Literature and the Writer

LITERATURE AND THE WRITER

Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature

Edited by David Bevan

LITERATURE AND THE WRITER Edited by Michael J. Meyer

AMSTERDAM

- NEW YORK,

NY 2004

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of " I S 0 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence". ISBN : 90-420-1653-1 (Bound) @Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam Printed in The Netherlands

- New York,

NY 2004

CONTENTS

Introduction Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”: The Conundra of Writing and Editing Watt Mark Byron Decapitation, Castration and Creativity in Elena Garro’s Andamos huyendo Lola [We Are Fleeing Lola] Marketta Laurila Unauthoring the Text Laura Kathleen Reeck The Novel Construction of the Writer: Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors in The Golden Notebook Marjorie Worthington Memory, Memoir, and Fictions in the Autobiographics of Kim Chernin Connie Griffin

vii

1

19

43

59

79

Stephen King’s Writers: The Critical Politics of Literary Quality in Misery and The Dark Half Michael J. Meyer

97

Whose Story Is It?: Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies and the Voice of Self-Invention Mary Catanzaro

119

“Only Half Here”: Don DeLillo’s Image of the Writer in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction David Clippinger

135

vi

Contents

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig: Faulkner’s Disdain for the Reader Gene C. Fant, Jr.

155

Woolf and Welty, Readers and Writers, Writing and Unwriting Reine Dugas Bouton

175

Writing the Writer: The Question of Authorship in the Novels of Martin Amis Magdalena Ma
czyn´ska

191

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing: “Realities that arise from the craft itself ” Lawrence Stanley

209

A Narrative of Ethical Proportions: History, Memory, and Writing in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions Laurie Edson

227

About the Authors

243

INTRODUCTION Good writing teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good oldfashioned jealousy—. “I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand”—but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing—of being flattened in fact—is part of every writer’s necessary foundation. (146)

In the above excerpt from On Writing, Stephen King suggests that there are certain qualities that define competent writers and that such traits are not only recognizable but are emotionally powerful, moving readers to admire the craftsmanship of such wordsmiths, as well as to wish they could emulate them and produce similar prose masterpieces. When this current volume was first conceived, my initial idea was that the essays would shed light on several dimensions of the authorial craft. It would examine not only writers’ choice of vocabulary, but also their deliberate selection of grammatical constructions and word order and their seamless weaving together of plots and imagery. It would also draw attention to how the writing process impacts the development of characters and the formulation of thematic strands in fiction. Given these rather limited expectations, the wide variety of proposals surprised me. They included studies of classic American texts by Faulkner and Hemingway, autobiographical re-invention of self in the works of Samuel Beckett and the importance of so-called “literary” quality to the writers depicted in Stephen King’s The Dark Half and Misery. An analysis of the writer/narrators in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions represents developing nations while a study of the French authors Djaídani and Smaíl depicts how a writer’s ethnicity/ minority status affects both his personal philosophy and his writing technique. In addition, some essays examine whether the fictional authorial characters created by writers are self-referential while still others dissect autobiographical non-fiction to determine how an author perceives the composing process. Besides the variety of authors represented, what was most impressive about the proposals was the wide range of subject matter discussed. Since the call for

viii

Introduction

papers allowed for very creative and individualistic approaches, popular fiction as well as modern classics were represented; traditional writers were examined, and contrasts were established with those who preferred to follow experimental trends. Modernists were set against postmodernists, absurdists vs. realists, minority ethnicities vs. majority cultures, and dominant genders appeared in contrast to subordinated ones. The range of essays submitted demonstrated clearly the complexities of the writing process evident not only in different genres but in different time frames and in varied cultural milieus as well. Clearly, the writing profession provides an unending dilemma that deserves to be explored in more depth: we need to determine how authorial voices confuse while simultaneously elucidating their audience, how texts are constructed by authors and yet deconstructed by the very words they choose to include, how silence functions as inaudible yet audible discourse; and how authorial self-concept shapes not only itself but is also echoed in the fictional characters/writers who appear in the texts. As readers examine the essays in this collection, they will see that some essayists predict a dire future for the art of writing while still others suggest that some writers harbor disdain for an uneducated and unreceptive reading public. This latter argument suggests that the failure of the written word to communicate is due not to the failure of the composition itself but rather to the deficiencies in its audience, individuals who can no longer decipher messages because the complexities of the text bewilder and confound them rather than challenge them to move toward understanding. However, it is my belief that, quite to the contrary, none of the essays presented here will confound readers and that the authors have carefully considered their audience and avoided not only literary jargon but also convoluted and wordy prose constructions. A final aspect of this volume is its analysis of how a variety of cultural, economic, and personal factors influence the writing process. Some studies document how individuals such as Paul Cezanne and Virginia Woolf had a significant impact on the writing styles of Ernest Hemingway and Eudora Welty. Other studies focus on how dominant cultures create uneasy silence and develop repressed authors who are reluctant to speak out for fear of retribution or ridicule. Still others discuss commercialization of the art in Don DeLillo and Martin Amis. As King notes, the goal of all writers should be to “write what you like and then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex and work” (161). Moreover, and most importantly, King reminds his audience that frequent reading creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing and provides a growing knowledge of “what has been done and what hasn”t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what lies there dying (or dead) on the page.” (150) Certainly, the authors under consideration in this volume have followed King’s dictums. Consequently, the authors/personas in their works seem keenly

Introduction

ix

aware that the more well-read they are, the less likely it is that they will make fools of themselves with their pens or their word processors. May those who read these essays similarly benefit from work designed to help them examine the complexities of setting words on paper to express the most intimate personal thoughts and feelings about life. Michael J. Meyer DePaul University 2004

This page intentionally left blank

BECKETT’S “TENTH RATE XENIUM”: THE CONUNDRA OF WRITING AND EDITING WATT MARK BYRON

On reading and re-reading Samuel Beckett’s complex novel Watt (first published in 1953), several literary and philosophical conundra begin to dominate its interpretive surface. The narrative is composed in the voice of an unreliable narrator whose identity is not readily disclosed, who later contradicts his own, earlier statements, and who leaves an obscure, truncated manuscript for a patient editor to recover and re-assemble. The uneven surface structure and fragmentary form of the story and of the text—graphically demonstrated in the Addenda fragments that conclude the novel—are compounded by the circularity and contradictions to be found in the plot structure. Such issues of writing and narrating are common enough in the history of the novel and have become defining features of metafiction and postmodernist fiction. Yet the unusual circumstances of the text’s production defy any simple explanation by means of its literary mode. Watt was composed from the time of Beckett’s flight from the Gestapo following the fall of Paris in 1941 and during his prolonged displacement in the south of France. It was his final novel in English for many years and immediately preceded the aptly named “siege in the room” during which he wrote (in French) his prose trilogy and En Attendant Godot, the texts that saw fame thrust upon him. That Watt should reveal pressures of narrating and writing at such a time in Beckett’s life, and at such a point in his oeuvré, is perhaps readily understandable. Yet in its many complexities, this novel demonstrates more than a set of now-settled prose conventions. It indicates, through oblique reference and in its patterns of construction, the notion of a looming, unruly archive, in which multiple narrative choices were made available, alternative plot structures were explored and abandoned, and where narrators and characters appeared in earlier manifestations. This formal innovation in Watt is evident upon each page: its history as an unresolved set of fictional, imaginary, and real manuscripts (the latter catalogued and archived at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin) is written into the text. The narrative and textual puzzles are records of the text’s physical and virtual composition and transmission. Provisionality, fragmentation, and the non sequitur are not evidence of authorial or narrative equivocation, but are eminently suitable choices for a work precariously composed and tenuously transmitted to publication, and are the means by which this textual history is scrupulously recorded. This essay will document

2

Mark Byron some of these features, and will demonstrate how they vigorously question the very notions of authorship, narrating, and editing, and the status of the completed or completable literary object. I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding. —Samuel Beckett to James Knowlson, 27 October 19891

Samuel Beckett’s aesthetics of impoverishment developed over a long lifetime of composition (or perhaps more in keeping with his vision, a lifetime of decomposition). This notion of indigence, of taking away, is evident in his earliest work. The eponymous anti-hero of Murphy—Beckett’s first novel published in 1938—expends a great deal of effort in an attempt to enter the dark zone of his mind and to relinquish any concrete relationship with the world. Despite his aspirations, that world crowds into the novel and carries it, and Murphy himself, along to their respectively tragicomic ends. Beckett’s first major publication, the long poem Whoroscope of 1930, develops an imagery of material abasement and earthy humor alongside the lofty philosophical preoccupations of the philosopher Descartes. Yet Beckett is perhaps more famous for his middle and later works: monologues and tableaux uttered by figures attempting to navigate and understand their diminished worlds. The prose Trilogy of the early 1950s (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) and the dramas (beginning with Waiting for Godot and continuing for nearly four decades), as well as the spare, vivid late prose, all explore the anguished relation between the story and its teller. These works do away with baroque narrative and imagery and get down to exploring the bare bones of literary expression. Beckett’s complex novel Watt sits at a crucial juncture in his creative output. He began composing Watt in Paris whilst working for the French Resistance. He continued writing in his flight from the Gestapo following the fall of Paris in 1941 and during his prolonged displacement in the south of France for the duration of World War II. It was his final novel in English for many years, and it immediately preceded his self-proclaimed “siege in the room,” during which he wrote (in French) his prose Trilogy and En Attendant Godot, the texts that saw fame thrust upon him. The narrative of Watt is composed in the voice of an unreliable narrator whose identity is not readily disclosed, who later contradicts

1 Qtd. in Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 352.

Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”

3

his own earlier statements, and who leaves an obscure, truncated manuscript for a patient editor to recover and re-assemble. The uneven surface structure and fragmentary form of the story and of the text—most graphically demonstrated in the Addenda fragments that conclude the novel—are compounded by the circularity of the text and contradictions to be found in the plot structure. It is perhaps readily understandable that Watt should reveal pressures of narrating and writing at such a time in Beckett’s life and at such a point in his oeuvré. Yet the disquieted critical response to this novel suggests that its form is not merely the product of historical circumstance and authorial privation. That is, the contradictions and equivocations in narrating Watt’s tale are not simply fictional counterparts to Beckett’s very real difficulties in writing the novel. Instead, they suggest a critical stage in Beckett’s narrative vision and the processes of literary production that is perhaps yet to be fully understood. In a letter to his friend George Reavey, dated May 14, 1947, Beckett attributed the rifts in the text material to the composition process: “It is an unsatisfactory work, written in dribs and drabs, first on the run, then of an evening after the clod-hopping, during the occupation, but it has its place in the series, as will perhaps appear in time.” 2 Beckett’s assessment contains both the problem of the text and its solution. The incomplete, disordered narrative, the prevarications of its central character towards the nature of reality and truth, and the opacity with which events are recorded, have led critics to read Watt as a parable of the limits of rationality, a demented application of the Cartesian reduction, or as a way of coping with the difficulties of war, occupation, and displacement. These readings bear upon the thematic substance and historical context of the novel in illuminating ways, but are, in a sense, secondary to its central project. For Watt—as Beckett wrote of Joyce’s Work in Progress—“is not about something; it is that something itself.” 3 This essay does not aim to assert merely the unity of form and content in Watt, but rather to explore how the composition of the text is the actual subject of the narrative, perhaps on several planes at once: that is, to read Watt as fiction interrogating its textual state.

I The immediate circumstances of the text’s composition, though complex, need to be stated briefly here. Beckett had moved permanently to Paris in 1938, following years of restless movement between Dublin, London, Germany, and Paris. In 2

Qtd. in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978; London: Vintage, 1990), 386–387. 3 “Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett, et al., Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929; London: Faber, 1972), 14.

4

Mark Byron

the build up to war over the following year, Beckett returned to Ireland several times. He also traveled in north-western France to visit friends such as Alfred and Marie Péron, where he wrote, in French, the unpublished essay “Les Deux Besoins” (“The Two Needs”).4 Around this time he also assisted James Joyce with the final pages of Work in Progress, which was to be published as Finnegans Wake.5 Beckett’s turn to the French language was complemented by his solidarity with the nation: he returned to Paris from a trip to Ireland on September 3, 1939, immediately following the Allied declaration of war on Germany.6 Beckett began composing Watt in Paris shortly after Joyce’s death in 1941. He composed in six large stationer’s notebooks, now housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. As is well known, at this time Beckett was an active member of the French Resistance cell code-named Gloria HMS: “His assignment was a lethal composite of what he called ‘boy-scout stuff’: collecting, collating, coding and passing along to Allied headquarters in London information on German troop movements.” 7 Although little can be verified concerning Beckett’s daily life from this period, it seems as though composition of the first two notebooks took place between various Resistance tasks and when the motivation to write existed. A two-month silence in the third manuscript notebook has been attributed to the final flurry of activity in Beckett’s Resistance unit before it was infiltrated and betrayed, followed by five weeks of continual composition before Beckett was forced to go underground and eventually flee Paris.8 He was smuggled into Vichy and then into unoccupied France in late September 1942, and composed the remainder of the notebooks in the town of Roussillon in the Vaucluse between October 1942 and April 1945. Following the conclusion of the war and a stint working for the Irish Red Cross at Saint Lô in Normandy, Beckett made several attempts to have his manuscript published. He mailed a manuscript of the text from Ireland on May 25 to his former publishers at Routledge in London. T. M. Ragg wrote a peremptory rejection on June 6: Both Herbert Read and myself have read WATT, and both of us I am afraid have very mixed feelings about it and considerable bewilderment. To be quite frank, I am afraid it is too wild and unintelligible for the most part to stand any chance of successful publication over here at the present time, and that being so, we cannot see our way to allocating any of our very limited supply of paper to its production.

4 Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 303. 5 Bair, 301–315. 6 Bair, 318–319. 7 Sighle Kennedy, “‘Astride of the Grave and a Difficult Birth’: Samuel Beckett’s Watt Struggles to Life,” Dalhousie French Studies 42 (1998): 116. 8 Kennedy, 139.

Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”

5

I am sorry about this, and sorry indeed that we cannot feel the same whole-hearted enthusiasm for WATT as we did for MURPHY, but there it is!9

The typescript passed through the hands of four literary agents and many editors of major publishing houses before its eventual publication in Paris in 1953.9a By this time Beckett had published Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951), En attendant Godot (1952), and L’Innommable (July 1953), all with the Parisian firm Les Editions de Minuit. According to his biographer James Knowlson, the striking blue and white covers of Beckett’s French texts caught the eye of Richard Seaver, an American passing by the publisher’s storefront at 7 rue BernardPalissy in 1952. Seaver was associated with a young expatriate group in Paris who published the English-language journal Merlin. He wrote to Beckett asking to see the unpublished novel (after Jérôme Lindon, proprietor of Minuit, had told him of its existence) and was presented with the manuscript in “a black imitation-leather binding.” 10 Watt was published by Olympia Press on August 31, 1953, in a first printing of 1125 copies. Initially, the aim was to publish the text under the Editions Merlin imprint, in homage to and in imitation of the expatriate private presses of the inter-war period in Paris (such as Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, publishers of Ulysses). But the Merlin group needed a French gérant or manager under French law. Maurice Girodias—the son of Jack Kahane, the proprietor of Obelisk Press that published Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade, and excerpts from Finnegans Wake agreed to publish Watt as the first “Collection Merlin” publication under his—Olympia Press imprint, along with Miller’s Plexus, Sade’s Justine and La philosophie dans le boudoir, and some translations of Apollinaire.11 Beckett’s limited control over the printing process and the inexperience of his first publishers produced a text containing numerous errors. Since the printer did not have a decent command of English, and “with the history of Joyce’s Ulysses in mind, Beckett must have feared the consequences of using a French printer to print a lengthy and difficult English text.” 12 The results were 9

Qtd. in Knowlson, 342. Beckett’s literary agents during this period were: James Greene of Curtis Brown, Richard P. Watt, Denis Devlin (who became an Irish diplomat in the United States), and George Reavey. In 1945 and 1946 alone, Watt circulated between the publishing houses of Nicholson and Watson (August 1945), Chatto and Windus (April 1946), Methuen (June), and Secker and Warburg (September). An expression of interest came from Hamish Hamilton, through George Reavey, in the summer of 1947. Since Hamilton was eager for further publications in English, and Beckett had by this time turned decisively to French, there would have been a commercial loss on Watt and thus no deal was struck (Cronin 371). 10 Richard Seaver, ed., I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1976), xv; qtd. in Knowlson, 395. 11 Cronin, 429. 12 Knowlson, 396. 9a

6

Mark Byron

made worse by the dark and blotchy typeface and the lurid magenta cover: “His own copy (number 85 of the ordinary edition) shows that he found over eighty spelling and typographical errors, and that, on page 19, an entire sentence had been omitted.” 13 The British Calder and American Grove editions subsequent to the Olympia Press edition each corrected certain (different) errors and retained others. To date, there is yet to be a fully collated and corrected edition of Watt.

II Watt interrogates its own status as a literary work. It does not signify the “end of the novel,” the inauguration of a new aesthetic program or school, or a final, triumphant resistance to reading. Instead, it is a work of deep exile that embodies themes and practices of abandonment and suspension, and calls into question the assumptions of its own presence. Perhaps the clearest signals of this inflected composition can be seen in the uneven surface structure of the text: logical inconsistencies, narrative aporias, footnotes, musical scores, lists, ambiguous narrative voices and editorial presences, and the notorious Addenda (a collection of fragments that conclude the text). These irregularities are part of the narrative substance and are relatively self-contained. Intentional infelicities in the text have often been ascribed to the narrating voice, but it is not certain, for example, that the narrating voice is responsible for the inclusion of the musical scores. The aporias in the “MS” towards the novel’s conclusion are reported by a kind of reticent editorial voice, who indicates the tale’s status as a transcribed manuscript—at one point this voice indicates, parenthetically, a “(Hiatus in MS).” 14 In addition, several interruptions to the block of print on the page are actual omissions and errors in the text. These different spatial variations are quite separate textual effects with distinct implications for a reading of the text. The larger narrative structure plays an intermediate role between the details of variants, aporias, scores and footnotes in Watt, and its potential or possible meaning as a “whole.” The ostensible story is the tale of Watt, a “downtrodden university man” (23). Watt travels to the place of his future employment, the house of Knott (Part I). He enters his first year of service and discovers his obliviousness towards people and events in the house (Part II). He falls into an even greater state of ignorance during his second year of employment, punctuated by memories of events and tales recounted at great length (Part III). Finally, he returns from the house to the railway, and then to “the end of the line” (244) (Part IV). This terminus appears to be the institution framing Part III, 13

Knowlson, 396. Samuel Beckett, Watt (1953; New York: Grove, 1959), 238. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition unless otherwise indicated and are incorporated in the text. 14

Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”

7

where the tale is told to the scribe Sam. This schema is complicated by the narrator’s claim at the opening of Part IV: “As Watt told the beginning of his story, not first, but second, so not fourth, but third, now he told its end” (215). The four parts actually follow a rough chronological order, but the narrator, revealed to be Sam in Part III, is given the tale in this chiasmic order. The meeting between Sam and Watt in Part III occurs last chronologically, whilst its nested tale (Watt’s second year of employment) keeps the larger sense of linearity intact. This presence of a narrator within the framing action of Part III places the world of Watt’s tale within a diaphanous and intransigent past tense. This signals a change from its conventional narrative past framing the first two parts. The transcription by the narrator works at odds with the reading experience: Sam’s notation of Watt’s tale is rearranged into a rough chronology, just as he transposes the deranged language of Watt (who inverts words, syllables, and even letters in his telling his tale to Sam). One example of narrative digression (among many) will demonstrate the vexing problem of reading and unraveling such a reticulated text. Part III contains the story, told by Arthur, the new servant, to Mr. Graves, the gardener, of his friend Ernest Louit’s dissertation, The Mathematical Intuition of the Visicelts, and particularly Louit’s defense of the expenses defrayed in the course of his (fabulated) research. It transpires that the manuscript containing months of fieldwork was left “in the gentlemen’s cloakroom of Ennis railway station,” but that Louit “was now exerting himself to the utmost, and indeed he feared greatly beyond his strength, with a view to recuperating his MS, which, qua MS, could not be of the smallest value to any person other than himself and, eventually, humanity” (173). The mention of this “MS” does not produce any spatial interruption to the text, partly because the manuscript itself never existed for Louit. Yet it anticipates the “MS” of Sam’s transcription mentioned in the latter stages of Part IV. The narrative layering of this episode is extensive: Louit reports to a university committee and later narrates the tale to his friend Arthur, who tells Mr. Graves one day in the garden of Knott’s house. Watt overhears Arthur’s rendition and reports this tale to his scribe Sam, who leaves a manuscript for a fictional editor to establish and print. These layers are all recorded in Beckett’s manuscript and transcribed into the typescript (and the tale’s author changes from Watt in the manuscript to Arthur in the process). This episode is reproduced in a fair typescript for the French printer employed by the Olympia Press, who produces a faulty text upon which the American (Grove) and British (Calder) editions are based. The narrative introduction of a manuscript in such a nested episode has the effect of cutting across all narrative and textual orders, binding them in a complex system of textual contingency. Anterior to the tale being told is its telling. Several voices and scribal hands populate Watt, where several personae may narrate, report, converse, and meditate

8

Mark Byron

within one text. Yet the situation is more subtle than that: the text comes into being through the scribal efforts of several entities, both fictional and actual. Several amateurs of assemblage compose the text in concert with the system of reference in the text itself. The existence of multiple consciousness in Watt has moved Thomas Cousineau to rethink a persistent interpretation: that the text lampoons the efforts of rationality in an absurd world. Instead, “the true center of Watt, of which the concern with rationality is merely the visible trace, is the suspicion, apparent in all of Beckett’s fiction, that humans are inhabited by a false consciousness.” 15 This bad faith is only part of the tale: Watt is imbued with a bad editorial faith as well. The emergence of Sam as the scribal figure in Part III captures the instability of the narrating subject in Watt. It is impossible that Sam or Watt know of the events of Part I prior to Watt’s arrival on the scene—unless Sam is the recording observer who deceptively uses the conventional omniscient voice. Sam later presents himself as Watt’s “biographer.” This lapse in verisimilitude is a symptom, for Cousineau, of “Beckett’s conception of stories as merely furtive, temporizing instruments for dealing with a situation which is at once unbearable and inescapable.” 16 This view of fiction assumes a transparent or ghostly editing presence, but the text takes this one crucial step further, containing numerous examples of tangible editorial influence or interference. For example, the editing presence in the text fails to clean up the manuscript received by Sam; or, if indeed Sam is the unlikely editor of his own text, he has failed to tidy the lacunae and hiatuses in the midst of material he cannot remember (particularly towards the end of Part IV, when Watt is unconscious). As a consequence, no promises are made regarding the actuality of the fictional world of Watt, except through an editorial interdiction that provides a narrator and the power to write. Watt abounds with examples of narrative slippage. In addition to the footnotes and the Addenda, both of which suggest an editorial presence looming behind the narrator, the narrative voice occasionally breaks from omniscience into the first-person singular voice. For example, in the opening episode, the narrator explicitly announces his presence: “He made use, with reference to Watt, of an expression that we shall not record” (17, italics added). Elsewhere a question is put in the correct impersonal voice: “One wonders sometimes where Watt thought he was. In a culture-park?” (77). Direct injunctions to the reader also arise throughout the text and complement the role of the footnotes: “This was indeed a merciful coincidence, was it not, that at the moment of Watt’s losing sight of the ground-floor, he lost interest in it also” (113). At this 15

Thomas J. Cousineau, “Watt: Language as Interdiction and Consolation,” in The Beckett Studies Reader, ed. S. E. Gontarski (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1993), 64. 16 Cousineau, 71.

Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”

9

point in the text the reader does not yet know that Sam may be telling the story, but the first-person narrator is evident: But he assured me at the time, when he began to spin his yarn, that he would tell all, and then again, some years later, when he had spun his yarn, that he had told all. And as I believed him then and then again, so I continued to believe him, long after the yarn was spun, and Watt gone. (125)

If Sam (or the voice to be called Sam in Part III of Watt) is to be invested with any authorial veracity, then the events of Watt’s journey to and from the house of Knott, and his term of residence there, are bracketed into the non-proximate past. Watt is “gone” (the simple past) and “had spun his yarn” (the pluperfect) over a period of “some years” to this narrating persona. Yet, even if this voice is to be believed, and the complicated narrative temporality made consistent, the reader is warned that either Watt or Sam may have omitted or introduced material: “It is so difficult, with a long story like the story that Watt told, even when one is most careful to note down all at the time, in one’s little notebook, not to leave out some of the things that were told, and not to foist in other things that were never told, never never told at all” (126). Watt and Sam are subject to the vicissitudes of narrating and recording, and of accidental omissions and insertions as well. The narrative episodes cut across textual dimensions to act out a scenario similar to the transmission history of the text itself. They point forward and backward in time to the composition and redaction of the manuscripts, not only to narrate the events of text realization, but to signify the way these text dimensions are bound together. Sam is the narrating (and scribing) subjectivity and, at the same time, is a subject of his discourse in Part III. He turns the process of writing itself into narrative material when he exclaims, “How hideous is the semicolon” (158), immediately after using a semicolon in the previous sentence. Elsewhere Sam’s transcription of Watt’s tale invokes the materiality of writing and patterns of speech. He explains the different inversions in Watt’s speech: From this it will perhaps be suspected: that the inversion affected, not the order of the sentences, but that of the words only; that the inversion was imperfect; that ellipse was frequent; that euphony was a preoccupation; that spontaneity was perhaps not absent; that there was perhaps more than a reversal of discourse; that the thought was perhaps inverted. (164)

10

Mark Byron

Both speech and writing are heavily mediated within the text. Watt inverts his speech and places obstacles or codes between the items of speech and his meaning. Sam describes these symptoms of aphasia in explicitly rhetorical terms— “spontaneity, euphony, imperfect inversion, ellipses.” 17 Sam frames his own patterns of speech and writing in figures of anaphora and isocolon within a passage itself concerned with rhetorical usage. Linguistic precision and tangled inconsistency perform an unlikely foxtrot for Sam’s narrative, much like the way he and Watt perambulate together in the grounds of their institution in Part III. At points where Watt alters his mode of narration, Sam confesses to having missed swathes of the story, yet he defends his oracle and the accuracy of his telling: “Watt’s sense of chronology was strong, in a way, and his dislike of battology was very strong” (165). The reader is left to decide whether this constitutes an ironic joke at Sam’s expense, laying at his feet the manifold textual inaccuracies, or whether this is his joke on the reader, who, having to wade through numerous applications of battology—“needless and tiresome repetition in speaking or writing” (OED)—is left to ponder their redundant but intentional inclusion by Sam. Like the musical scores, unreliable narrators, and manuscript lacunae, the footnotes in Watt also continue the preoccupation with the text’s own history and acknowledge the history of its literary form. The footnote draws attention to composition, compilation and editing processes by dividing the text space. Several footnotes perform as explanatory or reference guides (such as those on pages 82, 153, 183, and 211). Others are comic adjuncts to the narrative, undermining the truth-value of the story being told. Two such examples concern the genealogy of the Lynch family. The first reports on Kate Lynch’s status as a “bleeder”: “Haemophilia is, like enlargement of the prostate, an exclusively male disorder. But not in this work” (102). The second follows soon after, concerning the sum of ages in the Lynch family: “The figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore doubly erroneous” (104). As a result, the ostensible function of the footnote collapses with these statements. They qualify the prose of the text, but only to establish a different order of truth to that of the regular text space. The editing persona is the likeliest author of these poker-faced footnotes, whilst the explanatory footnotes found elsewhere seem to imply Sam’s authorship. Thus the comedy arises not simply through flat contradiction, but through the dissonance of at least two voices speaking in different registers about different orders of truth. Rather than simply impelling the reader to trace genealogies of authorship or to consider the reliability of certain kinds of knowledge, the footnotes alert the reader to multiple phases of composition.

17 Hugh Culik, “The Place of Watt in Beckett’s Development,” Modern Fiction Studies 29.1 (1983): 67.

Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”

11

In sum, these spatial irregularities all contribute to the text’s faultlines. They work directly or indirectly with the changing status of the narrative voice (the omniscient narrator, Sam, or the editing persona) and its scribal performance (the conventional narrative, transcribed speech, or a corrupt manuscript). These elements, ostensibly operating within the borders of fiction, actually disturb those borders. The form and meaning of events are thus clouded beyond measure or description; and therefore Watt’s incoherent experience at Knott’s house inspires his catalogues and permutations, before finally having him abandon his efforts and leave the house no better informed than when he came. Yet Watt is compelled to narrate his encrypted story to Sam. He preserves and conveys the full oddity of his experience by virtue of his methods of narration. One might be tempted to read Watt’s renewed drive to construct meaning as the mimicry of the reading experience and as a parallel process to Sam’s scribal task. Sam’s transcription is also an interpretation of Watt’s story, and his narrative voice goes as far as to explain the difficulties of assembling such disparate material into a coherent narrative. The editing persona faces a similar, if less arduous task, and leaves evidence in parenthetic comments and in footnotes. The turn from meaning, evident in several aspects of the text, is not any simple refusal of meaning, but a turn from teleology to the process of meaningproduction. This turn is not a mystification but an expansion of the text, made possible through the submerged presence of earlier stages of the narrative. Watt’s hermeneutic tangle is a reconsideration of the function of the literary work and a critical, productive examination of aesthetic meaning. But neither Sam nor the editing persona function transparently. In Part II, the transcriber of Watt’s tale (not yet known to be Sam) suspects, regarding certain events, “that one is sometimes tempted to wonder, with reference to two or even three incidents related by Watt as separate and distinct, if they are not in reality the same incident, variously interpreted” (78). The entire fabric of Watt’s tale is thus open to internal repetition; but if it is “variously interpreted” by Sam or the editor, then the transcription and redaction of Watt’s tale are not above suspicion. An aporetic sink looms on the one hand, and the diminishing value of repetition looms on the other. Yet the liminal presence of Beckett’s earlier manuscript material and its periodic submergence in Watt should indicate that occulted repetitions of narrative episodes can and do occur between the archive and the text. This is particularly true of the Addenda section that concludes the text, a section to be considered below. Watt’s confusion may be that of a character caught in a text-complex not yet adequately defined or imagined. Equally, the process of seriality (evident in several episodes throughout the text) prompts the reader to reconsider, along with Watt, the effects of repetition and modulation on perception and cognition. There is one sense in which Watt seems to begin to understand the process of diminished knowledge and uncertain perception during his tenure in Knott’s

12

Mark Byron

house. His master appears before him on any number of occasions, but Knott’s visage is elusive enough to escape all description, or worse, to encompass an impossible variety of description (145–147, 199–213). Knott is a distant, almost transcendental figure, and of the few definite things known about him are his two needs: “one, not to need, and, two, a witness to his not needing” (202–203). Knott is a kind of anti-aesthetic pole against which Watt can assert his own precarious identity. Knott is an anterior presence to the notion of the artist and he engenders the artist’s persona. He even has his own forebear called Quin in the manuscripts, a persona who engages in his own abortive quest for knowledge. An analogous figure in the text of Watt is the receding figure seen from the wicket at the railway station in Part IV (225–228). Watt’s eyes tell him the figure approaches, but in fact it never arrives and eventually vanishes. On the surface, this short episode might relate to other instances in which Watt’s perceptions fail him. Yet the approaching/receding figure might also be thought of as an emblem for the text process, in which earlier personae recede and submerge and give way to their fully-realized forms, but who are not quite erased from the eventual narrative. That is, such anterior figures exist at the text’s faultlines, demarcating its composition history in the narrative present. As Watt learns to avoid asking the wrong kinds of questions, the archaic personae of the text (and the manuscripts) withdraw to its perimeters to allow Watt, Sam, the editor, and the reader to navigate a text without the legislating author-function of the classic text.

III Several features of the text estrange the story from its simple telling: the structure of the narrative, its division between the reportage of Watt’s words and the mediation of Sam’s notes, the presence of a seemingly independent narrator, and the strong presence of at least one editor. Yet the text of Watt is suspended in a way anterior to all of these matters. Watt signals in its structures a profound questioning of its status as a literary work and as a novel. In this way, it embodies a radically different kind of text than previously imagined. Watt is often placed within a prose tradition that seeks to unsettle literary conventions by means of the text’s appearance. (Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake are other texts within this tradition.) Yet this text functions at a more basic level; it actually situates itself anterior to the idea of the novel as a stable text assemblage. Watt is a suspension of literary assumptions, and is a considered appraisal of the question embedded in its own title: what is the text to be, and thus, to do? That question may be considered, if not answered, by digging beneath the text’s architecture, and by considering the way its archive may inform the text material and the process of reading.

Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”

13

Beckett’s manuscript notebooks and the typescript contain large portions of the published text, but also contain vast tracts of earlier material subsequently and thoroughly reworked and submerged. This layering of text material signals a shift of focus within the text’s ostensible narrative in several ways. Several loose sheets inserted into the first notebook trace out the foundational paradox: an attempt to combine the positive act of composition with the imperatives to regress and to discompose the assumptions of aesthetic work. Far from halting at an impasse, these notes anticipate Watt’s own aesthetic interrogations, particularly the episode of the painting in Erskine’s room (128–130). The earlier notebooks see emergent narrators and characters pose philosophical questions; later, however, these experiments develop into an interrogation of the grounds of literary production in the notebooks and in the published text. Equally, the shift from meditative thought to physical description in the manuscripts sees a relatively unobtrusive narrative voice replaced by a narrating “we” fully engaged in the action. This narrator then embarks on a number of asides and tableaux, charged with wit and intertextual reference, and largely concerned with the vexed process of literary composition. The complex relations between archive and text in this case might be set out under three general principles. Firstly, the typescript demonstrates how various themes and narrative events in the final text were generated from sometimes quite different beginnings and how this process creates a wider aesthetic and hermeneutic appreciation of the text. The notions of exile and suspension in particular are illustrated more literally in the manuscripts than in Watt, and suggest ways these themes might be read in the text. Secondly, the archive material shows that the typical charges held against Watt—its narrative incoherence, incompletion, and inconsistencies—might be refigured to exhibit a more productive model of the text. The text material is more thoughtfully developed than its commentators often assume. The difficulties under which the text was composed are evident in the physical constitution of the notebooks and typescript, but these difficulties make for a distinctly different kind of text rather than simply a sloppy or incomplete one. Thirdly, the archive material illustrates how the extended and complex meditation on the status and constitution of the artwork is reflected in the way completion and integrity are made problematic in the text. These relations between archive and text reach gnomic and tantalizing heights in the Addenda, the concluding section of Watt. These “fragments” perform an efficient task of coding earlier moments of the text’s composition, as a kind of internal archive, offering the reader an enlarged text field rather than obscurity and doubt. Watt does not finish with a conventional narrative endpoint—even the circularity of Finnegans Wake is conventional in this way. The novel “finishes” with the Addenda, notes compiled (and cursorily footnoted) by the editorial voice for the delectation of the long-suffering reader. Within the text of Watt,

14

Mark Byron

the narrative remains unfinished from the respective viewpoints of Sam, the narrator, and the editorial persona. But whether or not the novel is seen to be finished as a text will determine what kind of production it is understood to be. Critics have expressed deep ambivalence towards the Addenda and the apparent stalling of the narrative toward the novel’s end. Instead of transposing an illfitting scheme of aesthetic completion (or of fragmentary innovation) onto the material, it may be better understood by allowing its archive the role indicated by the published text and particularly the Addenda. The text material, including the manuscripts and typescript, are part of a text process, an assemblage towards the realization of the text by author, reader, and critic. Several Addenda fragments, particularly those concerned with portraiture, point to a submerged meditation on composition and authorship. Knott’s music room—with its piano, bust of Buxtehude, and ravanastron that “hung, on the wall, like a plover” (71)—initially served as the Quin family’s dining room in Beckett’s manuscripts. Portraits of Quin’s father and mother (Alexander, and Leda, née Swan) occupy the dining room walls, and vestiges of these dynastic monuments are present in the Addenda. The reader is informed, cryptically, that Quin pater is painted by “Art Conn O’Connery, called Black Velvet O’Connery, a product of the great Chinnery-Slattery tradition” (247): a “tradition” of two exiled Irish painters with little aesthetic common ground. The portrait itself survives as the “second painting in Erskine’s room,” graphically described later in the Addenda, featuring (save for the sheet of music placed on his lap) a naked and remarkably dirty man at the piano, striking a chord (250–251). In the manuscripts, the painting has the bust of Buxtehude resting on its face beneath the piano, beside which is the ravanastron and its bow. This irreverent joke is absent from the published text, or more accurately, is submerged in it. The manuscript episode of Alexander Quin’s portrait is important as an emblem of this archiving process: the ekphrasis of the painting is separated in time and context from Knott’s piano in Watt, but the manuscript combines themes of written composition (Alexander Quin’s treatise on the ravanastron), musicianship, and painting. Quin mater—“her married life one long drawsheet” (247)—is painted by Matthew David McGilligan, the “Master of the Leopardstown Half-Lengths” (247). Matthew McGilligan is the subject of a lengthy, baroque episode in the manuscripts. The episode contains an early draft of Dum Spiro’s ecclesiastical question posed in Part I of Watt. McGilligan’s dissertation, the “Mus Eventratus McGilligani,” also foreshadows Ernest Louit’s dissertation in Part III of Watt. The manuscript episode constitutes a portrait of the indigent artist, who, seeking spiritual succor in the Catholic Church, is transported into a state of aesthetic illumination when exposed to the magnificence of Rome. McGilligan is roused into sensual appreciation of art when he discovers a painting by “Gerald of the Nights” in the Galleria Doria Pamphili, depicting a girl in her nightdress catching

Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”

15

a flea by candlelight. Even this moment of exultation collapses when the reader realizes that the painting is Giuseppe Crespi’s The Scullery Maid, erroneously attributed, and which actually resides in the Galleria Uffizi in Florence. The irony and self-deprecation is compounded when the episode breaks off abruptly, only to reveal its composition by an even more destitute writer. This figure sinks into an extended lament of the artist’s lot, sprinkled with surreal conversations, memories, philosophic meditation, and witty encyclopedic reference (and perhaps providing the blueprint for several of Beckett’s future narrators). The treatment of painting in the Addenda is complemented further by the presence of music and its notation. The presence of music demonstrates the complex historical contingencies of composition and the way these can be archived in the published text. For example, the visually striking threne that appears in Part I (32–33) raises complex questions of interpretation and of the physical distribution of the text. It is known that the lyrics of the threne18 were the last words Beckett composed, on August 16, 1942, before a two-month hiatus during which his Resistance group had been betrayed.19 The threne is sung by a “mixed choir” (32) and is heard by Watt as he lies in the ditch on his way from the railway-station to Knott’s house (although it actually stems from an entirely different episode in the manuscript material). A rough system of musical time is provided with the lyrics, which are themselves divided into four parts. The notes are not given any pitch value, and thus a footnote asks: “What, it may be enquired, was the music of this threne? What at least, it may be demanded, did the soprano sing?” (32) The penultimate item in the Addenda provides the answer for the patient reader: “Threne heard by Watt in ditch on way from station. The soprano sang:” (254). This note is followed by the soprano line itself, depending on the edition of the text. No music appears at all in the galley proofs, and varies between other editions: The appearance of the music in the Addenda is itself tortuous, some editions (Olympia, Grove and Italian) presenting the complete sentence of introduction with the music; others (Calder, Swedish and Spanish) retaining the sentence but omitting the music; yet others (Minuit and German) omitting both; and the Norwegian translation retaining both but “correcting” mistakes of key and time-signature.20

18

The lyrics are simply the wording of 52.285714 (i.e. fifty-two and twosevenths), the number of weeks in a leap year to six decimal places. This calculation is significant with regard to the manuscript episode from which it derives—a debate over literary merit between the narrator and Arsene, enumerating the number of weeks available for a literary text to make the best-seller list during a leap year. 19 Knowlson, 43–44; Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), 349. 20 Chris Ackerley, “Fatigue and Disgust: The Addenda to Watt,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 2 (1993): 186.

16

Mark Byron

It makes some sense to read the threne and its musical time, on the one hand, and the Addenda score, on the other, as items separated by the time of their composition: this historical fact is reflected in their spatial separation in the published text. Even so, the link is made between these disparate items by a footnote, an editorial apparatus residing within the frame of the fictional work. Although the reader does not need to compile these elements and appraise the resultant musical work, the theme of tenuous aesthetic integrity is imparted in a (fictional) musical composition. Such questions as “who might have scored the music?” and “by what means did they obtain knowledge of the melody?” recede before the notion of a text visibly and precariously assembled on several planes at once. Another significant instance of musical scoring in Watt concerns the “descant heard by Watt on way to station (IV)” that appears on the previous Addenda page (253). Like the threne, this piece of music also derives from a vastly different manuscript episode. Indeed, its first recital in the manuscript marks an interruption to the narrator’s hallucinatory wanderings, and instigates an extended comic interlude concerning the role of music and literature, and society’s neglect of its artistic practitioners. This manuscript “episode,” or series of fragments, is distilled into a single entry in the Addenda, where the four voice parts are set out in rough time, but without scale or pitch. The reader is provided with the lyrics and told, simply, of Watt’s radically exilic and ecstatic state. The soprano’s lyrics confirm this: “With all our heart breathe head awhile darkly apart the air exile of ended smile of ending care darkly awhile the exile air” (253). In each of these examples, it is clear that Beckett’s composition process transforms and submerges the roles of artistic media and instruments. This archiving mechanism is made all the more appropriate when artistic production is at once the ostensible theme and activity: it is a moment of art appraising itself. A second category of Addenda items do not entail distilled and submerged references, but issue composition instructions and aides-mémoires: “Watt learned to accept etc.” (248), “Note that Arsene’s declaration gradually came back to Watt” (248), and “change all the names” (253). The first two fragments derive from the final page of the fifth manuscript notebook, and “were chosen for enigmatic reasons to become part of the Addenda.” 21 These fragments perform two subtle but important functions. They situate the Addenda as a compositional hinge, illustrating the way archive and text are mutually constitutive, but they also join the various levels of narration with the act of composition. The narrating and editing personae indulge in scribal disclosures at various points throughout the manuscripts and the text, yet these Addenda fragments extend to the author-function itself: composition is both an historical fact and a fictional dimension of the tale. The text asserts an agency simply not reducible to

21

Ackerley, 180.

Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”

17

its author, to the conditions of its composition and transmission, or to its audience. The condition of displacement that suffuses the narrative (and its composition) presents a foundational challenge to its text status. This can be realized in a reading process that is able to identify the radical challenge to the possibility of literary production. These interrogations of text status and unity address questions of literary authority of foremost concern to the critical appraisal of modernism. As Michael Groden asks: Is the author always engaged in the “creative process” or only up to a point, after that point becoming more a revizer or editor? Are we concerned with an isolated human being who conceives and writes a work, or the social being who, willingly or reluctantly, collaborates with others (manuscript editor, copyeditor, printers, proofreaders) to achieve a public text? Can an author, or any of these individuals, be seen as an autonomous, unified subject isolated from other forces (social, economic, historical, psychological)?22

Whilst these questions might have been posed for rhetorical effect, it is clear that a suspicion regarding the stable categories of author, editor, and even the reader as a passive consumer of texts is justified in this case. The challenge to classic text structure in Watt entails a critical appraisal of the status of the literary work and its motivating forms of authority.

Conclusion If it is possible or desirable to consider Watt an “experimental” or “protopostmodern” novel, it embodies much more than an exploration of now-settled prose conventions. It indicates, through oblique reference and in its patterns of construction, the notion of a looming, unruly archive, in which multiple narrative choices were made available, alternative plot structures were explored and abandoned, and where narrators and characters appeared in earlier manifestations. This formal breakthrough in Watt is evident upon each page: its history as an unresolved set of fictional, imaginary, and real manuscripts. The structures of contingency, fragmentation, and the non sequitur are not evidence of authorial or narrative equivocation, but are eminently suitable choices for a work composed in conditions of extreme duress and published following a precarious life in manuscript. The novel’s structures are the means by which this 22 Michael Groden, “Contemporary Textual and Literary Theory,” in George Bornstein, ed., Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991), 264.

18

Mark Byron

textual history is scrupulously recorded. This essay has attempted to document some of these features and to demonstrate how they vigorously question notions of authorship, narrating, and editing, and the status of the completed or completable literary object. But what about the quotation contained in the title of this essay, Beckett’s “tenth rate xenium”? This exotic word functions an emblem of contingent interplay between stages of the text’s composition, and of the various narrative and editorial personae attempting to give it coherent shape. The word appears towards the end of Part II, as Watt meditates on the phenomenon of Knott’s abode: Yes, nothing changed, in Mr Knott’s establishment, because nothing remained, and nothing came or went, because all was a coming and a going. Watt seemed highly pleased with this tenth rate xenia. Spoken as he spoke it, back to front, it had a certain air, it is true. (131–132)

The Grove edition retains the word “xenia” from the Olympia edition: according to the OED the term xenia denotes “the influence of a pollen genotype on the maternal tissue or endosperm of the fruit.” It is an arboreal term, fittingly applied to Watt’s speech—spoken “back to front,” even here in Part II before the reader is aware of Sam the scribe. This image captures the genetic processes at work in the transmission of the text, and the genetic relationship between various parts of the narrative. The word is altered to “xenium” in the Calder edition of Watt, in compliance with Beckett’s explicit instructions recorded in his copy of the Olympia edition (now housed in the International Beckett Foundation Archive at the University of Reading Library). The OED defines a xenium as “a gift for a guest or stranger,” capturing the intimacy and estrangement between Watt and Sam (again, at a point before Sam is explicitly present), and also between the various narrative voices and subjects, their writers, and their readers and auditors. The profoundly contingent relations between phases of the text’s transmission, and the way a reader absorbs the various voices, situates Watt as both xenium and xenia: a gift bearing the traces of its lineage and ancestry, given by a host of voices, publishers and writers to a host of readers, each of whom cannot help but partially occupy the others’ space.

DECAPITATION, CASTRATION AND CREATIVITY IN ELENA GARRO’S ANDAMOS HUYENDO LOLA [WE ARE FLEEING LOLA] MARKETTA LAURILA In Andamos huyendo Lola [We Are Fleeing Lola], the Mexican writer Elena Garro examines the process of writing and the consequences of authorship for the female writer. By creating a discourse of silence, characterized by omission, marginal perspectives, ambiguity, displacement and troping, Garro narratively represents the silence to which her writer-protagonist is condemned. Through this “silent,” hidden discourse, her authorial personna, Lelinca, challenges the hegemony of the ubiquitous, unidentified male persecutors/censors who appear as “heads,” “invisible bodies,” or government representatives. Just as Garro displaces her authorial persona onto her writer-protagonist, Lelinca displaces her own authorial voice onto a cat, Lola, a frog, and male narrators in order to tell her story while appearing to submit to injuctions to silence. As she does so, she reappropriates silence and passivity, the model of femininity in Mexican thought, to develop a femino-centric text in which the creative “I” is both silent and expressive.

In Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, Debra A. Castillo distinguishes between silencing, a condition imposed from outside, and silence freely chosen.1 She further suggests the latter can take two forms: using silence as a weapon or breaking silence with hypocrisy (Castillo, 38–39). The interplay between silencing and silence, as explained by Castillo, characterize Elena Garro’s life and work. After being imprisoned for her activism on behalf of the Indian peasants in Chihuahua and Morelos, taunted by the press, rejected by the left for allegedly betraying the leaders of a planned 1968 coup, and barred from publishing houses that were controlled by her powerful exhusband Octavio Paz, Garro left Mexico for the United States in 1971. She

1 Debra Castillo, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 37. All subsequent references to this source will be given in the text with the author’s last name and the page number of the reference.

20

Marketta Laurila

moved on to Spain, where her Mexican passport was confiscated, and finally settled in France.2 These events had a profound affect on Garro’s literary career, her attitude toward authorship, and the creation of the writer/artist protagonists of the works published after a thirteen year hiatus. Garro initially, however, remained silent in response to personal and political persecution, to misrepresentations of her words and actions, to the limitations of her broken health and to the demands of single parenting. Castillo admonishes, As a political strategy, however, to embrace silence is clearly of limited value. Silence alone cannot provide an adequate basis for either a theory of literature or concrete political action. Eventually, the woman must break silence and write, negotiating the tricky domains of the said and the unsaid, the words written down, as Lispector would have it, smudging the page, and the words left, for whatever reason, between the lines (42).

Following a similar imperative, Garro again wrote and published; she wrote of loneliness, loss, fear and persecution while denouncing the silencing of the female authorial voice and the sado-masochistic underpinnings of male–female relationships. Garro’s protagonists, as the author herself, suffer the negative consequences of female authorship and other creative activity. In these novels, Garro implicitly denounces the hypocrisy of the Latin American leftist intellectual who takes upon himself the social, political and economic privileges of the previous aristocratic elite and who represses the female narrative voice even as he claims to express alternate (more real) realities than those of official discourse. While Garro’s protagonists decry male control of authorship, and their own forced silence, they reclaim their own right to author-ity as they create a different reality, a magical reality of their own making or a new meaning for the reality created by male writers.3 To address the problems confronting the female author/creative artist, Garro creates an alternate discourse characterized by omission, marginal perspectives, ambiguity, displacement and troping. Through this discourse, Garro and her protagonists appropriate silence as they appear to submit to injunctions to silence, with respect to their narrative voice, while at the same time telling the 2 I am indebted to Michèle Muncy for this information and other biographical data on Elena Garro. See the interview with Elena Garro and the chronology that Muncy derived from several conversations with the writer. Michèle Muncy, “The Author Speaks …” in A Different Reality: Studies on the Work of Elena Garro, edited by Anita K. Stoll (Lewisburg, London and Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1990). 3 The collection of critical essays on Garro edited by Anita K. Stoll appropriately bears the title, A Different Reality: Studies on the Work of Elena Garro (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990).

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

21

story of the silencing of the female writer. Garro’s protagonists, who represent her authorial persona, repeatedly encounter verbal, written or symbolic injunctions to silence, are often coerced into silence, and, in some cases, are permanently silenced through murder. The reader must assume an active role in decoding Garro’s silent discourse, reading between the lines to uncover the textual basis of the violence against the female protagonists and their apparently unmotivated passivity. Delia Galván and Michele Muncy have discussed the passivity of Garro’s female protagonists and the different tone of the narratives of Garro’s literary production following the hiatus.4 Galván states that the tenderness, joy and charm that characterized Garro’s earlier period are scarce in her later works and suggests that the passivity of the female protagonists is maddening to male critics unable or unwilling to read the silence in the texts.5 The playfulness associated with creativity in Garro’s earlier work gives way to a sense of fear of and ambivalence toward authorship in these later narratives. In addition, Garro’s use of ambiguous endings, characteristic of her alternate discourse, leaves the reader to wonder about the real fate of the protagonist-authors, who may have escaped, may have been murdered, or have committed suicide. The tragic or near tragic destiny of all of the protagonists emphasize the danger of creativity and explain the protagonists’ understandable ambivalence in the face of these consequences. In Andamos huyendo Lola [We Are Fleeing Lola],6 Garro examines the process of writing and the consequences of authorship for the female writer and other marginalized groups. By means of her discourse of silence, she narratively represents the silence to which Lelinca is condemned while at the same time obliquely describing the terror this female writer-protagonist experiences as a result of her attempt to usurp the (male) authorial voice. The majority of the stories in this collection document the flight of Lelincaa and her daughter 4 Delia Galván, “Las heroínas de Elena Garro,” La Palabra y el Hombre: Revista de la Universidad Veracruzana 65 (1988): 144–153. See note 1 for citation for Muncy’s article. A fifteen year period of silence characterizes Garro’s literary production. While some critics divide Garro’s work into two periods (1958–1964 and 1979 onward), others such as Rhina Toruño-Castañeda, believe that Garro never stopped writing although she did stop publishing. Toruño-Casteñeda explains that Garro was not able to publish because of censorship from two centers of power: the government (because of her alleged participation in a plot against the government and her outspoken support for the peasants) and her ex-husband Octavio Paz and his group of supporters. Rhina ToruñoCastañeda, “Protesta contra la opresión: categories medulares en la obra narrativa y dramática de Elena Garro,” Deslinde: Revista de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UANL 11, no. 35–36 (1992): 93–95. 5 Muncy, 148. 6 Elena Garro, Andamos huyendo Lola, (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1980). All subsequent references in the text are to this edition. Page numbers are given in parentheses. All translations are my own since there is no published translation.

22

Marketta Laurila

Lucía, along with Lola and Petrouchka to New York, Canada and Spain as they are followed, intimidated, and perhaps even murdered by vaguely identified persecutors, whose motives are never explicitly revealed. Although apparently a collection of separate stories, this work has a complex structure in which each story individually and the collection as a whole aids the reader in deciphering the mystery behind the protagonists’ identities and the reason for their current plight. While the protagonist, Lelinca, appears to have submitted to injunctions to silence, she has created a discourse through which the creative “I” is both silent and expressive. The collection has a Chinese box structure in which the stories fit one into the other. Each story is self-sufficient, but the meaning of the entire collection and the “true” fate of the protagonists can only be deciphered within the context of the entire collection. Hence Garro has erased the division between narrative (or novel) and short story; the collection is a narrative, yet it is not. Similarly, Garro dispenses with linearity by means of the story within a story structure mentioned above. The meaning of the text is not revealed diachronically at the end of the collection, but rather synchronically through clues within the embedded stories as well as the relationship between each of them and the framing stories. Only by deciphering clues within the stories “Andamos huyendo Lola,” “La corona de Fredegunda” [Fredegunda’s Crown], “Las cabezas bien pensantes” [Heads Who Think Well], “Debo olvidar …” [I Must Forget], and “Las cuatros moscas” [The Four Flies] 7 does the reader learn about the true fate of Lelinca, Lucía, Lola and Petrouchka. By displacing her creative persona to other characters, Lelinca is able to maintain silence while at the same time obliquely tell her story about the terror of creativity and the persecution she suffers because of her writing. In “El mentiroso” [The Liar] and “La dama de la turquesa” [The Lady of the Turquoise], Garro and the writer-protagonist, Lelinca, examine issues of imagination and creativity, in discussing the punishment a boy receives for telling stories/lies in the former and by delineating the mishaps of a woman/artist whose story/gem is so closely tied to her identity that she becomes the gem in the latter. The protagonist, Lelinca, is apparently absent from these stories, which are metaphors for her own creative “I.” In “El niño perdido” [The Lost Boy] and “La primera vez que yo me vi” [The First Time I saw Myself], Lelinca appears in the stories, but her creative persona or “I” is displaced on to a boy and a Mexican frog, respectively, who tell Lelinca’s story as they tell their own. In “Debo olvidar …” [I Must Forget], an unnamed male writer appears to assume the narrative voice, but in reality he incorporates or “hides” Lelinca’s diary in his own his first person, male narrative. 7 The same four protagonists are the central characters in these five stories that will be analyzed in detail in this study. In support of the main premise of this study, references will be made to the other stories in which they play a marginal role or are absent.

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

23

Her diary, which provides the most important clues to her fate, is hidden in Garro’s narrative within the male writer’s diary. “Las cabezas bien pensantes” [Heads Who Think Well], positioned at the center of the collection (story six of ten), offers the reader the clearest explanation for the apparently unmotivated persecution of Lelinca and Lucía as well as that of the female protagonists of Garro’s subsequent narratives. In this essay-story, Garro addresses more explicitly than elsewhere in the collection the problems facing the female writer. Only in this story-essay does Lelinca narrate in first person as she explains to Lola why they must flee. Her explanation has the form of a treatise on female creativity in patriarchal societies in which the “cabezas bien pensantes” have exclusive right to the “gaze.” However, even in this narrative in which Lelinca tells her story in her own voice, she dissociates from the events and displaces her creative persona to Lola. Lola is now the one who is pursued, persecuted, and abused for her creative activity rather than Lelinca. While defending Lola and other strong, intelligent, and creative women, Lelinca subtly suggests that female creativity is dangerous by simply changing the punctuation in the statement that gives the collection its title. She shifts between “Andábamos huyendo Lola” and “Andamos huyendo, Lola”: “we” are both fleeing with and from Lola. Lelinca expresses the danger of female creativity/authorship through silence, through the (creative) omission of punctuation. While the statement is first introduced in the title story, it is further developed in “Las cabezas bien pensantes.” In an ironic use of silence, Garro leads the reader to believe that Lola, who escaped from a gas chamber, and Petrouchka, an unemployed vagabond, are human rather than feline. The epigram to the collection, attributed to Helena Paz, Garro’s daughter, offers a clue to Lola’s identity and her relationship to Lelinca. It claims: “Detrás de cada gran hombre hay una gran mujer y detrás de cada gran mujer hay un gran gato.” [Behind every man is a great woman and behind every woman is a great cat.] Garro incorporates the whimsical humor of the revised adage into an otherwise somber collection by creating a catprotagonist, but leaves the reader to discover the feline identity of this protagonist, never specifically identifying its animal attributes. The epigram, with its mention of cat, prepares the reader to identify Lola’s and Petrouchka’s, feline mannerisms and behavior. Lola, the cat behind Lelinca, represents creative inspiration for the latter’s writing, which is the cause of all her misfortune and the reason she is fleeing. Since Lola is a metaphor for Lelinca’s (female) creativity, Lelinca is in fact fleeing with and from her creativity or from the dangerous repercussions of female authorship. Garro cleverly manipulates the text and the authorial persona by using Lola and Petrouchka to reveal the perspective from the margins, from the closet and from under the bed. Initially unaware of the feline identity of these two characters, the reader experiences the discourse as skewed or off kilter. Similarly,

24

Marketta Laurila

the reader does not immediately learn that the narrator of “La primera vez que yo me vi” [The First Time I Saw Myself] is a frog, causing the frog-narrator’s perspective to be somewhat jarring. Lelinca and Lucía, her daughter, appear to be examined from various angles as if a camera were placed in odd locations. The angles reflect either others’ (the child’s, the cats’, the frog’s) observations of the two women and/or perspectives of differing first and third person narrators. For example, the perspective of the male narrator in “Debo olvidar …” is unique in that he “observes” Lelinca, Lucía, and the two cats through Lelinca’s text (diary) where she writes herself rather than being written by some (male) other. The male author’s diary serves merely as a frame and as camouflage for Lelinca’s text. Moreover, the focus on documentation in the stories links existence and identity to writing. Lelinca and Lucía progressively lose their documentation, the proof of their existence and their nationality. Without visas and passports, they become “illegal” refugees like Lola and Petrouchka, the two cats who also lack documentation. They must be written to be legal, and they become illegal (criminal) by writing themselves, by usurping the role of author. They must be quiet (and hide) whenever a “cabeza” [head] comes close so as not to be caught at their illegal, subversive activity. Lelinca remains silent, but at the same time gives voice to her creativity in three ways: by “hiding” her diary at the center of the male writer’s text, by displacing her creative persona to Lola, and by being “seen”/“written” from the marginalized perspective of the tiniest frog, two cats, and a child. As in her previous novel Los recuerdos del porvenir [Remembrance of Things to Come] 8, where the stone-village guards the memory of the future, Garro rejects traditional conceptions of time in the work analyzed here. Lelinca’s diary anticipates its hiding place in the diary of the male writer. Other clues to Lelinca’s fate and to the meaning of Garro’s text are hidden, as in the case of “The Purloined Letter” in Poe’s story, in the most public of places: among the letters/signs of previously published texts (The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, and Paradise Lost) that circulate among the public. The title story of Andamos huyendo Lola, contains the most direct reference to intertextuality and to the public/private nature of Lelinca’s story and its hiding place. In this story, Lelinca and her daughter, Lucía, apparently dying from a serious wound, take advantage of a month rent free that Mr. Soffer, an old Jewish immigrant from Vienna, offers those who are persecuted. The threat of violence continues to hang over the mysterious new arrivals causing not only them, but 8 Elena Garro, Los recuerdos del porvenir (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1986). Elena Garro, Recollection of Things to Come (Austin: The Texas University Press, 1986). This is one of the few works by Garro translated into English. Unfortunately, it has been out of print since 1995.

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

25

also another mother–daughter pair (Aube and Karin, respectively), to live in ever greater fear of unknown malevolent forces. Mr. Soffer’s safe-haven turns into hell as mistrust characterizes the relationships between the inhabitants, who are uncertain of each other’s loyalties, and as several inhabitants become victims of violence. Lelinca and Lucía appear to be the main target of strangers who stalk the building and inquire about the two women. One of these, a strange man who poses as a representative of a fashion house, pretends he wants to launch Karin’s modeling career. When he comments to Lelinca that he understands she is an expert in fashion, she appropriates his metaphor and comes dangerously close to expressing, rather than keeping silent, why he and others are persecuting her: —Me gusta la moda “Gatsby”. ¡Es increíble la fuerza que puede tener un escritor!-contestó ella. El hombre pareció contrariado. ¿Un escritor? ¿Qué quería decir aquella mujer? El no estaba allí para hablar de escritores … sino de modas. —¿Quién era el presidente de los Estados Unidos cuando se escribió El Gran Gatsby?—preguntó la señora Lelinca. —No lo recuerdo, señora—contestó el hombre con aire molesto. —¡No se preocupe! Nadie lo recuerda, pero todos recordamos a “Gatsby.”—afirmó ella. Aube y Karin se miraron sorprendidas. Después, una sospecha oscureció sus frentes claras y observaron al visitante que se revolvía incómodo en la silla de mimbre: iba demasiado bien peinado y sus maneras eran rebuscadas. El nombre de Scott Fitzgerald sonaba muy extraño frente a aquel hombre de mirada vidriosa. No sabían porque aquel diálogo era peligroso y escuchaban hipnotizadas (82). [I like the “Gatsby” style. It’s incredible the power that a writer can have!—she answered. He seemed annoyed. A writer? What did that women mean? He was not there to talk about writers … but rather fashions. —Who was the president of the United States when The Great Gatsby was written?—Miss Lelinca asked. —I don’t remember, Madame—answered the man in an irritated way. —Don’t worry, none of us do. But we all remember “Gatsby.”— She affirmed. Aube and Karin looked at each other surprised. Then a dark shadow of suspicion covered their clear foreheads and they observed the visitor who was squirming uncomfortably in the wicker chair: his hair was too well combed and his manners were affected. Scott Fitzgerald’s name sounded strange in front of that man with the glassy look. They did not know why that dialogue was dangerous, and they listened hypnotized.]

