WOMEN'SVOICES: THE LATE DRAFTS OF JAMES JOYCEAND MALCOLM LOWRY Sue Vice University ofsheffield This is an examination of points of comparison between the works of James Joyce and Malcolm Lowry in tenns of their pre-publication revisions to their central female characters: Yvonne in Under the Volcano, Molly Bloom in Uiysses. Do Lowry and Joyce have methods of revision in common? Are these women characters affected by such revisions in similar ways? Do they become 'freer' and more dialogmd, in Mikhail Bakhtin's tenns, or is there a negative connection between their linguistic gender and the author's masculinity, the wielding of a blue pen over a textual b*?' And Wy, how do such pre-publication revisions affect the textual construction of femininity which we md in the published form? Can a case be made for such authorial transvestism actually putting into question accepted gender roles, voices and behaviour patterns? To start with Under the Volcano,in Yvonne's case a drama occurs in the five full drafts which Lowry produced over ten years2 It could be seen as Oedipal: the dnuiken Consul's daughter becomes the alcoholic Consul's wife; Hugh, the daughter's boyfriend, becomes the Consul's half-brother and possibly adulterous lover of Yvonne; and Laruelle looms increasingly larger, ñrst as a hoverer over the Consul's daughter, then as another possible lover of his wife. However, what Yvonne's metamorphosis fkom daughter to wife also shows is, ñrst, how Lowry's pracíice involved progressively casíing off the conventional intnisive narrator and allowing the characters to speak for themselves, so that, as Bakhtin would say: "we have a pluraiity of consciousnesses, with equal rights, each with its own world" (Bakhtin 1984, 104). Second, Yvonne becomes increasingly similar to her own ex-husband, as the daughter's outspokenness is replaced with a wifely version of his own melancholia. The Published version of Yvonne has been critically treated in a similar manner to Molly Bloom: she is both disapproved of and the eterna1 feminine.' Richard Cross calls her "a rather fxigid Gretchen" to Geofúey's Faust (1980, 40), while Ron Binns speaks of her "~thles~sexuality" (1984,57). It is as ifYvonneYsprevious incarnations in draft cannot be forgotten, and are used as evidence of her ill-faith. Binns says, "Until a very late stage in the writing of the novel, chapter 11 was to have ended with Hugh and Yvonne making love under the trees, Yvonne's impressions of rising towards the stars expressive not of death, but of orgasm" (1984,36). This seems somewhat unfair in view of the lengths to which Lowry went to alter Yvonne's rebelliousness and role, and to excise any unwmted feeling for Hugh, even anger, in the ñnal galleys. Binns treats the drafts as ifthey were the text's unconscious, its repository of 'tme' meaning. This inability to forget the textual past is testimony to the fact that traces of the old meanings can still be detected. The mder who, like Binns, has a total recall of the draf€s,becomes like the obsessively jealous person described by Freud (1922), who pays such pathologically close attention to the loved one's unconscious that they see evidence of betrayal which may really be there, but on such a small scale that anyone else would have ignored it. This reader becomes a kind of double for the Consul, who is a pathologically jealous reader of his ex-wife's unconscious - an unconscious which does in fact consist of traces of the earlier versions of the text. The tremors of sexual guilt Yvonne feels in relation to Lamelle and, paríicularly, Hugh are as much due to the fact that in the earlier versions of the novel she did indeed have a reason for guilt, as to the fact that she still has something on her consciente in the published version: by which time we simply cannot tell what is the case. In the final version Yvonne's deaúi, for insiance, does still sound a bit like that other, less terminal kind of death. Indetenninacy, for which Jonathan Quck praises Joyce in his article on Molly Bloom's mother (1990), has replaced overt and over- insistent statement of the following kind fiom draft four of Under the Volcano : "She knew that the horse would hll her. Her bowels were bayoneted with an agony of fear ... Then the horse carne down" (UBC Templeton 6: 11, 17). Lowry's method is similar to Joyce's in being what James Van Dyck Card has called "accretive" (1984, 12); in the final version the writing is not a seamless whole, as it may look, but a complex bundle of layers. (This is particularly significant in the case of Molly's monologue, which gives the impression of free-flowing naturalness, but is, rather, characterised by