Kate Chopin, Bayou Folk (1894), and Hamlin Garland, Main-Travelled Roads (1891).

118 LYNCH (on Nagel and Lynch): It is true that there were certainly books that looked like cycles before Scott’s and Jewett’s. (I’ve often traced that history myself.) In fact, there were two important Canadian texts, the McCulloch mentioned, serialized beginning in 1823, and Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s first series of The Clockmaker (which introduced Yankee Sam Slick to the world in 1836). But in claiming a “first” for Scott

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(and less so for Jewett), I am thinking particularly of a form of short story that in both style and substance we’ve come to understand as “Modern,” as in the Modern Period beginning about 1913 (with Pound’s “Imagist Manifesto”), stories that in a less ornamental prose style, a “plainer style,” and even in expressing a modern anxiety about what was happening in the rapidly changing world, look more like what Joyce and Hemingway would soon write than what Haliburton or Poe or Hawthorne or any of the great American nineteenth century short story writers were writing or, and most relevantly, composing in books as short story cycles. Perhaps too I am working from a more exclusive definition of “short story cycle.”

119 MURISON (on Lynch, Thrailkill, and Wallace): Reading through our various responses to questions posed about the relation of short stories to affect, I could not help but recall the ever-present voice on the London metro: “Mind the gap.” What many of the responses seem to come back to is how the short story form, in its divergent varieties, “is good at,” as Thrailkill puts it, “leveraging gaps.” Thrailkill notes the temporal gaps between Crane’s connected stories, Red Badge of Courage and “The Veteran,” and Chopin’s “At the ‘Cadian Ball” and “The Storm,” describing how a virtual novel fits into their interstices. In describing the short story cycle, Lynch writes that the “stories of a cycle, like plucked guitar strings responding to others of its strings, gain much distinctively in resonating not only within the whole cycle but from proximity to—in relation to—the other stories, individually and collectively, whatever their place in the cycle.” Lynch’s metaphor is particularly suggestive in that the gaps between strings resonate, creating the music. Resonances between gaps are as much a part of the internal structure of the short story as between stories in a cycle. From their beginnings in the eighteenth century (as Wallace reminds us) through the tales of the nineteenth (including Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which I discuss), short stories often depended on frame narratives, in other words, on internal gaps. The formally slight but significantly meaningful gaps between narrative perspectives within a story produce what we might call affective effects in that they prompt but are not reducible to the emotions or feelings within the narrative voice, the plot, or the character’s psychological states. Short stories resonate and vibrate with affect.

120 To “mind the gap” is therefore to consider the stakes of affect in the short story form. The phrase is equally powerful because of its insistence on “” the gap. While this, needless to say, means to attend to the gap, as I point out above, it also occurs to me that it names one of the risks of writing about affect in the first place: filling it with mind rather than body. If affect is, as theorists like Teresa Brennan and Brian Massumi insist, a pre-discursive disposition of the body, one that occurs on the “lower frequencies” (to borrow Ralph Ellison’s wording), then there exists a fundamental mismatch—a gap—between literature and affect. Literature is, of course, textual and discursive. But what makes our exchange about the short story and affect helpful is that the gaps in the stories reflect, unconsciously to be sure, the gaps between affective worlds and our linguistic rendering of them. I wager, after reading the responses in this forum, that the form of the short story (and not just the emotional representations in them) can guide scholars to more fine-grained and resonate explanations of that intersection of text and affect that has posed difficult theoretical problems since the “affective turn” in literary study.

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7. Coming to Terms with the Cycle

121 When do we know that a group of stories is a cycle? Does this understanding strictly emerge at the author’s paratextual behest—in a title or subtitle, for instance? Does the cycle depend upon or seek to predate knowledge of its category? Lauro Zavala and others write of the “flexible strategies of interpretation” required of readers put in the position of having to “come to terms with the diversity of textual forms that surpass the traditional literary norms,” (284) including hybrid forms like the cycle. When and how does this coming to terms operate? Do readers “come to terms” with the cycle while progressing through it? Do we experience this transition, pre- cognitively—before we recognize it?

122 Many affect theorists understand the difference between affect and terms like feeling and emotion as the difference between a pre-cognitive, biological operation (affect) and a recognizable, describable feeling. Is the cycle affective before it is recognizable?

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123 NAGEL: The term “cycle” assumes a work’s relationship to other such works surrounding it, as in the ancient cyclical plays presented in Greece, the cyclic of Homer’s day, the medieval mystery cycles, and the long history of story cycles published in France and, later, in America. A story could be judged to be part of a cycle if it has an important relationship to the other tales in the volume in which it was published, a continuing setting (as in Winesburg, Ohio, Friendship Village, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, Main-Travelled Roads, Old Creole Days, Tales of Whilomville or The Country of the Pointed Firs or Deephaven), characters who appear in multiple stories (as in Love Medicine, Annie John, The Joy Luck Club, In Our Time, Bayou Folk, Stones for Ibarra), a unifying developing theme (as in The Things They Carried, Balcony Stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, The Bowery Tales, The Pastures of Heaven), or all of these things (as in Monkeys, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, or The Beet Queen). The genre was not rare, as some scholars assume, nor did it originate with Dubliners nor In Our Time, despite the reviews that accompanied the publications of these volumes. There were well over a hundred such collections published in America before Hemingway was born, and there have been more than a hundred each decade of the late twentieth century. Virtually every issue of Book Review features a “novel in stories” or a book that is “almost a novel” or a collection of stories with a recurring central character. The reviewers are not scholars, and they are innocent of literary history and the rather extensive critical commentary on the form of the story cycle.

124 LYNCH: More often than not, genre theory is a muddled mess, ranging from the categorizingly inane to airless abstraction. In such matters, I am most reliably guided by Alistair Fowler’s (perhaps) too sensible notion of genre as “family resemblance” among works (41). As for readers knowing when they are reading a short story cycle, I would put it this way: readers soon know when they are reading a book of short stories that is more than a miscellaneous collection yet clearly not a novel; Dubliners is not only an obviously different reading experience from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but also different from reading such a collection of stories as Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades. The stories in books such as Dubliners do both stand on their own and do accrete to represent a more meaningful whole that, in turn, does enlarge the meaning of each discrete story. (The first is what Ingram meant by “the [story cycle’s] dynamic

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patterns of recurrence and development,” 20.) Coherence in such books of related stories—story cycles—can be achieved weakly, as in a frame narrative, a thematic similarity, or a distinctive style, or coherence can be achieved strongly through shared setting (Dubliners, Winesburg), through intensive focus on the same character (for example, Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women), or through recurrent narrators and characters (for example, British writer Kate Atkinson’s Not the End of the World). Such collections we call short story cycles. Someone (Eliot? Frye?) said that every new work of literary art trains its readers. I think the same might be said largely of the comparatively new genre of the short story cycle and its readers (and confused reviewers, as per Nagel’s remarks preceding). Readers who encounter a story cycle for the first time find themselves in deceptively familiar territory (Oh, a book of short stories), are soon de-familiarized (Oh, this story is strangely like the last one), then ultimately re-familiarized (Oh, I see how it works, sort of like a book of stories, sort of like a novel), and more (Oh …).

125 HOGAN (on Lynch): Professor Lynch shares Fowler’s quality of being sensible (though I would demure from the view that either is “too sensible”). In consequence, I do not wish to take anything away from his emphasis on the value of story cycles. However, I would like to extend the general point to other forms of coherence, most importantly bodies of work by a single author that are not designed as story collections. These too may cohere “strongly” or “weakly” and with these too each new story may train the reader in understanding and responding to other stories. Indeed, the point applies to historical and cultural periods as well—up to and including even universal patterns.

126 But let us stick for the moment to authors—and even a single author, Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was one of the greatest figures in Bengali short story writing. With each story we gain a greater sense of just what is at stake for the children and women whose mistreatment concerns him. Specifically, the reader of many Tagore stories may begin to recognize that, for Tagore, perhaps the most deeply painful form of oppression involves the destruction of attachment bonds. In keeping with this, insensitivity to attachment bonds often enables our ordinary complicity with oppression; thus a key form of ethical practice involves cultivating attachment sensitivity. A reader who becomes attuned to this pattern from some of the simpler stories may respond much more fully to a complex work, such as “Āpad.” In that story, a young woman lies on behalf of an adolescent thief, evidently treating this as a moral obligation, even though the boy himself has disappeared and the lie will have no consequences for him. The title appears to suggest that this deception is a case of āpaddharma. (Āpaddharma is “a practice only allowable in time of distress” [Monier-Williams 143], thus a form of moral behavior that occurs in exceptional circumstances.)

8. Making Affective Sense of the Past, Present, and Future

127 Jeff Birkenstein writes that readers of the short story cycle “quite naturally […] make connections, see patterns, impose order and meaning retroactively, and begin to anticipate themes and possibilities to come” (498). Does the short story cycle, then, speak to the ways we make affective sense of the past, present, and future? Some affect theorists differentiate between affect and emotion by seeing emotion as historical—as “the combination of an affect with our memory of previous experiences of that affect” (Nathanson 131). (Nathanson suggests, along

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those lines, that “affect is biology, whereas emotion is biography.”) Does the short story cycle have the potential to create an emotional history for its readers?

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128 WALLACE: Sara Ahmed writes that Feminist philosophers [like Alison Jagger] have shown us how the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body […]. Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as “closer” to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgment. (Cultural Politics of Emotions, 3)

129 It is then no accident that some branches of affect studies have developed out of feminist, critical race, and queer theorizing, but that very history makes me suspicious of Nathanson’s distinction between emotion as historical and affect as biological. The biological too has a history—and in fact a culture, and affect studies, in some veins, risks a kind of bloodless abstraction that flattens differences of embodiment, language, etc. even by turning to consideration of cognition, endocrinology, etc. That history, in fact, has been the subject of feminist and race-sensitive critiques of science for some time, so the turn to biology, sometimes cognition, or neuropsychology may raise as many questions as it purports to answer (see Gross, Secret History of Emotion).

130 It’s interesting that while the turn from “emotion” to “affect” is in part an effort to move beyond character or reader, we tend to come back to feeling as though emotions need a location—in a reader, in a mind, in an embodied response, in a social situation. While Nathanson’s distinction seems initially helpful, I’d resist making such a strong break along these lines. First, coming from older literary and cultural traditions, I want to suggest that there is something useful in older and quite flexible concepts such as “sympathy” (Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments or David Hume’s Dissertation on the Passions), which seems implicitly tied to embodiment, or “emotion” in the sense of something that is fundamentally about movement. Like Ann Cvetkovich, who summarizes the “affective turn” as relying on a distinction between affect as “precognitive sensory experience” and emotion as “cultural constructs and conscious processes that emerge from them” (4), I find “affect” more useful when it is more inclusive or even better, terms like “feeling” or “emotion” not as naming specific properties belonging to one subject, but as naming something that seems shared, tied to embodiment, but also located in a particular moment or history or cultural location.

131 Blushing, for example, has a long history of signifying the place where interior psychic subjectivity, corporeal and biological response, and socio-cultural context intersect to write their effects in blood flow, heat, color—that may or may not be legible to observers (and thus seems to invite the interventions of scientific measurement while also exceeding that gaze, see Crozier). In that case, it seems the history of emotion (shame, desire, disgust, recognition) intersects directly with biological response. To distinguish affect is sometimes oddly to disembody it—something that some versions of affect theory do, but that other versions seek to reinvigorate and resist.

132 So to return to the question, one thing to keep in mind about short story “cycles” or even collections is that they are curiously embodied in the sense that certain elements are repeated, reiterated—read silently the eye fixes and notes them, read aloud they take on a sonorous sensation. It is in the reiteration of words, settings, names, and the

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differences among those repetitions that they invoke a kind of recognition that ascribes affective content to them.

9. Creating New Feelings or New Ways to Feel

133 At the most basic level, does the short story cycle—in general—imagine a capacity to create new feelings or to create feelings in a new way? Does the cycle imply a shortcoming in the abilities of the novel or the short story collection to represent or produce feeling?

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134 LYNCH: Even if my proposed system of categorizing story cycles according to what contributes most to their coherence—place/setting or/and character—takes us further than does a system that must often speculate on the principles that governed the cycle’s composition (Ingram’s), categorizing by setting and character still risks compromising the spirit of the short story cycle. Something troubling persists in the recourse to recurrent setting and character (let alone a constituent theme, a consistent style or tone, or a clever device). Such an approach risks assessing story cycles as failed novels—the very thing to be avoided with this historically recent genre. It is the novel, from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela to Ian McEwan’s Atonement, that presents a continuous narrative of character, place, theme, and style. The short stories of a cycle, because they still come rapidly to focus on climactic events, continue to be distinguished for their relative concision. Even the most tightly unified story cycles will lack the traditional novel’s chief advantage as a completed action, as temporally continuous, and as couched in a totalizing narrative design. There is something essential to short stories that is decidedly un- or even anti-novelistic, an aesthetic (as Poe postulated at the genre’s inception) that is closer to lyric poetry—the illuminating flash of a revelatory event rather than the steadily growing light of causal relation. A series of flashes (slow flashes, as it were) will never a steady beam make. The sequence that is a story cycle signals a different code: recognizing and representing a place and understanding a character as seen by stroboscope, held still momentarily, in still flashes of revelatory/epiphanic insight, strangely fragmented into kaleidoscopic arrangements, continually unfolding unfamiliarly in the minds of readers accustomed to the slower pace, still panorama, and single perspective of traditional novels.

135 The story cycle is peculiarly different for the ways in which its form also enables an exploration of the paradoxical failure of place and character to unify a modern vision that remains tantalizingly whole yet fundamentally suspicious of coherence and completeness, and of the meaningfulness that wholeness and closure entail. Perhaps this suspiciously neat paradox can be clarified in terms of the outer and inner dynamics of the short story cycle, as those concepts are deployed generally by genre theorists René Wellek and Austin Warren. By way of illustration, Viger (the titular setting of Scott’s early story cycle), the fictional place, represents the outer dynamic that obviously gives coherence and unity to the story cycle, while Viger as the figure of Scott’s vision of disintegrating small-town North America at the turn of the twentieth century represents the inner principle of a fragmenting metropolitan modernity that destabilizes the lives of Viger’s residents/characters. To take one more example, this time from the second major category of story cycle types, those of character: in similar

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manner the character Rose does not satisfyingly unify Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? That story cycle is also about the possibility/impossibility of essential (female) selfhood and character–how they are formed and represented, how identity may only ever be provisionally achieved–as entities in both fiction and, by realistic projection, life. Rose is both the fictional figure of the destabilized self, a form of inner principle threatening ideas of coherent personality, and Rose is the recurrent character who knits up the stories, the outer dynamic confirming readers’ expectations of character development in a bildungsroman.

136 Often each story of a cycle explores such problems of (dis)continuity and (in)coherence, only to defer solution to the next story in the cycle (Ingram’s “recurrence” principle), whose conflict both repeats and cumulatively advances those of its predecessors (Ingram’s “development”), until readers reach the final story of the cycle, which returns them to the preceding stories in the context of the whole cycle. Thus the short story cycle can indeed be seen as another form of Modern anti-novel, fragmenting the continuous narrative’s treatment of place, character, event, and time, while providing multiple perspectives on its subjects in a manner that suggestively parallels cubist aesthetics.

137 I don’t think much, if any, of the foregoing responds to question 9’s perfectly appropriate wondering about the story cycle’s ability to “create feelings in a new way” or “to represent or produce feeling.” But that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

138 WALLACE (on Lynch): Lynch writes suggestively that “There is something essential to short stories that is decidedly un- or even anti-novelistic, an aesthetic […] that is closer to lyric poetry […] recognizing and representing a place and understanding a character as seen by stroboscope, held still momentarily, in still flashes of epiphanic insight, strangely fragmented into kaleidoscopic arrangements, unfolding unfamiliarly in the minds of readers accustomed to the pace and panorama of novels.” Part of what I think Lynch is pointing to is that where the novel (particularly the bildungsroman form) constructs sense of self as made over time, short story or short story cycles seem in some ways to capture the fragmented nature of the experience of selfhood. My question is whether this is a representational aesthetic strategy that mirrors a changed and changing sense of “self” or “subject,” or whether as some critics have argued (Deidre Lynch’s Economy of Character comes to mind), the novel itself as a genre helped to create a particular experience of interior self as “character” under a particular socio- economic regime? In that case, are we perhaps pointing to the short story (that is, the modernist short story) as likewise contributing to construct a more fragmented, epiphanic sense of self and of character under a changed socio-economic and political regime? A “novel” like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves could in this frame also be read as likewise contributing to that fragmented, “kaleidoscopic arrangement” that Lynch suggests “unfold[s] unfamiliarly in the minds of readers accustomed to the pace and panorama of novels.” Perhaps the “novel” we have in mind here is more akin to the high realist nineteenth-century novel, rather than some of the early twentieth-century experiments

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139 SECTION EDITORS: A shortage of space necessitates what will inevitably feel like an abrupt end to the conversation. Our thanks to the contributors for a wide-ranging and useful series of discussions.

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Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. Print.

---. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

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Varia

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Is There a Doctor in the House? Rudyard Kipling’s Private Message to Arthur Conan Doyle in “The House Surgeon”

Donna R. White

1 When describing Rudyard Kipling’s earliest known story, “My First Adventure,” published in a hand-written home magazine by Kipling’s Burne-Jones cousins when Kipling was barely in his teens, Harry Ricketts claims that the tale contains some of the characteristics of Kipling’s mature work, including “the preoccupation with abnormal mental states; the delight in farce; [and] the use of cryptic personal references ...” (37). The three characteristics listed above could easily be a description of “The House Surgeon”; the third feature in particular rewards close examination. In his 1999 biography of Kipling, Ricketts returns again and again to the notion that Kipling used private codes in his letters and stories—that he liked to play “literary games” and pepper private jokes throughout his writing (95). Evidence from “The House Surgeon” and the lives of both Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle suggests that the story is in many ways intended for an audience of one: the man who created Sherlock Holmes.

2 Kipling’s stories are often extremely complex. As J. M. S. Tompkins says about Kipling, “Pattern and intricacy of all kinds delighted him, and he loved to play with his tools and his material” (258). Kipling consciously layered different meanings into his texts: writing about the composition of Rewards and Fairies in his autobiography, he says, “I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience” (Something of Myself 205). Tompkins compares such stories to icebergs and says they often contain a “hidden narrative” (112). “There are always sufficient directions,” says Tompkins, “but they do not spring to the eye; they must be looked and listened for” (112-13).

3 Such hidden narratives reflect Kipling’s love of the specialized knowledge of other crafts and the jargon associated with it as well as his delight in alluding to it in his

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work, often indirectly. His hints and suggestions create what Lionel Trilling calls his “gnomic quality” (119). Kipling’s fiction and poetry allude to the secrets of exclusive groups such as Freemasons, scientists, and engineers, and that allusiveness is part of the attraction to his work: “Kipling’s superior cryptic tone . . . suggested first that the secret was being kept not only from oneself but from everyone else and then it suggested that the secret was not so much being kept as revealed, if one but guessed hard enough” (Trilling 120). Hidden narratives and private messages appealed strongly to a writer who loved secrets.

4 Part of the hidden narrative in “The House Surgeon” involves the private codes Ricketts mentions as a feature of Kipling’s writing. Although ostensibly a ghost story, this tale of a psychic haunting can also be read as a humorous tale, a story of healing, and a private communication to a friend. Only Arthur Conan Doyle could pick up the personal references in the story, which are so carefully hidden as to require the skills of Sherlock Holmes to decipher. I do not claim to be as astute as Conan Doyle’s famous detective, but a modern abundance of biographical materials enables any would-be detective to unravel the clues.

5 When “The House Surgeon” was first published in Harper’s Magazine in September and October of 1909, Kipling and Conan Doyle had been friends for fifteen years. Kipling, by all accounts, was selective about his friendships: he was an intensely private man who valued loyalty, tradition, and country. Conan Doyle, on the other hand, was a hearty, gregarious extravert, but he shared Kipling’s values. In this case, opposites attracted. They first met in Vermont in November of 1894 when Conan Doyle and his brother interrupted their American tour to spend two days at the Kiplings’ American home. Their friendship continued through correspondence, and the following year Conan Doyle sent Kipling a pair of Norwegian skis—the first pair of skis in Vermont, according to Charles Carrington, one of Kipling’s biographers (230). When Kipling moved back to England, visits were more frequent, and eventually the two men became distant neighbors in Sussex. For the next thirty-five years, they maintained a regular correspondence and read each other’s works as they were published.

6 Kipling and Conan Doyle had much in common, from artistic families to a total lack of musical ability. Both men were Freemasons and celebrated authors. They shared an admiration for Robert Louis Stevenson and for American authors as well as a passion for new technology, particularly motorcars, which were new to the English countryside at the turn of the century. They had a common literary agent and many of the same literary friends as well as strong interests in photography and the paranormal. At the time “The House Surgeon” was written, Conan Doyle had not yet embraced spiritualism as a religion. He and Kipling shared an intellectual curiosity about paranormal activity, but Kipling remained leery of spiritualism his entire life and was not sympathetic to Conan Doyle’s later views on the subject. However, their views had not yet diverged in the early 1900s.

7 Kipling and Doyle also shared many of their political views: unlike most writers of their era, both men were conservatives and both volunteered for service during the Boer War, Kipling as a journalist and Conan Doyle as doctor. In fact, Conan Doyle arrived for duty in Bloemfontein the day Kipling left the town.1 After observing the lack of military training among the British soldiers in South Africa, both men spoke out in favor of military reform at home and started local rifle clubs when they returned to England.

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8 Another shared interest was the practice of medicine. Conan Doyle, of course, was a physician before he became a writer. Kipling’s interest was that of an intelligent observer who was fascinated by all forms of science and technology. Kipling’s short stories often feature doctors, scientists, and engineers, along with new technological gadgets like the wireless and the automobile. He stayed current with new developments in medicine, too. Setu K. Vora and Robert W. Lyons claim that one Kipling story, “Love-o’-Women,” is “one of the earliest examples of literary description of a newly understood medical disorder [a disease that is a side effect of syphilis] and a diagnostic test associated with it” (1162).

9 Because Kipling kept his feelings private and seldom criticized his fellow writers, we cannot know his true opinion of Doyle’s works. He wrote to Doyle in 1894 that he had read one of the latter’s stories “at one fascinated sitting” (qtd. in Miller 173). Conan Doyle’s historical novel Sir Nigel came out in book form at the end of 1906, and Kipling wrote to Conan Doyle, “I spent all yesterday evening reading Sir Nigel at one gulp. From cover to cover I read it, and I put it down still hungry for more” (qtd. in Carr 175). Neither of these comments remarks on the quality of Conan Doyle’s works. However, Harry Ricketts claims that Kipling was a fan of Conan Doyle’s writing (209). Biographers of both men confirm that they were friends.

10 A few scholars have taken an ambiguous, second-hand comment in H. Rider Haggard’s diary as evidence that Kipling did not like Doyle. The diary entry recounts a visit Haggard made to Kipling’s home in 1911: He [Kipling] told me that I was the only literary man with whom he cared to associate at all. He knew no others, though Conan Doyle, who lives somewhere near, sometimes came to call, but he “got nothing from him.” (Cohen 71-72)

11 No Kipling scholar could give credence to the notion that Kipling knew no other literary men: he had been an entrenched member of the Savile Club, a famous literary hangout, for fourteen years. This obvious inaccuracy throws Haggard’s entire comment into question. Even if Kipling did say something about getting nothing from Conan Doyle, his remark could easily refer to the latter’s literary works since Kipling’s known comments on them were so carefully worded that they suggest a desire to avoid giving offense. Nevertheless, one second-hand comment cannot void years of mutual correspondence and personal visits between Kipling and Conan Doyle. Similarly, the suggestion that a 1927 Kipling story, “Fairy Kist,” criticizes Conan Doyle as a writer has no bearing on their earlier friendship. One can like and appreciate the man without admiring his writing.

12 Conan Doyle’s opinion of Kipling’s works is more readily determined. Conan Doyle was never reticent about expressing his opinions in writing. In letters to his mother, he wrote admiringly of Kipling the man, and his many biographers record numerous incidents in which he praised Kipling’s work. John Dickson Carr reports that Conan Doyle told Robert Barr, the associate editor of The Idler, that Kipling was a great short story writer (78). Daniel Stashower claims that Conan Doyle studied Kipling’s poetry carefully and used it as a model for his own (209). In Through the Magic Door, Conan Doyle praises Kipling’s short stories: “There is a dash, an exuberance, a full-blooded confident mastery which carries everything before it. Yes, no team of immortals would be complete which did not contain at least two representatives of Kipling” (“Kipling’s Best Story” 303).

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13 Conan Doyle seems to have considered Kipling not only a great writer but also an admirable man of honor, and honor was the highest virtue to Conan Doyle. He considered himself second only to Kipling in his ability to stir up patriotism among young men. When his mother was pressing him to accept a knighthood, Conan Doyle measured his response by Kipling: “Surely you don’t really mean that I should take a knighthood—the badge of the provincial mayor … Fancy Rhodes or Chamberlain or Kipling doing such a thing!” (Lellenberg, Stashower, and Foley 494).

14 The events that I suggest inspired Kipling to write “The House Surgeon” were the death of Conan Doyle’s first wife, Louise, in July of 1906 and Conan Doyle’s long depression afterwards. Although the story was first published in 1909, obviously it had to have been written earlier. Most biographers, and Conan Doyle himself, state that the author sank into a depression after Louise died.2 As a doctor, he felt guilty that he had not been able to do more to relieve her suffering, and as a husband, he felt guilty that he had fallen in love with another woman. According to Martin Booth, “With her passing, Conan Doyle’s guilt increased. He started to sleep badly and his own health declined, although he was suffering from no medical condition. His ability to work left him and he grew very depressed” (258). Daniel Stashower concurs: … as his wife was laid to rest in Hindhead, the cumulative stresses of the thirteen- year illness sent Conan Doyle to his lowest ebb. Tortured by insomnia, he grew weak and listless. His work ceased. The intestinal complaint of his South Africa days returned to plague him. He carried flowers to his wife’s grave and spent dark hours alone with his thoughts. (254)

15 Conan Doyle had certainly been under a great deal of stress, not only because of Louise’s long terminal illness but also because of his decade-long love for Jean Leckie, who would become his second wife. He wrote to his mother that his soul felt “wrenched in two all the time” (Lellenberg, Stashower, and Foley 473). He had grown touchy and irritable in the years before Louise died, and he suffered from black moods. Louise’s death only exacerbated the situation because his sense of relief was compounded by even more guilt. As a good Victorian, he also had to face at least a year of proper mourning before he could marry Jean.

16 Both grief and depression were states of mind that Kipling knew intimately. He suffered from long bouts of depression his entire life, and he experienced inordinate grief. Even though he had never met Robert Louis Stevenson, when the latter died, Kipling was “paralyzed with grief for weeks” (Dillingham, “Spiritualism, Bereavement” 415). He never recovered fully from the death of his beloved daughter Josephine in 1899. As William Dillingham writes, “At times he appeared to be almost obsessed with the subject of grief, which he considered to be one of the exquisite torments that make human existence a living hell” (“Sorrow” 3). Nothing was more inclined to elicit his sympathy and empathy than Conan Doyle’s mental and emotional state in 1906 and 1907. “The House Surgeon” extended a promise of healing.

17 In “The House Surgeon,” a first-person narrator later identified as Mr. Perseus investigates what might be called an emotional haunting of a country house owned by the M’Leod family. At certain times of the day, the household is overwhelmed by either black despair or an unutterable grief. Perseus tracks down the lawyer who sold the house to the M’Leods, and through him, the elderly sisters who used to live there. Eventually he figures out that the feeling of despair comes from the oldest sister, who believes a younger sister committed suicide in the house by jumping out a window. The

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grief belongs to the dead sister, who has been unable to communicate that her death was an accidental fall. Once Perseus convinces the two remaining sisters to revisit the house, they make their peace with the dead sister, and the haunting disappears.

18 When Kipling wrote “The House Surgeon,” Conan Doyle was dealing with a death, a depression, and an engagement. The characters in the story are also concerned with a death, a depression, and an engagement. The death is that of Agnes Moultrie, the youngest of the three sisters. The depression belongs to Mary Moultrie, a strict Evangelical, who believes that her sister committed suicide and therefore went to hell. This belief disturbs Mary so much that she spends most of her time thinking about the place where her sister died; her strong emotions are what the M’Leods and Perseus feel in Holmescroft. Perseus’s detailed description of the depression that falls on him in Agnes’s room showcases Kipling’s personal familiarity with the emotion: … I was aware of a little grey shadow, as it might have been a snowflake seen against the light, floating at an immense distance in the background of my brain. It annoyed me, and I shook my head to get rid of it. Then my brain telegraphed that it was the forerunner of a swift-striding gloom which there was yet time to escape if I would force my thoughts away from it, as a man leaping for life forces his body forward and away from the fall of a wall. But the gloom overtook me before I could take in the meaning of the message. I moved toward the bed, every nerve already aching with the foreknowledge of the pain that was to be dealt it, and sat down, while my amazed and angry soul dropped, gulf by gulf, into that horror of great darkness which is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as auctioneers say, must be experienced to be appreciated. (249)

19 The engagement is more of a suggestion than a statement. Thea M’Leod seems to be postponing her marriage because of the depression in the house. Nothing would have been easier than for her to escape the depression and grief by marrying and moving out, but Kipling does not present this as an option; thus he links the engagement to the emotions in the house.