The dialogue juxtaposes two forms of power by comparing the president and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Lelinca demonstrates, the writer’s influence is more powerful and continues beyond that of the political figure, powerful as he may

26

Marketta Laurila

be. In Lelinca’s oblique, silent discourse, fashion functions as a metaphor to “hide” or replace the power of the creative text. Fashion suggests both a creator and a public to whom the fashion appeals (over whom it has power). When the man states that Lelinca is an expert in fashion, he reveals her crime and the reason she is persecuted so relentlessly: she is an expert writer and, therefore, potentially powerful. Moreover, she does not have the right to authorship, which is reserved for those who are officially authorized by virtue of gender, race and politics. Lelinca, Lola and Petrouska are denied the right to authorship because of their marginalized status: Lelinca because of her gender, Lola because of her aesthetic rather than functional art, and Petrouska because of his politics. Of course, the latter two are doubly marginalized because they are also cats, whose skewed discourse challenges the dominant one. Writing for them is transgression, and, therefore, they suffer severe consequences for this subversive act. Aube and Karin, although unable to decipher the conversation, realize, however, that it is dangerous just as they perceive that the man is far removed from the likes of Fitzgerald. It is dangerous because Lelinca, in her status as “public,” does not have the right to words, to creating “fashion.” While waiting to get a visa to remain in the United States, Lelinca observes the following: “Era un lugar oficial para ‘Servir al Público.’ ‘El Público’ está mudo, carece del derecho de la palabra” (84). [ It was an official place to “Serve the Public.” The “Public” was mute, since it did not have the right to words.] The “public” is separated from and placed in a powerless position in relation to the incorporeal “they” who occupy the official place and serve/dominate/speak for the silenced public. The absent “they” appears more predominately in the selection “Las cabezas bien pensantes” [Heads Who Think Well] and will be discussed in more detail later. While Lelinca complains that the unidentified “they” have all the power and the glory and can buy assassins and witnesses, paradoxically she and other writers/ artists are obviously so influential and threatening that “they” feel compelled to silence this “public” (83). Further clues appear in a discussion in which Aube suggests that Lelinca is keeping a secret that would explain why the latter is stalked and threatened. Lelinca silently confirms Aube’s suspicions: “Era verdad que guardaba un secreto que por lo demás, era público. Se preguntó si Aube ignoraba la acusación que pesaba sobre ella de la cual nunca se libraría por carecer de poder político y guardó silencio frente a su amiga que había salvado la vida de su hija. Sintió una gran pena e inclinó la cabeza. ¡La habían marcado! Recordó aquella novela leída en su adolescencia y que le pareció completamente irreal: La letra escarlata. También ella llevaba un signo infame marcado en la frente” (81, emphasis added). [It was true that she had a secret which otherwise was public. She wondered whether Aube knew about the accusation that weighed over her and from which

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

27

she would never free herself because she did not have political power, and she remained silent facing the friend who had saved her daugher’s life. She felt ashamed and lowered her head. They had marked her! She remembered that novel read in her adolescence that had seemed completely unreal: The Scarlet Letter. She also wore an infamous sign marking her forehead.]

Like Hester Prynne, Lelinca guards her secret, which paradoxically is public, and wears an ignominious sign as punishment for her transgression. Nina Baym explains that Hester subverts the meaning of the scarlet letter that she is forced to wear as a sign of her adultery. “An artist with a needle,” Hester turns the letter into a work of art.9 Hester’s art, Baym says, is amoral for it is sheerly decorative. However, it is also an act of self-expression, like Hester’s adultery, within a society that demands conformity and surrender of self-hood. In her study of Hester as the heroine of The Scarlet Letter, Marilyn Mueller Wilton claims that Hester represents the artist in American society.10 She explains: “Rather than accept defeat at the hands of those who have scorned and rejected her, Hester, in heroic style, determines to forge an independent life for herself and her daughter through her role as solitary artist on the fringes of society. Although Hester and Pearl are social and physical outcasts living in an isolated hut near the seaside, Hester’s fine needlework is in high demand” (Mueller, 225).11 Similarly, Lelinca, also an outcast artist striving to survive with her daughter, subverts the invisible letter/sign on her forehead by appropriating letters to write her own text. Lelinca, however, does not limit herself to the traditional women’s art of embroidery (and the good works that change the “A” of adultery to “A” of angel and able in the imagination of the townspeople), but usurps the role of the “cabezas bien pensantes” who have exclusive right to the pen/penis 12 and to writing. Like, Hester, however, Lelinca creates a purely “decorative” or aesthetic text in opposition to the acceptable “functional ink.”

9

Nina Baym, The Scarlet Letter: A Reading (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 183. Marilyn Mueller Wilton, “Paradigm and Paramour: Role Reversal in The Scarlet Letter, in The Critical Response to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ ” edited by Gary Scharnhorst (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 183. In her reading of The Scarlet Letter, Nina Baym also sees Hester as representative of the American artist. (See note 9.) 11 The quote suggests further comparisons between Hester and Lelinca that are beyond the scope of this study. For example, both have daughters with whom they live in isolation. Interestingly, in the story “La primera vez que me vi,” not analyzed in this essay, Lelinca and her daughter are living in an isolated house near the seaside in the United States. 12 Susan Gubar, “The Blank Page and the Issue of Female Creativity,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter (New York: Panteon Books, 1985), 153–164. 10

28

Marketta Laurila

Lelinca’s double crime, female authorship and the creation of purely aesthetic texts, is both secret and public. While she never tells her secret story, which is “hidden” in the novel within the discourse of silence, it becomes public as Garro’s novel circulates along with The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Paradise Lost and the other (male) narratives that Lelinca remembers and with which she compares her experience. At the end of the story, Lelinca, Lucía and the two cats disappear and are presumed dead because they were seen being spirited away in a limousine by apparently hostile parties. Nevertheless, Mr. Soffer eventually receives two letters, one signed “Sus dos amigas L. L.” [Your two friends, L. L.] and one that follows and contains a check; he keeps both letters a secret from the other residents. The two letters-signs correspond to the two letters-missives, but it is the presence of the missive with the letters L L rather than the content, which is not revealed to the reader, that is the message. The secret letter-missive and the “public” (communal) letters-signs tell the story of their survival and escape from those who would deny (and even murder) Lelinca and Lucía’s creative identities. Garro relies on metonymy, metaphor and synecdoche in her silent discourse. While these tropes are not in and of themselves characteristic of strictly marginalized discourse, they function in the text as such. By means of troping, Garro hides the message of the text behind the literal meanings of words. In like manner, Lelinca, her authorial persona in the text, appears to remain silent while addressing the central issue of her persecution in the discussion containing the “fashion” metaphor discussed previously. Another example appears in “La corona de Fredegunda” [Fredegunda’s Crown], in which gems and words are associated through metonymy. In this story Lelinca, Lucía, Lola and Petrouchka are in Spain, where they continue to suffer deprivation and fear at the hands of “representatives” of Lelinca and Lucía’s country. The “representatives” are stationed in both a bookstore and in the consulate, where they keep track of the two women’s activities. The metonymical use of consulate and bookstore, where “representatives” are vigilant, suggests that Lelinca is guilty of both political and creative wrongdoing, actions which have brought about her current predicament. She is unable to find work or publish the translations on which she is economically dependent because of the influence of an unidentified “clan” of which she had previously been a member (156). Lelinca’s inability to “work”/publish as well as her previous membership in the same “clan” that now persecutes her reflect Garro’s own inability to publish in the same publishing houses that had previously accepted her work and the political problems that led to her exile from the Mexican literary elite and from the country. Another explicit example of the connection between Garro’s experience as a writer and that of her writer-protagonist involves the issue of a politically correct form of literature or art that was introduced in the previous discussion on

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

29

The Scarlet Letter. The reader learns that Lelinca is also writing something else, something forbidden that the innkeepers, spies for the representatives, try to discover. Again Garro and her writer-protagonist resort to metaphors to “hide” and, at the same time, reveal this secret text. At the bookstore, Lelinca and Lucía meet Diego, the owner of a “precious” book that is disdainfully rejected as worthless by the bookstore owner and representative of his (and Lelinca’s) government. The metonymical relationship between “precious” and “book” compares the book to precious gems of which Diego has plenty. To entertain the distraught and starving Lelinca and Lucía, he pulls several treasures from his pocket as if he were a magician, the value of which, as with Diego’s book, is not recognized by those around them. Each item, encrusted with gems, relates to a historical story about Isabella, the Catholic Queen, Phillip, the Handsome, and the visigothic queen, Fredegunda. Each gem/treasure is a story and Diego’s stories are his book. This metaphorical relationship between gems and stories/words is further reinforced by the displacement of the adjective “precious” from gem to book. Just as the people on the street do not recognize the value of the gems, Palencia, the literary gatekeeper, does not appreciate the artistic value of Diego’s book or the validity of his purely aesthetic style. In a curious statement and denial sequence following a discussion on the connection between money and power, Lelinca hears the voice of her husband César, whose existence she then denies.13 This memory compels her to ask Diego if he has a crown among his “gems” (151). The crown of the Visigoth, Fredegunda, that Diego magically produces, evokes images of blood and the death of the queen, whose face changes to that of Lelinca and then Lucía. Diego reinforces this identification by asserting, “En fin, esta corona puede sentarte bien, eres la única goda que tenemos en España” (152–53). [Well, this crown suits you, you are the only (female) Visigoth that we have in Spain.] The crown, which is linked to Lelinca’s husband, César, is usurped by Fredegunda/ Lelinca/Lucía. Later, however, an unfamiliar voice appears from the recesses of Lelinca’s mind asking her: “¡Y ahora qué mis queridas Leli y Lucía? … ¿Han visto que soy el más fuerte?” (151). [And now, what my dear Leli and Lucía? … Have you not seen that I am the strongest?] While she denies ever having heard the voice, she also remembers it along with a large room covered in mirrors and a young, blond woman who has been assassinated,

13

Rhina Toruño points out in her book (Rhina Toruña, Tiempo, destino y opresión en la obra de Elena Garro [Lewiston: Mellon University Press, 1996]) that Garro says she used the name Augusto for Mariana’s husband in Testimonios sobre Mariana so that there would be an allusion to Octavio Paz. Augusto refers to Augusto Octavio and, hence, to Octavio Paz. In this reference, in Andamos, to the husband as César, one is similarly led to Augusto César to Augusto Octavio to Octavio Paz. See footnote 3 regarding Octavio Paz.

30

Marketta Laurila

who is Lelinca herself. She hopes that “he” has died because only then will Lucía be saved. The identification between Lelinca and Fredegunda and between her husband and the Roman Caesar generates the dichotomies César-Lelinca, CaesarFredegunda, Romans-Visigoths, conqueror-conquered, which extends to include “he”-Lucía. The latter reveals that the dialectic of domination, played out in the story on the historical and creative level, will extend to the daughter, and future generations of female writers; and the impersonal “he” that replaces “César” reflects a continuing cycle of oppression by nameless males. It is because of Fredegunda’s, Lelinca’s, and Lucía’s use of the crown/gems/words that they must be silenced, “murdered,” to maintain androcentric hegemony over writing. Additionally, the “gems” contrary to the functional ink, mentioned in the “Las cabezas bien pensantes,” represent an art/literary form that is purely aesthetic rather than politically engaged. While Diego and Lelinca work with the gem-words, Lucía, Lola and Petrouchka, left alone in the room, concentrate on dreaming/imagining to escape the ugly, threatening reality of the inn. … los tres amaban soñar con ángeles de alas de oro que algún día los llevarían a un prado azul sembrado de margaritas blancas. El prado celeste era ondulante e inmenso, más grande que todos los mares juntos, incluyendo al Mar Rojo y al Mar Negro, que en ese prado aparecían como una ampola y un pequeño cuervo. Juntos los tres, añoraban el instante en que un diminuto personaje inesperadamente bello, les hiciera un signo con algún reflejo, les tendiera su mano, perfecta como un nardo y los hiciera cruzar el dintel de la Gran Puerta de Oro … ¡La Gran Puerta de Oro no era la puerta de ningún hostal o fonda! La Gran Puerta de Oro no estaba hecha para que las cruzaran los fonderos (142). [… the three loved to dream about angels with wings of gold who would one day take them to a blue field sown with white daisies. The celestial field was undulating and immense, larger than all the oceans together, including the Red Sea and the Black Sea, which looked like a poppy and a little crow in this field. Together the three longed for the moment in which the diminutive and surprisingly beautiful character would give a them a sign with some kind of reflection, would reach out her hand, perfect as a spikenard and would have them cross the lintel of the Great Gates of Gold … The Great Gates of Gold were not the gates to any inn or boarding house! The Great Gates of Gold were not made so that innkeepers could pass through them.]

In the celestial field of their imagination, poetry transforms reality (the seas into poppy and crow) and opens the Golden Gates that lead to a place free from hunger and fear. The language in this passage as well as the figure of the “diminuto personaje” [diminutive character] and later the “Dame de Licorne” call to mind the character of Rubén Darío’s “El velo de la Reina Mab” [“The

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

31

Veil of Queen Mab”], in the collection Azul.14 In Darío’s work, Queen Mab encourages and inspires four starving and disillusioned male writers/artists while they sleep by covering them with a veil that inspires them. In Garro’s appropriation of “El velo de the Reina Mab,” the two women and two cats fall into the deep sleep that refreshes their imagination. The Virgin, who puts the four to sleep to “dream,” the diminutive person and the “Dame a la Licorne,” encourages the four outcasts while patriarchy conspires against their efforts toward authorship. Diego, with his precious gem words, brings about the final miracle that saves the four fugitives from the machinations of the innkeepers and government representatives; he magically creates a wall that covers the openings to the building, permanently trapping the innkeepers, their daughters, as well as a spy for Lelinca’s government. The prison workers, as Garro metaphorically describes the innkeepers and the other inhabitants who deny Lelinca her authorial voice, become prisoners themselves, while Lelinca, Lucía and the cats escape and, hence, are free to write and create. Artistic ink wins over the functional ink, and, in Lelinca’s revision of history, Fredegunda triumphs over Caesar. As Diego raises the Royal Scepter, inlaid with precious gems, he exclaims, “¡Esto significaba el poder! … ¡Ja!, y todavía lo significa” (164). [This represents power! … Hah! and still does.] Since the gems are synonymous with the Royal Scepter, which in turn represents the power of a monarch, Diego’s words reinforce the idea that whoever possesses the gem words has enormous power. Fredegunda, Lelinca, Lucía or any woman writer who gains control of the gem words presents a serious threat to patriarchal authority, the “he” that threatens Lelinca and the next generation of women (writers) embodied in Lucía. Lelinca is fleeing with Lola from Fredegunda’s fate and at the same time from Lola to escape the violent death of the queen. She metaphorically flees by distancing herself twice over from the truth that she is a writer; Fredegunda and the gems stand between Lelinca and the literal words of her craft. The metaphors protect Lelinca by “silencing” the truth while at the same time providing clues to the truth of her authorship, which is the reason she is persecuted. Although Lelinca does appropriates the narrative voice with first person narration in “Las cabezas bien pensantes” [Heads Who Think Well] to explain why they are fleeing, she continues to keep silent about her own story by displacing her creative persona, the cause of all her troubles, to Lola. She uses a clever interplay of metaphors and synecdoches to discuss this “dangerous” topic. The synecdoche of the title suggests, as Rojas-Trempe points out, a group that controls yet is separated from the body of society.15 While Rojas-Trempe

14

Rubén Darío, Azul (Santiago de Chile: Empresa Editorial Zig Zag, 1953), 95–105. Lady Rojas-Trempe, “El estado en ‘Las cabezas bien pensantes,’ ” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 14, no. 3 (1990): 597. 15

32

Marketta Laurila

interprets the synecdoche and the story-essay as an expression of Garro’s monarchistic loyalties, in this essay the synecdoche is identified with male hegemony over creative activity. Lelinca’s use of the modified “las cabezas bien pensantes” [heads who think well], rather than the unmodified “las cabezas pensantes,” suggests a counterpart — “cabezas mal pensantes” [heads who think poorly]. Since Minerva, the goddess of art, and Marie Antoinette are juxtaposed to the “cabezas bien pensantes,” it follows that they represent the implied “cabezas mal pensantes.” Interestingly, Marie Antoinette and Minerva are decapitated; and the latter’s head is encased in glass to protect society from her unhealthy influence. With the introduction of the decapitated Minerva (whose head is kept at a safe distance from society) and Marie Antoinette, the double synecdoche (heads who think well and heads who think badly), is inverted to form a new synecdoche, decapitated body. The male heads are properly equipped to think, gaze, create and control. Women who usurp the role for which men are specifically equipped, are, as Minerva and Marie Antoinette, decapitated; in effect they are castrated because they have no right to the male head/penis. Lelinca and her entourage are in effect fleeing the fate of Minerva. Lelinca has found a way to flee, to avoid castration/decapitation/silencing, through her oblique, marginal discourse characterized by metaphor, synecdoche, displacement and alternate perspectives. In her discussion of the Rights of Man, Lelinca further reveals the gender bias that explains why she is persecuted. She tells Lola: “La dificultad reside en que para gozar de los Derechos hay que ser Hombre. Y ser Hombre es algo así como ser Diputado por lo menos y como no eres Diputado, Lola no tienes ningún derecho” (170). [The problem is that in order to enjoy the Rights, one must be a Man. And to be a Man is something like being a Legislator, at least, and since you are not a Legislator, Lola, you have no rights.] Here Lelinca interprets “man” as referring only to the male gender rather than to all humans and, thereby, the male gender of the “cabezas.” She further claims that all men govern and that only men have rights. It logically follows that women are governed and have no rights, including to the right to an authorial voice. However, Lelinca’s conclusion is based on false premises. The first three parts of the syllogism lead logically to the conclusion that Lola is not a man, not to the conclusion that she has no rights. Furthermore, Lola is not a member of “mankind” (male or female) because she is a cat. Lelinca’s use of the false syllogism reveals the false underpinnings of male hegemony in politics and creative expression. The double synecdoche in turn slips into a double metaphor that equates head with gaze and gaze with penis, leading to the conclusion that only men have the right to gaze, the right to subjectivity and authority. Lelinca establishes the link between “cabezas” and penis when she explains the point of view of

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

33

the “cabezas bien pensantes”: “Hay que salvar al pene. El hombre occidental está frustrado desde su más tierna infancia” (173–74). [We must save the penis. Western man is frustrated since his early childhood.] Even here she maintains silence by using metonymy to allow the reader to make the connection between the contiguous discussions on the penis and the silencing of women. In order to save the penis, women must be beheaded (silenced, discredited, transformed into body) before they castrate the “cabezas bien pensantes.” Women represent a threat to the penis through their intellectual and creative work. By writing, women would gain the same power that made Fitzgerald, according to Lelinca, more important than a president. The dichotomy penis-male/no penis-female is displaced to form the dichotomy head-male/no head-female, and the castration is inverted: women are beheaded–castrated because of their potential power, which would undermine, as Octavio Paz fears, the very fabric of patriarchal society (Castillo, 38). Minerva’s head ends up safely, for men, behind a glass case. Later, Minerva, transformed from goddess of the arts into war goddess, puts on a helmet, in Lelinca’s revision of the myth, to protect herself from the onslaught of male opposition to her authority, to protect herself from decapitation. The connection between Lola and Minerva occurs at the beginning of the story where Lelinca explains that Lola never complains, she just looks at her with her Minerva eyes. She further explains that Lola is: “Una Minerva melancólica, pasada de moda. Una Minerva pateada hasta hacerla vomitar sangre. Es la suerte que corren las Minervas en nuestros tiempos” (168, emphasis added). [A melancholy Minerva, out of date. A Minerva kicked until she vomits blood. It’s the destiny of Minervas in our time.] The quote also mentions multiple Minervas and, thereby, reinforces the idea of Minerva as metaphor. The addition of “en nuestros tiempos” [in our time] suggests other times during which Minervas (and Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette, and Fredegunda) had power and authority. Garro moves from the cat behind every great woman of the epigram to Lola the cat-protagonist/modern Minerva to Minerva the goddess of art, who has to don a war helmet to protect herself from beheading. Lola, who represents female authorship in these times, however, has no protection from beatings and suffers serious injury. Lelinca continues her discussion on the problems that the female and other marginalized writers face by means of another metaphoric binomial, functional ink and the non-functional ink, that distinguishes non-artistic and artistic expression: “Para nosotros ya no corre la tinta, ese líquido inventado para dibujar mariposas, vuelos de cigueñas y ojos de gacelas. Sin embargo ’las cabezas bien pensantes’ la convirtieron en ‘tinta funcional’ y un día pidieron por escrito el Decreto de Muerte para las mariposas” (171). [For us ink no longer runs, this liquid invented to draw butterflies, the flight of storks and the eyes of gazelles. However, the heads who think correctly converted it into functional ink and

34

Marketta Laurila

one day asked in writing for the Death Decree for butterflies.] The butterflies are punished for stealing pollen and ruining the economy, the gazelles for fomenting popular prejudice (“el Mal del Ojo” or evil eye), and the storks for attempting to bring babies. All three, grammatically feminine in Spanish, have usurped the role of the penis: pollinating, engendering, and gazing. Lelinca associates the ink of creativity with “we”: Lola, Lelinca herself, and other female or marginalized male artists, since she uses the masculine “nosotros” that refers to a “we” comprised of both males and females. Lelinca, however, is doubly marginalized as writer by virtue of her gender and of her purely aesthetic writing. Similarly, discredited, by virtue of her cat species and her aesthetic art, Lola is kicked and tortured mercilessly by men at whom she gazes because she has taken on the active role of the one who gazes rather than that of the object of another’s gaze. Lelinca continues the translations on which she depends to support herself, Lucía and the two cats; however, the publication of her (forbidden) creative work is obstructed by unknown, clearly male, powers that extend throughout Canada, the United States and Spain. Her crime is deemed so serious as to warrant punishment by death. Lelinca explains to the Lola at the end of this selection: “Claro que no sabemos de quién huimos, Lola, ni por qué huimos, pero en este tiempo de los Derechos del Hombre y de los Decretos es necesario huiry huir sin tregua, Lola, lo sabes …” (174). [Of course we don’t know from whom we’re fleeing, Lola, nor why, but during these times of the Rights of Man and the Decrees it is necessary to flee and flee without respite, Lola, you know … ] And in this narrative, Lelinca, Lucía, Lola and Petrouchka continue to flee those who would silence them. Of this silence, Lelinca says, “… ese silencio, Lola, que sólo conocen las Minervas, las Reinas y las Personas Marginadas” [this silence, Lola, that only Minervas, Queens and Marginalized People know] (173) Here Garro clearly, although metaphorically, identifies the three major issues relating to writing that appear throughout the stories in the collection: the silencing, censoring, and discrediting of writers based on an aesthetic that is not politically compromised (Minervas), on female gender (Queens), and on other factors that contribute to marginalization (Marginalized People). The latter includes race, class (peasants), political and religious beliefs (Catholic, monarchistic, communist), and even, metaphorically, species (cat). “Debo olvidar …” [“I Must Forget”] and “Las cuatro moscas” [ “The Four Flies”] are companion pieces that resemble Chinese boxes, with the latter story fitting inside the former to ostensibly clarify Lelinca and company’s fate. “Debo olvidar …” is the diary of a male narrator who includes Lelinca’s diary in the middle of his own. The interrelationship between different texts within and between the stories suggests that interpretation is closely linked to issues of intertextuality. Garro further develops this notion in Reencuentro de personajes

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

35

[Reencounter of Characters], in which characters created by Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald conspire to silence the female protagonist.16 As mentioned in the introduction, “Debo olvidar …” [“I Must Forget”] contains Lelinca’s diary narrated in first person, which is inserted (hidden) in the text of a male first person narrator. The latter realizes that if he presented pages from Lelinca’s diary or told her story, he would be accused of having invented it himself. Lelinca has, therefore, effectively hidden her diary which, should it come to light, would be attributed to the male narrator. This narrator and his cat rent the room previously occupied by Lelinca, Lucía and their two cat-friends and are similarly persecuted by unknown agents. Hidden in a drawer, he finds Lelinca’s diary, which documents the persecution of the former occupants and the alleged murder of an unknown guest. As the narration reveals the similarities between Lelinca and the narrator, the reader assumes that the two suffer a similar fate. The last entry in each of the diaries states that the writer would take the diary if the possibility of escape from the boarding house were to present itself. Since the diaries are still hidden, the reader is led to believe that all the protagonists were murdered. While the male writer initially appears to have greater legitimacy than Lelinca, as evidenced by the fact that her text would automatically be attributed to him, he ends up equally marginalized and persecuted. Both Lelinca and the narrator have cats hidden in the closet, cats that are beaten or otherwise tortured (burnt with cigarettes, slashed with a razor) by the owners and guests. “Las cabezas bien pensantes,” as demonstrated in the preceding analyis, establishes the relationship between Lola (the cat) and Minerva, representing the inspiration behind creative and artistic expression. Just as the “functional ink” obliterates artistic ink in “Las cabezas bien pensantes”, the false musicians and composers in “Debo olvidar …” silence the male narrator and Lelinca, real artists, who hide their diaries (stories) and disappear with their cat/muses. The narrator explains that these diaries-stories, the memory or alternate discourse of the vanquished, are dangerous to the victorious (198). The synecdoche of “Las cabezas bien pensantes” is repeated in this story, but reversed in that the “cabezas” [heads] are now invisible bodies as Lelinca complains in the following: “Un tribunal invisible nos ha condenado …” (180) [An invisible tribunal has condemned us …] and “Casi todas las voces pertenecen a cuerpos ‘invisibles’ ” (186, emphases added). Almost all the voices belong to “invisible” bodies.] The recurring emphasis on “invisible” points to the incorporeal, or textual, nature of the persecution which is directed 16 Elena Garro, Reencuentro de personajes (México: Editorial Grijalbo, 1982). The topic of intertextuality in Reencuentro de personajes is examined in detail in: Marketta Laurila, “Elena Garro’s Reencuentro de personajes: The Female Writer and Androcentric Texts,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 27, (1993), 171–186.

36

Marketta Laurila

toward the protagonists’ alternate voice. While in “Andamos huyendo Lola,” Lelinca’s letter from Canada lets Mr. Soffer know that she, Lucía and the cats have survived, this story implies that they have not. This story and its companion story mimic the genre of the murder mystery that recounts the metaphorical murder, silencing, of “true” artists. In “Debo olvidar …” Lelinca’s diary bears witness to a night filled with the sounds of a person being dragged and beaten, followed by the clanging of buckets and mops used to clean the hallway. The next morning Lelinca sees buckets with red water and bloody rags and finds that the innkeepers have “condemned” a room by placing a board across the door (196). She also discovers that a curtain placed at the end of the corridor hides a series of “condemned”/sealed/hidden rooms. The use of “condemned” to describe both the sealed rooms and Lelinca (condemned by the invisible tribunal) suggests a metaphorical link between “condemn” and “silence” indicating that several other “artistic” inhabitants, perhaps with their companion cat/muse, have been silenced to preserve the legitimacy of the false artists. The reader is led to the conclusion that Lelinca and the narrator have also become victims, but, regardless of the fate of the writers, the diaries continue to threaten the hegemony of the dominant voice, just as Minerva continues to influence creative artists although she is sealed in the glass case to prevent contagion in “Las cabezas bien pensantes”. Lelinca provides a clue to the role played by malevolent innkeepers by means of further intertextual references. She affirms: “‘Cervantes era un genio’ me dije al recordar a Repa y al ventero”(190). [“Cervantes was a genius” I told myself while thinking of Repa and the Innkeeper.] This reference to innkeepers in Cervantes’ work invites a comparison between Don Quijote and Lelinca. Both discover that as they create their own texts/lives, they are objects of another’s text with false representations of them and their actions. While Don Quijote finally heeds the voice of “reason” and reality, and thereby succumbs to his own death when he gives up his dreams/text, Lelinca, Lucía, and the cats hold on to illusion, reaffirming their authorship. While the endings of the stories individually and as a whole are ambiguous, leaving the reader to suspect that perhaps Lelinca, Lucía and the cats were murdered by the innkeeper, the inversion of Don Quijote’s experience suggests that the endings are also inverted, and the four survive. The magic of the creative text prevails against the murderous designs or censorship of the innkeeper, the guardian of (male) reason and logic. Just as Garro appropriates Cervantes’ text to provide clues to the protagonists’ fate, she uses the the format of framing story of El Conde Lucanor (published in 1335) in “Las cuatro moscas” [The Four Flies]. In doing so, she revises rather than continues the tradition of male canonical texts. In this story, Garro narrates what happens to Lelinca and company during the last day and night documented in Lelinca’s diary and, therefore, fits chronologically within

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

37

Lelinca’s diary, which is placed within the male narrator’s diary. This story, however, recounts the final events from a different perspective, a third person narration that includes the innkeeper’s point of view. This story, while fitting into the Chinese box structure in relation to “Debo olvidar … ,” also has another story within it. The framing story continues the tale of the two women and the two cats at the inn, while the central part narrates Lelinca’s memory of Don Tomás’ soap store. However, the inside story permeates the frame to challenge the destiny of the four that is implied in the framing story. During the last night of terror at the inn, Lelinca reflects: “El tiempo de soñar había terminado. La memoria había escapado a la memoria, quedaba sólo una hoja en blanco mojada por las lágrimas de los cuatro … Amanecerá algún día” (203). [The time to dream had come to an end. Memory had escaped memory, there only remained a blank page moistened by the tears of the four … It will be dawn some day.] Memory has been replaced by a new, blank page upon which the four have written (by moistening) with their tears (with the ink that reflects their experience). The text is the blank page, the (silent) text about the silencing of the female narrative voice. The use of “tears” further reinforces the connection between self and creativity; Lelinca (as Dionesia in the “La dama y la turquesa”) is the text. Lelinca’s childhood memories evoke the perfume associated with Don Tomás’ soap store. The perfume mediates between Lelinca’s current adult life and her childhood in Mexico. As children, Lelinca and her sister, Eva, imagined two possible destinies for themselves: to become like the beautiful sisters Ifigenia and Amparo, who painted moon shaped moles on their left cheek, or to become flies with wings made of the finest silk paper and exquisite ink that allow them to fly to the celluloid doll/goddess on the top shelf in the soap shop. In her discussion of “making up” Castillo explains: “The underlying assumption, still, is that the woman’s gaze is directed only at herself, in the mirror, as she applies her face; men, in this economy, are licensed to gaze at women, and this license to stare is nonreciprocal” (Castillo, 150). Lelinca chooses to be like a fly, to “illegally” observe/gaze and write texts. Eva foresees that her sister’s obsession with paper and ink wings (gazing and writing) will lead to death, the metaphorical death/silencing that the writer Lelinca repeatedly experiences in the stories. Paradoxically, contrary to Eva’s predictions, the paper and ink allow Lelinca and her three companions to escape the “death” plotted by the innkeepers as they fly to the temple of the celluloid doll/goddess. In an ambiguous ending, as Repa and Jacinto collect Lelinca and Lucía’s clothes and shoes in a box, Jacinto refers to a night similar to the one in which the unidentified inhabitant was murdered: “¡Quémelas [la ropa] tú! Yo debo hacer otras cosas, ya lo sabes, los chicos nos ayudarán en todo, como siempre … nececito descansar un rato, después de la noche que he pasado.” (209). [You burn them (the clothes)! I have

38

Marketta Laurila

to do other things, you already know that; the boys will help us with everything, as always … I need to rest awhile after the night I went through.] While Jacinto’s comments imply that they murdered Lelinca and Lucía, the presence of four “flies” who listen to Repa and Jacinto from the other side of the “golden gates” reveal that the two women and two cats survive by means of their paper and ink wings. They follow a ray of light that leads them to the soap store, the temple of the goddess where Don Tomás greets them with the words, “Han ganado a la reina de las flores. ¡Pobres moscas!, han esperado tantos años y han sufrido tantos fríos …” (209). [You have reached the queen of flowers. Poor flies! you have waited so many years and have suffered so much from the cold …] While Garro examines the trauma of writing for female authors throughout the collection, she also suggests that only by rewriting/revising male canonical texts, whatever the cost, can they survive a metaphorical death and that their efforts will eventually be rewarded. Lelinca finds, as she flies through the golden gates, that paradise is not in the pages of her mother’s copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, now located in some used bookstore, but in her own writing (wings). By linking Milton’s epic poem to the mother and the childhood home, Garro acknowledges that writing, especially for the female or the racially, politically or aesthetically marginalized writer, involves a sense of loss as one leaves the safe confines of the known and acceptable. Between the original state of innocence/paradise, before the knowledge of one’s authorial identity, and absolution for the transgression of writing, lies a long and difficult path: the persecution, misrepresentations, terror and hunger that characterize Lelinca’s journey through Andamos huyendo Lola and Garro’s own literary career. In her article on the semiotics of guilt in Garro’s work, Ana Bundgard asserts that falling into guilt is transgression and rupture, a necessary evil for anyone who aspires to status as subject.17 By taking on the role of writer, Lelinca carries a burden of guilt that represents rupture from the paradise of the patriarchal home of her childhood. She appropriates Milton’s title to explain that his paradise, which she had hoped to rediscover, is truly lost; she can only be object in his paradise, while in her paradise with the celluloid doll, of her own invention, she gains subject status. Although the four may be dead, as implied in Jacinto’s comments, they have achieved the “queendom” of heaven, presided over by the doll/goddess, through their subjectivity, by writing the pages/wings smudged with ink. In “Una mujer sin cocina” [A Woman Without a Kitchen], a story in which the other three protagonists do not appear, Lelinca has lost her kitchen as

17 Ana Bundgard, “La semiótica de la culpa,” in Sin falsos espejos, edited by Aralia López Gónzalez (México: Colegio de México, 1995), 140.

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

39

punishment for rebelling by taking up the pen-penis. Castillo, referring to A Room of Our Own, explains: “… the kitchen is the ‘room of our own’ Virginia Woolf recommends as essential to women’s spiritual advancement, the place we write—or more often speak—our cooking secrets and our lives” (Castillo, xiii). For Lelinca, the kitchen is the magical place where the Indian servants cooked wonderful dishes and brought to life historical and mythical events. In a typical Garro revision, the familiar “man without a country” is transformed into “woman without a kitchen.” The concrete kitchen, literally and metaphorically the space where women and servants create tasty dishes along with imaginative tales, or as in the case of Sor Juana, learn the lessons of chemistry, replaces the abstract “country” of male discourse. Lelinca, now a “woman without a kitchen,” is a woman without a space for her creativity, without a home and without a country as a result of her determination to write. She remembers the kitchen as the place where everything marvelous happened. She recalls: “sucedía todo lo mejor del mundo: los postres, los hechos históricos, las hadas, los enanos y las brujas que salían de las bocas de las criadas” (220). [… the best things in the world happened: desserts, historical events, fairies, dwarfs and witches that came from the servants’ mouths.] Lelinca’s association of creativity with the kitchen began with the stories the Indian servants told in the kitchen as they worked. As in the case of Garro, these stories were the inspiration for Lelinca’s creativity, closely tied to the folklore and legends of her homeland from which she is now exiled. Her separation from the kitchen/homeland/source of creativity has in effect silenced her authorial voice. The story parallels Garro’s own literary career in the years following her exile. When she published again, the metaphorical and literal “kitchen,” the folktales, and the warmth and color of her previous works were missing. At the end of the story, when Lelinca opens the door to her rented room, she loses her memory, and her mind becomes blank as she enters “the forbidden room.” Her room is now “forbidden” because her mind has once again become the blank page on which she writes. Lelinca’s mother appears and guides her through the wall to the kitchen where the Indian servant Tefa keeps the hearth lit. The room becomes smaller and smaller, until only a small piece of coal is left in Tefa’s hand: “Se estrecharon [las paredes] tanto, que sólo quedó lugar para una brasa de carbón encendida que brillaba en medio de la oscuridad más completa” (227). [The walls closed in so much that there only remained enough room for the ember of lit coal that was shining in the middle of complete darkness.] The kitchen/room of one’s own, where Tefa guards the last bright ember, is a forbidden space, the space of women’s and Indians marginalized discourses that threaten “the very fabric of (patriarchal) society.” Women’s, children’s and Indians’ lives intersect in the space of the kitchen, a space of oppression as well

40

Marketta Laurila

as creativity.18 Lelinca attributes greater legitimacy to the Indians’ discourse than to the dominant discourse because they were on the land before anyone else and because they are clairvoyant; they know the past and the future. Since Lelinca forms part of the dominant white society, the Indian servants initially turn their backs to her as they speak and continue to cut vegetables in the kitchen. Only at the end of the story does Tefa, the guardian of ancient oral traditions, turn around to reveal her Indian face deeply scored with the wrinkles of age and of wisdom. Tefa faces Lelinca only after the child has grown to (female) adulthood, been silenced and learned of oppression similar to that suffered by the Indians. But neither Tefa nor Lelinca’s voice is completely silenced, since Tefa holds the flickering coal, the dying ember of marginalized discourses, that can again be fanned into creative fires. Lelinca will again write as Garro herself did. The last story, in which Lelinca does not appear as protagonist, reveals, however, that she did retrieve the ember, the source of creativity, escaping the “death” suggested in “Debo olvidar” [“I Must Forget”]. The kitchen metaphor is replaced by the gem metaphor previously employed in “La corona de Fredegunda” [Fredegunda’s Crown]. In this imaginative story, the protagonist, Dionisia, becomes separated from her turquoise-home, as Lelinca was from her kitchen, and, is now persecuted and unable to sell her stories. Reminiscent of Don Quixote’s experience, she finds that she is falsely represented in films and paintings as a kleptomaniac of gems and a Nazi whore who blinds other artists. The first implies that she steals the work (gems) of writers and artists, while the other identifies her as the persecuter rather than the victim. The motif of the “nazi” suggests that there is an erroneous underpinning to her art, an art of aesthetics, like gems, that represents unrealistic and apolitical topics such as that of a woman living in a turquoise. Paradoxically, her unrealistic story is more real than the realistic art of the false artists in the story. Dionisia, whose body and hair reflect the colors and shades of her turquoise home, is her gem/story. Creativity and writing are so closely tied to the self and the homepatria, the source of inspiration, as to be become synonymous. When Dionisia loses her home-patria, as the jeweler shatters the gem that had been her home, she loses the memory of her life within the icy blue domain of the turquoise. At the end of the story, a friend offers to help her find a new home. When he cannot find a vacant turquoise, he offers her a topaz, which she accepts. As she settles 18

In her discussion of “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas,” Doris Meyer discusses the relationship between the Indian servant and the mistress, which resembles Lelinca’s relationship with Tefa: “Both servant and mistress are marginated females who seek each other’s support in spite of their unequal status” (155). She also points out that Garro focuses on “the protective enclosure of the kitchen, not only physically but psychologically.” Doris Meyer, “Alienation and Escape in Elena Garro’s Semana de colores,” Hispanic Review 55, no. 2 (1987): 153–164.

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity

41

into this new creative space, she takes on the bronze tone of the topaz.19 In this story, the new gem replaces the new paradise of the celluloid doll of “Las cuatro moscas” [The Four Flies]. Like Lelinca, Dionisia experiences rupture from the original home-paradise, but eventually finds a new creative space and resumes her authorship. In the stories of Andamos huyendo Lola, Garro’s female protagonists struggle against those who would restrict their artistic expression because of their gender or because their art does not conform to the model of politically correct art (“functional” ink/art), such as that of post-revolutionary Mexico. Through her “silent,” hidden discourse, Lelinca challenges the hegemony of the ubiquitous, unidentified male persecutors/censors who appear as “heads,” “invisible bodies,” or government representatives and who control a network of accomplices to ensure her continued silence. She reappropriates silence and passivity, the model of femininity in Mexican thought, to develop a femino-centric text that defies traditional interpretations. By means of troping (metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche), ambiguity, and displacement, the writer-protagonist as well as Garro negotiate the “tricky domain of the said and the unsaid.” The structure of the entire collection as a whole and the internal structure of the stories, characterized by embedding/hiding, suggest the female body with its ability to contain, to labor, to re-produce. By means of this structure, Garro points to the possibility of a femino-centric text based on inclusion rather than the exclusion characteristic of androcentric discourse and on re-production rather than imitation. Her author-protagonist challenges and reinterprets the meanings of Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Milton, Cervantes, and Darío’s works. The intertexuality between this text and other (male) texts is a also played out internally with each story, challenging, revising and reinforcing the meaning of the others. With Andamos huyendo Lola, Garro has succeeded in creating a dynamic text which invites continual revision of other discourses and of its own “slient” discourse.

19

This story has parallels with Garro’s own life. The color and playfulness of Garro’s earlier work have given way to somber stories of persecution in Andamos huyendo Lola and the Garro’s subsequent narratives. Interestingly, the collection of stories from the first period is entitled Semana de colores [Week of Colors]. The protagonists of the title story are Lelinca and her sisters Eva and Elena as children.

This page intentionally left blank

UNAUTHORING THE TEXT LAURA KATHLEEN REECK

In Boumkoeur by Rachid Djaïdani and Paul Smaïl’s Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa, Beur characters undertake initiatory writing projects. For his part, Yaz (Boumkoeur) sets out to write a testimonial account of life in the lowincome housing projects where he lives. He decides to use his writing to reflect the environment and to set himself on a new course, one distinct from his peers and his own past. The author-character Paul Smaïl (Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa) builds his novels on lived experiences, specifically his passage as a Beur to the status of author in the French literary milieu. Both author-characters are Beurs, or the children of Maghrebi immigrants, whose identity does not match the dominant French one promoted around them. Just as the identity of these characters does not fit the mould of Frenchness, their writing philosophies and techniques differ visibly from the mainstream. Instead of adopting and glorifying the role of truth-holding creators, Yaz and Paul Smaïl prefer to belie the transcendent role of the author(ity). The characters gesture to unauthor their writing; this is a rebellious act through which they seek new forms of expression and representation.

Artist-apprentice novels, or Künstlerromane, are novels in which the main characters’ maturation process parallels and grows out of the artistic projects that they undertake; bildung (formation, creation, invention, production) takes place through artistic creation. Boumkoeur (1999) by Rachid Djaïdani, and Vivre me tue (1997) and Casa, la casa (1998) by Paul Smaïl are three such novels that have been written by contemporary authors in France. There are many similarities between Djaïdani’s and Smaïl’s characters, Yaz and Paul Smaïl respectively. They both are approximately twenty-one years old; they do not have work; they have younger brothers who overdosed on drugs; and they are Beurs, the sons of North African immigrants, who live in France. At the critical moment when they should be entering the working world as full-fledged participants in French society, the Beur characters find themselves on the sidelines. Discouraged by a series of failed interviews, training sessions, and menial jobs, the characters Yaz and Paul Smaïl view writing as a constructive alternative to

44

Laura Kathleen Reeck

delinquency’s downward spiral. As they engage the writing process, these underground author-characters invest the text with commentary on life at the fringes of French society.

1. Becoming/Unbecoming and Authoring/Unauthoring Boumkoeur, Vivre me tue, and Casa, la casa narrate process: on the one hand, the process of personal maturation (becoming, bildung) and on the other, the process of literary creation. It is important to note that what generates these concurrent processes is a reaction on the part of the characters to their environment and the experiences, especially the failures, they have had at the heart of French society. The characters Yaz and Paul Smaïl both have the examples of their Maghrebi immigrant fathers, who never attained the stability they were seeking in France, and the immediate examples of their brothers who died as a result of drug addiction. But instead of following in paternal and fraternal footsteps, they decide that they will extricate themselves from their existential predicament by initiating a new beginning: writing will engender self-reinvention. The notion of “beginning” contains an interesting complexity. Here it is useful to return to Edward Said’s distinction between “a beginning” and “an origin.” According this distinction, beginnings are characterized as importantly active, origins as passive. Said writes: “we see that the beginning is the first point (in time, space, or action) of an accomplishment or process that has duration and meaning. The beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional production of meaning.” 1 A beginning, in this sense, inaugurates a process of development or unfolding. This observation informs the novels by Djaïdani and Smaïl where the characters’ initiation of book projects occurs subsequent to their realization that they could be heading toward an unwanted outcome. The decision to undertake a “beginning” is a decision that initiates a process toward better self-identity, which in turn will lead the characters to derive greater meaning from their existence. These novels illuminate the notion that, unlike an immutable origin, a beginning points both backwards and forwards; in short beginning comprises the double movement of becoming/unbecoming. So the author-characters’ decisions to initiate a new beginning through writing commits each of them to intentionally becoming someone new and to intentionally “unbecoming” at least a part of the person that they have been. The sort of double movement mentioned here is of course characteristic of all protagonists seeking to reinvent themselves. What is striking about Boumkoeur, Vivre me tue, and Casa, la casa is that for the author-characters Yaz and Paul

1

Said, 5.

Unauthoring the Text

45

Smaïl the movement of becoming/unbecoming as it is reflected through the process of authoring—embarking on a writing project—leads to an unexpected process of unauthoring. In these novels, then, becoming/unbecoming involves a parallel process of authoring/unauthoring. That becoming, a positive movement toward production and creation, should rest upon unauthoring, a movement seemingly contrary, signals the complex nature of the quest upon which the characters have embarked. Unauthoring arises in part as the author-characters’ response to the authoritative French mainstream or to those centralizing forces that keep them in their place as Beurs. In other words, the characters have to contend both with stereotypes about their Beurness and with the rigid identitarian categories that pertain to Frenchness. Hegemonic modes of thought and representation do not sit well with the characters because of the very nature of their complex identity and their position within French society. As a result of their desire to subvert author/ity, Yaz and Paul Smaïl do not conceive of themselves as implacable, truth-holding authors. Specifically, the author-characters’ authority over and identification with their texts diminishes in favor of more ambiguous and flexible relationships. In Boumkoeur, Vivre me tue, and Casa, la casa, the author-characters’ quest for self-identity interacts with, and even transforms, the authoring process.

2. Boumkoeur Rachid Djaïdani’s author-character introduces himself to the reader as an unemployed high school dropout who has decided to make a change. In the opening pages of Boumkoeur, Yaz reports that the New Year will mark a new beginning, a departure from the undirected past: “Cette année, j’espère un nouveau départ. J’ai décidé d’arrêter toutes mes bêtises. J’ai toujours voulu écrire sur les ambiances et les galères du quartier et j’ai toutes les cartes en main” [This year, I am hoping for a new beginning. I’ve decided to stop fooling around. I’ve always wanted to write about the ambiance and the hard times in the neighborhood, and I have everything I need at my fingertips].2 His express goal is simply to exist, and he conceives of writing as the means to this end. When he has finally come to a better sense of self, it will be seen that he will no longer need the activity that takes him closer to himself. Writing and the text that it produces become inconsequential in light of his more sharply defined self-identity or the moment at which Yaz constitutes his oneness with himself.

2 Djaïdani, 11. The translation into English is my own. All further citations are from the original text with English translation provided by the author of this essay.

46

Laura Kathleen Reeck

Yaz sets out to address a number of social issues in a testimonial, all the while reserving the right to embellish his writing for his readers’ pleasure; he will include “une part pour le rêve” [something to dream about] (16). When he sits down to start writing, he wonders where he should begin: “Le racisme? La violence? La politique?” (16). The author-character positions his testimony over and against the simplistic and sensationalistic reporting of the news media. If outsiders (members of the mainstream) can make money on the stories and films that they make about the life in the subsidized housing projects, why shouldn’t he? The money that he will make on his testimony about the social fragility of his neighborhood will not only provide Yaz with some money, but it will also be a call for change. C’est toutes ces aventures que je vais raconter, pour me faire des tunes à gogo, pour que ça change. Comme c’est toujours les mecs de l’extérieur qui prennent l’oseille, en racontant des histoires, ou en faisant des films, moi aussi j’ai la haine, ma cité va craquer et ce n’est pas sur un air de raï que je ferai mon état des lieux. (18) I’m going to write about all of these adventures, to make myself a bunch of money, to call for change. Since it’s always guys from the outside who come in and make all the cash by telling stories or by making a film, then me too … I’m pissed off, the project I live in is going to explode and I won’t describe the damage humming a raï tune.

Here Yaz references the outsiders (the news media) who have characteristically documented life in the projects. He refuses this mode of representation, suggesting how it is artificial, situated, and careful to perpetuate all stereotypes and clichés. He proposes that insiders represent the inside, and he will be the first to undertake such an initiative. But while the author-character intends to communicate a social message, he does not want to fly any banners. This comes across metaphorically when he describes the way that he is dressed: “Me voici déjà dans ma paire de pompes dont je tairai la marque, il n’y a pas de sponsoring dans mon histoire” [Here I am in my tennis shoes whose brand name I’m going to hide, there is no sponsoring in my story] (30). The character rebuffs sponsorship, posing as an antiinstitutional rebel unwilling to become a representative or a spokesperson. Moreover, the statement foreshadows the loose authority the author will keep over his text; it hints at the unauthoring that Yaz will later enact—the author will ultimately not sponsor his own text. To nourish his writing project, Yaz claims that he will get ideas for his story line from the housing projects and their inhabitants; his authorship is already far from unified and singular (authoritative) since the author-character intends to steal ideas from his surroundings (“pirater” [lift] (38), “plagier” [plagiarize] (40)). Yaz does not see himself as an author per se, but rather as a witness.

Unauthoring the Text

47

Everything signifies for the Beur author-character who sees text on the walls and hears dialogue in the voices of his cohorts. Yaz envisions a borrowing in which, for example, graffiti directs the author’s pen, and testimony can be gleaned from an illiterate friend. Accordingly, the character readies himself to translate the tagged walls and to interpret the stories of one of the best-known caïds (leaders) in the area, Grézi; Yaz claims that he will be the ears, and Grézi will be the eyes. But Yaz’s plans to use Grézi to write his book are to be thwarted by Grézi’s plans for Yaz, since Grézi plots to capitalize financially off Yaz by holding him hostage and demanding a ransom payment from his parents. With this money, he will fly away to his dreamland, the United States. To lure him into the trap, Grézi tells his author friend that he is being sought on murder charges and that he needs to find refuge until his 18th birthday. The two form a pact according to which Yaz will keep Grézi company if the latter volunteers to help write the neighborhood’s memoirs. However, the pact leads to an unexpected outcome for the two: as a result of their shared experience, Yaz and Grézi will both have awakenings that will bring them out of the sleepy refrain (“Ron-piche ronpriche ron-piche c’est le refrain du dodo” [Ron-piche ron-piche ron-piche is the sound of sleep]) that appears throughout the novel. From the outset of his pact with Grézi, Yaz knows that they will have to find a “lieu secret” [hiding place] for their writing project (18). This space turns out to be an atemporal, cocoon-like cellar, which has a palpably dream-like and embryonic quality to it. An abrupt narrative shift, the only one that moves the narration outside of Yaz’s first-person voice, makes way for the intervention of an omniscient narrator who comments on the space as if it were a stage. Among the props on the bleak set are a mirror and a stopped clock, both located on the same wall: “sur l’un d’eux [murs] sont pendus une horloge figée dans le temps et un éclat de miroir ne reflétant plus les âmes” [A clock fixed in time and a sliver of an unreflecting mirror hang from one of the walls] (46). Silence reigns, and time is at a standstill in the sensory deprivation chamber, where the door is double-locked and characters must face the most basic part of who they are. That an omniscient voice narrates the description of the locale suggests that Yaz and his setting are so intimately connected that the habitual narrator does not have adequate distance to comment on his surroundings: the cellar encloses his forming subjectivity. The cellar serves as an appropriate setting for the two characters who must pass from the initial stages of identification (consciousness) to self-consciousness, from reflections in the mirror to self-reflection. While the omniscient narrator reports that the mirror hanging on the wall no longer casts back images, this is more a commentary on the characters’ primary stage in the maturation process than on the efficacy of the mirror. During the time that Grézi holds Yaz hostage, the pair spends a good deal of time in front of the mirror, looking at themselves and even looking at the other person through a mirror image. In a telling passage,

48

Laura Kathleen Reeck

Yaz describes the mirror as the thing they look through to see the other person: “Grézi, occupé à faire sa belle, me tourne toujours le dos, enfin, sans vraiment me le tourner. Le reflet de glace lui a scotché d’autres yeux” [Grézi, making himself beautiful, still has his back to me without really having turned it. The reflection in the mirror has given him another set of eyes] (44). The two characters see each other by way of a reflection in the mirror—in fact, they are united through the mirror image. Within the walls of the underground cellar, the Beur characters begin to look at each other, and more importantly at their individual selves. It is noteworthy that the mirror serves as a metaphor for Yaz’s maturation process throughout Boumkoeur. He has entered the mirror stage, or “ l’aventure originelle par où l’homme fait pour la première fois l’expérience qu’il se voit, se réfléchit et se conçoit autre qu’il n’est—dimension essentielle de l’humain, qui structure toute sa vie fantasmatique” [the unique adventure wherein the individual has the first experience of seeing himself, reflecting back to himself, and seeing himself other than how he is—an essential dimension to the individual, which structures the whole of his symbolic order].3 Entering the mirror stage takes Yaz to writing. Appropriately, Yaz marks the moment he will begin writing by breaking his reflection in the mirror. Put otherwise, a prise de conscience and a prise de parole go hand in hand: to construct a new selfimage, Yaz must destroy its precedent. Shortly after entering into his pact with Grézi, the nascent author briefly returns to his family’s apartment to get a writing utensil and dictionary. On his way out, he catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror. He lashes out, throwing the dictionary at his reflection: Con je suis. Le dico que je tiens vient d’être projeté à trois cents à l’heure contre le miroir qui me fixe … Il fallait bien me défouler un jour sur ce reflet de moi qui m’a toujours ridiculisé. Le dictionnaire s’est retrouvé en confettis. (56) I’m an idiot. I just threw the dictionary 200 miles per hour against the mirror staring back at me. One day I was bound to lash out at my reflection that has always made me look ridiculous. The dictionary wound up in shreds.

Yaz sees his reflected image as pathetic. The broken glass reduces the dictionary to a collection of words, “confettis,” the matter with which the narrator intends to begin anew in order to see himself differently. The symbiotic dynamic between Yaz and Grézi gives rise to the cyclical effect that also prompts Grézi’s writing. In other words, the characters’ individual itineraries from delinquency to self-reflection by way of writing mirror one another. Delinquency plays a role in each of their stories: if at the outset Yaz has recently returned to the projects after having been taken into custody for theft, towards the end of Boumkoeur, Grézi lands in prison because of his 3

Jacques Lacan, 94.

Unauthoring the Text

49

prank gone awry. Suddenly, the roles shift: initially Yaz was looking for a new beginning and a way out of petty delinquency; now Grézi is looking for a new start as a rehabilitated member of society. What Grézi and Yaz ultimately reflect back to each other is the desire to reinvent self, which they find through their rush toward narrative activity. Writing unites them around a common cause and serves as the self-reflective medium through which they come closer to self and closer to each other. They have entered into the mirror stage together, reflecting self back to the other. Their development is simultaneous, visceral, and intersubjective—they are two parts of the same ensemble. The reader learns of Grézi’s self-reflection and self-writing in a long confessional letter, figured as text within the novel, that he dictates to a cellmate. For the last thirty pages, Grézi takes over as narrator, and Yaz becomes the prisoner’s privileged interlocutor and reader. For the inmate Grézi, learning to write amounts to a journey within: “Plus que me punir, la prison m’a fait réfléchir sur mon avenir” [More than punishing me, prison has made me think about my future] (151). Grézi makes the interior nature of his quest clear in his poetic first sentence, noting again in rhyme: “C’est pas du Molière mais au moins c’est sincère” [It’s not Molière, but at least it’s sincere] (151). “Punir/réfléchir/ avenir” [“to punish,” “to reflect,” “the future”] form an interior rhyming triptych that is semantically significant: punishment brings him to reflection, which will bring him to a new vision for his future. According to Grézi’s letter, when he landed in prison, he entered into a new self-reflective phase that occurred as he came to writing. In an effort to feel his existence, he recounts that he inscribed his initials into the prison walls, alongside those of past prisoners. Each time he changed cells, Grézi wrote himself into the walls. But as he inserted himself into the social world of the prison and into the delinquent genealogy on the prison walls, Grézi claims that he began to think about himself more seriously. He decides that his re-entry into the real world and real time will mark a new beginning: La chance qu’a un prisonnier, c’est qu’à la sortie il est ressuscité, une autre vie commence pour lui s’il se donne la hargne de la saisir, sans quoi il ne sera qu’un pensionnaire de la maison carcérale, un récidiviste. (155) What a prisoner has going for him is that when he gets out, he is brought back to life, a new life begins for him, if he takes the time to think about it. Without this realization, he will never be more than a boarder in the prison system, a repeat offender.

Once again, writing emerges as a beginning, the catalyst to the double movement of unbecoming/becoming. At the end of Boumkoeur, the two characters have come full circle. “De sa cage carcérale, Grézi a fait l’effort de m’écrire, dans ma cage d’escalier c’est avec attention que je l’ai lu” [From his prison cell, Grézi made the effort to

50

Laura Kathleen Reeck

write to me, and in my stairwell I attentively read what he wrote] (158). In separate but equal spaces, the “cages” to which Yaz makes reference, Grézi has become the author and Yaz the reader. As he concludes his narration, the authorcharacter reveals that he finally “sees” Grézi, although not in a face à face. Rather the narrator sees Grézi within the confines of his own identification process: “D’un trait même pas saccadé, mon imaginaire l’a revu” [Without the least hesitation, my imagination saw him again] (158). Within the realm of “l’imaginaire,” the topos of identity formation, the characters have fused, finding each other and themselves. When Yaz and Grézi finally get themselves in sight, they have already seen the other: they emerge as complementary parts of the same consciousness. The narrative pact into which they enter stands at the confluence of past and present, a temporal juncture out of which stems the affirmation of their new beginning, motivated through writing. It is significant that Yaz never completes his book project despite the fact that Grézi sends his testimony from prison to keep up his end of the pact. In a surprising move, the author-character sets fire to the pages that would have constituted the material for his writing project, sending Boumkoeur’s conclusion up in smoke and ending his narration with a tautology: “Paf!! Rouge/Fin” [Paf!!/Red/End] (159). By burning the pages from Grézi, Yaz unauthors his project once and for all. In fact, he author-character’s authority has been far from authoritative from the moment he undertook his writing project; instead of closing the text off, Yaz turns writing outward to unconventional forms of transmission (conjoined witnessing: Grézi as the eyes and Yaz as the ears) and extra-authorial textuality (graffiti, rap music, and the anecdotes of the disenfranchised). By setting fire to his writing, the Beur author-character throws doubt on the very possibility of representing, of using words to fix meaning. He reduces what was to be a social testimonial to ashes, suggesting that he cannot represent—for his reality escapes representation. Ultimately, Yaz opts out of his self-assigned role of witness and defers to the reader: Le journal prospectus sur lequel mon cul est posé flambe et m’offre des éclats qui me laisseront conclure. Les histoires de quartier du best of de la mémoire de Grézi partent en fumée. Je ne vous les balancerai pas. Faites l’effort de nous rendre visite. (158) The paper under my ass goes up in flames and offers me the sparks with which to conclude. The Best of Grézi’s Remembered Stories goes up in smoke. I’m not going to hand them over to you. Make an effort to visit us.

The author-character hands over his authorial intention and indicates that anything he may have intended to communicate in his testimonial can best be apprehended if the reader come to the projects for a first-hand perspective. Instead of viewing Yaz’s final act as self-destructive to the character, it is important to consider that the author-character has reached a new level of

Unauthoring the Text

51

self-awareness. He has new options for himself as he waits to hear back from numerous job applications that he has submitted, and he has even come to the realization that he will likely leave the projects in search of a better life. More importantly, on the symbolic level, as seen through the relationship that Yaz and Grézi have with each other as formative parts of the same subjectivity, Yaz is now whole. His heightened consciousness of self means that the text has become unnecessary; although there is no text to attest to the transformation of Yaz and Grézi, parts of the same whole, what they have authored is their process of becoming.

3. Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa Like Yaz, the author-character in Paul Smaïl’s Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa— also called Paul Smaïl—undertakes a book project that initiates a voyage inward. His project will fill the silent space left by the death of his brother. Shortly after leaving his brother’s hospital bed, the Smaïl character vows to finish the book he had promised to write: “je me suis fait le serment d’écrire enfin ce livre que je m’étais promis d’écrire, ce livre que j’avais promis à Daniel” (12). [“I swore solemnly that I’d finally get down to the book I’d promised myself I’d write. I would write the book I’d promised Daniel.”] 4 Writing stands opposite death, self-annihilation, and delinquency, much as it did in Boumkoeur. As the title of his first book (Vivre me tue) indicates, the author-character has begun an existential inquiry into the meaning of life and death. He anticipates that through writing he will begin anew, creating an adventure without a definite end point which may or may not bear literary fruit: “Je ne sais pas vraiment où je vais, je ne sais pas encore si tout cela fera un livre à la fin, ni si ce sera du roman ou ma vie plus ou moins, on verra bien. C’est l’aventure” (14). [“I don’t know where I’m going. I still don’t know if all this will end up making a book, or if it will be a novel or my life, give or take a little. We’ll see. It’s an adventure” (Smile 5).] With Casa, la casa, the sequel novel to Vivre me tue, the author-character has published a novel entitled Vivre me tue. Subsequently, the French literary milieu—what he judges to be the representatives of the French mainstream—has begun to recruit Smaïl to their ranks. The character’s dilemma is how to remain a marketable author without getting bought back through sponsorship and dilute hospitality. As soon as Smaïl authors his first novel, he senses that he has released, or killed, a part of himself (his past): “Car c’était aussi un peu à ma vie que j’avais 4 Paul Smaïl [Jacques-Alain Léger]. Vivre me tue, 12; hereafter referenced in the text as Vivre. The English-language translation [Smile. Translated by Simon Pleasance, Fonza Woods, and Janine Dupont (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 4], hereafter referenced in the text as Smile, follows the original French in the text.