aríifice and deliberation.) Elaborate tinkering, the incorporation of large extra units of material, the addition of whole series of details late on - the horses in Under the Volcano;Gibraltar in Ulysses - characterise this accretion. However, such a claim conds a significant difíerence Ween the two. Lowry's revisions are synchronic, in that, at such a late stage, they aect the characters' present and the whole text horizontally. Joyce's, in contrast, are diachronic. He tunnels out a history behind a single character, thereby adding a vertical süand of femininity to his text. In the case of Yvonne, various other changes accompany the transformation fiom daughter to wife. As the daughter of Priscilla in draft - the wife who has left the Consul for Los Angeles - Yvonne is angry and outspoken. She weeps, defends her mother, and comments in the following manner on well-loved episodes in Under the Volcano. To the memorable opening scene of the morning after and the Consul's remark, "'A corpse will be transported by express!"' (Lowry 1947, 43), Yvonne responds, '"Cockeyed, in your dress clothes, at 7 o'clock in the morning, howling about a corpse!"' (UBC 17:3, 4). Of the Consul's failure to recail W.J. Turner's volcano poem she says, " 'How can you hope to remember anythmg accurately, drink absolutely rots your memory, any doctor will te11 you"' (UBC 17:3,8). This is quite difíerent from the self-accusation and reticence of the published Yvonne; coming upon the Consul discussing the corpse, she does not rebuke him but feels herself to be "repellent" (Lowry 1947,48). As she turns into a wife, Yvonne's desire, as well as her anger, gets crossed out - literally, in the second draft: "She stumbled and Hugh picked her up and lifted her over a fallen log. Was it her imagination, her own longing, or had he held her tightly to him for a moment before he set her down?" (UBC Templeton 5: 11, 11). The second sentence is deleted by Lowiy. It suits the indeterminate, less realist nature of the published text that Yvonne moves towards the unexpressed and inexpressible. Instead of 'real' events, adultery and betrayal, these things become part of the Consul's consciousness instad. (It is interesting to speculate why the iinñdelity of a wife is so usefid in Under the Volcano and Ulysses in demonstrating indeterminacy, as if that is the one thing husbands and readers really expect to know the truth about. It is as if this is the ultimate in dialogism: everythmg takes place within people's field of vision, so no fact of the matter can be objectively determine4 to the possible chagrin of the patriarchal world.) Intermediate in the various drafts between angry daughter and silent, published wife, is a manied Yvonne who really is adulterous. It is as if the Consul's fantasy of betrayal is written out to see what it would look like, md it does not look very good: "'Hugh! Say nothing can separate us!"' (UBC Templeton 512, 7-S), and so on. Here, the plot catches up with the Consul's internai state and gives him reasons to be paranoid before moving on to its final indeterminacy and making those mnsless certain. Shards of phrases remain in the published version, often halferased, or transposed, and the altered context at a particular moment also alters the sense of the words, in perfect illustration of Bakhtin's theory of how meaning is constructed. Words are never original, contexts always are: "The meaning of a word is determined entirely by its contex*. In fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage" (Volosinov 1986, 79). A particularly striking example of this process is the genesis of a passage in the published Under the Volcano where the Consul wishes Yvonne would come and rescue him "as a daughter ... as he had seen the Indian children lead their fathers" (Lowry 1947, 360). It is one thing to wish this of an undutiful daughter, which Yvonne once was; quite another to wish it of your wife, which she is here. Lowry treats his own work as he does the writing of others, extracting and grafting into a coherent surface. (A similar family shifl occurs in Joyce's last changes to "Penelope", where Molly's memories of motherhood usually alter to refer to Milly, rather than Rudy: "what 1 went through with Rudy nobody would believe" becomes, in the corrections to the Rosenbach manuscript, "what 1 went through with Milly nobody would believe cutting her teeth too" (Card 1984, 92); and "1 had a great breast of rnilk with Rudy" tum into "1 had a great breasi of milk wiíh Milly enough for two" (Card 1984, 109).* The changes in familial relations occur as the Consul imagines them and he converts Yvonne into his faithless wife, Priscilla.