20 Many critics link the oppression in the house to the Kiplings’ experience in a rental house in Torquay in 1896. Rock House was as sunny and bright as the M’Leods’ house and had similarly been inhabited by three old maids. As Kipling states in his autobiography, it was also inhabited by “a growing depression which enveloped us both —a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart… It was the Feng shui—the spirit of the house itself—that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips” (Something of Myself 143). Tompkins links the house in the story to both Rock House and a house in which Kipling spent a miserable childhood: When Kipling fused his experience in the unhappy house at Torquay, of which he has told us, with still living experience of the spiritual climate of the House of Desolation, and cleansed the site, not as by fire but as by the water of grace, he performed an act of imaginative charity. Moreover, he put the “I” into the story, subjected him to the reflected agony of despair, and used him to remove the barriers that obstructed the renewal of love and hope. (130)

21 Despite the acknowledged connection to previous houses Kipling had known, the house in the story also has much in common with Undershaw, the house Conan Doyle built for Louise in 1897. Like the M’Leods’ residence, Undershaw was a country house on four acres of land approximately forty miles outside of London. Both homes were south- facing and plentifully supplied with windows, had tennis courts and modern electricity, and were near to new golf courses. Mr. M’Leod is extremely proud of his house,

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boasting of its gravel, its electric lighting, and the considerable expense of remodeling it. The gravel is mentioned casually several times, but the electric lighting and the cost of the house receive a great deal of attention. Undershaw was also built at great expense and boasted a gravel drive and its own electric power plant, which one of Conan Doyle’s biographers says was “unheard-of in country places” (Carr 99). Just as Perseus notes the lovely setting of the M’Leods’ house, visitors to Undershaw waxed poetical about the view from Conan Doyle’s drawing room: Bram Stoker compared the scene to a painting by Turner.3 Conan Doyle was an inveterate collector of all kinds of things, so the drawing room also featured a special display shelf, where he exhibited items he had collected on his journeys, including weapons, stuffed birds, and walrus tusks (from his stint as doctor on an Arctic whaler). Not coincidentally, in “The House Surgeon,” Mr. M’Leod boasts that he has “the finest collection of narwhal tusks in the world” (247). The most obvious clue that the M’Leods’ house is linked to Conan Doyle is its name—Holmescroft—which incorporates the name of the famous detective and the first name of his brother Mycroft. The name of the house is one of many references to Sherlock Holmes.

22 Earlier scholars have mentioned some of the Sherlockian references in “The House Surgeon,” but none of them have made a stronger connection to Conan Doyle. Although William B. Dillingham contends that the first-person narrator in another Kipling story, “Wireless,” resembles Arthur Conan Doyle in that both men are physicians with a strong faith in the power of logical reasoning along with an eagerness to believe in a spirit world, Dillingham has not traced the links between Kipling and Conan Doyle any further (“Eavesdropping” 136). Angus Wilson calls “The House Surgeon” Kipling’s “Sherlock Holmes piece” and sees it as an imitation of Conan Doyle, but he does not pursue the reason for the Holmes references (268). Ricketts specifically links Conan Doyle’s visit to Kipling in Vermont to “The House Surgeon” (209). Other critics find these allusions of little importance; John Coates, for instance, finds Wilson’s ideas of passing but minor interest (5).

23 Harking back to Tompkins’s stress on Kipling’s complexity and subtlety, however, a careful reader cannot afford to disregard any allusion as a passing reference, particularly not a repeated allusion. Although Tompkins herself misses the Holmes connection, her discussion of a supposedly passing reference in another story, “My Sunday at Home,” shows the care with which she usually examines such references. “My Sunday at Home” contains a remark about “Tess’s country,” which Tompkins pursues to the conclusion that the story, while not a parody of Thomas Hardy, nevertheless is a deliberate attempt to follow in Hardy’s footsteps (46-48). Tompkins sees conscious reflections of Hardy’s style and theorizes that Kipling’s story is a counter-statement to Hardy’s negative view of life. One seemingly casual remark leads Tompkins to look for other, less obvious clues, which she does indeed find. As Tompkins puts it, “Kipling never labours these hints; they fall almost noiselessly, but in a sufficiently copious shower” (46).

24 The hints in “The House Surgeon” extend further than the surface clues already noted. Besides the name of the house, there are two other obvious references to Sherlock Holmes in “The House Surgeon.” After his first visit to Holmescraft, Perseus writes, “I am less calculated to make a Sherlock Holmes than any man I know, for I lack both method and patience, yet the idea of following up the trouble to its source fascinated me” (255). His “first attempt at detective work,” however, leaves Perseus “more

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bewildered than any Doctor Watson at the opening of a story” (257). Nevertheless, the narrator plays at being both Holmes and Watson: he plays detective to track down John Baxter, the lawyer who sold the house to the M’Leods, and through him the Misses Moultrie, as well as to determine the source of both the despair and the depression; later he plays doctor to Miss Mary Moultrie. He is initially inept at both roles. As a detective he comes up with several faulty theories reminiscent of Dr. Watson’s lamentable attempts at logical reasoning, and as a doctor he faces the contempt of Miss Moultrie: “I cut my hand trying to save myself. Who has tied it up in this filthy handkerchief?” (266). The story is, without a doubt, a detective story, and Perseus muddles through to a successful conclusion of his case.

25 With a link to Sherlock Holmes firmly established, Kipling moves into stealth mode, engaging the private codes and literary games noted by Harry Ricketts. Less obtrusive Sherlockian references—mere suggestions—are peppered through the story. However, every detail counts in a Kipling story, so these suggestions, a discussion of which might otherwise be dismissed as over analysis, strengthen the Holmes connections. Perseus notes “a promising copper beech” in front of Holmescroft, and later he joins the family for tea under that copper beech (248). This species of tree does not appear to be rare in the English landscape, but anything to which Kipling draws specific attention is significant. One of the popular early Holmes stories is titled “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” which features a country house similar to Holmescroft. Violet Hunter, the heroine of the Holmes story, is “freckled like a plover’s egg” (Doyle, “Copper Beeches” 157). Not coincidentally, when Mr. Baxter is caught in a white lie, he turns “plovers’ egg colour” (Kipling, “House Surgeon” 257). This description of Baxter’s skin color occurs immediately after the reference to Dr. Watson’s bewilderment at the opening of a story; the description of Violet Hunter is indeed at the opening of a story, and Perseus is bewildered by Baxter’s reaction. The plover’s egg reference is obscure enough that R. E. Habord decided it required a definition in his Readers’ Guide to Rudyard Kipling’s Works (2877).

26 One of Holmes’s most recent cases at the time “The House Surgeon” appeared was “The Adventure of Black Peter,” published in The Strand Magazine in 1904, featuring a ship called the Sea Unicorn and some stolen South American securities and Canadian railway stocks. “Sea unicorn” is another name for “narwhal,” thus making a connection to Mr. M’Leod’s collection of narwhal tusks, and the nameless young man who wants to marry M’Leod’s daughter “knew everything about South American railway stocks” (Kipling, “House Surgeon” 251). In fact, Perseus refers to him throughout the story only as the young man who knows all about South American railways. Perseus’s refusal to use the young man’s name suggests a bit of jealousy on his part as he too is susceptible to Miss M’Leod’s charms. “Black Peter” also mentions a case about a canary trainer, and Mr. M’Leod calls his daughter “a perfect canary” who used to sing all the time (246).

27 Another Holmes adventure that Kipling may be invoking is The Hound of the Baskervilles, which appeared in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902. In the first paragraph of “The House Surgeon,” Perseus and several others are telling ghost stories, one of which deals with a “Curse on the family’s first-born” that turns out to have a physical cause (245). Such a curse and explanation are featured in the plot of the Holmes novella, although the physical explanation is nothing as mundane as the drains that Perseus mentions. Likewise, one of the first characters to appear in the Holmes tale is Dr. Mortimer, who is a former medical resident or house surgeon. Conan Doyle

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came up with the idea for his story while playing golf at a hydro called Cromer on the North Norfolk coast; R. E. Habord suggests that the fictional hydro Burry Mills in “The House Surgeon” is based on Cromer (2878).4

28 Perseus himself seems to be a link to “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” the story that introduces Mycroft Holmes. His name has obvious connections to Greek mythology, which Kipling flirts with. Thea M’Leod, the daughter, whose own name is Greek for “goddess,” compares the depression in the house to Medusa and talks about being chained to a rock. Although the obvious reference is to Andromeda’s rock, Kipling may also be thinking of Rock House, the depressed house in Torquay. The author goes to considerable trouble to establish the narrator as Greek without actually stating his nationality. In fact, the narrator’s name is only mentioned twice, so his Greek nationality must be inferred through his recurring comments about the peculiarities of the English and the English language and Mr. M’Leod’s apparent non sequitur during his first conversation with Perseus, in which he mentions, apropos of nothing, that his wife is Greek. The most obvious reason for M’Leod to mention his wife’s origin is to make a connection to Perseus. Thus we might assume that when Perseus and the M’Leod ladies discuss the oddities of the English, they may be speaking Greek. Perseus certainly becomes a Greek interpreter of sorts by acting as a cultural translator between the very English and Evangelical Misses Moultrie and the Greek/ Jewish M’Leods and by converting the wordless anguish in the house into peace and acceptance.

29 The Moultrie sisters provide another link to Greek myth. There are three of them, just as the ancient Greek stories feature many female triads: three Graces, three Graeae, three Hesperides, and three gorgons. The gorgons are particularly appropriate. Mary Moultrie is a Medusa figure, terrorizing Holmescroft with her despair over Agnes’s presumed suicide. Although Perseus does not literally slay Mary, he does vanquish her despair and bring peace to Agnes’s troubled spirit, thus freeing the house from its gorgon and Andromeda from her rock.

30 Kipling had an ulterior motive for making Perseus Greek and M’Leod Jewish. Providing these backgrounds for his characters allowed him to play with Matthew Arnold’s concepts of Hellenism and Hebraism, which Arnold viewed as two forces influencing Englishness. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold associates Hebraism with doing and Hellenism with thinking. The English, Arnold thought, combined the “’Hebraic’ virtues —hard work, thrift and moral duty—with a ‘Hellenic’ tradition which stands for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, beauty and truth” (Cheyette 18). In discussing the force of Hebraism, Arnold uses terms like “energy,” “acting,” “moral impulses,” “strictness of conscience,” “feeling,” and “obedience.” Terms he associates with Hellenism include “intelligence,” “thinking,” “ideas,” “intellectual impulses,” and “knowing.” Arnold says these two forces share the same aim: “man’s perfection or salvation” (Arnold 130), but they go about it in different ways. One or the other of these two forces has been ascendant at different times in English history, but the ideal is a “spiritual balance” between the two (141).

31 Kipling tries to create a spiritual balance between Hellenism and Hebraism in “The House Surgeon.” Hebraism is represented several ways, most obviously by M’Leod’s Jewish heritage. M’Leod exhibits the materialistic side of Hebraism, assuming money can solve the problem with his house. He spends thousands of pounds putting in electric lights and digging up drains, all in an attempt to banish the depression that

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haunts his house. As Bryan Cheyette says, M’Leod “replaces biblical knowledge and morality with a facile plutocratic modernity” (84). He is too simple and innocent about spiritual matters, although extremely shrewd in business matters. “The Rabbi’s Song,” the poem at the end of the story, incorporates the spiritual side of Hebraism in its concern with God’s power over grief.

32 Oddly enough, the character who most represents Hebraism is Mary Moultrie, the confirmed Calvinist. According to Arnold, Protestantism is an outgrowth of Hebraism, sometimes taking “strictness of conscience” to an extreme: “Christianity changed nothing in this essential bent of Hebraism to set doing above knowing. Self-conquest, self-devotion, the following not our own individual will, but the will of God, obedience, is the fundamental idea of this form ...” (132). Mary Moultrie’s conscience is so strict that she is certain Agnes committed suicide and therefore went to hell. Her feeling of despair is rooted in this belief, and like the legalistic concern with God’s rules, feelings are associated with Hebraism. In Mary Moultrie, Hebraism is taken to an extreme, unleavened by Hellenism.

33 Perseus is the voice of Hellenism, not because he is Greek, but because of his disinterested pursuit of knowledge. He wants to trace the depression to its source and find the truth. As Arnold says, “The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience” (131). Perseus applies his little gray cells to the matter and gathers all the information he can find about the house and its previous owners. He pursues a friendship with Baxter, the attorney who sold the house for the Moultrie sisters, who are his cousins. Everything he does is focused on gathering information and using his intellect and intelligence to interpret it correctly. He finally sees things as they really are: Agnes fell out of the window accidentally and her spirit is desperate to tell her sister so. When this voice of Hellenism brings Mary Moultrie, the representative of extreme Hebraism, back to Holmescroft, spiritual balance is achieved; Agnes’s spirit somehow communes with Mary, and both find peace. And, incidentally, the M’Leod family and Perseus experience a riot of joy and hilarity, thus firmly connecting the thinking of Hellenism with the feeling of Hebraism.

34 Conan Doyle was familiar with Arnold’s work and his concepts of Hellenism and Hebraism, so he must have recognized what Kipling was saying here about the need for spiritual balance. In his anguish over his wife’s death, the good doctor had gone too far in the direction of Mary Moultrie’s extreme Hebraism, and he needed to bring his intellect to bear in order to see things as they really are: to temper his grief with thought.

35 The strongest evidence that “The House Surgeon” is a coded message to Conan Doyle is biographical. In addition to the parallels between Holmescroft and Undershaw, there are multiple references to Conan Doyle’s medical profession. The title of the story itself is a pun on a hospital’s resident surgeon and Perseus’s role in “curing” the sick house. Thea M’Leod visits various hydros (health spas) to recuperate from the effects of the house, Perseus meets Mary and Elizabeth Moultrie for the first time at a hydro where they are seeking relief for their chronic bronchitis, and the Misses Moultrie mistake Perseus for a doctor (which is why they follow his prescription to revisit their old house to confirm that their sister’s death was accidental). During his wife’s long illness, Conan Doyle spent many months with her at similar hydros. Besides making medical references, Kipling gives his Jewish furrier a Scottish name—M’Leod—thus creating a

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link to Conan Doyle’s ancestry. Thea M’Leod, who sings beautifully, has put her engagement on hold because of the haunted house; she is reminiscent of Jean Leckie, a trained mezzosoprano who had waited for Conan Doyle a decade while his first wife died slowly of tuberculosis, and then an additional year while he observed the requisite period of mourning. The two women even have similar descriptions, both being young and dark-haired. Add to all of this the topic of the paranormal, an interest in modern home improvements, a fascination with those newfangled motorcars, and the joy of golf, and the picture that emerges could be a snapshot of Conan Doyle’s life.

36 The psychic phenomena in the story create another major connection to Conan Doyle’s life. Although he had not yet converted to spiritualism at the time “The House Surgeon” appeared, he had been scientifically interested in psychic manifestations since 1880. Like many other famous Edwardians, he was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, which investigated occult phenomena and exposed fraudulent mediums. Perseus must also be a member of this or a similar society. Why else would a stranger approach him and invite him to a haunted house, obviously expecting him to be able to do something about it? Thea M’Leod assumes that Perseus will report to “the Psychological Society” and then forget about the house (254). As Jonathan Rose points out in The Edwardian Temperament, “The emerging science of psychology was closely bound up with psychical research” and many eminent psychologists were members of the SPR, so Thea’s remark may refer to this organization (205). Since the British Psychological Society was not founded until 1901, Thea is much more likely to be familiar with the older and better known Society for Psychical Research.

37 Kipling’s use of coded messages also involved private jokes, and “The House Surgeon” is rife with such jokes, including medical ones. For instance, when Perseus arrives at the hydro, he is put through a gauntlet of ailing pensioners who confide every detail of their aches and pains. As a doctor who frequented such places, Conan Doyle endured many similar experiences, and Perseus’s plight must have elicited roars of laughter from him. Adding to the humor is the Moultries’ white-haired maid, Arthurs. Of all names, Kipling chooses a version of Conan Doyle’s given name. Arthurs is a disaster, especially in the medical arena. She breaks the bronchitis kettle and faints at the sight of blood.

38 Kipling’s biggest joke does not focus on Conan Doyle’s profession but rather on one of his favorite hobbies: golf. When Conan Doyle visited the Kiplings in Vermont, he introduced Kipling to the Scottish national pastime. By all accounts, Kipling did not enjoy the experience. Despite Conan Doyle’s enthusiasm for the game, he was apparently a mediocre player. His friend Robert Barr, interviewing him at Undershaw for McClure’s Magazine, writes, “Mr Doyle is a golf inebriate, and practices on this lawn, landing the balls in a tub when he makes the right sort of a hit, and generally breaking a window when he doesn’t” (Barr 109).

39 In “The House Surgeon,” Perseus uses golf to further his acquaintance with John Baxter, the Moultries’ cousin and lawyer: It appeared that he golfed. Therefore, I was an enthusiastic beginner, anxious to learn. Twice I invaded his office with a bag (M’Leod lent it) full of the spelicans needed in this detestable game, and a vocabulary to match. The third time the ice broke, and Mr. Baxter took me to his links, quite ten miles off, where in a maze of tramway lines, railroads, and nursery-maids, we skelped our divoted way round nine holes like barges plunging through head seas. He played vilely and had never

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expected to meet any one worse; but as he realized my form, I think he began to like me, for he took me in hand by the two hours together. (258-59)

40 Perseus uses these hated golf lessons to wangle an invitation to Burry Mills Hydro to meet the Misses Moultrie. However, I suspect the golf is really a joke for Conan Doyle. Baxter, like Conan Doyle, is the inept enthusiast, and Perseus, like Kipling in Vermont, is the reluctant student.

41 No one can know whether Kipling believed that laughter is the best medicine, but he must have believed it was at least a good medicine because he scattered jokes throughout this story about emotional healing. Bonamy Dobrée, one of his biographers, writes, “Laughter for Kipling was an essential element of living, and equal in value with work as an anodyne against the pain of living” (25). Laughter, however, is less germane than acceptance and forgiveness as far as healing is concerned. The main focus of “The House Surgeon” is on healing the house (thus the title), which can only be effected by healing the emotional wounds of the Moultrie sisters, both living and dead. Healing the house frees not only the sisters and their cousin but also the M’Leod family and Perseus himself. When the oppression is lifted, Perseus and the M’Leods are giddy to the point of silliness in their feelings of release: “It was a disgraceful evening. To say we rioted through the house is to put it mildly” (275).

42 This feeling of release from grief and depression was Kipling’s real message for Conan Doyle. The story opens with the promise of redemption after great suffering: “On an evening after Easter Day... ” (245). When it was first published in Harper’s Magazine, it opened with an ultimately hopeful quotation from 2 Samuel 14.14: “For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again; neither doth God respect any person: yet doth he devise means, that his banished be not expelled from him.” At the end of the story, Thea, released from the house’s oppression, is able to sing again. The song she sings, “With mirth, thou pretty bird,” referred to as “an old English song,” appears to be Kipling’s own composition (276). The pretty bird—no doubt the previously mentioned canary—is Thea herself, joyfully singing praise for her deliverance. Like most Kipling stories, this one is followed by a closely related poem, “The Rabbi’s Song,” about releasing our minds from grief and pain to avoid inadvertently distressing others: If Thought can reach to Heaven, On Heaven let it dwell, For fear that Thought be given Like power to reach to Hell. For fear the desolation And darkness of thy mind, Perplex an habitation Which thou hast left behind. (279)

43 Thus Kipling’s promise to Conan Doyle is future peace and joy when past suffering is laid to rest. “The House Surgeon” is about dealing with grief and guilt after a loved one’s death, and it promises release and hope for a suffering soul. The myriad Holmes references are intentional, as are the biographical parallels and the jokes; therefore, the inevitable conclusion is that the story is meant to have special significance for one specific reader: Kipling’s bereaved, depressed, and guilt-stricken friend, Arthur Conan Doyle.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971. Print.

Barr, Robert. “Real Conversations—V. A Dialogue between Conan Doyle and Robert Barr. Recorded by Mr Barr.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections. Ed. Harold Orel. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. 108-17. Print.

Booth, Martin. The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Print.

Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Harper, 1949. Print.

Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. London: Macmillan, 1955. Print.

Cheyette, Bryan. Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print.

Cohen, Morton, ed. Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship. London: Hutchinson, 1965. Print.

Dillingham, William B. “Eavesdropping on Eternity: Kipling’s ‘Wireless.’” English Literature in Transition 55.2 (2002): 131-54. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 June 2012.

---. “Kipling: Spiritualism, Bereavement, Self-Revelation, and ‘They.’” English Literature in Transition 45.4 (2002): 402-25. Academic Search Complete. Web. 20 May 2012.

---. “Sorrow and the Redemptive Role of Fate: Kipling’s ‘On Greenhow Hill.’” Papers on Language and Literature 39.1 (2003): 3-21. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 June 2012.

Dobrée, Bonamy. Rudyard Kipling. London: Longmans, Green, 1965. Print.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. New York: Bramhall, 1975. 156-71. Print.

---. “Kipling’s Best Story.” Kipling: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Roger Lancelyn Green. London: Routledge, 1971. 302-03. Print.

---. Sir Nigel. 1906. New York: Dover, 2009. Print.

Gates, John. “Religious Cross Currents in ‘The House Surgeon.’” Kipling Journal 45.207 (1978): 2-7. Print.

Habord, R. E., ed. Readers’ Guide to Rudyard Kipling’s Works. Vol. 6. Bournemouth: Boscombe, 1971. Print.

Kipling, Rudyard. “Fairy-Kist.” Limits and Renewals. 1932. N. pag. Words. Web. 3 May 2016.

---. “The House Surgeon.” Actions and Reactions. Garden City: Doubleday, 1927. 245-77. Print.

---. “The Rabbi’s Song.” Actions and Reactions. Garden City: Doubleday, 1927. 279-80. Print.

---. Something of Myself. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1937. Print.

Lellenberg, Jon, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley, eds. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.

Miller, Russell. The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: St. Martin’s, 2008. Print.

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Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. Print.

Rose, Jonathan. The Edwardian Temperament, 1895-1919. Athens: Ohio UP, 1985. Print.

Stashower, Daniel. Teller of Tales: The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Holt, 1999. Print.

Stoker, Bram. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Tells of his Career and Work, his Sentiments towards America, and his Approaching Marriage.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections. Ed. Harold Orel. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. 155-63. Print.

Tompkins, J. M. S. The Art of Rudyard Kipling. London: Methuen, 1959. Print.

Trilling, Lionel. “Kipling.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking, 1950. 118-28. Print.

Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. New York: Viking, 1977. Print.

Vora, Setu K., and Robert W. Lyons. “The Medical Kipling—Syphilis, Tabes Dorsalis, and Romberg’s Test.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 10.6 (2004): 1160-62. Academic Search Complete. Web. 20 May 2012.

NOTES

1. According to Angus Wilson, Kipling worked as an editor in Bloemfontein from 1 March 1900 to 1 April 1900 (214). Wilson must be in error on the arrival date since the British did not take Bloemfontein from the Boers until March 15, so the military newspaper Kipling worked on could not have started before then. Other biographers say Kipling was only in Bloemfontein for two weeks. Conan Doyle arrived on 2 April 1900, the day Kipling would have left for Cape Town. See Booth 229. 2. Several recent biographies have suggested that Conan Doyle’s depression after his wife died is either fictional or highly exaggerated. Russell Miller, for instance, says that Innes Doyle’s recently released diary lists numerous social engagements in the months after Louise’s death (255-57). However, one of the so-called social engagements Miller mentions was the return of Conan Doyle’s teen-aged daughter from boarding school. The other two engagements are referred to as “rest cures” in Conan Doyle’s letters to his mother (Lellenberg, Stashower, and Foley 536). 3. Stoker describes Undershaw in glowing terms: “From where I sat the whole of the lovely valley, at the very head of which the house stands, lay before me. Due south it falls away, spreading wider as it goes, till its lines are lost in distance, an endless sea of greenery. Far away there are ranges of hills piling up, one behind the other, in undulations of varying blue. Even the whole sweep of the horizon visible from our altitude is like a wavy sea. Nearer at hand the wonderful green of the valley is articulated by the minor curves and slopes, the trend of surrounding hills. The mighty carpet of green is of the fresh young bracken, whose shoots seem close, are like little crosiers wrought in emerald [sic]. Against this the rising pine trees seem like dark masses. Close to us, beyond the vivid patch of tennis lawn, are some masses of color which are simply gorgeous amid the expanse of green. Great shrubs of yellow broom, clumps of purple rhododendron, luxuriant alder, with masses of snowy flowers starred in their own peculiar green. An expanse which, whether seen from near or far, in unity or detail, simply ravishes the eye with its myriad beauties.” (Stoker 155). 4. Kipling places his fictional Burry Mills in the Midlands, which does not include Norfolk, so I am not sure on what basis Habord claims it is Cromer.

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ABSTRACTS

D’après ses biographes, Rudyard Kipling incorporait souvent des allusions privées dans son œuvre littéraire ; allusions qui ne pouvaient être comprises que par certains amis ou membres de sa famille. “The House Surgeon” offre l’illustration d’une histoire destinée à un lectorat à la fois public et très privé. Certains éléments de l’histoire et de la vie de Kipling et Arthur Conan Doyle suggèrent que “The House Surgeon” était un message privé pour l’auteur des histoires de Sherlock Holmes, un message d’espoir et de guérison pour un ami traversant une période difficile après le décès de sa première femme.

AUTHORS

DONNA R. WHITE

Donna R. White is a professor of English at Arkansas Tech University. She is the author of A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature (1998), Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. LeGuin and the Critics (1999), and numerous academic articles, and she has co-edited four collections of scholarly essays on Peter Pan, The Wind and the Willows, the work of Diana Wynne Jones, and posthumanism in young adult literature.

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Liminality and the Epiphanic Spectrum in Joyce’s Dubliners and Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag

Daniela Janes

1 The short story cycle is inclined, by its very form, to an exploration of liminality. Its structure reminds readers at each break in the text that they are passing a threshold from one self-completing narrative to another. While the short stories in the cycle gain additional resonance from their position within a sequence, and the text as a whole may build towards thematic cohesion, at a formal level the short story cycle is punctuated by its gaps. The reader’s movement through the white space between stories is a corollary to the various physical and metaphoric thresholds encountered by characters within the text. A central liminal experience in much short fiction is the Joycean epiphany, the revelatory instant in which characters’ perception of themselves or their position in the world is transformed. However, when the epiphany is understood not as an instantaneous transitional moment but rather as a gradual accumulation of awareness, and thus process-driven, it has additional correlations with the structure of the short story cycle. In texts marked by narrative re-beginnings and the provisionality of endings, one character’s partial epiphany has the potential to be completed by another character later in the cycle. An analysis of epiphany as a process that occurs upon a spectrum has specific implications for the short story cycle as a genre.

2 James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), and Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) share a number of similarities: both are short story cycles in which the individual narratives are linked by a common setting, informed by the impact of British colonialism; both examine motifs of maturation, aging and loss; and both end by depicting the intersections between literal deaths and symbolic rebirths, as Gabriel Conroy senses that the time has arrived for “his journey westward” (Joyce 176) and Kersi Boyce reflects, from his immigration to the West, on the home he has left behind in India. Joyce’s and Mistry’s short story cycles present narratives of initiation and transformation, culminating in a final introspective turn in the last story that links the

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preceding narratives into a processual and successive stream. Neither novelistic nor anthologic, the two short story cycles stage cumulative narratives in which meaning accrues both through the stories’ contiguity and through the necessary disruption that occurs as readers pass from one complete narrative unit to the next. Joyce’s and Mistry’s treatment of the epiphany, then, can be considered not simply in terms of its anticipated role within narrative resolution and closure of the individual story, but in terms of the closing of the cycle as a whole.

3 Margot Norris’s introduction to Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners begins with a survey of the shifting critical landscape constructed around Joyce’s landmark short story cycle. Norris refers to James Fairhall’s reception history of Dubliners in his 1995 study, James Joyce and the Question of History, noting that “Dubliners was largely ignored until 1956, when American critics rediscovered the collection, which had never sold well and received little early distinguished attention” (Norris 1). The succeeding decades witnessed an energized critical inquiry into Joyce’s previously “marginalized” (1) early work that shifted the thinking about Dubliners away from what Warren Beck describes as its “relega[tion] . . . almost to the status of juvenilia” (qtd. in Norris 1) to a sense of the text’s maturity and artistic significance. Mistry’s early short story cycle, itself overshadowed by later novel-length works like his panoramic realist novels, Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Family Matters (2002), is, like Dubliners before it, ripe for renewed critical inquiry. One of the hazards of treating the short stories of future novelists as simple apprentice-work—perhaps a necessary way-station on the road to artistic maturity but certainly no place to linger—is the risk that a momentum accumulates in that consensus, leaving early work in alternate forms to languish at the critical road-side. In addition to the privileging of Mistry’s novels, most of the scholarship on Tales from Firozsha Baag has concentrated on postcolonial and diasporic readings of the text, situating the work of the Parsi-Canadian writer within the context of a Parsi or Indian global diaspora. A comparative reading of Mistry’s and Joyce’s texts focusing on the short story cycle form reveals the writers’ exploration of the fissures and fault lines that characterize the genre. At the same time, in two short story cycles structured, at least in part, around a succession of narratives of maturation, the textual gaps can be navigated by considering what Hugh Kenner calls, in his analysis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “the trace of a moving metamorphosing subject” (Kenner qtd. in Johnson xv). Applied to Dubliners and Tales from Firozsha Baag, this idea of the “trace” of the “metamorphosing subject” (xv) links the stories along a horizontal axis, bridging the discrete narratives into a “moving” picture.

The Short Story Cycle and the Epiphanic Spectrum

4 Short story theorists, while debating the most apt terminology for the linked sequence or cycle of short stories, agree about some of the definitive formal features of the genre, including the “tension between separateness and unity” (Lundén 17). Forrest L. Ingram’s definition, by virtue of its epigrammatic simplicity and precision, retains its staying power. In his Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century (1971), Ingram describes the short story cycle as “a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of its component parts” (19).