52

Laura Kathleen Reeck

mis un point final. En écrivant ce livre, je m’étais dépouillé d’une bonne part de moi. Je m’étais dépossédé d’un passé qui était ma seule richesse” [I knew that in a certain way I had also put an end to my life. By writing this book, I had shed a part of myself. I had released my past, which was my only asset].5 Now confronted by a sort of tabula rasa, Smaïl begins to reconsider his own identity. He decides to set out for his always already lost homeland, Morocco, but this adventure, along with his informal sessions with a psychotherapist friend, leads him to realize he is more at home in France. Yet the character had to go to Morocco in order to come home to France: “Il fallait seulement que je m’en aille pour le comprendre, et que j’y reviens” [I only had to leave and come back to understand] (Casa 26–27). Smaïl’s trajectory from France to Morocco marks the double movement of becoming/unbecoming and also the author-character’s transition from aspiring Beur author (with no guarantee of success) to French author. It is notable that no sooner has Smaïl authored his text than he experiences an impulse to unauthor it, imagining the destruction of his text through a gesture somewhat like Yaz’s: “J’étais tout près de renoncer. Je voulais leur demander de me le rendre. Pour le détruire” [I was so close to caving. I wanted to ask them to give it back to me. To destroy it] (Casa 41). But in order to retain the margin of maneuver that he desires, Smaïl decides not to destroy his text and instead to remain anonymous through other means. Accordingly, in Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa the author-character adopts a pseudonym to prevent his getting pulled back into the mainstream.6 From his auto-portrait on the first page of Vivre me tue forward, the author-character introduces nuance to his name (and identity): “Appelez-moi Smaïl” (9) [“You can call me Smile” (1)],

5

Paul Smaïl [Jacques-Alain Léger]. Casa, la casa (Paris: Balland, 1998), 41; hereafter referenced in the text as Casa. The English translations of this text are my own. All further citations are from the original text with the English translation provided by the author of this essay. 6 A good deal of controversy has risen concerning the author Paul Smaïl. As questions regarding the pseudonym under which he admitted to writing intensified, the author indicated in written interviews that he was indeed who he claimed to be—a child born in France to Moroccan immigrants. More recent information confirms that Smaïl is a known French author by the name of Jacques-Alain Léger who has used pseudonyms in the past. Perhaps one way of understanding the impact of the author Paul Smaïl’s gesture is to consider Barthes’s allowance for the return of the author to the text (after he has already announced the death of the author). In The Rustle of Language (Translated by Richard Howard. [New York: Hill and Wang, 1986], 61–62) Barthes writes that “it is not that the Author cannot ‘return’ in the Text, in his text, but he does so, one might say, as a guest … his inscription is no longer privileged, paternal, alethic, but ludic: he becomes, one can say, a paper author; his life is no longer the origins of his fables, but a fable concurrent with his life; there is a reversion of the work upon life (and no longer the contrary).” This reverse fictionalization process would certainly appear to illuminate the case of Smaïl/Jacques-Alain Léger.

Unauthoring the Text

53

he declares to a potential employer on the other end of the telephone line. He does not say that his name is Smaïl, but rather that one can call him that. Much later in his story, he will allude briefly and flippantly to his pseudonym: “Smaïl est un pseudo et tu ne leur diras rien” [Smaïl is a pseudo and you won’t tell them] (Casa 42). This gesture of the author-character Paul Smaïl finds illumination in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s reflections on the pseudonym. The Moroccan thinker reflects on his own use of the pseudonym, and queries: Qu’est-ce que’une signature pseudonymique? Ce jeu de division masquée de soi et de permutation nominale, ouvre-t-il à la réalisation anagrammatique d’un désir? Pourquoi accentuer l’illisibilité de soi à soi, voiler ainsi la transparence sociale de son identité?” What is a pseudonymic signature? Does this game of the masked division of self and of nominal permutation open onto the fulfillment of the desire to be someone else? Why draw attention to the undecipherable nature of self to self? Why hide the social transparency of one’s identity? 7

Khatibi concludes that the gesture provokes the loosening of ties to family, origin, and social identity; adopting a pseudonym is a freeing act that asks for the absolute independence of the author. This is appropriate and informative in the case of the author-character in Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa who envisages his anonymity as the means of preserving his freedom. When Parisian journalists begin speculating that the literary phenomenon Paul Smaïl does not exist, the author-character takes a self-imposed vow to silence: “Je comprends que je ne dois pas riposter si je veux demeurer un homme libre … Je suis un écrivain— ta ga da! Et je suis un homme libre—tsam tsam!” [I know that I cannot respond if I want to remain a free man. I’m a writer—ta ga da! And I’m a free man— tsam tsam!] (Casa 115). What is more, by keeping his distance and anonymity intact, the Smaïl character reacts to authoritative classificatory schemes that come from within French society as a whole and most importantly, in this context, from the literary milieu. He prefers to manufacture wells of obscurity than to obtain instant glory as an author in France.8 Tagged a Beur, a category from which he senses there is no escape, the author-character does all that he can to hold onto his personal 7

Khatibi, 40. Edouard Glissant (in Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997], 190) sums up the important action of opacity in his discussion of difference. He suggests that we should agree that we all have wells of opacity by our very nature. We should “agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.” 8

54

Laura Kathleen Reeck

integrity, thereby assuming the role of what Mirelle Rosello has called the “reluctant witness” whose intention is to decline the stereotype.9 Cognizant of how minorities get brought back into the system after reaching fame and fortune, the author-character elects to remain silent, and in so doing, he unauthors his text in the strictest sense of the word—there will henceforth be no author with whom to identify the text. After the success of his first book, Vivre me tue, he imagines the onslaught of incoming calls for public appearances and participation on literary talk shows. More than his authorship, the media would use him to promote the stereotypes about the Beurs already at work in dominant French culture: Tu seras le beur à la mode, le beur de service, le beur médiatique, le beur pour la télé, le beur thème d’émission, le beur sujet de société, le beur invité à Vingt heures … Le beur bien intégré ou le beur révolté, au choix, si possible les deux à la fois: le beur qui coupe la parole au ministre mais le beur qui a lu Proust!” (Casa 42–43). You’ll be the Beur fashion statement, the token Beur, the mediatized Beur, the Beur for the television, the talk show Beur, the Beur society piece, the Beur invited to the news hour … The well-integrated Beur or the rebellious Beur, one or the other, both at the same time if at all possible: the Beur who interrupts politicians, but who has read Proust!

The author-character senses that the media will take advantage of his budding persona: he will become the assimilated Beur, fashionable for the moment and for all purposes. Or better yet, he could be the rebellious Beur who is surreptitiously integrated as such. Wouldn’t integration be complete if all dissidents were brought back into the mainstream? The author-character strictly opposes recuperation and prefers to assume an unpredictable and somewhat intractable guise to stardom. He, like Yaz, will not fly any banners, nor participate in any one political platform. Highly attuned to literary reception, an interest already in place when he wrote a thesis in comparative literature entitled “Herman Melville en France: traductions, éditions et fortune critique …” (Vivre 74), the author-character pinpoints 9 In the strictest sense, declining a stereotype means standing at a distance from something one does not believe, and rejecting the role of the “reluctant witness”—this is a form of refusal. Meanwhile Mirelle Rosello (in Declining the Stereotype [Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1998], 11) emphasizes how declining a stereotype also occurs through subversive forms of participation that come from within: “In practice, this type of declining encompasses ironic repetitions, carefully framed quotations, distortions and puns, linguistic alterations, double entendres, and self-deprecating humor. Declining a stereotype is a way of depriving it of its harmful potential by highlighting its very nature.” The characters Yaz and Paul Smaïl pose as reluctant witnesses who challenge circulating stereotypes about the Beurs, particularly the way that the media portrays them. But also, more surreptitiously, they act within the stereotype, through the linguistic strategies mentioned by Rosello that punctuate their self-narration.

Unauthoring the Text

55

a larger concern, the equivocal canonization process. The canon, as the meeting point of literature and social institutions and mores, represents a form of authoritative consensus. Suspicious of all forms of authority, the authorcharacter sees the canon and the dominant reading strategies that feed into it as fertile ground for critical inquiry. Contrary to promoting a single, authenticated version the author-character prefers readings according to which competing, but equally authentic, versions of the same story can co-exist. His exposé to his dying brother on their family name (Smaïl), itself based on a textual explication of a story shared by the three monotheistic religions, sheds light on the adjustment he wishes to impose on unique readings. “ ‘Les Arabes vivront sous la tente, la descendance d’Ismaël …’ Abraham l’a voulu: le peuple d’Ismaël sera le peuple nomade … Les Smaïl!” (Vivre 172). [“ ‘The Arabs will live in tents, the heirs of Ismaël …’Abraham wished it so: the people of Ismaël will be a nomadic people … The Smaïls!” (Smile 138)], explains the character who situates himself as a wanderer, a nomad, like his ancestors issued from Abraham and Hagar’s line. Here Smaïl places himself within a line that splits off from the JudeoChristian canon. By inserting himself in the (nomadic) line of Abraham/Hagar/ Ismaël, he occupies the margins of the Abraham/Sarah/Isaac line. The Beur character thus re-historizes a story common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but turns his own interpretation toward the Islamic one that is easily overlooked by the participants in the other genealogies. His is the “illegitimate,” “bastardized” version of a twofold story that has been reduced to one authoritative version. He does not hesitate to identify with the alternative interpretation of the shared story of Abraham’s lineage by aligning himself as the progenitor of the ostracized, enslaved servant-woman. In so doing, he attenuates the authoritative reading and poses as an author-rebel who will not shy away from undoing the logic of the dominant reading.10 The emerging author takes aim at reading strategies that participate in the normalizing principles behind canons. In both Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa the canonization process at large gets examined through the microcosmic world of the bookstore. When Paul begins work in a small bookstore, the storeowner views his presence a cultural privilege for the bookstore: “Je suis très heureuse qu’un Maghrébin se joigne à nous. C’est pour notre librairie une ouverture sur le monde … (Vivre 83). [“I’m so pleased somebody from North Africa is joining us. For our bookstore this means an opening out to the world” 10 Barthes’s definition of “multiple writing” (in Rustle of Language, 68) implies multiple readings: “In multiple writing, in effect, everything is to disentangled, but nothing deciphered …”. The death of the author assumes the birth of the reader as the text’s privileged interlocutor. Just as meaning is not fixed, interpretation is not fixed in multiple writing. Instead the reader is left to construct and take meaning from the text.

56

Laura Kathleen Reeck

(Smile 62)]. But Paul quickly sees through the artificial goodwill of the storeowner, likening her tone to that of a colonizer’s wife. To prove his literary background, the owner puts her new recruit through potential requests by customers, asking him if he knows the author and where to find the book. He passes the test with great ease, but the procedure exposes the storeowner’s lack of confidence in him. On another occasion, he is further disappointed when the storeowner automatically assumes that he is an avid reader of the Maghrebi classics, such as Le passé simple by Driss Chraïbi and Le pain nu by Mohamed Choukri. Finally, when l’Abbesse offers Paul the cover to La malédiction by Rachid Mimouni, the Beur character launchess into a violent tirade: … les ratons ne devraient lire que des bouquins de ratons, selon vous? Proust, c’est seulement pour des pédés, alors? Et Melville aussi? Et Virginia Woolf, pour les gousses? Et les Bretons, alors, il faut qu’ils lisent Chateaubriand? Les Russes, Tolstoï? Mais pas Dickens, hein, Dickens c’est pour les Anglais! Il était anglais Dickens. Un raton ne peut pas lire Dickens! C’est ça que vous voulez, hein? Chacun chez soi? (Vivre 93) A-rabs should only read books by A-rabs, is that what you think? Then Proust is for faggots, is that right? And Melville too? And Virginia Woolf ’s just for dykes? And what about Bretons? They should just read Chateaubriand? Russians, Tolstoy? But not Dickens, huh, Dickens is for the English! He was English, Dickens! A raghead can’t read Dickens! Is that what you want then? To each his own? (Smile 71)

Smaïl makes the claim for common ground as well as the end to strict filial lines and genealogies. His own case problematizes the strict delineations that his employer attempts to draw between national literatures. An exploded canon, one that is universal and open to influence and mutual exchange, appeals to the Smaïl character. By doing away with classification according to the nationality, ethnicity, language, and the sexual orientation of the author, the author-character suggests that texts can be traded across all of these lines. Not only does the reception of texts extend beyond narrow groupings, but writing itself depends upon interchange and sharing. Through a series of borrowings from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Melville, Rimbaud, and Stendhal, the character Paul Smaïl positions himself over and against literary antecedents, formulating a writing philosophy predicated on re-writing and intertextuality. Put otherwise, the author-character’s invention of himself as an author binds itself to reinvention. The Beur character calls himself an author for the first time when he realizes that he has rehabilitated a classic by Shakespeare. Thanks to a schoolteacher, the Beur character learned about reading and interpretation at a young age. During one session at Monsieur Hamel’s house, the schoolboy was particularly sensitive to a passage in the Merchant of Venice where Shylock cries out: “ ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? … If you poison us, do we not die? … And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ ” (Vivre 105).

Unauthoring the Text

57

[“ ‘If you prick up, do we not bleed? … If you poison us, do we not die? … And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ ” (Smile 82)]. Not only do the lines announce the tone of the author-character Smaïl’s engaged writing, but through them he later realizes that he is an author. As he is moving out of his family’s apartment, the author-character comes across a page in his handwriting. When he looks at the writing more closely he notices that he must have written the paragraph after a visit at Monsieur Hamel’s house for it is a loose rewriting of Shylock’s passage. The author-character remarks that he had effectively become what he had always wanted to be: a writer. The Smaïl author-character appropriates the classics, becoming an author when he has re-written Shakespeare on his own terms. To sum up the unauthoring strands in Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa: first, the Paul Smaïl character makes a mockery of what he perceives to be the overdetermined relationship between author and text by adopting a pseudonym, taking a vow to silence and electing to remain incognito. Then, without the author at the center, he shows the boundaries between texts themselves to be nonauthoritative. Finally, as the character makes apparent in his diatribe against the literary institution and its prefabricated reception schemes, the unauthored text calls for readings that naturally allow for other readings. At bottom, the authorcharacter’s writing philosophy and stance on authorship show the text to be unlimited.11 There is perhaps no better expression of this than at the end of Casa, la casa where Smaïl’s affair with his love interest named Myriam starts up for the second time, and where beginnings and endings confound into the same matter. As Smaïl is reunited with Myriam, the author-character suggests that everything is beginning anew: “Tout recommence” [Everything is starting again] (188). In fact, he suggests that, instead of filling in the details to the love story (what is the end of the novel), he could simply return to his first book, Vivre me tue, where he initially recounted his feelings for Myriam. He imagines a borrowing that would create an intertext between his two novels. However, just a few lines later, Smaïl decides that he wants this new beginning to be just that—not a repetition of the same, but a truly new start: “Non, je ne veux pas que tout recommence, je veux que tout commence ici, ce soir. La page tournée, une

11 The idea of text as an unlimited process takes off from Michel Foucault’s estimation that writing is an unlimited process (in “What is an author?” In The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon Books, 1984], 102). In “What is an author?” Foucault defines the nature of writing after the death of the author: “Writing unfolds like a game ( jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its own limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.”

58

Laura Kathleen Reeck

nouvelle histoire” [No, I don’t want everything to start over again, I want everything to start here, tonight. Page turned, a new story] (Casa 190). The ending to Casa, la casa is nothing other than a new beginning. Appropriately, the novel ends on New Year’s Eve, the marker of a temporal intersection (past/ future), or the moment at which a new beginning naturally occurs, just as it did in Boumkoeur.

4. Conclusion For the author-characters Yaz and Paul Smaïl, the double movement of becoming/unbecoming gets motivated both from within, as they seek to give meaning to their existence and to hone their self-identity, and from without, as they refuse to occupy the role of Beur that dominant French culture has assigned them. These Künstlerromane with Beur author-characters show beginnings to be a decision to move away from an original course along with the authoritative mainstream and its social stricture. By their very nature, beginnings undermine the notion that self-identity is immutable. This applies well to the identity formation in which the author-characters Yaz and Paul Smaïl are engaged. These Beur characters’ self-identity is a complex, multi-sided one which denies finite, fixed categories. Unauthoring itself grows out of self-consciousness and awareness of the limitations of representation. Yaz and Paul Smaïl show the text to be unbounded: they keep meaning from getting frozen through word play, irony, and humor, and by refusing to fly a banner or send a Message; they leave interpretation to the reader; they enact gestures of self-effacement to limit their own authority over and their identification with their texts. As creators, Yaz and Paul Smaïl do not know precisely what they will produce, but they are less interested in the end than in the means. Through writing (the means) they will reach a desired end (a new beginning with a stronger sense of self-identity). In this way, the unauthored text is, somewhat unexpectedly, none other than the space of identity formation, the space of self-writing, the space of becoming.

THE NOVEL CONSTRUCTION OF THE WRITER: SYMBIOTIC TEXTS, PARASITIC AUTHORS IN THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK MARJORIE WORTHINGTON

Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, turns to writing to regain the wholeness of her selfhood. However, although Anna’s writing allows her to construct a written version of herself, it simultaneously and inevitably severs the connection between the writer and the written, evoking the splitting of the written subject from the writing subject. The paradox of writing—which both constructs and distances one from oneself—lies at the heart of The Golden Notebook. The diffused structure of the novel mirrors the subjectivity of its protagonist and demonstrates that the very process that catalyzes the disintegration of a self also enables the creation of an author. The Golden Notebook is a chronicle of the symbiotic relationship between and author and her text, as the novel itself constructs the consciousness capable of writing it.

Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel The Golden Notebook,1 feels herself to be a victim of the modern world and laments what she perceives to be the fragmentation of western society and the dissolution of essentialized, coherent identity. Her crisis is that she has lost definition, both in the sense that she can no longer define herself, but also in the sense that her identity has become less distinct, more blurred. She turns to writing to regain the wholeness of her selfhood, to fix unchangeably her identity and what that identity means. Anna worries, however, that the creative, controlling power of authorship is available only to those who already have well-defined and essentialized identities; she worries that the split or fragmented subject she is becoming will not be able to write an artistically satisfying novel. What becomes apparent, much to Anna’s chagrin, is that the very nature of the writing process conspires against her project; her attempt at writing to 1 Originally published: Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962).

60

Marjorie Worthington

restore an identity she feels she has lost results in the partial and fleeting construction of a fragmented subjectivity inflected by language. For although Anna’s writing constructs a written version of herself, it simultaneously and inevitably severs the connection between the writer and the written, evoking the splitting of the written subject from the writing subject. In this sense, the act of writing is simultaneously the means by which Anna might create a work of art and the means by which her subjectivity becomes split, possibly rendering her unable to create. This paradox lies at the heart of The Golden Notebook, and one of its central concerns becomes whether agentic authorship is available to a fragmented and diffused subject such as Anna. The fragmented and diffused structure of The Golden Notebook mirrors the subjectivity of its protagonist, and provides an answer in the affirmative; the complicated yet artful structure of the novel demonstrates that the very process that catalyzes the disintegration of a self, also enables the creation of an author. The action of The Golden Notebook largely involves Anna attempting to recapture the power of her writing and a coherent sense of her life and self. The diffusion that Anna feels and which she describes as being a common phenomenon in those around her, is reflected in the structural makeup of the novel itself, in that it aptly demonstrates—is even performative of—the fragmented consciousness so often touted as a primary modernist or postmodern characteristic. The structure is indeed complex and requires a bit of description. The Golden Notebook both opens and closes with sections of a frame novel, ostensibly written by Anna and entitled Free Women. Three other sections of Free Women are also interspersed throughout the novel. In between chapters of the frame novel are sections from Anna’s many writing notebooks or journals. Each notebook is a different color, and each is written in different handwriting, as though someone different had written each one. The black one is reserved for the story of and reflections about Anna’s experiences living in Africa. The red notebook is designated for the record of Anna’s membership in the British Communist Party. A yellow notebook contains a novel-in-progress entitled The Shadow of the Third, whose characters resemble those in the other notebooks and in Free Women, but have different names. For example, Anna is called Ella in the yellow notebook. The fourth notebook is blue and is a more traditional journal, with entries set off by dates beginning with January 7, 1950. These sections (or fragments) of notebooks and novels follow a distinct but somewhat confusing pattern: A chapter of Free Women, followed by one section each of the black notebook, the red notebook, the yellow notebook and the blue notebook. This sequence appears four times and is then followed by a section of a brand new notebook—the golden notebook—which is then followed by a final section, the final chapter of Free Women. Anna has turned to writing in several different notebooks in a desperate effort to maintain order in her increasingly chaotic mind. She hopes that if she

Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors

61

can demarcate boundaries between the disparate elements of her subjectivity, enclose each into a different colored notebook, then she will be able to keep a grip on herself. It is important to her to believe that the notebooks can act as vessels to contain and preserve the reality of her life, the truth of her self. Anna’s quest to maintain a hold on her sense of a coherent self is mirrored by her struggle to create a truthful written chronicle.2 Anna suspects and is terrified by the idea that concepts like “truth” and “self ” might be only that: concepts, not objective realities. She resists the idea: “And as I think of this, that there is no right, no wrong, simply a process, a wheel turning, I become frightened, because everything in me cries out against such a view of life.” 3 However, the more Anna resists what some critics have termed this “postmodern relativism,” 4 the more consistently she is confronted with it, as the truth that once seemed so clear and accessible now consistently eludes her. Instead of a truthful account, her writing seems to yield only an artificially constructed narrative. What Anna begins to fear, is that this narrativization might not be merely a personal impulse, but rather part of the very nature of writing itself. In other words, Anna suspects that writing might not be able to convey objective reality. For Anna, the implications of this failure of writing are dire, for if writing cannot provide direct access to truth, then her journals can provide no direct access to self. And neither can her previous writing. Prior to the events depicted in The Golden Notebook, Anna had written what had been a very successful novel about race relations in Africa called Frontiers of War. The novel is a fictional account of events and people that Anna encountered while living in Africa (events also chronicled in the black notebook). Despite its quite respectable success, both with critics and readers (it is years later, and Anna and her daughter 2

Gayle Greene reflects the critical consensus about the connection between Anna’s writing and her life when she says, “Anna’s search for literary form is thus the correlative of her efforts to shape her own life at a time when conventional forms have lost their meaning.” Gayle Greene, “Women and Men in Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook: Divided Selves,” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1985), 286. 3 Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 345. 4 See Suzette Henke, “Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook: A Paradox of Postmodern Play,” in Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. Lisa Rado (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 159–187. Also of interest are Molly Hite, “Subverting the Ideology of Coherence: The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City,” in Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival, eds. Cora Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose (Athens, OH: Ohio U P, 1988), 61–70, and Magali Cornier Michael, “Woolf ’s Between the Acts and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: From Modern to Postmodern Subjectivity,” in Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold, eds. Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 39–56.

62

Marjorie Worthington

Janet still live on its proceeds), Anna has not been satisfied with anything she has written since then. In fact, she now looks with disdain upon Frontiers of War, claiming that the emotion with which it is imbued detracts from its truthfulness. Anna says, “It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence.” 5 She argues that it is precisely this emotional content that makes the book a “novel” and not pure “reportage,” but asks herself why she ended up writing a “novel” and not a “straight, simple, formless account” of the events in Africa.6 Although Anna insists that she was not interested in writing a novel, but rather in depicting the reality of events and presenting “the truth,” she wonders, “why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fueled it.” 7 Indeed, this question is what plagues Anna’s writing process now and what keeps her from being able to write anything that satisfies her enough for publication. She says: “I have to first switch something off in me; now, writing about it, I have to switch it off, or ‘a story’ would begin to emerge, a novel, and not the truth.” 8 Despite her efforts, she is unable to resist the impulse to fictionalize, to narrativize her life in her writing. At this point in the novel, Anna still differentiates between right and wrong, truth and fiction. She believes that writing need not necessarily be narrative, that writing can and should have direct access to truth. As a result, she is convinced that the writing problems she is experiencing are purely her own; she does not imagine herself accepting the inherently narrative nature of writing or the illusory and contextual nature of truth characterized by postmodernism. The work of art she so longs to create would consist of the “truth” captured in writing. But Anna feels incapable of writing the kind of novel that “has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy,” because she herself is “too diffused.” 9 What follows this discussion is a rather lengthy excerpt from the black notebook, which is a written record of the actual events in Africa that were the impetus for the novel Frontiers of War. It is as though Anna expects in the black notebook to be able to depict the “truth” that her previous novel had glossed and distorted with emotion. Several months after its completion, however, Anna rereads this newer account and records her thoughts about it: I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being “objective.” Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through

5

Lessing, 63. Lessing, 63. 7 Lessing, 63. 8 Lessing, 64. 9 Lessing, 61. 6

Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors

63

any of that again. And the “Anna” of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.10

Apparently, as Anna is beginning to realize, it is not quite so easy to “switch off ” one’s fictionalizing impulse or to depict the unproblematic, objective truth through writing. Indeed, what becomes increasingly evident throughout all of Anna’s written narratives is that writing actually emphasizes the inherent distance between the signifier and the signified, between the word and the truth. Anna attempts to construct a frame of writing around an event that will fix the meaning of that event. However, she wants to avoid editorializing or interpreting the meaning herself. Later in the novel, Anna discusses why writing the truth is so difficult, and indeed, proves ultimately to be impossible for her: “As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a pattern … That is why all this is untrue. Because while living through something one doesn’t think like that at all.” 11 In other words, the act of thinking and writing about an event causes her inevitably to shape the event according to what she knows now, to pattern the account and give it meaning. “Literature” she says, “is analysis after the event.” 12 Paradoxically, however, it is the analytical opportunity literature provides that attracts Anna to the act of writing. Contradictorily perhaps, Anna is interested simultaneously in the attempt to portray “truth” in her writing, and in the potential of literature to provide an order to experience.13 Anna states that the only kind of novel that interests her is one which is “powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life.” 14 The novels of her time, she argues, often do not have that quality: “The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves.” 15 The unity that Anna deems imperative to good fiction is not present in many of the novels she encounters, she argues, because of the increasing fragmentation of society and the subject. And, of course, we could point to The Golden Notebook itself as a particularly 10

Lessing, 153. Lessing, 227–28. 12 Lessing, 228. 13 Giuliana Mutti, among others, has made this point, arguing that Anna’s writings “support the function of art as the most viable means of transforming chaos into order.” Giuliana Mutti, “Female Roles and the Function of Art in The Golden Notebook,” Massachusetts Studies in English 3 (1972): 80. See also: Betsy Draine, “Nostalgia and Irony: The Postmodern Order of The Golden Notebook,” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1980): 31–48. 14 Lessing, 61. 15 Lessing, 61 (emphasis Lessing’s). 11

64

Marjorie Worthington

apt example of such fragmentary fiction. The result of such fiction, to Anna, is a kind of crisis of language and literature that reflects a crisis of the contemporary mind. To illustrate her point, Anna provides the example of a story she had read while working as an editor for a Communist Party publication. At first, she thought the story a parody, and it was not until she had read it entirely that she realized it was meant to be serious: [W]hat seemed to me important was that it could be read as parody, irony or seriously. It seems to me this fact is another expression of the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience.16

In other words, Anna comes to believe that language and therefore writing is no longer sufficient for depicting, ordering or helping us understand experience because individuals cannot even be sure anymore what any written story means. In fact, she, like many other authors of her time, begins to wonder whether language even has the power to mean anything concretely: “the gap between what [words] are supposed to mean, and what in fact they say seems unbridgeable. I have been thinking of the novels about the breakdown of language, like Finnegan’s Wake.” 17 However, what marks one of this novel’s many contradictions, and what Anna does not seem to recognize, is the kinship between the fictionalizing impulse she resists, and the shaping, ordering impulse that she claims is a characteristic of great literature. In other words, the process of creating order or a new way of looking at life is the process of narrative; any effort to make sense or discern order is by nature a narrative. The more Anna attempts to separate her impulse to narrativize from her writing process, the more disillusioned and frustrated she feels and the more evidence she comes across to suggest that such a separation is impossible. Not only is Anna unable to write the unadulterated “truth” she seeks, but the continued effort to do so perturbs her to the extent that she fears she may lose her mind. According to Peter Brooks, this connection between writing, or narrativization, and loss (in Anna’s case, loss of self) is a very basic, almost primal one. Brooks argues that one tells oneself stories of loss and recovery in order to 16

Lessing, 302. Lessing, 300. Claire Sprague suggests that the widespread interchange of names in this novel represents a very deliberate sort of play. One connection she neglects to make, however, is between the initials of Finnegan’s Wake and Anna’s two novels Frontiers of War and Free Women. Claire Sprague, “ ‘Anna, Anna, I Am Anna’: The Annas of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” in The Anna Book: Searching for Anna in Literary History, ed. Mickey Pearlman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 151–58. 17

Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors

65

learn to cope with, or master, a sense of loss of that original pre-linguistic unity.18 Thus, Anna replays that Oedipal drama of emergence into the Symbolic by using writing as a means of attempting to master the sense of loss of a unitary identity. To accomplish this written mastery, she writes about and thereby attempts to construct a frame of meaning around the events of her life. In the process, she constructs written charactorial versions of herself in her different notebooks. Significantly, then, the idea of mastering her loss through writing coincides with the attempt to reconstruct the identity Anna feels she has lost. Through writing, Anna struggles to explain or even create her own subjectivity, constructing a frame of writing which might possibly contain her increasingly fragmented and chaotic self. However, Anna’s many different colored notebooks only add to the buzz of cacophonic voices. Each additional written word becomes part of Anna’s experience, becomes part of the material that requires explanation, and the written frame of meaning itself comes to require a frame. Throughout most of the novel, Anna yearns to construct the ultimate frame— “The Golden Notebook”—that could represent the truth of her self and her experience in their entirety. However, instead of serving as manifestations of a coherent written identity that has the power thereby to reunify the fragmented identity of the fictional author, Anna’s written charactorial alter-egos are just that: alter egos, or others to Anna, the writing subject. And, indeed, Lacanian theory posits that it is the linguistic interaction between the subject and the other that brings the subject into being, albeit a subject which is constantly shifting and changing with each encounter with the other.19 In this sense, the relationship between subject and other changes as the language or writing used to negotiate between them develops. As Anna attempts to construct a written frame of meaning around herself—a frame that would represent a coherent, unchanging identity—what emerges instead is a written frame which shifts continually with each new word. Anna’s attempt to construct a written frame around her subjectivity is mirrored by the structure of The Golden Notebook. Not only does Anna attempt to 18 According to Brooks, this sense of loss arises from the Oedipal drama, from the emergence of the subject into the Symbolic precipitated by the realization of the self as a discrete entity, separate and alone in the world. It is from this early loss of unity that emerges the traditional narrative structures of departure and return: “If repetition is mastery … and if mastery is an assertion of control over what man [sic] must in fact submit to—choice, we might say, of an imposed end—we have already a suggestive comment on the grammar of plot.” Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis, eds. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (New York: Columbia U P, 1983), 286. 19 Colette Soler, “The Symbolic Order,” in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Albany: State U of New York P, 1996), 42–43.

66

Marjorie Worthington

contain her subjectivity by creating a written frame around it, but the novel itself is structured as a series of frames within frames in an attempt to preserve the integrity of the novel itself—to preserve the novel’s unity or “subjectivity.” Scholars have often criticized this novel for being too chaotic, even “careless” 20 because of its overly intricate and multi-layered structure. Indeed, at times, the internal stories contained in the notebooks threaten to overwhelm the frame narrative and become the primary narrative focus; in other words, the story within the frame threatens to fragment the novel, to shatter its narrative unity. In order to maintain the integrity of traditional novelistic structure, the “primary” story must reemerge and recoup its authority as the dominant narrative within the novel, just as Anna the character must learn to assert her, albeit fragmented, subjectivity. In this way, the structure of The Golden Notebook must face the same threats to its cogency and coherence that Anna must face to her selfhood. The novel, then, is performative of the issues of subjectivity that it depicts. And, just as Anna learns eventually to write despite the fact that complete unity and fixed identity are impossible, the novelistic structure, in the face of its fragmentation, ultimately provides satisfying novelistic closure. In the essay on the novel that is often published as its preface, Doris Lessing writes that The Golden Notebook was designed to include both a novel and the material that went into the making of that novel: To put the short novel Free Women as a summary and condensation of all that mass of material, was to say something about the conventional novel, another way of describing the dissatisfaction of a writer when something is finished: “How little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity; how can this small neat thing be true when what I experienced was so rough and apparently formless and unshaped.” 21

Lessing’s comments provide one possible mode of reading The Golden Notebook: the novel Free Women represents the small neatly ordered text that 20

Much of the older criticism of this novel tends to dismiss its complicated narrative structure as being mistake-ridden rather than intentional. For example, Mary Cohen argued in 1977 that in the final sections of the novel, “Lessing is careless, and the novel becomes confusing, apparently without good reason,” whereas Irving Howe, who admired the novel for its “seriousness,” conflated characters in the novel Free Women with the eponymous characters in the notebooks, even though plot events differ widely enough from one to the other to make such a reading difficult to sustain. Mary Cohen, “ ‘Out of the chaos, a new kind of strength’: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, eds. Arlyn and Lee Edwards (Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1977), 192. Irving Howe, “Neither Compromise nor Happiness,” in Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, eds. Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1986), 181. 21 Lessing, xiv.

Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors

67

emerges from the morass of unordered experience documented in the notebooks. However, to view Free Women as the small kernel of writing distilled from the pure and formless experience of the notebooks is to ignore the fact that the notebooks themselves are also written narratives, and therefore by their very nature ordered and shaped by the same consciousness that ostensibly wrote Free Women. In addition to representing Anna’s attempt to convey a sense of the density of rough and formless experience, Anna’s notebooks also chronicle her struggle against what she senses is her disintegrating subjectivity. Anna’s ultimate goal is to maintain through writing the sense of coherent, unified selfhood amidst her increasing fears that it will be lost or further diffused. In her notebooks, then, Anna constructs and attempts to organize a series of written personae or parts of her “self ” in an effort to depict the “real” or “true” Anna, much as she tries to depict the reality or truth of the events in her life. She says: “Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna … and felt as if I had saved that day from chaos.” 22 The imagery here depicts Anna both as something to be fixed or nailed down and as something shifting or flexible enough to be shaped; she seems, then, to be wavering between defining her “self ” as a fixed identity or as a subject construct. Because Anna so closely connects her self to her writing, the perceived breakdown of the power of language threatens the cogency of that self: It occurs to me that what is happening is a breakdown of me, Anna, and this is how I am becoming aware of it. For words are form, and if I am at a pitch where shape, form, expression are nothing, then I am nothing, for it has become clear to me, reading the notebooks, that I remain Anna because of a certain kind of intelligence. This intelligence is dissolving and I am very frightened.23

By intelligence she means, of course, the conscious effort she exerts to separate herself into discrete fragments or units and represent herself on the page. In a sense, then, Anna views her subjectivity as a product of her writing, despite the fact that writing is not sufficient to construct her as a coherent whole. Throughout the text, Anna makes reference to her notebooks and the several different “Annas” contained therein as evidence of the multiplication of the subjectivity that she experiences. One example already provided deals with the Anna of the present looking back at the Anna of the past and viewing that Anna as an altogether different person, even an enemy. Another example involves 22 23

Lessing, 476. Lessing, 476–77.

68

Marjorie Worthington

Anna’s double role as both a mother to her daughter and as mistress to her married lover, Michael: “He prefers Janet to have left for school before he wakes. And I prefer it, because it divides me. The two personalities—Janet’s mother, Michael’s mistress, are happier separated.” 24 Indeed, Anna feels most comfortable being able to keep the many different selves or aspects of herself separate, which is why she has four different notebooks which are meant to create and maintain boundaries between four different elements of her life. Not only does Anna recognize on some level the extent to which writing precipitates the othering of the subject to itself, but, by maintaining distinct boundaries between her many notebooks, Anna attempts to keep all her “others” separate. The notebooks help her define herself and to impose a kind of order upon the events in her life, so much so, in fact, that they begin to represent to her the totality of her subjectivity. In response to the question, “Who am I, Anna?” she envisions: her room, long, white subdued, with the coloured notebooks on the trestle table. She saw herself, Anna, seated on the music-stool, writing, writing; making an entry in one book, then ruling it off, or crossing it out; she saw the pages patterned with different kinds of writing; divided, bracketed, broken.25

Anna also sees herself as the living embodiment of her notebooks: divided, bracketed, broken. The written representation of that fragmentation in the notebooks is what keeps Anna from complete and total dissolution, or so she thinks. These selfimposed boundaries are the result of Anna’s worries that she is losing herself in what she perceives to be the growing vastness of the nihilistic world around her. One night she writes: “I know that an awful black whirling chaos is just outside me, waiting to move into me. I must go to sleep quickly, before I become that chaos.” 26 The notebooks represent the order that Anna imposes upon her experience and which helps her stave off the chaos brought about by the recognition of the provisional nature of her subjectivity. Paradoxically, then, Anna writes of her very real feelings of fragmentation in order to contain that fragmentation, to enclose it within a written frame so that she can control it and keep it from overpowering her. She resists total fragmentation or chaos by writing herself into discrete and, she hopes, controllable fragments. Her writing, then, serves as a means to maintain her sanity and subjectivity, and, while she longs for unity, she can maintain only provisional fragmentation. This struggle, however,

24

Lessing, 336. Lessing, 389. 26 Lessing, 367. 25

Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors

69

provides a vivid depiction of the writing process, and the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic connection between a writer’s identity and her work. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the Anna of one notebook is not the same as the Anna depicted in another. As stated earlier, Anna is somewhat aware of the extent to which the written personae she constructs in her journals stand as others to herself. She explores this idea of the written other in her fiction as well as her notebooks. Just as she feels the need to recreate a written Anna every day, she also attempts to construct a fictional version of herself in her novel called The Shadow of the Third. Even that title is suggestive of the othering effect of writing. This novel, written in the yellow notebook, represents Anna’s conscious fictionalization of her life (as opposed to the narrative accounts in the journal, which Anna does not want to be fiction, but which they unavoidably become). The protagonist of The Shadow of the Third is named Ella, and Ella’s life is much like, although not completely identical to, Anna’s. Ella has a young child (a son named Michael, not, like Anna, a daughter named Janet); she has a married lover (Paul, to Anna’s Michael), and a close female friend named Julia who is very similar to Anna’s friend Molly. Ella, like Anna, is sympathetic to the beliefs of the Communist Party, is writing a novel, and is going through a very difficult breakup with her lover. Also much like Anna, Ella is facing the sense that her subjectivity is breaking apart and cherishes the same fantasies of unity: “As Ella cracks and disintegrates, she holds fast to the idea of Ella whole, healthy, and happy.” 27 Indeed, Ella is a creation arising out of Anna’s desire for wholeness and her fight against disintegration. However, as she writes Ella, Anna begins to understand that Ella will not necessarily provide or facilitate that wholeness, because regardless of their similarities, regardless of the fact that Anna has created Ella, they are not the same person: “I, Anna, see Ella. Who is, of course, Anna. But that is the point, for she is not. The moment I, Anna, write … Ella floats away from me and becomes someone else.” 28 Ella both is and is not Anna: she is a part of Anna who becomes more distinct from her with every written word. While it is the writing that constructs Ella, the moment of writing is the very moment of separation, the moment of the othering of Anna to this part of herself. Critics have often misrecognized these many Annas as a single writing character (sometimes even calling her “Anna-Ella” 29). To do so, however, is to miss the novel’s central contention that each act of writing brings a different written subject into being, and each different written subject is necessarily split from and other than the writer herself. What becomes evident, then, is the impossibility of 27

Lessing, 449. Lessing, 459. 29 See: Ellen Morgan, “Alienation of the Woman Writer in The Golden Notebook,” Contemporary Literature 14 (1973): 471–80. 28

70

Marjorie Worthington

completely and concretely framing a subject in writing, or of using writing to maintain a fixed identity, and a novel whose structure mirrors the fragmented subjectivity of its writer.30 Once she is put into writing, Ella becomes her own entirely different character and cannot be the written representation of a one “true” Anna. Indeed, it becomes clear that none of the different representations of “Anna” can stand as the “true” Anna. The Anna in the novel Free Women is quite different from the Annas of the many notebooks. Interestingly, even the different Annas in the different notebooks or journals are not identical to one another. Anna’s husband and Janet’s father in the black notebook is named Willi, but when Anna refers to her ex-husband in the blue notebook, she calls him Max. Through this deliberate play with names, along with the very different personalities exhibited by the Annas in the different notebooks, the novel suggests that despite all Anna’s efforts, it is not possible through writing to depict or construct one coherent subjectivity. Indeed, the proliferation of fragmented characters and framed narratives lead to the conclusion that there is no “one true Anna,” that such a figure would be impossible. Instead, the novel’s entire structure and content imply that Anna is a combination of all the many personae she creates each time she attempts to write. As mentioned earlier, Anna attempts to maintain a unified sense of self by controlling the fragmentation of her subjectivity by fragmenting her writing. In other words, she holds herself together by trying, increasingly unsuccessfully, to keep the different parts of her life separate. Paradoxically, however, at the same time that her writing seems to have the power to hold Anna together, it also splinters her subjectivity into incomplete shards of written persona. While writing gives Anna a waning sense of control over a coherent written subjectivity, it simultaneously others her from that written subjectivity, splitting it into multiple pieces. It is despite, or perhaps because of, her increasing sense of fragmentation and dissolution that Anna insists upon strictly policing the boundaries of her different notebooks. Her friend Molly’s son Tommy asks her: “Why the four notebooks? What would happen if you had one big book without all those divisions and brackets and special writing?” Anna replies: “I’ve told you, chaos.” 31 Throughout the novel, Anna is adamant that the information and personae in the different notebooks be kept separate, that the integrity of the system she has devised be maintained. Each journal represents a particular written frame of meaning. By sequestering different parts of her life in different journals, Anna 30 See Joanne Craig, “The Golden Notebook: The Novelist as Heroine,” University of Windsor Review 10: 1 (1974): 55–66. Also see: Henke, Hite, “Subverting the Ideology of Coherence,” Michael, and Claire Sprague, “Doubles Talk in The Golden Notebook,” in Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, eds. Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1986), 45–60. 31 Lessing, 274.

Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors

71

believes that she can confine through writing her complex and difficult emotions and experiences. She hopes that the written frames of the journals will allow her to determine a fixed and stable meaning for the fragments of her life, and she takes special care not to violate these self-imposed boundaries. For example, when Anna begins to reminisce about her psychotherapy sessions in the yellow notebook which has been reserved for discussions about her writing, Anna makes a note to herself: “This sort of comment belongs to the blue notebook. I must keep them separate.” 32 However, as evidenced by the previous quotation, this artificial order becomes increasingly difficult—even impossible— to preserve. What Anna fears is precisely what begins to happen: the boundaries of the imposed frame narratives begin to blur and shift, as with each new entry, a new frame must be delineated, a new overall meaning imposed. It becomes increasingly difficult for Anna to sustain the constant framing and reframing effort. Furthermore, Anna does not always want to sustain it; at times she wishes she could piece all her fragments together into a unified whole. She often dreams about such elusive unity, the whole of her subjectivity, within one frame, indivisible. For example, in one wonderful dream: I stood in a blue mist of space while the globe turned, wearing shades of red for the communist countries, and a patchwork of colours for the rest of the world. Africa was black. … The colours are melting and flowing into each other, indescribably beautiful so that the world becomes whole, all one beautiful glittering colour … This is a moment of almost unbearable happiness, the happiness seems to swell up, so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes. … The world had gone, and there was chaos. I was alone in chaos.33

Not coincidentally, the colors mentioned above are identical to the colors of the notebooks: Anna is encased in a blue mist, like the blue of notebook which is her personal journal, while Africa and the communist countries are black and red respectively, like her other notebooks. Significantly, even when this beautiful dream world breaks apart into fragments, Anna herself is able to remain unified and secure, alone (and whole) in chaos. She wakes, “joyful and elated” from this dream in which the possibility of chaos is no longer frightening but exciting and beautiful and safe. However, she soon loses the meaning of the dream and is left simply with a solid sense of a coherent self: “I am Anna Wulf, this is me, Anna, and I’m happy.” 34 In her perfect dream, Anna is able to persist as a unitary and autonomous being in the face of chaos; at the end of the novel, she attempts to write such a state of being into existence. 32

Lessing, 537. Lessing, 298–99. 34 Lessing, 299. 33

72

Marjorie Worthington

As her experiment with controlled written fragmentation begins to fail and each of her notebooks peters out and ends seemingly of its own accord, Anna determines to “pack away the four notebooks. I’ll start with a new notebook, all of myself in one book.” 35 This statement marks the last entry in the blue notebook, the last entry before the section entitled “The Golden Notebook.” This “one book,” of course then, is the “Golden Notebook,” a pretty, but expensive book Anna sees in a store and instinctively buys without knowing what purpose it would serve. As she feared, however, once she begins writing all of herself in one book, Anna descends into chaos or madness with her current boarder and lover Saul Green, who, Molly Hite has pointed out, acts as Virgil to Anna’s Dante.36 Saul Green’s role in Anna’s struggle to accomplish a unified subjectivity becomes apparent when she dreams that he is a projectionist who shows her films of her life and work. In the films, two characters struggle with one another to be included in the film. Anna realizes that the struggle is between Michael, her ex-lover, and Paul, Ella’s lover and Michael’s fictional counterpart in the novel The Shadow of the Third. During the struggle, the two figures become blended together, creating one much stronger, much more heroic fictional character. In a similar manner, Anna realizes that the films she is watching in her dream are the kind of slick, “conventionally well-made” studio films she detests for their falseness, their inability to portray true experience. The projectionist sneers at Anna’s objection to her life being made into such trite and impure films; he pauses at the end of each film to show her that the credits read “Directed by Anna Wulf.” These objectionable creations, “glossy with untruth, false and stupid,” are her own, and Anna panics, “unable to distinguish between what I had invented and what I had known.” 37 At this point, while Anna is still hoping to find a means of presenting true experience and entire subjectivity through writing, the projected films illustrate that her writing does not become more able to depict the real or the true. Rather, as she writes about it, her past experience begins to seem more false, more like art. Her attempts to depict her past and her subjectivity through writing have not brought her any closer to being able to depict the objective truth, because once her experiences have been written, they have necessarily been simultaneously fictionalized or narrativized. Anna can no longer see those experiences as actual events, but sees them as unreal, nostalgic “stories.” However, instead of viewing this discovery as a testament to the ubiquity of narrative and the power of writing to shape and even to create reality, Anna 35

Lessing, 607. Molly Hite, “(En)Gendering Metafiction: Doris Lessing’s Rehearsals for The Golden Notebook,” Modern Fiction Studies 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 487. 37 Lessing, 619. 36

Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors

73

views it as a failure of writing to convey truth. She says: “Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. … The fact is, the real experience can’t be described.” 38 This insight, one that Anna has suspected and feared throughout the novel, becomes real and final to her here, as she records it in the golden notebook. Furthermore, she recognizes that the “third” she had been trying to create in The Shadow of the Third was in fact her attempt to create “the woman altogether better than I was.” 39 In other words, Anna had been trying to construct a written subjectivity— an ideal construction—that could somehow become real, become whole: “I was thinking that quite possibly these marvellous, generous things we walk side by side with in our imaginations could come into existence, simply because we need them, because we imagine them. Then I began to laugh because of the distance between what I was imagining and what in fact I was.” 40 Here, Anna recognizes that the “third” she imagines, the third she writes, is necessarily different from—other than—the subject writing. She acknowledges the fact that writing necessarily others the subject to itself, and that the “better woman” she attempts to write is simultaneously a part of her and apart from her. Consequently, this is not a novel about the failure of writing, but about a character’s reconceptualization of what writing can accomplish. Anna had conceived of writing as being able to convey the universal, the real, the self, instead of as being a tool created by and creating those who use it. These realizations tempt Anna to give up writing altogether, and indeed, that is exactly what the Anna in Free Women does. The final chapter of Free Women, which follows the entries in the golden notebook and which ends the novel, depicts Anna deciding to take a job instead of writing again.41 The Golden Notebook, then, actually ends with Anna’s determination not to write. Some critics have viewed this ending as definitive, making the argument that the struggle Anna had undergone throughout the novel—to find a means of writing that thoroughly represented her—ends with her surrender of writing in Free Women.42 However, just because Free Women acts as the frame to Anna’s notebooks, or because The Golden Notebook begins and ends with chapters from Free Women, does not mean that the events described in Free Women should be considered 38

Lessing, 633. Lessing, 637. 40 Lessing, 637. 41 “Taking a job” would signify for Anna her failure to live according to the philosophical principle of the “free woman.” Until now, she has been living off of the royalties from Frontiers of War, but, as those are diminishing, her choice was either to write again or to “take a job.” Taking a job would signal a defeat for Anna, as it would indicate that she has given up writing. 42 For example, Giuliana Mutti argues that by the end of the novel, “Anna plans to enter the tidy, non-existent world which she and Doris have just manufactured.” Mutti, 83. 39

74

Marjorie Worthington

definitive or even “real,” particularly in a novel that so overtly questions the possibilities of writing to depict reality. Claire Sprague represents contemporary critical arguments about The Golden Notebook when she posits that the novel suggests its own “alternate-discrepant endings” that “suggest continuing process, contradiction, irony, uncertainty—anything but clear, unambiguous unity.” 43 To discuss these possible alternative endings, however, it is necessary to return to the golden notebook section of the novel, for although the novel begins and ends with sections of the Free Women novella, the novel itself is called The Golden Notebook, and it is in that notebook that Anna’s climatic breakdown and rebuilding occurs. In the golden notebook, once Anna has come to the conclusion that writing or words will never enable her to set down the objective truth or the unified subjectivity that she desires, Saul enters the room and exhorts Anna to begin writing again, saying, “Anna, you’re going to really crack up unless you do.” 44 Saul recognizes how necessary writing is to Anna, if not in helping her construct herself as a singular subject, at least in helping her construct the many subjectivities of which she is comprised. Also, he tells Anna that she is part of a “team” of writers for whom she must keep writing: “There are a few of us around in the world, we rely on each other even though we don’t know each other’s names. … We’re a team, we’re the ones who haven’t given in, who’ll go on fighting. I tell you, Anna, sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you’ve written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won’t have to write it.” 45

In other words, Saul tells Anna that she is part of a literary tradition, a tradition which values writing and believes in its power to move people and accomplish things. Anna must continue as part of this tradition. As Lessing says in her preface to the novel, “So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if. …” 46 Saul says almost the same thing to Anna: she must continue writing, she must continue to have faith that writing can be productive, and that she can be an author. In order to help her get started, Saul provides Anna with what he claims will be the first line of her next novel: “The two women were alone in the London flat.” 47 This line is, of course, the first line of the novella Free Women and therefore the first line of the novel The Golden Notebook. Thus, we learn in the golden notebook that Anna does go on to write the novel (Free Women) which 43

Claire Sprague, “Doubles Talk in The Golden Notebook,” 45. Lessing, 639. 45 Lessing, 642. 46 Lessing, ix. 47 Lessing, 639. 44

Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors

75

acts as a frame story around her four notebooks. Free Women, then, is framed in its turn by the novel entitled The Golden Notebook, which title implicitly privileges the events of the golden notebook which depicts Anna as ultimately successful in her writing endeavors. So, although the Anna of Free Women decides to give up writing, the Anna of the golden notebook (and The Golden Notebook) does not; on the contrary, she writes the Anna of Free Women. Through this alternative charactorial subjectivity in Free Women, Anna can experience what it might be like to give up her written fight by allowing the alter-Anna of Free Women to give up writing, to take the path that the golden notebook Anna has not chosen. Thus, whereas Suzette Henke has argued that in this novel, “the author as textual authority has been erased from the scene of writing,” 48 this essay argues that the novel is, on the contrary, primarily focused upon resurrecting that authorial authority by imbuing Anna with the power to shape and control her textual landscape. However, the Anna created in Free Women is no more the “real” or “true” Anna than Ella was (indeed, none of the written Annas is “true”). So, although Anna is able by the end of the novel to create through her writing, she is unable to accomplish one thing she set out to do: to depict and thereby capture a true, unchanging subjectivity. Anna can construct written aspects of herself, can create written “personae,” but she recognizes that none of these, either individually or together, can ever completely represent the subjectivity of Anna Wulf.49 Furthermore, she begins to recognize the extent to which all writing (indeed, all meaning-making) involves the imposition of a frame of meaning upon an event and can never, therefore, provide a transparent view of “reality” or “truth.” Despite these recognitions, however, Anna continues writing, continues her written attempt at unity, and forces herself to go on living “as if.” Thus, Anna has accepted the challenge of searching for the power of writing in the contemporary world. The Golden Notebook, as a whole, can be read as Anna’s attempt to approximate as closely as possible the reality that goes into fiction. By including all the different fragments of bracketed notebooks and uncompleted novels, Lessing attempts to present the raw factual material that went into the making of Free Women. However, the written fragments of The Golden Notebook are not merely fragments; together, they also serve to

48

Lessing, 173. Beth A. Boehm has argued a reader of this novel would be “mocked by Lessing for her attempts to find a coherent, unified, ontologically stable ‘author.’ ” I agree in part, but argue that not only can a reader find an author in Anna, but that the novel itself constructs her as such. However, although she is, by the end of the novel, an author, Anna is by no means coherent, unified or ontologically stable. Beth A. Boehm, “Reeducating Readers: Creating New Expectations for The Golden Notebook,” Narrative 5, no. 1 (January 1997): 95. 49

76

Marjorie Worthington

create a kind of unity or a frame of written meaning—a narrative. So, whereas Claire Sprague sees “alternate-discrepant endings,” perhaps there is only one: Anna completes her novel Free Women, which depicts a character named Anna who gives up writing. Anna the writer constructs a character who no longer writes. Thus, by the end of The Golden Notebook, Anna has, through her writing, forged herself into a successful writer who writes about the failure to write. In this sense, the novel mirrors a dream Anna has in the middle of the novel: I dreamed I held a kind of casket in my hands, and inside it was something very precious. I was walking up a long room, like an art gallery. … There was a small crowd of people waiting at the end of the hall. … They were waiting for me to hand them the casket. … I opened the box and forced them to look. But instead of a beautiful thing, which I thought would be there, there was a mass of fragments, and pieces. Not a whole thing, broken into fragments, but bits and pieces from everywhere, all over the world. … This, looking at the mass of ugly fragments, was so painful that I couldn’t look, and I shut the box. … At last I looked and I saw that there was something in the box. It was a small green crocodile with a winking sardonic snout. I thought it was the image of a crocodile, made of jade, or emeralds, then I saw it was alive.50

This passage suggests that both this novel and Anna are much like the little crocodile: a new, beautiful and living thing emerging from the amalgam of seemingly unrelated fragments. As Patrocinio Schweickart has posited, this novel’s simultaneously cracked and hinged structure is a signal that it is both unified and fragmented at the same time, with the result that “The novel is more than the sum of its component parts.” 51 In contrast to critics like Joanne S. Frye, then, who claim that the novel’s theme is “based precisely on a refusal of resolution, the impossibility of thematic coherence,” 52 it is more likely that, within the fragments of these many narratives and notebooks, lies a traditionally structured narrative with a unified and productive ending.53 Anna’s crocodile dream is an apt description of the The Golden Notebook entire, a work in which all the various fragments come together to form, if not a whole, at least a unity of sorts. Read this way, The Golden Notebook comes to straddle issues of unity 50

Lessing, 252–53. Patrocinio Schweickart, “Reading a Wordless Statement: The Structure of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” Modern Fiction Studies 31: 2 (Summer 1985): 267. 52 Joanne S. Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience (Ann Arbor, U Michigan P, 1986), 179. See also: Henke. 53 Judith Roof argues that traditional narrative structure demands an ending in which something is produced: “As ideology, this pattern of [narrative’s] joinder to product also accounts for the countless analogies to child/product—knowledge, mastery, victory, another narrative, identity, and even death—that occupy the satisfying end of the story.” Judith Roof, Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia U P, 1996), xvii. 51

Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors

77

and fragmentation, serving as a frame of tenuous, never complete meaning that brings the text and its subject to life. So, although Anna is not able to become a coherent whole, the novel Free Women and indeed, even The Golden Notebook have been able to do so. As narratives, they do have a coherence and wholeness that, although illusory perhaps, is the inherent nature of narrative. Ultimately, however, Anna emerges as a fragmented subject who can create, although she does not create the unified and organized novel of traditional fiction. Rather, she constructs the chaotic yet powerful novel that is The Golden Notebook. In other words, while Anna may not be able to construct an identity through writing, she is most certainly able to craft and structure a novel. Anna demonstrates that, despite critical claims that the author is dead, one need not be a self in order to be an author. What Anna learns, and what is the ultimate lesson of this novel is that fragmented subjectivity is still subjectivity, and a fragmented novel is still a novel. Anna is a self, even if she is not the kind of self she wants to be, and she is an author even if she is not the kind of author she dreams of being. Furthermore, within the chaos and disorder of this selfhood and this novel, there emerges, in the end, a kind of order. The novel actually does adhere to the dictates of traditional narrative: there is a climax and a productive ending. And that productive ending is that Anna emerges from her crisis once again able and ready to write: the novel produces its author. And Anna, by writing and shaping both the narrative that is Free Women as well as the chaotic narrative that is The Golden Notebook, creates a powerful work of art: the author produces her novel. Thus, The Golden Notebook is a striking chronicle of the symbiotic relationship between authors and their texts, as the novel actually creates the consciousness capable of writing it. If Anna can continue writing despite this fragmentation, continue writing, even though writing cannot achieve what she wants it to, this is the victory. Anna decides not to give up or surrender to nihilism, but to continue attempting to find meaning, to find truth, even if it is only the truth inherent in the fruitless search for truth. In this sense, The Golden Notebook, represents the victory of form (or at least the attempt at form) over chaos, and the persistence of authorship in the face of contemporary fragmentation.

Works Consulted Boehm, Beth A. “Reeducating Readers: Creating New Expectations for The Golden Notebook.” Narrative 5: 1 (January 1997): 88–98. Brooks, Peter. “Freud’s Masterplot.” In Literature and Psychoanalysis, edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips, New York: Columbia U P, 1983. 280–300. Cohen, Mary. “ ‘Out of the chaos, a new kind of strength’: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.” In The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Arlyn and Lee Edwards. Amherst, MA: U Massachusetts P, 1977. 178–193.

78

Marjorie Worthington

Craig, Joanne. “The Golden Notebook: The Novelist as Heroine.” U Windsor Review 10, no. 1 (1974): 55–66. Draine, Betsy. “Nostalgia and Irony: The Postmodern Order of The Golden Notebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1980): 31–48. Frye, Joanne S. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. Ann Arbor, U Michigan P, 1986. Greene, Gayle. “Women and Men in Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook: Divided Selves.” In The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1985. 280–305. Henke, Suzette. “Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook: A Paradox of Postmodern Play.” In Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, edited by Lisa Rado. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994. 159–187. Hite, Molly. “(En)Gendering Metafiction: Doris Lessing’s Rehearsals for The Golden Notebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 34: 3 (Autumn 1988): 481–500. ———. “Subverting the Ideology of Coherence: The Golden Notebook and The FourGated City.” In Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival, edited by Cora Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose. Athens, OH: Ohio U P, 1988. 61–70. Howe, Irving. “Neither Compromise nor Happiness.” In Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, edited by Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1986. 177–181. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1981. Michael, Magali Cornier. “Woolf ’s Between the Acts and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: From Modern to Postmodern Subjectivity.” In Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold, edited by Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 39–56. Morgan, Ellen. “Alienation of the Woman Writer in The Golden Notebook.” Contemporary Literature 14 (1973): 471–480. Mutti, Giuliana. “Female Roles and the Function of Art in The Golden Notebook.” Massachusetts Studies in English 3 (1972): 78–83. Roof, Judith. Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. New York: Columbia U P, 1996. Schweickart, Patrocinio. “Reading a Wordless Statement: The Structure of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 31: 2 (Summer 1985): 263–279. Soler, Colette. “The Symbolic Order.” In Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus. Albany: State U New York P, 1996. 39–46. Sprague, Claire. “ ‘Anna, Anna, I Am Anna’: The Annas of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.” In The Anna Book: Searching for Anna in Literary History, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992. 151–158. ———. “Doubles Talk in The Golden Notebook.” In Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, edited by Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1986. 45–60.

MEMORY, MEMOIR, AND FICTIONS IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICS OF KIM CHERNIN CONNIE GRIFFIN

In an impressive body of work that crosses fiction and nonfiction, Kim Chernin excavates memory and metaphor from beneath repression and denial, beneath even the cunning power of forgetting. Such liminal spaces are the places from which the narratives of Reinventing Eve, A Different Kind of Listening, and Crossing the Border unfold, uncovering what Annis Pratt describes as archetypes that are “often encoded, frequently hieroglyphic, but nevertheless present as possibilities to be assimilated and emulated.” Entering into and revising the ancient, mythic journeys of Western literature, Chernin searches for “some kind of forgotten code or buried script underlying the normative plots which women authors in a patriarchal culture internalize.” Like numerous feminist writers in the latter half of the twentieth century, Chernin suggests that while women’s modern and postmodern literary sensibilities may share with men a sense of hollowness, such hollowness is differentiated from men’s in that it does not derive from either the “anxiety of influence” expressed by male modernists, nor from the futility of selfrepresentation to which postmodernists tend to fall prey. Ultimately, the hollowness to which Chernin is referring is “a selflessness that derives from her rejection of the discursive plots of contemporary Western culture. Fracturing the “I” as are assuring rhetorical device, Chernin likens memory to “a liar, a cheat, a thief, a pirate.” Such an approach not only acknowledges the fractured nature of memory, but the active role its unreliability plays in self-representation.

