Imaginary Specters, Imagined Listeners: The Undecidable in Graham Swift’s Tomorrow and Mothering Sunday Rebecca Weiger English Studies – Literary Option Bachelor 15 credits Spring Semester 2021 Supervisor: Martin Cathcart Fröden Weiger Abstract This paper aims to investigate the possible connection between specters and silence in Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007) and Mothering Sunday (2016). In both novels, the protagonists predominantly speak in interior monologues, recounting the memories and secrets that haunt them, in what could be construed as an attempt to exorcise the ghosts of their past. The paper’s understanding of specters is based on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), and the idea that specters—as figures that exist in states of in-between—disrupt not only temporality, but what we know to be true. Much like specters, the protagonists vacillate between states, neither speaking nor remaining silent, as they address absent or imagined listeners. This undecidability leaves one to wonder if their ghosts are—or ever can be—truly exorcised. Weiger Table of Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... i 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 2. Theory and Analytical Tools .................................................................................................. 4 2.1. Specters ........................................................................................................................... 4 2.1.1. A Briefer Definition .................................................................................................. 5 2.1.2. Application to Literature .......................................................................................... 5 2.2. Monologues ..................................................................................................................... 8 2.3. Listeners ........................................................................................................................ 10 3. Tomorrow ............................................................................................................................. 12 3.1. Haunted by Father Figures ............................................................................................ 12 3.2. Silently Speaking ........................................................................................................... 15 3.3. Imagined Conversations ................................................................................................ 18 4. Mothering Sunday ................................................................................................................ 21 4.1. Spectral Memories ......................................................................................................... 21 4.2. Untold Stories ................................................................................................................ 25 4.3. Fairytale or Obituary? ................................................................................................... 28 5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 31 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 34 Weiger 1 1. Introduction In Understanding Graham Swift (2003), David Malcolm analyzes a selection of Swift’s earlier works—from The Sweet Shop Owner (1980) to The Light of Day (2003)—in terms of motifs and characters, highlighting the “sameness, within considerable differences, that mark Swift’s novels” (10). One of his key points of interest is the “distinctively Swiftian narration” (110), which Malcolm defines as the “isolated monologue to an absent listener” (110). These monologues are further distinguished by a combination of eloquent language and incomplete utterances (15), which arguably emphasizes the notion that “there are deep silences in some narrators’ lives” (15)—silences that they struggle to break. Malcolm also highlights the lack of chronology in Swift’s novels, as the narrators—who tend to be burdened by their past (16)—move back and forth between the present and the past events they are recounting. Interestingly, although Malcolm underscores the lack of female narrators in this collection of novels (18), little research has since been done on how this characteristically Swiftian style applies to the sole, female voices of Tomorrow (2007) and Mothering Sunday (2016). While there are no spectral sightings in either of these novels, both protagonists can be said to be haunted by their past—at the very least, certain parts of their past that they have always kept secret, or certain people they have lost. Therefore, the haunting only ever occurs inside their minds. This is further emphasized by the narrative styles of the novels; although one is speaking in the first person, and the other in the third, both narratives take the shape of inner monologues that drift back and forth in time, recounting memories and imagining what could have been or might come to pass. Swift himself comments on this narrative choice of his in an interview quoted by Isabelle Roblin, reportedly saying that his voices “aren’t usually spoken voices, they are internal voices” (75)—voices that are meant for “a silent reader, the inner ear of that reader” (75). This raises the question of whether or not such monologues are “sent into a void” (Malcolm 112). Weiger 2 In Tomorrow, the reader is introduced to the first-person narrator Paula Hook, a middle-aged mother of two teenaged twins. During a sleepless night in 1995, Paula reflects on what will come to pass in the morning, when her husband will finally tell the children that— due to infertility—he is not their biological father. In an inner monologue primarily addressed to her sleeping children, Paula returns to various parts of her and her husband’s past, revisiting family deaths and her secret affair with another man, in an attempt to construct a narrative of how the twins came to be. The novel pays great attention to the idea of fatherhood and lineage, which is emphasized by the various father figures that haunt Paula’s memories, including the unknown sperm donor whom Paula refers to as a ghost in need of exorcising (Swift 205). Ironically, though the novel is titled Tomorrow, the morning never actually arrives, as the story ends before the twins wake up. Instead, the reader is left only with the possibilities of what is to come—and the question of whether or not Paula will actually exorcise the ghosts of her past in a vocal confession. The story of Mothering Sunday is mediated through Jane Fairchild, who—at the age of ninety-eight—looks back on her journey from maid to successful writer, exploring her past in a monologue without a specified addressee. In a series of flashbacks, she returns to Mothering Sunday of 1924: the day of her last rendezvous with Paul Sheringham—the heir to a neighboring estate—and, also, the day of his tragic death. While the novel revolves heavily around the way Jane transcends her class status on this last day of their seven-year-long affair, there is also a significant focus on history—in particular, the impact of the First World War. The novel can therefore be said to be haunted in more than one sense: by the aftermath of the Great War, which has deeply impacted Jane’s local community; by the sudden death of Paul, which leaves this day forever imprinted on her mind; and by the state of being either childless or motherless on Mothering Sunday. While Tomorrow’s narrator mainly imagines what might come to pass in the future, Jane consistently imagines what could have been, conjuring scenes Weiger 3 that she knows never actually occurred. This, in combination with the way she refers to herself as a ghost, arguably lends a spectral quality to her memories—a quality that is only enhanced by the underlying sentiment that Jane is now near the end of her life. While I intend to analyze these novels separately, I am interested in exploring them both in terms of imaginary specters, interior monologues, and the ways in which the narratees can be seen as spectral. My analysis of the spectral will—much like the majority of my secondary sources—be based on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), while the notions of silent narrators and absent listeners, as introduced by Malcolm, will be further discussed with the help of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (2002) and a variety of scholarly articles. I am primarily interested in the undecidability of the spectral—that is, as Colin Davis phrases it, how the specter is “neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (53)—and how this is mirrored in the undecidability of the silent narratives. In other words, the protagonists are neither speaking nor silent, and their listeners can arguably—much like a specter—be interpreted as imagined presences. Weiger 4 2. Theory and Analytical Tools 2.1. Specters Derrida’s Specters of Marx is centered around his discussion of hauntology, a term that refers to the idea that elements from the past may always return. This is exemplified by the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s play, as its stage directions reflect its ability to come back more than once: “’Enter the ghost, exit