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However, Susan Garland Mann cautions against “over-emphasiz[ing] the importance of any single unifying pattern” (30). Leaving aside the “pattern,” with its emphasis on narrative coherence, Ingram’s language of “modif[ication]” emphasizes readerly agency rather than writerly intention, and identifies some quality of plasticity in the reception of the short story cycle. Building on Roland Barthes’ division between readerly (lisible) and writerly (scriptible) texts, a shift in emphasis from the short story cycle as a site of completeness and pre-determined narrative patterning to one of incompletion, elision, and allows for a productive opening up of the expectations of the genre and of readers’ work as narrative interlocutors.

5 The title of Mistry’s text foregrounds the telling and receiving of “tales” and anticipates a number of embedded storyteller characters, including Nariman Hansotia in “Squatters,” Jacqueline (called Jakaylee), the Goan ayah in “The Ghost of Firozsha Baag,” and the unnamed writer-narrator in the concluding short story, “Swimming Lessons.” The term “tale” emphasizes orality and creates a narrative space for the tall tale, as presented in the story of Sarosh’s failed immigration in “Squatters” and Jakaylee’s encounter with the seductive spectre in “The Ghost of Firozsha Baag.” The title also gestures towards famous cycles of tales like The Arabian Nights and The Canterbury Tales. Most significantly, “tales” remind us of the role of the implied listener as the one whose act of listening constitutes the storytelling scenario, and who can be seen, thus, as a collaborator in the telling of the tale.

6 Taking a paradigmatic short story plot point—the Joycean moment of epiphany—and reconfiguring it as a formal rather than exclusively thematic feature offers opportunities to unpack the texts’ self-referential treatment of reading and interpretation, seeing in the work of embedded “readers” and “writers” a mirror for the external reader’s negotiation of textual indeterminacies. The emphasis on reader agency rather than writer intention further allows for the possibility that a text built, like the short story cycle, out of occasionally incongruous collisions and competing narrative sightlines, may produce no single or definitive interpretation. This exegetical scenario is staged in the self-reflexive final short story in Mistry’s collection, “Swimming Lessons” (a story which could be alternatively titled “Reading Lessons”). Here, the mother and father of the story’s protagonist, a man belatedly revealed to be the “author” of the preceding cycle of stories, debate the meaning of their son’s work, ultimately arriving at no consensus about the work of the writer or the meaning of the stories. As Wolfgang Iser notes, the reader’s experience of a text is “dynamic” (275); the “unwritten part … stimulates the reader’s creative participation” (276). Here, the “unwritten part” can refer both to the gaps within and between the individual stories in the cycle. While each text in the short story cycle is a self-contained narrative—a story that can be read and interpreted independent of the cycle of which it is a part— Robert M. Luscher proposes that, “Within the context of the sequence, each short story is ... not a completely closed formal experience” (148). However, the “cumulative thematic impact” (Luscher 149) can be measured against what Rolf Lundén describes as the short story cycle’s “structure of disjointure with its gaps, voids, contradictions, and silences” (21). Iser’s interpretation of the reader’s “dynamic” experience with textual gaps, while framed in broadly narrative terms, has particular implications in the context of the short story cycle, which is formally predicated upon the reader’s movement through the gaps that punctuate the sequence. Connections can be made between Ingram’s description of the short story cycle’s capacity to produce a

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“modifying” (that is, active) reader experience, and the language of narrative negotiation. Dubliners’ structure of “fragmentation and discontinuity” (Kennedy 11) offers readers opportunities to navigate the gaps and reckon with the text’s interpretive cruxes. Similarly, Tales from Firozsha Baag challenges the imagined reader’s desire for narrative resolution through a cycle of stories that emphasizes incompleteness, interruption, and misinterpretation.

7 The starting point for discussions of the epiphany is often the use of the term in Joyce’s Stephen Hero, the embryonic and fragmentary autobiographical novel that would take final shape in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this early work, Joyce identifies the epiphany as the moment of illuminating recognition: “we recognize that it is that thing which it is … The object achieves its epiphany” (Stephen Hero 213). Florence L. Walzl describes this early articulation of the epiphany as an “instantaneous apprehension of the essential being or nature of the object,” that simultaneously “acts as illumination for the beholder” (“Liturgy” 442).1 Walzl charts the shifting significance of epiphany in the aesthetic theory advanced by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; here, epiphany is reformulated not as the recognition of the object’s quiddity but as the artist’s creation of something—“a character or situation or setting that will in turn give a revelation of life” (Walzl “Liturgy” 442). For some critics, the reader’s quest to locate the epiphany results in under-developed readings. Susan Bazargan proposes that the search for the epiphany transforms the “highly mutable stories” in Dubliners into “‘idle’ predictable narratives for many readers,” and she notes that “save for the epiphanic flare-up, other interpretative lights are skimmed” (qtd. in McSweeney 19). Rather than “the loose, generalized sense that [epiphany] has come to acquire in literary-critical discourse—a sudden moment of illumination for a character or the reader” (McSweeney 17), reconceptualizing the epiphany in spatial terms, occurring upon a spectrum rather than within a single “moment,” allows a horizontal axis of developing understanding to replace a vertical axis of instantaneous insight. This reorientation of the epiphany as a threshold experience—an active, process- oriented and dynamic event occurring within time, and achieving various degrees of completeness—emphasizes that the Joycean epiphany functions as a parallel to the structural and thematic thresholds that are central to the short story cycle as a genre.

Thematic Thresholds: Literal and Metaphoric Negotiations

8 Mistry’s text beckons across the century to Joyce’s earlier cycle, offering what Linda Hutcheon terms a “postmodern intertextual echoing” (140). The most evident connection that links the two short story cycles is their common focus on place: in Joyce’s text, the city of Dublin and its inhabitants are depicted in a series of fifteen short stories focusing upon the lower and middle class, while in Mistry’s text the denizens of a predominantly Parsi apartment complex in Mumbai, called Firozsha Baag, are represented in a series of eleven short stories linked by a common setting and recurring characters. The focus upon a seemingly closed and self-contained community belies the mobility inherent in liminality, represented symbolically in the image of the “threshold”—the in-between space through which characters move. Joyce’s declared aim in Dubliners was to present the city as the centre of the country’s “paralysis” (letter to publisher Grant Richards, May 1906; qtd. in Johnson xvii), although Richard

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Robinson quips that paralysis has now been “rendered almost unmentionable in Joyce studies” (46). And while, undoubtedly, the cycle of stories is filled with characters failing to move beyond the limits of custom and creed—for example, Eveline resisting the temptation to run away to Argentina with Frank; Mr. Duffy renouncing his connection with Mrs. Sinico in order to preserve his carefully controlled masculine world; the political stasis in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”—some characters do seem to achieve a kind of spiritual or psychic mobility via the epiphanic impetus which is itself an exploration of movement: from symbolic darkness to light, from ignorance to self-knowledge, from metaphoric blindness to insight. For all that Joyce’s stories do explore the stasis of his characters’ lives, many of the stories also foreground the possibility of crossing the symbolic threshold via the epiphanic process. As Ben Forkner observes, the very “organization of the stories into a movement from childhood to maturity implies a half-hidden possibility of human development, a faint blueprint of hope despite all evidence to the contrary.” Forkner’s argument that the structure provides a “hope” which otherwise is thematically elided opens intriguing interpretive possibilities: of the possible gap between theme and form, of their contradictory movements, and of a formal impetus that has a strength beyond the thematic interpretation of the cycle. Building upon Forkner’s “blueprint” metaphor, one could suggest that while the rooms themselves are gloomy and closed, within the larger architecture of the short story cycle there are capacious views and open doors.2

9 Similarly, Tales from Firozsha Baag explores the tension between stasis and mobility in the lives of individual characters. As Forkner proposes of the larger narrative pattern in Dubliners, that it implicitly indicates a narrative of “human development,” so too does Mistry structurally emphasize the physical growth and emotional maturation of his recurring characters, Kersi and Jehangir, as elliptical, fragmentary pieces of their coming of age narratives move the short story cycle inexorably from their adolescence to their manhood. The place that traps them—the decaying apartment complex, with its vestiges of English colonialism represented in the inefficient Criterion stove and the romantically remote Enid Blyton books—must be escaped in order to enter fully into manhood. Indeed, in the short story “Squatters,” the local sage and storyteller, Nariman Hansotia, identifies the boys as likely to go abroad and thus in need of specific (and distinctly narrative) instruction. As Peter Morey observes, Mistry’s stories shift between third and first person (31); like Dubliners, which uses similar shifts, the effect is of formal narrative mobility. Even as characters individually or collectively experience entrapment on the basis of age, gender, class, race, or religion, the reader’s vantage point is one that emphasizes mutability and flexibility as there appears to be no single perspective from which the narrative worlds are explored. Arguably, rather than presenting a “novelistic superstructure” (Morey 31), Tales from Firozsha Baag offers a shifting and gap-filled structure that generates meaning through its contingent narrative form. The short story cycle offers a renunciation of what Gerald Lynch describes as the “totalizing impression of the traditional novel of social and psychological realism” (17).

10 Characters in Joyce’s and Mistry’s short story cycles encounter both literal and symbolic thresholds. At the literal level, recurring architectural motifs, including windows, doors, ante-rooms, hallways and staircases, emphasize spatial liminality. Little Chandler gazing out the window at the beginning of “A Little Cloud,” with melancholic reflection on the difference between his life and that of his friend,

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Gallaher, who left Dublin eight years earlier and had “got on” (53), recalls Eveline and the boy narrators in “The Sisters” and “Araby,” gazing at and through windows, and anticipates Gabriel’s longing glance out the window at the pure, snowbound world outside as the time for his supper speech draws near in the final story, “The Dead.” The threshold or liminal space is complicated by locks, doors, and keys throughout Tales from Firozsha Baag, suggesting the challenge to free and unimpeded movement, and a corollary challenge to epiphanic insight. The threshold becomes a vexed space, as in the battle over a divided apartment in “The Paying Guests” or in the incursion (and expulsion) of a thief and former friend in “One Sunday.”

11 At the symbolic level, adolescence functions as the crucial “threshold space” that characters within both cycles must successfully negotiate. Joyce’s focus on this pivotal narrative juncture (the “coming of age” narrative) is one he gestures towards in a 1906 letter to Grant Richards, who in 1914 would finally publish Joyce’s short story cycle. Here Joyce described the “four aspects” of Dublin life that he presented in the stories that would become Dubliners as “childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life” (qtd. in Gabler xvii). Florence Walzl suggests that Joyce employs the “Roman divisions of the life span” (“Life” 410), where childhood stretches until the age of seventeen, and adolescence follows from seventeen to thirty. The period of Joycean “childhood,” then, corresponds more nearly with our sense of the period ordinarily described as “adolescence.” The stories of “childhood,” namely “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” and “Araby,” do not present a static moment in childhood but rather a series of moments that emphasize the threshold nature of adolescence: the space through which the protagonists must pass in order to reach maturity. However, the loosely chronological progress of stories that follows this opening movement simultaneously promises and undermines the possibility of achieving maturity, self-knowledge and insight, as older characters are thwarted by their nature and their circumstances. The final short stories in both cycles present their protagonists in a retrospective mode, looking back on the lives and choices of their younger selves, and of those who moved within and just beyond their own orbit of existence.

12 There is a parallel thematic structure in Mistry’s story sequence, which also attends to the discrete eras of the human life. In a sequence of narrative iterations that echoes Hemingway’s Nick Adams suite of stories in In Our Time, Mistry returns several times to the interrelated narratives of two similarly thoughtful and introspective boys whose fates ultimately diverge: Jehangir and Kersi. Like the boy narrator in “Araby,” both of Mistry’s adolescent protagonists experience processual epiphanies: accumulated moments of self-awareness that bring them trembling to the precipice of maturity and, in Kersi’s case, beyond, to the life Joyce’s Little Chandler (in “A Little Cloud”) dreams of: the life of a writer. The final story, “Swimming Lessons,” stages a revision of the text that preceded it, encouraging a reading of the short story cycle as the book that Kersi has written and which his parents read and comment upon. As Richard Robinson proposes of “the epiphanic structure of the parts” of Dubliners (48), the structure of Mistry’s story sequence reaches gloriously revised significance when the reader is offered a final moment of revelatory insight into the text they have just read. Mistry’s final story, through its embedded readers, frames the external reader’s own act of reading; this is reminiscent of Joyce’s reading lessons as, for example, when the boy narrator in “The Sisters” seeks to “read” the window at Father Flynn’s residence. As Garry Leonard notes, “the boy struggles to form a coherent narrative out of apparently unrelated details” (89) in a process that directly corresponds to the reader’s struggle to

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produce meaning. This sense of affinity between embedded and external readers places significant shared emphasis upon the critical work of exegesis, and links to the adolescent character’s struggle to cross the threshold into adult understanding.

13 Arguably, in these texts, the transition from childhood to maturity embodies the liminal or threshold position more than any other stage in life. One further link is that adolescence brings with it—at least in its literary incarnation in these short story cycles —the possibility of an understanding of the frailty of human life and of the vanity of material ambition. All things made, characters realize, are subject to decline. At the end of “The Collectors,” Jehangir passively accepts that the once treasured stamps of the dead Dr. Mody are devoured by cockroaches under his bed, and the “Araby” narrator, who fails to buy a present for Mangan’s sister, perceives the vanity of his endeavour, and feels his “eyes burn[ing] with anguish and anger” at his own folly (24). Mistry uses the Joycean image of the burning eyes not once but twice. Building on the “Araby” plot structure—the high note of anticipation followed by deflation—the middle-aged Rustomji’s careful preparation to attend temple in “Auspicious Occasion” is frustrated, and he stands defeated with “tears of shame and rage well[ing] in his eyes” (26). Mistry makes more literal use of the motif of burning eyes (and the connection to the epiphanic moment) in “Lend Me Your Light,” when Kersi prepares for his emigration to Canada while contending with a case of conjunctivitis that causes “a searing pain” in his eyes (186). He imagines himself, “half-jokingly” (186), as Tiresias, the blind seer, “guilty of the sin of hubris for seeking emigration out of the land of my birth, and paying the price in burnt-out eyes” (186). While the reader does not learn until the final story that Kersi has become “the writer” of the Tales, this moment appears as humorously self-reflexive and self-aware, the young man seeking to find symbols in life as in art, and parodying his own medical misfortune. Kersi’s awareness of his hubris further links him to the boy narrator in “Araby.” The recurring structure of the Dubliners stories is echoed in the Firozsha Baag stories; as Kennedy notes of Joyce’s characters, their opportunities for “a more fulfilling life” are met instead by the “collapse” of their dreams (24).

14 Joyce and Mistry’s focus on threshold spaces emphasizes the peripheral positioning of many of the short stories’ protagonists: those who are alienated or marginalized because of their age (this includes both the young and the elderly); their socio- economic or class position; their gender, race, or religion; or some essential aspect of the self. When brought to centre stage, like the young singer Kathleen in “A Mother” or the ambivalent pater familias Gabriel, in “The Dead,” characters confirm their sense of their own alienation. Moments before Gabriel delivers his supper speech, readers are invited to recall an earlier scene in which Gabriel gazed out the window and longed to be in the cold and anonymous dark, that “pleasant” (151) alternative to the stifling supper-table. Gabriel thinks again of the “pure” (159) air that lies beyond the lighted window and he hesitates on the brink of opening his speech, as he “leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company” (159). The silent pause before beginning is, too, a kind of rhetorical threshold across which Gabriel must move.

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Formal Thresholds: Epiphanies, Gaps, Codas

15 The physical spaces that separate inside from outside (windows, doors), and that connect spaces (hallways, staircases) reflect the inherent separateness of the stories and also the tissues of connection between them. The architectural liminal spaces— spaces which are moved through but which are not, in themselves, destinations— corroborate a sense of narrative imperative that leads the reader through the linked stories. Rather than encountering the short stories as stand-alone texts, ultimately independent from their neighbouring narratives, the sequential nature of the short story cycle insists that proximity and order create additional meaning. The stories possess simultaneously independent and contingent relationships with their neighbouring texts. The reader who encounters the liminal experience of moving through and across the threshold that divides one story from the next is formally positioned in a way that echoes the stories’ protagonists, hovering at their own symbolic thresholds of understanding.

16 These examples of the literal and metaphoric thresholds that may be crossed reach their epitome in the pivotal moment of epiphany. Indeed, Garry Leonard describes the epiphany as “the primary aesthetic building block of [Joyce’s] stories,” locating the epiphany as “a point where hitherto disparate observations, thoughts, and desires rearrange themselves into an unsuspected pattern that shatters often long held ideas about one's self and one's surroundings” (91). Clare Hanson’s observation that “in many ‘plotless’ fictions a moment of heightened awareness acts as a focus, a structural equivalent for conventional resolution of plot” (7) offers the potential to read the epiphany as a substitute for conventional narrative closure and resolution. The epiphany can also be framed in a tissular relationship, connecting the pieces of the short story cycle. In its dual role as thematic and formal device, the epiphany is a transitional and liminal marker of the protagonist’s deepening consciousness of some fundamental aspect of self or other. Disparate characters from individual stories are thus linked in a processual stream.

17 When the epiphany is figured in terms of movement, it ceases to be a moment of passive reception and becomes instead an active and self-determining experience. Like passage through the threshold space, it requires initiative and will. Furthermore, while the epiphany in both short story cycles can be read as “momentary,” bearing witness to characters’ rapid movement from one state to another, from innocence to experience or from ignorance to (partial or contingent) understanding, it may be more productive to conceive of the epiphany as a dynamic experience which occurs upon a spectrum. Focusing upon the epiphanic spectrum rather than the epiphanic moment locates characters’ experience within time, seeing the partial or the incomplete epiphany as a realistic representation of character psychology rather than as a marker of failure of awareness or recognition. In addition, the concept of the epiphanic spectrum accommodates the structural singularities of the short story cycle, in which readers’ experience of meaning accumulates via their movement through the stories in sequence, and through the experience of negotiating the gaps and ellipses that punctuate the linked cycle of stories. The spectrum also allows for a cumulative reading of the epiphany, whereby earlier instances of epiphanic failure are redeemed by later instances of perception, even if these insights occur in separate stories and to other protagonists. For example, in the penultimate paragraph of “A Painful Case,” a

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constellation of images accumulates during James Duffy’s walk from the shop where he eats his supper to the park, where he stands alone under a tree and, in an epiphanic realization of his soul’s loneliness, condemns himself for his imagined complicity in the death of Mrs. Sinico. The glowing lights of Dublin shine “redly and hospitably in the cold night” (88); he feels himself “outcast from life’s feast”—a phrase repeated twice in the paragraph (88, 89); and he frames himself in a binary relationship to the “furtive” lovers in the park (88). The epiphanic moment disrupts Duffy’s complacency and accustomed truths. It also pre-figures Gabriel’s epiphany in the final short story, “The Dead,” in which the images of hospitality and feasting are literalized, and the image of the lonely man standing “under a tree” (89) is revisited in Gabriel’s vision of Michael Furey as “a young man standing under a dripping tree” (176).

18 A parallel reading of the final stories in each of the story cycles, “The Dead” and “Swimming Lessons,” offers opportunities to unpack the formal and thematic significance of epiphanies in the summative stories in the sequences. In The Short Story Cycle, Susan Garland Mann proposes, “many cycles end with final stories that dramatically change the direction of the work” (114). While the concept of the epiphanic spectrum relies upon explicit and implicit continuities within the sequence as a whole, Mann’s notion of the final “change [in] direction” is not so much a renunciation of continuities, as it is a reminder that discontinuity is an essential formal element of the short story cycle. Readings of Joyce’s “The Dead” have been shaped by the critical consensus that has accrued around Walzl’s analysis of it as a “coda” to Dubliners (“Paralysis” 228), which recalls themes and images that appeared earlier in the cycle. However, notwithstanding the reiterative work of the final short story, it too can be seen as moving across a thematic and formal threshold, or along an epiphanic spectrum. As the last story to be written (and not part of the cycle as initially conceived), it moves beyond Joyce’s original schema for diagnosing a nation’s paralysis and, as has been proposed elsewhere, offers a more redemptive depiction of Dublin and its citizens (Lazar), both in its valorization of the virtue of Irish hospitality and in its depiction of Gabriel’s epiphany in the darkness of the hotel room. At the same time, critics like Charles Peake have observed the “sustained irony” (48) in Gabriel’s speech, reading it in relation to a key paratext: Joyce’s letter to his brother Stanislaus, in which he assesses himself as “unnecessarily harsh” in his depiction of Ireland, and suggests he has “not reproduced . . . its hospitality” (qtd. in Peake 45). Peake proposes that Gabriel’s speech about Irish hospitality at the supper table becomes a “parody” (48) of the sentiments Joyce expressed in his letter. If Gabriel’s lauding of Irish hospitality can be read as parodic or performative—designed to humble Miss Ivors in absentia for the perceived injury she offered to Gabriel’s dignity during the dancing—what opportunities remain to read the epiphany in an uncomplicated light, as a redemptive moment that reflects a nascent empathy in the protagonist? It remains to track backward through Gabriel’s evening to locate the thread of his thought along the epiphanic spectrum.

19 The final story in Mistry’s short story cycle, “Swimming Lessons,” unexpectedly reveals that Kersi is the writer of the tales, a narrative which stands as a loosely autobiographical portrait of the community in which he was raised and from which he has exiled himself through his immigration to Canada. The revelation also belatedly allows for the earlier stories in which he featured to be read as a fragmentary and distinctly postmodern Künstlerroman. The story comments self-reflexively upon the narratives that have preceded it, drawing attention to the joint creative labour of

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writing (in the figure of the expatriate son) and interpreting (in the role of the parents who function as the story’s embedded reader-critics). In this way, Mistry’s final story, too, offers a coda to the cycle as a whole.3 “Swimming Lessons” foregrounds the epiphanic spectrum in its depiction of the manifested insights of the expatriate writer- son, and of Kersi’s mother and father as readers in situ of his tales of his old community. Interestingly though, Kersi is never mentioned by name within the story. The reader’s ability to identify the protagonist and his parents hinges upon the clues placed throughout the piece, an experience which emphasizes the reader’s own gradual accumulation of insight. Kersi Boyce is a postmodern, Parsi James Joyce figure, a chronicler and exile from his community, who finds himself turning backwards in his writing, towards the past and the place from which he can never fully escape.

20 In “The Flash of Fireflies,” Nadine Gordimer suggests “the short story doesn’t deal in cumulatives” (180); what you get, she proposes, is “a discrete moment of truth,” not “the moment of truth” (180). This is true of the short story; however, the short story cycle does formally, if not thematically, gesture towards more than the “discrete moment”; it moves towards a kind of fragmentary vastness, well encapsulated by Joyce’s own claim that he was writing a series of epicleti (what Gabler calls “a suite of … little epics” [xix]).4 This impression of the cumulative significance built by movement through a sequence relates to the epiphanic spectrum and to the dominant place given to epiphanies at the end of both books. The epiphany stages an “opening out” that takes characters across the threshold of their own necessarily limited first-hand experience to a nascent understanding of the vastness that lies beyond the limitations of individual subjectivity. Connecting theme to form, the endings of the cycles remind readers of the relationship between the parts and the whole, and between the past and the present; just as characters are affected by their past experiences, readers are shaped by their movement through the stories that have come before.

21 “The Dead” is set at an apt time of year for an analysis of epiphanies, as the Misses Morkan’s annual party takes place on or around January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. As the party reaches its end, Gabriel waits at the bottom of the stairs, looking from the dim shadows of the hall up the staircase to where his wife, Gretta, stands “listening to distant music” (164). Although Gabriel is here positioned as the symbolic equivalent of the male artist, framing his wife as muse (“If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. . . . Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter” [165]), it might be reasonable to also frame him as a symbolic reader—a reader distinctly lacking in interpretive power (“He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of” [165]). The scene gives Gabriel an illusion of interpretive power while simultaneously stripping it away. Comparing the staircase scene in Dubliners to its corollary in Firozsha Baag—an elevator scene—the reader encounters Kersi exercising confident but flawed interpretation in his interactions with the elderly man who functions as a double for Kersi’s own deceased grandfather, and who offers Kersi a second chance to gain a symbolic blessing. Kersi earlier reflected, in a self-reflexive, parodic moment in “Lend Me Your Light,” that “the epiphany would have to wait for another time, another trip” (201). Now, in the final story in the sequence, he has the possibility to attain insight, self-knowledge and, most urgently, a glimpse of the world beyond the self. Gabriel in the dark hotel room, and Kersi in the waters of his bathtub, gaze outwardly, and, in so doing, seem to reach for an insight that extends beyond the prison-house of individual subjectivity. Gabriel’s “generous tears” (176) link with Kersi’s eyes, open and wet under the bathwater. The

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epiphany acts as a liminal movement because, in both instances, it allows the protagonist to transcend the limits of the self. While critics debate whether Gabriel’s epiphany is genuine, and while the open ending of “Swimming Lessons,” and the loss of the old man’s blessing, deflate a fully redemptive conclusion, both final stories foreground the power of the epiphany to move the protagonist beyond a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. If an ironic or parodic reading of the conclusions of the two narratives is adopted, readers may identify in Gabriel’s and Kersi’s longing to locate and define their discrete “symbols” (Gretta listening to “distant music” in Joyce’s narrative; a life replete with ambivalent water imagery in Mistry’s text), not genuine epiphany but false or deferred epiphany. As the guests leave, Gabriel standing in the “gloom of the hall” (165) observes, “A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife” (165). Johnson argues that Gabriel’s “lack of recognition” (his perceived failure to identify the woman, immediately, as Gretta) speaks to other failures of perception (xxxix); the potential absence of the final epiphany creates movement, but it may be the complicated movement of the story turning inwards upon itself.

22 If, on the other hand, Gabriel’s failure to identify Gretta at the top of the stairs is a syntactic delay rather than a perceptual one (that is, if it is the reader who is forced to lag behind Gabriel’s identification of the woman at the top of the stairs) then the perceptual short-coming can be more fully redeemed. Through his longing to “read” Gretta, Gabriel demonstrates a desire for understanding, even as his reading functions as an imposition of meaning upon her inscrutable form. However, Gabriel is not only a reader but, like Kersi, a variant on the writer figure; later that night it is his own textual production that is brought back to him across the years in the form of a remembered romantic phrase from an old love letter to Gretta: “Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?” (168). Gabriel’s interior act of self-citation is a moment of acute literary self- consciousness. Adding his own words to the text’s larger preoccupation with quotation, Gabriel aligns himself with the expressive power of Robert Browning or Shakespeare and, like the title of his imagined painting of Gretta at the top of the stairs, the words are carried “[l]ike distant music” [169] from their past, linking these two moments, the flawed exegesis of his “reading” of Gretta implicitly discrediting his romantic perception of his tender sentiments in the love letter. Indeed, rather than highlighting Gabriel’s power, his limits as reader and as writer point to his deficiency, to some lack or absence.

23 After leaving the party, Gabriel walks behind his wife and Mr. Bartell D’Arcy through the snowy street, and longs for something that he imagines Gretta possesses, seemingly as a consequence of her “pure” and rural upbringing: a capacity for spontaneity in place of his own acute self-awareness. His memory of Gretta calling out to the glass- blower, “Is the fire hot, sir?” (168), is borne to him across the reaches of time, like his own romantic phrases will be a moment later. Almost epigrammatic in her pithy, concise phrasing, Gretta’s words are marked by their “sudden[ness]” (168). Unguarded, incautious, spontaneous, Gretta offers an alternative and model beyond the muse-like figure she seems to embody as her husband observes her from the bottom of the stairs. Gabriel, perhaps unconsciously, hungers for her freshness and spontaneity, unbounded by the punishing self-consciousness that hampers him in his interactions at the party. Gabriel appears to perceive a lack here, recognizing some limitation in his character;

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the fact that this precedes the fraught scene in the hotel room (with its revelatory motif of entwining darkness, mirrors, and windows), stages the crisis of self before the hotel room scene where discussions of epiphany tend to focus.

24 As they journey towards the hotel after the conclusion of the party, Gabriel expresses his desire for spontaneous action in his ultimately repressed longing to catch Gretta in his arms from behind. His erotic desire is thwarted; his sense of his own power (as a reader, writer, artist, lover) is undermined. Recognizing Gabriel’s failure to be spontaneous, his overarching capacity for self-restraint and self-control, the reader establishes the framework for Gabriel’s humble acknowledgement of his romantic limitations. Gabriel’s epiphany happens not in an instant in a hotel room but through time and across a spectrum: it can be read not as a momentary flash of transformation but as a gradual accumulation of impressions throughout the evening that culminates in his “generous tears” (176) in the darkened hotel room. The reader’s sense of the incompleteness of Gabriel’s epiphany is modified by a recognition that it occurs upon a spectrum and thus its incompleteness may not undermine the significance of his partial achievement of insight.

25 Similarly, Mistry’s final short story stages a collapse of the protagonist’s interpretive powers, and erotic and romantic self-conceptions. Even as the reader learns that Kersi is “the writer,” and thus a figure charged with interpretive and narrative power, Kersi himself must negotiate with his own limitations of vision and understanding. Looking at two sunbathing women from the window of his apartment in Don Mills, Ontario, Kersi constructs a narrative of seduction and desire that must be revised when he encounters the women in the elevator and recognizes the disparity between his fantasy and the reality freshly presented to him. Similarly, in the gap between his erotic fantasies about the woman in his swimming lesson for non-swimmers, and the reality of his deflating experience in the swimming class, his erotic narrative of his “delectable Asian brown body” (244) collapses. The self-authored fantasy of the desirable body is a recuperative and restorative narrative to challenge the objectification he experiences as a “brown body,” subject to the racism of white boys at the local pool, a wholly interior revisionist narrative strategy whereby the figure of the Other is made the object of desire. Like Gabriel’s thwarted erotic longing for Gretta, Kersi’s failure to achieve erotic conquest challenges the power of the self-created narrative. The epiphany is unmoored from a single insightful moment; instead, the protagonists move through a series of linked experiences that brings them, by degrees, closer to self- awareness.