In her mythic novel, The Flame Bearers, Chernin’s protagonist, Rae Shadmi, speaks of Kovahl, the Jewish tradition of repeating while revising the old stories. “It is the story we write, each woman for herself,” she proclaims, “from the story that is already written.” “But what happens if a woman tries to write the story another way? And what happens if a woman runs from the story already written?” 1 Chernin’s significant body of work, which crosses genres of fiction and nonfiction to include novels, biography, autobiography and memoir, 1

Kim Chernin, The Flame Bearers (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 88.

80

Connie Griffin

responds to both questions, while providing reflexive insight into the process she undergoes when writing. In Reinventing Eve, a nonfictional narrative subtitled “modern woman in search of herself,” Chernin draws on images of a garden “gone wild” to describe a self who wants to break out of its allotted cultural and literary plot but fears the consequences. I began to admit that I had been drawn out of my house by a wish to disinvent myself as patriarchal female, to give myself back to the nature that was in me, grow profusely, overstep my bounds, step out of the confined plot to which I had been assigned, and finally admit, in the most radical possible way, that I as a woman did not exist.2

Although disinvention of the culturally constructed woman is her desire, Chernin’s narrator fears that such a deconstruction will leave her “[s]elfless in the most severe sense of the word. A woman with no self, facing the female void.” 3 If she follows desire and leaves the domesticated garden, if she “step(s) out of the confined plot to which [she] has been assigned,” she may cease to exist. In acknowledging the various plots by which she has been cultivated—the cultural plot creating specific gender roles, the literary plot setting forth a tradition in which she does not fit, the Judeo-Christian plot subordinating woman to man—Chernin comes to terms with her dismay that she has been constructed in an image that does not represent her deepest sense of self. Chernin faces a frightening conundrum: dissolution of her sense of selfhood. Having come to a personal crisis and feeling confined by cultural definitions of her identity, Chernin chooses to break out anyway. Setting her narrative in relation to and yet outside of the modernist literary canon and its assumed representativeness, Chernin wonders who she would be if she negated cultural assumptions about “the nature of [herself] as a woman” 4 Comparing her situation as a woman with T. S. Eliot’s claim that he and his fellow poets are “the hollow men … headpiece filled with straw,” she argues that for women the situation is even worse, because: [t]his straw with which we had been stuffed wasn’t even our straw. Woman, keeping to her place in patriarchal culture, was nothing more than an accumulated terror, a blind fear of what we might become if we dared, just once, create ourselves.5 2 Kim Chernin, Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 15. 3 Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 15. 4 In their introduction to De/Colonizing the Subject, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue that women who position themselves as autobiographical subjects find themselves in the position of facing previously constructed paradigms of theme and structure within which they do not “fit.” 5 Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 15–16.

Memory, Memoir, and Fictions

81

A number of things are going on in Chernin’s reference to Eliot, but the significant issue is that, while Chernin may fear “breaking out” of those cultural “places” to which she has been relegated by cultural pressure and norms, her greater sense of hollowness derives from the simultaneity of her desire for selfcreation and her realization that the “straw” to which Eliot refers is not the stuff from which she can create a self. It is not the dying of a long-standing literary tradition and its myths, so lamented by Eliot and other modernists, to which Chernin is referring; it is the inheritance of a tradition that is not of her making, that does not speak her experience; it is the inheritance of a tradition on which she could not draw even if it were vitally alive. Like numerous feminist writers in the latter half of the twentieth century,6 Chernin suggests that while women’s modern (and postmodern) literary sensibilities may share with men a sense of hollowness, such hollowness is differentiated from men’s in that it does not derive from either the “anxiety of influence” expressed by male modernists, nor from the futility of self-representation to which postmodernists tend to fall prey. Ultimately, the hollowness to which Chernin is referring is her sense of being “[s]elfless in the most severe sense of the word,” a selflessness that derives from her rejection of the discursive plots of contemporary Western culture.7 Chernin states unequivocally that she is not seeking guidance from “Holy Writ or any mediated authority,” but must “claim the authority of [her] own experience, to trust the wisdom of [her] own body.” She must write “a story about a woman who creates the world from her own substance.” 8 Admitting that she had no idea that she “was looking for an embodied image of female potential” when she went out on her walks, Chernin nevertheless had begun to lose her “fear of the wildness called up in [herself] by wild, uncultivated places.” 9 Asking herself how she could imagine “that there was hidden knowledge, old memory, another possibility of being female,” Chernin sets out toward “the hidden,” toward the “old.” 10 It is an active choice requiring solitude, loneliness, and a stripping away of distractions. Describing this process as cyclical and involving various states of mind, Chernin asserts: All change is like this. It circles around, snakes back on itself, finds detours, leads us a merry chase, starts us out it seems all over again from where we were in the first place. And then suddenly, when we least expect it, something opens a door, discovers a threshold, shoves us across.11 6 See, for example, Gayle Greene, Molly Hite, Janice Morgan and Colette T. Hall, Elaine Showalter, Sidonie Smith, Leslie Wahl Rabine, and Shari Benstock. 7 Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 15. 8 Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 19–20. 9 Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 20. 10 Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 16. 11 Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 16.

82

Connie Griffin

Background Throughout her lifetime, Kim Chernin has been made aware of the power of story and the importance of telling—storytelling, as it were. Having grown up as the daughter of a woman who had a rich, oratorial voice, who loved a good story, and who applied the power of the speaking voice to her cause of justice for American workers, Chernin took to heart her mother’s frequent refrain and writes “ ‘[w]hat is in the background,’ my mother used to say, ‘this matters also to the story.’ ” 12 In her autobiography, In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story, Chernin quotes her mother, Rose Chernin, who is quoting her mother Perle, thus setting stories within stories, histories within histories and prioritizing context, especially maternal context. Foregrounding what has been relegated to the background, Chernin draws on memory and experience as her foundation even as they shift and shatter under her reliance on them. Chernin’s experiences and perceptions become sources for self-construction. Memory’s groundlessness becomes the ground from which she writes, gathering fragments that accumulate meaning like a three-dimensional puzzle, carefully assembled, yet fragile where the fragments meet. Chernin’s narrative reflexivity acknowledges a wariness of veracity, even as memory’s unreliability becomes an embedded element in the story of remembering. For Chernin, the autobiographical story creates an intersection where self and story sometimes meet, sometimes miss, but where the act of writing the self, however imperfect a medium language may be, serves as the thread that leads the writer out of the labyrinth of not knowing and into an imperfect place of partial knowing. Setting background and foreground up as interactive, Chernin’s extensive oeuvre explores the unconscious as well as the conscious, the sleeping as well as the waking, the story of the mother that shapes the story of the daughter. Delving beneath the surface, into the shadows and cultural cracks and chasms, Chernin excavates memories and metaphors from burial beneath repression and denial, beneath even the cunning power of forgetting. Such liminal spaces are the places from which the narratives of Reinventing Eve and A Different Kind of Listening unfold, uncovering what Annis Pratt describes as “ancient archetypes,” archetypes that are “often encoded, frequently hieroglyphic, but nevertheless present as possibilities to be assimilated and emulated.” 13

12

Kim Chernin, In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story (HarperPerennialHarperCollins, 1994), 55. 13 Annis V. Pratt, “Spinning Among Fields: Jung, Frye, Levi-Strauss and Feminist Archetypal Theory,” in Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-visions of Jungian Thought, ed. Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht (Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1985), 95–96. Pratt argues that “[w]hether or not they derive from some golden age of women in our atual past, the archetypes we find in our literature represent

Memory, Memoir, and Fictions

83

Dividing Reinventing Eve into four sections: “Initiation,” “Descent,” “Underworld,” and “Disobedience,” Chernin’s narrative protagonist immerses herself in what poststructuralists refer to as the “master narratives” of the West, including Freud, Jung, the Hebrew bible, even as she calls into question notions of a legitimate literary canon. Entering into and revising the ancient, mythic journeys of Western literature, Chernin searches for “some kind of forgotten code or buried script underlying the normative plots which women authors in a patriarchal culture internalize.” 14 Like Adrienne Rich’s diver in “Diving into the Wreck,” Chernin is seeking models, mentors, and myths by which to live as a contemporary woman.15 Thus, entering into self-representational narratives of emotional and psychological states of renewal, Chernin’s text enacts a descent into an “Underworld” of regeneration. Drawing on the same imagery of descent that she will later use in A Different Kind of Listening, Chernin journeys down into a cavelike space in the earth via a spiral staircase that drops beneath her desk. The journey is not only spatial (down, into the earth), but also historical (back in time), as well as psychological (to a state of being she might have experienced as an infant). It was an imagistic consciousness, around which external reality seemed to float, present but not attended to, while I drifted in a sea of half awareness, bathed in half impressions, vivid imagery, and strong bodily sensations, all of them presided over by hovering female shapes or fragments.16

Cultivating a state of what Romain Rolland has described as “oceanic consciousness,” a limitless, unbounded state, which, according to Rolland, was not the result of a belief system, but rather strong, subjective impressions, Chernin finds a way back to an archaic state of infantile consciousness in order to explore its qualities. Freud drew on Rolland’s insights when, in Civilization and Its Discontents, he associated the oceanic feeling with the first relationship between mother and child, linking the infant’s sense of merged identity with the mother to that of an unbounded relationship to the universe and located the “fons et origo” of religious feeling in a state of infantile consciousness experienced at the mother’s breast.17 Chernin notes that Freud later rejected Rolland’s vital psychological possibilities. The feminist archeteypal critic seeks to elucidate these feminine counterstructures, to show how gender norms affect tone, attitude, imagery, characterization, and plotting, to trace the counterstructures through the total work of an author and then throughout the field of women’s literature as a whole.” 14 Pratt, “Spinning,” 95. 15 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 22. 16 Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 86. 17 Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 88–91.

84

Connie Griffin

claim as “not highly compelling” and shifted his focus to the father, claiming that he could “not think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.” 18 Although Chernin expresses shock at Freud’s admission that he cannot follow memory back to those moments of infantile merging, she is liberated by her realization that Freud will no longer be of assistance on her journey. She is on her own, for she believes that “[t]here, in that dark and murky realm of first impressions, was the seed bed of women’s original power.” 19

Fragments: Past and Present Constructing a narrative persona who is actually a series of selves, a self who achieves self-actualization through a kind of shedding, Chernin’s insight about the nature of sequential selves derives from a hunger for self-knowledge that motivates her to write A Different Kind of Listening, the title of the book that recounts her twenty-five years of psychoanalysis. Having acquired analytic tools for self-reflection and self-observation, Chernin approaches subjectivity as a “sequence of provisional selves through which we pass in the course of our lives, each self lived for its season, then sloughed off, leaving behind fossil traces (memory) but no immediate, felt sense of the living being who once occupied one’s life.” 20 Chernin proposes to revisit these “provisional selves” by tracing their existence through the fossil traces left behind. Chernin envisions the book’s structure as similar to a medieval Russian triptych. Comparing the triptych’s “long, complex history” to memory itself, Chernin describes it as “worn away, but still decipherable here and there,” a “chipped, defaced, treasured icon.” 21 Proposing the book as an experiment “that suggests the psychoanalytic process itself,” Chernin admits that a book cannot possibly remain “as free, unpremeditated, wild, rough, crude, and halting as the

18

Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 91. Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 87. Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht note in their introduction to Feminist Archetypal Theory that Jung’s followers came to see archetypes as having their origin in a transcendent and religious realm, therefore unchanging. The concept of archetypes, however, have been in the process of redefinition. Eric Neumann, in Art and the Creative Unconscious describes archetypes as changing and changeable “according to the time, the place, and the psychological constellation of the individual in whom they are manifested.” And James Hall argues that “the trigger for the archetype to manifest itself is also experience,” for example, while “there is no inherited image of the mother … there is a universal tendency to form an image of the mother from the experience of the child” (in Lauter and Rupprecht, 9–11). 20 Kim Chernin, A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 10. 21 Chernin, Listening, xiii–xiv. 19

Memory, Memoir, and Fictions

85

verbal free association by which analytic work proceeds,” although both rely on the assembling of “fragments of memory that have endured against that forgetting which is the enemy of literary, as well as psychoanalytic, work.” 22 Entering into a narrative that refers to the self in the present as “I” and past selves in the third person as “she,” Chernin renders both forgetting and remembering as suspect. She debates the pros and cons of discontinuity and continuity of selves, noting that even one’s sense of one’s self in the past is suspect because continuity may be constructed to soothe one’s fear that one might shortly be done away with. On the other hand, with discontinuity comes a closing off of awareness of “how different we have been, how entirely other and alien to ourselves we might yet become, so that this seemingly stable entity we think of as an ‘I’ would have to be viewed as a mere rhetorical device that stands between us and madness.” 23 Thus, Chernin’s narrative exploration of self-configurations unfolds in selfreflexive movements. Taking the self, past and present, as her object of scrutiny, so that the “I” of the present fractures as a reassuring “rhetorical device” no longer capable of containing the self, it dissolves into a surreal landscape where fragmented selves float by just out of reach, out of focus, but observable. It is in this strange landscape of self-reflection that, under the right circumstances, memory rips open into the past, so that one is transported, as it were, in time and becomes one with the past, feeling the feelings from past moments, and in those moments the past is clearly before one; there’s nothing conjectural about it. Such a poignantly emotional movement across the landscapes of past and present suggests that there is “some thread of continuity that ties together” Chernin’s “provisional selves.” 24 It suggests that, although the self may be as transient as time’s power, reconfigured in the wake of new experiences, it is possible that past self-configurations are not completely closed off from her awareness and therefore are capable of participating in the present. Depicting the experimental nature of narrative self-reflexivity as its own kind of descent (not unlike the underworld journey enacted in Reinventing Eve) into “uncharted regions,” Chernin surmises that the journey to the “far shores of the self ” is only representable by images and metaphors, evocations of veiled references that “direct the gaze to the shadow play of the unknowable, by which [her] self in its most fundamental gesture wishes to be known.” 25 Chernin describes her journey into memory as “traveling in the ‘misty seas’ of a world inhabited by ‘lost selves’ that ‘drift by in their tangle of sea growth, most in the grip of another figure … as if all the lost, old, outgrown, hacked-apart 22

Chernin, Listening, xx. Chernin, Listening, 13. 24 Chernin, Listening, 13. 25 Chernin, Listening, 84. 23

86

Connie Griffin

selves, taken down by the history of their attachments, to which they still cling, were inseparably linked to the unknown stories of their decline.’ ” These surreal images sing out in “isolated phrases, a language of fragments that thrills.” 26 Comparing memory to a blurred landscape with occasional bursts of clarity, Chernin moves, not toward the obvious, not toward the clear, sharp memory in reconstructing the self, but into the fog, into the deepening shadows; here she finds what memory has blurred and buried.

Home, Another Country Crossing the Border traces Chernin’s literal and figurative journeys to her cultural and spiritual “homeland” by situating the “I” of her text as narrator and “Kim Chernin” as an individual from the past, the self she inhabited up until and during her time in Israel. This autobiographical narrative is not a straightforward journey back in memory; rather it reflects on the process of remembering and its relation to the conscious shaping of the autobiographical story. Chernin’s investigation of the effects of memory and forgetting on the shaping of the self—memory shaping the conscious self, forgetting shaping the unconscious—leads not only to her experiment with an autobiographical narrative parallel to psychoanalysis (as in A Different Kind of Listening), but to structural considerations in Crossing the Border in order to implicate the vicissitudes of remembrance. Crossing the Border creates a narrator who tells one story, only to receive letters (the narrator had written just after leaving the kibbutz in a shattered emotional state) which reveal a very different story from the one remembered. This disjuncture of narratives disrupts the traditional heterosexual romance and inserts a story of same-sex love and desire, a story of two women loving. Thus, Crossing the Border attests to the power of dominant cultural narratives and traditional literary conventions to shape the story into a false frame, so that what doesn’t “fit” is forgotten—excised from the story. Chernin refuses to forget. She shifts the focal lens and fractures the frame to include those lives and stories that otherwise would exist outside the dominant frame of reference, that frequently remain repressed and denied, both by the individual and the cultural consciousness. Chernin “crosses the border” into the buried parts of the psyche. Constructed in four parts defined by themes and dates, the first two sections of Crossing the Border, titled “A Small Farm Near the Border: September 1971,” and “The Soldier: Late Fall 1971,” tell the story that has been remembered; the third section, titled “The Death of Kim Chernin: February 1972,” tells the story that has been forgotten, while the fourth section, titled “The 26

Chernin, Listening, 84–85.

Memory, Memoir, and Fictions

87

Return: Late Fall 1991,” brings the reader into the present moment of the narrator’s life and writing. Although the first two sections develop the conventional theme of heterosexual, romantic love, they do so unconventionally, calling into question what is being reconstructed in self-reflexive fashion. Opening the book with a reflection on memory, Chernin contradicts herself, writing: “What will be told took place. It happened to people I knew.” But, in the next paragraph she begins to hedge, noting that “[t]his story” is as “true as I can make it after almost twenty years.” Likening memory to “a liar, a cheat, a thief, a pirate,” Chernin sounds a warning, setting a tone of ambivalence toward both memory and its reconstruction in storytelling.27 Such an approach not only acknowledges the fractured nature of memory, but also the active role its fracture plays in self-representation, for it is the forgetting signified by her metaphorical death in the third section that sets her transformation in process. Reflecting on the narrative project undertaken, Chernin writes that the “story has to conform to the shape of memory. Literary considerations (pace, narrative continuity, etc.) must be suspended. Memory will throw off these structures at every turn.” 28 “Memory,” she notes, is embued with a “self-revising refusal to let the story be known.” 29 Memory, then, is numerous and contradictory things; it resonates, not as a still space to which the narrator may return at will, but a dynamically shifting space that intrudes and evades, following a logic that is often unconscious. This shifting sand of memory’s groundlessness weaves itself into Crossing the Border so that, even as the story is read, the reader is made fully aware that the narrator is shuttling back and forth among half-forgotten images, softened, changed even, by time and repression; she is sifting and sorting, ostensibly trying for an accuracy of detail, and yet expressing such distrust of this thing called memory that readers also begin to wonder about its veracity. “Is memory out to get me? Is it on my side,” she wonders, “hoping I’ll figure out what is hidden in its fragments? I doubt it.” 30 Referring to an earlier (third-person) self, Chernin writes: I sometimes think she stacked them maliciously, hoping I’d have trouble sorting things out. … I’m sure her memories do not mean well by me. There’s a trap here somewhere, some trick lying in wait, someone who lives at the edge is likely to have arresting, impossible memories.31

27 Kim Chernin, Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 3. 28 Chernin, Crossing, 69. 29 Chernin, Crossing, 200. 30 Chernin, Crossing, 70. 31 Chernin, Crossing, 119.

88

Connie Griffin

Chernin’s wariness in approaching history through memory also derives from hindsight: the present self (“I”) would like to rescue the past self (“she”); thus, through revision past outcomes could be changed. In revising past actions, Chernin’s narrator hopes, not only to change the story, but to change the self. Chernin’s self-reflexive narrative would like to reign in the feisty character from her past, save her from destruction, so that: … if it were possible to end here, I would have done all a biographer could do on behalf of an unruly subject whose story will soon turn another corner, bringing her back to everything she has come up here to avoid. If I could set the mountain in a ring of fire, making it hard to leave or enter, that is what I would do to keep Kim Chernin from the kind of love she is calling down on herself.32

And yet, even though Chernin’s stated task is the shaping of story from memory’s reservoir, she suggests that there are underlying plots that will have their way with the story under construction; there are cultural, literary, and personal scripts that shape, not only the writing of the story but the very memory of the experience about which she is writing. The unconscious shaping of self to match the culturally conventional script becomes dangerous for the very reason that it is unconscious; therefore, its construction becomes naturalized. Because of this, in the first version of the story, Chernin cannot save her heroine from the story’s ostensibly “inevitable” unfolding. Because, of course the soldier is going to arrive … knowing by heart some entire passages from a twilight song of love and death … he will walk through fire, pledge eternal love, go down off the mountain, betray her. Nothing I can do, that’s how it will go, in keeping with some inevitable twist in the way things get told, there seems to be no other way to register it. The same laws govern the shape of opera, saga, epic, old tale, weaver’s fancy, memory, I guess.33

It is at this point in the story that the narrator begins to have difficulty remembering her time in Israel and starts to rely on “some inevitable twist.” But, the emphasis is not on the events that happened; rather it is on the way things get told, on the laws that govern storytelling in its various genres. Such scripts, however, not only govern the “way things get told,” but what gets told. It is a vicious cycle that Chernin is representing, a literary and cultural overdetermination that wipes out those elements that contradict its script. Memory, then, is not innocent, nor is it transparent. One cannot approach it directly. Chernin notes: “Memory is an instrument crossed by so many purposes, no one

32 33

Chernin, Crossing, 143. Chernin, Crossing, 143.

Memory, Memoir, and Fictions

89

has ever figured out how to read it. Memory is not for amateurs. I’ve made it my life’s work.” 34 Having lost its thread of continuity, Chernin is not sure how to end the story; what she remembers is romantic love and tragic loss. But, she doesn’t quite trust this conventional ending. Comparing memory to a house set on fire, narrative reconstruction is likened to a process of searching for precious things after the fire. Chernin writes: Someone has gone through these memories setting whole scenes on fire. … I have shards, fragments, incriminating ashen possibilities. To remember has become a game of make as make can.35

Concerned that the memories have been reconstructed to give the illusion of coherence, or even worse, that they are a “false stage, a protective contrivance,” Chernin opens the revealing letters that “make a mockery of her life’s work.” The letters reveal that the “burned” parts of the story, the scenes that were set on fire, were those of Kim Chernin’s love and passion for a woman while living on the kibbutz in Israel.36 Kim Chernin should have had a chance before her death. She should have told her own version. I, who came after, would have preferred to know sooner what I found out when I read Kim Chernin’s letters. If someone else finds a new voice hard to get used to this late in the story, imagine how I felt when the letters turned up twenty years after I thought Kim Chernin had shut up for good.37

Here Chernin explicitly addresses the literary devices of voice, audience, and point of view, calling into question past events as she remembers them. A distrusting narrator, fragmented memories, conflicting stories, these are the materials with which Chernin works. But the tale that could not be told, that could not continue to be lived out even, in 1971, is finally told and published in 1994 in Crossing the Border, subtitled “An Erotic Journey.” This story takes shape in the form of letters that have been returned to the narrator some twenty years later, although how they are returned is contradicted in various tellings. In one version, they are returned by the soldier of the conventional plot, in another version they are returned by the narrator’s former husband when he is returning things to her. In either case, it is unclear whether the letters were ever sent to the woman lover. What is clear is that the letters were written from Scotland, where Kim Chernin went after leaving the kibbutz. 34

Chernin, Crossing, 166. Chernin, Crossing, 190. 36 Chernin, Crossing, 191. 37 Chernin, Crossing, 209. 35

90

Connie Griffin

The Return of the Repressed The “forgotten” story is one of two women’s passion for one another and their attempts to live out their love in the midst of a small, close-knit community, where “homosexual relationships” are one of the forbidden rules, agreed to in writing before being admitted to the kibbutz. This story, like the first, is a story of love and loss, of violence and betrayal. But, unlike the first story, which is propelled along in a culturally over-determined process, replete with its own romantic conventions, the forgotten story is framed by those forces that are set against its unfolding. It is a story that requires crossing over the borders of that which is culturally forbidden, of crossing those forces that are set against such stories taking their place in history, indeed those internalized forces that resist its being remembered. The “shards” and “fragments” to which Chernin turns to reconstruct her time in Israel and her love of a woman take the form of a series of letters from Kim Chernin to her “Beloved”; there are no letters in response. But, there were telephone calls, recordings of her lover’s voice that the letters describe as a “disembodied voice that has already grown shrill from repeating itself …” 38 I play the tape to the end. I wind it back. I start over. … I play the tape back, punch it to silence, listen to your voice echo along the stone walls. I can make you speak at top speed, as if you were desperate to say everything before I turn you off. I can slow you down to a drone, as if every word had to be wrung out of you. You say I was careless, I was selfish, I overcame your resistance, you talk as if I were a magician, practicing spells.39

Here Chernin compares the role of the author to that of the lover listening to her beloved’s recorded voice, indeed not passively listening, but in control of how the words are heard, at what speed, with what emotional intonation. Here the author/lover is compared to a “magician,” with the power to manipulate the story, to change its meaning through various distortions. The receipt of the letters, repressed for twenty years, precipitates a crisis in the subjectivity that the narrator has reconstructed after her disintegration, likened to a “death,” following her time in Israel. The re-integration of split selves culminates the three stories of Crossing the Border. The first-person narrator is cautious because the presumably dead Kim Chernin was a powerful force, a force that has been subsumed by a more stable current subject. Chernin’s narrator is not sure that she wants to welcome the old Kim Chernin back. Not only have her letters made “a mockery of [her] life’s work,” work that 38 39

Chernin, Crossing, 214. Chernin, Crossing, 214, 220.

Memory, Memoir, and Fictions

91

she has consistently described as the exploration of memory and selfhood, but they have reintroduced an old self that, if re-integrated into her present identity will construct a new subjectivity.40 And who might that be? It is a frightening prospect. I have read Kim Chernin’s letters slowly. … I began to suspect she had written them to me. She would have wanted to cast herself forward, she must have known she was coming to an end, with those letters she hoped to anchor herself in me. If I had read fast, staying up all night, unable to put them down until I had finished, Kim Chernin would have made her way back. Yes, back. Of course, back. I must have known she would not stay dead forever.41

In order to maintain distance from her earlier self, the narrator works with the letters “only in the morning, searching out contradictions, gaps, inconsistencies in the story.” 42 In other words, in maintaining a critical distance, the narrator resists the emergence of the ghost self and its merging with her present self. The conclusion to Crossing the Border moves into an allegorical weaving across boundaries of nationhood, of selfhood, and of fact and fiction; it creates parallels between the stories being told in this text and Israel as Jewish homeland, between emotional boundaries and a “security road” that was being built when she lived on the kibbutz. The conclusion mirrors the beginning of Crossing the Border when the young Kim Chernin links her sense of homelessness with her identity as a Jew, passionately defending Israel as the Jewish homeland, citing “the battles recorded by Josephus, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem in the year 70.” 43 The narrator tells friends assembled there “how the Jewish tendency to repeat stories was solely responsible for the Jewish return to Eretz Israel,” and argues that “that is how we must understand Israel, as testimony to the sheer narrative bravado of bending history to the story’s will.” 44 Soon, she [Kim Chernin] will cobble together a resemblance between our domestic strife and the blood struggle for the homeland. I can just see her with her map of the interior, erasing the security zones. … I sit sternly, clipping, posting, assembling, recording. Much has been lost; the memory of the land in its blood struggles has fragmented. The claims are driven back to a sharp cut of antiquity, exclusive, absolute, irresolvable on either side. I would say neither can have the land without the other, if both cannot possess it, it cannot be home to either. Always, the other, across the border.45 40

Chernin, Crossing, 277. Chernin, Crossing, 279. 42 Chernin, Crossing, 279. 43 Chernin, Crossing, 21. 44 Chernin, Crossing, 22. 45 Chernin, Crossing, 318. 41

92

Connie Griffin

In this scene of the present-day writer at work at her desk, Chernin illustrates optional constructions of the story of her homeland; as such, history is in the process of being reconstructed, from memory which takes shape in fragments and bits. History has fractured and shifted, depending upon point of view and historical positionality. Memory is not to be trusted, yet history is constructed through memory. Here the stories merge, conflating the individual and the communal, the personal and the political, the story and the historical. And this merging takes shape from the position and perspective of the split self, foreshadowing a re-emerging of the former self and its merging with the narrating subject. I do not weep. … Now that my work on Kim Chernin has come to an end, I have been sent on to other restorations. If she thinks there is a way to live out the passionate destiny of the romantic dreamer, now, in this place, if she imagines I am terrified by her outrage, her weeping, her clenched fists because she is pounding the work table where my papers have been spread out, so be it. … If Kim Chernin wants to cry let it be for the lost family romance with her own people. If Kim Chernin cannot make memory of this, why should I any longer fear Kim Chernin? Do you hear? Why should I any longer fear Kim Chernin?46

This is yet another story being woven into the primary stories of Kim Chernin’s going to Israel to find herself, of falling in love with a soldier, of falling in love with a woman. This story seems to break through the other stories, fragmented and impressionistic; it suggests the author’s task is not merely with memory, but includes an older narrator’s relationship with a younger aspect of self. Like the insertion of the forgotten story, it is a different kind of romance, therefore, a different kind of loss. Chernin is suggesting that the younger self must give up her ideals of her homeland and her people because they are based on idealized memory. Chernin is suggesting that the younger self cannot work with complex Jewish identity, but sees the right to a Jewish “homeland” in absolute terms, does not recognize the need for a “security zone,” a zone that resonates politically, geographically, and psychologically. The narrator, on the other hand, needs a “security zone,” needs some distance between reason and raw emotion, between passionate feeling and action, between telling and story. Welcome her back? … My youth self still coming of age with her uproar and disorder? Okay, welcome her back. My perpetual waif, still coming of age at every age with her uproar and disorder. … Share my house with her. … She will not have changed. … Have I really missed her these twenty years, my wandering spirit who should have been trampled out in the name of maturity?

46

Chernin, Crossing, 318–319.

Memory, Memoir, and Fictions

93

Welcome her back. A me not entirely me, a self violently outgrown on a cold morning in Scotland, an incorrigible me newly back from the dead, staking its claim to the living. Of course she will have a story to tell. If she hasn’t been dead these twenty years, what has she been doing? She will sit up by the fire late into the night to tell me about the lost years of Kim Chernin. … Would I have to admit I too have missed her all these years? Will I have to confess my life cannot go on without her?47

Repressed for twenty years, the former self is seeking to rejoin the current self, thus creating a new subjectivity. Melding the passionate with the rational, the youthful with the mature, the chaotic with the ordered, Chernin crosses the most dangerous border, her own subconscious “security zone” set up between that which is repressed and that which is remembered. And so the book ends, not with her work on Kim Chernin having been completed, but with the integration of disparate selves that had been split off from one another. This ghost self, relegated to the background, dismissed as dead, repressed as too frightening to remember, when welcomed back brings with it what has been pushed out of the frame of reference. Slipping into the shadows, A Different Kind of Listening creates a narrative space through which the disparate selves may be in dialogue rather than cut off from one another. And so we return to the analytic couch where the narrator is speaking of the “ghostly self,” where she is welcoming back her “secret-sharer,” and coming to terms with her bisexual identity, stating: From the moment the exuberant, would-be whole-self emerged, there would never again be a wholesale shattering. This self, although it is fated to undergo further disintegrations, has a firm hold on the world. Therefore, it is different from any self-configuration that has emerged before.48

With this new self-configuration, multi-dimensional but not so fragile as to shatter and scatter into disparate parts, Chernin can begin to ask questions central to postmodern concepts of the self. For example, is the self really like Lyotard’s onion, endlessly layered until one arrives at nothingness? Is it like the helix of modern science, so that no matter how deeply one descends, one will encounter “the same pattern … the same thematic structure” only deeper within the self’s interior?49 The subject can be described only by analogy, by rhetorical devices that provide correlatives to the experience of journeying into the inner recesses of the self. Chernin’s adept ability to draw on metaphorical

47

Chernin, Crossing, 319, 324–325. Chernin, Listening, 105–106, 110. 49 Chernin, Listening, 112. 48

94

Connie Griffin

mappings of subjectivity is demonstrated in Reinventing Eve, Crossing the Border, and A Different Kind of Listening, all of which are textual journeys that weave exterior landscapes as they delve into the subjective psyche by drawing on memory, altered states, and psychoanalysis. In each narrative Chernin confronts her life-long fear of psychic fragmentation: If you came apart, what would happen to the parts? Would they float off into space, lacking the specific gravity of their integrity? Would they yearn for one another. … Would the body’s intelligence have survived in each part, so that each part might then hastily seek a strategy for reintegration?50

In this image of a fractured self, consciousness is its own body; Chernin’s narrator experiences her fear of fragmentation as something that happens, not merely within the psyche but to the physical body itself. Pondering the relation of the parts to the whole, Chernin invokes a concept of the self not unlike the hologram in quantum physics, a “strange new land that physicists [have] found lurking in the heart of the atom” where matter and consciousness inhabit a single field.51 Holographic principles call into question notions of matter and consciousness as separate and suggest a universal pattern that is dynamically interactive in nature with constant movement and change as its organizing pattern.52 Such a view of reality suggests that any one aspect of an object or being “contains all the information possessed by the whole.” 53 This interconnectedness is beautifully illustrated by Chernin when, in the midst of one of her disintegrative experiences, she hears a bird singing. The singing bursts forth intermittently, providing reassurance of time’s passing, suggesting that morning will eventually arrive. But then, the bird stops singing, there is only silence, and this suggests that time may have stopped. Of course, within this logic, if time no longer passes, the body will not disintegrate. But, “[u]nfortunately, it also means this moment will never change, the disintegration will always be about to happen, no one will be able to apprehend the cry, to come to help you.” 54 Finally, when the bird’s song, usually delivered in brief bursts, is sent forth in a “silver cascade,” releasing “the entire song” in one full piece, Chernin experiences it as a “reminder of the self’s integration.” 55 The dynamic interaction among self, song, story, time, and self-integration beautifully conveys another key concept of contemporary physics: the power of

50

Chernin, Listening, 118. Michael Talbot. The Holographic Universe (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 33. 52 Talbot, Holographic, 47. 53 Talbot, Holographic, 48. 54 Chernin, Listening, 119. 55 Chernin, Listening, 120. 51

Memory, Memoir, and Fictions

95

perception to change that which is perceived. Placing value and meaning on the night-singing bird, Chernin’s narrator not only listens to its song, she participates with it, becoming so deeply connected to it that she believes that her integrity depends on its continued singing.

Annealment Remarking on this perceptual participation, Chernin writes that when she initially went into psychoanalysis, she still believed in a truth and in the possibility of discovering it. She believed that the stories that emerged about her childhood were absolutely accurate reconstructions of childhood events that had actually taken place. But, through the course of navigating language, narrative, memory, and forgetting, Chernin begins to identify with “subjectivists, hermeneuts, and constructivists who often seem to have shrugged off truth as beyond the pale,” who have been shaped by cultural trends of “partial knowings, some good guesses, along with minutely observed interactions.” 56 “As for truth,” she notes, “it holds a close affinity with fictions, carrying ambiguities, sustaining multiple meanings, through which a fertile, contradictory, sometimes multiple self is said to derive, sometimes with a core, sometimes without.” 57 Like the opening narrative to Crossing the Border where Chernin writes of the story as actually having happened to people, people she has known, only to caution the reader that memory is not to be trusted, Chernin concludes A Different Kind of Listening with an epilogue where she claims that although she has written “[a] true story, it has its limitations. It is a version fully aware that other versions might have been told.” 58 Here Chernin negotiates a space somewhere in between fact and fiction, holding two apparently contradictory ideas together simultaneously.59 “Other versions” are important to Chernin who, as a student of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, has a dislike for “other people’s giving names to what [she] believe[s].” Noting that she has claimed Freud’s original power for naming his own experience, she seeks counsel from her own dreams, as did Freud. “After Freud, we’ve used his names, borrowed the stories he liked to tell,” Chernin contends, pointing out that she prefers to construct her own “design,”

56

Chernin, Listening, 126. Chernin, Listening, 126. 58 Chernin, Listening, 213. 59 I am indebted to Leigh Gilmore for the use of the term, Autobiographics. For an excellent analysis of the instability of nonfiction and the cultural politics of selfrepresentational writing, see Gilmore’s Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. 57

96

Connie Griffin

prefers to plumb her own “underworld.” 60 It is not necessarily Freudian models to which Chernin takes exception; it is the universalization of those models. “I have no argument with Freud’s truths when they stick to Freud. As for myself, I have never seen why his truths should be binding for me,” she writes.61 Asserting that Freud selected Oedipus “from among a thousand mythical faces because Oedipus had in common with Freud an abiding love for his mother, a bitter quarrel with his father,” Chernin refuses other people’s versions of her subjectivity.62 “When other people have tried to translate me into Freud, I resisted. This has made for a stormy, irregular psychoanalytic experience, but why should I blame Freud for that? I have my own underworld, as useful to me as Freud’s proved to be for him.” 63

Works Consulted Chernin, Kim. A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. _____. Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. _____. In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story. HarperPerennial-HarperCollins, 1994. _____. Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. _____. The Flame Bearers. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1994. Pratt, Annis V. “Spinning Among Fields: Jung, Frye, Levi-Strauss and Feminist Archetypal Theory.” In Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-visions of Jungian Thought, edited by Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1985. Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. De/Colonizing the Subject:: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1992. Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

60

Chernin, Listening, 214–215. Chernin, Listening, 43. 62 Chernin, Listening, 214–215. 63 Chernin, Listening, 209. 61

STEPHEN KING’S WRITERS: THE CRITICAL POLITICS OF LITERARY QUALITY IN MISERY AND THE DARK HALF MICHAEL J. MEYER

This essay explores how King, through his writer protagonists in Misery and The Dark Half, presents several traits shared by all creative artists and attempts to determine the validity of the present criteria used by literary critics in order to establish the differences between “classic” and “pulp” fiction. King first pinpoints differences in the writing process, including methodologies employed and language used, but, more importantly, he considers the motivation that engenders composition. As he probes the selfconcept of a “writer,” King subtly delineates his own personal identity crisis, and, in the process, provides his readers with a deliberate analysis of the dichotomy that exists between writers whose work is considered interpretative and therefore classic ... and those who produce stories that are “only” designed to provide entertainment and relaxation rather than to probe vital questions about human actions and motivations. Through the plots of both Misery and The Dark Half, King poses the ambiguous question faced by all writers: whether their concern for the symbiotic relationship with their reading public is great enough to overcome their fear of catering to inferior quality in order to attain a more measurable goal: reader acceptance and financial success.

Stephen King has made it increasingly obvious in his work that he yearns to be considered one of America’s premier writers rather than merely a master of the horror genre. Perhaps motivated by his experiences as a former literature major in college and as a high school English teacher, King indicates his desire by paying lip service to so-called “great” American authors in most of his work, mentioning Poe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and especially Faulkner directly or through literary allusions. These authors, as well as Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Franz Kafka and T. S. Eliot, are representative of the artistic community with which King would like to be identified. One problem King faces in his quest to elevate his status is the fact that the genre he has chosen (horror) has long been relegated with its sisters, crime and

98

Michael J. Meyer

romance, as an inferior pursuit and the province of hack writers or write-alikes. In order to redeem these areas of interest, King writes intensely in their defense, attempting to elevate their reputation by associating writers of “quality” with the field. For example, he argues in “The Horror Writer and The Ten Bears”: Horror isn’t a hack market now and never was. The genre is one of the most delicate known to man, and it must be handled with great care and more than a little love. Some of the greatest authors of all time have tried their hand at things that go bump in the night, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hawthorne, Poe, Henry James, William Faulkner and a score of others. (13)

Unfortunately, King has reluctantly acknowledged that his critical reputation has not reached these heights; indeed in a preface to “The Sun Dog” in Four Past Midnight he states: “I am no one’s National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize winner” (608). Elsewhere, he has admitted, “I am not a great artist, but I’ve always felt impelled to write” (Night Shift, xiii). However, despite his protests to the contrary, readers can sense that King is offended by the suggestion that he has never written anything serious. He seems to take it as a personal insult that despite his adroit manipulation of plot and his skillful development of character, he remains, in the eyes of most critics, merely a writer of popular fiction, an author whose books may be evaluated on a level with those produced by Sidney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, Victoria Holt, Rosemary Rogers and Danielle Steele, composers of what King himself labels pulp-fiction and whom he has dismissed as “write-alikes” (The Dark Half 67). Perhaps, as novelist Michele Shung suggested in The New Republic, “the grisly nature of [his] subject matter [has led] some critics to underestimate his literary talents” (150). In an interview published in Playboy in 1983, King rails against critics who “ghettoize horror and fantasy and instantly relegate them beyond the pale of so-called serious literature” (Bare Bones, 52). He argues that such criticisms assume “that all popular literature must also, by definition, be bad literature. These criticisms are not really against bad writing; they are against an entire type of writing” (53). Thus King’s chore is primarily a struggle to overcome what Leslie Fiedler has defined as “the notorious reputation of macabre fiction,” its tendency to be labeled as “disreputable schlock, frivolous makebelieve, vulgar and gross, and a regrettable regression from the straight path of literary progress” (The Kingdom of Fear, 57). Clearly uncomfortable with being labeled as an individual whose preoccupation with horror automatically results in inferior prose, King has not only revealed his frustration in interviews and in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre but also has surprisingly included it as a major factor in several of his major novels, including Misery

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

99

and The Dark Half. In each of these works, King struggles with a definition of what it means to be a literary artisté as opposed to being a hack writer. Specifically, through his writer protagonists, he examines several areas shared by all creative artists and tries to determine the validity of the present criteria used by literary critics in order to establish the differences between “classic” and “pulp” fiction. King first attempts to pinpoint differences in the writing process, including methodologies employed and language used, but, more importantly, he considers the motivation that engenders composition. As he probes the self-concept of a “writer,” King subtly delineates his own personal identity crisis, and, in the process, provides his readers with a deliberate analysis of the dichotomy that exists between writers whose work is considered interpretative … and therefore classic … and those who produce stories that are “only” designed to provide entertainment and relaxation rather than to probe vital questions about human actions and motivations. Since King admits that he often becomes obsessed “with the possibility of bad reviews” and that he “broods over them when they come,” (Four Past Midnight, xiv) it is no wonder that he uses his work to launch defensive attacks about critical reactions to material that forms the cornerstone of his oeuvre. A close examination of the novels mentioned above provides numerous examples of King’s theory of writing, a theory that King himself acknowledges was central in developing each text. For example, in a prefatory note to “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” the second novella in Four Past Midnight, King confesses a cyclical pattern in his work and identifies this particular work as his “last story about writers and writing and the strange no man’s land which exists between what’s real and what’s make-believe” (250). In the same prefatory remarks, King goes on to classify Misery as a story which “illustrates the powerful hold fiction can have over the reader” and claims that The Dark Half explores a converse idea: “the powerful hold fiction can have over a writer.” The present novella, he then claims, is his way “of telling both stories at the same time by approaching some plot elements from a totally different angle” (250). Although King contends that writing is a “secret act” and alleges that he does not always think about composing, his writing about writing at times seems to deny his premise that books just happen as an author grabs “the tail of a tale” and “hangs on tight,” hoping to get it right (Four Past Midnight xiii). Instead, the two novels not only define an anticipated audience but also delineate an approach to writing and express clearly a primary motive for composition. Such self-dialogue clearly involves thoughts about the differences between “serious” writers and “hacks,” and causes speculation about which of the two labels King deserves to wear. For example, King writes in Kingdom of Fear: “I’m a writer, not a lousy comic book artist” to assert his status in the literary community; yet in the same article, he also contends that horror magazines “are far from trash,” while still confessing that “they rarely reach the

100

Michael J. Meyer

plateau of Art” (17). Such paradoxical statements prefigure King’s distressing struggle with literary politics in these novels. He seems particularly confused about critical decrees that certain genres are by nature less valuable. Although horror director Clive Barker claims that from the beginning King “has never apologized or been ashamed to be a horror writer,” (Kingdom of Fear 64) his discussions in these novels certainly lead readers to an opposite conclusion. For example, Misery, published in 1987, introduces readers to Paul Sheldon, a writer who wrestles with the question of whether the quality of his work is up to par by the establishment’s standards of excellence. Described on page six of the novel as an author who wrote “novels of two kinds, good ones and best sellers,” Sheldon is best known for a series of romance novels featuring the character, Misery Chastain. However, the author has recently killed off this most bankable of heroines in an attempt to break away from stereotypical plots and devices; to his delight he has completed a contemporary, realistic book entitled Fast Cars that he feels is “a cinch for next year’s American Book Award” (Misery, 14), an honor no “Misery” novel could ever attain. When Sheldon is seriously injured in an auto wreck, however, his new manuscript is appropriated by his rescuer, a fanatic fan named Annie Wilkes. Annie, a desperate follower of the Misery series, is unimpressed by the author’s new and more literary achievement. She complains, “It’s hard to follow. It keeps jumping back and forth in time.” (Misery, 19), almost sounding like King’s own critics who have at times deplored his fragmented style and his tendency to present episodes out of time sequence. In addition, Annie disapproves of the fact that Sheldon’s new title is all “technique and that the subject dictates the form” (19). Moreover, she is disgusted by the fact that Fast Cars’ hero, Tony Bonasaro, is uninteresting and frequently uses profanity. She announces that the book lacks nobility and that she finds it offensive and unreal when compared to the “Misery” series (20). In a defensive posture, Sheldon calls his approach a trick of the trade, one that gives evidence of the complexity of his creation, a factor usually not identified with plot-centered and chronologically ordered works of the mystery and romance genre. Fast Cars, on the other hand, is Sheldon’s major attempt to write “better,” to move away from popular fiction, works produced for and influenced by audience approval. He confesses They wanted Misery, Misery, Misery. Each time he had taken a year or two off to write one of the other novels—what he thought of as his “serious” work with what was first certainty and then hope and finally a species of grim desperation. … The message was always the same: It wasn’t what I expected ... Please go back to Misery. I want to know what Misery is doing. He could write a modern Under The Volcano, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Sound and the Fury; it wouldn’t matter. They would still want Misery, Misery, Misery (Misery, 25).

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

101

Despite his determination to avoid publishing another harlequin romance, Sheldon finds such demands from his admiring reading public are hard to ignore. When he is under Annie’s care, they become literally impossible. Sheldon is held captive by his “number one fan” and is physically coerced by Annie to re-create or resurrect “misery,” to continue crafting what he and other influential reviewers consider “inferior” romance fiction. King’s The Dark Half provides another exploration of the writer’s craft, this time looking at them from the perspective of a closeted crime novelist, Thad Beaumont, a classic writer who has used the pseudonym George Stark in order to publish in an “unacceptable” genre. Like Sheldon, Beaumont has become literally controlled by the characters he creates and also finds it difficult to break away from them or the fictional genre they represent. Yet the destruction of a part of himself becomes problematic. Just as King must have struggled with leaving his personal pseudonym of Richard Bachman behind, he presents Beaumont with the similar challenge of destroying someone and something he is attracted to, perhaps even admires. Like King, who in 1988 admitted his pseudonymous self and allowed the Bachman books to be published under his real name, Beaumont is initially unwilling to “own up” to his authorship, since he remains unsatisfied with and unsure of the quality of the Stark texts. Yet at the same time, Beaumont is also unable to let such “readable” manuscripts lie dormant and unpublished. King portrays the ultimate writer’s dilemma by having Beaumont confess his initial distress at the content of the Stark novels but paradoxically be attracted to and proud of them. These books, like Sheldon’s Fast Cars, find their selling point in their explicit violence and in the crass language of their villainous protagonist, Alexis Machine. In what appears to be a deliberate contrast to Sheldon, however, King establishes Beaumont as having already attained the label of a premier artist rather than being known as a “wannabe.” His first novel, the best-seller, The Sudden Dancers, has won the 1972 National Book Award but unfortunately brought only critical acclaim without audience acceptance and approval. Without a means of support or a devoted readership, Thad is depicted as the opposite of Sheldon. Yet despite critical acclaim, eventually he finds it opportunistic to “degenerate,” to move away from “quality” in order to make a living from his craft. Although he justifies his dabbling in crime novels and the existence of the pseudonymous Stark as necessary because he had gone through a “serious case of writer’s block and need[ed] a jump-start,” (22) yet Beaumont realizes that the Stark persona has really emerged as a result of his failure to attain monetary success. Beaumont’s ultimate concern is putting food on the table, but he differs from Paul Sheldon because from the beginning he genuinely enjoys creating popular fiction. For example, Beaumont expresses his delight at being able, through Stark, to “kick up my heels for once, if I wanted to. Write about anything I pleased without the New York Times Book Review looking over my shoulder

102

Michael J. Meyer

the whole time I wrote it” (23). On the other hand, Sheldon reacts: “Free at last! Free at last! Great God Almighty, I’m free at last!” (Misery 13) when he believes he has written the final “Misery” chapter. Here Beaumont represents the antithesis of Sheldon who feels his production has become stale and predictable rather than fresh and appealing. For Sheldon, romantic pulp fiction has begun to create literal misery or distress as he is forced to invent yet another episode of the fictional Misery’s life. According to Thad, however, his pseudonymous productions are freeing, like “a secret escape hatch” (23) which allows him the opportunity to reinvent himself in a more felicitous manner. Such reinvention allows Beaumont to virtually change his personality as he creates, to formulate a new image of the self that supersedes reality and allows him to produce what he “normally” would have avoided or perhaps even criticized. Certainly Sheldon shares the same goal of reinvention, and, though the details are different, apparently both authors are struggling through their literary production to overcome feelings of personal inadequacy and negative selfimage. Beaumont’s invention, Stark, unlike his creator, is a macho man, a former convict whose crimes include arson and assault with intent to kill; on the other hand, Beaumont sees himself as a rather common individual, clumsy, balding and fairly inept (156). Thad muses: Hadn’t there always been a part of him in love with George Stark’s simple, violent nature? Hadn’t a part of him always admired George, a man who didn’t stumble over things, a man who never looked weak and silly, a man who would never have to fear the demons locked away in the liquor cabinet. A man with no wife and children to slow him down? A man who had a sharp straight answer to all of life’s more difficult questions? (328)

Similarly, Sheldon is unhappy with his stereotypical heroine and her melodramatic life. He perceives himself as a stronger and more competent individual when he composes Fast Cars, a novel whose hero is far different from the effete males who populate his romantic sagas. He seeks a new and more virile character through his writing, and Geoffrey and Ian from his Misery novels are hardly comparable to Tony Bonasaro of Fast Cars. In the same manner, Beaumont, when writing as Stark, also discovers a different, more powerful individual within himself, since his alter-ego has both inner courage and outward physical strength combined with convincing cleverness and determination. When Stark is in charge, Beaumont even finds himself undergoing physical changes while composing, such as writing with a Berol Black pencil instead of a typewriter, consuming large amounts of alcohol and smoking cigars. As his wife describes him in his Stark mode, she says: He’d become distant. Not cold, not even cool, just distant. He was less interested in going out, in seeing people … he’d feel headachy and unrested, but if he’d been having bad dreams, he couldn’t remember what they were (190).

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

103

Another Dark Half character also notes the change. “He is two men,” Sheriff Allen Pangborn says, “he has always been two men. That’s what any man or woman who makes believe for a living must be. The one who exists in the normal world … and the one who creates worlds. They are two. Always at least two” (346).1 Yet despite attaining a more powerful physical self-image through his fiction, Beaumont admits that he has primarily continued to write “pulp” because it pays. Following the lead of Alexis Machine, all Beaumont seeks is “my money. I want my money” (The Dark Half 25). Unlike Sheldon, Beaumont seems initially satisfied with his “betrayal” of his so-called art. As Beaumont says: “I enjoyed him [Stark] for a long time … and, hell, the guy was making money. I called it my f—you money. I’m as vulnerable to the siren song of money as anyone else” (28). Although King in the introductory note to Different Seasons specifically denies his own attraction to money as a motive for writing, his continued creation of monetary motives for his authorial characters suggests that perhaps both texts contain a subtle examination (perhaps apologetic) of King’s own attraction to repetitious plotlines, violence and horrific detail as selling points for his talent. Through the plots of both Misery and The Dark Half, King poses the ambiguous question faced by all writers: whether their concern for the symbiotic relationship with their reading public is great enough to overcome their fear of catering to inferior quality in order to attain a measure of reader acceptance and financial success. Consequently, the authorial figures must continually submit themselves to vigorous self-analysis in order to justify their literary existence. Such examinations, while grueling, provide an opportunity to examine the guilt feelings writers occasionally experience from not striving for aesthetic heights but rather being satisfied with the approval of the masses. In terms of their reactions to such self-examination, Sheldon and Beaumont are as different as two sides of a coin. Surprisingly, however, they make the same discoveries. As Sheldon is forced to enter a composing stage of yet another “Misery” novel, he is surprised to discover that “the pride in his work, the worth of the work itself ” (Misery, 26) begins to overcome his objections to writing yet another book in the series. He becomes more liberal about his criteria for success, seeing value in story-telling no matter what its subject matter. Contrarily, although the Stark alter-ego prospers through three more novels, Thad’s threatened exposure as Stark creates a negative reaction about being associated with and writing “pulp.” The publicity may cause sales of his classic work to plummet. To avoid blackmail and certain exposure, Thad decides to create a media 1 Amy Rainey, the wife of the writer/protagonist in “Secret Window” describes a similar reaction to her husband. “He was two men,” she says. “He was himself and he became a character he created (395).

104

Michael J. Meyer

event; he will go public with his Stark identity and kill the pseudonymous entity off, refusing to compose any more Machine novels just as Sheldon has decided to swear off writing anymore about Misery. Although Beaumont lies by saying that Stark is running out of things to say and that he wants to write his own books again, he inwardly realizes with Sheldon that popular fiction does have a market and an audience and that he continues to enjoy both. It is this paradoxical enjoyment and frustration that also plagues Sheldon in_Misery. By creating this dilemma over the critical politics of literary quality, King forces both of his characters to reevaluate whether the “questionable” genres that initiate such pleasure are indeed less valuable than Sheldon’s “good” books and Beaumont’s National Book Award. As King states in Bare Bones: “My deeply held conviction is that story must be paramount because it defines the entire work of fiction. All other considerations are secondary— theme, mood, characterization and language” (53). Yet plot centered compositions tend to be looked down on as works which only have mass appeal and are written to make a fast buck. As a result, in order to pursue the devious devils of fame and fortune, King’s writer/protagonists come to understand that they may have to sacrifice what some label “quality.” For example, Sheldon realizes that Fast Cars will never “sell half as many copies as the least successful Misery book [he] ever wrote” (Misery 41) and that even though it has the traits of a “classic,” it will draw the same negative criticism from so-called literary oracles such as Newsweek. He also comes to realization that there is “real stuff ” and there is “dog crap” (Misery 105). The difference between the two is shown to be the realm of the author himself, and any attempt to categorize “inferior” by genre is dismissed. Instead, as he is forced to compose Misery Returns, Sheldon begins to see that his original speculation that romance fiction is inadequate is tenuous at best. Similarly, Beaumont must evaluate what purpose his writing serves and how it functions in his life. Through his effort to kill off the dark half of himself, he discovers the power of the Stark persona, and, consequently the demise of the pseudonymous character proves more difficult than he had originally imagined. He is forced, like Sheldon, to acknowledge the power of his “inferior” fiction and to admit how reluctantly both he and his readers abandon it. Beaumont also begins to realize that his “serious” novels, The Sudden Dancers, Purple Haze, and the recently completed The Golden Dogs, are to most readers exquisitely stupid and are classified as “boring pieces of shit” (The Dark Half 69).2 Although they have been labeled “masterpieces” by society, Beaumont 2 Morton Rainey, the protagonist of “Secret Window, Secret Garden” has a similar inferiority complex about his work, referring to it as “sort of trash” (279). Rainey also has little respect for his profession, seeing it as a type of elegantly played con game and stating that most writers “were so full of shit they squeaked” (281).

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

105

realizes that they are valuable only in the metaphor of Rumplestiltskin since they contain more hay than gold. King continues to weigh each protagonist’s critical criteria required for literary success by recording their fluctuating opinions about writing as life and writing as business as well as their confusion and distress about the varying reputation and the critical response they receive when they persist in composing for the popular genres. For example, the very fact that Misery, while asserting King’s claim to be a serious writer, glorifies the art of the best seller suggests that King’s stance about literary quality is equivocal since Paul Sheldon and Thad Beaumont represent opposite poles of the literary spectrum: the unrecognized craftsman struggling to achieve and the successful but closeted hack, despairing over his quality. Sheldon is King’s writer as artisté. He is an idealistic picture of a writer as one who sees composing as part of his very existence, who realizes that he would keep writing even if there were no salary involved. As King says in Bare Bones: “Good, bad, or indifferent books, that’s for others to decide; for me, it’s just enough to write (33). Elsewhere, he states: “the act of writing is beyond currency … Money is great stuff to have but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think about money too much. It constipates the whole process (Four Past Midnight xv). Similarly, Sheldon asserts that as long as there is an audience to appreciate his literary creations he will be satisfied. Yet later Sheldon seems to contradict his initial perception that his writing need not receive critical praise in order to be worthwhile. He admits that the increasing dismissal of his work in the critical press as that of a “popular writer”—one step, a small one—above that of hack, had hurt him quite badly. It didn’t jibe with his self-image as a Serious Writer who was only churning out these shitty romances in order to subsidize his Real Work (263).

Sheldon goes on to identify that his personal goal; it is for critics “to see that they were dealing with a young Mailer or Cheever here,” a heavyweight. Yet he also recognizes that in seeking such acknowledgment, his attempts at “serious fiction” have become “steadily more conscious, a sort of a scream” (263) which demands attention. When Sheldon imagines shouting: “Look how good it is!” to critics about his serious writing, he is reflecting his personal frustration that his so-called REAL WORK must be composed self-consciously, seeking to impress the critical establishment. Conversely, his Misery fiction, no matter what its validity to his reading public, is never seen as anything more than fodder for a pulp magazine. As Sheldon resurrects Misery from the dead, however, he is surprised to find joy even as its concepts begin to form in his mind. He recognizes the lifegiving process inherent in his work, and the composing process eventually

106

Michael J. Meyer

awakens him to the fact that writing is a mystical and magical event rather than a stilted craft. By the end of the novel, he is no longer distressed about composing what others have labeled inferior prose. He is sure that he can even be proud of a creation that literary critics will degrade and scorn because he finds it pleasing and his audience is satisfied. He almost echoes King’s words in Bare Bones where he says: “I think as far as any judgment goes, the only thing that matters is what I think of it” (59). The same cannot be said of Thad Beaumont, who symbolizes the other category: writing as business. His literary output reveals little self-struggle about writing as an art. For him, writing has become more exasperation than deep pleasure, more duty than a labor of love.3 Although he has attained a critical acknowledgment of significance, he finds such recognition empty and worthless. Beaumont definitely is portrayed as less motivated by a love of his job than Sheldon is. For example, King reveals that his writing technique involves a journal about “the events in his own life that interested, amused and frightened him,” but that the entries are “mostly passionless, as if a part of him was standing aside and reporting on his life with its own divorced and disinterested eye” (75). This passage is almost a confession that Beaumont as writer no longer has concern for his stories. Instead Thad sees the pseudonymous George Stark as a way to gain instant profit from his craft; Stark is a powerful alchemist who is able to transform “straw into gold. Tigers into butter. Books into best sellers” (230). Slowly but surely, Beaumont comes to accept that it is Stark’s “crazed nonsense that paid the bills Thad’s own work could not pay” (238). He says of his work: Thaddeus Beaumont has written two books hardly anybody has read. The second, published eleven years ago, didn’t even review very well. The infinitesimal advances he got didn’t earn out. … Stark, on the other hand, makes money by the fistful. They’re discreet fistfuls, but the books still earn four times what I make teaching each year (112).

This reaction confirms that Thad’s fictional output has given him adequate evidence that quality does not breed quantity, either of readers or financial rewards. Yet, until Stark’s chilling physical appearance threatens his continued existence, Beaumont seems unmoved by the fact that he uses his craft only as a means to attain financial security. It is obvious from observing King’s protagonists and his personal statements that deciding on valid criteria for quality and determining whether money-making and popular appeal are adequate motives for writing or whether they are detrimental to “success” are critical issues for King’s art. Furthermore,

3 Again Rainey provides a parallel by suggesting that his composing has degenerated into a mere production of feces that will attract a reader (288).

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

107

King’s angst over arbitrary degrees of value apparently arises from his simultaneous recognition that quality is surely not always a prerequisite for elevation to canonicity. The two novels, along with other paradoxical comments made by King himself, lead readers to a similar quandary over whether critical acclaim and recognition by the artistic community are essential in order for a writer to attain true success. For ironically, the two books lead readers to opposite conclusions about writing. First of all, King persuades the sensitive reader to hope against hope that Paul Sheldon will continue to write “misery” fiction and recognize its intrinsic value yet at the same time to yearn for the destruction of the murderous Stark and the redemption of the “virtuous” if “unlikeable” Beaumont in The Dark Half. Thus while readers wish for Beaumont’s success in exorcising his personal demon and returning to his bland form of critically acceptable writing, they paradoxically cheer when Sheldon decides to abandon the potential classic, Fast Cars, and write them another “entertaining” tale. These contradictory reactions suggest that, no matter what criteria are agreed on, any attempt to draw a precise dividing line between artisté and hack is problematic. What then would King have us believe? Although he seems to be advocating all writing as positive, yet King’s manner of presentation in the two works reveals a continuing insecurity about which types are admirable, a reaction that is most evident in the parallel and contrasting imagery that he utilizes. Specifically, writing as art is described as sexual engendering, as an original God-like creation and as a therapeutic drug, while writing as business is shown as a type of prostitution, idolatry, and addiction. Such parallel constructs are designed to help readers to see the potential differences in good writing and bad writing; but ironically King’s presentation also reveals his own ambivalence about accepting such dichotomies. The first image King uses to explore writing as art and writing as business is sexual. For example, Paul Sheldon compares writing to the sexual climax, a life-producing act. The perception, however, is entirely from a masculine point of view. As he envisions the writing process, composing itself becomes autoerotic and the appearance of words is comparable to male ejaculation in the pleasure that it brings to the creator of fiction.4 Such a distinctively male image suggests the writer’s dominance and seminal power over his text. He forcefully creates his child, all the while reveling in the release of his engendering. This imagery helps us to understand Sheldon’s horror as he is forced to destroy the child of his brain, Fast Cars. The pain he feels is as if he has sacrificed his own child. 4

In “Secret Window” Rainey’s craft is depicted as his lover, continuing this sexual analogy of a writer’s relationship to his work. His wife laments, “She was prettier than me, smarter than me, more fun than me. How could I compete? (364)

108

Michael J. Meyer

King also uses the image of male sexual dominance to express the power that a writer wields over his reader. Sheldon makes this discovery as he is forced to create Misery Returns for Annie Wilkes. He realizes that he has “a certain passive hold over her,” (230) a hold that he associates with sexual dominance. Sheldon goes on to parallel his reactions to similar heightened emotional experiences he felt as a reader when a “classic” author created a character or an event that moved him. Citing such literary works as The World According to Garp, Oliver Twist, The Forsyte Saga and The Lord of The Flies, Sheldon recalls the powerful hold produced by writers of classic fiction (231). Such texts have the ability to cause a variety of physical reactions, a radical reader involvement that reminds one of and perhaps even rivals the rewards of sexual arousal. Yet such strong emotional reactions can also be seen from a negative side, an event that occurs when the creative urge is manipulated or distorted. In Misery this distortion is identified sexually by the Scheherazade complex as Sheldon associates himself with the original story teller from The Arabian Nights, the Sultan’s bride, Scheherazade. Just as this exotic concubine uses stories to save her own life, Sheldon occupies a similar role as the writer of Misery Returns, keeping Annie Wilkes interested in his clever plots and so unable to kill him. Such role playing for personal benefit is also characteristic of Beaumont, whose main tie to Stark initially involves a monetary factor and later becomes a gamble for continued existence. Beaumont, like Scheherazade, must keep telling stories to save his life—to prevent his dark half from destroying him. King associates this corruption of a more artistic motivation with prostitution, the selling of sexual favors for a price, and suggests to his writer/protagonists that they may indeed be taking advantage of their audience, plying them with words and ideas that lack true value. If writing popular fiction has indeed become a prostitution of talent in order to make money, the sexual imagery invoked previously may no longer be seen as positive. King is also quick to point out that such prostitution is not restricted to writers of popular fiction. Authors of “classic” prose have also found it advantageous. A second image that appears in both books to distinguish writing as art from writing as business is the portrait of the artist as a powerful God-like creator. In an interview published in Bare Bones, King describes his writing as “sort of like a God-like function in a way, and that’s kind of fun. You get to play God. If you’re writing a book, you point your finger at somebody and say, “You, turkey, you’re coming with me!” and the character drops dead (114). Here the previously mentioned sexual image is enlarged as King and writer/protagonists become deific. On page thirty-three of Misery, Annie Wilkes presents the metaphor by saying: A writer is God to people in the story, he made them up just like GOD made us up and no one can get ahold of God and make him explain, all right, okay … but now God just happens to have a pair of broken legs and God just happens to be in MY house eating MY food … and …

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

109

Later Sheldon repeats the image when he compares himself to a “literary Zeus from whose brow sprang Misery Chastain, darling of the dumpbins and sweetheart of the supermarkets” (52). Beaumont also describes writing as a deific occupation, envisioning himself as having a third eye in his head that he equates with the Godhead since it has both the power to create out of nothing and to disintegrate into nothingness (The Dark Half 157). Yet this deific figure also has a negative side, and its omnipotence is shown to be as transient and ineffective as the power of an idol. For example, King points out that the power an author possesses can also be ironically transferred to his audience or reading public, who then can exert pressure and demands over the creator figure and force him to capitulate. Under these circumstances, the writer becomes a false idol rather than an all-powerful majesty. The reader rather than the writer gains predominance. Envisioning a rebellion similar to that experienced by Uranus and Saturn who were displaced from their thrones in Greek mythology, King presents the demanding reader as a force to be reckoned with. For example in Misery, King’s first sentences suggest the dark side to this deific profession by suggesting a reversal of roles. As Sheldon recalls his first remembrances of Annie Wilkes, he uses the Biblical words of creation to describe the experience, mentioning chaotic darkness and haze followed by light. King then continues with another Biblical parallel as he depicts Annie breathing life into Paul (through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation) just as God did to Adam. Her bad breath, however, is an indication of the corruption of this renewal. In fact, it is such a forced revival that Sheldon associates it with rape. Such forceful and unwilling engendering suggests that the powerful and Godlike author is now under the control of a rabid fan. This distortion of his authorial power leaves Sheldon out of control and reminds the reader of the similar situation faced by Beaumont when he finds himself unable to control his Stark persona. The characters and plots these two authors create are shown be motivated less from within than from without, and their creative process becomes less a positive and more motivated by fear of their reading public. Eventually the writing of King’s protagonists begins to suffer from the dilution of their power over their texts. The strength of their reading public begins to scare them and to suggest that they have degenerated into servants rather than masters. Soon they begin to see the necessity of destroying the idolatrous and false gods they have become. To do that they must pull down their manipulative reading public who have temporarily assumed their power as deity. For instance, Sheldon contemplates whether Annie Wilkes and the other fans of Misery have “scraped away part of his essential self … his subjective reality” (239). Beaumont is in a similar dilemma as he struggles with whether to let the blackmailer, Frederick Clawson, reveal his identity as Stark. Someone else would then be in control of his production, an unacceptable element for a true artist. Although Sheldon confesses that novelists never know exactly how their

110

Michael J. Meyer

books will end, he fears the possibility that his fans are intimidating and influencing his output. Certainly, Stark also has this effect on Beaumont, causing not only lapses in memory but also driving him to the brink of madness and self-destruction. Both Sheldon and Beaumont are determined that they and only they will exercise the right to choose what they compose. They will not be threatened by those who consume their products nor by their own sense of inadequacy. Again King makes it quite clear that the dilemma of the distortion of a writer’s God-like power is not a problem that exists only for writers of popular fiction. As Sheldon composes for Annie, he realizes that just as he must kowtow to her whims while trying to maintain his own individual power over his book’s creativity, so the classic artist must do obeisance to the publishing company that brings his book to life. Thad’s similar recognition that he has been manipulated by his publishers for their own interests occurs when his editors decide to create a media event from his disclosure about his Stark persona in the hope that it will sell more books. Their interest is hardly in Thad’s art but in how his production can make them extra money. These episodes thus posit the probability that a classic artist is also a prisoner who is forced to produce what critics and publishing houses expect just as the popular writer must satisfy the appetite of his idolatrous readers for more of the same. Though their God-like traits make them appear powerful and unapproachable, they also remain vulnerable targets for voracious readers. A third image King uses to express his ambivalent reaction to writing as art and writing as business is that of drugs. For example, in an epigram that begins section three of Misery, he considers composition not only as life-imparting but also as therapeutic. Using a quotation by John Fowles, King expresses a medicinal view of writing: Writing is a sort of drug. It’s the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote … And it seemed vivid … because the imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn’t understand … It seems a sort of magic … And I just can’t live in the present. I would go mad if I did (210).

By using the metaphor of drugs, writing is seen as a curative, a dosage that allows the writer to continue to produce words and story despite his concern about the eventual outcome of his task. King uses Sheldon to illustrate this positive presentation of writing, depicting his composition process as an essential element in overcoming his pain. Another therapeutic image is Sheldon’s depiction of the well of dreams an author has inside him (150). This supply can be relied on for sustenance and healing, and “like a thirsty animal finding a waterhole at dusk” the author drinks from it, “finding a hole in the paper and [falling] through it” (150). Sheldon finds the drug of composition especially valuable in conquering the physical pain he has incurred in the car accident.

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

111

Writing, like the Novril he consumes to ease the pain from his distorted, broken limbs, creates a world of dreamlike speculation that allays his depression and allows him to suppress the reality of fear and discomfort which he is experiencing at Annie’s hands. King again presents the other side of the picture when he depicts the same therapeutic image transformed from beneficial to addictive in The Dark Half. Thus despite Thad’s alleged aversion to the type of writing Stark produces, his attraction to Stark is depicted as similar to alcohol or drug addiction. By having Thad acknowledge his difficulty in stopping the production of this type of writing (drawn by its strong audience appeal and its ability to bring excitement and pleasure), King reveals a dualistic picture of popular fiction. Such writers create works in the genres of horror, crime, or romance to survive their own trauma and to enable readers to obtain a similar escape, but they often find that continued exposure may result in an addictive rather than therapeutic condition. Thus although Sheldon sees writing as a medicine that will help him “kick” the Novril, he recognizes that too heavy a dosage may prove harmful. In a similar manner, King demonstrates that the drug of composition can also affect readers in positive or negative ways. Specifically, Annie Wilkes is shown as dependent upon Misery Chastain’s continued existence, and George Stark requires Alexis Machine to stay alive. Such characters require the fix and are unable to exist without it. Although this addictive behavior may be seen as negative, yet perhaps the characters of Misery and Stark create a simultaneous positive by subduing or temporarily keeping in check Annie’s and Thad’s psychotic tendencies. Thus despite this negative potential of addiction, King is unable to condemn it entirely. In fact, when asked to defend why such seemingly “inferior” and fantastical ideas occupy his time, the author replies that they have the potential to be curative: The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with real ones. We grasp the very elements that are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools—to dismantle themselves … The dream of horror is in itself an outletting and a lancing (Danse Macabre 26).

Thus the drug image remains paradoxical, for drugs, while harmful if used in excess or wrongfully, still have the potential to produce good. It seems obvious from King’s presentation of these images that he is unable to distinguish and establish absolute criteria for good writing and bad writing. He states in Bare Bones: I think if you talk about good writing, one thing about it is that it’s anti-genre. Good writing is not mystery writing. It’s not western writing, horror writing, science fiction writing. Good writing is good writing. It can be appreciated by anyone who picks up the book … It doesn’t matter what you write about, there is really not enough of that good stuff to go around (70).

112

Michael J. Meyer

In Danse Macabre, King further declares: “Writing [need not] be justified on the basis of its usefulness; to simply delight the reader is enough, isn’t it?” (27) On a later page he even argues that, despite an appearance to the contrary, popular fiction and especially horror stories do have redeeming social merit “because of their ability to form liaisons between the real and the unreal” (132). Such fiction is essential to allay fears, to take minds off problems and “to build little rooms where people can go for a while to get away into make believe” (Bare Bones, 59). However, if determining worth appears to be an arbitrary task rather than objective one, the writer/protagonists in both novels are revealed as conscientiously pursuing it. First of all, they are depicted as totally committed to their craft; writing is revealed as their life’s blood, essential to continued existence of both. As has been noted previously, when Sheldon realizes that his life literally depends on finishing the new Misery novel, he comes to the surprising discovery that for a real artist writing is always a necessity; it is a tool for survival. Composition gives life to plot and character and simultaneously provides the composer a way to avoid whatever is upsetting him (Misery 157, 220). The fact that writing is essential to an artist’s survival is also prominent in The Dark Half for when Thad announces that George Stark is dead, the fictional entity literally fights for his existence, his right to compose and appear on the printed page. If he cannot write, he will literally decompose; his supernatural self will destruct. As Stark realizes that if he doesn’t write, he’ll die, Thad simultaneously recognizes the inherent power of written words. They give life, and their absence will end it. Not surprisingly, Thad uses writing to complete his exorcism of Stark. It is through writing that he discovers what will destroy his evil twin. Ultimately, the composing process is depicted as a matter of life and death, both literally in the two plots and symbolically as well. Both writers also show a deep concern for originality and a fear of borrowing the ideas of others.5 Yet, as King examines these contrasting qualities, neither is deemed an essential factor in determining a text’s quality. At first, however, it appears that derivative works will be condemned. Since both the “Misery” and the “Alexis Machine” novels lack a sense of uniqueness, they are dismissed as inferior; the reader agrees that Beaumont and Sheldon should kill off their golden “geese” and move on to other more challenging projects. Since both authors have become accustomed to reworking old ideas in “stereotypical” ways, they are bored with the repetition, feeling as if they are merely retelling the same story with the same characters. Only the details have been 5 This is also a major theme in “Secret Window” since the plot line revolves around the issue of plagiarism and depicts writer Mort Rainey’s descent into chaotic fear and madness as he contemplates stealing another author’s story and publishing it under his own name.

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

113

modified somewhat in order to please the reader. Yet, surprisingly, they find that such familiarity does not breed contempt among the public; rather it engenders ease of association, a sense of belonging. King identifies Annie Wilkes as the essential force who helps Sheldon evaluate himself and redefine originality and creativity. Her purity as a reader is portrayed with admirable innocence of spirit since she is transported by “misery” fiction. To her, Misery’s life is original and compelling. Conversely, her own pathetic life ironically seems fictionalized and repetitive. As Annie forces Sheldon to begin Misery Returns, he comes to a new understanding of his creative process. He begins to value his work as an expression of his innate talent to move his readers, to transport them to new and fantastic worlds that seem real and tangible. Thus Misery exalts the ineffability of creativity rather than the earthbound contrivances employed by authors. According to Annie, Sheldon’s fiction is admirable because it incorporates “a wonderful story” (197), not for any critically praiseworthy traits such as erudite vocabulary, complex thematics, or a unique approach to a previously unexamined topic. A similar observation might be made about the avid readers of the Stark novels; they are not asking Beaumont for anything but a repeat performance of a good tale. Yet borrowing and repetition have continuously been signals of literary failure, and writers of popular fiction have frequently been accused of these faults. King himself admits his own fear of rehashing ideas or of being accused of having little originality. In an interview with Christopher Evans, he says, “One thing I don’t want to do is write the same book over and over again. I’m very leery of that” (Bare Bones, 91). Yet a writer’s tendency toward derivativeness and repetition is not revealed to be totally negative. King helps his readers to see that authors of classic novels (Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner) have received high praise for their creativity and originality yet by right of privilege they also enjoy exemption from the critical injunction against borrowing and being repetitive. As King points out in Bare Bones: “if you’re taken seriously as someone whose practicing literature, you’re allowed to return to what you’ve done before; you’re amplifying previous themes.” The repeated productions of popular artists, however, result in severe criticism as evidence of lack of talent; “the idea is that your head is so empty, it’s produced an echo” (96).

In fact, King notes that writers of popular fiction have been labeled by critics as content to rework well-worn material; therefore they rarely contain “creations that do not suggest earlier work in the genre and that sometimes are borrowed outright (47). With derivativeness and originality so hopelessly entertwined, King goes on to examines verisimilitude as a distinguishing criterion for determining

114

Michael J. Meyer

high quality. He begins by identifying plausibility in the midst of a fictional construct as the element that makes writing appealing. “The reader should be able to get through the barrier of print and into the story without too much effort” (Bare Bones 75). According to Clive Barker, it is precisely this very element that accounts for King’s own popularity. “He describes the confrontation between the real and fantastic elements so believably that the reader’s rational sensibilities are seldom, if ever, outraged” (Kingdom of Fear 61). But King’s writer/protagonists are also forced to face head-on the question of relative value of writerly skills which “entertain” rather than “dissect,” “elucidate,” or “inform.” If only attaining verisimilitude is important, works which do the former have been discriminated against and works that do the latter have become the norm by which “quality” is determined. Both novels seem to question the validity of requiring writing as art not only to possess believability but also a “serious” message. On the other hand, writing as business is generously allowed to be less plausible and may contain both events and characters that are improbable in a “real” world. Such writers are stereotyped as craftsmen who are geared more at delight and escape than in confronting serious problems in society. Yet is this really so? It is obvious that both Sheldon and Beaumont worry about their characters’ believability, especially their association with the far-fetched and the supernatural. Can Misery actually be transported to a “melodramatic” African setting without seeming fake, and is Machine’s chilling violence merely titillating rather than revelatory for purposes of social change? King seems to be asking: Are Misery and Machine real in any sense of the word? Or does the fact that their creators have stretched the truth and bent their characters by exposing them to unusual and abnormal events make them merely implausible fakes and stereotypes, characters that a reader would expect in “pulp” fiction and which result in devaluation of their worth? As a matter of comparison, King assesses the work of Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins in this vein, condemning the chessboard feeling “where people seem cardboard and you can almost see the hand of the writer moving from place to place” (Bare Bones 78). Both of King’s writer/protagonists fear such negative assessments about their own work based on their failure to be believable. For example, Sheldon similarly wonders whether his plan for the characters in Misery Returns does not cross into territory that lucid readers would find questionable. Especially pondered is whether the Constant Reader would swallow “two unrelated women in neighboring townships being buried alive six months apart as a result of bee-stings” (Misery 139). Similarly, on page 122 of The Dark Half, Beaumont questions the language of his characters as inconceivable outside of a book, and, in Chapter Thirteen, Pt. 2, he is bemused by the fact that individuals in books, at least in Stark’s

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

115

books, never “take pauses, never stop to wonder something nonsensical … [or] take time out to move their bowels … the world would be a more efficient place if everyone came out of a pop novel [because] people in pop novels always manage to keep their thoughts on track as they move smoothly from one chapter to the next” (144–145). Beaumont also acknowledges his vulnerability to such charges by admitting that he is “really quite lazy when it comes to that end of the job” [accuracy and believability] and that “it’s so much easier to sit there in front of the typewriter and make up lies” (97). This comment again suggests the possibility that popular writing is only a clever crafting of falsehoods that tricks its readers and ultimately disintegrates into repetitious prose, devoid of truthfulness. As he evaluates the criterion of verisimilitude, King also has his writer protagonists recognize that at times reality itself seems unreal. For example, when King has Sheldon discover Annie’s scrapbook of newspaper clippings delineating her heinous crimes (including murders and mercy killings), the reader suddenly must confront the fact that at times reality is even more improbable than fiction. What appears in the newspaper, though true, seems inordinately strange and unreal to the untrained eye. In contrast, a fictional construct may be interpreted literally by readers. King points out the amazing fact that fictional characters and even pseudonymous authors have become so real to the reading public that they insist that such entities actually exist. They are even mourned for or celebrated in the present and continue to be cherished in memory despite the fact that they never physically lived. Moreover, King illustrates that even classic literature demonstrates situations that are unbelievable. Through Sheldon’s recollection of the deus ex machina devices used by the ancient Greek tragedians, King demonstrates that plays of “quality” contained as many impossibilities as do present day pulp novels. In fact, perhaps the absence of verisimilitude and relevance may account for the unpopularity of Beaumont’s two critical successes and for Sheldon’s relatively quick acceptance that an effort to save the manuscript of his classic, Fast Cars, is not worth undergoing severe pain (Misery 49). If these classics lack truthfulness and what Annie Wilkes labels “nobility,” they are far more deserving of Sheldon’s label of “dog-crap” and the fact that are critically acclaimed will not assure either an audience or a readership. Instead they are shown to appeal only to a fragmented minority and to elicit readers who appreciate the technical craftsmanship they represent rather than their depiction of truth. If this is so, then King is subtly suggesting that literary critics who fail to condemn classic fiction because it lacks plausibility have made precipitous judgments. All quality writing, irrespective of genre, must possess genuineness of some type. Yet the ephemeral nature of verisimilitude is confirmed by the fact that readers of Misery, like Annie, often find themselves just as fascinated by the

116

Michael J. Meyer

work within the work (Misery Returns) as they are with King’s own “realistic” creation. Primarily, they are delighted by impossibilities being turned into possibilities, as the writer persuades them to accept the improbable. As a final examination of the necessity for verisimilitude in all types of fiction, King has Sheldon describe the experience of selecting details to incorporate into a text by employing the metaphor of a childhood game he played at day-camp called “Can You?”. Using this game as an illustration allows Sheldon to explain how writers decide what is real and what is merely fabricated. In the game of Can You?, part of a story is told by the leader, and the participants are asked to finish it. Then the rest of the group is asked to vote whether the addition to the original tale succeeded or not. Did the individual attain probability or did he fail to convince? (Misery 107–109) King’s point is that an inspiration or a believable story concept is essential for all fiction, not only for classic works. If this story concept does not possess probability, no matter what its significance or genre, the writing will fail. The tricks and illusions of writing will become obvious, and the work will fall apart. When Thad begins a parallel self-examination of his plausibility, the act is again forced rather than voluntary, but both writers discover similar insights: their “serious” work is less real than their “hack” compositions. For example, after Thad’s assessment is complete, he acknowledges that his Stark novels seem real as life when compared to his more “recognized and acceptable” work. In fact, Stark becomes so real that he has the power to take on human flesh and to resurrect himself in order to continue his writing career as Thad’s Dark Half. Misery identifies this fantastic quality of “reality” in yet another light when King asserts through Sheldon that “Art consists of the persistence of memory” (219) and that the true artist is able to remember every detail and formulate a story that accounts for them. This fictional reality assumes a life of its own and when successful continues to move its readers with or without a so-called “message.” Similarly, in Danse Macabre, King defines verisimilitude in fiction as “the truth within the lie; and morality is telling the truth as you know it” (375). The lasting quality of a tale in its readers’ thoughts and their appreciation of its accuracy should determine a work’s ultimate value not whether the topic is aesthetically appealing or realistically possible. As King struggles to come to terms with what he is and to define what he wishes to become, he finds it helpful to examine the power and complexity of human experimentation with words, sentences and paragraphs. His examination of the various genres open to writers indicates he is still unsure of his position. In Bare Bones, King admits that: In the time since Carrie was published, I’ve written two mainstream novels and haven’t published either one. I put them away because I’m not sure how they’ll be taken. I suppose it’s more than a business decision. I like them. I mean shit. I wrote

Critical Politics of Literary Quality

117

them, so I must like them. One of the things that’s going to happen is someday I’m going to wake and just don’t want to write about horror anymore … Then I’ll go down the tubes and nobody will ever hear of me again (119).

But no matter what road King decides to take, his novels about the writing profession deserve further analysis by critics because they deal with how to explain the inexplicable, how the human imagination transforms the fantastic into the real, how it converts auto-biography into fiction and how it merges fiction with fact to create a new reality that ironically is not real at all.

This page intentionally left blank

WHOSE STORY IS IT?: SAMUEL BECKETT’S MALONE DIES AND THE VOICE OF SELF-INVENTION MARY CATANZARO

Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies probes the relationship between space, objects, and the act of writing as the vehicle through which the writer, Beckett, re-invents himself. In Malone Dies—the second volume of his trilogy bound by Molloy and The Unnamable—Beckett puts his pencil in the hands of the principle character, Malone, and then allows the fictional personality to write the story of his own life. Through myriad metaphors, self-deprecatory admonishments, ironic confessions, sexual punning and admissions of self-doubt, Beckett reroutes his character’s story as a parallel to his own life. Malone Dies opens a window through which the reader witnesses wistful glimpses into Beckett’s own painful growth and doubts as he matured into success. Like a theatrical performance, the novel functions as an act of transfer, a way for him to transmit his sense of identity and memory. Hence, by “performing” his character Malone, the shy and retiring Beckett discovers a way to acquaint himself with his readers. This essay examines the way that Beckett’s personal feelings interface with those of his character, all the while playing the role of a “character” himself in his novel.

In Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, the relationship between writing, objects, and space are the principle vehicles of self-invention through which Beckett revisits his own feelings of inadequacy as a writer and his fear of failure, emotions that menaced him his entire life. Through the musings of his main character, the self-styled writer Malone, Beckett inserts himself as a “character” in his own drama, performing the role of the dying Malone. Moreover, Malone’s exercise book and pencil are cherished fetish objects, ends in themselves (just as they were for Beckett himself), and they become personified as characters in their own right. At the behest of his fictional character, Beckett lets Malone do the writing about himself. But this is no autobiography, since Beckett starts from scratch in order to invent himself in his work. In this way, Beckett can enjoy the writer’s illusion that life can be rewritten, reiterating his personal belief that life is like a text that the writer can endlessly correct. Beckett also extends physical

120

Mary Catanzaro

space by beginning with Malone confined in a bed and yet is able to escape it by writing stories of others who exist in an imagined other world. As death approaches, Malone announces, “While waiting, I shall tell myself stories” 1 (MD 180). And then he actually writes them, thus justifying the value he places on his stub of a pencil and the frayed exercise book, and explaining the ensuing panic when he temporarily misplaces either or both of them. In addition, when Malone’s character, Macmann, for instance, talks about being in a certain place and speaking in a particular way, it is Beckett’s voice, rather than Malone’s, that we hear, off-stage and directing the show. In this way, Beckett turns Malone’s tale into a dramatic experience in which he directs Malone to rehearse his “scripts.” Taking cues from Beckett, Malone loses himself completely in his stories as he weaves in and out of the Sapo, Macmann, and Moll tales, before ending finally with his death (or rather his disappearance) in the final episode. Like many writers, the force of his stories, whose endings he cannot see even as he is telling them, carries Malone away. He demonstrates the fact that writers hear many voices in their heads, that there are the voices of the characters and “voice-over” in the narration, and that sometimes even the setting in time and place seems to speak in a low distinctive murmur. Malone is no exception to this phenomenon. Many critics, notably James Acheson, have likened Beckett to Malone, and indeed there are many biographical similarities that one could point to as evidence.2 In addition to those similarities, a more persuasive possibility is that Beckett the writer invents himself in this work. Malone states, “And yet I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise-book as about him. It is because it is no longer I, … but another whose life is just beginning” (MD 207–8). As the loved object of Malone’s genius, his tales turn toward a kind of second-degree biography of his own creator, Samuel Beckett. While others, such as J. D. O’Hara, have seen a kind of “creator-creature” 3 in Macmann, as the name suggests, it is through Macmann that the real, true Samuel Beckett 1 All quotations from Malone Dies are from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1965). Page numbers are given in the text preceded by the abbreviation MD. 2 See James Acheson’s Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). I am grateful for the insights he offers in Chapter 6 (116–132), where he devotes considerable space analyzing the emotional, physical and artistic similarities between Malone and Beckett. Acheson writes, “So close is the resemblance between Malone and Beckett that at times it is difficult to distinguish between their two voices—as, for example, when Malone says that his death will mean the end of earlier Beckett characters” (116). 3 J. D. O’Hara elaborates fully on the notion of the creator-creature duality in “About Structure in Malone Dies,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, ed. J. D. O’Hara (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentiss Hall, Inc., 1970), 62–70.

Whose Story Is It?

121

emerges. As a consequence, another unifying motif in Malone Dies is the voice speaking in counterpoint to the written text. A binary principle thus organizes the novel, calibrating the voice in opposition to the written material. One of several ways Beckett accomplishes this counterpoint is by underpinning the voice beneath the writing rather than behind the narrative voice. What factors are taken into account when Malone puts his pencil to paper? In the Macmann tale, we hear of a figure obsessed with guilt and God who, because of His absence, offers no forgiveness. Although God may be merely temporarily out of town, His absence makes the torment all the more poignant for Macmann, and for Beckett as well, who throughout his own life was obsessed with feelings of sin and punishment. Readers witness these emotions when Macmann is soaked in a rainstorm. “The idea of punishment came to his mind … And without knowing exactly what his sin was he felt full well that living was not a sufficient atonement for it or that this atonement was in itself a sin, calling for more atonement, and so on …” (MD 239). Beckett’s art grew out of a compulsively measured, brutal honesty tinged with feelings of having been deprived the common optimism accorded to others. Since Malone leaves no stone unturned in his ruthless moral self-examination in depicting the stoicism with which his quasi-alter ego Macmann accepts the cards that fate deals him, the reader perceives that Malone’s spiritual hope is rigorously matched with Beckett’s despair. But this is despair so thoroughly infused with hilarity that it reverts to hope again. Malone’s voice parodies itself with wry humor that plays also on other theological questions. Before he even begins his stories, he humorously ponders death and the hereafter: “The truth is, if I did not feel myself dying, I could well believe myself dead, expiating my sins, or in one of heaven’s mansions” (MD 183). Here, the voice seems to have a life of its own. Sometimes witty, sometimes kinetic and “tangible” in its rhythmic pulse, the voice most often concerns itself at a deeper level with the problems of expression, communication, and self-realization. There is no doubt that a crucial question regarding the voice arises very quickly in the novel. When the person writing the story (Beckett) has his character (Malone) say to avoid boredom and to pass the time, “I will tell myself stories,” it becomes obvious that the various axes of guilt, despair, perseverance and acquiescence intersect and devolve to the author himself. Because all stories are at bottom really about their authors, the question remains that when a character in one’s story tells a story, who and what is that story about? In Malone Dies, it is sheer performance. Performance, for Beckett, functions as a vital act of transfer, a way for him to transmit his sense of identity and memory through reiterated, or “twice-behaved” behavior, as Richard Schechner has called it.4 4 Cited in Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 36.

122

Mary Catanzaro

Hence, by “performing” his character Malone, the shy and retiring Beckett finds a way to acquaint himself with his readers. “Not that I wish to draw attention to myself ” (MD 253), the wily Malone forewarns. Those close to Beckett, especially his biographer, James Knowlson, knew that he despised easy hope.5 Nevertheless, this most reticent of writers personifies hope through his characters’ characters. But if the resonant part of Malone’s message in Macmann is that the spirit will prevail, the higher truth is that man will also succumb. In his eagerness to embrace the last vestiges of a central truth he was addressing, Beckett chooses a somewhat unsavory character, Malone, to liven things up. He is the sort of anti-hero that anyone else would reject because of his being a morally ambiguous subject. While relying on the persona of another to speak for him, Beckett divulges his own acute sense of worthlessness (what he called “the sin of having been born,” 6) by employing an ironically expansive literary style in Malone Dies. Despite the differences in the writing style and the settings in the various tales in Malone Dies, each contains familiar themes that run through all Beckett’s work. One of the most common themes is the journey. As with any journey there is always the possibility of its failure. Malone spares Beckett the embarrassment of speaking for himself when he says, “What fine things, what momentous things, I am going to miss through fear, fear of falling back into the old error, fear of not finishing in time, fear of revelling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate” (MD 197). As may befit stories written in an environment of roads, open spaces, traveling, where secrets are buried everywhere, the protagonist Malone proves to be Beckett himself searching for the truth about his past. “I used not to know where I was going, but I knew I would arrive, I knew there would be an end to the long blind road. What half-truths, my God. No matter” (MD 182), Malone utters. While Malone pursues his story-telling quest largely in the solitary, male fashion, the tale of Macmann’s interactions with his female caretaker, Moll, in the nursing facility represents Beckett’s understanding of himself in the relational style that he himself always associated with women: attraction and repulsion. Macmann composes a few rhymes for Moll, feeling pleased that they were “all remarkable for their exaltation of love regarded as a kind of lethal

5 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). It is well known that Beckett always felt uncomfortable with fame. Knowlson plays ironically on Beckett’s emotions in choosing the title for his biography. Hereafter cited in the text as Damned. 6 Beckett first expressed the idea of sin in his essay Proust (New York: Grove, 1931). He writes, “The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, … the sin of having been born” (Proust 49). He translates this line from Calderon’s La Vida es Sueno: “The greatest crime [or sin] of man/Is that he ever was born” (I:ii:111–12), qtd. in Acheson, 227.

Whose Story Is It?

123

glue” (MD 262, my emphasis). In each case, Beckett ponders what lies dormant not only in Malone’s active sexual imaginings, but also those that lie buried deep within him. Given the fact that Beckett was the product of a long ancestry of severity in relationships, beginning first in his relations with his mother,7 it is no surprise that he examines the sources of his own dark history. For example, whenever Malone thinks about sexual failure (“perhaps it is the knowledge of impotence that emboldens me” [MD 218]), he passes that same impotence on to his character Macmann. Macmann can barely manage sexual intercourse with his caretaker, “given his age and scant experience of carnal love” (MD 260). In these scenes, the reader can observe the black-humored underside of Beckett’s own anxiety. Malone also stands in for Beckett’s fear of literary failure when he comments, “But I feel at last that the sands are running out …” (MD 183). Of course, writers are often isolated, but both Beckett and Malone are more than usually withdrawn and ironically morose, as they soldier on with their own tales. Eventually, a moral panic ensues, their minds imprisoned in a sort of mental hospital of their own imagining. It could be argued that when Malone uses the third person “he” or “him,” as opposed to his initial “I” and “me” earlier in the novel, Beckett removes himself from himself as he goes from the first person to the impersonal third person. Beckett disappears into the text in order to reveal himself in another kind of theatrical performance. In this regard, Peggy Phelan’s notion of performativity offers a significant commentary as Malone Dies unfolds. Phelan limits the life of performance to the present: “Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity … becomes itself through disappearance.” 8 This idea is evident when Malone plunges deeper into his own psychic disappearance: “Of myself I could never tell, any more than live or tell of others. How could I have, who never tried? To show myself now, on the point of vanishing, at the same time as the stranger, and, by the same grace, that would be no ordinary last straw” (MD 195), he muses. Like Beckett, he seems to want to avoid revealing too much about himself. Beckett’s depression was not merely literary. There were genetic, social, and familial factors at work, arising particularly in his uneasy relations with his mother. Beckett’s biographer, James Knowlson, reveals that it wasn’t until 7

See Knowlson (esp. 36–47) for an in-depth account of Beckett’s relationship with his parents, especially his mother. Knowlson remarks early on in his biography that “May Beckett aimed to mold her children to her own design. But she did not always succeed, particularly with her younger son … Sam seems to have been an anxiety with her. All his life. A naughty boy.” (Damned 40). 8 See also Anthony Uhlmann’s “To Have Done with Judgment: Beckett and Deleuze,” SubStance 81: 25.3 (1996): 110–131. He writes of Malone’s becoming through disappearance: “But Malone suggests he cannot grasp what might constitute this [self], ‘For I have never seen any sign of any, inside me or outside me’ ” (121).

124

Mary Catanzaro

Beckett was almost thirty that he discovered one of the sources of a near nervous breakdown “lay in the intensity of his mother’s attachment to him and his powerful love-hate bond with her.” 9 When he left Ireland after an argument with his mother, Beckett realized that it was she, not Ireland he was fleeing. To his friend, Tom MacGreevy, Beckett confessed, “I am what her savage loving has made me” (Damned 252). Living up to her expectations was more than burden enough for him. Therefore, the adult Beckett writes through Malone to address the issue without his having to speak about it directly. Malone writes of Macmann’s worry “if it was really necessary to be guilty in order to be punished but for the memory, more and more galling, of his having consented to live in his mother, then to leave her” (MD 239–40). Malone himself explores the maternal love-hate issue for Beckett when he speaks of the physically repellent but mentally alluring Moll in affectionate terms. “But it is more convenient to suppose that when I came in for the room I came in for her too. All I can see of her now is the gaunt hand and part of the sleeve” (MD 185). More disturbing than Moll’s enigmatically loving hands as she tends Macmann, Beckett allows himself to feel the chilly hands of his elegant, aristocratic mother reaching for him, and eventually realizes that those hands resemble his own. Then too, the strangely erotic, clumsy love affair between Moll and Macmann gives Beckett an opening to confess his own unpreparedness to live with his female characters quite so intimately and to ponder the darker side of love via his proxy Malone. Beckett was always a prisoner with his own private eye when it came to sex. Conveniently, Malone’s text puts Beckett’s discomfort with male-female sexual relations at a safe distance. But as products of his imagination, those fictional characters are Beckett, and how could they not intrude into his own consciousness? Malone writes: “Example. One day, just as Macmann was getting used to being loved, though without as yet responding as he was subsequently to do, he thrust Moll’s face away from his own on the pretext of examining her ear-rings” (MD 263). It took Beckett many years to climb out of the pit of wrestling with an uneasy intimacy with women. In coming to know Beckett over many years, Knowlson concluded that his “feelings of love for his mother and remorse at having, as he saw it, let her down so frequently, struck me as still intense, almost volcanic” (Damned 589). Malone sarcastically remarks, “My mother? Perhaps it is just another story, told me by some one who found it funny” (MD 268). Beckett suffered similar guilt and remorse about his remarkable wife, Suzanne, who died some months earlier than he.10 Although Beckett’s 9

Qtd. in O’Hara, 14. After his wife’s death, Beckett confessed in a conversation with Knowlson the many ambivalent feelings he felt towards her during their long relationship: “So much regret, so much regret.” (Damned 586). 10

Whose Story Is It?

125

oeuvré dispels the notion that he was a philosophical loner, it shows him as a man whose troubles shaped his writing. What seems to have helped him most was to persevere, torturous as that sometimes seemed, and to see it through to Malone’s acquiescence and final release was perhaps one of Beckett’s finest victories. Isn’t all writing intended for catharsis? Beckett came to appreciate what women can bring to men. He didn’t just imagine his characters’ travails; he lived them, and then told the tale. Beckett’s writing brings to mind H. L. Mencken’s famous dictum on the curative power of writing: “There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out.” 11 Malone’s discovery of previously unexplored mental spaces can be also likened to E. H. Gombrich’s description of interior mental explorations of the psyche. He calls these introspective plumbings “inscapes,” morphologies of the psyche, maps of the mind, if you will.12 This introspection also can be described as an actual visualizing of the psyche, which means not just looking at one thing at one point in time and space, but also as encompassing the past, present, and future, all mixed into one. Consequently, when the writer discusses a character that speaks for his invented character, another performance takes place. Certainly, writing stories can awaken energies in an author that otherwise might manifest themselves as violent or dangerous behavior. Beckett needed this kind of unfettered imagination at critical moments in his life. The visual and aural texture of Macmann’s so-called “baptismal” awakening into guilt in the rainstorm provides a subliminal commentary on Beckett’s aforementioned personal sense of unworthiness. Like a painted cinematography, all the emotions that Beckett repressed come to life in the rain episode. Malone’s harsh critique of his writing and humorous self-abasement plays beneath every scene, puts melody in the sexual melodrama between Moll and Macmann, and reaches moments of operatic intensity at those moments when he himself gets closer to admitting that he might possibly have been happy. “The only thing you must never speak of is your happiness … Better even not to think of it” (MD 270), Malone later admonishes himself. That type of tender rebuke might seem disproportionate to his character critiques, but that is the source of this tale’s troubling beauty. It suggests that Malone’s façade of so-called normalcy—represented by the mundane routines in the nursing facility—reveals

11 Qtd. in Joan Acocella, “On the Contrary: A New Look at the Work of H. L. Mencken,” The New Yorker (9 December, 2002), 133. Beckett shares Mencken’s sentiments, as can be seen in the last line of The Unnamable: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” (Three Novels 414). 12 E. H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art. (New York: Phaidon, 2002) 56. See also his “Expression and Communication,” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Eds. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 171–176.

126

Mary Catanzaro

an undercurrent of both a ruthless, personal machinery devoted to the scoffing at physical love as well as the admission of his hidden incendiary passions. Beckett is an inverted comic in this novel: a comedian’s pain is buried at the base of Malone’s jokes, but Beckett’s jokes are buried at the base of his pain. “Whose pain is whose?” readers might ask. “Nothing is funnier,” Beckett once told the critic Richard Rosen, “than unhappiness.” 13 This remark reveals a scientist of real anguish. It is also particularly evident when Malone comments on Macmann’s desires: For when one has within reach the one and only love requited of a life so monstrously prolonged, it is natural one should wish to profit by it, before it is too late, and refuse to be deterred by feelings of squeamishness excusable in the fainthearted, but which true love disdains. (MD 265)

Of course, this is hardly a new idea: in Beckett’s own youth and young adulthood the open discussion of sexual matters were, indeed, part of the era’s understanding of what constituted taboo subjects. As was the case with so many twentieth century postwar cultures, the subtle complexity of professional success or failure also fueled Beckett’s own subversive knack for tucking selfcriticism and psychological insight into stories governed by the constraints of repression, a repression that can be appreciated only retrospectively. The fluid, incandescent style of Macmann’s poem unifies art and sensation, intellect and feeling, physical appeal and aesthetic refinement. Macmann feels no bashfulness about giving the reader a glimpse into his sexual yearnings. “Example,” he writes: Hairy Mac and Sucky Molly In the ending days and nights Of unending melancholy Love it is at last unites” (MD 262).

After Macmann is told of Moll’s death, his own follows shortly thereafter. In an ironic foreshadowing of biographical fate, Beckett himself lived only a month or so after the death of his wife Suzanne, nearly thirty-five years after writing Malone Dies. The Moll poem marks the apogee of Beckett’s collaboration with his deeper feelings through his agent Malone. Malone recounts the stress of actual writing with a musical style when he says, “I wept up to a great age, never having really evolved in the fields of affection and passion, in spite of my experiences” (MD 247–8). When Malone describes his stick as one “that I used 13

Richard Rosen, “When It Hurts to Laugh,” quoted in rev. of Texts For Nothing, performed at the Susan Stein Shiva Theater, dir. Joseph Chaikin, November 1, 1992. The New York Times, Arts and Leisure (1 November, 1992), 22.

Whose Story Is It?

127

to rub myself against it saying, It’s a little woman” (MD 247), are readers hearing Beckett’s views about the natural tensions that repel and attract males and females? Does Malone’s remark represent for Beckett what it feels like to collaborate with someone who is closer than a wife, without the burdens attendant on married life? The 50-year old Beckett, in a creative crisis, felt the pain of a dazzling coexistence of failure with success. The way Malone’s stories interface with Beckett’s feelings speaks for what is inside every human heart. Writers often have a sense of dislocation and alienation and uneasiness with themselves; certainly Beckett did. Most individuals get the sense that their secrets, if made public, would be rejected. They cover up who they really are to be acceptable. An emotion in the heart of every creative person is the sense of being strange. As performers, writers realize that they make lives out of pretending, making things up, and inhabiting other people’s lives. “My concern is not with me, but with another, far beneath me and whom I try to envy …” (MD 195), Malone announces. Malone ties his “scripts” together by building parallels between himself and Macmann. In these parallels, Malone clearly longs to experience the allconsuming inner passion that Macmann feels about divine alienation from grace, allowing him to feel a kinship with Beckett on those fronts. In this way, Beckett makes emotional paralysis a central theme in Malone’s story line. To create symmetry, Beckett gives the hyper-conscious Malone his own counterpoint in the form of ruthless self-doubt: “My stories are all in vain, deep down I never doubted,” concluding finally that they are “in the long run, a joke” (MD 234). The constant shifting of the voice in this case is particularly significant because it tells us there is no reality or truth; there is only role playing behind what Malone says. Dina Sherzer notes that the voice in Beckett’s trilogy traces what Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman have elaborated in their theoretical works; namely, “that language and communication are constructions. What is said is not reality or truth, but a rendering of experience through language, through frames.” 14 In Malone Dies, origin and causality are not traced through time but are constantly present in the immediate formation of memory and “fictionalizing.” Considering how “autobiographical” Malone Dies appears to be, some readers may surely ask, was Beckett really as self-conscious, afraid to fail, and as self-deprecatory as Malone confesses himself to be? An implicit answer to this question comes from a cursory comparison of Malone as Beckett’s alter

14

Dina Sherzer, “Samuel Beckett, Linguist and Poetician: A View from The Unnamable,” SubStance 56:XVII, Number 2 (1988), 89. Hereafter cited in the text as Sherzer.

128

Mary Catanzaro

ego, and vice versa. Just like Beckett, Malone is a sly, though charming character who, in darkly amusing utterances, berates himself for being incapable in his writing: “This is awful;” “What tedium;” “no, I can’t do it;” “how stupid I am” (MD 191,187, 196, 238). Suffice it to say that it is rather tempting to think of Malone Dies as a transparent window on its creator’s own life. And the internally allusive, double-braided narratives of Malone and Macmann evoke Beckett’s other works with titles suggestive of failure and personal apprehension, such as Krapp’s Last Tape (1956)—written the same year as Malone Dies and Stories and Texts for Nothing (1958). Other questions remain: What can be said of the role of the writer when he “performs” a character in order to recreate himself in his story? When is an adaptation as fundamental an imaginative function as the performer who tells the storytelling itself? It is said that everyone has at least one good story, and Malone’s adaptation of Beckett rather than vice versa is a different kind of creation because the original—Beckett’s life—had to be built from scratch. There is, however, an advantage of Beckett’s giving a pencil to a character and then inviting the character to create the writer’s life. Without question, it is almost easier to invent a whole new story, but aren’t all stories always about the writer? Beckett skeptically probes and exposes human weaknesses and truths, particularly his own longing for love and physical intimacy with another. His discussion of traditionally taboo subjects in a mode of hilarity through the pencil of another is analogous to Joe Roach’s comment on communication and performance: Performance genealogies draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in the silences between them), and imaginary movements dreamed in minds not prior to language but constitutive of it.” 15

Although Malone Dies, in its dreamlike way, seems to mimic the movements of a film camera, it also creates effects that would be impossible on celluloid: the evocation of Beckett by Malone, and vice versa, Beckett evoking Malone, through their intimations of each other by implicit comparisons with writing and its instrument the pencil. Rather than an individual, Beckett 15 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), 26. See also Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme: A New Theory on How We Think (New York: The Free Press, 2002) and Susan Blackmore, “The Power of Memes” Scientific American (Oct. 2000) 64–73 for recent contributions on the history of human behavior and mnemonic reserves. Blackmore explores reiterated human behavior through memes, which she defines “are stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions, and ways of doing things that we copy from person to person by imitation” (65).

Whose Story Is It?

129

constructs himself as a kind of anonymous male presence, as a fantasy. More importantly in this novel, the pencil occupies a key position as a kind of hinge between the two orders of voice and text and between Malone and Beckett. It is the point of their reciprocal articulation that not only dramatizes the conflicts of each individual but also serves as the transition from one to the other. For the pencil is a binary instrument and its mark—on paper—is there or it is not. The pencil, furthermore, is an analog tool, producing infinite shades of emphasis between presence and absence, black and white. It is the medium of notes, dictation, on-site corrections. Malone’s love of his pencil reflects Beckett’s own, perhaps unconscious, obsession with shading, with the oppositional pulls of absence and presence, of an inscription that is a hesitant, never-for-sure mark. And because of this, Beckett’s voice makes itself visible, or almost so. In any case, the voice is so transparent that it is hardly noticeable as it flows beneath the text, insistently marking a secondary writing, that of exegesis and commentary. Not only is this voice the critical interpretation of itself, it is also the means by which the discourse is made visible. Commentary is the vehicle that allows Malone and Beckett come to know each other, and as exegetes, they seek out the other through a writing that parses the voice. In this way the novel connects audibility and visibility. Bitingly ironic and comically tragic, Malone Dies oscillates between meaning and meaninglessness in communication. The novel can be seen as organized textually as an interaction between two interlocutors, whereby Beckett uses structural devices, as Dina Sherzer notes, that actualize components of Roman Jakobson’s model of communication, the text being anchored as a verbal exchange between a sender/addresser and receiver/addressee. Sherzer explains: The sender is someone who sometimes calls himself a narrator, sometimes a speaker, sometimes a reciter, and sometimes a voice … The voice addresses himself to an anonymous receiver/addressee whose existence is concretized within the text by phatic utterances, but who remains undecidable and silent. (Sherzer 89)

What this means is that a written sign is proffered in the absence of a receiver. At the moment when one is writing, the receiver may be absent from one’s field of present perception. What holds for the receiver holds also for the sender. This image implies the existence of another image: what the voice conveys corresponds to an idea known in linguistics as free indirect discourse. It consists of an enunciation taken within an utterance, which itself depends on another enunciation. For example, when Malone sarcastically enjoins himself, “but not a word and on with the losing game” (MD 234), the problem is not a combination of two fully constituted subjects of enunciation, one a reporter, the other a reported. It is rather an assemblage of enunciation, carrying out two inseparable acts of subjectivation simultaneously. In this case, one constitutes

130

Mary Catanzaro

a character in the first person, Malone (“in spite of my stories I continue” [MD 235]), and another already present on the scene, Beckett (“I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself ” [MD 189]). But the two are really one and the same. By establishing an atmosphere of shared feelings and intuitions rather than communicating literal ideas, Malone Dies thus mobilizes another notion of communication in the context of a philosophical reflection of Platonic dialogue. Between two speakers, a sympathetic contact is first established and then ideas are exchanged. As a “speaker,” Malone engages the attention of the listener, Beckett. The speaker then engages the listener without ceasing to be the speaker, the listener being Beckett in the wings. In short, Beckett reinvents himself in order to tell himself something; yet the message comes from an Other, his character Malone. This movement involves the characteristics of play. “In order for there to be a game,” as Gadamer has said, “there always has to be, not necessarily another player, but something else with which the player plays and which automatically responds to his move with a counter move” (Truth and Method 93). In the game of Beckett and Malone, the ubiquitous first person “I” is everywhere and nowhere, and they are in this way voyeurs of each other. As Malone eavesdrops on the utterances of a voice that he overhears, the result is the feeling that another is inhabiting him, or that there is a perception finer than his, but that he is not necessarily aware of its meaning. Also pertinent to writing is the well-known, modern penchant for labyrinthine games of meaning, in which a disappearance of meaning at the very spot it was expected to appear, or a reappearance where it was not expected, occurs. In his essay, “Of a Real That Has Yet to Come,” Clément Rosset maintains that this inclination is found “where there is faulty communication between neighboring and homogenous elements, or proper communication between distant and diverse elements ….” 16 Rosset compares certain emotional issues to labyrinths. He likens the bewildering sensation that arises when one cannot isolate a crucial memory to being lost in a neural labyrinth that is flooded with other, related memories. Indeed, the idea of loss is a crucial aspect of the novel’s endeavor: to reconstruct the self even as death approaches, to rebuild a world that Beckett the writer can apprehend only through memory and imagination. It is a phantasmagorical region in which mundane incidents—Malone’s temporarily losing his pencil in bed, for example—expand to take on a mystical dimension. An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and splendid 16 Clemént Rosset, “Of a Real That Has Yet to Come,” SubStance 60: 18.3 (1989), 12. Of the idea of disappearance, Rosset writes that Beckett’s works, “offer an immediate and flat meaning without the promise of any echo or reflection, a meaning that evaporates at the very moment it is revealed …” (14).

Whose Story Is It?

131

perspective because a higher order irradiates it violently as it tries to express itself. In this manner, Malone’s anticipating his death provides a way for Beckett to cleanse himself of anxiety. Any story in which a pencil has its own history and that lives in a manner close to the writer is like the original writer, namely Samuel Beckett. The enigmatic voice hovering beneath Malone’s personal “I” couples him to Beckett while it simultaneously separates author from character. Readers hear a voice coming from beyond Malone’s notebook and recognize the fact that it is Beckett’s voice writing that voice. This is not a voice that says nothing yet is never silent, as Foucault suggests, nor is it a language whose sole function is simply to evoke. Between Malone’s and Beckett’s separate regions, so distant from each other, lies a domain that is more obscure and less easy to analyze. Below the two orders of text lies an area of the unspoken voice, emancipated from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids. It is on the basis of this voice that ordinary codes of communication and perception are rendered invalid. Thus, between the visible voice in Malone’s exercise book and the inaudible voice of Beckett directing that voice lies another, deeper, sphere that liberates the voice that speaks through silence. In this domain, the unfettered voice appears, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, but always linked to space. In the novel, time and silence are Malone’s allies, and they stay with him until the end. Significantly, Malone’s being confined to bed forces him to confront his own moral shortcomings. Similarly, Beckett examines his fear of literary inadequacy by allowing himself to be cornered in his writing. Malone seems to speak for Beckett when he says that all his stories have been nothing more than a “pretext for not coming to the point …” (MD 276). The frayed notebook—the middle region between Beckett and Malone—is the most fundamental space in the novel. It is where the voice is anterior to words, perceptions, and texts. Malone thus says, “The noises … even my own, were all jumbled together in one and the same unbridled gibberish” (MD 207). The essence of these voices is drawn together by several subjects, all of whom are interlocked with an intuitive voice that does not inform the senses or point to what is real in the world, but that constitutes a theatrical scene. Rigorously worked through, the voice in Malone Dies is held together by a series of scenes which answer, at consecutive moments, the Nietzschean question, “Who is speaking?” These scenes serve to emphasize the differences between the voice and writing, hence its difference from writing. As though a verbal straitjacket had narrowed the voice’s spatial limits, the distance between Malone and Beckett is sustained by the ever-slender stimulus of a voice that signals the body’s inability to keep still. To the Nietzschean question: “Who is speaking?” Michel Foucault offers this suggestion: “Mallarmé replies—and constantly reverts to that reply—by saying that what is speaking is, in its solitude, in its

132

Mary Catanzaro

fragile vibration, in its nothingness, the word itself—not the meaning of the word, but its enigmatic and precarious being” (Order of Things 305). Confined to his bed, Malone enjoys that margins-of-society feeling when he confesses: “After the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again, to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another. … Of myself I could never tell, any more than live or tell of others” (MD 195). Beckett’s voice communicates to Malone’s intuition through its analogue in the body, and its somatic symptom, as Julia Kristeva has said, is of “a language that gives up a structure within the body” (Powers of Horror 10). When Malone writes, “I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end. It is in order to know where I have got to, where he has got to. At first I did not write, I just said the thing. Then I forgot what I had said. … And yet I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise-book as about him. It is because it is no longer I, … but another whose life is just beginning” (MD 207–8), readers perceive a performance taking place first of all in the body.17 Malone Dies is a novel within the compass of a genre—the deathbed summa, the parting shot in which the narrator, sequestered in bed and his world one of silence, begins to reconcile himself to his new state: dying. This is a work that plunges into the viscid depths of the aged male psyche. Malone is fending off a rapidly encroaching sense of failure. His writing promises an escalating confrontation not with actual failure but rather with some darkly comic calamity. Every strange sentence in Malone Dies carries full-disciplined intention, moving toward synthesis even as it laughs at the sense of futility. In the final section, Malone’s self-effacing writing manner engenders moments of great conviction and persuasive power, especially when he admits to pain. In those scenes, one feels Beckett communicating directly to us through Malone’s pencil in this final collaboration between writer and character. And what is the nature of this communication? Malone’s fertile imagination and witty ingenuity, his use of ironic snippets from his own (fictional) past, the juxtaposition of simple optimism and restless, creative experimentation and sexual punning— all are central to Beckett’s creative aesthetic. Indeed, both Beckett and Malone find storytelling and writing significant on many levels, from the intimately personal to the public. The writer not only always has the chance to speak to his character and to us, the readers, but writing allows him also to return home in his works. The artist, Beckett, can return home both through his voice and through his characters, but the greatest possible 17

In this instance, it appears that Foucault is searching for the underlying meaning of memes and gestural behavior, just as Roach and Aunger do. Foucault asks: “What is unspoken in the world, in our gestures, in the whole enigmatic heraldry of our behaviour, our dreams, our sicknesses—does all that speak, and if so in what language and in obedience to what grammar?” (Order 306).

Whose Story Is It?

133

distances are no obstacle to a story of one’s soul. In the words of Adorno, “the only home truly available now, though fragile and vulnerable, is in writing” (Said 184). As Malone lies dying, he comments rather emotionally, “For of all I ever had in this world all has been taken from me, except the exercise-book, so I cherish it, it’s human. The lead too, I was forgetting the lead, but what is lead, without paper?” (MD 270). It is certainly true that writing was Beckett’s only true home. At the end of his life, in a nursing facility himself, his friend, John Montague, asked him, “Is it true that you are dictating something about yourself, something autobiographical?” to which Beckett enigmatically replied, “Oh, no, nothing like that, just tidying up the letters. Getting things straight. Only the professional details, nothing personal” (Montague 18). No matter, we might conclude. His characters did all the speaking for him, in advance.

Works Consulted Acheson, James. Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Acocella, Joan. “On the Contrary: A New Look at the Work of H. L. Mencken.” The New Yorker, 9 December, 2002: 133 Adorno, Theodor. Quoted in Edward W. Said. Reflections on Exile. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 2000. Beckett, Samuel. Malone Dies. Trans. Samuel Beckett. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press, 1956. _____. Proust. New York: Grove Press, 1931. _____. The Unnamable. Trans. Samuel Beckett. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Crossroads 1985. Gombrich, E. H. The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art. New York: Phaidon, 2002. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia U P, 1982. Montague, John. “A Few Drinks and a Hymn: My Farewell to Samuel Beckett.” The New York Times Book Review (17 April, 1994): 18. O’Hara, J. D. “About Structure in Malone Dies.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Ed. J. D. O’Hara. Englewood Cliffs: Prentiss Hall, Inc., 1970. _____. “Savage Loving.” Review of James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. The New York Times Book Review, (24 November, 1996): 14. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.

134

Mary Catanzaro

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Rosen, Richard. “When It Hurts to Laugh.” Quoted in review of Texts for Nothing. Performed at the Susan Stein Shiva Theater. Dir. Joseph Chaikin. November 1, 1992. The New York Times: Arts and Leisure (1 November, 1992): 22. Rosset, Clement. “Of a Real That Has Yet to Come.” Trans. Steven Winspur. Substance 60 (1989): 5–21. Sherzer, Dina. “Samuel Beckett, Linguist and Poetician: A View from The Unnamable.” Substance 56 (1988): 87–98.

“ONLY HALF HERE”: DON DELILLO’S IMAGE OF THE WRITER IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION DAVID CLIPPINGER

The “brand” has become an increasingly visible and valuable component of post-modern consumerism: trademarks and signatures dictate the success of most marketing campaigns. While one does not often associate “brands” and “marketing” with the field of literature, Don DeLillo, in his novel Mao II, explicitly addresses the extent to which the writer in a globalized postWorld War II economy has become merely a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded—all because of the implicit use-value of his or her “signature.” This essay explores the extent to which the ideational motifs as well as the narrative structure of the novel present a dire view of artists as a second order of value that is imbued with meaning only through explicit economic and political linkages that intend to capitalize upon an artist’s “brand” in order to advance a specific socio-political agenda. Mao II, in this respect, ultimately begs to be read as a dark critique of the tendency in postmodern culture to reduce all aspects of society, even those that are regarded as the defining moments of that era such as art, philosophy, and scientific advances, as consumable goods and products.

The secret of being me is that I’m only half here. Andy Warhol

The commodification of American culture is the mainstay of Don DeLillo’s fiction. More so than any other novel, Mao II, with its central character of Bill Gray, the reclusive writer, offers the most astute documentation of the extent to the which the writer, his or her value in society, and literary texts are directly implicated in—and perhaps created by—the economics of production and exchange. Within such an economic structure, the author is completely secondary and can disappear—either by withdrawing from society or through death—without adversely impacting the “commercial” (hence marketable) image of the writer. Mao II, in this respect, not only illuminates the extent to which the subjectivity of the writer is subsumed by an image constructed and

136

David Clippinger

maintained by the publishing industry, but also asserts that the status of the writer is a byproduct of material relations. DeLillo’s representation of the writer, in this context, yields an invaluable opportunity to explore the “dissolvability of the artist” in the face of postmodern material relations and to question whether the writer and literature, like many aspects of cultural production, are exposed as empty signs that are imbued with meaning only through linkage to economic and political power. Mao II, in brief, follows the final stretch of Bill Gray’s life from his ongoing inability to finish the novel he has been writing over the last two decades to his foray into hostage negotiations and his anonymous death upon a ferry en route to Beirut, where he hopes to meet with a terrorist who is holding a Swiss poet hostage. Gray is clearly the focal point of the novel, yet the narrative sequence of the novel advances the central critique of how image supercedes subjectivity within postmodern commodity culture. Before Bill Gray appears, his commodified image as contained with a New York City bookstore is introduced when Scott Martineau, Gray’s personal assistant, enters the bookstore, where the books are displayed provocatively on step terraces and Lucite wall-shelves, books in pyramids and theme displays, … standing on pedestals and bunched in gothic snuggeries, … and in stacks on the floor five feet high, arranged in artful fanning patterns.1

The presentation of the books sparks Martineau’s desire to fondle “the covers of mass-market books, running his finger erotically over the raised lettering” as he hears the books “shrieking Buy me” (19). The erotically charged depiction of the bookstore and its wares foregrounds books as objects of fetishized consumer desire, and Martineau signifies the lay person—an “everyman”—under the sway of such images. It is against this backdrop that readers of Mao II first encounter Bill Gray, not the character but the author included in the “modern classics” section where his “two lean novels in their latest trade editions” are ensconced (20). Within the sheen of consumer desire sparked by the displays, the image of the writer as a commodity takes precedence over Bill Gray the person. And the narrative sequence reinforces how humanity always runs the risk of being subsumed by commodification and marketing in the postmodern capitalist era; in fact, all of the characters in the novel face the daunting task of engaging a system that dehumanizes by eliminating difference and ratifying anonymity within the mass.

1

Don DeLillo, Mao II. (New York: Penguin, 1991), 19. All subsequent references to Mao II will be given in the text with the corresponding page number(s) provided in parentheses following the citation.

“Only Half Here”

137

Other readers of Mao II have noted the socio-historical implications of the novel, but the focus has largely been upon how the occasion of Mao II answers to forces outside the economic arena of the United States. Margaret Scanlan, in particular, makes a compelling argument for how the novel is a literary response to the fatwa declared by the Ayatollah upon Salman Rushdie for his The Satanic Verses.2 Certainly the setting of Beirut for the final section of Mao II as well as the figure of Abu Rashid, the neo-Maoist terrorist who has kidnapped a Swiss poet, Jean-Claude Julien, suggest strong parallels with the Rushdie affair and the political tensions between the Middle East and the West. In this socio-historical context, a less masterful writer might rhetorically position the drama of the novel only as an extension of the easily polarized binaries of Christian versus Muslim, Middle-East versus United States positions wherein American individuality and democracy are threatened by “outside” religious and political fundamentalism. Instead, DeLillo explores how individualism is under siege within American capitalist culture, and the “threat” from abroad—in the figure of Abu Rashid—merely mirrors the erasure of identity within American commodity culture. In this respect, Bill Gray, who attempts (unsuccessfully) to navigate between the worlds of the Middle East and the West, is the site of socio-political crises surrounding subjectivity within a postindustrial global economy. Yet even more pointedly, Gray accentuates those difficulties by his position as an author—as both a producer of textual “products” and as a marketable product himself within American culture. In regard to the topics of image and product, other readers of DeLillo’s fiction have noted how the interrogation into the authenticity of subjectivity and the commodification of the image (whether it is a product or a person) resonates strongly with the philosophical premises of both Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard—and especially the ideational parallels with Benjamin’s conception of the “aura” and mechanical reproduction and the simulacrum of the image in consumer culture, which Baudrillard investigates with great rigor. Yet many of those readers have overlooked how those philosophical premises bear upon the representation of the writer and the publishing world. Therefore, a gloss of the most salient and pertinent elements of Benjamin’s and Baudrillard’s arguments will help demonstrate the degree to which the ideas of aura of simulacrum are at work in Mao II and how they also apply to the field of writing at large. Benjamin in his famous “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” advances the premise that it is the aura of a work of art that gives that work its value because “a work of art has always been reproducible [since] man-made

2 Margaret Scanlan. “Writers among Terrorists: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and the Rushdie Affair.” Modern Fiction Studies 1994 Summer; 40 (2): 229–52.