Conclusions: Negotiating Closure

26 Stories end, but not every story provides the reader with closure. In Coming to Terms with the Short Story, Susan Lohafer examines “anticlosure,” describing the reader’s experience of “an impetus toward closure, blocked by various kinds of interference which are in one way and another removed, surmounted, absorbed” (42).

27 Nevertheless, the gratification of closure may be perpetually deferred. Narrative gaps contribute to a reader’s sense of textual incompletion. Garry Leonard observes of Joyce’s “The Sisters” that the short story is characterized by “more gaps than substance” (88). Leonard proposes of Dubliners’ dense texture of allusion, and burden of obscure material objects, that “Upon first reading, there seem to be no obvious clues to

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the strategy behind Joyce's selection of a bewildering array of obscure street names, stray thoughts, lost corkscrews, gold coins, lost plumcakes, confiscated adventure books, and forgotten novels of a dead priest. Never before, it seems, has a writer used so much detail to explain so little” (87). Tales from Firozsha Baag, too, strains under the weight of its arcane references. The textual “thickening” produced through the authors’ creation of densely realized (and realist) discrete worlds conceals—but cannot defend the reader against—the stories’ elliptical turns. As Leonard notes of Dubliners, “The stories appear to be taking the reader toward a moral dilemma, or a climax, or a revelation, or at least a conclusion, and then they stop, but without appearing to have ended” (88). Yet Frank O’Connor proposes that Joyce “make[s] tragedy out of a plate of peas and a bottle of ginger beer” (127). The tension, then, appears to be between the seeming meaninglessness of the plotless wandering, and the possibility that within the “under-plotted” story lurks all the complex humanity of its characters’ quotidian existences.

28 The reader’s quest to locate the epiphany reconfirms the ambivalence of the texts’ endings. Rather than creating sterile narratives, with meanings that exist in advance of the reader’s encounter with the text, Mistry’s and Joyce’s final stories provide only qualified kinds of closure that insists upon the reader’s work of perpetually re- negotiating meaning. In formal terms, reading the final short story as a coda implicitly argues for a significance beyond the individual story. It reframes and adjusts the readers’ perspective of the narrative thresholds through which they have already passed. While the interpretive gaps complicate the simple resolution of the singular narrative unit (the individual short story), the presence of the epiphanic spectrum creates new interpretive tissues but does not necessarily resolve the key narrative cruxes.

29 Austin M. Wright observes the short story’s propensity for “recalcitrance.” Taking “final recalcitrance” as an example, he notes “an effect of incompleteness” (121) in the endings of modernist short stories like “The Dead” that forces the reader to return again to the story to puzzle out its meaning. Here, recalcitrance “depends on the accumulation of details whose significance is not immediately evident” (123). Wright’s concept of recalcitrance can be connected to the processual epiphany. Like the characters who move along the epiphanic spectrum, the reader, too, experiences deferred, contingent or partial understanding. This notion of the recalcitrant short story offers some accommodation of the reader’s experience of a text that appears to “withhold” itself, and to deny the reader’s conventional expectations of closure. Taking another approach to the topic of narrative recalcitrance, John Bayley proposes, “A good story exhibits not so much restraint as a lack of curiosity. Its interior is revealed unawares, as if the story itself were not interested in it” (185). This expresses in formal terms what can be observed in thematic terms: the protagonist moving away from solipsistic self-examination into a larger awareness of the role of “the part” in relation to “the whole.” In Joyce’s and Mistry’s short story cycles, as in others, the form affects the interpretation of the themes. Suzanne Ferguson’s observation that “formal concerns influence interpretation” (117) has implications for the significance of the epiphany in the specific context of the short story cycle. The structure of the short story cycle, with its formal emphasis on liminality, foregrounds the reader’s own process of moving through the cycle of stories. The notion of the epiphanic spectrum offers new strategies for approaching the dynamism and mutability of the epiphanic register within the specific genre conditions of the short story cycle. Linking Joyce and

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Mistry’s narratives to a modernist hermeneutics that foregrounds the diverse interpretive work and textual negotiation in which embedded and external readers engage, the short story cycle is not reduced to the sum of its patterns but instead opened up by, and to, its indeterminacies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights. Trans. Malcolm Lyons with Ursula Lyons. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print. Bayley, John. The Short Story: Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988. Print.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Peterborough, ON: Broadview P, 2012. Print.

Fairhall, James. James Joyce and the Question of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Ferguson, Suzanne. “Sequences, Anti-Sequences, Cycles, and Composite Novels: The Short Story in Genre Criticism.” Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (2003), 103-17. Print.

Forkner, Ben. “Joycean Drama and the Remaking of Yeats’s Irish Theatre in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’.” Journal of the Short Story in English 34 (2000), 89-108. Web. 22 September 2014.

Gabler, Hans Walter. Introduction. Dubliners. By James Joyce. New York: Norton, 2006. xv-xliii. Print.

Gordimer, Nadine. “The Flash of Fireflies.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio UP, 1994. 178-81. Print.

Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980. London: Macmillan, 1985. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of : History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Print.

Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. 274-94. Print.

Johnson, Jeri. Introduction. Dubliners. By James Joyce. Oxford UP, 2008. vii-xl. Print.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

--- . A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.

--- . Stephen Hero. London: J. Cape, 1960. Print.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Towards a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle.” Journal of the Short Story in English 11 (1988), 9-25. Print.

Lazar, Mary. “A Little Cloud and Chandler’s Tears of Remorse.” Journal of the Short Story in English 36 (2001), 41-63. Web. 22 September 2014.

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Leonard, Garry. “Dubliners.” Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. Second Edition. Ed. Derek Attridge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 87-102. Print.

Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983. Print.

Lundén, Rolf. The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Print.

Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Eds. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 148-67. Print.

Lynch, Gerald. The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2001. Print.

Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle. New York: Greenwood P, 1989. Print.

McSweeney, Kerry. The Realist Short Stories of the Powerful Glimpse: Chekhov to Carver. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2007. Print.

Mistry, Rohinton. Tales from Firozsha Baag. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990. Print.

Morey, Peter. Rohinton Mistry. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. Print.

Norris, Margot. Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. Print.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1963. Print.

Peake, C. H. James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1977. Print.

Robinson, Richard. “‘That Dubious Enterprise, the Irish Short Story’: The Untilled Field and Dubliners.” James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. John Nash. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. 46-60. Print.

Walzl, Florence L. “The Life Chronology of Dubliners.” James Joyce Quarterly 14.4 (1977), 408-15. Print.

---. “The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce.” PMLA 80.4 (1965), 436-50. Web. 20 October 2014.

---. “Pattern of Paralysis in Joyce’s Dubliners: A Study of the Original Framework.” College English 22.4 (1961), 221-28. Print.

Wright, Austin M. “Recalcitrance in the Short Story.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Eds. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 115-29. Print.

NOTES

1. The term “epiphany” disappears in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Walzl interprets as evidence of Joyce’s “own dissatisfaction or uncertainty” with it (“Liturgy” 443). 2. Playing with architectural metaphors, Peter Morey argues that Tales from Firozsha Baag “reproduces on the formal level the community that inhabits the compound” (31). 3. Tales From Firozsha Baag was published in the United States as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories From Firozsha Baag, emphasizing the prominence of the final story in the sequence.

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4. Walzl defines epicletic differently, linking the term to epiclesis. In the Eastern Church tradition, Walzl explains, epiclesis is the transubstantiation of “bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus” (“Liturgy” 437). She suggests, “Joyce’s adoption of this term indicates that he believes the artist’s creative act was analogous to the Eucharistic change effected by the priest” (437).

ABSTRACTS

En proposant une lecture parallèle de Tales From Firozsha Baag de Rohinton Mistry et de Dubliners de James Joyce, cet article soutient que la forme narrative liminale du cycle de nouvelles apporte un corrélatif structurel à la figure joycienne de l’épiphanie. Cet article identifie les croisements entre le « seuil » et l’épiphanie, clarifiant des connections pour les lecteurs, qu’ils soient enchâssés ou extérieurs. Le « seuil » peut être perçu comme une caractéristique formelle du cycle de nouvelles soulignant l’expérience du lecteur lorsqu’il négocie les intervalles entre les nouvelles d’un cycle ; tandis que le spectre épiphanique (en tant qu’alternative au moment épiphanique) nous permet d’aborder le dynamisme propre au registre épiphanique dans le cadre des conditions génériques spécifiques de la série de nouvelles.

AUTHORS

DANIELA JANES Daniela Janes teaches a course on the Short Story Cycle at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where she also teaches twentieth-century Anglo-American literature and Canadian literature across its history and in a range of genres, including a specialized course in the Canadian Short Story. She has published articles in Studies in Canadian Literature, Canadian Literature, and Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature.

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The Geography of the Imagination: Benedict Kiely’s Dubliners

Thomas O'Grady

AN IRISH LANDSCAPE

1 Surprisingly, given how virtually every word that James Joyce left behind has been subjected to microscopic scholarly scrutiny, relatively little attention has been paid to his own estimation of “Two Gallants,” the sixth story of Dubliners. In a letter he wrote to publisher Grant Richards in May of 1906, Joyce emphatically defended the story’s inclusion in what would one day become a landmark collection: To omit the story from the book would really be disastrous. It is one of the most important stories in the book. I would rather sacrifice five of the other stories (which I could name) than this one. It is the story (after ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’) which pleases me most. (Selected Letters 87-88)

2 Joyce’s satisfaction with “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is understandable: employing, essentially, the dramatic mode—an almost minimalist reliance on dialogue, as opposed to third-person narration—to expose the myriad failings of the cross- section of Dublin political hacks and hangers-on that gathers in Richard J. Tierney’s Committee Room, the story epitomizes the “style of scrupulous meanness” that Joyce had described in an earlier letter to Richards as a defining quality of Dubliners as a whole (Selected Letters 83). Culminating in Joe Hynes’s equivoque “One grief—the memory of Parnell” (Dubliners 135), the story reflects, via Joyce’s irony-tempered realism, the extent to which, more than a decade after the downfall and the death of messianic Charles Stewart Parnell, Ireland had still not awakened from what Joyce would later inscribe as the “nightmare” of history (Ulysses 28). This, of course, would endure as a central theme of Joyce’s writing all the way through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and even Finnegans Wake.

3 Obviously, “Two Gallants” does not resound quite the same way through the entire body of Joyce’s work, either stylistically or thematically; nor has it attained in its own right the iconic stature of other stories from Dubliners, particularly “Araby” and “The

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Dead,” that have been anthologized too many times to count. Still, a reader of “Two Gallants” might easily suppose that Joyce was most pleased with the way the tune played by the Kildare Street harpist—Thomas Moore’s “Song of Fionnuala” (“Silent, O Moyle”)—allows the entire story to reverberate with Moore’s many other Irish Melodies that associate the harp with Ireland feminized; or that he was most pleased with how that particular melody directs the reader to the ironic implications of Moore’s footnote to the song that explains how “the coming of Christianity” to Ireland, signaled by the ringing of a mass-bell, would herald a salvific “release” for Fionnuala, a daughter of the Irish sea god Lir, who had been transformed into a swan (Moore 46). Or a reader might suppose that Joyce was most pleased with how he engineered the story’s ending to exemplify that “spiritual manifestation” he described in Stephen Hero—that “most delicate and evanescent of moments” he labeled “epiphany”: how when the reader looks over Lenehan’s shoulder at the coin illuminated in Corley’s hand, “Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance” (Stephen Hero 211-13). This is the very emblem of uncouth betrayal that gives the lie to the deeply embedded notion of romantic Ireland (a recurring theme of Dubliners) long before William Butler Yeats would declare “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave” (107-08).

4 Actually, Joyce’s satisfaction with “Two Gallants” probably involved the amalgamation of all of those details and elements, along with the very simple evaluation of the story that he proffered to his brother Stanislaus not long after he had defended it to Grant Richards: “And after all Two Gallants—with the Sunday crowds and the harp in Kildare street and Lenehan—is an Irish landscape” (Selected Letters 110). In fact, Joyce’s confidence in his inscription of that landscape—the streets broad and narrow traipsed first by Lenehan and Corley together and then by Lenehan alone—anticipates by more than a decade his bold pronouncement, when writing Ulysses, that his intention was “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book” (Budgen 67-68).

5 Yet as that very landscape of “Two Gallants” helps to illuminate, Joyce does not have an exclusive claim on either Dublin or Dubliners. Clearly, the opening sentences of the story stake that claim: The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur. (Dubliners 49)

6 Yet, as registered in the opening sentences of Benedict Kiely’s signature story of Dublin, “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly,” that claim may be contested: On a warm but not sunny June afternoon on a crowded Dublin street, by no means one of the city’s most elegant streets, a small hotel, a sort of bed-and-breakfast place, went on fire. There was pandemonium at first, more panic than curiosity in the crowd. It was a street of decayed Georgian houses, high and narrow, with steep wooden staircases, and cluttered small shops on the ground floors: all great nourishment for flames. The fire, though, didn’t turn out to be serious. The brigade easily contained and controlled it. The panic passed, gave way to curiosity, then to indignation and finally, alas, to laughter about the odd thing that had happened when the alarm was at its worst. (The Collected Stories 351)

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7 A “grey warm evening of August,” a “warm but not sunny June afternoon,” the crowds, the streets of Dublin…—mere coincidence of narrative “place setting”? Perhaps not.

8 Or perhaps. For like Joyce before him, who declared to Grant Richards that “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories” (Selected Letters 89), Benedict Kiely recognized in his own right that the raw material of realistic fiction is grounded, literally, in place specificity. Obviously, this recognition determines so many of his short stories set in and around Omagh, County Tyrone, his boyhood town in Northern Ireland; indeed, with only a few exceptions, story after story in his substantial Collected Stories resounds with the author’s own version of the obsessive spirit of the narrator’s father in “A Journey to the Seven Streams,” the title story of Kiely’s first collection, published in 1963: “My father, the heavens be his bed, was a terrible man for telling you about the places he had been and for bringing you there if he could and displaying them to you with a mild and gentle air of proprietorship” (Collected Stories 200).

9 Tellingly, in those few exceptions, set mostly in Dublin, Kiely is no less proprietary about the city where he lived for more than 65 of his 87 years. In fact, he is no less proprietary about Dublin than Joyce was, and yet the picture of Dublin—and of Dubliners—that Kiely presents is ultimately so different from Joyce’s. It would be simple enough to shrug away the difference by acknowledging that a span of a half- century and more separates the settings of Kiely’s Dublin-based stories from the settings of Joyce’s—that notwithstanding the wishful or wistful thinking of some readers that “Joyce’s Dublin” lived on and on (and lives on still), the city where Benedict Kiely made his life and made his living beginning around 1940 was not really the same “Hibernian Metropolis” that Joyce had engraved in his memory around the turn of the century. A more scholarly strategy might be to acknowledge that Joyce had a very specific agenda for his book of short stories: “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country,” he explained to Grant Richards in May of 1906, “and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis” (Selected Letters 82). A couple of weeks later, he declared: “I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country” (88). In fact, in projecting his writing as a “nicely polished looking-glass” (90), Joyce essentially established the realistic short story in Ireland as a viable and vital form of social commentary; Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain (among many others) owe much to his example. Benedict Kiely less so.

10 But a little essay by the great American short story writer Raymond Carver may offer a much more interesting—and much more illuminating—way of contemplating the difference between Joyce’s and Kiely’s Dubliners. Carver observes: Some writers have a bunch of ; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else… Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications. It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time. (13)

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11 Obviously, Joyce’s “way of looking at things” has been dissected extensively by fully three generations of scholars. “Who Killed James Joyce?” Patrick Kavanagh asked—and answered—as early as 1951, in a poem he wrote for the special Joyce-centered issue of the magazine Envoy: “I, said the commentator, / I killed James Joyce / For my graduation” (51-52). There have been a lot more guilty parties since then, and obviously the Joyce industry is still alive and well and thriving.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE IMAGINATION

12 The Kiely industry has not been so robust; nor has it been so lethal. In fact, Kiely’s body of work has suffered not from over-attention but from the benign neglect that trends and tendencies in the literary marketplace and in academia can effect: Kiely has suffered not even from being misunderstood but from being un-understood, to adapt from Myles na Gopaleen a coinage he applied to early readings of Joyce (6). One way of redressing that un-understanding is by engaging with a sampler of the short stories that represent his “unique and exact way of looking” at his adopted and adoptive city of Dublin via a strategy described by American man-of-letters Guy Davenport in his essay “The Geography of the Imagination”: “The imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we must reeducate our eyes” (5).1 Davenport’s wonderfully cryptic comments may be interpreted to mean first of all that the writing process is largely intuitive, that the writer can only follow imagination’s lead and thus cannot easily reconstruct the incidental path that it cuts; and secondly that the reader thus needs to recognize that imagination confounds easy mapping—the reader needs to be alert to the sometimes subtle (sometimes even barely perceptible) and unpredictable twists and turns that the writerly imagination may have taken en route to its narrative destination, and the only way to have that alertness, paradoxically, is to allow oneself to become wholly intoxicated by what the writer has concocted and distilled. Given the astute observation by John Wilson Foster that “Kiely is hypnotised by his own verbal facility” (5) and another by Daniel J. Casey that “at times his story outgrows the printed page and has the author in its grip” (40-41), Davenport’s simile involving the drunk man’s watch seems altogether apt.

13 And so does his simile about “speech and custom” which, taken literally, takes the reader back to that first paragraph of “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly”—actually to the last sentence of that first paragraph and the single brief sentence comprising the second paragraph—as a point of entry into “Kiely’s Dublin”: The panic passed, gave way to curiosity, then to indignation and finally, alas, to laughter about the odd thing that had happened when the alarm was at its worst. This was it. (The Collected Stories 351)

14 With that announcement of narrative intention—or perhaps with the “alas” that precedes it—the reader is suddenly in the “intoxicating” midst of a Kiely short story. Abruptly abandoning the detached, third-person past-tense narrative of the opening sentences of the story, Kiely adopts an engaged and engaging present-tense account of the plight of a half-Japanese prostitute known as Madame Butterfly—“From a window on the top-most floor a woman, scantily-clad, puts her head out and waves a patchwork bed coverlet, and screams for help”—and before long the narrator has announced himself in the first-person, in effect denouncing the purported “omniscience” of the

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story’s beginning as he admits of the lop-sided protagonist, Pike Hunter: “Why he sagged to one side, just a little to the left, when he sat down, I never knew” (Collected Stories 351-52).

15 As Declan Kiberd has noted in his essay “Story-Telling: The Gaelic Tradition,” many well-known modern Irish writers—Seumas O’Kelly, Padraic Colum, James Stephens, Daniel Corkery, Frank O’Connor, Mary Lavin—“employ in their stories a style which verges on the conversational” (20). Just a few years before the first publication of “A Ball of Malt” in The Kenyon Review in 1969, however, Irish short story master Frank O’Connor had complained in his book The Lonely Voice that “generations of skilful stylists from Chekhov to Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce had so fashioned the short story that it no longer rang with the tone of a man’s voice speaking” (xix). As “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly” exemplifies, Kiely set out to restore that voice. For although the narrator of this story of not-quite-requited love identifies himself only late in the narrative as a newspaperman—a common Kiely persona, not to be confused with the author himself—his presence is felt throughout in the remarkable variety of literary references and allusions that, even if conceivably attributable to the obsessively literary Pike Hunter, could hardly have been passed on intact from the prostitute Butterfly, his paramour, to the fireman Austin, her confidant, who is the narrator’s primary source for the anecdote on which the story as a whole is purportedly based. In a tour-de-force performance that includes quotations from and paraphrases of not only William Butler Yeats, who has a walk-on part in the story, but also Joyce, John Millington Synge, Edmund Spenser, Guy de Maupassant, and Gilbert and Sullivan, the narrator plainly reveals—and revels in—his own literary background and bent.

16 More than one Kiely commentator has suggested that his narrative style shows “characteristics of oral narrative” that reflect his exposure to the storytelling of seanchaí during summer visits to the Rosses in Donegal during his boyhood (Dunleavy 160). Essentially an urban folktale that Kiely admits “I built around many stories told me by men older than myself” (The Waves Behind Us 125), “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly” certainly exemplifies a feature of the oral tradition noted by J. H. Delargy in his important study The Gaelic Story-Teller: “the art of the folk-tale is in its telling” (13).2 But by way of that abrupt transition—the typesetter’s two hard line breaks, the first taking the reader to “This was it,” the second into the immediacy of the story—“A Ball of Malt” exemplifies another crucial feature of that tradition as well, as it creates for the reader the illusory experience of the story being heard not read: as scholar Vivian Mercier has noted in “The Irish Short Story and Oral Tradition,” the distinct and distinctive relationship between the narrator of a story and his audience is “the indispensable component of the oral tradition”—“without it, the finest of storytellers loses his function” (110).

THIS WAS IT

17 In fact, when we “trace” (in the way that Davenport suggests) the meandering path taken by Kiely’s literary imagination, that relationship between narrator and audience proves indispensable even in his Dublin-based stories with more “literary” first-person narrators. In each of these stories, the narrator bears a resemblance to Kiely himself— each is a newspaperman or a budding writer: in “God’s Own Country” the narrator

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writes for the weekly Catholic newspaper The Standard, in “The Green Lanes” he works for a Catholic “missionary magazine” (perhaps based on the Father Mathew Record), and in “Your Left Foot is Crazy” he is a minor civil servant, originally from County Tyrone, who (like Kiely in the 1940s) is writing a book on William Carleton.3 The role of the narrator in “God’s Own Country” may be the most unusual, as the first six pages, a series of vignettes (including several cameos involving a character identified simply as “the big poet,” readily recognizable as Patrick Kavanagh), seems to establish the story’s focal point as the offices of The Standard with the narrator at the center of all of the activity. Abruptly, however—as abruptly as those line breaks in “A Ball of Malt” but without the announcement of “This was it”—the first-person narrator (with all the liability and unreliability associated with that narrative point of view) morphs into a third-person omniscient narrator who proceeds to recount, with full authority, fully unwarranted, the journey of a fellow newspaperman, Jeremiah Slattery, to the Aran Islands with two bishops (one Irish, one American) and a cameraman: The night before the voyage they rested in a hotel in Galway City. The wind rattled the casements and now and again blew open the door of the bar in which Jeremiah sat alone until well after midnight, over one miserable whiskey. Nobody bothered to talk to him, not even in Galway where the very lobsters will welcome the stranger. The bar was draughty. He wore his black greatcoat, a relic of his clerical ambitions. (Collected Stories 306)

18 The best explanation for this sort of unconventional shift may be embedded in the admiring review of Kiely’s collection of stories The State of Ireland published on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in 1980: “His skill is such that we have to distinguish between writing stories and telling stories. Once you have seen how Mr. Kiely builds a narrative, you must admit that he is not doing what Joyce or Chekhov or Maupassant were doing. His is a different art altogether.” Coincidentally enough, that review was written by Guy Davenport (“An Irish Story” 1).

19 The first-person narrators in “The Green Lanes” and “Your Left Foot is Crazy” operate more conventionally within their narrative structures. In “The Green Lanes” the eighteen-year-old editorial and circulation assistant at the “missionary magazine” has his eyes opened to the ways of the world—or at least to relationships between the sexes —not only by a forty-year-old mother-bridled drinking partner who is a self-styled womanizer but also by a sixty-year-old hunchbacked colleague who, twenty-one years earlier, fathered a child by a friend’s wife. In “Your Left Foot is Crazy,” the narrator- protagonist learns those ways of the world on his own, thanks to a pair of identical twin sisters and another pair of young women up from the country whom he and his friend Peter meet at a ballroom dancing academy near the Liffey. In each of these stories Kiely activates his impressive ventriloquial skills to invest his narrator with the ability to tell a story. Describing the twins, the narrator of “Your Left Foot is Crazy” observes: One of them affected, as we’d have said in another century, bright colours. I’m talking now about the twins. The other went abroad in more demure shades. Brenda was the bright one. They were handsome girls, both of them: if one was the other almost had to be. They spoke well, the good, clear, unaccented (almost) English of the Dublin middle-class: as in Bernard Shaw. They had dark-blue berets and brown eyes that were always smiling. They were good-humored but never laughed out loud, not, at any rate, while we were with them. They were self- assured, capable I’d say, good managers, good housekeepers, the pride and joy of their parents, and rightaway I could see how they had Peter rattled. One of them would have rattled a veteran. Two was, or were, by much too much or too many. (Collected Stories 620)

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20 The narrator of “The Green Lanes” is not so loquacious, but what these stories have in common with each other and also with “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly” and “God’s Own Country” is that forged relationship, described by Mercier, between the “speaker” in the story and the “listener”/reader.

DUBLIN DIVERSIONS

21 As Colum McCann observes in his fine Introduction to The Collected Stories, “in all of Kiely’s stories, the writer and reader become twinned in an act of verbal and personal intimacy” (xiii). Indeed, Kiely’s narrators in his Dublin-based stories—or Kiely himself through those narrators—charm the reader into entering wholly into the world of clerks and newspapermen, domestic workers and dance instructors, priests and drinkers and prostitutes: the world of teeming streets, of bone-numbing and spirit- chilling offices, of green parks and green lanes where lovers rendezvous, of warm and welcoming pubs.

22 But his narrators do not merely charm—they also disarm; and it is that disarming quality that allows his stories their ultimate power not just to entertain but also to move the reader profoundly. An apt metaphor for this effect might be the famous photo of Flann O’Brien/Brian O’Nolan/Myles na Gopaleen that shows that multifarious man-of-letters—“three men, or more, in one” Kiely once described him (The Waves Behind Us xii)—standing by a roadworks detour sign on Clifton Avenue in Monkstown; the sign, with an arrow pointing toward O’Brien/O’Nolan/Myles, reads: DUBLIN DIVERSION.4 Kiely’s narratives likewise operate as “Dublin diversions,” leading the reader by a circuitous route indeed—usually involving hilarity of one sort or another— to a place that, along the way, the reader probably did not suspect he was headed. Recognizing that as Kiely’s career advanced his stories became “more subtle, more suggestive, darker, more complex,” Daniel J. Casey, one of his earliest commentators, assured readers: “While they seem to lack narrative unity, . . . [these] stories move in loose psychological streams that have a tendency to keep doubling back on one another, melding in a single cumulative effect” (32). Colum McCann offers similar assurances: “Often the stories have double or triple helixes in operation, stories wound around other stories, layers of narration that would confound even the best architects, and yet the buildings remain essentially simple, we do not get lost inside them” (xiii). Perhaps American novelist John Gardner’s rich image in The Art of Fiction of how a writer composes an utterly coherent world begins to describe Kiely’s specific artistry in this regard: to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel—to draw us into the characters’ world as if we were born to it—the writer must do more than simply make up characters and then somehow explain and authenticate them (giving them the right kinds of motorcycles and beards, exactly the right memories and jargon). He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot… (46)

23 “Bloodless Byrne of a Monday” is a good example of this art and craft. It is also a good example of a Kiely story that achieves that effect of “verbal and personal intimacy” remarked by McCann even while employing a less personal and less intimate third- person voice.

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24 While, strictly speaking, the protagonist of this story is not a Dubliner—and certainly not a Dublinman (“there is a difference” Kiely has pointed out emphatically [Dublin: Small Oxford Books vi])—the story itself has Dublin written all over it. Perhaps, as with “A Ball of Malt,” there is a whiff of urban folklore to this tale of Arthur, a hungover Sligoman who wanders into a recently vacated Dublin hotel room and briefly assumes the identity of its previous occupant, a fleeting figure named Mulqueen, ordering brandy go leor from room service while lounging in the man’s bed and taking telephone calls from his wife, his mistress and a business associate. As this passage displays, Kiely proves himself the equal of James Joyce in deploying Ulysses-like “interior monologue” (think Leopold Bloom, though, rather than Stephen Dedalus) to convey the state of his protagonist’s mind—and body—as Arthur skirts past the porter in the hotel foyer: This morning anything is possible. He raises his left hand to reinforce his nod, and passes on. Upstairs or downstairs or to my lady’s chamber? Destiny guides him. So he walks upstairs, soft carpets, long corridors, perhaps an open, detached bathroom even if he has no razor to shave with. Afterwards, barber’s shave, oh bliss, oh bliss. He finds the bathroom and washes his face and those tired eyelids and tired eyes, and combs his hair and shakes himself a bit and shakes his crumpled suit, and polishes his shoes with a dampish handtowel. A bit too risky to chance a bath and total exposure, although he has heard and read the oddest stories about deeds performed in hotel bathrooms by people who had no right in the world to be there. Bravely he steps out again. A brandy in the bar, and the road to the bank and his own hotel and sobriety, and home: Bright sun before whose glorious rays… Before him in the corridor a door opens and a man steps out. (Collected Stories 578)

25 But as Guy Davenport remarked admiringly in his review of The State of Ireland, “A Kiely story is usually several stories at once, for his finest habit is to tell a story within a story to illustrate a point, and his characters all have stories to tell too” (“An Irish Story” 37). In this case, the stories within the story—including (but not limited to) three Dublin dock workers exchanging anecdotes about a frightfully anemic, toothless, pigeon-fancying, feline-despising, and ultimately vengeful drayman named Byrne, Arthur’s nostalgic reminiscences of his annual male-bonding reunion in Dublin with former schoolmates, and Mulqueen’s apparent personal troubles (domestic, romantic, and professional)—finally culminate in Arthur’s grappling, through the haze or the glaze of morning-after brandies, with the recent death of one of his schoolmates and with vague misgivings about marital so-called bliss. After leaving the hotel, Arthur discovers that Mulqueen’s own life of quiet desperation led him to jump into the Liffey, from which he was ignominiously retrieved. Arthur ponders the implications of his having briefly played Mulqueen in his hotel room: “He has never seen the man’s face. Shared his life for a bit. Shared it? Lived it” (584). Obviously, the reader is enjoined to conclude, along with Arthur, that life could be worse.