138

David Clippinger

artifacts could always be imitated by men.” 3 Therefore, it is natural that given technical expertise, a work of art would be reproducible. Benjamin adds that with the reproduction, a work of art runs the risk of diminishment: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” 4 While the “authenticity” of the work of art grants the space for its reproducibility, its “aura,” which is the true mark of its artistic “authenticity,” is sacrificed in the process of reproduction. As Benjamin observes, To an ever great degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility … [and] the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed.5

The work of art, via the excessive proliferation of copies, ceases to signify an “aura” of authenticity. DeLillo touches upon this issue in an interview when he remarks that “when the images are identical to each other, consumerism and the mass production of art in their most explicit form take over.” 6 The work of art becomes susceptible to the force of what Baudrillard refers to as the “simulacrum”—a sign in which the referent has been subsumed by the proliferation of copies, that in the signifying process of “exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit [that itself becomes] without references or circumference.” 7 For Baudrillard, signs are intended only for consumption, and, moreover, Consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and messages presently constituted in a more or less coherent discourse. Consumption, in so far as it is meaningful, is a systematic act of manipulation of signs.8

Those signs are mass-produced, and to fuse Baudrillard’s socio-economic critique of signs with Benjamin’s assertion that “the mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art,” 9 clearly what is altered in post-industrial capitalist culture is that the work has been wholly absorbed by the economics of marketability that grants “value” but replaces aesthetic value with economic value. Guy Debord offers further insight into the relation of 3

Walter Benjamin. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans., Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 218. 4 Benjamin, 221. 5 Benjamin, 224. 6 Maria Nadotti. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Salgamundi 100 (Fall 1993): 97. 7 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 11. 8 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. Mark Poster, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 22. 9 Benjamin, 234.

“Only Half Here”

139

image and marketability in his emphasis upon the specular element within mass consumption: As the indispensable packaging for things produced as they are now produced, as a general gloss on the rationality of the system, and as the advanced economic sector directly responsible for the manufacture of an ever-growing mass of imageobjects, the spectacle is the chief product of present-day society.10

If the “spectacle” of the image—its production, marketing, and consumption—is the defining characteristic of post-modern capitalism, then “images, styles, and representations are not the promotional accessories to economic product,” as Steven Connor observes in regards to postmodern culture; rather “[t]hey are the products themselves.” 11 The “aura” is specularized and fetishized and is secondary (and one might argue, ancillary) to the image that is created and reproduced. Mao II, against this socio-economic theoretical backdrop, not only presents how the “aura” of an artwork has been reproduced, the novel also dramatizes the degree to which the producer of the artwork is duplicated, marketed, and consumed—all of which “empties” the author of signification and imposes upon the writer the simulacrum of subjectivity. In this respect, DeLillo modernizes Benjamin’s famous critique by exploring how Bill Gray is prey to consumption and simulation as well as the extent to which the writer is subjected to three distinct yet overlapping layers of economic commodification and specularization: the political manipulation of terrorism, the economic sphere of publishing and marketing, and the visual domain of photography and iconography. In this context, Mao II raises the question of the value of the artist in contemporary society, and as the novel asserts, that value is no longer conceived in literary terms but can be calculated only with socio-economic parameters wherein “literary” value is handily exchanged for political cache. The most blatant example of the effacement of the literary value occurs in relation to the terrorist organizations and the kidnapping of Jean-Claude Julien, the Swiss poet, by Abu Rashid, leader of the neo-Maoist group in Beirut. Throughout the novel, the spheres of literary and political value overlap in significant ways, and the kidnapping of the Swiss poet signifies this point of intersection in a rather dramatic fashion. Moreover, the connections between writers and terrorists and the realms that they inhabit are not only demonstrated through thematic parallels and shared ideational motifs, the parallels are a 10 Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans., Donald Nicholson-Smith. (New York: Zone Books, 1994.), 16. 11 Quoted in Mark Osteen. “Children of Godard and Coco-Cola: Cinema and Consumerism in Don DeLillo’s Early Fiction.” Contemporary Literature. 37.3 (Fall 1996): 439–470 [proquest].

140

David Clippinger

recurring topic of dialogue for various characters. As she is winding along dirt roads to arrive at Bill Gray’s house, Brita Nilsson, the photographer, remarks that she feels “as if I am being taken to see some terrorist chief at this secret retreat in the mountains” (27). Later in the novel, she is driven to meet and photograph Rashid, which suggests a structural and ideational parallel. Further, Gray himself remarks that [t]here’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. … Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunman have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (41)

The failure of the novelist, according to Gray, materializes as a loss of power inversely proportional to the accession of the power of the bomb-markers; yet within the novel, the latent and residual power of the writer is determined by his or her potential to be a commodified object, which is appropriated (violently through the act of kidnapping) for the purpose to political gain. Gray accurately cites the shift in the novelist’s ability to sway “mass consciousness,” yet, ironically, he fails to recognize that the image of the novelist remains a powerful tool for political purposes, otherwise the terrorist would not have kidnapped a poet and would not desire to use Gray to advance their cause further. But within this structure, what is at stake is clearly the agency of the writer, and while the writer continues to exist as an image, he holds no control over that image, which can be purchased and manipulated by others for their own specific gain—whether that gain is economic or political. Behind the tangled presentation of image/subjectivity is the question of power, and literary merit is rendered as another commodity to be purchased and displayed as a vestige of power. In this light, the novel advances an extended analysis of the agency of the artist within this socio-economic structure, an image which is amplified rhetorically by the case of Andy Warhol, whose artistic image and reputation parallels Gray and demonstrates the degree to which constructed reputation can be appropriated and absorbed into the “aura” of the artwork itself. But while that image can be commodified, Warhol’s agency seems to remain largely within the purview of the artist. One reader of DeLillo and Warhol, Jeffrey Karnicky even boldly asserts that “Warhol has no concern for his aura, except as a commodity,” and he quotes from Warhol in order to support his claim: “Some company recently was interested in buying my ‘aura.’ I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it.” 12 12 Jeffrey Karnicky. “Wallpaper Mao: Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol, and Seriality.” Critique 42.4 (Summer 2001): 339–356 [proquest].

“Only Half Here”

141

Unlike Underworld where he appears at a masked ball wearing a photo of his own face as a mask, Warhol is not a character in Mao II but he is a rhetorical and ideational foci. For example, the title of the novel gestures to Warhol’s series of portraits of Mao Zedong, some of which are featured on the cover of the book. More, after checking for Bill Gray’s novels at the bookstore, Scott Martineau visits a special exhibition featuring Warhol, his Mao series, and a large silk-screen entitled Crowd; Martineau is so taken by the exhibition that he purchases a reproduction of Mao II, which he gives to Karen, who can’t remember the name of the “famous painter” who was “dead [and] had a white mask of a face and glowing white hair—or maybe he was just supposed to be dead” (62). Furthermore, Brita, the photographer, comments upon an Andy Warhol knock-off titled Gorby I, which prompts her to ruminate upon the “dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure” and how Warhol deftly negotiated and manipulated those two seemingly distinct realms to his advantage. In addition, each of the major characters in Mao II whose lives are tangled with Bill Gray’s share a fascination with the figure of Warhol and seem to admire how he managed to retain his agency in the postmodern era. The juxtapositioning of Gray and Warhol suggests that Gray’s plight and trajectory toward death should be interpreted and mediated by Warhol’s success. That is, Warhol, one of the most popular artists in the United States, clearly has negotiated the world of the fetishized image with great ease and success—so much so that his image of himself in his spiky white wig is as recognizable an icon as his paintings. Even a recent billboard on the Pennsylvania turnpike for the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh capitalizes on Warhol’s image as a marketing strategy: the billboard, with a photo of Warhol in his white wig, reads “Intriguing, isn’t it?” suggesting that the interest lies not in Warhol’s art (conspicuously absent from the billboard) but in Warhol’s image of himself. Nevertheless, depicted against this backdrop of Warhol’s success, Bill Gray fails to comprehend his position within the market and, therefore, surrenders his agency to the system that controls the creation, manipulation, maintenance, and reproduction of the image. He is, like Jean-Claude, a prisoner to outside forces—namely, the media and the publishing world, which are represented in the figures of the editor Charles Everson and Gray’s assistant, Scott Martineau, who serve as stand-ins for the “masses” as Gray’s most vociferous and controlling “audience.” Gray’s position in relation to society gestures back to the anti-hero of DeLillo’s earlier novel, Bucky Wunderlick, the rockstar/narrator of Great Jones Street (1973). Wunderlick is an obvious prototype for Gray: he has recently quit his highly successful band and has disappeared by retreating to an East Village apartment in New York City. Like Gray, Wunderlick is successful and reclusive. Other parallels are even more tantalizing: Wunderlick owns a

142

David Clippinger

“studio-equipped house in the mountains … [that is] almost inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t have a detailed map.” 13; while Gray lives in a “secret retreat in the mountains” accessed only by dirt roads (27). Wunderlick ruminates upon fame and argues that “the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide” 14; similarly, Gray’s fame may be the force behind the disappearance of this life and is the root of his suicide. Bucky’s life is largely reduced to his recordings which are referred to throughout the novel as “product”; likewise Gray’s only vital signs are two “lean novels.” And the disappearance of both Wunderlick and Gray contribute to the proliferation of the “currency” of their “aura.” As the CEO of Transparanoia, the conglomerate that owns the rights to Wunderlick’s music, remarks, Your power is growing, Bucky. The more time you spend in isolation, the more demands are made on the various media to communicate some relevant words and pictures. We make demands on you not because we’re media leeches of whatever media but frankly because proportionate demands are being made on us. People want words and pictures. They want images. Your power grows. The less you say, the more you are.15

And as Scott Martineau explains to Brita in language and terms that resonate strongly with the above passage from Great Jones Street: Bill is at the height of his fame. Ask me why. Because he hasn’t published in years and years and years … It’s the years since that made him big. Bill gained celebrity by doing nothing. … [and he] gets bigger as his distance from the scene deepens. (52)

And finally both Gray and Wunderlick lack agency within the industries that create and maintain their “auras.” Wunderlick discovers that most of his world and much of his own subjectivity is owned by a conglomerate named Transparanoia, which is run by Globke. As Anthony DeCurtis shrewdly notes, But once Wunderlick retreats to a room on Great Jones Street, having reached his own limit within the context of the general cultural dissolution, it quickly becomes clear that the forces that really control events—quite independent of the whims of pop stars—have not relaxed their grip simply because he has decided to drop out. What happens is that the void he creates by his withdrawal makes the functioning of those forces more apparent—and more frightening—to him.16

13

Don DeLillo. Great Jones Street. (New York: Random House, 1973), 23. DeLillo, Great Jones Street, 1. 15 DeLillo, Great Jones Street, 128. 16 Anthony DeCurtis. “The Product.” in Introducing Don DeLillo. Frank Lentricchia, ed. (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), 135. 14

“Only Half Here”

143

Gray, on the other hand, does not exist within quite the same range of totalitarian control, and Mao II lacks the paranoia that characterizes Great Jones Street. Yet Gray is, clearly, a product of his publishing firm and is held hostage to the fame that his publicity has generated—most explicitly via the figure of Scott Martineau, who is so obsessed by Gray’s novels that he stalks him over a long period of time, coerces Gray to hire him as his assistant, and now controls and regiments all facets of Gray’s personal and professional life—even chiding him to get back to work. Gray is a hostage, and, while it is not the omnipresent industry that controls his actions, he is subject to the repercussions of his commodified image and the industry lurking behind the façade of this image. The relation of image and product is clearly the core parallel between Wunderlick and Gray despite the fact that they exist in seemingly disparate realms of rock music stardom and the literary world. Great Jones Street, though, bridges these two realms through Eddie Fenig, the struggling writer who lives above Wunderlick and counsels him about various issues. Fenig’s discussion of the writing market is particularly insightful for interpreting the other world in Mao II: I know the writer’s market like few people know it. The market is a strange thing, almost a living organism. It changes, it palpitates, it grows, it excretes. It sucks things in and then spews them up. It’s a living wheel that turns and crackles. The market accepts and rejects. It loves and kills.17

The question of quality (musical, artistic, and literary) is noticeably absent in this depiction of marketability as a rather fickle creature that operates according to its whims. Moreover, it is clearly the market that creates and destroys, and, as Fenig adds in a later conversation, “Everything is marketable” 18— including the image and aura of the writer. Great Jones Street, arguably, is the prototype for Mao II: it frames the issues that evolve into the full-scale interrogation of the relationship of individuality, the market, and the masses who consume the images created, promoted, and abandoned by the market. The world of pop music and its celebrated one-hit-wonders would seem more susceptible to the ebb and flow of the market, and yet DeLillo, by situating this issue within the literary arena, seems to be even more poignantly questioning the “sacred” area of artistic subjectivity and the assumption that an author succeeds solely through his or her literary merit; rather, literary merit itself is shown to be a product. DeLillo’s critique, followed to its logical extreme, is nothing short of the interrogation of the end of humanism and of the human, which are central to the proclamations of many 17 18

DeLillo, Great Jones Street, 27. DeLillo, Great Jones Street, 49.

144

David Clippinger

historians and philosophers of the postmodern. But unlike the discourse of philosophy, Mao II dramatizes the extent of the reduction of self to the market by demonstrating how Gray’s subjectivity is secondary to his image. More poignantly, his subjectivity is reduced to his image. His past—his familial history as well as his real name, Willard Skansey, Jr., and his life—has been erased by the world that his writing has created. Thus the manipulation of the image and the subsequent erasure of identity is shown to be at the heart of the tangled relation of the publishing world (with its focus upon promotion and marketing) and the political world of the terrorist (with its focus upon political ideology and exploitation of the image of terror). The overlapping elements of those two realms are presented subtly in the episode in which Gray visits his publisher, Charlie Everson. During their conversation, Everson vociferously announces his desire to retain the rights to Gray’s new book, which then is superimposed upon the discussion of terrorism: “I want this book, you bastard” (102). The desires of the publishing world and terrorism, thereby, occupy a shared ideational space, which is heightened further when Everson explains that I’m chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression. We’re mainly academics and publishing people and we’re just getting started and this is the crazy part of the whole business. This group takes a hostage simply because he’s there, he’s available, and he apparently tells them he’s a poet and what is the first thing they do? They contact us. They have a fellow in Athens who calls our London office and says, “There’s a writer chained to a wall in a bare room in Beirut. If you want him back, maybe we can do a deal.” (98)

The “business” of the publishing world with its “statesmen”—academics and publishing people—finds itself on common ground with the realm of terrorists. In addition, through Everson’s economically loaded language—“chairman,” “business,” and “deal”—the poet is depicted as a type of merchandise. Subsequently, the fact that the terrorists would contact an organization affiliated with the “business” of the literary world (and its “free expression”) instead of the government is extremely provocative and suggests that publishing and terrorism share an implicit understanding (whereas governments and terrorism do not). Moreover, the only difference between the two is teleological; i.e., both organizations exploit the image to further their own ends, but whereas the goal of the publishing world is to generate financial revenue, the “payoff ” for terrorism is to serve a political ideal which is enacted through violence. Ironically, the terrorist organization, a neo-communist group, is at war, one would assume, with capitalism, which the publishing world embodies. Nevertheless, by collaborating with publishers, the Maoist group is implicated in the very form of capitalism that it abhors—namely, the fetishization of the image

“Only Half Here”

145

and the subsequent exploitation of the individual for “profit.” Instead of merely exposing the machinations of the neo-communist organization as hypocritical, however, the novel advances a profound argument that encompasses both communism and capitalism, an argument which is presented through the entwining of the world of the terrorist and that of the publisher. For example, Everson’s explanation for his desire for Gray to take part in the release of the hostage, which is juxtaposed with the tactics of the terrorists, emphasizes how both groups seek to exploit the image and, by extension, dehumanize the artist. Everson explains: I can get any writer I want. But I want Bill Gray. Look, I didn’t tell anyone you were coming here today. Not even my secretary. Because if I had there’d be a queue outside that door stretching like a conga line into the distance. There’s an excitement that attaches to your name and it will help us put a mark on this event, force people to talk about it and think about it and think about it long after the speeches fade. I want one missing writer to read the work of another. I want the famous novelist to address the suffering of the unknown poet. I want the English-language writer to read in French and the older man to speak across the night to his young colleague in letters. Don’t you see how beautifully balanced? (99)

Everson envisions a public relations goldmine via the exploitation of Gray’s “fame.” The “beautifully balanced” proposal, rife with the potential to charge Gray’s marketability and give validity to Everson’s “high-minded committee,” maintains a patronizing and reductive element that might be characterized as “bourgeois”: “the hostage is being freed at that moment on live television” just as Gray is reading the yet unnamed (at this point in the novel) and unknown poet’s work. Consequently, the writing life of the hostage is subsumed by the cache value of the more famous Gray, and the poet’s suffering (and his subjectivity) are validated only by the “free” Gray. In short, the Swiss poet/hostage gains freedom only by being absorbed into the prison of Gray’s fame. Moreover, the image of Julien’s freedom serves only to validate Everson’s organization and Gray’s power. As envisioned by Everson, the commodification of the writer—even within the political arena of hostage negotiations—is natural and acceptable, and speaks to a culture wherein the control of subjectivity and the lack of agency is missing, even with a committee dedicated to “free expression.” The terrorists in the novel, surprisingly, are more open about the marketability of the writer. For example, Brita asks Rashid, the head of the neoMaoist group, about Julien, “We have no foreign sponsors,” Rashid replies. Sometimes we do business the old way, you sell this, you trade that. Always there are deals in the works. So with hostages like drugs, like weapons, like jewelry, like a Rolex or a BMW. We sold him to the fundamentalists. (235)

146

David Clippinger

Julien’s status as a commodity—whether it be a generic product (a drug or a weapon) or a name-brand luxury item (a Rolex or BMW)—is clearly articulated. Of course it should not be overlooked that in this speech Rashid has committed the same reduction that is at the core of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx argues in The Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefensible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom— Free Trade. … The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.19

In Mao II, the hostage—a poet, no less—is similarly stripped of his humanity, and his personal worth is reduced to the market value as an exchangeable good that can be exploited for “profitable” ends. But it is a reduction that typifies postmodern culture as a whole. Gray’s position as a writer of “acclaim” is also vulnerable to such reductions, especially later in the novel when he is regarded as an exchangeable commodity for the Julien—since he is more of the caliber of a “Rolex or BMW” than mere “drugs.” Gray’s dialogue with George Haddad, the liason for the terrorist group, is particularly insightful. Gray asks, “What happens if I go to Beirut and complete this spiritual union you find so interesting? Talk to Rashid. Can I expect him to release the hostage? And what will he want in return?” “He’ll want you to take the other man’s place.” “Gain the maximum attention. Then release me at the most advantageous time.” “Gain the maximum attention. Then probably kill you ten minutes later. Then photograph your corpse and keep the picture handy for the time when it can be used most effectively.” “Doesn’t he think I’m worth more than my photograph?” (164)

Gray’s concern over his “value” is comical and perhaps naïve both in terms of terrorist politics as well as given the fact that up until this point, Gray’s worth, as determined by society, has been as an image constructed and maintained by the publishing world. Therefore, Rashid’s supposed use of the image to be released at an “advantageous time to gain maximum attention” rhymes with Gray’s earlier quip that publishers love to “run those black-border ads for dead writers. It makes them feel they’re part of an august tradition” (47).

19 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. (New York: Penguin, 1967), 82.

“Only Half Here”

147

The moment of death, in other words, is advantageous to the publisher since death allows the publisher (and the writer) to lay claim to an “august tradition” and to the process of canonization. For both the publisher and the terrorist, the “real” death is a marketing bonanza, and the exploitation of the image is the shared and collected terrain of both the publisher and the terrorist. Subsequently, Bill Gray as well as Jean-Claude Julien are sites of political and economic exploitation, consumption, and annihilation—the ultimate signifiers, par excellence, of the tangle of writing and death depicted by Foucault: The mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.20

The conception of a writer’s death is the manifestation of “work” wherein an author’s writing enters into the socio-cultural domain, and becomes, as Roland Barthes adds, “an object of consumption.” 21 Consequently, the death of the writer and the transformation to “work” is linked to the process of cultural consumption, and as the recurring figure of Chairman Mao testifies, that image can be manipulated as a sign of “life” beyond the reaches of death. But clearly, the power of that “sign” exists outside of the realm of the writer since that power resides solely within the domain of politics and economics. Chairman Mao, as a political figure, not only suggests parallels with Bill Gray; he is also the site of intersection for a number of ideational and narrative threads that suture together the motif of image, exchange, and power; i.e., not only is he the philosophical source for Rashid’s neo-Maoist terrorist organization, Mao also appears as the subject of Warhol’s art and is, therefore, implied throughout the novel via the figure of Warhol; like Warhol, he is shown as a shrewd marketer of his own image by using the release of his photos to his political advantage. Consequently, Mao is regarded as one of the “great leaders who regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns” through carefully constructed events such as the “photograph of Mao taken in the course of his famous nine-mile swim at the age of seventy-two, following a long disappearance.” In this regard, “Mao used photographs to announce his return and demonstrate his vitality, to reinspire the revolution” (141). The carefully construed image is a site of political power. And the socio-political consumption of the image is linked to the perpetual revolution of communist China as well as the ideology informing Rashid’s use of the image of the hostage/writer as a political catalyst.

20

Michel Foucault. The Foucault Reader. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 102–103. Roland Barthes. “From Work to Text” in Textual Strategies. (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1979), 79. 21

148

David Clippinger

In contrast with the image as a pronouncement of Mao’s vitality, the photos of Gray taken by Brita Nilsson are described as “the announcement of [Gray’s] dying” (43) and a “death notice” (141). The image of the reclusive writer, once released to the public, will not enhance the legendary status of Gray but will “be the end of Bill as a myth, a force” (52). In this sense, the image will disrupt the religious logic wherein the “person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and wholeness the rest of us envy,” which is akin to “God’s famous reluctance to appear” (36). Not only would the release of such photos dissolve the inscribed spiritual position of the inaccessible writer as somehow beyond the corruption of the (human, hence material) image world, it would reabsorb Gray within the world of public relations where all writers are willingly or unwillingly incorporated. Gray’s desire to be photographed and his willingness to “become someone’s material [wherein] the life [is displayed as a] consumer event” (43) is a testimony to his complicity in the marketing of his aura as a commodity. “The image world is corrupt,” Gray tells Brita, and yet by consenting to such a world, he is confessing his own corruption perpetuated via the image maker—the photographer and her camera (36). As Adam Begley observes, “Cameras are more likely to produce commercials than art.” 22 Therefore, to allow oneself to become the “subject” of the camera’s gaze is to enter willingly into the construction and commodification of the self. “Character or identity making,” Eugene Goodheart argues, “is a commercial exchange, a consumer activity.” 23 By extension, then the construction of subject positions within postmodern culture is a commercial process, yet the willing subjugation to the gaze of the camera is tantamount to allowing the self to be reduced to an image. The photo, therefore, becomes part of the materialization of character and participates in an economics of exchange and substitution. Gray seems to grasp how his identity as rendered by Brita is exchangeable, but Brita’s comprehension far exceeds Gray’s as evident in her analysis of her extended project of photographing writers: I mean what’s the importance of a photograph if you know the writer’s work? I don’t know. But people still want the image, don’t they? The writer’s face is the surface of the work. It’s a clue to the mystery inside. (26)

The extra-textual image is conceived as a vital clue to the text; yet the claim is advanced later that the “Book and writer are now inseparable” (68). The writer

22 Adam Begley. “Don DeLillo: Americana, Mao II, and Underworld.” Southwest Review. 82.4 (1997): 478–505. 23 Eugene Goodheart. “Don DeLillo and the Cinematic Real” in Introducing Don DeLillo. Frank Lentricchia, ed. (Durham: Duke U P, 1991), 118.

“Only Half Here”

149

is inextricably linked to his/her product, and the image becomes an acceptable substitution for the person; as Laura Barrett observes: “Brita’s photographs of Bill do not reject the man; they replace him.” 24 But in addition to being a substitute for the person, the images become surrogates for the infinitely deferred product, the novel that Gray has been unable to complete for years and has spent his time revising endlessly in a charade that parodies the act of writing. This play of substitution sheds some light upon Gray’s willingness to be photographed as well as his motives to becomes involved in the hostage negotiations, which will surely lead to his death. In effect, Gray’s written life has been reduced to only a slight stream of words that cannot sustain him. Subsequently, as Richard Levesque points out, “Language having failed [Gray, he] seeks affirmation in the new visual medium of the spectacle.” 25 In other words, the power once associated with language now falls under the jurisdiction of the image. Concomitant with the displacement of power is “the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure.” And as Gray observes, “What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our shapers of sensibility and thought” (157). Yet the failure on Gray’s part isn’t merely a failure of language but rather his failure to harness the power over language which he originally controlled but which now has been appropriated by the image maker. Unlike Andy Warhol or Chairman Mao, Gray lacks the savvy to capitalize artistically or politically upon his commodification, and his lackluster attempt to transform himself from a writer to a public figure is more an announcement of his willingness to succumb to the cultural “death of the author” than a sign of his re-emergence and reinvention as a vital social figure. Peter Baker locates Gray’s impotence clearly within the domain of the cultural: If the postmodern culture is one in which novels and their creators are increasingly commodified (the heightened commodification correlating to a presumably diminishing public) rather than read and cherished, this may explain Gray’s increasingly morose view of himself and his writing. Certainly this view provides a motivation for Gray’s thinking that the only possible remaining step is to try to bridge the gap between the interiorized experience of novel-writing (and reading) and engaged action in the public sphere.26

24 Laura Barrett. “ ‘Here But Also There’: Subjectivity and Postmodern Space in Mao II.” Modern Fiction Studies. 45.3 (1999), 790. 25 Richard Levesque. “Telling Postmodern Tales: Absent Authorities in Didion’s Democracy and DeLillo’s Mao II.” Arizona Quarterly 54.3 (Autumn 1998), 81. 26 Peter Baker. “The Terrorist as Interpreter: Mao II in Postmodern Context.” Postmodern Culture 4.2 (1994) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/ v004/4.2baker.html

150

David Clippinger

The novel also denies the public figure the ability to escape the issue that haunts and confines Gray: i.e., the marketing of the image and the prisonhouse of commodified meaning. Consequently, all of the “famous” figures in the book—Gray, Warhol, Chairman Mao, and Abu Rashid—are subject to the ebb and flow of their perceived images, and their success within this exchange of visual representation is largely a response to how effectively the power of the image can be harnassed to a specific ideological end. Whereas Warhol understands the aesthetic and economic implications of the marketability of his image, Abu Rashid follows in the wake of Mao in his comprehension of the political power latent in the image and the ability to magnify that power through careful manipulation and proliferation. Subsequently, when asked by Brita why the young men training at Rashid’s compound wear hoods over their heads and picture of Rashid on their shirts, he responds that displaying his photo is like a badge and that it gives them a vision they will accept and obey. These children need an identity outside the narrow function of who they are and where they come from. Something completely outside the helpless forgotten lives of their parents and grandparents. (233)

This practice gives them an “identity, [a] sense of purpose” that they can not share in otherwise. The image is not only a surrogate for identity, the image is the identity, which completely subsumes individuality. Brita responds to Rashid’s explanation in a telling fashion by snatching the hood from the head of one of Rashid’s sons and snapping his “identity” as captured in the lens of the camera. Her anger, in this respect, might be understood as her rejection of the “mechanical reproduction” of human subjectivity, but it is an anger that fails to take into consideration the extent to which photography and its “reproducibility” contributes to the disintegration of individual “aura” and, thereby, dehumanizes. As Roland Barthes notes, “From the object to its image there is of course a reduction—in proportion, perspective, color …” 27 The reduction, as it applies to Brita’s photograph, also applies to a second order of linguistic code that contextualizes the image, thereby reducing its subject to the sociopolitical use of glorifying or vilifying its subject and the political cause associated with its subject. Further, for a reader of Mao II to project beyond the time-line of the novel, the photo will be “reproduced” in newspapers, magazines, and perhaps books, and the son’s “identity” snatched from him via the picture will ultimately be dissolved through the dissemination and reproduction of the image to serve particular ends. The act of photography, then, as an attempt to document the “internal” life of the person, who has been subsumed by the collective identity of his leader, 27

Roland Barthes, The Barthes Reader. (New York, Hill and Wang, 1982), 196.

“Only Half Here”

151

is a rejoinder to the opening of the novel, which is devoted to describing a mass wedding at Yankee Stadium. The narrative gaze of the chapter fluctuates between the overwhelming singularity of the mass—the six thousand couples being married by Reverend Moon—and the point of view of Karen Janney, who is about to marry a man chosen for her by Moon through the matching of photographs. Karen “fades into the thousands, the columned mass” as her identity is effaced by that of the “master.” The parents in the stands desperately are attempting to locate their sons and daughters who have merged into the faceless crowd and to take their pictures, but the only individual person who can be clearly identified (and thereby photographed) is Reverend Moon. The photo, in this context, occupies a position of cultural power and a clear and recognizable subject position—a point that is emphasized when two rival militia groups in Beirut are firing guns “at portraits of each other’s leaders” (227). The assassination of the image is a challenge of power. To “kill” the image, the signifier of political power, is a prelude to “real” death. But blown large, the image takes on a life of its own, a life that ultimately effaces the individual and reveals that the person’s subjectivity is empty. The photos of Bill, which Scott does not plan to release, also function within the binary of life and death. The photos and other images exist on a plane beyond the reach of Gray’s “real” death. In fact, Gray’s “real” death will allow his image to “live-on” in legend because the complete and total effacement of his identity has been achieved. His absence will enable his “aura” to be undiminished, and, therefore, it can retain its level of value, which is its only vestige of power. The logic of the novel, in this respect, comes full circle: the writing that led to fame, which generated an “aura” that was marketed and marketable, created a death in life; yet the life, linked inextricably with books (which Gray tells us “are never finished” [72]), will be extended beyond death because of enhanced “product life.” This logic, therefore, suggests that the only life Gray ever had belonged to the book, and considered in proportion to his increase in fame, his life was inversely diminished. As Gray notes in one of his last fleeting thoughts before he dies, “It was writing that caused his life to disappear” (215). His life has not been subsumed by writing. Writing has not become his life. Rather, once his life becomes intertwined with the materiality of his writing (books, articles, photos, and the like), his life enters into the economics comprised of value and exchange. Consequently, it is not the act of writing that subsumes his life but rather the extra-textual exchange that writing pulls that life into—namely, the world of contracts, agents, editors, press releases, and sales figures. Gray’s anonymous death, wherein his papers and identification are stripped from his corpse in order to be sold, is a poignant reminder that his life and his death do not have a value beyond market value. In this respect, both the ideational motifs as well as the narrative structure of the novel present a dire

152

David Clippinger

view of artists as a second order of value that is imbued with meaning only through explicit economic and political linkages. Mao II ultimately begs to be read as a dark critique of the tendency in postmodern culture to reduce all aspects of society—even those that are regarded as the defining moments of that era such as art, philosophy, and scientific advances as consumable goods and products. While Mao II is a work of fiction and its argument should not be misconstrued as DeLillo’s own attack on the publishing world, the novel’s rendering of the proliferation of the image world and the life of the writer depleted in the face of the market sheds light upon comments that DeLillo has made about his own career as a writer. During an interview with Maria Nadotti, Delillo remarks that he does not “want to become familiar.” 28 To be recognizable is to be reduced to an image, a style, a book. It is to be dehumanized and to be subject to a form of death. In interviews, DeLillo is quick to point out that the character of Bill Gray is not in any way autobiographical, and DeLillo’s career and style speaks to a sustained writing life clearly beyond the grasp of Gray. But the whole arena of production and marketability, which defines the postmodern world, bears upon the literary and economic world that DeLillo must inhabit. More, it is a world that DeLillo insists that the writer must resist: “The writer is working against the age … and so he feels some satisfaction in not being widely read. He is diminished by an audience.” 29 In a Paris Review interview, DeLillo adds to this idea when he notes that “we need the writer in opposition , the novelist who writes against power, who writes against … the whole apparatus of assimilation.” 30 The dominant characteristic of the age, as presented by Mao II, is the proliferation of the consumable image and the reduction of life to an economics of material exchange. To resist the audience is to deny the commodification of the self as a “familiar” product susceptible to the “apparatus of assimilation.” To become familiar, after all, is to be appropriated and to negate one’s ability to work against the power dynamics that reduce and belittle. DeLillo’s agenda parallels Benjamin’s critique against the mechanical reproduction of art that strips a work of its integrity, and for both DeLillo and Benjamin, at the core of what is the problematic relationship of art, reproduction, and economics. And while Mao II may assert that the “future belongs to crowds” (16), the writer must occupy a position of resistance against the surge of the crowds and the whims which have been fed to them by outside forces—either political figures with cult-like power or the media industry. Bill Gray, though, lacks the power 28

Maria Nadotti. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Salgamundi 100 (Fall 1993), 92. Daniel Aaron. “How to Read Don DeLillo” in Introducing Don DeLillo. Frank Lentricchia, ed. (Durham: Duke U P, 1991) 73. 30 Quoted in Begley 492. 29

“Only Half Here”

153

to resist a process wherein his books are substituted for his life. Consequently, he succumbs to the ultimate erasure of his subjectivity in death. Nevertheless, DeLillo’s biting novel not only unmasks the vestiges of assimilation that should be resisted, but it also argues that the most significant battle is the confrontation of those facets of postmodern American culture that have been naturalized and commodified. Mao II, like many of DeLillo’s novels, is a fight against the crowds of consumers whose desires, perpetually unfulfilled by the false promises of products and/or willing to assume an identity bestowed by a leader of personality, have embraced the simulation of subjectivity encoded in the image world. It is a fight against a culture that treats art and literature as if it were, like those who consume it, “only half here.”

This page intentionally left blank

THE BLIND MAN, THE IDIOT, AND THE PRIG: FAULKNER’S DISDAIN FOR THE READER1 GENE C. FANT, JR.

William Faulkner’s disdain for the reader surfaces in his narrative approach in three novels: Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom! Frustrated with the failure of contemporary critics and general readers to wrestle with his style, he asserts authorial power over his audience. Three particular characters come to symbolize, in part, the general reader. In Sanctuary, Faulkner undermines the senses, leading the reader to identify with the blind-deaf-mute, Pap Goodwin. In The Sound and the Fury, the reader’s demands for narrative order find a parallel in the idiot Benjy Compson. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner depicts the overactive reader in the priggish Shreve McCannon, who reshapes the story. Each character provides insight into the total dependence of the audience upon the narrator and the overall epistemological ramifications of narrative itself.

By 1928, William Faulkner was an experienced novelist, with Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes published and a third completed manuscript (which became Sartoris), under his authorial belt. His experiences as a novelist, however, frustrated him as his sales lagged and his critical reception proved underwhelming. He felt underappreciated and misunderstood, as his own recollections give evidence.2 When Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary, the two major works of 1928–29, he made a step in his approach to writing that elevated his prose: he stopped writing for the “ideal” reader, regardless of the consequences. Up until that time, Faulkner had taken a fairly traditional approach to relating a story with fairly ordered plots and narrative points of view. With

1

I am deeply indebted to Noel Polk, Martina Sciolino, and Victor Taylor for their assistance in the early stages of this article. 2 In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary (1932), Faulkner wrote “I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought” (Rpt. in Sanctuary (New York: Vintage, 1931. Corrected text. Ed. Noel Polk, 1987), 338.

156

Gene C. Fant, Jr.

these two novels, however, he shifted his view of the ideal reader.3 First, in The Sound and the Fury, he wrote for himself. In the introduction to the 1932 Modern Library edition of Sanctuary, he commented, “I had just written my guts into The Sound and the Fury though I was not aware until the book was published that I had done so, because I had done it for pleasure. I believed then that I would never be published again. I had stopped thinking of myself in publishing terms.” 4 As he wrote so passionately about the Compson family, he intentionally disregarded what critics and the broad readership might think. In Sanctuary, he claims to have gone to the other extreme, invoking the opposite strategy. In the introduction to Sanctuary, he observed: “I began to think of books in terms of possible money. I decided I might just as well make some of it myself. I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks. …” 5 His extensive re-workings of the novel 6 belie his flippant observation, but the grain of truth to the novel’s conceit does seem to focus on his new-found attitude toward the general reader. Concurrent with these new approaches to audience came an opportunity for Faulkner to explore epistemology, highlighting the narrator’s power over the narrative’s presentation. The general reader, then, became secondary to his interest

3

At the University of Virginia, a student asked if he wrote with a “particular reader in mind,” to which Faulkner replied, “No, I don’t. I wrote for years before it occurred to me that strangers might read the stuff, and I’ve never broken the habit. I still write it because it worries me so much I’ve got to get rid of it, and so I put in on paper” Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 1959; hereafter abbreviated FIU), 14. By this, he meant that he had to write; he had no other motive than that basic semi-selfish reason. He insisted elsewhere in that interview (FIU, 4) that he did not “know what the average reader gets from reading [The Sound and the Fury].” Faulkner also insisted that he wrote for pleasure, in an effort to please the reader. I think, though, that he meant for the pleasure of a reader like himself. See, as an example, Lion in the Garden: “I’m a story-teller. I’m telling a story, introducing comic and tragic elements as I like. I’m telling a story—to be repeated and retold. I don’t claim to be truthful. Fiction is fiction—not truth; it’s make-believe. Thus I stack and lie at times, all for the purposes of the story—to entertain” (Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926–1962, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), 277. See also page 280: “Let [the writer] remember that a novel is to create pleasure for the reader. The only mistake with any novel is if it fails to create pleasure. That it is not true is irrelevant: a novel is to be enjoyed. A book that fails to create enjoyment is not a good one.” 4 Rpt. in Sanctuary, 338. 5 Sanctuary, 338. 6 See Noel Polk’s Editor’s Note in the corrected text edition of Sanctuary for an overview of the novel’s convoluted publishing process, 335, ff.

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig

157

in style, meaning that the general reader could even appear symbolically in Sanctuary and The Sound and the Fury, as well as the later Absalom, Absalom! 7 In each of these works Faulkner illustrates his disdain for the general reader, showing the reader to be blind, fearful, and priggish in the respective works. Interviews with Faulkner reveal the high regard he himself had for reading. At almost every turn in published interviews, Faulkner refers to his appetite for re-reading favorite works.8 These observations from Faulkner himself tell us exactly what kind of reader he preferred: one who read, re-read, read other works, and labored to understand the writer’s narrative. Although Faulkner describes what every writer would prefer in the so-called “ideal reader” of her works, he did not observe this sort of ideal reader in the responses to his work. Instead he felt most of his readers possessed a passive desire for simple narratives easily laid out for the general public. Sanctuary provided Faulkner with an opportunity to assault the reader’s sensibilities, for the work still shocks many readers. To many, Faulkner’s depiction of rape and murder placed the novel into the potboiler category, but more than that, its content pushed the envelope of censorship. His editor protested loudly over the work’s content (“Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail” recollected Faulkner),9 and John Arthos, one of Sanctuary’s earliest critics, claims that Faulkner used the novel to chastise his readership for failing to react properly to his earlier fiction.10 The content of the novel, though, is not the only assault Faulkner foists on the reader. He also assails conventional

7

Judith B. Wittenberg (Faulkner: The Transfiguration of Biography (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1979, 135–36) has asserted a similar symbolism in Pylon, which was written at about the same time as Absalom, Absalom!. She believes that the editor Hagood symbolizes “the impatient reading public,” 137. She views the reporter as being representative of the artist. 8 See, for example, his response to a question posed at West Point concerning his reading habits: A: I read the books that I knew and loved when I was twenty-one years old. Q: Can you tell us some of them? A: Yes, I go back to the people, not the books—but the people. I like Sarah Gamp— she’s one of my favorite people—and Don Quixote. I read in and out of the Old Testament every year. Shakespeare—I have a portable Shakespeare I’m never too far from. … When I was young, I was an omnivorous reader with no judgment, no discretion—I read everything. As I have gotten along in years, I don’t read with the same voracity, and I go to the book as you go to spend a few minutes with a friend you like. I will open the book to a particular chapter or to read about a particular character in it. Not to read the book but just to spend a little while with a human being that I think is funny or tragic or anyway interesting.” Faulkner at West Point, ed. Joseph L. Fant and Robert Ashley (New York: Random House, 1964), 66; 114. 9 Rpt. in Sanctuary, 338 10 John Arthos, “Ritual and Humor in William Faulkner.” Accent 9 (1948): 17–30.

158

Gene C. Fant, Jr.

ideas about epistemology by undercutting the senses upon which the reader relies for information in the text. Faulkner not only shocks the reader’s sensibilities, he undermines the reader’s senses. Readers may interpret Sanctuary as a book of trials. Trials seek to establish reality, guilt or innocence, based on the testimony of witnesses’ senses. In this case, the narrative provides the evidence to the reader, who makes decisions about interpreting the story while reading the text. Faulkner, however, undermines “normal” sensory input throughout the novel, deliberately creating illusions, creating a narrative style that may confound a careless or inattentive reader. Faulkner’s style, in fact, anticipates a postmodern sensibility concerning text and the undermining of a reader’s perceptions. Fiction saddles the reader with a burden similar to that of a trial jury. The text limits the reader’s sensory abilities to discern any sort of reality. Like most scholars, Dianne L. Cox urges that all of Faulkner’s fiction must be read carefully, “with a careful use of each narrative perspective as a touchstone for the reliability of the others and as a supplement to the evidence supplied in the others.” 11 Virginia Hlavsa, writing about modernism in Faulkner, observes that “Faulkner demonstrates that the traditional beliefs can be broken apart, distorted, and reassembled in the unlikeliest of forms and folk—a maid, a stable, a man—of the Mississippi clay.” 12 Such “clay,” though, is unstable and malleable in the hands of a skillful artist. In fact, the artist’s manipulations of the text may deliberately undermine the reader’s ability to make such distinctions. Christopher Norris, following Jacques Derrida, defines such activity as deconstructive: drawing “out conflicting logics of sense and implication, with the object of showing that the text never exactly means what it says or says what it means.” 13 Norris urges a reader to push and prod a text in an effort to deconstruct it: “to ‘disseminate’ meaning to a point where the authority of origins is pushed out of sight by the play of henceforth limitless interpretive freedom.” 14 These processes all strike at the very heart of how Faulkner approaches epistemology throughout Sanctuary’s narrative.15

11 Dianne L. Cox, “A Measure of Innocence: Sanctuary’s Temple Drake.” Mississippi Quarterly (1981): 302. 12 Virginia V. James Hlavsa, Faulkner and the Thoroughly Modern Novel. (Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 1991), 41. 13 Christopher Norris, What Is Deconstructionism? Berkeley: U California P, 1988), 7. 14 Norris, 8. 15 Robert Dale Parker specifically assigns this postmodernist impulse to Absalom, Absalom!, referring to the fracturing of the narrative. Absalom, Absalom!: The Questioning of Fictions. (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 10.

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig

159

In Sanctuary, Faulkner deliberately undermines his own text with conflicting senses, sensory illusions, and irrational logics. He tries to “imitate life, creating and maintaining an illusion founded in reality.” 16 Faulkner was wont to tamper with these illusions, providing narratives which involve “a combination of internal and external perspectives which simultaneously complement as well as contradict one another.” 17 Such a view would make Faulkner, to borrow Linda Hutcheon’s phrase, “both critical and complicit” 18 in his handling of epistemology, with him using traditional sensory-based epistemology to critique its flaws. Matters of epistemology inextricably bind the reading and interpretation of text. Both activities depend on the ability of the narrator to communicate sensory-based events through words to the eyes and mind of the reader. Therein lies the problem: how reliable is sensory-based testimony? In a world where illusions and deceptions abound, how can a witness establish objective reality based solely upon sensory input? Standard practice invokes an appeal to as many senses as possible: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. The more senses involved, the more reliable the reader’s perception. Using the trial motif of the novel, for example, eye witnesses who are deaf are limited in their testimonies: if such a witness sees persons conversing but cannot hear the conversation, that witness’s testimony is of limited worth. The reverse is true as well: a witness who hears a conversation but cannot see the conversers can give a similarly limited testimony, “hear-say evidence,” which is inadmissible as primary evidence. Sanctuary presents the reader with numerous sensory problems. The reader can never be sure of exactly what happens in the novel, for the reader’s senses depend on the narrator’s descriptions of events and the narrator’s record of the characters’ own descriptions. In a seemingly deliberate attempt to stress ambiguity, the narrator frequently obscures the visual and muddies sounds into noise. To further confound matters, visible items and persons go unheard, while audible sounds have no observable source. Instead of using the more traditional device of synesthesia, “sensory transfer,” Faulkner inverts the device, creating dysesthesia, the intentional undermining or confounding of sensory input. Dysesthesia makes epistemological judgments difficult. In the face of dysesthesia’s subjectivity, an appeal to objectivity must be made for any “valid” judgment by the reader. Instead, Sanctuary forces the reader to question rational reality by questioning the realities of the novel itself: Is the narrator reliable? How many narrative layers must be peeled away

16 Hugh M. Ruppersburg, Voice and Eye in Faulkner’s Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 1. 17 Ruppersburg, 14. 18 Linda Hutcheon, Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 4.

160

Gene C. Fant, Jr.

to find the “truth” of the narrative? When is Temple really raped? How many times and by how many men? How can Popeye’s character be explained? Can justice ever be realized? Is the justice of Popeye’s conviction and execution really “justice”? Faulkner seems to revel in his ability to thwart certainty, as he manipulates sensory input at every turn. A close reading of the text unveils Faulkner’s constant attention to exploiting the reader’s traditional means of understanding the text. The most overt undermining of the senses occurs in the novel’s optical disruptions, and Faulkner emphasizes a lack of visual clarity throughout Sanctuary’s narrative.19 Light is never strong, and objects often disrupt characters’ lines of vision. The novel’s first image is an obstructed view: “From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking.” 20 The screen may hide Popeye, but it also filters his field of vision. The bushes impair Popeye’s vision, breaking it into a striped view of alternating bush limbs and Benbow drinking. Benbow’s first sight of Popeye is equally distorted. Thick plant growth surrounds the locus, “in which broken sunlight lay sourceless. … In the spring the drinking man leaned his face to the broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the shattered reflection of Popeye’s straw hat, though he had heard no sound.” 21 The same screen that hides Popeye impedes Benbow’s vision, but Popeye’s reflection rippling in the spring’s water further distorts his perceptions. Neither man gains a clear picture of the other; therefore, neither man attains a clear understanding of what he observes. Visual fracturing binds their first impressions of each other.22 Another example of this intentional flawing of sensory input comes in the scenes describing Tommy’s voyeuristic activity at the Old Frenchman place.

19 Faulkner also undermines the auditory descriptions, separating them from the visual elements that usually accompany sounds, such that things which are seen are unheard, and things which are heard are unseen. 20 Sanctuary, 3 21 Sanctuary, 3. 22 Sanctuary’s jails likewise are filled with muddled light. Goodwin’s cell is dimly lighted by a “narrow slit of a window,” 289. At dawn, “a narrow rosy pencil of sunlight fell level through the window,” 293. Popeye’s cell has a similar window: “the high small window, the grated door through which the light fell,” 325. A further description notes that “[l]ittle daylight ever reached the cell, and a light burned in the corridor all the time, falling into the cell in a broad pale mosaic, reaching the cot where his feet lay,” 328. Inside Popeye’s Inferno, there is little light, little sight and little which makes him human. Sensory deprivation undermines his senses (and those of the reader). Just as he was hidden behind a screen of brush which filter his view of Benbow in the novel’s opening, Popeye approaches the end of his fictional life hidden behind a screen of jail-bars which also alter his view of the outside world.

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig

161

With nightfall, the characters become anxious and more aggressive. Darkness cloaks the desires the men have regarding Temple, and, as the tension rises, Faulkner injects a masterful increase in the action’s suspense by shifting the narrative to follow Tommy. In the oppressive darkness outside the house, Tommy finds the lighted window of the room to which Temple retreats to spend the night. The narrator relates Tommy’s thoughts: “There was a light in the window there. Don’t nobody never use in there, he said, stopping, then he said, That’s where she’ll be stayin, and he went to the window and looked in.” 23 Crouched in the darkness, Tommy watches Temple undress. Temple looks at her watch, and then she looks directly at Tommy: “With the watch in her hand she lifted her head and looked directly at him, her eyes calm and empty as two holes. After a while she looked down at the watch again and returned it to her stocking.” 24 Tommy continues to be invisible as he stares in the window: “Then, the coat clutched to her breast, she whirled and looked straight into Tommy’s eyes and whirled and ran and flung herself upon the chair.” 25 Temple does not realize that Tommy is watching her because Tommy is invisible due to the light reflection gradient of the lighted room against the darkened window glass. The optical illusion flaws her sense of sight. Even through she looks “directly at him,” her eyes are useless, as “empty as two holes.” The reader also must temper the interpretation of Tommy’s observations of Temple and the tension of the night scenes against Tommy’s mental state as he crouches. He is the group’s low man, uncomfortable with the actions he believes that Popeye or one of the other men will undertake that night. As he crouches beneath the window, though, Tommy becomes aroused by the sight of Temple moving about the room: “From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave him.” 26 His state of arousal heightens his senses and colors his thinking, causing him to be skittish of noises, especially ones that might indicate Popeye’s presence. Tommy’s skittishness leads to a second instance of virtual invisibility when he enters the room with Popeye and Ruby. Ruby cannot see him, though she can feel him: Tommy crept into the room, also soundless; she would have been no more aware of his entrance than of Popeye’s, if it hadn’t been for his eyes. They glowed, breasthigh, with a profound interrogation, then they disappeared and the woman could then feel him, squatting beside her … she remained motionless beside the door,

23

Sanctuary, 73. Sanctuary, 74. 25 Sanctuary, 74. 26 Sanctuary, 83. 24

162

Gene C. Fant, Jr. with Tommy squatting beside her, his face toward the invisible bed. … [S]he felt Tommy move from beside her, without a sound, as though the stealthy evacuation of his position blew soft and cold upon her in the black silence; without seeing or hearing him, she knew that he had crept again from the room, following Popeye.27

The descriptions of Tommy’s lack of visibility, though, are not the only way that Faulkner complicates the narrative. For example, Faulkner gives the first part of the narrative a distinct problem, forcing the reader to see what Tommy sees, generating a situation in which the reader “watches” Tommy watch Temple who watches herself in the window’s reflection. All of this depends on the narrator’s ability to translate the scene into words. Significantly, though, Faulkner adds another detail to the scene: he has Tommy looking through a damaged window. Tommy not only contends with the darkness and with his own arousal; he has an impaired view. To complete the aforementioned description of Tommy first looking in the window, the narrator concludes with a very specific detail: “There was a light in the window there. Dont nobody never use in there, he said, stopping, then he said, That’s where she’ll be stayin, and he went down to the window and looked in. The sash was down. Across a missing pane a sheet of rusted tin was nailed.” 28 This broken window provides an apt metaphor for what the reader must understand: narrative is imperfect and subjective. Narrative vision is not simple and orderly. Its very nature flaws it. Just as the covered window pane impairs Tommy’s view of Temple, the narrator’s choice of details impedes the reader’s view of the narrative.29 Tommy’s observations shape the reader’s interpretation of the evening’s events, but should the reader trust the narrator to reproduce accurately the character’s sight and thoughts? Just how reliable should the reader find an invisible man’s observations anyway? 30 27

Sanctuary, 85. Sanctuary, 73. 29 Tommy’s case is a good one, for every time I teach Sanctuary, all of my students presume that he is African-American. The text, though, indicates that he apparently has blond hair: “the sun-bleached curls on the back of his head matted with dried blood and singed with powder,” 117. These readers have made judgments and interpretations about the text that rely on their own eisegesis of the text rather than close reading of the narrative. See below concerning the character of Shreve McCannon for further thoughts on this eisegetical impulse. 30 Throughout the novel, the optical senses may not always be trusted or believed. Other things are invisible as well; including a secret bird (Sanctuary, 3), invisible automobiles (5), an invisible highroad (6), an invisible bed (85), and invisible rat feet (87). Temple is a shadowy ghost (69, 70, 86), Goodwin and Van are a single shadow (76), and the faces of Popeye’s mother and grandmother both disappear (320 and 323, respectively). Popeye himself even performs an act of illusion with a match: “They removed the handcuff; Popeye’s hand appeared to flick a small flame out of thin air” (325). 28

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig

163

Faulkner also provides an example of how text has the power and how reading sets some of the other characters apart from the rest. Specifically, neither Ruby nor Popeye seem to have much use for reading (readers may even doubt Popeye’s basic literacy), and Ruby generally does not read newspapers, but instead uses them to line her shelves.31 Popeye refuses to look at magazines while he serves out his last few days, saying “What for?” 32 Further, he refuses to read the newspapers which the turnkey brings every morning: “They fell to the floor and lay there, accumulating, unrolling and flattening slowly of their own weight in diurnal progression.” 33 These details suggest that Popeye has no need to inquire about reality or to seek after information: he knows his fate. He also knows his guilt for other murders and other felonies. The dramatic irony is great when the District Attorney declares, “It’s them thugs like that that have made justice a laughing-stock, until even when we get a conviction, everybody knows it wont hold.” 34 Ironically, Popeye senses that a twisted justice actually is being served. He refuses to read about it in the papers because he knows the truth. If anyone in the novel should be a reader, Benbow should be, and, in fact, a book gives him his first identity in Popeye’s mind. Popeye thinks that Benbow may be carrying a pistol in his pocket, but indicates amusement that a man would carry a book in his pocket while walking through the woods. Consequently, the unnamed book in Benbow’s pocket gives him partial identity to Popeye, who begins to call him “Professor.” 35 This book sets Benbow apart from the moon-shiners because he has access to something special, even though Benbow’s book is nothing special: “Just a book. The kind that people read. Some people do.” 36 When Popeye brings Benbow into the house, he introduces Benbow as a professor (“He’s got a book with him” 37), and jokes that maybe Benbow has come to the Old Frenchman place to read. Ultimately, Popeye labels Benbow, the lawyer, the seeker after epistemological truth in the court of law, as a reader, and this supposedly gives him special access to knowledge. Even Reba suspects that Benbow should have access to information when she speaks with Benbow after Temple’s disappearance: “They’re gone,” she said. “Both of them. Dont you read no papers?”

31 Sanctuary, 291. Ruby does, however, read the newspaper as she lines her shelves; this is how she finds out about Goodwin’s return from the Philippines. 32 Sanctuary, 329. 33 Sanctuary, 329. 34 Sanctuary, 328. 35 Sanctuary, 9. 36 Sanctuary, 4. 37 Sanctuary, 9.

164

Gene C. Fant, Jr. “What papers?” Horace said. “Hello. Hello!” “They aint here no more, I said,” Miss Reba said. “I dont know nuttin about them.” 38

Reba assumes that anyone who wants to can read about the truth. For her own part, though, she refuses to read, because she “dont want to know nuttin.” 39 Reba, Ruby, and Popeye may be expected to be ignorant or illiterate, but Horace, in fact, does not seem to read either. When Popeye asks Benbow if he reads books, the narrator fails to give us any reply from Horace.40 In the same way, Benbow’s response to Ruby’s question, “Don’t you read no papers?” is “What papers?” 41 By depicting several general readers who refuse to read actively, Faulkner suggests not only a personal deficiency but offers a generalized criticism of individuals who refuse to be bothered with any sort of struggle with text. As the narrative describes Goodwin’s trial, Faulkner provides yet another glimpse into narrative manipulation of the reader. The District Attorney at Goodwin’s trial presents physical objects as objective evidence of Goodwin’s guilt. These objects are revealed in stages: first, the D. A. presents these “sparse objects”: “the bullet from Tommy’s skull, [and] a stoneware containing corn whiskey.” 42 Neither of these objects can speak for itself, so the D. A. has Ruby testify against her husband. She includes information about Goodwin’s moonshining activities and their marriage. Eventually, the D. A. forces her to translate the mute objects as well. The next day he introduces another object into evidence: “The district attorney faced the jury. ‘I offer as evidence this object which was found at the scene of the crime.’ He held in his hand a corn-cob. It appeared to have been dipped in dark brownish paint.” 43 This evidence, like the bullet and the jug, cannot testify itself, so the attorney translates the object for the jury: The reason this was not offered sooner is that its bearing on the case was not made clear until the testimony of the defendant’s wife which I have just caused to be read aloud to you gentleman from the record. You have just heard the testimony of the chemist and the gynecologist—who is, as you gentlemen know, an authority on the most sacred affairs of that most sacred thing in life: womanhood—who says that this is no longer a matter for the hangman, but for a bonfire of gasoline—.44

38

Sanctuary, 282. Sanctuary, 282. 40 Sanctuary, 4. 41 Sanctuary, 282. 42 Sanctuary, 282. 43 Sanctuary, 298. 44 Sanctuary, 298. 39

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig

165

He appeals to the corn-cob’s expert interpreters: Ruby, a chemist, and, finally, a gynecologist. Faulkner’s undermining of sensory experience thus carries over into the realm of non-sensory evidence, as he allows persons who possess flawed perspectives on the objects translate them to the reader. When the time comes for a verdict to be made, the D. A. continues to appeal to the objects and their interpreters: “You have listened to this horrible, this unbelievable, story which this young girl has told; you have seen the evidence and heard the doctor’s testimony: I shall no longer subject this ruined, defenseless child to the agony of—.” 45 The skewed interpretation of the objects’ testimony renders them quite worthless because it must be filtered through experientially driven human interpreters. The problem is that all translation is interpretation, and the court experts undermine the objective truth of the objects with sensory-based interpretation. It is no wonder that the reader finds the story “unbelievable,” for the reader “knows” the inaccuracy of Temple’s story, but the reader must also recognize that the reader’s own understanding of the story’s events has been manipulated the narrator, just as the evidence presented in the trial has been related by a district attorney who has an agenda. One final image yields a powerful metaphor concerning the reader: Goodwin’s invalid father, Pap. This man depends totally on Goodwin’s provision: Benbow watched Goodwin seat the old man in a chair, where he sat obediently with that tentative and abject eagerness of a man who has but one pleasure left and whom the world can reach only through one sense, for he was both blind and deaf: a short man with a bald skull and a round, full-fleshed, rosy face in which his cataracted eyes looked like two clots of phlegm.46

When Tommy tells Benbow, “Hit’s jest Pap,” he proceeds to say, “Blind and deef both. I be dawg ef I wouldn’t hate to be in a fix wher I couldn’t tell and wouldn’t even keer whut I was eatin.” 47 When Temple wakes up in the corncrib, Pap appears again, this time headed toward the barn to use a stall as a latrine: “The blind man was coming down the slope at a scuffling trot, tapping ahead with the stick, the other hand at his waist, clutching a wad of his trousers.” 48 Pap, virtually dependent in every way, acts independently only to move his chair into the sunshine49 and to relieve himself in the barn stall.50

45

Sanctuary, 303. Sanctuary, 12–13. 47 Sanctuary, 48. 48 Sanctuary, 92. 49 Sanctuary, 48. 50 Sanctuary, 92. 46

166

Gene C. Fant, Jr.

Pap provides Faulkner with this final metaphor for the relationship between the reader and the narrator. The name “Pap,” a clipped form of “Papa,” has a double meaning: “pap” meaning “nipple” (as in infantile) or “insipid food with neither taste nor substance.” He can eat only what he is brought, a bit of meat and bread smothered in sweet sorghum.51 Pap could not survive without such assistance. This situation pretty much describes the general reader, who depends on the narrator to provide narrative sustenance and usually receives pre-cut, pre-sweetened morsels. This image matches the aforementioned comments Faulkner later made concerning the novel, that he had written it purely for the money and that he viewed it as non-literary pablum. Goodwin’s father symbolizes the novel’s general reader: the reader is like the invalid old man who must depend on someone else who provides everything. The reader is blind and deaf, save for the sensory input provided by the narrator, who leads the way to the story’s table and provides the entire repast. Further, a passive reader forces the narrator to extrude from the narrative, to assert his or her presence throughout the construction of the narrative; Faulkner takes ample advantage of this scenario, toying with the epistemology throughout the narrative. “Cataracted eyes” have been dammed, and general readers of Faulkner’s fiction must realize that when they come to the table for a fictional repast, they are completely dependent on the narrator. Ruppersburg observes, “The reader must actively engage in the narrative process. Passive acquiescence guarantees both his own failure as well as the artist’s.” 52 If readers read passively, they become self-blinded and -deafened bystanders who are unable to do anything about what happens in the narrative. Pap Goodwin, who sits on the porch in the very midst of the action, deaf and blind, hands crossed in his lap, cannot do anything when Temple screams in terror, “Something is going to happen to me. … ‘Something is happening to me! … I told you all the time!’ ” 53 In the same way, Faulkner sees his readers helplessly experiencing the narrative world that passes by. With Sanctuary’s undermining of the senses, the veracity of narrative reality must be challenged continually. Through this struggle, Faulkner draws the reader into the action, compelling the reader “to view events from the same vantage point as characters, in a sense establishing a ‘second narrator’ who must gather facts, evaluate opinion, and order the story into a lucid, comprehensible form.” 54 Can the reader trust the narrator? Are the narrator’s descriptions trustworthy? Can the reader trust his or her own interpretation of the narrative? Can the reader believe in verdicts based on a reading experience that asks the reader to 51

Sanctuary, 13. Ruppersburg, 19. 53 Sanctuary, 107. 54 Ruppersburg, 19. 52

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig

167

stay busy regurgitating the facts into mental rags after chewing the facts like “chewing tobacco” in a toothless old man’s mouth? Postmodern sensibilities force readers to examine the text for flaws and logical anomalies. When the reader begins to probe Sanctuary, however, the realization arises that Faulkner has already been there, booby-trapping the path and anticipating every move. Epistemology cannot be based simply upon sensory evidence, but what other options may be used? The undercutting of the narrative in Sanctuary extends Faulkner’s previous experiments in controversial techniques in The Sound and the Fury. In that case, of course, he used the multiple narrators to undercut the reader’s ability to follow the narrative in “normal,” orderly fashion. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner also struggled with these same issues of narrative responsibility to meet the expectations of the reader.55 In this novel, though, he asserts an even bolder assault on the reader’s sensibilities. By resorting to multiple narrators, Faulkner demands the reader to be more flexible and patient; she must wait for the entire story to be told before coming to any sort of conclusion about the events of the story or the characters. Intensifying the narrative style of, among others, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights,56 Faulkner obscures the story’s events through multiple narrators and even gives characters in two different generations the same name. Donald Kartiganer notes, “The reader remains in a welter of contradictory visions” 57 throughout the novel. As Maurice Coindreau observes, “The structure of The Sound and the Fury would in itself be enough to discourage the lazy reader.” 58 Such a “lazy reader” who first comes to The Sound and the Fury usually gives up trying to figure out exactly what has been going on. That is why such reader’s guides as that of Edmond Volpe are so popular: Volpe breaks down the events of the narrative into chronological order to help the reader make sense of the fluid time shifts of the tale.59 Certainly these

55

See his comments at Virginia: “[T]hat’s an obligation that [the writer] assumes with his vocation, that he’s going to write it in a way that people can understand it. He doesn’t have to write it in the way that every idiot can understand it—every imbecile in the third grade can understand it, but he’s got to use a language which is accepted and in which the words have specific meanings that everybody agrees on,” FIU, 52–53. 56 He was enamored of its technique, he said at the University of Virginia, FIU, 202. 57 Donald Kartiganer. “The Sound and the Fury and the Dislocation of Form.” Rpt. in Modern Critical Interpretations of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (New York: Chelsea House, 188), 23. 58 Maurice Coindreau, “Preface to Le Bruit et la fureur.” Rpt. in Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘The Sound and the Fury’. Ed. Michael H. Cowan. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968), 31. 59 Edmond Volpe. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1964.

168

Gene C. Fant, Jr.

guides aid the novice reader, but they defy Faulkner’s crafty intent: he wanted the reader to eschew conventional narrative rules about order. Kartiganer asserts, “The novel insists on the poverty of created meaning.” 60 Simple readings just do not work with The Sound and the Fury. The novel’s concluding scene is among Faulkner’s most famous images. Luster drives Benjy in the family wagon through the courthouse square area and, in doing so, must proceed around the circle in which the Confederate soldier monument stands. Seeing that the various persons around the square have focused their eyes on Benjy and himself, Luster decides to show off his wagonhandling skills by breaking the rules for circling the monument: “Dar Mr Jason car,” he said, then he spied another group of negroes. “Les show dem niggers how quality does, Benjy,” he said. “Whut you say?” He looked back. Ben sat, holding the flower in his fist, his gaze empty and untroubled. Luster hit Queenie again and swung her to the left at the monument. For an instant Ben sat in an utter hiatus. Then he bellowed. Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound, and Luster’s eyes backrolling for a white instant. “Gret God,” he said. “Hush! Hush! Gret God!.” 61

This scene provides the epitome of sound in the narrative’s conclusion, just as Jason’s ensuing beating of Queenie and Luster provides the fury necessary in order to restore order to the idiot’s tale. Lewis Simpson assigns a romantic Southern attitude to Benjy in that concluding scene. For Simpson, Benjy’s world is that of the South’s attempt to remove the chaos from history and to impose an artificial sense of order to the world: “History is closed in the consciousness of a world historical idiot.” 62 When Luster passes the monument, he reveals the lack of critical scrutiny of the world, embodied in the soldier’s “empty eyes” and “marble hand.” In the real world, people go the wrong way, people are where they shouldn’t be, and bad things happen. On the other hand, Benjy, the mentally challenged observer demands a fixed, idealized world. Perhaps Simpson is on to something here, for this demand for an idealized, ordered world can carry over in other directions as well, including that of the reader. The choice Faulkner made to conclude the narrative with this specific scene elevates its importance, and Faulkner’s choice of two details in this scene 60

Kartiganer, 37. The Sound and the Fury. Corrected text ed. Noel Polk (New York: Vintage, 1984.), 319–20. 62 Lewis P. Simpson “Sex & History: Origins of Faulkner’s Apocrypha.” The Maker and the Myth: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1977. Ed. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie. (Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1978), 65. 61

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig

169

further extends this elevation. David G. Miller63 believes that the choice of direction reveals one of Faulkner’s purposes in the scene. The scene includes two references to directions. In the first paragraph indicating which direction Luster took around the monument and then in the closing paragraph. Benjy expected the wagon to follow the “rules” of orderly procession around the square. Luster, however, violates the rules, and the bellowing begins, ending only after the fracas Jason implements. Instead of going right, Benjy’s wellconditioned expectation, Luster takes a new path, deciding to call attention to his ability to direct the cart any way he wishes, since he is in control. Benjy goes berserk out of fear and lamentation for the lost order. Jason intervenes and restores everything’s “ordered place,” to use Faulkner’s own phrase, at which point all is well with Benjy’s world once again. Faulkner himself called attention to the importance of the directional shift, when he wrote the comments on his map of Yoknapatawpha County. In his commentary to the arrow pointing at the town square, he notes that the courthouse was where the confederate monument stands, “which Benjy had to pass on his left [Faulkner’s underlining].” 64 Significantly, the directions invert the reader’s expectation of order both in narrative array and in eye movement on text. The “normal” expectation dictates that narrative will follow conventions of chronology and sensibility. But Faulkner disrupts everything, forcing the reader in the wrong directions, flouting the reader’s expectations at every possible turn. Just as a violation of the “normal” proved to be too much for Benjy, so the violation of the “normal” rules for narrative order proves to be too much for Faulkner’s “idiot” general readers.65 Through these metaphors in Sanctuary and The Sound and the Fury, the essence of what Faulkner appears to be saying is that epistemologically, most readers are foolish at best and blind at worst. The reader is either lost in his own world of dependency or trapped in a world of manipulation. The other option for readers is active engagement in the reading of the narrative, but this option has problems as well, for readers can become seduced by the idea that they know the story better than the narrator and thus force the narrator into meeting the readers’ slavish expectations for the narrative. Shreve McCannon in Absalom, Absalom! embodies this sort of reader.

63

The equating of the reader’s desire for order and Benjy’s outburst at the Square was originally an idea Miller expressed in a conversation with me; he has been kind enough to extend his permission to amplify his idea in this work. 64 Rpt. as the endpiece to Absalom, Absalom! Corrected text ed. Noel Polk (New York: Vintage, 1986). 65 Faulkner actually calls a segment of the general audience an “idiot” in an answer to a question at the University of Virginia, FIU, 53.

170

Gene C. Fant, Jr.

Faulkner uses Shreve McCannon to extend further his criticism of the reader. The novel presents insight into how narrative arises; Robert Dale Parker states that the novel powerfully exposes the way that any story is an act of mind. … To finish reading Absalom, Absalom! can turn the process of thinking about it upside down. … [I]t is like a detective novel, where new information helps sort the clues from the false leads, but Absalom also ends with more questioning and less certainty than we might expect from a detective novel.66

Edwin R. Hunter, following an argument suggested in Cleanth Brooks’ William Faulkner, The Yoknapatawpha Country,67 believes that Shreve is the novelist, but Shreve and Quentin together synthesize the story into being.68 Other critics, such as Wittenberg, say that together the two young men symbolize the artist: “Faulkner produces a virtual paean to the marvelous process of fictional creation. The two men share an experience which is so heightened that it approaches ecstasy, and the process itself becomes essentially more valuable than its product, the completed tale.” 69 Perhaps we should read the novel with Parker’s “act of the mind” as a clue regarding Faulkner’s metafiction. In Shreve, readers do not have a portrait of the writer, they have a peek into how the writer’s mind must modulate the narrative based on the anticipated reader of the novel. When Faulkner was trying to publish short stories in the late 1920s, one of the editors at Scribner’s Magazine wrote back to him, “It would seem that in the attempt to avoid the obvious you have manufactured the vague. … It might be worth while [sic] to attempt to tell a straightforward tale as you might narrate an incident to a friend.” 70 The goal of the editor, likely, was to get Faulkner to tell the story to someone who would ask questions of clarification in order to simplify and “point” the narrative. Joseph W. Reed sees Shreve as just this sort of outside-the-narrative audience and feels that Shreve’s participation in the narrative’s creation unveils the very mind of the writer: 66

Parker, 11; 125. Parker, in fact, labels the entire novel as metafiction, 10. Joseph W. Reed, Jr., prefers to call it meta-narrative: “narrative about narrative” Faulkner’s Narrative. (New Haven: Yale, 1973), 147. 67 Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner, The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale, 1963), 311–12. 68 Edwin R. Hunter William Faulkner: Narrative Practice and Prose Style (Washington: Windhover, 1973), 74. 69 Wittenberg, 154. 70 Rpt. in Gary Lee Stonum “The Sound and the Fury: The Search for a Narrative Method.” Modern Critical Interpretations: William Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury’ (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 42.

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig

171

The creation must be a collaboration between the maker of the fiction and the faith of the reader. He cooperates in responding with expectations which arise from what he is told; he collaborates as he alters the substance of the myth, as he identifies with it or not, responds to it, reshapes it in the hearing to suit his own ends. … Quentin and Shreve … make visible a process which generally starts only after the novel has passed out of the novelist’s hands and into the mind of the reader. It is a process which the novelist must continually imagine and project (What will the reader think? What do I want him to do?), but over which he can have no control. Here it becomes a part—and I think a most important part—of the novel itself.71

Shreve, then, embodies the imagined audience with whom Faulkner must communicate. Shreve, though, is not simply the “Hearer,” as Reed terms it.72 In Shreve, Faulkner shows the writer’s struggles with an overactive imagined reader, who asserts power over the narrative that should be reserved for the author.73 Shreve’s character, not content with simply listening to the events of the story, actively fills in the narrative’s interstices, altering the story to address his own sensibilities and suppositions about the story. He has taken the initiative in getting Quentin’s story started: “Tell me about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” 74 As the story of Sutpen’s plan and Rosa Coldfield’s dotage unfolds, Shreve exercises unusual participation in the retelling. Sometimes the participation closely matches that of the reader’s own mental activities during a reading session, such as correcting Quentin’s errors of fact (such as the status of West Virginia’s statehood in 1833),75 interjecting editorial comments (like Shreve’s harrumphing “The demon” 76 at Sutpen’s actions), urging Quentin to proceed with the narrative77 and (like most readers) begging Quentin for pronoun reference clarification.78 Notably, Shreve questions narrator reliability, observing that Mr. Compson “seems to have got an awful lot of delayed information awful

71

Reed, 174. Reed, 169. 73 Knowing how Faulkner loved to pull at quibbles on character names, I think it no accident that Shreve’s name is close to “shrive.” “To shrive” is “to hear the confession of and give absolution to (a penitent),” The American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 1263. 74 Absalom, Absalom!, 142. See a West Point cadet’s question about Faulkner’s grandfather and the protracted response for an interesting personal parallel to Shreve’s question, 108–109. 75 Absalom, Absalom!, 179. 76 Absalom, Absalom!, 181. 77 Absalom, Absalom!, 210. 78 Absalom, Absalom!, 198. 72

172

Gene C. Fant, Jr.

quick, after having waited forty-five years.” 79 His participation in the narrative, though, is more intense than the “normal” reader’s participation in the reading process. In chapter six, Shreve dominates the narrative, restating what he has heard but adding his own blandishments to Quentin’s tale (such as Rosa’s father making “General Lee and Jeff Davis mad”)80 and even making simple errors, such as calling Rosa “Aunt Rosa.” 81 As Shreve proceeds, Quentin can only answer with a simple affirmative: “Yes.” 82 When Quentin finally begins to amplify the events, Shreve halts him to conclude the chapter: “Wait then, … For God’s sake wait.” 83 At that point, Shreve bursts out, “Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it. It’s better than the theatre, isn’t it. It’s better than Ben Hur, isn’t it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn’t it.” 84 Not only does the story fascinate Shreve, he even suggests other details, such as that Sutpen had a girlfriend somewhere,85 and invents details outright, such as the drawing room’s appearance.86 Shreve’s assertiveness causes the narrator to pause, observing that Shreve ceased. That is, for all the two of them, Shreve and Quentin, knew he had stopped, since for all the two of them knew he had never begun, since it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which one had been doing the talking. So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve.87

At the novel’s conclusion, Shreve, unaware of Quentin’s plans to commit suicide, posits summary judgments about the South. He blends his comments on the South with his offer to help Quentin warm up, and, as the reader would expect, he is unintentionally harsh: Jesus, if I was going to have to spend nine months in this climate, I would sure hate to have come from the South. Maybe I wouldn’t come from the South anyway, even if I could stay there. Wait. Listen. I’m not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I don’t know how to say it better. Because it’s something

79 Absalom, Absalom!, 214. See Parker, 134–152, for a cogent discussion of the epistemological problems related to the novel’s narrative layers. 80 Absalom, Absalom!,144. 81 Absalom, Absalom!,143. 82 Absalom, Absalom!, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150. 83 Absalom, Absalom!, 175. 84 Absalom, Absalom!, 176. 85 Absalom, Absalom!, 177. 86 Absalom, Absalom!, 268. 87 Absalom, Absalom!, 267. This conflation occurs again on page 276.

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig

173

my people haven’t got. … What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? 88

Quentin replies, “You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.” Shreve’s retort is fecund: “Would I then? … Do you understand it?” 89 Shreve implies that Quentin, the primary narrator, understands no more about the story than does the story’s primary audience: Shreve. Shreve, thus, provides Faulkner with a metaphor for the active reader who arrogantly claims knowledge over the narrative. Shreve does have some knowledge, to be sure, but he greatly overestimates his sense of vision about its meaning. In fact, when Faulkner finally provides a physical description of Shreve, he portrays him as watching Quentin “from behind the two opaque and lamp-glared moons of his spectacles.” 90 Just as he had done in Sanctuary, Faulkner gives the reader a character with impaired sight, for Shreve’s glasses, the standard equipment of the stereotypical readers, are “opaque” and “lampglared,” just as was the window through which Tommy watched Temple. Faulkner also depicts Shreve as sitting bare-armed 91 and shirtless,92 like a worker who has been exerting in the cold air. He appears to be active physically, like a wrestler who is grappling with a story. He is struggling to make a judgment about Sutpen’s plan and about the South and Southerners in general. At the novel’s conclusion, Shreve’s judgments about the narrative find full articulation. In his mind, he has determined that Quentin holds great disdain for his homeland. He expresses a desire for Quentin to affirm this judgment and to explain his abhorrence: “Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?” 93 Quentin’s response is instinctual and spasmodic: “I dont hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!.94 At this point, the audience has superceded full control over the storyteller. Shreve is a prig, with very smug expectations concerning the story’s events, values, and meaning. Rather than perform an exegesis of the story, drawing his conclusions from the story, he has performed an act of eisegesis, forcing his preconceptions and judgments into the narrative. He has usurped the role of the narrator.

88

Absalom, Absalom!, 289. Absalom, Absalom!, 289. 90 Absalom, Absalom!, 176. The spectacles also appear on page 177. 91 Absalom, Absalom!, 176. 92 Absalom, Absalom!, 177. 93 Absalom, Absalom!, 303. 94 Absalom, Absalom!, 303. 89

174

Gene C. Fant, Jr.

In reading Faulkner’s interviews concerning his works, especially those in public forums like the University of Virginia and the United States Military Academy, the exchanges are sometimes reminiscent of Shreve’s back-andforth querying of Quentin. In Faulkner in the University, repeated questions sought after Faulkner’s views on the South. For example, one Virginia student asked him, “Mr. Faulkner, throughout your work there seems to be a theme that there’s a curse upon the South. I was wondering if you could explain what this curse is and if there is any chance of the South to escape.” 95 At times, the reader almost expects for the more hostile questioners, especially those who were upset with his off-the-cuff characterization of Virginians as “snobs,” to ask, “Mr. Faulkner, why do you hate the South?” Perhaps that question could be translated into, “Mr. Faulkner, why do you hate the Reader?” to which one doubts that he would have burst into tears Quentin-like and retorted, “I don’t! I don’t hate the reader!” Instead, one suspects that he would have replied, “Tell him to get off his lazy mule-haunches and stop being such an idiot.” “or blind.” Or “such a prig.” Let the reader choose her own metaphor.

95

FIU, 79.

WOOLF AND WELTY, READERS AND WRITERS, WRITING AND UNWRITING REINE DUGAS BOUTON

Reflecting and departing from Virginia Woolf’s story, “An Unwritten Novel”, “The Key” enables Eudora Welty to stretch her audiences’ reading muscles as they grapple with the importance of meaning-making in a narrative. The relationship between writer and reader becomes the story as readers begin to recognize how Welty, and, in a different manner, Woolf, expected readers to play an active role in the storytelling process. To this end, Welty used “An Unwritten Novel” as a springboard to explore the art of writing. Welty borrows key words and symbols from Woolf’s story and creates an uninterested yet interested storyteller/observer; however, the two stories diverge as Woolf’s story unwrites itself as she intended while Welty’s remains a conundrum that must be solved. Yet, there can be no doubt that Welty hoped readers would become illuminated just as her narrator hoped Albert and Ellie might. Welty seems to endorse this process, this journey or struggle, toward illumination. Just as Woolf’s narrator and “Minnie” make their journey, Welty’s narrator, along with Albert, Ellie, and the red-haired man also make a similar kind of movement toward a destination. Meanwhile, readers of both stories are asked to continue their ongoing struggles, their effort to reach the goal of communication and understanding of the author’s message. In short, all share the task decoding meaning and unwriting narratives in order to become illuminated.

For at the other end of the writing is the reader. There is sure to be somewhere the reader, who is a user himself of imagination and thought, who knows, perhaps, as much about the need of communication as the writer. Eudora Welty (“Looking at Short Stories” 106)

In an interview, Eudora Welty said, “I was always a reader, but I was never conscious of being specifically influenced by any writer or reader. I’m sure there were lots of unconscious influences, but when I was writing a story it was all of a piece in my head” (White 234). While she was writing her short stories and novels, Welty may have been unaware of outside influences; however, her

176

Reine Dugas Bouton

readers may see more clearly what effect other writers like Virginia Woolf have had on her writing. Woolf ’s style and subjects surface in much of Welty’s fiction. Two stories often neglected by readers and critics alike, “The Key” and “An Unwritten Novel,” reveal several specific parallels between Welty and Woolf as writers. Because Welty may not have been conscious of Woolf ’s influence, her reasons for writing fiction that frequently reflects Woolf’s remain unknown. Perhaps Woolf’s words resonated so strongly inside of Welty, that they fortuitously found their way into her story. It is more likely, though, that while Welty was a beginning writer when she composed “The Key,” she perceived Woolf ’s attempt to demystify the writing process in “An Unwritten Novel” and attempted to use Woolf ’s story as a springboard to explore the notions of narrative, writing, and storytelling. The rich connection between Woolf’s and Welty’s fiction has been made by other critics. Welty scholar, Noel Polk, first suggests the conflation of “The Key,” “An Unwritten Novel,” and another story by Woolf, “A Mark on the Wall,” noting that Woolf’s and Welty’s narrators appeared to have similar methods. Additionally, in her book, Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence, Suzann Harrison argues that “Welty’s reading and rereading of one particular author contributed to the writer she has become,” and that since she was an avid reader of Woolf’s works, Welty uses many of the same symbols, character types, and narrative techniques (142). While Harrison illustrates the confluence of themes and “shared concerns” in both writers’ major works, as in To the Lighthouse and The Optimist’s Daughter (109), she does not note that the “The Key” resonates even more uncannily with elements of “An Unwritten Novel,” especially in its narrative strategy and technique. In fact, the stories begin so closely the same that readers may confuse one for the other. The first similarity is that Welty uses a narrator/observer in “The Key” who creates a story about people in a train station, a subtle parallel to Woolf ’s setting of a train in “Unwritten Novel.” A further parallel is found in the fact that Welty’s story also revolves around reading the story of one’s lives based on an individual’s appearance or gestures, just as does Woolf ’s. In fact, Welty incorporates and repeats so many words and concepts that originate from Woolf ’s story that one can almost read “The Key” as a word by word homage. Welty mimics many of Woolf’s words and phrases verbatim: hope, reproach, awkward, conceal, knowledge, Niagara, mysterious, happiness, symbol, secret, reticence, and communication. In both tone and content, the beginnings of each story seem much too alike to be mere coincidence. Clearly, Welty borrows heavily from the beginning of “An Unwritten Novel” to expand upon as well as diverge from Woolf’s notions of writers and readers. Woolf and Welty place their narrators in the position of observers who watch people in a train or train station, choose those who interest them the most—a deaf mute couple for Welty and a solitary woman for Woolf—and begin to

Writing and Unwriting

177

formulate stories about them. The similarities go beyond narrator to include subjects, both of whom have noticeable disabilities. The woman in “An Unwritten Novel” has a twitch: she “shuddered, twitched her arm queerly to the middle of her back and shook her head” (UN 106). Likewise, Albert and Ellie Morgan in “The Key” are deaf mutes who, when they make their disability known by talking with their hands, cause a reaction in those around them: “shallow pity washed over the waiting room like a dirty wave foaming and creeping over a public beach” (K 32). Another parallel both plots share is that they depict the hopeless lives the narrators create for their subjects. For example, early in the story, Woolf ’s narrator notices that her subject’s twitch “alone denied all hope” (UN 107). Woolf later names her subject Minnie Marsh, employing one of her frequently used narrative strategies, which James Hafley notes are “naming and plotting” (32). In much the same way, Welty’s narrator plots Albert’s story when he or she sees him find a key on the floor and relays for him, “You can take hope. Because it was I who found the key” (K 32). The narrators create tragic stories for their subjects whom they believe to be marginalized and without hope. And while the remainder of both stories may appear to be about Minnie Marsh or Albert and Ellie Morgan, the more significant meaning is what the speculation reveals about the narrators. For the creator, “the story is never about the subject but always, unavoidably, completely … about its teller” (Hafley 33). A final similarity is that these narrators deliberately mark specific and telling symbols as catalysts for the plot development. Woolf ’s narrator chooses a newspaper, the London Times, and Minnie’s twitch; Welty’s chooses a key and the Morgans’ deafness. Later, both narrators offer interpretations and narratives based on those symbols as well as the other physical details they observe. This is not to say that Welty copies Woolf ’s ideas, for the stories depart from each other in significant ways. The most telling difference, perhaps, is the narrators’ personae. Besides the diverse paths the narratives themselves take— Minnie Marsh has supposedly committed a crime and has a hateful family while Albert and Ellie are looking for happiness and an escape from their deaf world by going to Niagara Falls—Woolf ’s narrator seems quite the opposite of Welty’s. One difference is that Woolf’s narrator’s tone exposes the highly charged, impetuous person behind the voice that readers hear. Often excited in parts of her story—a tone Woolf denotes with exclamation marks—the narrator clearly becomes emotionally involved in the fictionalized stories of her subjects. The narrator thinks of Minnie Marsh, “she looks at life. Ah, but my poor, unfortunate woman, do play the game—do, for all our sakes, conceal it!” (UN 106). As her narrative unfolds and she creates an awful sister-in-law for Minnie, the narrator comments, “How you hate her! She’ll even lock the bathroom door overnight, too” (UN 110). The animated tone of the narrator may reflect the writer’s involvement with the characters in her own fiction.

178

Reine Dugas Bouton

Mirroring Woolf’s passion for her subjects, her narrator interacts with them, talking to them as though they can hear her. After drifting off on a tangent about another subject she has invented a story for—James Moggridge—she writes, “[Yes, Minnie; I know you’ve twitched, but one moment—James Moggridge]” (UN 113). Though Minnie (not even her name) cannot hear the narrator, to the narrator, the created identity exists. Woolf’s use of brackets around her narrator’s direct address to Minnie depicts the narrator’s awareness of her own departure from the main narrative. Earlier, she questions her subject, Minnie: “Have I read you right?” (UN 111). Not only does she wish to know if she has gotten Minnie’s story right, but the narrator’s choice of words also reveals that her subjects are symbols which she interprets. She reads the physical details in front of her and offers her interpretation to her readers, but, at the same time, expresses concern for the potential inaccuracy of her conclusions. This concern manifests itself in Woolf’s tentative lack of confidence in her own skills. At times, the narrator both forgets her train of thought and questions the narrative choices she makes. In fact, Pamela Caughie notes that “none of Woolf’s fictional artists is confident, skillful, successful, or even very productive” (371). While Caughie may be correct, in “An Unwritten Novel,” the narrator’s seeming lack of skill may be an affectation. Perhaps she allows her questions to interrupt the narrative. Indeed, the questions most storytellers might ask themselves in the prewriting stage make their way into Woolf’s finished product. As she sits in the train, speculating on how Minnie might explore the bedroom at Hilda’s house, the narrator breaks in momentarily to observe the real woman, her subject, sitting across from her and says, “(Let me peep across at her opposite; she’s asleep or pretending it; so what would she think about sitting at the window at three o’clock in the afternoon? Health, money, bills, her God?)” (UN 109). By allowing the audience a glimpse into her creative process, the narrator offers the reader a glimpse of her own brainstorming process as she tries to find another detail to embellish. Once the narrator lights on the idea of God, she’s off again: “Yes, sitting on the very edge of the chair looking over the roofs of Eastbourne, Minnie Marsh prays to God. … but what God does she see? Who’s the God of Minnie Marsh … the God of three o’clock in the afternoon?” (UN 109). As she discovers a potential detail, she shifts from reality to fiction as she continues on, parentheses-less and bracket-less, right back into the plot line of Minnie in Eastbourne. Any writer or storyteller will recognize such questioning, fumbling, and doubt as crucial part of the creative process. However, Woolf, through her narrator, unabashedly includes the mental work as part of the story. In doing so, she reveals that the act of storytelling is more complex than the end result, the words readers find on the page. By commenting on her own narrative and revealing the writing process in this way, Woolf’s narrator informs readers without challenging them to interpret on their own; in other words, she decodes or unwrites her own story. However,

Writing and Unwriting

179

by engaging readers in this way, she risks her own reputation for readers may see Woolf and her narrator as inept. While Caughie writes that “Woolf’s artist figures comment directly on their difficulties in narrating the work we are reading” (371), those revelations of seeming ineptitude may be quite calculated. The narrator might, in fact, not have difficulty narrating at all; rather, she may offer readers a far more accurate glimpse into her composition or craft. While at times the narrator does not seem to have control of her own creative powers— “for God’s sake let me have one woman with a name I like!” (UN 112)—and may express frustration at her apparent (though possibly for effect) flighty train of thought, she ultimately completes her job by finishing the story. Because she includes her self-questioning as part of the narrative, Woolf exhibits courage in sharing her writing process. Rather than edit those comments from the story as Welty surely does, she includes them, thus illuminating the entire storytelling process from the moment the writer/narrator/observer views the object which triggers the story to the development of the plot to the conclusion. This break in the narrative, while unusual, alerts readers to the double meaning of “An Unwritten Novel”: what could become a novel does not because Woolf unwrites it so that readers may understand and value its creation. Woolf’s medium for sharing her storytelling technique is her narrator. In “Virginia Woolf’s Narrators and the Art of ‘Life Itself’,” James Hafley accurately argues, “An Unwritten Novel” is “clearly ‘about’ its narrator, whose voice literally creates itself out of the mere raw material that is its subject” (37). Thus, if “An Unwritten Novel” is about the narrator, readers should only interpret Minnie’s story as a function of the narrator’s story. Readers cannot become involved with the painful experiences of Minnie as they are only means to an end—the narrator’s end. The plot the narrator creates for Minnie explains the narrative choices made and the rationale for those choices. For instance, besides emphasizing Minnie’s twitch as some gross debilitation, one noticed and disdained by her family, the narrator determines that Minnie is the poor spinster relation everyone barely tolerates. To further exacerbate Minnie’s life, the narrator decides she must be guilty of a crime and that is the reason she rubs the glass with her glove, to wipe away her guilt: “What she rubs on the window is the stain of sin. Oh, she committed some crime! I have my choice of crimes” (UN 109). Rejecting the notion of a crime of passion because “what flummery to saddle her with sex!” (UN 109), the narrator finally decides that Minnie lingered too long at the draper’s shop and then in a sentence laden with nouns and dashes and little else, creates her crime: “Neighbours—the doctor—baby brother—the kettle—scalded—hospital—dead—or only the shock of it, the blame?” (UN 109). What would normally be the climax of Minnie’s story, the awful crime she has committed, is glossed over—deliberately. The narrator says, “Ah, but the detail matters nothing! It’s what she carries with her; the spot, the crime, the thing to expiate, always there between her shoulders” (UN 109).

180

Reine Dugas Bouton

Woolf’s narrator chooses not to tell the story of Minnie’s crime; rather she creates the crime to explain her subject’s actions—why she rubs the window and why she twitches. She gives Minnie a back story. She notes a sign—Minnie’s twitch—then interprets it for us, and her interpretation becomes a story in itself. Like any good storyteller, the narrator in “An Unwritten Novel” uses the signs in front of her as plot points for her story. At the start of the story, she holds The Times, using it as camouflage and a detail to embellish. The narrator glances down at The Times “for manner’s sake” (UN 106) and later incorporates it into the narrative: “The Times was no protection against such sorrow as hers” (UN 106). By turning signs into symbols through her interpretation, the narrator again comments on the writing process. While she interjects her interpretations as well as asides into the narrative, she, for the most part, maintains the illusion of telling a story. The narrator moves the story along in not quite a linear manner, but forward nevertheless; even when she breaks character in an uncharacteristic manner, she tenaciously clings to her narrative, dragging herself back when she strays and reassuring herself when she doubts her choices. Only “Minnie’s” words or any proof which belies the narrator’s story will convince the narrator of the truth. At the climax of the narrator’s story, the narrator writes, “Unless I’m much mistaken, the pulse’s quickened, the moment’s coming, the threads are racing, Niagara’s ahead. Here’s the crisis!” (UN 114–115). The narrator associates Niagara Falls (which is also mentioned in Welty’s “The Key”) as the symbol representing crisis and Minnie’s confrontation of it. However, her thoughts and narrative are interrupted, for they have reached Eastbourne. The woman destroys the narrator’s fiction by saying, ‘ “He said he’d meet me … Oh, there he is! That’s my son.’ ” (UN 115). Doggedly, the narrator denies the truth, thinking, “Well, but I’m confounded … Surely Minnie, you know better! A strange young man” (UN 115). Finally, she acknowledges the truth—her illusion, spoiled, her story, undone: “What do I know? That’s not Minnie. There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life’s bare as bone” (UN 115). Rather than ignore or suppress the information the woman supplies her with, the final detail—the son—a detail that exposes the truth, Woolf’s narrator includes it as part of the narrative, showing the audience her craft from start to finish. Thus, Woolf dispels her own illusion, and only the narrator and her method are exposed. By contrast, Welty’s narrator in “The Key” is not so open, and, while her story is one primarily about writing too, she presents only the end result—the final narrative—tenaciously maintaining the illusion of Albert’s and Ellie’s story. Welty offers the finished product of the storyteller’s craft by using a narrator of insidiously emotionless expression. Unlike Woolf’s narrator, this narrator remains reserved as she creates the story of Albert and Ellie and, furthermore, does not share with the audience her uncertainties regarding the narration of the incident. The narrator does not break character and, by doing

Writing and Unwriting

181

so, successfully diverts our attention to her story; in fact, most critics discuss Albert and Ellie without questioning the narrator’s reliability despite his or her deficiencies or Welty’s frequent use of unreliable storytellers in other stories. This is evident because critics who address the narrator’s plot—the Morgans’ story—invariably believe the narrator without question. For instance, Ruth Vande Kieft writes that Albert and Ellie “miss their train for Niagara Falls because they cannot hear” (K 30). Upon examining the details of the story, however, readers do not know for certain that Albert and Ellie have missed their train, only that a train master approaches the couple and shoots “his arm out in a series of violent gestures and shrugs” (K 33). The narrator also claims that the red-haired man says “they missed their train!” (K 33). Yet, somehow, like Vande Kieft, readers have accepted the red-haired man’s assumption as the only one, while the train master’s word would be a far more reliable statement. Similarly, Gail Mortimer writes that Albert and Ellie “are both aware that their marriage has been based as much on the loneliness they have felt, being deaf, as it has been on love” (K 39). Yet, readers have no confirmation that Albert and Ellie are lonely or, for that matter, even married, only the narrator’s unsubstantiated story and their names on the luggage—not Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, but “Albert Morgan, Ellie Morgan, Yellow Leaf, Mississippi” (K 29). No one considers the possibility that they may be brother and sister; most readers assume they are married. The narrator later states that “perhaps, you thought, staring at their similarity—her hair was yellow, too—they were children together—cousins even, afflicted in the same way, sent off from home to the state institute” (K 34). Because Welty has included credible details, readers and critics continue to believe rather than doubt this narrator. Most critics and readers accept the narrator’s rendition of the Morgans’ drama even though Welty problematizes “The Key” by telling it through the words of an observer in the station who does not participate in any way. One of the most important—and overlooked—ambiguities about Welty’s narrator is that no evidence confirms whether or not she understands sign language. The narrator claims full knowledge of the Morgans’ conflict, yet never describes a single sign language gesture. If the narrator knows sign language, then he or she very likely reports the actual communication between Albert and Ellie. However, Welty, through her narrator, conceals whether the story of Albert and Ellie is an objective report of what the narrator observes or a complete fiction the narrator creates by building a narrative on symbols other than the Morgans’ conversation. By inventing such a complex story—one that questions the very consequences of narratives—Welty adds another layer to “The Key” which allows her to challenge her readers. There are those who will read the story of Albert and Ellie as just that: a well-told, if ambiguous, story. Then there are those who will realize that Welty’s narrator may not know sign language and

182

Reine Dugas Bouton

they must, in effect, un-write the narrative of Albert and Ellie to discover the narrator’s meaning. While Woolf ’s narrator unwrites her story for readers, Welty’s does not. Welty will not illuminate the story for readers—they must do so themselves. Thus, Welty intentionally obscures her narrator to redirect the focus of reader’s attention from the narrator to the Morgans. She does not want readers to know her narrator intimately, complete with his or her shortcomings; her narrator must be only a voice and nothing more, no reflection of Welty, no identifiable character. Welty has said that, “the finest story writers seem to be in one sense obstructionists. As if they held back their own best interests. … if we look for the source of the deepest pleasure we receive from a writer, how often do we not find that it seems to be connected with this very obstruction” (Welty “Looking” 90). In this way, Welty’s narrator differs from Woolf’s; the narrator in “The Key”—with the exception of very subtle indications—succeeds in obscuring his or her own identity by withholding any details that would give readers insight into his or her personality or intent. While Welty may have had a different intent than Woolf, their characters behave in much the same manner. Welty’s narrator, like Woolf’s narrator, observes those around her, searching for a subject to iterpret but unwilling to reveal the problematic struggles of being a writer. In a train station, rather than on a train, Welty’s narrator chooses a couple whom she later discovers are deaf mutes—the ideal people to inscribe a tale upon since they cannot tell—in conventional terms—their own story. If we assume that Welty read and modeled her own story after “An Unwritten Novel,” it is interesting to note that she chose a train station rather than a moving train in which to situate her story. If, as Hafley claims, Woolf’s narrator’s shift “from novelistic imaginings to the hard kernel of reality is paralleled by the movement of the train which carries the observer and the observed” (Hafley 57), then Welty’s choice of a static location, the train station, depicts a lack of movement or revelation by the narrator. Welty’s narrator presents only “novelistic imaginings” without ever offering readers a reality that might break her illusion. She ends her story with Albert’s conflict unresolved: “His trembling hand … touched the pocket where the key was lying, waiting. Would he ever remember that elusive thing about it or be sure what it might really be a symbol of ?” (K 37). Unlike Woolf’s narrator who finally discovers the truth about her subject, Welty’s narrator does not allow Albert to discover the key’s meaning and does not supply it for readers. To further complicate the story, Welty presents another symbol which will remain unexplained: the mysterious red-haired man supplies Ellie with a second key. Offering selective interpretation for some symbols and none for others, the narrator compels readers to make their own meaning. Thus it is clear that Woolf’s and Welty’s narrators engage readers in different ways. While Woolf’s narrator includes us in the creative process by revealing

Writing and Unwriting

183

her doubts and uncertainties, Welty’s only allows words like “as if,” “must have been,” “seemed to,” “as if to say,” “as though,” and “might seem to you” to alert readers to her creative process. Instead of saying, Albert murmured—a definitive statement given by an omniscient observer—the narrator says of Albert, “as though he were murmuring, ‘Don’t look—no need to look—I am effaced’ ” (my emphasis K 30). By choosing the qualifier, “as though,” the narrator’s observation becomes an assumption, not a fact reported. Thus, only through phrases such as this one, readers become aware that the narrator indeed is creating a narrative, making up a fiction. Likewise, Welty’s narrator shifts from third to second person throughout the story. This shift and the use of qualifiers are the only subtle clues Welty offers into the narrator’s identity. When observing Ellie and trying to determine her destination, the narrator says, “And to what place? you wondered, for she sat there as tense and solid as a cube, as if to endure some nameless apprehension” (my emphasis K 29). The narrator assumes that readers wonder about the Morgans’ destination and places responsibility on these readers to figure out the mystery of this quiet, frumpy couple. Of course, the reader cannot participate in the forming of this particular narrative, so the narrator’s use of “you” serves only to reinforce his or her own interpretations. By referring to the reader as “you,” the narrator merely gives the impression of including the reader in the interpretive process: “Yet for a moment he might seem to you to be sitting there quite filled with hope” (K 30). Whether speaking to the invisible reader or the “others waiting for the train” (K 29), the narrator involves someone else in the interpretations of symbols such as the key and Albert’s demeanor. This show of collaboration between narrator and reader strengthens the plausibility of the story the narrator constructs about the Morgans. The tale that the narrator invents for Albert and Ellie centers around the decoding of symbols that will enable them to solve the mystery of their lives. This conflict—Albert’s inability to interpret the meaning of the key—speaks to the problems inherent in narrative: how to make meaning. Thus, the narrator makes his or her own agenda—interpretation and meaning-making—the characters’ dilemma. The entire narrative focues on the topic of communication. Albert and Ellie have difficulty with it, the red-haired man seems “reticent,” and until, the key is introduced, these three characters are simply lost, unable or unwilling to communicate. The key, the most conspicuous symbol in the entire collection, becomes a symbol around which the narrative forms. The red-haired man drops the key, and characters and readers alike now have a symbol to decipher: “the key fell to the floor. … It was regarded as an insult, a very personal question, in the quiet peaceful room where the insects were tapping at the ceiling” (31). When Albert retrieves the key, the narrator begins to build the intensity of the narrative by highlighting the significance of this symbol. Albert picks up the key and examines it with “wonder written all over his face

184

Reine Dugas Bouton

and hands” (31). Just as the narrator inscribes Albert’s character with wonder, he or she also inscribes on the reader the illusion of the Morgans’ drama. Welty scatters many symbols throughout “The Key” and makes the word “symbol” part of her narrative, just as Woolf does. Indeed, the first line of “An Unwritten Novel” alerts readers to note the symbols along the way: “such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face—insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it” (UN 106). In a line that might have come from “The Key,” Woolf makes the woman’s face a symbol that she will interpret; from that face that is “almost a symbol,” Woolf will form a fiction and make the face and its expressions, symbols upon which she will inscribe. Likewise, Welty determines that a key—the dropped key—will be the symbol around which her narrative will form. Welty’s deliberate use of symbols in “The Key” contradicts what she believes should occur in fiction: a subtle weaving in of symbols, a whisper of a suggestion, an intimation. Uncharacteristically, Welty magnifies the importance of the symbol of the key(s) and depicts her characters obsessing about the keys’ meanings as well. In “Words into Fiction,” Welty states that symbols: Symbols for the sake of symbols are counterfeit, and were they all stamped on the page in red they couldn’t any more quickly give themselves away. … However alive they are, they should never call for an emphasis greater than the emotional reality they serve in their moment, to illuminate. Most symbols that a fiction writer uses, however carefully, today are apt to be as swiftly spotted by his reader as the smoke signals that once crossed our plains from Indian to Indian. Using symbols and—still worse—finding symbols is such a habit. It follows that too little comes to be suggested, and this, as can never be affirmed often enough, is the purpose of every word that goes into a piece of fiction. The imagination has to be involved, and more—ignited. … For symbols can only grow to be the same when the same experiences on which fiction is based are more and more partaken by us all (my emphasis Welty “Words” 139).

Welty emphasizes the key by stamping it in red, assuming that it will be spotted as a “smoke signal” by readers; furthermore, Welty allows the narrator, through his or her narrative, to portray other characters attempting to interpret the symbol. Thus, readers’ imaginations are not “involved” or “ignited” and, if they do not look beyond the surface narrative of Albert and Ellie—the only element which has become illuminated for them is the narrator’s interest in symbols and meaning rather than their own understanding of the symbols in the story. “The Key,” then, is hardly about Albert and Ellie’s trip to Niagara Falls, and instead about Welty’s relationship with the reader, a relationship denoted by the narrator’s relationship with his or her characters. The narrative the storyteller forms for Albert and Ellie parallels the narrative veil between writer and

Writing and Unwriting

185

reader. By creating a story for the fictive audience, using Albert, Ellie, and the key as his or her fodder, the narrator mimics Welty who likewise creates a story for her real audience using “The Key” as her fodder. Forming a plot for Albert and Ellie about finding happiness by understanding the meaning of the key, the narrator assumes a lack of effort expended by his or her fictional audience to interpret the symbols themselves. Welty, by leaving the story unresolved, shows either disdain or high expectations for her audience. Either she has no regard for what her readers think or she expects them to effortlessly interpret the story—Albert and Ellie’s as well as the narrator’s. Albert’s and Ellie’s apparent inability to decode the symbol before them—the key—reflects some readers’ inability to decode Welty’s symbols. For instance, while Albert struggles to connect the key somehow to their happiness, Ellie connects Niagara Falls with their happiness. Caught up in the quest for meaning, readers may feel like Albert and Ellie—victims of a conspiracy. As Ellie wonders of the red-haired man, readers may wonder of the writer, “What do you think [s]he wants?” (K 34). Unlike Woolf who provides her readers with an answer—Minnie is not a miserable spinster, but a mother meeting her son—Welty leaves Albert, Ellie, and her readers in the dark, unilluminated. When the trainman sets his lantern down by Albert and Ellie after he has reportedly told them they’ve missed their train, the couple continue, according to the narrator, to try to understand the key, the importance of Niagara Falls, and the red-haired man who hovers near them. This narrator paints them as unsuccessful in their search for meaning: Ellie sits looking “unblinking into the light of the lantern on the floor. Her face looked strong and terrifying, all lighted and very near to [Albert’s]. But there was no joy there” (K 37). And Albert, who seems to retreat, touches the key in his pocket. The narrator asks, “Would he ever remember that elusive thing about it or be sure what it might really be a symbol of ?” (K 37). Like “idiot bees,” these characters bump along without direction or understanding by somehow failing to do what the narrator has given them as options. Whatever the Morgans’ real story, they are now inexplicably confined by the narrator. Likewise, by this contract, the readers are confined if they do not decipher Welty’s meaning. Welty has filled this story with imagery such as mindless insects clinging to a globe of light, the trainman’s lantern, the redhaired man’s match, the Morgans’ teacher who used her “wand on the magiclantern slide” (K 35)—but offers little assistance to characters or readers to comprehend the images. In the end, only Albert’s and Ellie’s inadequacy is revealed. The narrator says, “the whole story began to illuminate them now, as if the lantern flame had been turned up” (K 34). The narrator has shone the spotlight on Albert and Ellie and their failure at everything, and, as they are shown to be unsuccessful, readers, too, may be viewed as unsuccessful if they fail to doubt Welty’s narrator by viewing “The Key” as the subjects’ story only.

186

Reine Dugas Bouton

Readers must also decode the red-haired man, another obscure symbol in Welty’s story. More than just a character, the red-haired man plays an active role in forming the narrative. Like Welty and the narrator, the red-haired man is an observer in the drama unfolding at the train station, who watches and forms opinions about his subjects. If the narrator represents the “voice” of the writer, the red-haired man may represent the ‘will’ of the writer; collectively, the narrator and the red-haired man form a complete writer, one who can both speak and interact with characters on the page. While the narrator speaks the words that become the narrative, the red-haired man is the one who judiciously— physically within the context of the story—places the key in the character’s view. Since Welty herself cannot drop a real key onto the pages of her story, a character must do it for her. Thus, the red-haired man acts on her—not the narrator’s—behalf. When the red-haired man drops the first key, he becomes involved in Albert’s initial excitement and later angst over this newfound treasure. A story unfolds based on this symbol that the red-haired man has inserted into the story. The Morgans communicate through sign language, and the narrator and the redhaired man assume that they discuss the key; the red-haired man looks on, hoping their story will be revealed. In this way, the red-haired man again epitomizes the writer. While one part of the writer—the narrator—wants to obscure, the other part—the red-haired man—wants to reveal. The narrator acts as though he or she wants to reveal this story about Albert and Ellie by including symbols for interpretation and imagery about illumination, but in reality, he or she only obscures meaning by offering no concrete truths. The red-haired man, on the other hand, exhibits reticence to communicate (K 30), but reveals more than the narrator; he reveals the difficulty of creating a narrative. Unlike the son in Woolf’s tale who helps readers unwrite the story, the redhaired man in “The Key” only succeeds in confusing readers. Exhibiting an empathy the narrator lacks, the red-haired man attempts to help the Morgans with what he sees as their dilemma—their missed train, their dashed hopes— by supplying another symbol which might solve the mystery or give them happiness: he “took a second key from his pocket, and in one direct motion placed it in Ellie’s red palm” (K 37). Then, without waiting to “see any more,” he “went out abruptly into the night. He stood still for a moment and reached for a cigarette. As he held the match close. … You could see that he despised and saw the uselessness of the thing he had done” (K 37). Intentionally supplying another symbol into an already mysterious narrative, the red-haired man hopes to aid Albert and Ellie; however, his attempt may be misguided because of his own lack of understanding. Whether the red-haired man sees his gesture as useless—a second key could never replace the happiness the couple might have found in Niagara Falls because a second key would not have the same meaning to Ellie as it had to

Writing and Unwriting

187

Albert—remains unknown. Neither he nor the narrator nor Welty ever explain his behavior. However, if the red-haired man represents the writer, then he may despise his gesture of supplying the second key because it is a clear manipulation of events. Writers manipulate characters, dialogue, and symbols in a necessary, but controlling, element of writing fiction because such manipulation interferes with the truth of the story, the simple telling of one’s observations. Welty, however, reveals the despicable and covert side of this manipulation that art takes from life. As Welty calls the incorporation of obvious symbols for the sake of symbols, “counterfeit,” she shows in the red-haired man’s gesture the uselessness of such actions by writers. The red-haired man reveals much of what the narrator hopes to obscure by his action. While the narrator tries to obscure the process of storytelling by focusing readers’ attention on the Morgans, the red-haired man depicts the intent of the writer. At first appearing like a peripheral character in the story, the red-haired man manipulates the characters’ story and offers a limited insight into the narrative process. Welty clearly designates the narrator—as well as the red-haired man—in the role of writer, but the writer she shows is a challenging one. If this is what writers do, according to Welty’s narrator, then they essentially trick readers, and they make it difficult for them to discover the heart of the story. Thus, Welty urges her readers to work hard to find meaning and ultimately, to understand the craft of writing; the meaning of this story and the craft of writing, then, are inextricably linked for Welty. By allowing the reader little insight into the narrator other than what’s on the page—the narrative—Welty asks for complete trust. She expects readers to accept the narrator’s story despite or, perhaps, because of the narrator’s inability to read sign language. Welty hopes to attain communication between herself and her readers when, and only when, they have put their total trust in the narrator and succumbed to, become immersed in, the Morgans’ story. Welty says: Communication through fiction frequently happens, I believe, in ways that are small—a word is not too small; that are unannounced; that are less direct than we might first suppose on seeing how important they are. It isn’t communication happening when you as the reader follow or predict the novel’s plot or agree with, or anticipate, or could even quote the characters; when you hail the symbols; even when its whole landscape and climate have picked you up and transported you where it happens. But communication is going on, regardless of all the rest, when you believe the writer. (Welty “Words” 140)

Above all, Welty expects unfailing trust regardless of how challenging her fiction is for readers. Communication between reader and writer manifests itself in “The Key,” a story filled with all forms of communication. In “The Key” when the narrator notices Ellie’s face and sees in it “that too-explicit evidence of agony in the desire to communicate” (K 29), she recognizes the basic

188

Reine Dugas Bouton

need in everyone to connect with each other; furthermore, in showing Albert’s and Ellie’s frustration with their inability to communicate, the narrator hopes to connect with her own audience’s need to be heard and understood. In their quest for communication, both Welty and Woolf seek to explain the craft of writing and storytelling, and at the same time, cultivate more sophisticated readers. Welty built on Woolf’s ideas, gave tribute to them, and expanded them. Both writers, by creating narratives about narratives, draw the reader into the writing process as a means of enhancing the writing and reading experience. However, readers have no simple task before them when delving into Welty’s fiction. Welty, it seems, challenged readers in a more complex manner than Woolf, who was more direct with her readers. Welty seemed to want readers to work through her fiction, to treat it like a journey: “as readers we too proceed by the author’s arbitrary direction to his one-time-only destination: a journey rather strange, hardly in a straight line, altogether personal” (Welty “Words” 138). The metaphor of the journey, then, found in “The Key” and “An Unwritten Novel,” illustrates how some readers, like Albert and Ellie, never make their journey and, thus, don’t achieve understanding while others, like Woolf’s Minnie Marsh who move forward on the train to her destination, reach a conclusion after many narrative twists and turns, one that is conclusive and real, no matter the costs to the narrator/writer. Welty’s personal reticence and obscurity, however, does not interfere with the effect of her fiction on readers. Above all, she wanted, as a writer, not as Eudora Welty, to form a connection with her readers through her fiction. She said, “that the two concepts, writer’s and reader’s, may differ, since all of us differ, is neither so strange nor so important as the vital fact that a connection has been made between them” (Welty “Words” 144). Authorial distance restrained Welty from enabling readers to become too close to her but not from engaging with her fiction. By withholding details about the narrator in “The Key,” Welty maintains her anonymity, urges readers to work harder to decode the symbols and make meaning, in the end, hoping that her story does “the greatest thing that fiction does; it may move you” (Welty “Words” 144). Woolf, who forms a more personal connection with her readers, hopes that they will, in turn, supply energy to the writing process. The reader’s unbridled openness to the experience of fiction was, for Woolf, similar to Welty’s view of the journey—as important to Woolf as the work itself: “if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other” (Woolf “How Should” 235). For Woolf, a reader’s openness enables him or her to understand the writer and her on a personal level; the more private Welty was not as willing to share herself with her audience.Welty may challenge readers so that she as a writer is challenged, a concept—that of better readers make better writers—Woolf asserts in “How

Writing and Unwriting

189

Should One Read a Book?”: “But we still have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print” (244). The connection between writer and reader, while found in both writers’ stories, conveys a more powerful resonance between the writers themselves; if Welty had not read Woolf ’s fiction, she certainly would not have written “The Key” in quite the way she did. By being a careful reader and interacting with “An Unwritten Novel” to make her own meaning, to revise it to meet her own agenda, Welty illustrates the significance that reading makes to a writer—both herself and others. Reflecting and departing from “An Unwritten Novel,” “The Key” enables Eudora Welty to stretch her audiences’ reading muscles as they grapple with the importance of meaning-making in a narrative. The relationship between writer and reader becomes the story as readers begin to recognize how Welty, and, in a different manner, Woolf, expect readers to play an active role in the storytelling process. To this end, Welty uses “An Unwritten Novel” as a springboard to explore the art of writing. Even with Welty’s use of similar words and symbol as Woolf, and her use of an uninterested yet interested storyteller/observer, Woolf’s story unwrites itself as she intended while Welty’s remains a conundrum that must be solved. Yet, there can be no doubt that Welty hoped readers would become illuminated just as her narrator thought Albert and Ellie might. And Welty seems to endorse this process, this journey or struggle, toward illumination. Welty “urges us … to savor the journey itself, since otherwise our distractedness and focus on our objectives may make us oblivious to occasions when we have, willy-nilly, attained them” (Mortimer 62). As Woolf’s narrator and “Minnie” make their journey, as Welty’s narrator, Albert, Ellie, and the redhaired man make a kind of journey, as readers make their own journey, all share the goal of communication; all must decode meaning and unwrite narratives in order to become illuminated. “Before there is meaning, there has to occur some personal act of vision. And it is this that is continuously projected as the novelist writes, and again as we, each to ourselves, read” (Welty “Words” 137).

Works Consulted Caughie, Pamela L. ‘ “I must not settle into a figure’ ” The Woman Artist in VirginiaWoolf’s Writings.” Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture. Ed. Suzanne W. Jones. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1991. 371–397. Hafley, James. “Virginia Woolf’s Narrators and the Art of ‘Life Itself’.” Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity. Ed. Ralph Freedman. Berkeley: U California P, 1980.

190

Reine Dugas Bouton

Harrison, Suzan. Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1997. Mortimer, Gail. “ ‘The Way to Get There’: Journeys and Destinations in the Stories of Eudora Welty.” Southern Literary Journal 19:2 (1987): 61–69. Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Prenshaw, Peggy, ed. Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1984. ———. More Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1996. Richter, Harvena. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970. Ruas, Charles. “Eudora Welty: 1980.” More Conversations with Eudora Welty. Ed. Peggy Prenshaw. Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1996. 58–68. Welty, Eudora. “Looking at Short Stories.” The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Vintage, 1983. 85–106. ———. “The Key.” The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. San Diego: Harcourt, 1980. 29–37. ———. “Words into Fiction.” The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Vintage, 1983. 134–145. White, Clyde. “An Interview with Eudora Welty: 1992.” More Conversations with Eudora Welty. Ed. Peggy Prenshaw. Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1996. 231–242. Woolf, Virginia. “An Unwritten Novel.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Hogarth, 1985. 106–115. ———. “How Should One Read a Book?” The Virginia Woolf Reader. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt, 1984. 233–245. ———. “The Mark on the Wall.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Hogarth, 1985. 77–83.

WRITING THE WRITER: THE QUESTION OF AUTHORSHIP IN THE NOVELS OF MARTIN AMIS MAGDALENA MA
CZYN´ SKA

This essay examines Martin Amis’s use of the authorial figure, from his debut novel, The Rachel Papers, to his most recent work of fiction, The Information. The twin subjects of analysis are Amis’s thematic interest in the subject of authorship, and his playful foregrounding of the authorial role on the level of novelistic technique. While Amis’s postmodern play with the ontological levels of the text poses questions regarding the relationship between the author, the work and the audience, his comments on the commercialization of the literary milieu, the interface of literature and criticism, or the dialogue between high and low culture provide a vivid, and at times hilarious, commentary on the condition of the author in the contemporary world.

Martin Amis belongs to the generation that introduced the postmodernist novel into the literature of Great Britain. In contrast to the unalloyed mimesis of most modernist and postwar British fiction, the works of Amis and his contemporaries tend to break the novelistic illusion of reality by drawing attention to their own status as textual artifacts. Brian McHale’s influential study characterized postmodernist fiction as primarily interested in matters of ontology, posing such questions as: “What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?” 1 Martin Amis’s narratives explore exactly this order of questions. His penchant for postmodern experimentation does not, however, mean that Amis is not interested in the more traditional effects of fiction. In fact, his ability to combine a postmodern awareness of the problems and limitations of textual representation with an attempt at representing contemporary urban reality has been noted by a number of critics. Peter Stokes saw Amis as “the nearest postmodern fiction has come to offering something other than a mere critique of the mediating effects

1

Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Rutledge, 1999), 10.

Magdalena Ma
czyn´ska

192

of language and the consequences of such language for contemporary notions about subject construction.” 2 Amy J. Elias has argued convincingly that Amis’s work belongs to British Postmodern Realism, which, in spite of its experimental character, retains the traditional realist ambition of recording the real.3 In a similar vein, Catherine Bernard postulated that if the works of Martin Amis “question and foreground the way we make sense of the world,” they also “reaffirm the necessity for fiction to shoulder reality.” 4 Amis’s dual investment in ontological experiment and novelistic representation is evident in his fictional analyses of authorship. While foregrounding the complexities of the authorial role through a number of favorite postmodern literary techniques, Amis’s novels present, with much realism and humor, the personal and institutional dilemmas faced by authors in the late twentieth century. One of Amis’s favorite devices is the use of an intrusive narrator, the “dramatized spokesman for the implied author” 5 popular in 17th, 18th and much of 19th century fiction. This device, dismissed by Henry James as “a horrible crime,” has been enthusiastically re-introduced in the postmodern novel. In Amis’s work, intrusive narrators may stand outside the narrated story, as in Dead Babies, or enter it in person, as in The Rachel Papers, Other People, London Fields, and, in a minimal degree, The Information. The narrators’ direct addresses to the readers are frequently metafictional, offering insights into the process of narration rather than into the story narrated. This results in a heightened awareness of the fiction’s special ontological status. A similar effect is achieved by Amis’s use of narrative involution, whereby the fictional world is entered by its author, or, rather, by an author-character, in this case called Martin Amis, or bearing the initials M.A. Thus, as Edmondson put it, the writer becomes a “character within the larger narrative line and therefore not omniscient, but rather a discursively constructed character himself.” 6 Both involution and intrusive narration foreground and complicate the role of the author on the level of metafictional play. On the level of representation, Amis

2

Peter Stokes, “Martin Amis and the Postmodern Suicide: Tracing the Postnuclear Narrative at the Fin de Millennium,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38, no. 4 (1997): 300. 3 Amy J. Elias, “Meta-mimesis? The Problem of British Postmodern Realism,” in British Postmodern Fiction, eds. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), 26. 4 Catherine Bernard, “Dismembering/Remembering Mimesis: Martin Amis, Graham Swift,” in British Postmodern Fiction, eds. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), 122. 5 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 211. 6 Elie A. Edmondson, “Martin Amis Writes Postmodern Man,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 2 (2001): 146.