26 But it could also be better. And with that recognition the reader moves a bit deeper into Kiely’s Dublin landscape—the geography of his imagination—in search of that drunk man’s watch. For “Bloodless Byrne of a Monday” exemplifies how, almost invariably, a more ominous tone or note resonates behind even the most self-delighting voices of Kiely’s narrators and how the hilarity of even his most “diverting” stories tends to moderate if not into the sobering contemplativeness experienced by Arthur (and shared by the reader) then at least into an unsentimental poignancy capable of expressing otherwise ineffable aspects of the human condition.

27 Another of Kiely’s Dublin stories, “Through the Fields in Gloves,” represents an extreme version of this tendency, as establishing his protagonist as the center of

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consciousness for the narrative, Kiely takes the reader right into the mind of a certifiable Dublin eccentric, or psychotic: a man who has made a name for himself —“Peter the Painter”—by way of his compulsion to spray red paint on slender young women. Apparently this compulsion was triggered by his overhearing a couple of lines from a minor poem by minor poet Frances Cornford that he took as a summons to prove his love for his exceedingly obese wife: Once in a pub, he could remember exactly when, because it wasn’t often he darkened the door of a pub, redfaced bastards on whiskey and overdressed bitches drinking gins and tonics that cost the moon and sixpence, and a fat woman walked past to the loo as they called it nowadays and a drunk at the counter said why do you walk through the fields in gloves fat white woman whom nobody loves: and then said to the barman that that was a poem, as if anybody wouldn’t have known, even if it wasn’t much of a poem.Misery Martha can’t walk through the fields but she loves nice gloves. She has lovely small hands, not too pudgy about the knuckles and how did that drunk know that nobody loved the fat woman who walked out to the loo? (Collected Stories 604-05)

28 But as Kiely reveals through the artfully managed interior monologue of the story, his protagonist is clearly haunted by memories of his obsessively gambling mother, “a thin, quickwalking, brownfaced woman, hat pinned on one side, sixpence each way, never more and you couldn’t have less, up and down the street all day long to the bookies, she could run like a hare” (604), and the squalid wretchedness of his domestic life is exacerbated by Martha’s devoutly religious live-in cousin Julia who spouts malapropisms about “Looseyah” (Sr. Lucia of Fatimah fame) and “the Children of the Atom” (606). Notwithstanding his belief that he is somehow defending the honor of his grossly overweight and chair-bound wife, his own obsession with assaulting young women with spray paint has about it at least a hint of deep-rooted misogyny. Perhaps the reader gets to know “Peter the Painter” a bit too well, as the “diverting” element here seems to produce a textbook instance of what Vivian Mercier described in The Irish Comic Tradition, his study of eleven centuries of comic expression in Irish literature and culture: “It seems to me that there is a laugh—call it the aesthetic laugh, if you wish— which laughs at whatever is not beautiful. Essentially, this laugh is provoked by the grotesque” (48).

29 After an impressive array of “diversionary” tactics—literary allusions (William Carleton, William Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson), historical allusions (the practices of Gaelic poets, Napoleon, the Battle of the Bulge), references to movies and movie stars (Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron), the naming of traditional Irish dances (the Walls of Limerick, the Siege of Ennis, the High Caul Cap), glosses on Ballyvourney in West Cork and St. Gobnait, and sundry sidetracking anecdotes—“Your Left Foot is Crazy” ends rather grimly too, with the narrator-protagonist recounting first his discovery that the identical twin sisters had been randomly switching between him and Peter on dates and then his discovery that the two winsome country girls he and Peter had met at the dance academy had died in a bicycle accident: “They got two and a quarter inches, single-column, provincial papers please copy, and I kept the clipping for a long time. And that was that, the man’s bicycle one in the saddle one on the bar, brakes that snapped and the stone bridge at the foot of the precipice of a hill…” (627). “The Green Lanes” ends a bit more ambiguously, a couple of decades on, with the image of the now elderly hunchback being helped across the street by his handsome grownup son—“They were talking and laughing and he didn’t see me,” the narrator remarks— contrasted with the image of the once-cocky womanizer dying in his mother’s home:

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“His face was thin and old the last time I saw him and his sharp voice was failed to a feeble sort of a whisper. He was aged all of a sudden, I thought, but then I remembered that I was, at that moment, the age he was when I first met him. That’s the way it is in being friendly for a long time with people older than yourself” (Collected Stories 350). The narrator is wiser, yes; but he is also older.

DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN

30 Has the drunk man found his watch yet? Not quite. But perhaps locating both “Two Gallants” and “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly”—or at least the way that each story ends—relative to a specific moment in Joyce’s Ulysses will help a reader to narrow the search for a remedy for the “un-understanding” of Benedict Kiely’s distinctive vision and narrative strategy vis-à-vis Joyce’s Dublin and Dubliners. That moment takes place in the “Aeolus” episode, which is set in the offices of The Freeman’s Journal (and the Evening Telegraph). Under the headline of DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN, Stephen Dedalus is about to share his “Parable of the Plums” with a motley assembly of newspapermen, idlers and scroungers (including Lenehan from “Two Gallants”). A tale of “two Dublin vestals” eating plums atop Nelson’s Pillar on Sackville Street, Stephen’s sketch is his first fully realized attempt to register Dublin as the Joycean “centre of paralysis”: too “giddy” to look outwards and “too tired to look up or down or to speak,” Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe are content merely to gaze obliviously at the statue of the “onehandled adulterer” Lord Nelson, in Stephen’s mind an ironically obvious symbol of the vitality—in this case a metaphorical virility—so wanting in turn-of-the-century Dublin. Steeling himself before these men whose prowess with words has already made him blush, “his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture,” Stephen considers what is at stake, his thinking conveyed by Joyce through interior monologue: “Dubliners.” Rising to the occasion, Stephen then emboldens himself, his thinking again conveyed via interior monologue: “On now. Dare it. Let there be life” (Ulysses 121-22).

31 For Stephen Dedalus, this imperative amounts to a version of Raymond Carver’s “unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking”—essentially, the exigency for Stephen to inscribe “life” not simply as he knows it experientially but rather as he conceives it in an exact literary manner. Of course, this was Joyce’s imperative too, as just weeks after the fictional Stephen shares, on June 16th of 1904, his “Parable of the Plums” with his fellow men of words in the newspaper office, the real-life Joyce announced in a letter to his friend Con Curran: “I am writing a series of epicleti—ten—for a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city” (Selected Letters 22). Eventually, Joyce’s “unique and exact way of looking” would be reflected in the way that “Two Gallants” ends with the death of romance in Ireland exposed “epiphanically” by Corley’s cynical exploiting of the slavey so that he and Lenehan can have a night of boozing at her expense: “Corley halted at the first lamp and stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm” (Dubliners 60).

32 In telling contrast, Kiely’s story has, in effect, two endings. The second one involves Butterfly, the half-Japanese Dublin prostitute who had been able to reciprocate only within the limits of her profession Pike Hunter’s commitment to her, which was

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triggered by a chance meeting that he had witnessed on a Dublin street between the aged William Butler Yeats and his beloved Maud Gonne: “Something odd had happened to him: poetry, a vision of love?” (Collected Stories 355). “Poor Pike,” she says of the timid, retiring civil servant who hoped to win her with the words used by Yeats to woo that woman Homer sung: “he’d puke you with poethry” (360). Eventually, taking heed of the exemplary tale told to her by fireman Austin McDonnell of Lady Emma Hamilton’s rise from lowly slavey to celebrated mistress of Lord Nelson, Butterfly proves susceptible to a different vision: “She may have been wearied by Pike and his sad attachment to poetry, but she rose to the glimmering vision of herself as a great lady beloved by a great and valiant lord. A year later she married a docker, a quiet hard-working fellow who had slowly sipped his pints of black porter and watched and waited all the time” (367-68).

33 Pike’s ending comes first. Unraveling into clinical madness after a “fatally poetic” rendezvous atop Howth Head, where he tried to recreate the scenario of Yeats’s early (and not especially striking) poem “The White Birds”—“I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!”—Pike is committed, the narrator tells us, to “Saint Patrick’s Hospital where, as you may all remember, Dean Swift died roaring” (366). Effectively, the story concludes with the narrator’s audience—or Kiely’s readers— not quite roaring with the laughter that the story’s opening may have provoked. Call that last laugh “the aesthetic laugh, if you wish”: ultimately, “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly” emblematizes how Benedict Kiely’s “proprietary” view of Dublin and of Dubliners stands on equal footing with the distinctive signature of James Joyce’s “Irish landscape.”5

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1960. Print.

Carver, Raymond. “On Writing.” Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983. 13-18. Print.

Casey, Daniel J. Benedict Kiely. Lewisburg: Bucknell U P, 1974. Print.

Costello, Peter and Peter van de Kamp. Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography. London: Bloomsbury, 1987. Print.

Davenport, Guy. “An Irish Story: Kiely,” New York Times Book Review, November 16, 1980, 1, 37. Print.

---. “The Geography of the Imagination.” The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. 3-15. Print.

Delargy, J. H. The Gaelic Story-Teller. The Proceedings of the British Academy XXXI London: British Academy, 1945. Print.

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Dunleavy, Janet Egleson. “Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, and a New Generation: The Irish Short Story at Mid-Century.” The Irish Short Story: A Critical History. Ed. James F. Kilroy. Boston: Twayne, 1984. 145-68. Print.

Foster, John Wilson. Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974. Print.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. Print.

---. Selected Letters. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: The Viking Press, 1975. Print.

---. Stephen Hero. New York: A New Directions Books, 1963. Print.

---. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1986. Print.

Kavanagh, Patrick. “Who Killed James Joyce?” A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish. Ed. John Ryan. Brighton: Clifton Books, 1970. 51-52. Print.

Kersnowski, Frank. “Ben Kiely and His Ball of Malt,” Journal of the Short Story in English 1 (Autumn 1986), 17-27. Print.

Kiberd, Declan. “Story-Telling: The Gaelic Tradition.” The Irish Short Story. Ed. Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown. Gerards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979. 13-26. Print.

Kiely, Benedict. Drink to the Bird. London: Methuen, 1991. Print.

---. The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely. London: Methuen, 2001. Print.

---. The Waves Behind Us: Further Memoirs. London: Methuen, 1999. Print.

McCann, Colum. Introduction. The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely. London: Methuen, 2001. ix- xvii. Print.

Mercier, Vivian. The Irish Comic Tradition. London: Oxford U P, 1962. Print.

---. “The Irish Short Story and Oral Tradition.” The Celtic Cross: Studies in Irish Culture and Literature. Ed. Ray B. Browne, William John Roscelli, and Richard Loftus. West Lafeyette, IN: Studies, 1964. 98-116. Print.

Moore, Thomas. Moore’s Irish Melodies. Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, Ltd., n.d. Print. na Gopaleen, Myles. “Cruiskeen Lawn,” Irish Times 10 April 1957. 6. Print.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. New York: Bantam, 1968. Print.

Yeats, William Butler. “September 1913.” W. B. Yeats: The Poems (Second Edition). Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner’s, 1997. 107-08. Print.

NOTES

1. Incidentally, Davenport was the first student ever to write an Oxford M.A. thesis on Joyce, circa 1951. 2. For specific background details regarding “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly,” see Frank Kersnowski, “Ben Kiely and His Ball of Malt,” Journal of the Short Story in English 1 (Autumn 1986), 17-27. 3. In his Drink to the Bird, Kiely acknowledges his basic writerly strategy: “You pick a bit from here and a bit from there” (147). He also admits: “My father told me never to spoil a good story for the sake of the truth” (52).

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4. This photo, from the archives of The Irish Times, appears on the cover of Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp, Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 1987). 5. This article revises a talk, titled “Through Streets Broad and Narrow: Benedict Kiely’s Dubliners,” presented at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin on July 30, 2013.

ABSTRACTS

Benedict Kiely est peut-être mieux connu pour ses romans et nouvelles (et surtout pour son roman Proxopera) qui inscrivent le tissu social, culturel et politique du territoire dans et autour de sa ville d’enfance d’Omagh, comté de Tyrone en Irlande du Nord. Mais Kiely a résidé à Dublin pendant plus de 65 des 87 années de sa vie, inscrivant également sa ville d’adoption dans un certain nombre de nouvelles mémorables, en particulier « A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly ». Localisant les nouvelles de Kiely situées à Dublin et liées à Dubliners, le recueil emblématique de James Joyce, cet article engage une discussion sur la notion significative de Guy Davenport, « la géographie de l’imagination », pour éclairer la façon dont les nouvelles de ces deux écrivains importants, concomitantes dans leurs similitudes, sont finalement plus conséquentes dans leurs différences.

AUTHORS

THOMAS O'GRADY Thomas O’Grady is Professor of English and Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has published articles, essays and reviews on Irish literary and cultural matters in many scholarly journals, including Éire-Ireland, James Joyce Quarterly, Études Irlandaises, Irish University Review, New Hibernia Review, Joyce Studies Annual, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, The Irish Review, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, The Recorder, The Clogher Record, An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts, and Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing.

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Immigration, Ethnicity, and Race in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “Tony’s Wife”

Timothy K. Nixon

1 In reference to Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s published fiction, one of her critics, Violet Harrington Bryan observes, “To make her stories marketable […], Dunbar-Nelson camouflaged the issue of race, even though matters of race and gender are easily apparent to the late-twentieth-century reader” (125). In this observation Bryan aligns herself with the majority of scholars who have commented on Dunbar-Nelson’s work. As a brief sampling, Caroline Gebhard, Pamela Glenn Menke, Elizabeth Ammons, and even Akasha Gloria Hull—the woman who has single-handedly done the most to perpetuate critical interest in Dunbar-Nelson—all concur that race, albeit race handled sometimes covertly, permeates the fiction as a dominant theme.1 Interestingly, however, much of the attention that many scholars have paid to race in Dunbar- Nelson’s oeuvre has focused on the figure of the Creole and on the characters who are of an ambiguous but mixed-race heritage. These readers adopt, I believe, a somewhat limited, literalistic, and anachronistic view of racial dynamics operating in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s short stories. Even in an ostensibly “white” short story, like “Tony’s Wife,” which was published in the collection The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories in 1899, race is an inescapable undercurrent. “Tony’s Wife” is the tale of an Italian shopkeeper and the German woman with whom he lives. Yet Pamela Menke speaks for the majority of critics when she categorizes “Tony’s Wife” as a story concerned with “gender obedience” (85), and Menke skips over it in her analysis of race in the stories.

2 Using critical race theory and situating the text within its appropriate historical context, this paper argues that while “Tony’s Wife” tackles gender issues, race is just as much its thematic focus. Reading this white short story written by an African-American woman, I am mindful of the insightfulness of another “Tony”—Toni Morrison—and her study, Playing in the Dark. It’s almost as if Morrison has Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction in mind when she declares, “Even, and especially, when American texts are not ‘about’ Africanist presences or characters or narrative or idiom, the shadow hovers in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation” (46-47). Racialist dynamics and politics, particularly in the guise of the blackening of the Other, are indeed a factor in the short

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story “Tony’s Wife,” even though most readers in the twenty-first century would conceive of it as, at most, a tale of ethnicities and national origins. I concur with Jürgen Grandt’s assessment that the tendency to read select pieces of Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction as raceless overlooks the clear presence of race in her work (46), and when we view “Tony’s Wife” in its appropriate historical context, Grandt claims, “multiple and often ironic layers of meaning […] emerge” (54) that demonstrate the story is a highly racialized narrative. Similarly and more broadly, Caroline Gebhard concedes “that America vainly tries to reduce everything to black and white, whereas the reality is often not so simple” (173). Such an acknowledgement is especially appropriate for this one short work.

3 Historian Howard Zinn offers some of the background that helps read “Tony’s Wife,” with all of its multi-hued complexity, in context. From his work A People’s History of the United States, we learn that as early as the 1830s and 40s those in power fomented anti- immigrant sentiment as a political strategy (216). Furthermore, Zinn notes, it became common under “Jacksonian Democracy” for African Americans, Native Americans, females, and the foreign-born to be elided and placed outside the target audience for governmental appeals (221). From a nineteenth-century perspective what arises is a linkage of blacks and foreigners; foreigners and blacks; foreigners as blacks. Now while it would be incorrect and disingenuous to suggest a uniform oppression was applied to all subaltern groups, it is, nonetheless, interesting that they were aggregated into one disenfranchised body. The situation worsened throughout the 1800s. The race hatred under which black Americans suffered was accompanied by a class hatred that plagued immigrants. In the midst of a severe depression in the 1870s, immigrants were used as strike-breaking scab labor (Zinn 244). And by the last two decades of the century, the pace and the face of immigration changed. Greeks and Italians and Jews, those, as Zinn observes, who were “even more alien to native-born Anglo-Saxons than the earlier newcomers” (265), comprised the nine and a half million immigrants whose desperate need for work resulted in “a labor surplus that kept wages down” (266). The swarthy faces of the immigrants and the black faces of the resident African Americans became equally contemptible to the white working class, because these groups, on account of their own economic hardships, were willing to work for less. And for its own unacknowledged reasons, the privileged class amassed these blacks and foreigners into the same category as well.

4 Howard Zinn is not alone; other historians corroborate this view of a complex interrelatedness between race and ethnicity in America’s past. In one especially provocative essay from the collection Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, David R. Roediger argues that our knowledge and understanding of how race and ethnicity were interpreted and deployed in American history are woefully inadequate. While trying to rectify that deficiency, Roediger agrees with others in his field that a too easy conflation of race and ethnicity is both naïve and inaccurate, and he insists we acknowledge the distinct and different experiences of immigrant populations and African Americans. Nevertheless, Roediger points out “that immigrants could be Irish, Italian, Hungarian and Jewish […] without being white. Many groups now commonly termed part of the ‘white’ or ‘white ethnic’ population were in fact historically regarded as nonwhite, or of debatable racial heritage, by the host American citizenry” (184). Talking specifically about the middle decades of the 1800s, he goes on to posit

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that any distinction among nonwhite populations in the US, at least in the minds of the white citizenry, was nebulous and slippery: The ‘simian’ and ‘savage’ Irish only gradually fought, worked and voted their ways into the white race in the US. Well into the twentieth century, Blacks were counted as ‘smoked Irishmen’ in racist and anti-Irish US slang. Later, sometimes darker, migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were similarly cast as nonwhite. The nativist folk wisdom that held that an Irishman was a Black, inside out, became transposed to the reckoning that the turning inside out of Jews produced ‘niggers’. Factory managers spoke of employees distinctly as Jews and as ‘white men’, though the ‘good Jew’ was sometimes counted as white. Poorer Jews were slurred as Black with special frequency. (184)

5 What arises from Roediger’s observation is how easily “nonwhite,” a term applied to immigrants, became synonymous with “Black” in the racist views of the times. The status as Other, and specifically as subaltern, trumped all other factors, real or perceived.

6 In this social and historical context, Alice Dunbar-Nelson composed her short fiction for the collection The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. These tales of local color, the first such collection published by an African-American woman (Menke 78), coalesced in this milieu. And this heavily racialized worldview preoccupied the stories’ intended readers. Dunbar-Nelson must have been quite aware of this dynamic, so she finessed her treatment of race, but that is not to suggest she shrank from exploring it.

7 Artfully, and also somewhat patronizingly, Dunbar-Nelson differentiates the characters throughout the story “Tony’s Wife” from the type of people who are its intended audience. Right from the opening, in the commercial exchange of two marginal figures, two immigrants, we encounter telling details that mark these fictional characters as different from—and, notably, lower than—the white, Eastern readers anticipated for this collection. In the opening paragraph a young, Jewish girl buys candy from the character known simply as Tony’s Wife. The little customer places her order in non- standard, heavily accented English, and she makes the purchase with a “dingy nickel grasped in warm, damp fingers” (19). The imagery here is loaded. Those who could afford to purchase and spend time reading a short story collection from the New York publishing concern Dodd, Mead and Company would most likely not trade in “dingy” coins, much less nickels gripped tightly and expectantly in sweaty hands. Moreover, accented and non-standard English was one of the defining attributes of local color fiction. Through it, white Eastern readers engaged in vicarious forays into the exotic. Exoticism, however, operates on at least two levels here: there’s the foreign or the Other, to be sure, but there’s also the aspect of the subaltern. Comparable to how later generations would go slumming—that is, frequenting jook joints and dives merely for the enjoyment and excitement of seeing how the underprivileged lived—these readers encounter the lower classes from the comfort and security of their privileged lives.

8 Throughout “Tony’s Wife,” we encounter these exotics. There are Germans and Jews, Irish and Italians; there are even a few quick appearances by a couple of Orleanians—a hodgepodge people if there ever was one. All of these characters, however, are marked by their difference from the East Coast reader, and it is a racializing mark that they bear. We see this most distinctly in the figure of the shopkeeper in this story. It is rather apparent that Tony was meant to be read, during Dunbar-Nelson’s time, as not white. In this character, Dunbar-Nelson built upon the distance that her white Eastern readership would have felt between themselves and immigrants from Southern Europe.

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As is the case with so many of the characters in her short fiction, the single most important indicator of Tony’s race, his status as “not white,” is his eyes. We are told at one point in the story that he has “black eyes” (28). Like her ambiguous yet still racially marked characters , from “The Goodness of Saint Rocque” (3), and Sister Josepha in the eponymous story (157), protagonists in other stories in this collection, Tony’s black eyes position him as “other than white.” They are a synecdoche: their blackness darkens Tony’s entire person.

9 Additional details in the story point to Tony’s status as a non-white Other as well. In painting an image of her character, the narrator describes Tony as a “great, black- bearded [...] specimen of Italian humanity” (22). The significance of this modifier, “Italian humanity,” is its specificity. Tony is not the typical Everyman found in much fiction; he is Italian. A passage from the preface to Playing in the Dark, where Morrison observes that white readers tend to view themselves as “‘universal’ or race-free” (xii), comes to mind here. Such a view would certainly have prevailed among Eastern, white readers at the turn of the century who could not—or would not—see themselves as raced. So through the specificity of his country of origin, Dunbar-Nelson’s Tony is neither on par with nor representative of her intended readers, those who thought of themselves as universal, for he is, above all else, Italian. Thus, he is not white; he is racialized.

10 Beyond his Italianness, other indicators suggest that Tony is marked by race. First, Tony is a “specimen of Italian humanity.” In terms analogous to the racist and pseudo- scientific views European and American slavers had of Africans, Tony exists in a liminal space somewhere between the bestial and the human. He is a specimen, which connotes objectification beneath the rational, Western—that is, white—gaze. Furthermore, the narrator notes, “You instinctively thought of wild mountain-passes, and the gleaming dirks of bandit contadini in looking at him” (22). Wildness, lawlessness, and danger, aspects at odds with civilization, are, then, appended to Tony’s characterization. And in the West at least, civilization has historically been defined from one frame of reference, the white point of view. So again, on account of his wild, unruly nature; his bestial and objectified status as a specimen; his specificity, rather than universality; and his black eyes—not an eye color found often among Anglo-Saxons and Northern Europeans— Tony is racialized.

11 A return to Roediger for some additional historicizing is appropriate here, for the uniqueness of the story’s setting appears to be significant as well. Dunbar-Nelson was a native of New Orleans, so she logically relied on it for the setting of so much of her early fiction. However, that city and its populace were not like other cities in America of the time. Immigrants in this particular locale in this particular era may have behaved and been conceived of differently than anywhere else in the United States. Roediger observes, That the native population questioned their whiteness may also have led immigrants to a sense of apartness from white America and occasionally a willingness to sympathize and fraternize with African Americans. The best-studied example of the dynamics of such solidarity and mixing is that of the Italian (and especially Sicilian) immigrant population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Louisiana—a ‘not-yet-white’ population both in the view of white Louisianans, and in its self-perception. (186)

12 Because Italians in Louisiana at the time may have had easier exchanges and less fraught interactions with African Americans than did the white residents of the day,

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the two communities could have been associated in the minds of the white polity and readership. The character, Tony, therefore, may have been easily interpreted as a nonwhite, racially inferior Other through nothing more than guilt by association. Thus, his ethnicity informs how others assign a racial category to him.

13 Whatever category might have been assigned to Tony at the time Dunbar-Nelson was writing the story, we can be certain that it would not have been white; immigrants like him were first and foremost Other. In a quick statement by the story’s narrator, we learn that Tony and his brother John both demonstrated “the same lack of race pride” (29). This accusation is made because Tony partnered with a German woman and John married an Irishwoman. The acknowledgement that persons of German and Irish descent are of distinct races from persons of Italian descent represents more than casual, careless terminology. The implication here is that the categories of Other are multitudinous. Most importantly, however, this sort of regional fiction offered members of the privileged class a vicarious experience among parties unlike them and their associates. Thus, all of the characters were set apart from and below the white, Eastern readership. Just as Tony’s description connoted danger and a lack of civilization, John’s wife, “Betty, a daughter of Erin” (29), has attributes associated with her that set her at odds with the intended readers. She is described as being “aggressive, powerful, and cross-eyed” (29). Certain suffragettes and temperance advocates of the day may have secretly prided themselves on being powerful, and perhaps a few even acknowledged their aggressiveness. But “cross-eyed”? Not only would Betty’s personality seem flawed to polite, Eastern society, she is physically unattractive as well. In what might seem like a pandering move, Dunbar-Nelson relegates this incidental character to an unsympathetic position in the minds of her readers. And it seems fairly apparent that Betty serves as a representative of her “race.” The three descriptors taken together are the discriminating factors between such Irish immigrant women and the fiction’s ladylike readers.

14 In her depictions of Tony and his sister-in-law as racial Others, Dunbar-Nelson panders to her white readership’s sense of centrality, its . The characters are raced, and they, the readers, are not. They are flattered by the unflattering depiction of the Italian, the Irish, the German, and the Jew. Tony’s racial self and his despicable behaviors are conflated in the East Coast readers’ minds, as are Betty’s aggressiveness and homeliness; the one is a metaphor for the other, just as the readers’ whiteness equates to rightness, propriety, and decorum. The readers see themselves reflected in the neighbors surrounding the shops “kept by Tony and Mrs. Murphy, the grocer” (21). The residents in this area of Prytania Street “are fine enough to look down upon these two […] shops” (21, emphasis added); after all, theirs is “the sort of neighbourhood where millionaires live before their fortunes are made” (21-22). Although never directly involved in the narrative’s plot, these individuals, like the persons reading about them, sit back and observe the behaviors of this ragtag band of colorful characters. And finally, in a direct address to the reader that appears almost sycophantic, the narrator asserts, “you must admit that it was indeed a condescension to tolerate Tony and Mrs. Murphy” (22). The narrator strokes the ego of the readers by applauding the tolerance and patience and generosity of spirit they demonstrate in condescending, in looking down upon these people not like them. The story, however, does not reduce to just this one interpretation.

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15 While we find numerous indications in the narrative and from the story’s historical context that an Italian immigrant was set apart from the Anglo-Saxon readers, a simultaneous linkage or affiliation of the Italian shopkeeper and the intended reader obtains as well. In some ways, Tony is the most American of all the characters in the tale—and “American,” here, signifies white. Consider, for instance, Tony’s speech. We learn early on in the story that despite being an immigrant, Tony’s “English was unaccented” (20). Many immigrants could recount tales of stigma and handicap arising from their accented, faltering speech—this is suggested by the inferences that are possible from the little Jewish girl’s diction at the beginning of the story. Unlike her, however, Tony is, linguistically speaking, on the inside. In referring to the work of Gavin Jones, Gebhard observes that at the end of the nineteenth century, “dialects from Maine to Louisiana could be parodied or invoked to assert the cultural superiority of the white middle class” (165). By communicating in “unaccented” English, then, Tony escapes the marginalization; he is affiliated with the white readership. Furthermore, Tony’s brother John is described as being “fair and blond, with the beauty of Northern ” (29), so he—and his brother, by extension—approximates whiteness. Tony is also a small business owner, exemplifying that myth of entrepreneurial possibility that America has always perpetuated about itself. Furthermore, in the most incidental of details, we learn that Tony now eats red beans with his spaghetti (24). Granted, he is still eating pasta, but it is not a dish that his Italian kin would recognize. And finally, he rejects the Catholic Church as an institution belonging to the Irish Mrs. Murphy and his German companion, figures equally marked by their foreignness. In his religious and economic life, as well as in his language and cuisine, Tony has internalized the trappings of American life.

16 To the extent that we allow for this paradoxical reading—Tony as simultaneously immigrant and American, racially Other and white—we are left wondering about its implications. What was Dunbar-Nelson getting at with this racialized character? The most reasonable interpretation is that the not white/white Tony represents a jab at her intended readers. This maneuver is Dunbar-Nelson’s artfulness; hers is a slap the readership does not see coming. Of course, not many of Dunbar-Nelson’s readers would have understood her shifting, multi-leveled placement of Tony in turn-of-the-century America’s racial hierarchy. But for any who did, this most American of all immigrants in the story is far from sympathetic. Tony is bullying, drunken, spiteful, abusive, and niggardly. Dunbar-Nelson describes him as “communicating” with Mrs. Tony through growls and mutters. More often than not, he is pressuring her to tend to the business— his business. He beats his partner to the point where the neighborhood children see the “blue marks on her face and neck” and pity her (25). Tony even beats his partner’s mother for having too great an appetite when she comes for a brief visit (25). And in his final act of cruelty he refuses to marry the woman who all along had been presumed to be his wife. She implores him, before the priest, to let her become “a real-for-true married woman” (31), but Tony will not hear of it. His refusal, moreover, has greater significance than just Mrs. Tony’s position within the Church community; it also deprives her of any livelihood. Without being actually married to Tony, the woman has no claim to the store or Tony’s small estate. Instead, Tony’s brother John inherits them, and Mrs. Tony is left destitute and is heartlessly evicted from the shop, thereby casting an unflattering light on that “fair and blond” figure as well. While on one hand positioned as racial outsider, Tony is, on the other hand, something of a metonym for America, for white America. And in that representation, the token American is shown

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to be cruel, paternalistic, and exploitative, in no position to condescend to individuals who look or sound different.

17 In my reading of “Tony’s Wife,” I do not mean to suggest that Dunbar-Nelson had to be concerned with the issue of race merely because she was a woman of color, as if race is the only topic a black author can discuss. Her novella A Modern Undine, for instance, seems to sidestep matters of race altogether, and the work’s characters are almost raceless cyphers, upon which the reader can project any phenotype he or she chooses. Nevertheless, that quotation by Toni Morrison near the opening of this essay does arise once again, and we are left to wonder how race operates even in something occupied with other themes. Race is an obvious concern in this particular Dunbar-Nelson short story, because “Tony’s Wife” is an artifact of American socio-historical and cultural life, where the nexus of immigration, ethnicity, and race was a site of great anxiety for white, Eastern readers. “Explicit or implicit,” Morrison observes, “the Africanist presence informs in compelling and inescapable ways the texture of American literature” (46). This Africanist presence, moreover, can be either the author herself or a shifting signifier—say, for instance, an Italian shopkeeper—the author has created. Regarding the author, we do know that matters of race and racism were subjects Dunbar-Nelson focused on throughout her career. For example, in her fiction, a story like “The Stones of the Village,” grapples with a light-skinned African-American man deciding to pass in white society. In her non-fiction, she devoted an essay, “Brass Ankles Speaks,” to hierarchies based upon skin tone within the African-American community. And her educational work, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence, anthologizes notable rhetoric by black figures to instill in African-American youth a sense of pride in their history and community. Clearly, then, issues of race were of real interest to Alice Dunbar-Nelson. So despite the majority of critics overlooking the fact, “Tony’s Wife” is just as much about race as any other topic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ammons, Elizabeth. “The Limits of Freedom: The Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Kate Chopin, and Pauline Hopkins.” Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 59-85. Print.

Bryan, Violet Harrington. “Race and Gender in the Early Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.” Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography. Ed. Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992. 121-38. Print.

Dunbar, Alice Moore. Ed. Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: 1818 – 1913. Mineola: Dover, 2000. Print.

Dunbar-Nelson, Alice. “Brass Ankles Speaks.” The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Ed. Gloria T. Hull.Vol. 2. Schomburg Lib. of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 311-21. Print.

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---. “The Goodness of Saint Rocque.” The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. New York: Dodd Mead, 1899. 3-16. Rpt. in The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Ed. Gloria T. Hull. Vol. 1. Schomburg Lib. of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

---. A Modern Undine. The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Ed. Gloria T. Hull. Vol. 2. Schomburg Lib. of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 3-71. Print.

---. “Sister Josepha.” The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. New York: Dodd Mead, 1899. 155-72. Rpt. in The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Ed. Gloria T. Hull. Vol. 1. Schomburg Lib. of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

---. “The Stones of the Village.”The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.Ed. Gloria T. Hull. Vol. 3. Schomburg Lib. of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 3-33. Print.

---. “Tony’s Wife.”The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. New York: Dodd Mead, 1899. 19-33. Rpt. in The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Ed. Gloria T. Hull. Vol. 1. Schomburg Lib. of Nineteenth- Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

Gebhard, Caroline. “Inventing a ‘Negro Literature’: Race, Dialect, and Gender in the Early Work of , James Weldon Johnson, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson.” Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877 – 1919. Ed. Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard. New York: New York UP, 2006. 162-78. Print.

Grandt, Jürgen. “Rewriting the Final Adjustment of Affairs: Culture, Race, and Politics in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s New Orleans.” Short Story 9.1 (2001): 46-57. Print.

Hull, Gloria T. “Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A Regional Approach.” Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective. Ed. Leonore Hoffman and Deborah Rosenfelt. New York: MLA, 1982. 64-68. Print.

---. “Shaping Contradictions: Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the Black Creole Experience.” New Orleans Review 15.1 (1988): 34-37. Print.

---. “‘Two-Facing Life’: The Duality of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.” Collections 4 (1989): 19-35. Print.

Menke, Pamela Glenn. “Behind the ‘White Veil’: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Creole Color, and The Goodness of St. Rocque.” Songs of the Reconstructing South: Building Literary Louisiana, 1865-1945. Ed. Suzanne Disheroon-Green and Lisa Abney. Contributions to the Study of Amer. Lit. 11. Westport: Greenwood, 2002. 77-88. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.

Roediger, David R. “Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of ‘White Ethnics’ in the United States.” Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. London: Verso, 1994. 181-98. Print.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York : Harper, 2009. Print.

NOTES

1. See, for instance, Gebhard’s essay “Inventing a ‘Negro Literature’” (2006); Menke’s essay “Behind the ‘White Veil’” (2002); Ammons’s essay “The Limits of Freedom” (1991); and Hull’s essays “‘Two-Facing Life’” (1989), “Shaping Contradictions” (1988), and “Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A Regional Approach” (1982).

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article met en question la tendance critique dominante qui persiste à lire la nouvelle “Tony’s Wife” d’Alice Dunbar-Nelson comme si elle n’avait rien à voir avec la race et le racisme. En s’appuyant sur la théorie critique de race proposée par Toni Morrison dans Playing in the Dark, cet article affirme que la nouvelle de Dunbar-Nelson sur des immigrés à la Nouvelle Orléans au tournant du siècle représente la vie dans une communauté racialisée, bien que les personnages soient blancs en apparence. Pour soutenir cette affirmation, cet article place la nouvelle dans son contexte historique approprié, montrant comment des facteurs tels qu’un statut d’immigré récent ou une ethnicité non-anglo-saxonne facilement repérable auraient trouvé un écho chez les lecteurs blancs de la classe moyenne américaine à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle. L’article conclut en soulignant combien les questions de race étaient importantes pour Alice Dunbar- Nelson, en tant que femme noire américaine qui devait faire face au racisme et aux préjugés raciaux.

AUTHORS

TIMOTHY K. NIXON Timothy K. Nixon, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Shepherd University. Dr. Nixon has presented at conferences in the USA, Canada, and France, and he has published on the lives and works of Kate Chopin, Christopher Isherwood, Arturo Islas, Herman Melville, Walker Percy, Gertrude Stein, and Eudora Welty. Dr. Nixon’s edited collection, Selected Short Works by Klaus Mann, will be released in 2016.

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“Betch you’ bootsh!”: Jewish Humour, Jewish Identity, and Yiddish Literary Traditions in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl

Brian Jansen

1 There’s a well-known Jewish joke which goes, more-or-less, as follows: A Frenchman, a German, and a Jew walk into a bar. “I’m tired and thirsty,” says the Frenchman, “I must have wine.” “I’m tired and thirsty,” says the German, “I must have beer.” “I’m tired and thirsty,” says the Jew, “I must have diabetes.”1

2 This is a joke that raises questions. To what extent does it depend on stereotypes? Is it racist? Is it funny? And does the answer to that last question depend on the identity of its teller? Can a joke—even such a seemingly mean-spirited joke—reveal something positive about its teller? Can ethnic humour be, as Howard Ehrlich claims, “an act of self-disclosure” (qtd. in Brandes 233)? There is a world of difference between a simple joke, told offhand, and a work of literature, but the questions such a joke raises may nevertheless be worth keeping in mind when approaching literary works in which ethnic humour is a prominent feature. And it is just one such literary work that this essay takes for its focus: Abraham Cahan’s Yekl, the most well-known of the Jewish- American author, politician, and newspaper editor’s tales of Yiddish life in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century.

3 In her essay “Problems of Representation in Turn-of-the-Century Immigrant Fiction,” Susan K. Harris claims that realism as a genre was inadequately suited to representing the subjectivities of immigrant lives in the turn-of-the-century United States. As she puts it, “these stories are often problematic in their aesthetic and ideological constructions of their ethnic characters, often recreating stereotypes prevalent in mainstream culture rather than representing ethnic characters’ own subjectivity” (128). For Harris, authors who represented immigrant characters were de facto implicated in a political debate between assimilationism and multiculturalism—and once implicated in such a debate, there was no way out. Those who sided with the

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assimilationists wrote fiction that “accepted the implicit superiority assumed by mainstream narrators” (130) in the first place, while multiculturalists faced a more systemic problem: “voicing a given ethnic reality that was both different from and equal to the reality of the native-born population” (131). Sabine Haenni, in her essay “Visual and Theatrical Culture, Tenement Fiction, and the Immigrant Subject in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl,” seems to echo this concern when she argues that immigrant fiction can never “fully account for the immigrant subject outside middle-class norms of intimacy, privacy, and interiority” (519), which results in an immigrant subject left at a standstill.

4 Yet these arguments seem to me reductive. Harris and Haenni effectively summarize the problems that realism presents for turn-of-the-century immigrant writers without giving credit where credit is due for writers who are attempting, nevertheless, to find ways around those very same problems—and who, more importantly, may actually be drawing on other, very different literary traditions in addition to realism (or that subgenre of realism, local color) in order to make their point. As Matthew Frye Jacobsen puts it, “the American, English-language reception of [Yekl]... is paradigmatic of a certain blindness in American literary history toward transnational dimensions of ‘ethnic’ literatures” (103). Hana Wirth-Nesher argues rightly that “[t]his is the crucial difference between Cahan and local color writers… Cahan was not writing in his native language, and he was writing out of two linguistic, literary, and cultural frameworks, one of which was not American” (51). Cahan’s Yekl, for example, is a text whose realist impulse and urge to interpret Yiddish-American immigrant culture for a wider audience is complemented—and complicated—by a knowledge of and engagement with non-realist, Yiddish literary traditions: the folk tale, folk figures like the schlemiel, and a history of verbal, self-deprecating, anecdotal Yiddish humour. Yekl’s narrative technique, and particularly its use of dialect and its sense of humour, thus, do far more than simply “recreat[e] stereotypes” (Harris 128). Yekl absolutely ridicules its characters, but it does so as part of a larger project that actually celebrates Yiddish identity and heritage, and laughs at one’s personal flaws in a way that reveals, as Mark E. Bleiweiss puts it, “an admirable form of humility rather than any deep-seated self- hatred” (60).

5 Before proceeding, a word, briefly, on genre: Cahan’s Yekl has historically been characterized variously, as “novel” (in its original published form), “novelette” (as in Bernard G. Richards’ 1969 introduction [vii]), and “novella” (as in various works of scholarly criticism, from Hana Wirth-Nesher [49] to Natalie J. Friedman [71] and Sara Blair [261]). It has, likewise, been published in a variety of contexts, both as a standalone work (D. Appleton and Company, in 1896) and within the framework of Cahan’s other stories of Yiddish New York (as in Dover’s 1970 collection, which assembles Yekl along with the short story collection The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto). This is to say nothing of the fact that even in its original form, Yekl was originally subtitled as a tale (even if only at the behest of William Dean Howells, as we will see below), situating the text within yet another generic classification, one historically used to “refer to any narrative shorter than a novel, from about five to a hundred or more pages” (Good 197)—and one which specifically calls to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s framework for short fiction: his “aesthetic of intensity and unity of effect” (Good 207). The manner in which Yekl has been collected and discussed, therefore, makes it something of a liminal case for generic classification; these various characterizations speak to the fact that, as Graham Good has argued,

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“[c]ategories based purely on length are bound to be arbitrary; there is no magic number of words which constitutes the minimum for a novel or the maximum for a short story” (197). In focussing primarily on Cahan’s Yekl (which runs to roughly 30,000 words in its first edition) in a journal ostensibly dedicated to the short story, I am in part following the argument of Good, who posits that the term “novella” ought to actually cover both short and medium-length works (200).2 In presenting this claim, Good enumerates a series of compelling reasons for his argument, historical, linguistic, and formal: (1) In the Renaissance the term encompassed both the very brief stories in the Decameron and the middle-length Novelas Ejemplares of Cervantes. (2) In post-1800 German practice “Novelle” includes texts of under five and well over a hundred pages. (3) The nineteenth-century English terms “tale” and “story” covered both lengths. (4) “Short story” is a mainly twentieth- century phrase for a particular type of magazine fiction; [. . .] (5) Short and medium lengths have enough in common in form, content and history to justify opposing them conjointly to the novel ... (200)

6 Good posits for this proposed shared “novella” classification a number of features, and though it needs to be pointed out that there are myriad short stories and which can’t be placed quite so neatly within this framework, Cahan’s Yekl fits well—its novelty in setting (209) in terms of its depiction of Yiddish New York; its characteristic “written imitation of a ‘live telling’” (210); its use of a “frame” (210); its intensity (as opposed to what Good calls the novel’s “extensity”); and its oral quality, are all central to my analysis here, and all mark Yekl as an archetypal “novella” in Good’s sense of the term. More significantly for my purposes, Yekl shares these features with many (if not all) of the more “conventional” tales or short stories in Cahan’s body of work. This fact ought not to be surprising given both that Yekl is (as mentioned previously) often collected with these other stories, and that Yekl was composed and published at a time when much of Cahan’s literary output was dedicated to shorter prose fiction—Yekl having been written and released in the interim period between the publication of his first English-language story in 1895, and the 1898 release of his story collection The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (Richards vi-vii).

7 Indeed, Harris’s argument about the problematic aesthetics of turn-of-the-century immigrant fiction on which I draw above depends on a close reading of “The Imported Bridegroom,” the titular story of the latter collection. That short story shares many of the humorous and dialect elements of Yekl, and, as Harris argues, the technique of realism fails it. Realism here, she says, is “intensely problematic because the close focus on physicality highlights aspects of the immigrant culture that are inimical to American sensibilities ... individual psychology is glossed and mocked, rather than explored for its representative status” (138). In particular, Harris takes issue with the way the story reproduces language. Cahan varies between writing dialect (or reproducing, phonetically, the broken English of a non-native speaker) and “translating” Yiddish (that is, purporting to have characters communicate in Yiddish, but having the text given to the story’s readers in English). The “translated” Yiddish is, according to Harris, “rendered with a high degree of ornamentation” (138), while the English is problematic for the way in which it makes characters appear to be “ignoramus[es]” (138).

8 Though Harris does not touch on it, the problem she sees here is perhaps even exacerbated in Yekl, and especially in the speech of that novella’s main character Jake,

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whose Yiddish is littered with words lifted from English and poorly pronounced (as in his declaration that, “I knew a feller, so he was a preticly friend of John Shullivan’s” [2]). For Harris, neither of these reproduced languages are able to access a character’s interiority—“neither language, as represented, gives the space for Cahan to develop” (138) the situation in which Cahan’s characters have been thrust. Jake in Yekl and Asriel in “The Imported Bridegroom” are perhaps typical of first-generation Jewish immigrants to America, but Cahan’s methods never even hint “at the relationship between [these characters] and the social, economic, or political situation of the immigrant community as a whole” (138).

9 Harris’s critique, it should be noted, certainly attempts to celebrate marginalized voices, and her critique of realist immigrant authors is logically predicated on the perceived authority and influence of William Dean Howells’s edicts about realism and dialect fiction and the relationship between the two. As Harris rightly points out, these edicts are intensely problematic in their implicit insistence that “the ‘best’ kind of ethnic writing portrays its given subjects within the confines of preexisting molds” (134). She quotes at length Howells’s introduction to a collection of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry: ... there is a precious difference of temperaments between the races ... and this is most charmingly suggested by Mr. Dunbar in those pieces of his where he studies the moods and traits of his race in its own accent of our English. We call such pieces dialect pieces for want of some closer phrase, but they are really not dialect so much as delightful personal attempts and failures for the written spoken language. (qtd. in Harris 134)

10 There is something troublesome in Howells’s argument, suggesting that Howells “not only felt that dialect represented difference” (134), but that he also viewed it as a comic form, “further distancing readers and characters by posing the latter as objects to be laughed at” (134). Realism—or Howells’s realism—was therefore restricted from reassessing “the nature of human beings” (134); it depended rather, in its writing about ethnicity, on existing conceptions or stereotypes about the given ethnic group being portrayed.3

11 It is true that Cahan was a great admirer of Howells, of whom he wrote, “As a true realist he cares little for ideas; and yet it is just because he is such, because of his fidelity to the real, that he cannot help embodying an idea in his works” (qtd. in Wirth- Nesher 46). And it is also true that Cahan wrote Yekl at Howells’s behest, even going so far as to change the main character’s name and the story’s title on the latter’s advice— dropping Yankel the Yankee for Howells’s suggested Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. As Hana Wirth-Nesher argues, Howells probably “counted on [the subtitle] to attract readers who might want a glimpse of the exotic world of urban slums” (47). More importantly, his preference for the name “Yekl” may have stemmed from his reading of Heinrich Heine and his familiarity with the type of the fool in German and Yiddish traditions (49).4

12 Yet Howells’s word, for all of this, was still surely not God’s, and to read dialect fiction through this lens exclusively is to ignore the possibility for subversion on the part of an author like Cahan. The discourse of realism was surely not monolithic, and to suggest that immigrant writing and dialect writing as a whole are problematized because of Howells’s view of them is certainly as problematic as Howells’s view itself. It ignores a whole strand of thought that viewed dialect as “a democratizing poetic” (Wirth-Nesher 50). Wirth-Nesher glosses over some such views. For Hamlin Garland, “dialect is the life

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of language...” (qtd. in Wirth-Nesher 50); Fred Patee demanded that artists “give us the people as they actually are. Give us their talk as they actually talk it” (qtd. in Wirth- Nesher 50). There is, of course, an essentializing aspect about even these edicts (positing as they do, a monolithic “they”) that is somewhat troubling—and yet they seem to reflect a desire, a striving toward what Wirth-Nesher calls “a realistic portrayal of life in their communities” (50).

13 Harris, for her part, acknowledges that some authors—such as Charles Chesnutt, in the stories which comprise his collection The Conjure Woman—were able to subvert dominant culture through their dialect fiction. And yet she never fully articulates why this might be true of Chesnutt but not of Cahan or others. She refers only to the “African-American double consciousness [that] empowered [Chesnutt] to both use and subvert traditional narrative frames and dominant tones” (135)—but surely the concept of “double-consciousness,” as articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois can be extrapolated and applied (to some degree) to non-African-American immigrant authors. Surely “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois 3) is one felt by all “Othered” communities.5 And surely it is a sense that resonates through Yekl, given its central tension between Jewish and American identity—a tension which critical readings, such as that offered by Jason Paul Steed, see as being resolved in favour of Jewish identity: Gitl and Bernstein “find happiness only by maintaining their identity as Jews, ... [while] the story of assimilation—of Jake’s desire to become a ‘Yankee’ through and through—is the novella’s tragedy” (50). Wirth-Nesher would seem to agree when she posits that Jake’s identity as an American is tied most closely with his “anti-intellectualism [and] his physical abilities” (59), neither of these being traits that seem especially positive.

14 Chesnutt’s use of the eye dialect in The Conjure Woman is worth recognizing here as but one of an arsenal of subversive tools, and it is worth pointing out that Cahan’s Yekl does in fact employ the same technique at times. But to stop there is to do an injustice to Cahan’s attempts—however problematic they may ultimately be, according to Harris— to represent his characters. For the novella faithfully attempts to incorporate a process of language use and acquisition. Aviva Taubenfeld points out a few particular examples of attempts to differentiate the individual quirks and regional accents of different characters. The Russian-born Jake, for example, says “Vot’sh a madder?” (Cahan 28), while the Galician scribe to whom Jake takes his letters for translation says the same phrase with a subtly different pronunciation: “Vot’s der madder” (28). As Sanford E. Marovitz puts it, “Cahan was a polyglot, and his ears were attuned to the numerous dialects of his native Yiddish—to which he later added Russian, German, and English” (273). He adds later: “This is a language not of caricature, but of living people” (273), and the effect is less leaving the immigrant subject at a standstill (as Haenni would have it) or subscribing to stereotypes than it is an attempt at humanization, personalization, and individualization of the Other.

15 More importantly, as Wirth-Nesher’s argument elucidates, it is a language whose method of representation—phonetic transcription, interlingual puns, the English representation of absent Yiddish speech—itself communicates something (or, indeed many things) that Harris neglects to discuss in her reading of “The Imperial Bridegroom.” Aviva Taubenfeld explains some of the myriad methods Cahan used in an attempt to render his world realistically:

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He first translates... Yiddish idiom[s] into English. ... Cahan also incorporates twenty transliterated Yiddish words into his narrative; he defines these words in footnotes below the text so as not to disrupt the story with excessive explanatory material. ... Transliterated Yiddish is also used to relate puns and wordplays popular on the Lower East Side. (151)

16 For each of these strategies, Taubenfeld offers an example, and ultimately concludes that each of them “underscore[s] the distance between the two language communities that the immigrant author must traverse” (152) to represent this group to an outside audience—but Wirth-Nesher offers an alternate and equally compelling reading of what the effects of these different strategies are. Phonetic transcriptions, for example, work at the level of representing the sound of speech, but they also communicate visually. When Jake mispronounces ‘lick’ as ‘leak’, for example, “the semantic content will already have done its job in accentuating Jake’s crudeness, his bodily presence” (Wirth- Nesher 56), before the reader has processed the visual sign back into an oral one. More centrally to the purposes of establishing Yekl as a text that does strive to represent immigrant subjectivity, the story features signs that are simply not English words. The sign “Dzake” (2), for example, is a stand-in for “Jake”—the Americanized name that Yekl has adopted for himself, a name that is ironically completely unpronounceable to him and the other Lower East Side Jewish immigrants. The letter “J” has no Hebrew or Russian equivalent, and thus “Dzake” is the nearest approximation accessible by the community Jake inhabits. As Wirth-Neshir explains: For the characters, Jake’s American name is unspeakable. For the American readers, the orthographic sign ‘dzake’ is destabilizing, nearly unreadable. It can be read only by reproducing the sound made by the immigrants, by reading aloud, by speaking the word just as the foreign characters do. Processing the foreign-looking word into speech in order to read it situates the reader in the place of the immigrant, re- enacting the slowed pace of encounters with strange sounds and signs. (56)

17 If, as Wittgenstein posits, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (5.6), then to inhabit the language of another is perhaps to inhabit (or begin to inhabit) their interiority. But of equal importance in the presence of the sign “dzake” is the extent to which it both is and is not part of the project of realism: part of the project in the sense that it seems that realism attempts to render speech as it is actually spoken, but not part of it in the sense that the absence of an actual English sign corresponding to “dzake” “calls attention to the name’s representation on the page, to the poetic strategy at work ... [T]his absence promotes awareness of the materiality of the text” (Wirth-Nesher 57), which, in turn, draws our attention to the novella’s author, its narrator, and the relationship between the two. These linguistic strategies suggest Cahan as author actually stood between multiple impulses: situating himself in the role of interpreter, portraying the lives of immigrants; telling a very human story; and deploying the tradition and mores of Yiddish literature. It is through this first lens— Cahan as cultural interpreter—that Yekl has been most frequently read, but how does our understanding of the text change if we ascribe to the text a different purpose? To read Cahan and his narrator as “interpreting” this world for a mainstream white American audience is to offer an incomplete reading, in other words, and such readings which decry the implicit anti-Semitism of the text or its narrator is to fail to grasp the additional milieus in which Yekl operates.

18 The novella has a third-person, omniscient—as Taubenfeld puts it—“superior” narrator (154). The narrator speaks deliberately, ostentatiously correct standard English, recognizable to an American audience (pointing out, for example that “Mamie’s English

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was a much nearer approach to a justification of its name than the gibberish spoken by men” [19]). Yet his or her knowledge of the Lower East Side, the ghettos, sweatshops, and tenements, suggests an intimate, personal knowledge of the scenes he or she is describing. Indeed, the narrator must be (or have been) part of this community, as he or she is able to gloss Yiddish puns for the reader, and judge the quality of Jake’s and others’ Yiddish speech patterns. Notice, for example, the description of Jake’s Boston Yiddish as “Yiddish more copiously spiced with mutilated English than is the language of the metropolitan Ghetto in which our story lies” (2). The narrator is thus placed in a curious situation, deliberately attempting to distance himself or herself from a community even as his narration implies an intimate knowledge of that community. Indeed, though it is perhaps unwise to draw parallels, the Yiddish version of Yekl, prepared by Cahan after his English version failed to convince publishers, actually acknowledges its narrator as an acquaintance of Jake’s through a first-person voice that opens the story: I knew him. I met him a few times when his troubles were greatest. I know his story with all its details. But I will tell it only in short, simply tell it. Sketch it, paint it, perform it—that I will not even attempt. I will be very satisfied if I succeed in just telling it to you as if you were talking at a table. (qtd. in Taubenfeld 149)

19 We must of course treat these two versions of Cahan’s text as distinct (this introduction is certainly not the only difference between them),6 but it is interesting nevertheless to consider the implications of a comparison. The English version could never open this way, simply because—according to Taubenfeld—“the immigrant writer could never have presumed to share a table with his American readers” (149). Moreover, the first- person voice of the Yiddish Yankel der Yankee shifts quickly into a perspective of total omniscience not at all unlike the narrator of Cahan’s English version.7

20 Ultimately, however, the specific identity of the narrator is a question we simply cannot answer. But it is part of a larger question to ask about the text, that being what to make of the narrator’s treatment of the story’s characters. Yekl no doubt revels in its ability to ridicule its characters—and it seems that to know who the narrator is could potentially contextualize that level of ridicule. If the narrator is an outsider—or even a Jew himself whose proper English suggests an attempt to distance himself from the culture—then the Yekl’s meanness toward its characters takes on a degree of uncomfortable anti-Semitism. If the narrator is an insider, that interpretation is perhaps something different: a humble bit of self-deprecation and humility, an ability to laugh at one’s own flaws, a way for Jews who had “rejected Judaism without yet being absorbed into the non-Jewish society” to reconcile “their guilt feelings and ... their ‘need to search for self-identity’” (Bleiweiss 62).

21 There is no doubt that the narrator is mean, or at least quick to ridicule, and that no one is safe from his judgement. Even seemingly tossed-off observations are humorously cruel, and not even the novella’s most sympathetic characters are safe: Jake’s Yiddish is “copiously spiced with mutilated English” (2); a rabbi “discharge[s] his duty of dissuading the young couple from their contemplated step as scrupulously as he dare[s] in view of his wife’s signals to desist and not risk the fee” (83); “Mrs. Kavarsky gr[ows] as red as a boiled lobster” (72); Bernstein who, “as a rule, look[s] daggers at his meal” (46); Gitl illicitly trying on a corset is deemed pointless for the way “the corset prove[s] utterly impotent against the baggy shapelessness of the Povodyne garment” (40) she wears overtop of it. The question that arises: what purpose does the narrator’s meanness, or judgmental spirit serve?

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22 Yekl takes place within the hermetic bubble of Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side, and so the reader is never given to see a non-Jew in the novella. And yet the sustained tone of the book—the way, as we have seen, that even its heroes are treated with a sense of bemusement—suggests intuitively (and perhaps without sufficient evidence to make such an argument) that should a Gentile have ever entered a scene in the novella, he would be subject to the same humorous critique.

23 To some extent, it is worth acknowledging that Yekl was written in a very specific historical context and that it would be impossible for the novella to entirely escape the discourse of racial difference that would have dominated in turn-of-the-century America, and the truth is that at least a few of the novella’s scenes will remain problematic no matter how generous of a reading we are willing to offer the text. Mrs. Aaronovitz’s aforementioned attempts to prevent her rabbi husband from throwing away the fee associated with formalizing a divorce agreement immediately comes to mind, and so too does the narrator’s initial description of Jake and “his very nose, which was fleshy and pear-shaped and decidedly not Jewish (although not decidedly anything else), [and] seemed to join the Mosaic faith” (3)—both descriptions which reflect associations about the essentialized physical or moral characteristics of Jews widely held at the end of the nineteenth-century. The latter reference is less defensible (except perhaps on the grounds of self-deprecation); the former, at the very least, might indicate the degree and extent of the poverty that prevailed within the Yiddish- American immigrant community. But the tone of these remarks seems less deliberate, somehow—less essentialized, even, insofar as the latter seems to suggest a figure who at least partly departs from physical type. This defence of Cahan is nebulous, and it is not my wish to gloss over problematic aspects of the text. As American folklorist Richard Dorson points out, “Jokes that ridicule and lampoon Jews in the eyes of other peoples cannot easily be separated from jests which, circulating among Jews, contain all the ammunition for anti-Semitic raillery” (qtd. in Brandes 234). However, he goes on to add, “the same joke can be told gently or harshly” (qtd. in Brandes 234), and Cahan’s use of humour appears as more self-deprecating than stereotyping or racist: his humour can’t help but be accompanied by what Stanley Brandes calls “a note of affectionate gentleness” (234).

24 It might be instructive here, to contrast these moments in Yekl with evocations of Jewish peoples in contemporary works. ’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth seems most directly relevant here, given the recurring presence of a Jewish character, Mr. Rosedale—a social climber and member of the New Rich who is painted in a deeply unflattering and racially problematic light, as “a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac” (13). Elsewhere, he is noted as having “his race’s accuracy in the appraisal of values” (16), as “the same little Jew who had been served up and rejected at the social board a dozen times” (16). And indeed, the novel’s heroine Lily Bart seems almost naturally, intuitively predisposed to dislike him, for “some intuitive repugnance, ... had made her push Mr. Rosedale into his oubliette without a trial” (16). The essentialized association between the Jewish race and money or greed is here made explicitly, casually and nonchalantly tossed off in a way that suggests the acceptability and widespread self- evidence of such a statement.8 And the same statements are echoed, albeit less severely, in a number of textual variations of W.D. Howells’s 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham—

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in which Jews are described as “they” (344), linked to dropping property values (344), and theorized by Mrs. Lapham as having “all the money” (345).

25 In this respect, at least, as problematic as Yekl may be at times, it certainly is a profound corrective to some of the easy stereotypes posited in contemporary texts—if nothing else, in terms of its depiction of a struggling, poverty-ridden Ghetto slum where Jews certainly don’t have “all the money.” Moreover, as “mean” (and perhaps “mean” is the wrong word here, because it ignores how deeply humorous the narrator can be at times, especially in the juxtaposition between his high diction and the slang and polyglot language of the novella’s characters) as the narrator of Yekl is, he seems to be mean with a purpose. As Cahan explained his purpose—in response to charges of anti- Semitism stemming from even within his own community: The question in belle letters is not what kind of people the author presents, but how he presents them and whether they have a natural relation to the artistic plan of his work. I am sure that my theme touches on a situation that mirrors our immigrant life in a characteristic manner and that this has much more meaning than advertising the Jewish people. (qtd. in Taubenfeld 146)

26 As Taubenfeld explains it, Cahan wanted to be judged on “the realism, artistry, and thematic probing of his novel ... evaluated by the artistic merit and truth of his representation, not as an advocate of his ‘race’” (146). In this context, some of the narrator’s decisions are understandable. Most of the narrator’s cruelty (though obviously not all of it, as we have seen), after all, is directed at Jake—and directed at Jake not simply for his failure to become Americanized, but his desire to be Americanized in the first place, and his ignorance in general. Jake is an unappealing, unsympathetic, occasionally unpleasant character, and so the narrator’s rough treatment of him is to some extent justifiable. Jake’s movements are not American, they are grotesque. He responds to a question early in the first chapter “with what he consider[s] a Yankee jerk of his head” (2). A co-worker mocks Jake by observing that “He thinks that shaving one’s mustache makes a Yankee!” (6). Later, the narrator notes (with a degree of sadness, which is interesting in light of all the charges of anti- Semitism) that “[s]oon after his arrival in Boston his religious scruples had followed in the wake of his former first name; and if he was still free from work on Saturdays he found many another way of ‘desecrating the Sabbath’” (11-12). Jake is also mocked for his lack of interest in his wife and child in the Old World, through the lens of the scribe who writes letters that “might have been printed and forwarded one copy at a time for all the additions or alterations Jake ever caused to be made in it” (27). He fails even to respond to jokes, especially those puns which rely on knowledge of the Yiddish language or Jewish culture. Steed describes one scene in particular in which Gitl puns on the word dinner, playing with the word’s meaning in Yiddish—thinner. Jake is not even shown as reacting to the joke, for “to acknowledge and share in Gitl’s humor would be to share in her Jewishness—precisely what Jake wishes to avoid” (Steed 49). The narrator paints Jake as humourless,9 and humorlessness—within a novel of such humour and lively language-play, and within a culture that so values humour—is perhaps the worst thing that Jake can be.

27 We should make no mistake that humour is what Cahan’s story may all come down to. The narrator is mean to his characters, but mean in a way that is often tremendously funny (and funny, more importantly, in a way that does not hinge on anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as Jake’s ironic promise to Mamie that he will pay his debts “as sure as [his] name is Jake” [50]—which of course it actually isn’t). For all his narrative

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ridicule, too, the narrator is not afraid, either, to let his characters get in their own jokes and balance the scales. Gitl’s aforementioned pun on the word “dinner,” her timidly ironic observation that it “is not for nothing that [America] is called the golden land” (52), her sarcastic declaration that Mamie looks like “a veritable panenke” (52) or young noblewoman, and her “curse upon Columbus” (66) actually frame her as one of Yekl’s most humorous figures. Bernstein, too, gets in his licks, in the form of his learned pun in the first chapter: “America is an educated country, so they won’t even break bones without grammar. They tear each other’s sides according to ‘right and left’” (4), a joke which depends on knowledge of Hebrew. Indeed, charges of stereotyping seem especially absurd given the sheer number of jokes and references which depend (in some way) on knowledge of Hebrew, Yiddish, or Jewish culture. Even in terms of Yekl’s most serious moments, it is clear the narrator has respect for Jewish tradition. As Matthew Frye Jacobson observes, “one of Yekl’s rare moments of clarity, a momentary resolution to reform and fulfill his obligations to Gitl, was attended by Old World memories of ‘the Hebrew words of the Sanctification of the Sabbath’ and a homely vision of ‘a plate of reeking tzimes’” (106). Even Jake gets in a few jokes before the arrival of his wife and his attempts at Americanization render him humourless, which we may witness in the form of the good-natured banter between sweatshop co-workers that opens the novel.

28 Yekl is no doubt a tragic tale too, ending as it does with virtually every character unsatisfied in some respect: Gitl “burst[s] into tears” (87) at the prospect of her child growing up without a father, even though she knows she is now better off, while Jake ends as “defeated victor” (87), a passive victim to the movement of the cable car he is on and the life he has chosen, a “violent lurch ... accompanied by a corresponding sensation in his heart” (89). But the tragedy is what may actually make the novel’s humour so necessary. For this is where we see the tradition of Yiddish storytelling, following the lineage of Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, Sholom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz and others, with which Cahan is surely to some extent engaged. Cahan, as surely as Aleichem before him, knew that (writes Irving Howe in his introduction to a collection of Aleichem’s stories): ... the boundary between comedy and tragedy is always a thin and wavering line— and for Jews, often nonexistent. Almost all of [Aleichem’s] best comic stories hover on the edge of disaster. All exemplify the truth of ’s remark that in Jewish writing ‘laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two.’ (xxiv)

29 Mark Bleiweiss effectively parses the argument of Avner Ziv’s monograph Jewish Humor in summarizing why this tradition of humour has been so prevalent for generations of Jewish authors, from folk narratives to contemporary novelists: “Jews laugh to ease their pain. Their own foibles provide the best target for their laughter, not only because they are most familiar with the subject, but because by laughing at themselves first, they may prevent others from following suit” (59).

30 Take, for example, some representative works by Yiddish humorist Sholom Aleichem, in which humour (and conceivably even negative Jewish stereotypes) abound. In “The Clock That Struck Thirteen,” a family absurdly adds more and more weight to a grandfather clock in order to get it to function correctly, until more than “a half a ton” (87) hangs from it. The same piece features a gossipy character, Muma Yente who is “toothless [and] dark-skinned” (85), mocked for the “breathless” (86) character of her monologues which go on “faster and faster” (86), paying no mind to others around her.

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Another Aleichem story, “On Account of a Hat,” tells of a figure so absentminded that he is referred to as “Sholem Schachnah Rattlebrain” (103). Schachnah misses a train home for Passover because he actually mistakes himself for a police official who had been left sleeping on the train platform. The very same character is a real-estate broker, described as “contriv[ing] and conniv[ing]” (104), and the story ends with the narrator reflecting on the punishment inflicted on Schachnah by his wife—not just for failing to arrive home in time for Passover, but for including extraneous words in a telegram: “What possessed him to put that into the wire: Arriving home Passover without fail. Was he trying to make the telegraph company rich?” (109).

31 In light of these examples, Yekl’s cast of characters are surely a descendent of Jewish folk characters, some of whom are evident in Aleichem’s work above—characters like the luftgescheften, the schadchen, the schnorrer, each representing “a negative Jewish stereotype perpetuated inside as well as outside the ghetto walls” (Bleiweiss 60)10—and of the Yiddish schlemiel, that figure who “handles a situation in the worst possible manner or is dogged by an ill luck that is more or less due to his own ineptness” (qtd. in Pinsker 5) and who symbolizes “the continual shifting between ambition and defeat which characterized the experiences of the East European Jewry” (Pinsker 21), transplanted to a new, American milieu.

32 Yekl is an opportunity, then, for Cahan to represent his culture for a broader American audience, and the story does so beautifully, adopting a tradition of Eastern European humour to “mediate the chasm between [the Jew’s] spiritual claims and his material situation” (Guttmann 330). Yekl is also part of a more traditional project of humility and self-improvement. For, as Bleiweiss suggests of those Jewish folk characters, “Jews from the ghetto did not mean to offend any specific person through their ridicule of these characters” (60); rather, they recognized that these faults—complaining, gossiping, begging, amongst other chutzpadik (or impudent, or impertinent) acts— were faults that all were guilty of, Jewish or Gentile. Ultimately, then Yekl is a text that has much in common with the joke with which we began, in that the answers to the questions they raise are much more complex than they may at first appear.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aleichem, Sholom. “On Account of a Hat.” Trans. Isaac Rosenfeld. The Best of Sholom Aleichem. Ed. Irving How and Ruth R. Wisse. Washington: New Republic Books, 1979. 103-110. Print.

---. “The Clock That Struck Thirteen.” Trans. Julius and Francis Butwin. The Best of Sholom Aleichem. Ed. Irving How and Ruth R. Wisse. Washington: New Republic Books, 1979. 82-88. Print.

Bhabha, Homi. “The World and the Home.” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141-53. Print.

Blair, Sara. “Whose Modernism Is It?: Abraham Cahan, Fictions of Yiddish, and the Contest of Modernity.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 51.2 (2005): 258-84. Print.

Bleiweiss, Mark E. “Self-Deprecation and the Jewish Humor of Woody Allen.” The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Ed. Charles L.P. Silet. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006. 58-77. Print.

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Brandes, Stanley. “Jewish-American Dialect Jokes and Jewish-American Identity.” Jewish Social Studies 45.3/4 (1983): 233-40. Print.

Cahan, Abraham. Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York. Introd. Bernard G. Richards. New York: Dover, 1970. Print.

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Tribeca, NY: Tribeca Books, 2011. Print.

Friedman, Natalie J. “Adultery and the Immigrant Novel.” MELUS 34.3 (2009): 71-91. Print.

Good, Graham. “Notes on the Novella.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. 10.3 (1977): 197-211. Print.

Guttmann, Allen. “Jewish Humor.” The Comic Imagination in American Literature. Ed. Louis D. Rubin Jr. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973. 329-38. Print.

Haenni, Sabine. “Visual and Theatrical Culture, Tenement Fiction, and the Immigrant Subject in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl.” American Literature 71.3 (1999): 493-527. Print.

Harris, Susan K. “Problems of Representation in Turn-of-the-Century Immigration Fiction.” American Realism and the Canon. Ed. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst. Newark, U of Delaware P, 1994. 127-42. Print.

Heine, Heinrich. The Rabbi of Bacherach. Trans. Charles Godfrey Leland. New York: Mondial, 2008. Print.

Hoeller, Hildegard. “‘The Impossible Rosedale’: ‘Race’ and the Reading of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 13 (1994): 14-20. Print.

Howe, Irving and Ruth R. Wisse. Introduction. The Best of Sholom Aleichem. Trans. Julius Butwin, Frances Butwin, Irving Howe, Eleizer Greenberg et al. Ed. Irving How and Ruth R. Wisse. Washington: New Republic Books, 1979. Print.

Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. 1885. Ed. Don L. Cook. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982. Print. Norton Critical Edition Ser.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. “‘The Quintessence of the Jew:’ Polemics of Nationalism and Peoplehood in Turn-of-the-Century Yiddish Fiction.” Multilingual American: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: New York UP, 1998. 103-11. Print.

Marovitz, Sanford E. “‘YEKL’: The Ghetto Realism of Abraham Cahan.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 2.3 (1969): 271-73. Print.

Pinsker, Sanford. The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in Yiddish and American Jewish Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Print.

Richards, Bernard G. “Introduction: Abraham Cahan cast in a new role.” Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York. By Abraham Cahan. New York: Dover, 1970. iii-viii. Print.

Steed, Jason Paul. “Joke-Making Jews/Jokes Making Jews: Humor and Identity in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl.” Journal of the Short Story in English 43 (2004): 45-57. Print.

Taubenfeld, Aviva. “Only an ‘L’”: Linguistic Borders and the Immigrant Author in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl and Yankel der Yankee.” Multilingual American: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: New York UP, 1998. 144-64. Print.

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Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. 1905. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990. Print. Norton Critical Edition Ser.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “‘Shpeaking Plain’ and Writing Foreign: Abraham Cahan’s Yekl.” Poetics Today 22.1 (2001) 41-63. Print.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophocus. 1922. Trans. C.K. Ogden. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003. Print. Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading Ser.

Ziv, Avner. Jewish Humor. 1986. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998. Print.

NOTES

1. This is a joke the author confesses to having heard told at a party. However, it appears also in its rhythm and sequencing to be a variant of a similar (though much lengthier) joke told and explicated in multiple secondary sources (Brandes 233; Pinsker 3) consulted for this paper—a joke, more importantly, that apparently originated in Jewish circles. 2. Given the choice of the word nouvelle in the journal title, Les cahiers de la nouvelle, it is worth pointing out how these differences translate. As Good mentions, Guy de Maupassant used “nouvelle” to distinguish his longer works from his shorter “contes” (198). 3. At the same time, Howells’s focus on “delightful personal attempts” (emphasis mine) does, to his credit, offer some opportunity for a personal, individual voice in dialogue with those stereotypes or preconceptions. 4. In particular, Jäkel the Fool (whose name would have been pronounced identically to ‘Yekl’) from Heine’s 1840 novel The Rabbi of Bacherach. Jäkel’s speech representation “was considered defective German and referred to as mauscheln” (Wirth-Nesher 48). Mauscheln, in this case, translates loosely as mumbling or fiddling. 5. Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman is not without its own ambivalences, which makes Harris’s defense of it somewhat confusing. I am indebted to Martin Schauss here, for pointing out that though the conjurers are some of (if not the) only black characters in Chesnutt’s short stories who consistently defy white oppressors, and who surely serve as connections to an ancestral African home, their position is complicated by their refusal to take sides, and by the fact that they undertake their conjure for economic gain. In at least one instance, for example, the conjure figure discourages a character from attempting to escape slavery, asking him, “‘W’at you wanter be free fer?’… ‘Doan you git ernuff ter eat?’… ‘Doan you git ernuff sleep?’... Does you wuk too ha’d?’” (187). I am indebted likewise to an anonymous reviewer, who has suggested that Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “unhomely” (141) is another, less specifically African-American theoretical frame that works here, connecting as it does diverse immigrant communities, émigrés, and the un- homed more generally. Jake’s tendency to assimilationist values, after all, existed even in his native Russia: he would “often play truant” from Talmudic study in order to attend military parades , and “no lad in town knew so many Russian words” (10). 6. Amongst other differences, the two novels were titled differently. For the Yiddish version, Cahan retained the original title that Howells had nixed, Yankel der Yankee. He also much abbreviated the scene in which the letter writer relates Jake’s father’s death (Taubenfeld 150), and adds an encounter with an African-American grocer that is absent from the English original. 7. Not surprisingly, Cahan’s debt to a Yiddish literary tradition is maybe most explicitly present in the language of this Yiddish introduction—which resembles in its phrasing and syntactical switchbacks the narrative style of so many works of Yiddish folk stories. See, for example, Sholom Aleichem’s “The Clock That Struck Thirteen,” which features the same “I” voice and the

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same linguistic quirks in its opening moments: “That’s the truth. I wasn’t joking. I am telling you a true story of what happened in Kasrilevke, in our own house. I was there” (82). 8. Interestingly, however, though Mr. Rosedale is certainly a caricature of Jewish-ness, he is ultimately also one of the novel’s more human—and humane—characters, one of the few willing to associate with Lily Bart once she descends in class status. But this fact also raises questions: does Rosedale’s decency absolve the novel of charges of anti-Semitism? Given the narrator’s wide-ranging omniscient eye, who is it actually making these anti-Semitic characterizations? Are Rosedale and Yekl’s Jake perhaps more alike than first glances would suggest? For more on the problem of anti-Semitism and race in House of Mirth, see Hildegard Hoeller, who argues that Rosedale “echoes both the crudities and complexities of the anti-Semitism of [Wharton’s] time” (14). 9. Or at least humourless once Gitl and Joey arrive—the fun-loving, fast-talking Jake seems to lose his sense of humour at this point in the novel, though those around him go on making their jokes. 10. Luftgescheften here translates literally to something like “air person,” and refers to a schemer or conniver who finds ways to obtain money fraudulently; schadchen refers to a “matchmaker” (likely in this case an intrusive matchmaker whose matches are flawed; schnorrer translates to “beggar” or “sponger”—suggesting a freeloader, a kind of person who constantly asks for or borrows small items without offering anything in return.

ABSTRACTS

Contrairement aux idées qu’avancent notamment Susan K. Harris et Sabine Haenni, le réalisme littéraire américain est un genre tout à fait approprié pour décrire la vie d’immigrants au tournant du vingtième siècle dans toutes ses subjectivités – parce qu’il recourt à des dialectes qui ne permettent pas de donner accès à l’intériorité des personnages ou parce qu’il s’orientait toujours vers des normes propres aux classes moyennes reléguant les immigrants à la marge. Cet article propose une autre manière de lire la littérature émanant de l’immigration à partir de Yekl, l’histoire du New York Yiddish d’Abraham Cahan. Yekl est lu comme un récit dont la dimension réaliste et le désir d’interpréter la culture yiddish américaine pour un public large se complètent – et se compliquent – car il prend en compte et s’engage dans une réflexion avec les traditions littéraires yiddishs qui ne relèvent pas du réalisme : le conte populaire, les figures populaires comme le schlemiel (le pauvre maladroit) et l’humour que l’on trouve dans les formes verbales, le recours à l’anecdote et à la dérision. La technique narrative qu’emploie Cahan et plus particulièrement son utilisation du dialecte yiddish et de l’humour font plus que de recréer des stéréotypes. La novella tourne ses personnages en ridicule et ce dans le but plus large de célébrer l’identité yiddish et son héritage.

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AUTHORS

BRIAN JANSEN Brian Jansen is a PhD candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. His work has appeared most recently in the journal ESC: English Studies in Canada and the volume Literature, Rhetoric, and Values (CSP, 2012)

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Housebreakers and Peeping Toms: Voyeurism in John Cheever’s Early Suburban Stories

Yair Solan

1 Looking back on his move to the suburbs with his young family in “Moving Out,” an article featured in the July 1960 issue of Esquire, John Cheever claimed that on the night before they left New York City he “jumped, in an exuberance of regret, out of a first- story window” (979).1 If there was one writer whose work would embody the explosive growth of suburbia during the postwar era, it was Cheever—the celebrated “Ovid in Ossining,” as a 1964 Time magazine cover story had proclaimed. And yet, his reminiscence is full of sweeping dismissals of suburban life: “My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split- level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun” (977).

2 While his assiduous chronicling of the suburban cocktail party set effectively cemented Cheever in the public imagination, he had turned to the suburban milieu decades into his career, in the 1950s and 1960s—a crucial period during which, as his daughter Susan Cheever notes, he changed from “a talented, struggling writer” into “an acknowledged, established success” (153). Focusing on this phase of Cheever’s writing—and with an eye on his stories’ position within the shifting trajectory of magazine, where the majority of them were published during these years—this article will devote particular attention to what in his Esquire essay he calls the paradoxical “loss of privacy” in exclusive suburbia by examining his representation of suburban spaces which lack the comparatively liberating anonymity of the city. If this period has been aptly dubbed a significant “transitional moment” in Cheever’s career (Wilhite 218), despite his turn to suburbia these stories intriguingly exhibit a residual urbanism in their repeated emphasis on voyeurism and flânerie. The following discussion, then, uses the term voyeurism in its expansive sense, suggesting the scopophilic gaze’s intrusion into ostensibly private spaces as well as the disclosure of material observed

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from a privileged vantage point often expressed through a detached yet penetrating narrative voice.

3 The contents of the two short story collections that Cheever had published in the 1950s —The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953) and The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (1958), his second and third overall—signal his work’s transition from the city to the suburbs. While The Enormous Radio contains only a single story set largely within a suburb (the rest taking place in New York City or in various vacation resorts), all of the stories of The Housebreaker of Shady Hill are set in the fictional suburban enclave of Shady Hill. Cheever thus frames his Shady Hill collection around a central unifying device, one which has led some critics to refer to the volume as a suburban story cycle —or, as Scott Donaldson labels it, a “coherently constructed story sequence” (“Cheever’s Shady Hill” 133)—the volume itself serving to establish, for better or worse, Cheever’s reputation as the quintessential author of the suburban upper-middle class.

4 This shift in Cheever’s work closely mirrors the growth of suburbia in the immediate postwar era. Between 1947 and 1953, the year the first Shady Hill stories were published in the New Yorker, the overall population of the U.S. increased by 11 percent, whereas the suburban population grew by a whopping 43 percent (Cohen 195). As his Esquire essay glibly demonstrates, Cheever himself was part of this mass migration to the suburbs, the writer and his family having moved in May 1951 from their New York City apartment to Scarborough, New York, in wealthy, suburban Westchester County. In “Moving Out,” Cheever looks back on this middle-class flight from the city: I don’t suppose there was a day, an hour, when the middle class got their marching orders but toward the end of the 1940’s the middle class began to move. It was more of a push than a move and the energy behind the push was the changing economic character of the city. It would all be easier to describe if there had been edicts, proclamations and tables of statistics, but this vast population shift was forced by butcher’s bills, tips, increased rental and tuition costs and demolitions. (977)

5 Cheever’s relocation to the suburbs came of sheer economic necessity, like it did for many.2 This exodus out of the city was not greeted cheerfully: “the sense was that we were being exiled, like so many thousands before us, by invincible economic pressures and sent out to a barren and provincial life where we would get fat, wear ill-fitting clothes and spend our evenings glued to the television set. What else can you do in the suburbs?” (978-79). Nevertheless, the suburbs would provide Cheever with a lasting subject and setting for his fiction, and in 1961 he would permanently move to Ossining, New York. In some respects, “Moving Out” becomes a conversion narrative of sorts, with Cheever ultimately confessing, “The truth is that I’m crazy about the suburbs and I don’t care who knows it” (981).

6 Cheever’s newfound concern with suburbia coincides with the direction of the New Yorker fiction of this postwar period. Launched in 1925, The New Yorker began its life as a humorous, unmistakably urban weekly. The publication of ’s Hiroshima, which took up an entire issue in August 1946, is generally considered the beginning of a fundamental change for The New Yorker, a move away from what James Thurber called the “devil-may-care magazine of the 1920’s” (146) and toward an ethos of “social awareness and responsibility” (Lee 16). The New Yorker’s transformation during the postwar era, however, was just as deeply connected to its increasing interest in the suburban landscape, signifying both the rapid growth of the suburbs and its readers’ participation in this middle-class migration.3 Cheever’s fiction of these years stands as a prime example of the midcentury ‘New Yorker Short Story,’ characterized by its upper-

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middle-class setting, slice-of-life approach, and understated, lightly ironic voice. If his work would come to be seen as a major part of The New Yorker’s emerging suburban aesthetic, rather than simply following a trend, Cheever was in actuality ahead of the curve among its fiction contributors; indeed, as he was steadily turning his attention to the suburbs, his younger acolyte was still publishing Cheever-influenced urban vignettes like “Snowing in Greenwich Village” (1956) in the magazine.4

7 Cheever’s early suburban stories “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Cure” not only illustrate The New Yorker’s gradual development into a publication for newly transplanted suburbanites, but also attest to how Cheever led the charge in the fictional representation of suburbia during a tumultuous period for the magazine. Cheever’s work of this formative phase therefore functions as its own kind of cultural history documenting the influx of the middle class into the suburbs and the codification of the suburban lifestyle while also reflecting suburbia’s formal articulation within the cultural imaginary of mass-market magazine fiction. This demographic shift to the suburbs is particularly evident in the way his alienated characters voyeuristically survey and navigate through the suburban landscape, often carrying along with them the echoes of their expatriation from the city.

Voyeurism and Middle-Class Precarity in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”

8 The title story of The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories, originally published in The New Yorker in 1956, provides a window onto Cheever’s conflicted treatment of suburbia, especially in how its suburban terrain is mediated by the narrative lens of the exiled urbanite at its center. It begins by introducing its protagonist and narrator as an urban émigré formerly from New York City: My name is Johnny Hake. I’m thirty-six years old, stand five feet eleven in my socks, weigh one hundred and forty-two pounds stripped, and am, so to speak, naked at the moment and talking into the dark. I was conceived in the Hotel St. Regis, born in the Presbyterian Hospital, raised on Sutton Place, christened and confirmed in St. Bartholomew’s, and I drilled with the Knickerbocker Greys, played football and baseball in Central Park, learned to chin myself on the framework of East Side apartment-house canopies, and met my wife (Christina Lewis) at one of those big cotillions at the Waldorf. I served four years in the Navy, have four kids now, and live in a banlieue called Shady Hill. We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in heaven, I am as thrilled as I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life. (253)

9 In the story’s opening paragraph, the particulars of Johnny Hake’s life are systematically laid out through corresponding New York locales; Hake’s biography is essentially sketched out by urban geography. The location of these landmarks in Manhattan’s East Side and their rather affluent connotations will come to underscore Hake’s sudden financial difficulties after his migration to the suburbs. Compared to Cheever’s own move out of the city, then, Hake’s is not so much dictated by economic necessity as it is by the lure of the suburbs for new families, suburbia being a great place, as Hake claims, if you “have children to raise” (258), a standard contention which

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Kenneth T. Jackson associates with the fear of the growing racial diversity of cities (289-90).5

10 It has been suggested that the voyeuristic preoccupations of “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” are enacted, or foreshadowed, by the reader encountering Hake’s introduction; as Keith Wilhite notes, “we find ourselves thrust into a confrontational engagement with a man who, at least figuratively speaking, stands before us naked” (223-24). The details of Hake’s life are set out methodically, scientifically: it is not just a portrait of Johnny Hake, but the representation of an entire class. In referring to such bestselling books as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Catherine Jurca observes that popular postwar authors had “adopted quasi-sociological techniques, particularly in fiction dealing with the suburbs,” their work tending to utilize “the statistic tone of social science” to depict and critique suburban life (84-85). Jurca goes on to add that “the situation of ‘serious’ fiction is quite different,” citing Cheever’s work, and principally his Shady Hill collection, as an example of a strand of writing which resists “defining a typical suburbanite,” his protagonists seeming “almost monotonous because each is so glaringly unique” (102 n. 2). Yet as the opening of this story shows, Cheever was not averse to identifying his characters with a specific social class or type, as part of a mass of people, even if they will shed their mundane trappings throughout the course of their respective narratives.

11 Just as “Housebreaker” begins by having its “naked” antihero bare all for the reader, the story’s penchant for voyeurism extends to Hake’s critical assessment of his wife, Christina, who is portrayed still more stereotypically, more tightly bound to the codes and rituals of Shady Hill. In a gesture which serves to expose her as much as his act of “looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks,” Hake presents his wife satirically: Now Christina is the kind of woman who, when she is asked by the alumnae secretary of her college to describe her status, gets dizzy thinking about the variety of her activities and interests. And what, on a given day, stretching a point here and there, does she have to do? Drive me to the train. Have the skis repaired. Book a tennis court. Buy the wine and groceries for the monthly dinner of the Société Gastronomique du Westchester Nord. Look up some definitions in Larousse. Attend a League of Women Voters symposium on sewers. Go to a full-dress lunch for Bobsie Neil’s aunt. Weed the garden. Iron a uniform for the part-time maid. Type two and a half pages of her paper on the early novels of Henry James. Empty the wastebaskets. Help Tabitha prepare the children’s supper. Give Ronnie some batting practice. Put her hair in pin curls. Get the cook. Meet the train. Bathe. Dress. Greet her guests in French at half past seven. Say bon soir at eleven. Lie in my arms until twelve. Eureka! You might say that she is prideful, but I think only that she is a woman enjoying herself in a country that is prosperous and young. (263)

12 As Hake here discloses, Christina’s identity is marked by an excessively routinized schedule which divulges both her trivial habits as well as her mechanical devotion to routine. In Suburbia, an early study of suburban ideology published in 1958, the same year as Cheever’s Shady Hill collection, the political scientist Robert C. Wood maintains that the “use of time in the suburbs” consists of “an implacable array of schedules which seem to testify to the suburbanite’s inability to live as an individual” (6). “There are no longer any options,” Wood explains, “but instead unbreakable patterns for the day, the week, the year, and the generation” (6). This is precisely how Christina’s day- to-day life is structured, according to Hake’s exposé, though the very responsibilities guiding her are deemed frivolous and utterly inconsequential.

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13 With Hake unveiling his wife’s most trifling activities, the story’s derisive treatment of Christina exemplifies how, as one critic has remarked, “Cheever sometimes offers an easy target for feminist criticism” (Kane 112). This is not at all uncharacteristic of the New Yorker fiction of the period; as Mary Corey argues, the magazine’s literary representation of suburban women during this time often disparagingly stressed their “indolence, materialism, and lack of imagination” (175). Yet by the 1950s, Corey notes, The New Yorker would “come to possess a certain cachet” for the upper-middle class, and particularly women, who had by then comprised the greater part of the magazine’s readership (179). Perhaps indicative of female readers’ refusal to identify with their fictional counterparts, this is highly emblematic of what Betty Friedan referred to as the proliferation of the “feminine monster” figure in the mass-circulation magazines of the postwar years (120), Cheever’s almost painfully revealing portrait of Christina Hake conforming to this prevalent stereotype of the era.

14 While Christina is pigeonholed as the conventional suburban housewife in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” Johnny Hake’s acts of transgression allow Cheever to complicate the conception of the “typical suburbanite.” After losing his job at the beginning of the story, Hake decides not to tell his family about his financial woes and, on one desperate night, sneaks into his neighbors’ house—the wealthy Warburtons who, as Cheever writes, “are always spending money, and that’s what you talk about with them” (255)—where he steals Carl Warburton’s wallet. Hake is not caught, and although he proceeds to suffer a crisis of conscience for days afterward, at another house he attempts a second burglary that is quickly aborted. On the way to a third house on a following night, it starts to rain and the deluge triggers an epiphany whereupon Hake heads home and renounces his brief life of crime. Through what at first seems like a tidy contrivance of the plot, Hake subsequently gets his job back and receives an advance on his salary. But even when making restitution, Hake is compelled to repeat his transgressions. In an ironic inverse of his earlier misdeed, he revisits the scene of the crime, returning the money to the Warburtons by breaking into their home once again and secretly dropping off the wallet. Spotted by a policeman as he walks away from the house, Hake masks his offense through the performance of suburban banality, informing him that he is just walking his dog and leaving “whistling merrily in the dark” (269) as the story comes to a close.6

15 If, as Robert Beuka suggests, Cheever highlights “the tenuous class position of his protagonists to examine larger issues facing the American middle class” (70), Johnny Hake’s story is an archetypal Cheever narrative in this regard, Hake’s clandestine impropriety and financial anxieties pointing to his precarious status within Shady Hill. Hake is one of a long line of Cheever characters who act both as participants and voyeuristic observers in the domain of the well-to-do, these protagonists remaining simultaneously a part of and apart from their suburban milieu. In the story, Hake provides a running commentary on this environment and his uncertain place within it, his most extensive musings on Shady Hill curiously appearing just after he commits the theft: Shady Hill, as I say, a banlieue and open to criticism by city planners, adventurers, and lyric poets, but if you work in the city and have children to raise, I can’t think of a better place. My neighbors are rich, it is true, but riches in this case mean leisure, and they use their time wisely. They travel around the world, listen to good music, and given a choice of paper books at an airport, will pick Thucydides, and

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sometimes Aquinas. Urged to build bomb shelters, they plant trees and roses, and their gardens are splendid and bright. (258)

16 Hake’s sunny if resolutely defensive views of Shady Hill arise at a critical moment of transgression. Though Hake states that he “can’t think of a better place” than this banlieue, Shady Hill is just as likely to be rendered in the story as the site of endless backyard barbecues and tedious dinner parties.7 The town is presented as exclusively upper-middle class and typical of a postwar suburbia described by Jackson as “relatively homogeneous socioeconomically” (99), Shady Hill defined by an exclusionary socioeconomic system which offers its residents a deceptive sense of security. Early in the story, Sheila Warburton expresses concern over her husband’s return from a train station near “a terrible slum,” worriedly stating that “he carries thousands of dollars on him, and I’m so afraid he’ll be victimized” (256). Unaware that they will soon be burglarized by one of their own, Shady Hill’s exclusivity leads the Warburtons to erroneously believe that they can safely keep their doors unlocked at night. In accordance with its socioeconomic standing, Beuka asserts that for Cheever, “the suburban landscape [is] a symbolic field inscribed with the markers of social status” (69)—and, indeed, when breaking into the Warburtons’ home, Hake crosses a front hall composed of “black-and-white marble from the old Ritz” (255)—these class markers becoming especially stifling as Hake’s own fortunes begin to dwindle. Hake’s defense of his neighbors and his conflation of their social class with cultural refinement therefore reflects the push-pull dynamic of his relationship with suburbia; he is immersed in the mores of Shady Hill even as he regularly violates them in the narrative.

17 It is not too great a leap from Johnny Hake’s canny observations of Shady Hill society to Cheever’s own acute assessments of suburban life. This is vividly apparent in a suggestive letter Cheever wrote following his move to Westchester: After a year of observation it is astonishing to find how many of the people in this neighborhood are precisely what they appear to be. Of course if you look hard enough—and I do—you can find a drunken woman lying on a terrace, but she never seems to count for much anymore. One warm night last week I walked down these shady streets and saw, through a window, a man in his shirt sleeves rehearsing a business speech to his wife who was knitting. I often long for the windows of New York where foxglove sometimes grow and where women iron in their underwear. I have been riding and it turns out that there are miles and miles of wonderful trail in the neighborhood… (Letters 155)

18 In this account, it is the suburbs’ potential for voyeurism which provides Cheever with an important connection to his years in New York, as he comes to associate the suburban environment with the city in its amenability to this scopophilic gaze.8 This tendency to be voyeuristic is frequently exhibited in Cheever’s early suburban fiction, which features spatial boundaries that are repeatedly trespassed. In “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” Hake not only enters the Warburtons’ house, but sneaks into their bedroom—while its “doors stood open” (257)—to commit his theft. Moreover, another story in the Shady Hill collection, “O Youth and Beauty!” (1953), contains an evocative passage in which Cheever turns away from the central characters and muses upon their surroundings as if strolling through a street in Shady Hill: On Alewives Lane sprinklers continue to play after dark. You can smell the water. The air seems as fragrant as it is dark—it is a delicious element to walk through— and most of the windows on Alewives Lane are open to it. You can see Mr. and Mrs. Bearden, as you pass, looking at their television. Joe Lockwood, the young lawyer

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who lives on the corner, is practicing a speech to the jury before his wife. “I intend to show you,” he says, “that a man of probity, a man whose reputation for honesty and reliability…” He waves his bare arms as he speaks. His wife goes on knitting. (215)

19 The earlier letter’s observations are thus reproduced in this story as it details the private activities seen through the open windows of Alewives Lane; the reader, by way of the omniscient narrator, has become a Peeping Tom. These windows have been willfully left open, just as the front doors are left unlocked in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.” While Cheever does not strictly associate voyeurism with such aspects of suburban terrain, its unique manifestation in his stories of suburbia stems from certain specific socio-historical conditions. As Wilhite argues, the postwar suburban development of the late 1940s and 1950s served to redefine notions of the public and the private, so that in the suburbs of Cheever’s fiction “residents can never quite discern which spaces are truly private spaces” (222). Cheever’s homogeneous Shady Hill is sufficiently exclusive to keep out undesirables, and so wealthy neighbors like the Warburtons can fret about the slum surrounding the train station while still leaving their doors unlatched at night within the limits of this insular suburb. At the same time, genuinely public spaces are effaced within the suburban landscape. Consequently, when Hake is seen walking near the Warburtons’ house once “the last lights in the neighborhood had been put out,” he is greeted by a policeman who asks him, “what are you doing out at this time of night, Mr. Hake?” (269), as if he had broken a local curfew —this housebreaker more susceptible to detection when out in the open in Shady Hill than when creeping into his neighbors’ bedroom.

“The Cure” and the Peeping Tom’s Intrusive Gaze

20 Cheever’s “The Cure”—a major work, if under-examined in comparison to “Housebreaker”—depicts a similarly fragile suburban community whose private spaces are encroached upon. This tale of suburban desperation was published in The New Yorker in 1952, just one year after Cheever’s move to Westchester, and stands as the most markedly suburban in setting among those included in the Enormous Radio collection. The story revolves around a narrator whose wife has recently left him, taking with her their three children. Left alone in his now empty house, he proceeds to chronicle this despondent period and his attempts to “cure” himself—to avoid being “tempted to resume a relationship that had been so miserable” (157)—even as the story’s ending will see him reunited with his wife, the narrator declaring “we’ve been happy ever since” (164) in its ambiguous conclusion.

21 As with his Shady Hill stories, in “The Cure” Cheever constructs a psychological portrait of suburban existence, one which stresses the affective experience of suburbia. Like Christina Hake’s in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” the narrator’s routine is scheduled to the minute, all part of his self-imposed cure: “The first months will be like a cure, I thought, and I scheduled my time with this in mind. I took the eight-ten train into town in the morning and returned on the six-thirty. I knew enough to avoid the empty house in the summer dusk, and I drove directly from the station parking lot to a good restaurant called Orpheo’s” (157). As the narrator seeks refuge in his New York office during the day, the quick snapshots of the story’s unnamed suburb are of its isolated and isolating locales, such as the restaurant he frequents and a drive-in theater: “I’d drink a couple of Martinis and eat a steak. Afterward I’d drive over to the

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Stony-brook Drive-In Theatre and sit through a double feature. All this—the Martinis and the steak and the movie—was intended to induce a kind of anesthesia, and it worked” (157). Suggesting the growing popularity of drive-in theaters across the country, Cheever’s tale reflects this contemporary trend while playing on its dialectical position within the public/private sphere, as drive-ins represented a communal form of leisure entertainment that also guaranteed a level of privacy for consumers.9 Even with the opportunity for such leisure pursuits, the environment described here is positively deadening, its geography rendered indeterminate, its time routinized and overscheduled—all of this contributing to the “anesthesia” of suburban life that the narrator hopes will cure him of this personal trauma.

22 If, like Shady Hill, the suburb of “The Cure” is one in which “most of the front doors were unlocked” (157), the tranquility of the neighborhood turns sinister with a disconcerting quiet in the dead of night. This is abruptly broken when the narrator hears “the Barstow’s dog bark, briefly, as if he had been waked by a nightmare”—the bark itself becoming part of the nighttime routine in the story—but this stops just as suddenly as it began, after which, the narrator notes, “everything was quiet again” (157). As in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” suburban transgression occurs at three in the morning. Reading a book in his living room, the insomniac narrator notices a man watching him from outside his picture window. It is, as the narrator discovers, the neighborhood Peeping Tom, a man “whose intent was to watch me and to violate my privacy” (158). The narrator initially speculates that this Peeping Tom was “probably some cracked old man from the row of shanties by the railroad tracks” (158); again, as in “Housebreaker,” the culprit is assumed not to live among the well-to-do of the town. When hearing of the incident—the first of several—a police officer remarks that “the village, since its incorporation in 1916, had never had such a complaint registered,” speaking, the narrator observes, “as if I were deliberately trying to damage real-estate values” (160). The narrator would later realize, however, that the Peeping Tom is not a crazy old derelict but none other than Herbert Marston, a family man “who lives in the big yellow house on Blenhollow Road”; catching sight of Marston on the train platform looking “frightened and guilty” alongside his wife and daughter, the narrator mercifully decides not to confront him (160).

23 “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” then, may be read as a reworking of “The Cure” from the perspective of the trespasser, as both are concerned with the private spaces of suburbia and the potential for their infiltration. The two stories treat these offenders, these voyeurs, as part of the suburban landscape—even as part of the neighborhood community. For the narrator of “The Cure,” waiting for the possible arrival of the Peeping Tom becomes as much a staple of his nighttime routine as the book he is reading or the dog that is habitually barking: “When I heard the Barstow’s dog bark, I put down my book and watched the picture window to assure myself that the Peeping Tom was not coming or, if he should come, to see him before he saw me” (159). Despite his ominous presence in the story, the Peeping Tom is the member of the suburban community who stands out most prominently for the narrator during this low period, almost a surrogate for his wife; as the narrator states at the beginning, “her departure and his arrival seemed connected” (156). The narrator’s identification of the Peeping Tom shows how such voyeurism can cut both ways, for their roles are immediately reversed once he sees Marston on the train platform. As Cheever demonstrates, the act of trespassing through the permeable public/private borders of suburbia leaves the

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trespasser as vulnerable as the trespassed, this suburban “loss of privacy” that he had diagnosed in “Moving Out” implicating everyone within its bounds.

24 In “The Cure,” the Peeping Tom displays the same behavior suggested by the omniscient narrative voice of Cheever’s “O Youth and Beauty!” which subjects the open windows of Alewives Lane to its voyeuristic gaze. Cheever’s sharp observational sense (as well as its more unnerving incarnation, suburban voyeurism) is thus located at both the stylistic and the narratological level in his work. This motif—not merely voyeurism, but the very act of peeping—appears elsewhere in Cheever’s writing, including one of his most acclaimed New York stories, “The Enormous Radio” (1947). Using the fantastical conceit of a new radio that enables a married couple to overhear the private conversations, peccadillos, and everyday tragedies of fellow tenants in their apartment house, Cheever’s tale traces the wife’s increasing obsession with this radio’s invasive broadcasts. While the story is structured around this concept of a bizarre kind of aural voyeurism, when the husband scolds his spouse for her addiction to the radio’s transmissions he resorts to more familiar terms: “It’s indecent… It’s like looking in windows” (39), he insists, chiding his wife by invoking the figure of the Peeping Tom.10

25 This act of direct and intrusive observation, so imaginatively elicited in “The Enormous Radio,” is irrevocably complicated within the suburban setting. As the revelation of the Peeping Tom’s identity in “The Cure” makes plain, true anonymity is shown by Cheever to be practically impossible in suburbia. And if Johnny Hake is remarkably able to escape discovery as a suburban housebreaker, he is still prone to questioning by the police for walking the streets of Shady Hill at night; the suburbs are scarcely conducive to such urban wanderings. These observational inclinations likewise extend to Hake’s general point of view and function as narrator. As a transplanted New Yorker who never got the city out of his system, Hake tends to scrutinize suburban Shady Hill—its residents, its customs, even his own wife—at a critical distance, his observations characterized by irony and detachment, albeit along with a degree of ambivalent pride.

26 This trenchant, observational narrative voice is not only evident in Cheever’s suburban fiction. “The Enormous Radio” notably begins with a statistical rundown of the exceedingly average Westcotts, its opening distinguished by a pointedly flippant tone: Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. (33)

27 As in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” this is a mock-sociological gesture—in which, yet again, the college alumni bulletin rears its head—one that sardonically outlines an ordinary upper-middle-class American couple. The satirical tenor of its authorial voice recurs throughout the narrative, the transmission of the Westcotts’ radio at one moment described as “a satisfactory burst of Caucasian music—the thump of bare feet in the dust and the rattle of coin jewelry” (35). The Westcotts are, in essence, the Hakes before their move to Shady Hill (they do, after all, aspire to live in Westchester) and Cheever’s tone here would be later echoed in Johnny Hake’s knowing, somewhat tongue-in-cheek narration after his turn to the suburban milieu.

28 If it has been noted that the trespasses of his characters allow Cheever to map out “the equivocal spaces of suburbia’s private geographies” (Wilhite 218), his protagonists’

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voyeurism is also indicative of a strong flâneurish impulse. Indeed, this detached observational mode which pervades Cheever’s short fiction is similar to that of the flâneur, for whom, as Walter Benjamin explains, “the joy of watching prevails over all” (“Paris” 41). Derived from his analysis of Charles Baudelaire and the Paris arcades of the nineteenth century, Benjamin depicts the flâneur as an urban figure “who goes botanizing on the asphalt,” crossing the cityscape with a cold, dispassionate gaze that suggests “the watchfulness of an observer who does not take his eyes off a miscreant” (“Paris” 19, 22). In building on Benjamin’s reflections on the subject, Susan Sontag posits that the observational faculties of the flâneur are marked by both “curiosity” and “detachment” (55), lending the flâneur an air of critical distance—that of “a disengaged and cynical voyeur,” as David Harvey puts it (14). It is this flâneurish gaze which is perceptible in Cheever’s voyeurs and in his aloof but incisive narrative voice.

The Suburban Voyeur as Flâneur

29 Although Cheever’s work has not typically been read in light of Benjamin’s meditations on the flâneur, such a reading further clarifies the lingering urbanism in his dispatches from suburbia and brings out the limits and the distortions of suburban flânerie. Much as Benjamin asserts in his remarks on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) that the urban flâneur “always remains in the middle of the crowd” (“Paris” 27), two stories from the Enormous Radio collection exemplify how Cheever also explicitly associates the urban environment with the phenomenon of the crowd, which is crucially absent in the suburbs. While the characters of his New York stories are not necessarily flâneurs in the Benjaminian sense, they are frequently thrust into busy crowds that alternately appear euphoric and oppressive—an inescapable part of the city’s topography. Cheever calls attention to the chaos of the urban masses in “The Sutton Place Story” (1946), where a father in frantic search for his lost child sees the crowded streets “only in terms of mortal danger,” bleakly observing that “the crowds and the green trees in Central Park looked profane” (74). Conversely, in “O City of Broken Dreams” (1948) an Indiana family visiting New York for the first time experiences the visceral thrill of the city’s streets as “they drifted with the crowd for hours” (45)—the husband having “never seen so many beautiful women, so many pleasant young faces, promising an easy conquest” (44)—before a steep descent into disillusionment.

30 Whereas Cheever defines the city by these ever-present crowds, the terrain of the suburbs is heavily regulated and surveilled, confounding the practice of flânerie while nonetheless stimulating certain voyeuristic proclivities. Johnny Hake’s “leisurely walk through neighborhood gardens and lawns,” Wilhite points out, confirms that “street life in suburbia seems almost nonexistent” (224). Suburban streets designed for car traffic rather than foot traffic are largely deserted, devoid of crowds. It should not be surprising that the flâneur diverts his gaze elsewhere in the suburbs, looking into the private houses comprising the suburban block. But strolling around suburbia, the flâneur is conspicuous as a highly visible figure, especially within such an exclusive, tightly monitored community as Shady Hill. Lacking the anonymity granted Benjamin’s urban flâneur, Cheever’s suburban variant is circumscribed and inevitably corrupted.

31 It is significant that the voyeurs in Cheever’s fiction that most closely resemble flâneurs can also be considered perverse distortions of the flâneur figure. Johnny Hake is both a

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suburban flâneur and a slippery housebreaker. If Hake steals because he is broke and overdrawn at the bank, the act of housebreaking is also an outlet for his flâneurish compulsion—his constant need to keep tabs on, and keep up with, his well-heeled neighbors. Similarly, if more menacingly, Herbert Marston is both a longtime neighborhood resident—part of the social fabric of Shady Hill—and the neighborhood Peeping Tom. Marston represents the dark side of the flâneur as seen from the opposite angle—from the perspective of the story’s narrator, who is the unwilling object of his gaze—the flâneur’s “joy of watching” expressed as an unsettling voyeuristic drive integrated into a suburban landscape lined by oversized, exposed picture windows.

32 The closest Cheever gets to portraying a true flâneur-voyeur is in Neddy Merrill of “The Swimmer” (1964), who sets out to “reach his home by water” (603) and maneuvers through the swimming pools of suburban Bullet Park to arrive at his destination. Still, this seems more a parody of such flâneurish wanderings than the genuine experience. For Merrill, Bullet Park’s streets are its swimming pools, and its crowds are the hung- over throngs of people aimlessly milling about suburban backyards. Characteristically, Cheever describes Merrill as an “explorer” observing “the hospitable customs and traditions of the natives” (604). Approaching suburbia with varying degrees of skepticism, affection, and bemusement, his protagonists in this way situate themselves as outsiders among the suburban “natives.” The liminal position of these characters as simultaneous observers/participants in suburban society, Timothy Aubry argues, is doubled in Cheever’s own ambiguous “narrative presence” (68). The narrative voice that propels these suburban tales is therefore the voice of an informed outsider—of a former city dweller who “can’t think of a better place” than Shady Hill, as Johnny Hake declares, or is “crazy about the suburbs,” as Cheever himself proclaimed, yet one who looks upon suburbia with a cynical urban eye.

33 Accordingly, if Cheever himself has been thought of as something of a suburban spy—as a sly infiltrator who aims to lay bare suburbia for readers—this important aspect of his work and self-image does not just begin with his move to Westchester and is not only related to this specific locale. In a journal entry written in 1948, a few years before Cheever left New York City, he emphasizes the class consciousness inherent in this role: “I was born into no true class, and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack” (Journals 16). Cheever’s vision of himself as a middle-class spy interestingly corresponds to Benjamin’s discussion of the flâneur’s scopophilic gaze. Referring to this figure as “the observer of the marketplace,” Benjamin calls the flâneur “a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers” (“Arcades Project” [M5,6]).11 Cheever’s stories of the suburbs as well as of New York City retain the flâneur’s attention to class and consumerism—from the Westcotts’ radio and “the other appliances that surrounded them” (33) in “The Enormous Radio” to the Warburtons’ conspicuous consumption in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”—even as Benjamin’s flâneur sees marks of consumerism in the public arena of the Paris arcades while Cheever’s voyeurs locate them squarely within the private domestic sphere and its preponderance of class signifiers. As his own efforts to “insinuate” himself into the middle class lead him, he notes, to occasionally take his “disguises too seriously” (Journals 16), this is redolent of Cheever’s at times conflicted position toward class irrespective of setting—a contradictory attitude fuelling both his ambivalent narrative voice and his alienated outsider characters.

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34 If, as Scott Donaldson affirms in his biography of Cheever, the publication of the Shady Hill collection established its author “overnight and always, as a chronicler of suburban life . . . who wrote those funny-sad stories about the suburbs for The New Yorker” (170), the persistence of the flâneur’s voyeuristic gaze in Cheever’s work of these years reflects a particularly urban phenomenon displaced to the suburban environment with often disturbing results. Rather than representing a complete break, then, this suggests the underlying continuity between Cheever’s New York stories and his suburban tales, with the latter still maintaining a decidedly urban sensibility. Peopled by New York City exiles, suburban flâneurs, and exurban commuters, Cheever’s suburbia is hardly disconnected from the city. In its view of the suburbs through a distinctly urban lens, its keen exploration of suburbia by means of the voyeur’s eye, and its wry commentary on the midcentury middle-class experience, Cheever’s fiction epitomizes the transitional nature of a transformative postwar period which saw the suburban banlieue rise in the shadow of the sprawling metropolis.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aubry, Timothy. “John Cheever and the Management of Middlebrow Misery.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (2003): 64-83. Print.

Bailey, Blake. Cheever: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2009. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.

---. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” 1938. Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938-1940. Trans. Harry Zohn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 3-92. Print.

Beuka, Robert. SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Print.

Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99-140. Print.

Cheever, John. “The Country Husband.” 1954. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. 325-46. Print.

---. “The Cure.” 1952. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. 156-64. Print.

---. “The Enormous Radio.” 1947. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. 33-41. Print.

---. The Enormous Radio and Other Stories. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953. Print.

---. “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.” 1956. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. 253-69. Print.

---. The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories. New York: Harper, 1958. Print.

---. The Journals of John Cheever. Ed. Robert Gottlieb. New York: Knopf, 1991. Print.

---. The Letters of John Cheever. Ed. Benjamin Cheever. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Print.

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---. “Moving Out.” 1960. Collected Stories and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 2009. 976-81. Print.

---. “O City of Broken Dreams.” 1948. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. 42-57. Print.

---. “O Youth and Beauty!” 1953. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. 210-18. Print.

---. “The Sutton Place Story.” 1946. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. 65-78. Print.

---. “The Swimmer.” 1964. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. 603-12. Print.

Cheever, Susan. Home Before Dark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Print.

Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage, 2003. Print.

Corey, Mary F. The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.

Donaldson, Scott. “Cheever’s Shady Hill: A Suburban Sequence.” Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 133-50. Print.

---. John Cheever: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1988. Print.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 1963. New York: Norton, 2001. Print.

Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Hersey, John. “Hiroshima”. The New Yorker (31 Aug. 1946). Print.

Howe, Irving. “Realities and Fictions.” Partisan Review 26.1 (1959): 130-36. Print.

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.

Jurca, Catherine. “The Sanctimonious Suburbanite: Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” American Literary History 11.1 (1999): 82-106. Print.

Kane, Richard C. “Earth, Water, and Fire: Elemental Representations of Feminist Force in Stories by John Cheever, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Tobias Wolff.” Journal of the Short Story in English 42 (2004): 111-34. Print.

Lee, Judith Yaross. Defining New Yorker Humor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Print.

Segrave, Kerry. Drive-in Theaters: A History from Their Inception in 1933. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1992. Print.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Print.

Thurber, James. The Years with Ross. 1957. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Print.

Wilhite, Keith. “John Cheever’s Shady Hill, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Suburbs.” Studies in American Fiction 34.2 (2006): 215-39. Print.

Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Simon and the Schuster, 1955. Print.

Wood, Robert C. Suburbia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Print.

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NOTES

1. It is unclear what precipitated Cheever’s fall through a window on Riverview Terrace in 1951, which nearly left him impaled on a sharp iron fence. Despite the way he presents the event in “Moving Out,” Cheever doubted he had fallen or jumped, and later on at his most paranoid he would even suspect that he was pushed by the New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell; see the biographies by Bailey (176) and Donaldson (118). 2. In Crabgrass Frontier, his detailed study of suburban development, Kenneth T. Jackson describes the housing market in the postwar years which, as a result of “mass-production techniques, government financing, high wages, and low interest rates,” made it, as he notes, “quite simply cheaper to buy new housing in the suburbs than it was to reinvest in central city properties or to rent at the market price” (241). 3. During the postwar era, The New Yorker’s readership was comprised more and more of affluent suburbanites, and despite the publication’s name, by 1947 most New Yorker readers were living outside of New York City, many of them in the suburbs (Corey 179). 4. Cheever’s work of this period, however, garnered some hostile reviews belittling his stories’ suburban subject matter and their venue of publication. Most disdainfully, in a 1959 review of the Shady Hill collection published in the Partisan Review, Irving Howe referred to Cheever as a “toothless Thurber” who “connives in the cowardice of contemporary life” (131), disparaging the author’s preoccupation with suburbia while denigrating his talent in comparison to a writer who represents an earlier golden era for the magazine. During these years, The New Yorker itself would come to be derided by some intellectuals as a middlebrow publication catering to a complacent bourgeois class. In an incendiary speech delivered in 1965 with Cheever in attendance, denounced The New Yorker as an instrument of “an uppermiddleclass [looking] for a development of its taste” (qtd. in Bailey 368-69), an assessment inextricable from the postwar demographics of the magazine’s readership. 5. The suggestion of the exclusionary practices in Cheever’s fictional suburban communities— their “white flight” subtext—is subtle but strong; perhaps most memorable is one character’s condemnation of Shady Hill in “The Country Husband” (1954): “So much energy is spent in perpetuating the place—in keeping out undesirables, and so forth—that the only idea of the future anyone has is just more and more commuting trains and more parties” (338). 6. Keith Wilhite, who has written most comprehensively on the ambiguous suburban geography of Shady Hill, relates the ending of “Housebreaker” to an incident that occurred to Cheever in Westchester, when the writer was arrested for vagrancy while walking down the street in his old working clothes—an act which “challenged the sumptuary codes for acceptable behavior” in suburbia (219). 7. Hake’s insider/outsider position has been duly noted by critics. Examining the dialectical nature of Hake’s “tonally ambiguous” voice, Timothy Aubry observes that it “allows him to speak praisingly of his community when he wants, in a convincing enough manner to facilitate his own integration. But it also allows him, even in the moment of praising Shady Hill, to preserve the possibility of ironic detachment … to maintain some degree of individuality under and within the guise of convention” (80). 8. Biographer Blake Bailey remarks that Cheever’s suburban promenades resemble “the nature of fieldwork” (184), his strolls through suburbia acting as fact-finding missions. Yet as this letter shows, these wanderings are also motivated by a strong scopophilic drive. 9. In contrast to the traditional movie theater, during the 1950s the drive-in theater market was booming; in 1952 alone, the year “The Cure” was published, nearly seven hundred drive-in theaters were built in the United States, compared to only sixty-five indoor theaters (Segrave 65). 10. The import of this motif of the Peeping Tom for Cheever is further illustrated by a 1957 journal entry where he recalls “the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not

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seem to have completely escaped,” which Cheever refers to as “the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people’s contentment and vitality” (Journals, 77). Reading the intimately confessional Journals themselves, of course, offers its own kind of voyeuristic experience. 11. As theorized by Benjamin, the flâneur allows for an interrogation of subjectivity, spectacle, and consumerism. If the flâneur has since become a historical figure, Susan Buck-Morss argues that “the perceptive attitude which he embodied saturates modern existence, specifically, the society of mass consumption”; as she explains, “in the flâneur, concretely, we recognize our own consumerist mode of being-in-the-world” (104-05).

ABSTRACTS

Les années 1950 marquent un moment transitoire significatif dans la carrière de John Cheever puisqu’il commence dès lors à s’intéresser à la représentation de la banlieue – une transformation que le magazine The New Yorker, qui publiait la majeure partie de ses textes, avait également opérée à la même période. Ce changement est évident dans des nouvelles comme “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” et “The Cure”, deux textes de « jeunesse » dans ce nouveau champ d’investigation où l’on sent le penchant de l’auteur pour le voyeurisme et la flânerie – tendances qui révèlent une vision conflictuelle de la banlieue et une sensibilité urbaine encore vive. En enquêtant et en naviguant à travers la banlieue, les personnages aliénés de Cheever font souvent écho à leur expatriation de la ville et illustrent les afflux des classes moyennes de la ville vers les banlieues. Le profond désir de flâner que l’on retrouve chez les personnages reflète, comme le montre cet article, un phénomène urbain qui est transféré dans un environnement périphérique – environnement dépourvu du pouvoir de l’anonymat propre à la ville tout en présentant le spectacle relatif à toute consommation.

AUTHORS

YAIR SOLAN Yair Solan is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, film and media studies, histories of spectatorship, and visual culture. His work has been previously published in Studies in American Naturalism.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 66 | Spring 2016