Writing the Writer

193

examines such aspects of modern-day literary life as the expanding machinery of marketing and promotion, the crisis of traditional literary institutions, or the interface of creative writing and criticism. Other salient themes include rivalry between writers, the author’s will to power, or the edge of sadism present in the act of creation. Amis combines such thematic choices with formal experimentation to provide a rich and multifaceted examination of contemporary authorship, from the complex ontological status of texts and their originators, to the public and private tribulations of writers who, “death of the author” notwithstanding, proceed with much passion, jealousy and ambition. Martin Amis’s novelistic debut, The Rachel Papers (1973), opens with the protagonist Charles Highway on the eve of his twentieth birthday, poised to recount such landmarks of adolescent life as leaving home, first love, or the first use of a condom. The novel enacts the process of its own creation, as the young narrator shapes the countless diaries, files, notebooks, letters, and sketches he has amassed to form the story we are reading. Rather comically, Charles is very serious about assuming an authorial status. He scrupulously enumerates his past literary achievements (including two epic poems and a “six-thousand-line Waste Land ”),7 nurses ambitions for the future (“It struck me, not for the first time, that I owed it to the world to write some kind of dissertation before my untimely death”) 8 and refers to his work in self-aggrandizing editorial jargon (“the marginalia of my youth”,9 “the only extant autograph MS of my first date with Rachel” 10). Charles’s illusions of literary grandeur lead him to define his life by reference to canonical authors: he reads Oscar Wilde and Gerald Manley Hopkins during his supposed gay period; he feels “spermy and Joycean” 11 after a night of sex. Most pretentiously of all, he compares himself to the other “delicate child” 12—John Keats: “I had spent the day with the growing conviction that my lungs were on the way out … that surely I could not live beyond a Keatsian twenty-six.” 13 Predictably, Charles’s bid at authorial identity is not limited to the outside trappings of literary status. Even more important is his attempt at exercising authorial powers within the narrative he is constructing. The description of his birth sets the tone: “To achieve, at once, dramatic edge and thematic symmetry I elect to place my time of birth on the stroke of midnight.” 14 Charles’ desire for authorial control is seen most clearly in his efforts at shaping the “folders, note-pads, files, bulging manilla envelopes, wads of paper trussed in 7

Martin Amis, Rachel Papers (New York: Vintage International, 1992), 27. Amis, Rachel Papers, 93. 9 Amis, Rachel Papers, 4. 10 Amis, Rachel Papers, 33. 11 Amis, Rachel Papers, 28. 12 Amis, Rachel Papers, 26. 13 Amis, Rachel Papers, 92. 14 Amis, Rachel Papers, 4. 8

Magdalena Ma
czyn´ska

194

string, letters, carbons, diaries” 15 that constitute the raw materials of his story. Although he frequently uses quotations from his earlier self to enrich the texture of the narrative, Charles always reserves the right to overwrite, or altogether dismiss, his earlier judgments. The papers he makes use of are subject to systematic and persistent reworking: “On my desk, a sea of pads, folders, envelopes, napkins, notes, the complete Rachel Papers stand displayed. Four-eyed, I indent subject-headings, co-ordinate footnotes, mark cross-references in red and blue biros.” 16 Interestingly, this image evokes not the creative authorial persona to which the young man aspires, but a meticulous editor, bent on imposing order on the chaotic material at his disposal. If Charles strives to control the abundance of his autobiographical data through careful editorial practice, he also desires to control the messiness of life: “You trust to the twitches and shrugs of the ego; I seek to arrange these,” 17 he reflects. From scripting important phone calls, to drafting date witticisms, Charles demonstrates an obsessive reliance on textual props. He wishes to replace the unpredictability of real life encounters with the comforting pliability of writing: he welcomes the absence of his beloved Rachel, as it allows him to spend solitary hours updating her file or exercising his epistolary talent. Not surprisingly, Charles’s letters are absorbed in their own verbal play and show no consideration for their communicative function; even the farewell letter to Rachel is seen by its author not as a devastating message but as a stylistic achievement, with its “pleasingly unrehearsed air.” 18 When in bed with a girl, Charles finds himself seeking the aid of the written word, his head “a whirlpool of notes, directives, memos, hints, pointers, random scribblings.” 19 In ironic contrast, the perusal of his own erotic descriptions gives him a “shirty erection,” 20 confirming his fetishist attachment to textuality. Charles’s proper element is the mediated, the editable. In the spirit of modern semiotics, he edits not only his notes and letters, but also his looks, his accent, his clothes. “What clothes would I wear? … What persona would I wear,” 21 he asks himself. Similarly, he manipulates the appearance of his room, scattering record sleeves and color supplements for Gloria, or displaying the Thames and Hudson Blake and Jane Austen’s Persuasion for the more discriminating Rachel. Such attempts at controlling reality parallel Charles’s authorial practices, demonstrating his awareness of the artifice inevitably involved in the process of constructing 15

Amis, Rachel Papers, 4. Amis, Rachel Papers, 57. 17 Amis, Rachel Papers, 180. 18 Amis, Rachel Papers, 217. 19 Amis, Rachel Papers, 158. 20 Amis, Rachel Papers, 20. 21 Amis, Rachel Papers, 42. 16

Writing the Writer

195

a narrative, but also in all verbal and non-verbal social interaction. While such understanding is positive in itself, Charles lacks the maturity of judgment that would allow him to move beyond an appreciation of reality’s manipulability into a responsible participation in that reality. Charles Highway aptly describes himself as “having a vocabulary more refined than … emotions”.22 He is a compulsive writer, an avid reader, and a student of English literature: “really fucking good” 23 at it, if one is to believe his own estimation. His attitude towards the story he is narrating is marked with equal self-assurance. As a narrator, and as a character, Charles feels free to manipulate the people, objects and texts with which he comes into contact. His lack of respect for the integrity of the other bars him from becoming a mature partner or a mature author. This fundamental flaw is pointed out by Highway’s Oxford tutor Charles Knowd, a character Martin Amis saw as the “author-figure” (i.e. his own avatar) in the novel.24 Commenting on his pupil’s eloquent but utterly soulless entrance exam, Dr. Knowd explains: “literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can’t just use it … ruthlessly, for your own ends.” 25 Such ruthless usage characterizes Charles’s relationship with art and reality throughout The Rachel Papers. The ultimate example comes at the end of the novel: after dismissing Rachel, possibly pregnant with his child, Charles changes her name and uses her as a character in the short story he is writing for the national under-21 competition. Like many troubled protagonists of adolescent fiction, Charles aspires to the role of author, but he is in fact something quite different. As Martin Amis explained, “Charles Highway is a budding literary critic, whereas the narrators of such novels are usually budding writers. … He is a nascent literary critic, with all the worst faults of the literary critic—that comfortable distance from life.” 26 This contrast between the narrator-protagonist’s authorial ambitions and his critical temperament is Amis’s brilliant twist on the popular adolescent comedy genre. Amis does not offer another sustained analysis of authorial character until his fourth novel, Other People. Nevertheless, his second work, Dead Babies (1975), develops several important themes introduced in The Rachel Papers. Amis’s partiality to metafictional commentary is apparent in Dead Babies’ intrusive narrator, who offers numerous remarks concerning the development of the novel’s plot and characterization. (“Are we presenting characters and scenes that are somehow fanciful, tendentious, supererogatory? Not at all.” 27) 22

Amis, Rachel Papers, 157. Amis, Rachel Papers, 62. 24 John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (New York: Methuen, 1985), 10. 25 Amis, Rachel Papers, 215. 26 Haffenden, 10. 27 Martin Amis, Dead Babies (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 16. 23

Magdalena Ma
czyn´ska

196

Furthermore, Amis continues to explore the subject of ruthless manipulation through the twin demiurgic figures of Marvell Buzhardt and Quentin Villiers. Marvell, the author of a book titled The Mind Lab, claims that all human complexity is chemical in nature, and attempts to shape consciousnesses through drugs. Quentin, the editor of a London University paper and “an adept at character stylization, a master of pastiche, a connoisseur of verbal self-dramatization” 28 maintains the appearance of a cultivated idealist, but turns out to be the novel’s arch-villain, and the orchestrator of its deadly finale. Both Marvell and Quentin represent aspects of the writer’s authority: they influence the minds and behaviors of their friends just as an author controls his characters’ thoughts and actions. This control, moreover, has an intimate connection with violence. Martin Amis admitted that the intoxicating feeling of authorial impunity (“there is no limit to what you can do” 29) can also be the source of sadistic pleasure (the creation of Dead Babies’ hapless Keith Whitehead allowed him a “horrible Dickensian glee” 30). Thus, the author is aligned with the likes of Quentin and Marvell. The cruel underpinnings of authorial control will remain one of the most persistent themes in Amis’s subsequent work. Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) recounts a young woman’s afterlife journey from innocence to experience. The story is told by an intrusive narrator who offers frequent comments regarding the trials of his protagonist, but also his own role as the constructor of the narrative. In the prologue, he expresses regret at the impossibility of reconciling the elegance of form he desires (“selfcontained, economical and shapely” 31) with the requirement of verisimilitude, his “most sacred duty.” 32 Throughout the novel, he repeatedly emphasizes that the story is at all times under his “protection and control,” 33 and even gives a demonstration of his powers when, following his words “It’s time to wake up,” 34 the heroine indeed wakes up from her sleep. The narrator’s interest in matters of novelistic art, and his desire for control over the story suggest that he is an authorial figure, although he never appears in the role of author in the narrative itself. In fact, he is identified with the novel’s other authority figure—the policeman John Prince. Prince is granted access anywhere he goes, the uncanny privilege of an officer but also of an author; his eyes are described as “law’s eyes” that “knew too much,” 35 again, a hint at powers that put Prince beyond the

28

Amis, Dead Babies, 38. Haffenden, 12. 30 Haffenden, 12. 31 Martin Amis, Other People (New York: Vintage International, 1994), 9. 32 Amis, Other People, 9. 33 Amis, Other People, 34. 34 Amis, Other People, 21. 35 Amis, Other People, 66. 29

Writing the Writer

197

sphere in which the remaining characters in the novel are forced to operate. On the level of plot, the policeman is seen constantly monitoring Mary/Amy’s progress, mirroring the process of authorial control. Finally, the linguistic choices made by Prince parallel those of the author-narrator: addressing Mary on the subject of London squats, Prince says: “Some squats are nice. Some are even legal,” 36 echoing the narrator’s earlier statement: “Some squats are hippie hells, but some squats are nice—if you can cope with the ghastly uncertainty of it all. Some squats are practically legal.” 37 It is interesting to note that the version intended for Mary is milder than that intended for the reader. When Prince talks to Mary about her former boyfriend Michael Shane, he once again uses the narrator’s phrases, withholding from his interlocutor the knowledge that had already been imparted to the reader. Both as a narrator standing outside the story, and as a character within the story, John Prince stands in the position of power in relation to Mary/Amy, controlling her actions and her understanding from the beginning until the morbid end. Even more disturbing than the identification of author-narrator with the policeman is the revelation that John Prince is also Mary/Amy’s murderer. In fact, he kills her twice: Prince had been her murderous lover in her first incarnation as Amy Hide, and he likewise murders her at the end of her second “life” as Mary Lamb. Martin Amis commented extensively on this affinity between the figures of narrator and killer, explaining that Prince’s roles “as narrator and as murderous demon-lover” are “exactly analogous,” as both grant him “equal power to knock her off.” 38 In his study of homicides in Amis’s fiction, Brian Finney examines Amis’s practice of combining the theme of violence with the postmodern device of introducing the narrator into the narrative. One function of this practice is to provide a commentary on the state of writing in a violent era, marked by a “perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation,” and “close to ecological disaster.” 39 The other, metafictional function is an analysis of authorial power: “Whoever narrates a story both creates and annihilates characters.” 40 The theme of author as murderer, or author as sadist, emerges once more as a familiar feature of Martin Amis’s fiction. The author-narrator is not, however, the only aggressor in Other People. The reader, as consumer of fiction (particularly the type of genre fiction to which this novel, with its subtitle, A Mystery Story, ostensibly belongs) is also strongly implicated in the textual crimes committed on Mary/Amy. As Finney 36

Amis, Other People, 125. Amis, Other People, 106. 38 Haffenden, 18. 39 Brian Finney, “Narrative and Narrated Homicides in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37, no. 1 (1995): 4. 40 Finney, 3. 37

Magdalena Ma
czyn´ska

198

put it, “We are both spectators of the action and aiders and abettors of the murdering author/narrator.” 41 Finally, the murderee herself bears part of the responsibility for her violent deaths. Other People is the hell of Amy Hide undergoing punishment for her many sins, including a sin against an author— forcing her boyfriend Michael Shane to destroy his play. (Amis here plays on J. P. Sartre’s proclamation that “hell is other people.”) It is fitting that Mary/Amy should now be trapped in a deadly narrative told by her second lover. “Look what she’s done to me,” 42 complains Prince, suggesting that he, too, labors under obligation, and that successful narration involves a mutual dependence of author, character and reader. At the end of Other People, Amy dies and begins her life again. Will her third incarnation bring an end to the cycle of violent exchange? In the epilogue, the narrator says, “I’m not in control anymore, not this time,” suggesting the possibility of a happier finale. Amis relents the hold of the narrative on the character, allowing Amy to enter another ontological order, a more conventional novelistic reality. This type of ending, in which a character finally escapes the clutches of authorial control, will also characterize Amis’s next novel, offering a traditional twist on the text’s postmodern play. While Other People’s John Prince is endowed with a godlike authorial status, in Money (1984) Amis creates a narrator who is both deluded and powerless. The novel is subtitled “a suicide note,” casting John Self in the role of the note’s author, but it is clear that the pathetic Self is not in control of the story he is narrating. His girlfriend is cheating on him, his best friend keeps taking his money, and his supposed producer is involving him in an elaborate and cruel con. Furthermore, John Self is abused not only by the other characters within the novel but also by the author, who takes pleasure in devising his protagonist’s mishaps. John is intuitively aware of the fact that his life is in the hands of powers he cannot control. He complains: “I sometimes think I am controlled by someone. Some space invader is invading my inner space, some fucking joker. But he’s not from out there. He’s from in here.” 43 The narrator even disclaims “all responsibility” for his thoughts, explaining: “They don’t come from me.” 44 If Self suspects that he is controlled by an external agency, he also nurtures a suspicion that the readers are involved in the joke, that they are on the enemy’s side: “And you’re in on it too, aren’t you. You are, aren’t you,” he accuses.45 John’s intuitions are, of course, true. Both authorial control

41

Finney, 5. Amis, Other People, 106. 43 Martin Amis, Money (London: Penguin Books 1985), 330. 44 Amis, Money, 267. 45 Amis, Money, 285. 42

Writing the Writer

199

and reader complicity had already been signaled in the novel’s brief prologue whose author, signing himself M.A., explains that the suicide note “is meant for you out there, the dear, the gentle.” The referent of this traditional appellation is, of course, the reader. John is also right as to the alien source of his thoughts. While his lack of eloquence and literary talent is emphasized repeatedly throughout the novel and his direct speech is a display of appalling verbal poverty, Self ’s narrative is characterized by a dazzling stylistic mastery that clearly isn’t his own. While fictional characters are always controlled by their authors, Money dramatizes this relationship by introducing a Martin Amis into the body of the text. “I’ve been hanging around the wings of my novels, so awkwardly sometimes, like the guest at a banquet, that I though I might jolly well be in there at last,” explained Martin Amis in an interview.46 And indeed, the creepy novelist living in John Self’s London neighborhood turns out to be the novel’s author himself: “This writer’s name, they tell me, is Martin Amis. Never heard of him. Do you know his stuff at all?” 47 The author and the narrator gradually make one another’s acquaintance, chat about Amis’s writing habits, and finally strike a deal, as Self commissions Amis to write a screenplay for his autobiographical movie Money. The irony of the character Martin Amis writing a screenplay called Money inside a novel called Money written by the author Martin Amis cannot be missed. Apart from the sheer fun of it, introducing a Martin Amis character into the text provides a running commentary on the development of the story. In a series of conversations with his protagonist (exemplifying what Brian McHale calls the postmodern interview topos 48), the fictional Martin Amis expounds his theories on the distance between authors and narrators, on the current crisis in novelistic motivation, on narrative structure, or on the moral philosophy of fiction. These authorial comments enhance the reader’s (but not John’s) understanding of the narrative’s strategies. Moreover, as Elie A. Edmondson observed, the author’s descent into the narrative is “an acknowledgement that he, as writercreator, is also constituted by a larger narrative line, a player on the stage,” 49 thus confirming the postmodern intuition that all subjectivity, even that of the author, is a discursive construct. Finally, the dialogues between author and his character serve as an enactment of Amis’s favorite principle of authorial violence, as when the fictional Amis ridicules his interlocutor, or informs John that, “the author is not free of sadistic impulses.” 50 The final chess match between John and Martin

46

Haffenden, 11. Amis, Money, 71. 48 McHale, 213. 49 Edmondson, 149. 50 Amis, Money, 247. 47

Magdalena Ma
czyn´ska

200

is the most poignant expression of this principle. Forced into a suicidal move, John comes to the novel’s central realization, finally grasping the truth that his sufferings were designed by the author: “I’m the joke,” he exclaims accusingly, “I’m it! It was you. It was you.” 51 If Martin Amis is the puppet-master responsible for John Self’s predicaments, he is not acting alone, but avails himself of a series of alter egos who aid him in his authorial task. Con-artist Fielding Goodney (note the allusion to picaresque novelist Henry Fielding) shares the author’s taste for cruel manipulation, as well as his creative passion. The fictional Amis refers to him with much understanding: “Probably he was too deep into his themes and forms, his own artwork. The illusionist, the lie artist, the storyboarder—they have a helplessness.” 52 Fielding’s lover Doris Arthur writes the first screenplay for John Self ’s movie, as well as a short story collection titled High Ironic Style, a mode also favored by Amis. Martina Twain, Martin’s benevolent double, offers John insights into his own situation, paralleling the author-character interviews between Self and Amis. Martin acknowledges her importance by calling her “the second joker in the pack.” 53 Moreover, all these auxiliary quasi-authorial characters present John Self with narratives that serve as analogues to his own story: Fielding shows him Prehistoric, a film about an alien-controlled attempt at civilizing an ape-man, paralleling both John’s uncouthness and his lack of agency. The title story of Doris’s volume features a “tramp who spoke exclusively in quotations from Shakespeare,” 54 suggesting the discrepancy between Self’s sophisticated style and the poverty of his thoughts and actions. Finally, Martina takes John to see Othello, one of the novel’s more important intertexts (naturally, the text casts Martin Amis as the arch-manipulator Iago). Juggled between these figures, all endowed with superior understanding of his situation, Self yearns for self-control. He wants to be like his author, whom he admires, envies, and even tries to impersonate in a New York brothel. Only at the end of the book does John free himself from all influences and achieve a tentative control over his life, ending up, as Martin Amis put it in an interview, “outside the novel, outside money and Money, in endless and ordinary life.” 55 The escape is not complete. The author still lends John his formidable voice. Nevertheless, in the novel’s last pages Amis returns to a more straightforward fictional ontology: the realistic novel’s “ordinary life.” In a move echoing the ending of Other People, where Amy, released from the narrator’s control, was

51

Amis, Money, 379. Amis, Money, 376. 53 Amis, Money, 375. 54 Amis, Money, 59. 55 Haffenden, 24. 52

Writing the Writer

201

given one more chance to straighten out her life, John is now, for better or worse, left on his own. Much like his debut The Rachel Papers, Amis’s sixth novel, London Fields (1989) foregrounds the process of its own creation. The narrator, Samson Young, is an American documentary writer who has found a great story, “unified, dramatic and pretty saleable,” 56 which he decides to turn into a work of fiction. Within his narrative, Sam discusses the writing process, describes his authorial mood swings, and FedExes chapters to his American publisher. Moreover, like Martin Amis in Money, this author enters the world of his characters, collecting their confessions (“I have always been a talented listener” 57) as well as more tangible “documentary evidence:” 58 Nicola’s diaries, Guy’s fiction and poetry, Keith’s promotional flyer. Even more radically, Sam enters his characters’ personal lives. “How I suffer for my art,” 59 he comments, taking darting lessons from his cranky protagonist Keith. As an excuse for such interventions, Sam pleads the quest for realism: “I must have the truth. There just isn’t time to settle for anything less than the truth.” 60 Samson’s non-fictional works have been critically acclaimed for “their honesty, their truthfulness,” 61 and he wants to replicate those qualities in his fictional work as well. “This is a true story,” 62 he claims, and takes this staple assertion of mimesis to its logical extreme. Fearing for the integrity of his plot, he is even willing to intervene in the “reality” he takes as his model, ingratiating himself with his characters and offering them suggestions concerning their future actions. This ontological confusion probes the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, between the fictional and the “real”—which is one of London Fields’ central preoccupations. While Samson claims a pursuit of perfect mimesis, the story itself is as far as can be from life’s messy spontaneity, featuring neat parallels, spectacular coincidences, and conventional stock characters. The plot draws on the modes of the mystery story and medieval romance, two genres very distant from the requirements of strict realism. Moreover, the narrator obviously manipulates his story, for example censoring the accounts of his witnesses: “Keith’s version just couldn’t be trusted for a second longer.” 63 It is also telling that Sam, a supposed realist, compares himself to Vladimir Nabokov, the master of playful crossings between reality and fiction, and even employs the Nabokovian conceit

56

Martin Amis, London Fields (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 1. Amis, London Fields, 13. 58 Amis, London Fields, 43. 59 Amis, London Fields, 101. 60 Amis, London Fields, 43. 61 Amis, London Fields, 39. 62 Amis, London Fields, 1. 63 Amis, London Fields, 59. 57

Magdalena Ma
czyn´ska

202

of a game, using darts in place of Nabokov’s chess: “Ah, were I the kind of writer that went about improving on unkempt reality, I might have come up with something a little more complicated. But darts it is.” 64 The narrator’s tone here is somewhat self-ironic, and so are his references to his own reliability: “But I can’t make anything up. It just isn’t in me. Man, am I a reliable narrator.” 65 The interplay of fiction and non-fiction is also highlighted in London Fields’ novel-within-the-novel. Marius Appleby’s Crossborne Waters, recommended to Sam by his London host Mark Asprey as a prime example of nonfiction, turns out to be a cliché-ridden romance. However, against his better judgment, Sam finds himself drawn by the book’s cheap narrative tricks. This paradox is explained by Mark Asprey: “You don’t understand, do you, my talentless friend? … It doesn’t matter what anyone writes any more. The time for it mattering has passed. The truth doesn’t matter any more and is not wanted.” 66 Asprey’s anti-mimetic manifesto is, of course, also a perfect comment on the romance of London Fields. Mark Asprey’s (and Marius Appleby’s) initials should alert the reader that the man who initiated the New York-London apartment exchange with Samson Young is not just one of the novel’s characters. He is in fact an author-figure, “the ghost of the author casting his enigmatic shadow over his fictional standin narrator,” 67 to use Finney’s phrase. Asprey displays many of the authorial features found in Amis’s fiction—he manipulates reality, creating an image of himself as successful author; he knows too much; finally, he has sadistic drives, as seen in his erotic photos with Nicola, or in his mocking treatment of Sam. Even the narrator feels the pull of Mark Asprey’s powers: he wants Asprey to read his chapters, and leaves him the completed novel after committing suicide. “Be my literary executor: throw everything out,” 68 pleads Samson in his farewell letter. Sam creates a pun on the word “execute,” asking Asprey to destroy, not publish, his work. The pun, however, has yet another meaning: Asprey, as Sam’s author, brings about the death of his narrator at the novel’s end. The reader has every reason to suspect Asprey did not respect Samson Young’s final wish. In fact, he had probably planned to use Sam’s narrative from the start, as a replacement for his own novel destroyed by Nicola. Although Sam has had his misgivings, he only realizes his position at the story’s end. In his suicide note, he calls himself Asprey’s “dream tenant,” 69 and

64

Amis, London Fields, 100. Amis, London Fields, 78. 66 Amis, London Fields, 452. 67 Finney, 9. 68 Amis, London Fields, 468. 69 Amis, London Fields, 468. 65

Writing the Writer

203

asks the other writer: “You didn’t set me up. Did you?” 70 Finally, in his letter to Kim Talent, he confesses: “I feel seamless and insubstantial, like a creation. As if someone made me up, for money.” 71 The text of London Fields has the ontological structure of Chinese boxes—Sam enters the story he narrates, but he is also inside someone else’s story, over which he has no control. The figure that moves between the narrator and his author is Nicola Six, the novel’s femme fatale, dark muse and murderee. Her powers exceed those of ordinary characters. She has insight into the ending of the novel; she supplies Samson with material in the form of her journals; she even negotiates the development of the story during nocturnal script conferences with her narrator: a new twist on the interview topos, with the character no longer cast as the author’s passive victim. Sam openly admires Nicola for her writing (“You have a way with language, and with much else. In fact, I’m envious.” 72) and for her “power to shape reality.” 73 Nicola is the ultimate artist, equipped with unbounded imagination, and a complete actress’s wardrobe, which she uses with consummate skill. “Always the simulacrum, never the real thing. That’s art,” 74 comments the narrator, as Nicola manipulates her fellow characters by transforming herself into their fantasies: a porn star for Keith and a trembling, eager virgin for Guy. Sam conceitedly believes that he is not one of the contenders and cannot fall for Nicola’s art. For him, Nicola wears the “natural” look—a white dressing gown and an unmade face—that turns out to be her most subtle trick. Gradually, Sam, too, enters the mimetic triangle of desire, first kissing Nicola (under pretense of research for the chapter on her kisses) and then engaging in sex. His ultimate involvement with Nicola comes at the novel’s surprise ending, when Sam becomes her murderer. Only after killing Nicola does he realize the extent of her deception: “She outwrote me. Her story worked. And mine didn’t.” 75 As in Other People, albeit with greater complexity and on a larger scale, London Fields illustrates the violent cooperation between author, narrator, character, and audience that is necessary to create a narrative. The escape from this ontological whirlwind comes only at the novel’s end when, in a typical Amis finale, Sam writes his last suicide note to the infant Kim Talent, asking her to outlive her own creator: “Children survive their parents. Works of art survive their makers. I failed, in art and love. Nevertheless, I ask you to survive me.” 76 70

Amis, London Fields, 468. Amis, London Fields, 470. 72 Amis, London Fields, 61. 73 Amis, London Fields, 119. 74 Amis, London Fields, 131. 75 Amis, London Fields, 466. 76 Amis, London Fields, 469. 71

Magdalena Ma
czyn´ska

204

Of all the characters he created, Sam chooses a little girl, an innocent victim to the struggles between the adults, to be the narrative’s survivor. The child is for Martin Amis, as it was for William Blake, a potent symbol of innocence. This final invocation to little Kim expresses a yearning for a reality less tormented than the narrative reality just coming to its end. If in The Rachel Papers, Other People, Money and London Fields Amis allowed his authorial narrators and author-figures to play a significant role within the text, The Information (1995) offers a more traditional novelistic world, whose third person narrator makes only one discreet cameo appearance within the narrative (signaling his initials to a child at a London playground: “And I made the signs—the M, the A—with my strange and twisted fingers, thinking: how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don’t know anything?” 77). The authorial narrator is still intrusive, commenting extensively on such problems of contemporary fiction as the confusion of genres, the bankruptcy of motivation, or the decline of literary heroes—all of which are enacted by the novel itself. Nevertheless, The Information focuses less on ontological acrobatics and more on the world presented. That world’s governing principle is the rivalry between two late twentieth century novelists—Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry. The plot echoes George Gissing’s New Grub Street, a dark analysis of the literature industry of the 1890s, focused on the triumph of a mercantile hack writer over an impractical literary idealist. Next to the British Gissing, Martin Amis invokes such international literary enthusiasts of rivals and doppelgangers as Vladimir Nabokov and Luis Borges. The result is a narrative rich in antagonism, jealousy and hatred—emotions morbid but necessary, if one was to believe Richard Tull’s conviction that “writers should hate each other … If they mean business.” 78 Richard is a “marooned modernist,” 79 writing complex, unreadable experimental prose intended not to please his readers but to “stretch them until they twanged.” 80 Tull’s work Untitled, for instance, features such delights as an “escort-agency advertisement done as a chapter-long parody of The Romance of the Rose,” 81 or a “miraculously sustained tour de force in which five unreliable narrators converse on crossed mobile-phone lines while stuck in the same revolving door.” 82 Richard is painfully aware that his works attract neither publishers nor readers, and that “whatever it was [he] stood for—the not-so-worldly, the contorted, the difficult—had failed.” 83 In striking contrast, Gwyn Barry’s

77

Martin Amis, The Information (London: Flamingo, 1996), 63. Amis, The Information, 312. 79 Amis, The Information, 170. 80 Amis, The Information, 170. 81 Amis, The Information, 324. 82 Amis, The Information, 324. 83 Amis, The Information, 364. 78

Writing the Writer

205

facile and politically correct novels, scrupulously cleansed of all potentially discomforting elements such as love, hate, or naked bodies, win him a vast readership and commercial success. While Richard offers readers difficulty, Gwyn offers heartening optimism. While Richard’s fiction explores London streets, Gwyn chooses “not the city but the garden. Not more neurosis but fresh clarity.” 84 Gwyn’s favorite metaphors for the creative process are very telling: writing is like carpentry, or like childbirth, both evoking a natural, organic world, untainted by modernity. Richard, more darkly, draws analogies between the history of literature and the history of armaments, both “getting heavier and hairier,” 85 or the history of astronomy, marked by man’s increasing awareness of his own insignificance. Gwyn, characteristically, shies away from such morbid reflections, allowing his readers a luxurious escape from all modern anxieties. Although it is clear that Richard is the more genuine artist, it is Gwyn’s lukewarm fiction that wins universal acclaim. The Information’s two novelists represent not only alternative literary modes, but also alternative modes of literary production. While Richard toils away at the traditional messy desk in his cramped apartment, with “books heaped under tables, under beds ... heaped on windowsills so they closed out the sky,” 86 Gwyn Barry manages a professional operation, complete with research assistant, neatly alphabetized bookshelves, and an extensive machinery of publishing and promotion. Gwyn’s literary life entails interviews, book tours, TV documentaries, Hollywood adaptations, as well as lucrative literary prizes, and he navigates the world of bestsellerdom with ease and cynicism, adjusting his image according to audience expectations. He understands that, as his publisher Gal Aplanalp put it, “People are very interested in writers. Successful ones. More interested in the writers than the writing.” 87 In a consumerist era, Gwyn’s popularity inevitably translates into commercial success. His is “the excitement of increase, of reputable profit, the kind you get when commerce meets art and finds it good.” 88 The more idealistic Richard resents such materialist preoccupations and their reflection in Gwyn’s nouveau riche verbal mannerisms: “It was a disgraceful capitulation to the here and now—to the secular, to the mortal. Why would you want to sound like a tycoon or a gangster? Whatever you were going to get, you weren’t going to get it in your time.” 89 Richard’s intuition that great literature and money are natural enemies is comically confirmed during his flight to America, as he observes that the gravity of in-flight reading matter 84

Amis, The Information, 113. Amis, The Information, 192. 86 Amis, The Information, 20. 87 Amis, The Information, 131. 88 Amis, The Information, 295. 89 Amis, The Information, 185. 85

206

Magdalena Ma
czyn´ska

is inversely proportional to the price of the ticket. The destination of the flight is also important: The Information draws a connection between the commercialization of literature and the encroachment of American values. Joe Moran observes that, in Amis’s novel, “the identification of the United States with the triumph of the marketplace over cultural distinction (a feature of British cultural life from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy onward) has resurfaced as a way of discussing what is seen as a current climate of bestsellerdom and hype in the publishing industry.” 90 Adding a new spin on the old Anglo-American theme, Amis juxtaposes the British icon of the tweeded writer with an image of American-style glamour and superficiality. Amis’s critique of New World cultural commercialism is accompanied by an equally biting satire on the non-commercial literary milieu. The Information, as Moran notes, is “a scathing view of the coziness and corruption of the old literary establishment and its forms of quality control and peer review.” 91 Richard Tull is Literary Editor of The Little Magazine, a disgustingly lazy and disorganized institution, and Special Director of Tantalus Press, a publishing house that makes profit by publishing worthless pseudo-literary efforts. Richard abuses both his position of reviewer and his access to Tantalus’s resources on his Quixotic quest to ruin Gwyn’s reputation, first by trying to turn prize jurors against his rival, and then by producing a supposed earlier version of Amelior and accusing Gwyn of plagiarism. Even the small independent American press Bold Agenda that brought out Untitled isn’t free from corruption, as it unscrupulously bases its publication choices on fashionable categories of political correctness, with the sole purpose of maintaining its funding. Amis presents both the old and the new modes of literary work as quite repulsive, placing The Information in the current of disillusioned writings about contemporary authorship that Gerald Howard termed the “literature of disgust.” 92 If neither modernism, represented by Richard, nor commercialism, represented by Gwyn, is entirely satisfactory, what is the alternative? The answer may perhaps be the work of Martin Amis. As John Nash observed, “Amis’s self-allusive, self-parodic narrators raise the question of literary value, the problem of judgment, for the work of Martin Amis.” 93 While laughing at Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull, Amis laughs at aspects of his own authorial

90 Joe Moran, “Artists and Verbal Mechanics: Martin Amis’s The Information,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41, no.4 (2000): 310. 91 Moran, 310. 92 Gerald Howard, “Slouching Towards Grubnet: The Author in the Age of Publicity,” in Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse, ed. Sven Birkerts (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1996), 20. 93 John Nash, “Fiction may be a Legal Paternity: Martin Amis’s The Information,” English: The Journal of the English Association 45, no. 183 (1996): 219.

Writing the Writer

207

practice: his Tull-like “urban, erotic and erudite” 94 voice, his experiments with multiple and unreliable narrators, his popularity, and his commercial success. Amis’s novel is clearly self-ironic, but it also offers a plausible way out of the impasse represented by Gwyn and Richard. The Information, like the rest of Amis’s oeuvre, is, both, highbrow and popular, sophisticated and entertaining — a happy synthesis in the Barry-Tull dialectics. Martin Amis’s novels analyze but also enact a number of crucial questions concerning modern-day authorship: the complex ontological status of authors with regard to the worlds they create and destroy; their proximity to violence, metonymically related to the violent times they inhabit; their paradoxical position in an age that had proclaimed “the death of the author,” and yet continues to harbor a fetishist obsession with authors’ personal lives. Amis’s analysis occurs on multiple levels of the fictional construct—the thematic, the structural, the psychological, the symbolic, the metafictional—reflecting this writer’s preoccupation with the complexities of the authorial role. In her study of Martin Amis’s literary masters, Victoria Alexander argues that Amis, while endorsing Vladimir Nabokov’s vision of the novelist as a trickster and illusionist, firmly believes in Saul Bellow’s ideal of writer as a moralist concerned with contemporary ethical dilemmas.95 These two modes of novelistic practice are evident in Martin Amis’s playful and profound scrutiny of his own vocation. While joining his fellow postmodernists in the project of twisting the ontological tissue of fictional worlds, Amis addresses the most pressing problems facing authors at the end of the twentieth century.

94

Amis, The Information, 170. Victoria N. Alexander, “Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov,” The Antioch Review 52, no.4 (1994): 580–90. 95

This page intentionally left blank

HEMINGWAY, CÉZANNE, AND WRITING: “REALITIES THAT ARISE FROM THE CRAFT ITSELF” LAWRENCE STANLEY

Ernest Hemingway’s writing, with its stark sense of reportage, hardly seems to challenge ordinary ways of seeing. Yet his desire to write the way Cézanne painted not only demanded rethinking the craft of choosing and arranging words, it also demands a different attention to the written text before the reader can see the text or story as there. Hemingway, in “On Writing” and in his personal letters, mulled over the difficulties that the writer faces when trying to make fiction have the ontological presence of an object. In his collection of short stories, In Our Time, he experimented carefully and methodologically with repetition and with syntactical patterns that brought his writing close to achieving his objectives. While the writing retains a definitive literal impression, an attentive reading will recognize the linguistic characteristics which give the writing its unique sense of presence. And so we have this situation, a settled language because a language is settled after it does not change any more that is as to words and grammar, and it being written so completely written all the time it inevitably cannot change much and yet the pressure upon these words to make them do something that they did not do for those who made that language come to exist is a very interesting thing to watch.1

As he looked at Cézanne’s paintings, first in Gertrude Stein’s Paris flat and then at the Musée du Luxembourg, Ernest Hemingway felt some of that “pressure upon these words” out of which “realities … arise.” He narrated his feeling sometime around 1924 in roughly nine pages of manuscript originally written into the longish two-part short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” These nine pages, which Hemingway deleted before its publication, are not an unfinished story—which is how they appear, as “On Writing” in the posthumously published collected

1

Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures ([1935] Chicago: U Chicago P, 1969), 9.

210

Lawrence Stanley

stories2—but are a story within a story or a layer within a story, a layer of Nick Adams’s thinking as he makes camp and fishes. Left in the story, the narrative would have been too explicit of the writer’s own wrestling with the construction of fictional narratives. While “On Writing” obviously tells how Hemingway was thinking about the making of fiction, when it is read collaboratively with “Big Two-Hearted River” it dramatizes the very problem Hemingway grappled with: that the intrusive subjectivity of reflection threatens the conditional object-state of writing itself, since reflection arises out of actual (and remembered experience) rather than out of the craft itself. Realistic writing seems to depend either on detailing the realities of actual perception or on bringing perception and craft into productive dialogue. How, then, can the writer go beyond these two alternatives to craft an object such that it has the ontological status of actual things? Excised from the original manuscript, “On Writing” seemingly begins in medias res, as a meditation no longer causally or chronologically linked to previous events. Prior to the meditation, Nick Adams has hiked deep into the woods on a personal trek into the wilderness to a place where he will be alone and will be left alone, and he had set up a campsite. He knows the place yet the place retains its rawness, its wildness, and, by setting up camp, he has tamed his small bit of it. The reader gets the details of the setting up, of cutting pegs for the tent and cutting ferns for bedding and the smell of the ferns on Nick’s hands and the making of a campfire and of a meal. The reader knows this as Nick knows it, as what he is aware of and not more, and the details of his consciousness shape him as a subjective immediacy in the present tense; so he is read in the present tense. “On Writing” picks up with the second day, and the day is hot, and Nick has been fishing and has caught one trout, a “good” one, and he has been observing the river and not only observing it but taking it all in with all his senses. Nick meditates on the past—“His whole inner life” (NAS 245), on his fishing buddies and their relation to women and to living and all the things that he loved about living: fishing and digging potatoes and playing baseball and watching bullfights, and summer. He remembers these things without deliberation or order. He pays attention to the river, reading its spots and currents and pools and shadows pragmatically, to determine where the fish are and how they will respond to flies and lures. And then the fishing/fishing-thinking stops. At this point, he thinks about writing and the writing of his that had been good and how the Nick in the stories had never been himself but someone he’d made up. He realizes that loving life too much makes writing difficult and that a certain amount of “discontent and friction” (NAS 247) facilitates writing. Writing

2 Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories, ed. Philip Young (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). Referred to hereafter as NAS.

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing

211

is about feeling, about “times when you had to write” and times when “you felt … like you could never write” (NAS 247) and yet somehow eventually you would write. It is akin to “peristaltic action,” unbidden and not wholly controllable. When it worked, when you felt as though you could write and you did write and the writing was good, then you knew it was possible and you always hoped for those times. The language of “On Writing,” unlike the more controlled and crafted syntax of “Big Two-Hearted River,” has a raw immediacy akin to Gertrude Stein’s writing. In this syntax, Adams thinks about how “It was so damn hard to write well” and how “There were so many tricks” and how such tricks could and “would all turn into clichés.” He wants then to see the river, not pragmatically as a fisherman studying its currents and pools and shadows, but as a self-contained and aesthetic object. And he thinks to himself: He wanted to paint like Cezanne painted. Cezanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. It was hell to do. … He, Nick, wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself. There wasn’t any trick. Nobody had written about country like that. … You could do it if you would fight it out. If you’d lived right with your eyes. It was a thing you couldn’t talk about. [NAS 247]

In that one single short sentence, “He wanted to write like Cézanne painted,” Adams realizes his writerly vision. All the reader gets, despite the quick shifts from third to second person that implicate the reader in the process, is the ambiguity of “like” and the question of whether the writer is aspiring to an effect or a technique or something altogether unnamed. Cézanne too had tricks but broke things down and, out of the broken, “built the real thing.” When he repeats the thought to himself, Adams hits upon a crucial clarification, not only that Cézanne did something with paints that he has sought to do with words, but more precisely “to write about country so it would be there like Cézanne had done it in painting.” It’s easy enough to get the main idea, to get the obvious Cézanne notion and to think about how Cézanne painted and how that kind of painting becomes a way to see what Hemingway was after, but when the emphasis is placed upon “there”—“so it would be there”—the reader’s attention is forced to move out of the painterly and into the writerly, to see how Hemingway had to learn the tricks of traditional fiction writing and then had to break those tricks before the present tense sense could be constructed within the text and consequently be experienced by the reader. To see what Hemingway was up to is seemingly simple, except for the enigmatic tension between the subjective—“from inside yourself ”—and the objective — “so it would be there.” Before Hemingway could write to the

212

Lawrence Stanley

objectivity of thereness, he had to break the narrative thread that conflated the as-if of fiction with the actuality of memoir; only then could he move his writing as completely as possible into the field of language. On the 15th of August 1924, Hemingway wrote from Paris to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas: I have finished two long short stories, one of them not much good and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain [“Big Two-Hearted River”] where I’m trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit.3

A month later he wrote to Edward J. O’Brien: What I’ve been doing is trying to do country so you don’t remember the words after you read it but actually have the country. It is hard because to do it you have to see the country all complete all the time you write and not just have a romantic feeling about it. It is swell fun. [Letters 123]

This swell fun is obviously different from the writing sensations he acknowledges when writing to Stein and Toklas. To them he says “isn’t writing a hard job though? It used to be easy before I met you.” Somewhere between the hard work of writing and the swell fun of it emerges something more crafted or “made” (to use one of Hemingway’s words4) and less subject to the whims of frustration and elation: language so thoroughly in its field that its thereness coincides with the thereness of other objects. In both letters, he defines his objective or intention as “do,” as simple a verb or even a word as one can get: two letters, a consonant and a vowel, visually distinguishable from each other only by a vertical line; yet so simple a word has a remarkable lineage—from the Latin facere, to make, and the Greek tithenai, to place or to set. The verb’s portmanteau of meanings suffices to represent the crafted art Hemingway labored into as a writer, so that the reader would “actually have the country.” Apparently, the reader’s subjectivity can be had only at the expense of the writer’s subjectivity.

3

Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917-1961 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), 122. 4 David Bromwich has observed: “work, for [Hemingway], has the quality of a made thing, which he of all others has added to life. The result is seemingly pointless. Nevertheless, it endures because it is alive with purpose, as life itself is not. So he must write in order to be released back into his experiences and then go on, without knowing why he does, until enough traces collect for him to deposit again in the form of writing.” 4 “Hemingway’s Valor,” Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry (Chicago and London: U Chicago P, 2001), 207.

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing

213

The narrative perspective of “On Writing” never breaks away from the intimacy of the writer’s subjectivity. In his edited collection of the Nick Adams stories, Philip Young placed it four stories after “Big Two-Hearted River” rather than chronologically, the way the other stories were arranged. That separation intensifies the relative independence of the manuscript (which depends upon a more personal heuristic of realities arising directly out of experience rather than out of language) and seems rather in keeping with Hemingway’s clear and deliberate decision to excise it from the original manuscript. A month after writing to O’Brien about writing “Big Two-Hearted River,” he wrote to Robert McAlmon: I have decided that all that mental conversation in the long fishing story is the shit and have cut it all out. The entire nine pages. … I realized how bad it was and that shocked me back into the river again. … Just the straight fishing (Letters 133).5

The excursion into Nick Adams’s consciousness violated a thin but distinct separation that the writer who wanted the writing to be there often scrupulously maintained. More to the point, the excised pages were too explicitly subjective, and the self-consciousness in that narrative was essentially at odds with the objective sense that Hemingway wanted with there-ness. Even though the explicit manifestation of thinking about there-ness was excised from the short story, Hemingway was constantly thinking about it. More than two decades later, in the late 1950s, as he wrote the manuscript for A Moveable Feast and recalled his earlier time in Paris of writing and of visiting the Musée du Luxembourg to study the Impressionist paintings, he noted: I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides, it was a secret.6

The absence of the explanatory is typical of Hemingway’s minimalist writing, so it is not surprising to find him calling what he was learning “a secret.” There is, nevertheless, a bit of enigma suggested in “it was a secret” which, unexplicated by Hemingway, remains a secret. It was and it is a secret, and one might imagine, without lapsing into sentimental acceptance of the writer’s words, that 5

Of this excision Joseph Flora writes: “In the cut segment Nick is too cerebral. Hemingway felt that “talk”—even if presented as memory—could ruin a thing. … He would do a Cézanne rather than talk about doing one.” He is right, except that the author himself did occasionally talk about doing; the excision seems to be more about proportion than about talking. Cf. Joseph M. Flora, Hemingway’s Nick Adams (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State U P, 1982), 181. 6 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), 17–18.

214

Lawrence Stanley

the draw of Cézanne—“something”—remained rather mysterious to him, as such powers often do. And Hemingway could be superstitious about those mysteries: “It was a thing you couldn’t talk about.” The tension between the syntactical simplicity of his writing and the “dimensions” that he wanted his writing to have defines the labor of creating the immediate. That much is relatively clear. For Hemingway, there were a few consistent crucial principles: to have his writing simple and true and to hold to these standards and to use these words, knowing well that words risk losing significance when used sloppily, but that they are also all that stand against fakery which for him was the death of good writing. “Good writing is true writing,” he tells the kid who wants to be a writer, and his declaration with its passive-voiced predicate and its symmetrical syntax perfectly equates good and true. He knows, too, that his declaration will not suffice and hence moves on to clarify: “it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is.” 7 This proportion must be, as all proportions must be, at once paradigmatic and dynamic, the very pattern of fluidity. This proportion, which has to be worked out by the individual writer and has to be derived from what has been done while pushing into the unknown and the uncertain, must be a matter of syntax and a matter of making words do what they have not yet done. Without that proportion and sense of reworked relations among words and between words and not-words, the writer risks faking it. Hemingway wanted to know as exactly as possible “how far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten.” 8 And the writer who seeks those dimensions must know this: “What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know. A writer should know too much” (Letters 780). But what exactly could Hemingway learn, particularly from one impressionistic painter, that would get him closer to the achievement of there? How did Cézanne produce “realities that arise from the craft itself,” or effect an intimate relation between the worked arrangements of materials and the real? It might be impossible to answer fully the question “why Cézanne?” yet something in this Impressionist, perhaps his ability to abstract from the visual all but the most essential experiential qualities and to force the viewer outside memory and the mimetic, caught Hemingway early on and stayed with him: “The oblique rendering of more than meets the eye; the repetition of line, color, and motif; the fusion of simplicity and complexity; the union of abstraction and

7

William White, ed., By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967), 215. 8 Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 33.

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing

215

reality; the elimination of non-essential details—the “sense” of Cézanne.” 9 Such characteristics define the field of the material and within that field the relational proportions, and this is what artists must grapple with as they counter the tyrannical and literal eye. Cézanne’s bolder work relentlessly abstracts the essence of the experience and demonstrates in essential form that one’s experience of something is not coincidental with the thing itself; mere representation goes nowhere. Hemingway’s stark sense of reportage, whose literalism appears to collapse the autobiographical into the fictional, seems quite un-Cézanne-like. This however is too simple, for Hemingway’s literal has a definitive degree of resistance that does not play to the reader’s desires, and it strips from the text virtually everything that can be stripped away before there is no story and no desire to read the story, and leaves within the stripped-away, a vague but distinct sense of the “beyond.” In his similar musings on Cézanne, Rainer Maria Rilke does not hesitate to explore the secret that Hemingway acknowledged but left unexplicated. Rilke prefaces his collection of letters on Cézanne10 with an excerpt from his own letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (10 August 1903): “Somehow I too must find a way of making things; not plastic, written things, but realities that arise from the craft itself.” The seductive intrigue of such a claim might blind the reader to its intimated complexities. For in painting, the relation between the artist’s materials and the world of intelligible objects is relatively direct; in writing, that relation is more oblique, for language is intricately bound up in the subjective and in how one perceives what one perceives. If the writer is to make “things,” language must be realized as material in its own right. In these letters, Rilke describes his perception of Cézanne’s urge to get “the most indispensable thing … To achieve the conviction and substantiality of things, a reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility by his experience of the object” (Rilke 33). Such conviction and substance come out of “a mutual struggle between looking and confidently receiving, and then of appropriating and making personal use of what has been received” (Rilke 36). Rilke’s language (more exactly, his translator’s language), dense with Latinate diction, leads intriguingly to a simple prepositional phrase and a simple but equally abstract noun: “object.” This art-reality, to have the “conviction” (convincere, the ability to overcome or conquer) and the “substantiality” (substantia, to be present) of an object and to “potentiate” ( potentia, to have the power), must be irreducible and mute and completely material. This is the compelling vision of Cézanne’s work. Rilke’s recognition of an essential necessity—“for this one thing which so much depends on” (Rilke 64)—must not be confused with liking or loving the 9 Kenneth G. Johnston, “Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country,” American Literature 56.1 (March 1984), 30. 10 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, tr. Joel Agee ([1952] New York: Fromm International, 1985).

216

Lawrence Stanley

object, for if one loves an object, “one judges it instead of saying it” (Rilke 50) and consequently “They’d paint: I love this here; instead of painting: here it is” (Rilke 51). To say a thing and in saying make it here: that is what Rilke the poet sees in Cézanne the painter, the achievement of the “labor … of an infinitely responsive conscience … which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color, without any previous memories” (Rilke 65). Certainly, Rilke must have sensed what his own work aspired to in making realities out of the craft: not love but “an infinitely responsive conscience.” The connection with Hemingway’s standard—“how conscientious he is”—is clear; equally important is how Rilke manages the relation between the subjective and the objective. In Cézanne’s work, “painting is something that takes place among the colors, and … one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves” (Rilke 75); in writing, writers must, similarly, be aware of “something that takes place among” the words, and they must have the discipline to leave that something alone. The determination to make the thing, not the art-form but the “here it is,” demands the audacity to know the physical, bold and unsubtle, without surface nuance or distance of irony, which force creator and viewer into or onto almost the same place or point: to realize there the way one realizes how there an actual thing is. Explaining to O’Brien that he wants “to see the country all complete all the time you write,” Hemingway rather enigmatically identifies the multidimensional potential of art and its ability to achieve empirically impossible ways of seeing. D. H. Lawrence, in his “Introduction to these Paintings,” argued that Cézanne “wanted to touch the world of substance once more with the intuitive touch, to be aware of it with the intuitive awareness:” When he said to his models: “Be an apple! Be an apple!” he was uttering the foreword to the fall … of our whole way of consciousness, and the substitution of another way. If the human being is going to be primarily an apple, as for Cézanne it was, then you are going to have a new world of men: a world which has very little to say, men that can sit still and just be physically there, and be truly non-moral. … For the intuitive apperception of the apple is so tangibly aware of the apple that it is aware of it all round, not only just of the front. … The true imagination is for ever curving round to the other side, to the back of presented appearance.11

Intuition and imagination are more the language of Lawrence than of Hemingway, but Lawrence gets close to unpuzzling “why Cézanne?” The

11

D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: The Viking Press, 1936), 578–579. I am indebted to Timothy Bewes for this reference.

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing

217

artists’ world, perceived by artists in this era (both Hemingway and Lawrence are writing their observations in the mid- and late-nineteen twenties), is a world stripped of human commentary into which the object emerges as a threedimensional object. In the above paragraph Lawrence claims that if the model were to “intrude her personality” the artist “would have to paint cliché,” a thought that resonates with Rilke’s earlier reflections and that has close kinship with Hemingway’s deletion of the subjective reflections of Nick Adams. Furthermore, the tangible awareness Lawrence describes runs parallel with Hemingway’s “what goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.” To see the conceptual in practice, one has only to watch William Gass reading Gertrude Stein as she looked at Cézanne … and as she examined the master’s portrait of his wife, she realized that the reality of the model had been superceded by the reality of the composition. Everything in the painting was related to everything else in the painting, and to everything else equally (there were no lesser marks or moments), while the relation of any line or area of color in the painting to anything outside the painting (to a person in this case) was accidental, superfluous, illusory. … the painting was an entity.12

The “entity”—a term correlative to “there”—is the painting as an object, as much an object as what the painting is about. Entity will be about Stein looking at Cézanne and Gass looking at Cézanne. Entity will also be about the way one thing relates to another with a kind of unvalued flatness, the way things themselves are, almost unperceived and yet not wholly objective either, so that anything not within the painting — or, for Stein and Hemingway, in the text—is superfluous: the constructed thing is about itself. Entity, as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines it, is “something that has objective or physical reality and distinctness of being and character: something that has independent or separate existence: something that has a unitary and self-contained character.” A complete and completely made thing resonates with self-reference, neither solipsistic nor narcissistic, but whole and feeling whole and giving a whole experience, and made of spatial relations within space: a separate existence. So one experiences: looking at a Cézanne painting, unable to use reference points outside the painting to make sense of the painting and not getting “it” if unable to give up the need for those external reference points. To write the correlative to painting is to write the unclosing but self-contained narrative, to compose the put-together-bits until they achieve a sense of necessity; such writing realizes that to be there is to be necessary. The writer must learn the trick and

12 William Gass, “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence,” The World within the Word (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 74.

218

Lawrence Stanley

then learn to break it before the writing can be an experience of the thing and before the writing can be the thing.13 “But I wish to hell I could paint,” Hemingway wrote to Ezra Pound in the 2nd of May, 1924. Such was his impulse toward the immediate material, to experience in art the tangibility of material objects. For humans, things are not as they are; they are as they are perceived—and therein lies the artist’s conundrum: to make a thing as a thing while having to perceive it in order to make it. “I wish to hell I could paint.” But he could not. Instead he wrote, and writing was the hardest thing he ever did and it was, when it worked, the most satisfying thing to do; he had to learn from painters a way of knowing things that would satisfy his desire for immediacy, particularly visual immediacy, as he made things with words. To be there, his writing would eschew even the layers of the reflective and analytical and the intimations of the psychological or the intimate. As an experiment in making it up, in making words “do something they did not do for those who made that language to exist,” 14 In Our Time places word against word, often repetitiously, places story against story, and finds its coherence through paratactically interleaved italic recollections; it might also be the closest Hemingway got to experimenting narratively with the Cézanne idea and consequently the least formalized and most overtly repetitive of his writings—writing whose “combinatory forms will rival ordinary vision.” Paul Ricoeur’s “signs whose combinatory forms will rival ordinary vision” 15 and Gertrude Stein’s “A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it” 16 and Hemingway’s “so you don’t remember the words after you read it but actually have the country” (Letters 123) have so little apparent correlation with each other as to seem more contradictory than complementary, yet brought on to the same plane of inquiry they offer a productive reading of Hemingway’s Cézanne secret. Very little of In Our Time appears to rival ordinary vision, not the way a Cézanne painting will rival ordinary vision; few of the sentences in the stories are so long and complicated as to

13 As Hugh Kenner has clarified, the arts of this era share an impulse for the thing and for the there, and such art needs “a new grammar, that of juxtaposed shots … and a new syntax likewise, of event counterpointed with setting, or dialogue with action” whose “[e]nvironments are simply there” (Homemade World 128, 129): the silent film with its completely being there, and Cézanne, bold and unsubtle, without the nuances of the actual. This is not to (de)value but simply to point out what finally is obvious—the audacity of non-reporting statements whose very bluntness forces creator and viewer onto almost the same plane of perception wherein they realize there. 14 Stein, Narration, 9. 15 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: The Texas Christian U P, 1976), 41. 16 Gertrude Stein, Writings and Lectures 1911–1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (London: Peter Owen, 1967), 130.

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing

219

make one know oneself knowing them; and even if the first two claims were relevant, then the writing could hardly give one the country itself. The materials of the writer are always diction and syntax, and the choosing of words and the arranging of them are its craft, so writing that aspires to making something there must experiment with the materials and must push writing into the field of language. Diction names things; diction names and in naming establishes reference points. Repetition, with its calling-to-attention insistence, directs attention to how a thing is being said and unsettles the reference of settled discourse. Words can be repeated but not in the same place and so repetition has the power to construct a peculiar syntax of space. A first reading of In Our Time will reveal the obvious: that the stories are not necessarily chronological and that they are interleaved with fragments of war memories. The stories are also quite accessible and seem so literal as to warrant little examination. Less obvious but more pervasive is the writing’s oblique jazz-like improvisations, wherein solo parts run responsively against traditional reference points. Nouns insist on literal specificity, but in Hemingway’s prose the repetitions point two ways, to the overt reference points outside the text and to the text itself whose “making” constructs its own reference points. “Cat in the Rain” with its repetitions and its Stein-like narrative achieves the Cézanne-like impression of thereness that Hemingway set up, in “On Writing” and his letters, as ideal fiction: Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain.17

The repetitions are numerous. Words are repeated; prepositional phrases are repeated; syntactical patterns are repeated. The simple syntax of subject-verb— itself the practice of mimetic realism—is wrested from traditional representation, and the writing moves from representation toward performance. Or, looked at another way, this is Hemingway wrestling with the difference between “simple true sentences” and “the dimensions I was trying to put in them.” The insistence of these repetitions gives the rain a there-ness that is like rain itself; the syntax separates each repeated “rain” from the others, as it does the “long line” of the seawaves. The repetition effects a rhythm, too, of water coming down as rain and slipping up and down the beach as sea, and in the last sentence the rain and the sea become one. Repetition moves the repeated words forward and subtly alters their meanings. 17 Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time ([1930] New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1958) 117.

220

Lawrence Stanley

This hardly seems to rival ordinary vision—unless ordinary vision is defined as the unseeing that many experience, the inability (lack of talent? or lack of discipline?) to see anything in particular of significance in the ordinary and the everyday. That is what “Cat in the Rain” rivals, if one considers how many rainy days one has known and how little one has had to say about them and what it would require to write like this. One begins to learn to see by seeing language doing what it is doing, and one must see and feel the dimensions on the page and the materiality of syntax; and one becomes conscious, through such a practice of reading, of oneself knowing it. And one has the country. Readers—in an effort presumably to fulfill Hemingway’s challenge to “see beyond”—often read Hemingway’s writing as symbolic and turn Santiago into a Christ figure or the burnt forests in “Big Two-Hearted River” into a figure of purgatory. These attentions reflect a pattern of reading: of veering away from the text at the crucial point, to make the text representative of something else, to read it symbolically rather than materially.18 In such readings, the demands of “there” are evaded, perhaps because critical theory shies away from naïve assumptions about the relation between words and things. Yet this sense of there-ness is a distinctly writerly sense, and it deserves critical attention, no matter how resistive the relation between words and things might be. If, as Theodore Gaillard has argued, Cézanne learned how to paint without “the traditional vanishing point, the fixed Renaissance perspective” and “Hemingway followed suit,” 19 then one will have to reform reading into a practice that will break away from reading for symbol and metaphor. For symbol-readings assume or seek close parallels (even as Gaillard does: “And so it is with …”) as literary equivalents of the Renaissance perspective, which itself is a codifying or systematizing of artistic practices, that determines how writers see and consequently how they write about something. It could be as simple as the distinction between symbolizing and being, between the semiotics of anything and the thing itself (and general assumptions of accessibility, of whether a thing can be known through symbols or whether it can be known—as distinct from experiencing it—without symbols or can be known only through symbols). In his next to last paragraph, Gaillard writes: Hemingway’s mastery … echoing Cézanne … manifests itself in the meticulous placement and repetition of key words and images to create patterns recognizable by perceptive readers as, in that instant of realization, they suddenly discover

18 After reading critical reviews of The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway said, bluntly and simply: “All that symbolism that people say is shit” (Letters 780). 19 Theodore L. Gaillard, Jr., “Hemingway’s Debt to Cézanne: New Perspectives,” Twentieth Century Literature 45. 1 (Spring 1999), 72.

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing

221

dimensions in such characters as the troubled protagonist of “Big Two-Hearted River” and in symbolic landscapes like those in A Farewell to Arms. [Gaillard 76]

As compelling as this claim is, it collapses perspective and dimension into the symbolic and consequently avoids the harder question of just how this writing constructs the immediate of the there. It fails to get at the “something that takes place among” the words. Since the writer’s materials are language and life, Hemingway’s longing for the life of the painter is a reminder of the translative nature of language, its ability to appear as the object that is being written about. The reader, like the writer, must learn to see the language. The realistic nature of Hemingway’s writing does seem, quite literally, to be there, and hence it is difficult to see what Paul Ricoeur has defined as impressionism’s “aesthetic augmentation of reality,” forms of art that proceed more and more boldly to the abolition of natural forms for the sake of a merely constructed range of elementary signs whose combinatory forms will rival ordinary vision. … it challenges perceptual forms by relating them to non-perceptual structures.20

If, as Hemingway assumed, “You had to do it from inside yourself,” then both writer and reader must see language as more than “a mere shadow of reality” (Ricoeur 40) and this, in turn, promises to reform both readers’ and writers’ experiences with and their interpretations of texts; they work the inward life of things with external perception. To be there, then, is to create an intellectual-aesthetic space within which a particular experience is possible, an experience that ought to have kinship with the immediacy of actual physical things while simultaneously removing the text from the ordinary. Hemingway’s mandate, to “make not describe,” is realized within his particular Cézanne-inspired work: the artist selecting out of the plethora of everyday ordinary things and the five senses and doing so within the “contraction and miniaturization” of language. Selection is less a matter of just leaving out things (which he does not necessarily do, as the details of Nick Adams setting up camp in “Big Two-Hearted River” show) and more of making “a new text of reality” (Ricoeur 41), of working with an already-existing minimal symbolizing system of language to counter the entropic effect of ordinary vision (neutralized qualities, blurred edges, shaded-off contrasts) to metamorphose by relating the perceptual to the non-perceptual. Selection and elimination open spaces for combination and for the arrangement of words whose surface is at once there and yet have luminosity. 20

Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 42, 41.

222

Lawrence Stanley

“Big Two-Hearted River,” the last of the stories in the collection, is different from “Cat in the Rain” which has a distinctly impressionistic feel and is more like a single picture within which the fluidity of experience seeks no reference point outside its own definitive frame. “Big Two-Hearted River” spans several days, and its narrator-character never stops moving. The story drives forward with cinematic force as its paragraph-frame sequences each dissolve into the next. Here too is repetition, but the repetition is stretched over a larger syntactical space. The dimensions of its there-ness exceed what could ever happen in “Cat in the Rain.” The syntax is short. The diction is simple and literal and common. Yet the text gives evidence of the writer crafting patiently and carefully. He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside a stone. Nick reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the elbow under water. The trout was steady in the moving stream, resting on the gravel, beside a stone. As Nick’s fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool, underwater feeling he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the stream. [In Our Time 201]

Here are repetitions—stream, gone, touch, beneath a stone—and repetitions with variations—touch/touched, under water/underwater, to the bottom/across the bottom. On a first reading, the repetitions might not be noticed, as if so the writing achieves the effect Hemingway wanted: to have the language be forgotten. Yet the repetitions construct a syntactical space as the words function like pinpoints on a map, and between the repeated words something happens that subtly modifies the repeated words. And their repetitive insistence affects a sense of simply being there. Holding the rod far out toward the uprooted tree and sloshing backward in the current, Nick worked the trout, plunging, the rod bending alive, out of the danger of the weeds into the open river. Holding the rod, pumping alive against the current, Nick brought the trout in. He rushed, but always came, the spring of the rod yielding to the rushes, sometimes jerking under water, but always bringing him in. The rod above his head, he led the trout over the net, then lifted. [In Our Time 206]

Here again are repetitions—rod, holding the rod, the trout—and counterpoints—out of/into, toward/backward. The repetitions of words and of grammatical structures, echoing in paragraph after paragraph, have become a pattern that stretches syntactical space outside the parameters of a single paragraph. Nick had one good trout. He did not care about getting many trout. Now the stream was shallow and wide. There were trees along both banks. The trees of the left bank made short shadows on the current in the forenoon sun. Nick knew there were trout in each shadow. In the afternoon, after the sun had crossed toward the hills, the trout would be in the cool shadows on the other side of the stream. [In Our Time 207]

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing

223

Again more repetitions—trout, stream, shadows—and variations—banks/ bank, shadow/shadows. The syntax is essential subject/predicate/(object) elongated with strings of prepositional phrases, yet through repetition and variation and counterpoint (which are interparagraphic as well as intraparagraphic), the language builds up and reinforces and modifies to make a graphic space. This space has kinship with the canvas; it is non-linear and its repetitions place words in two-dimensional relation to each other to stretch and separate, so that words begin to work like colors and brush strokes. The words are there and they create a sense of there. Yet the difference between painting and writing is crucial. The painting will stay on the canvas; viewers are not likely to look at a painting and assume that they are seeing Cézanne’s life. The syntactical space of writing exceeds that of the canvas, and that excess forges a kinship space with architectural space; it is three dimensional while it also intimates “the dimensions” and “a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten” to have “it all around.” Unlike the paint on the canvas, words are part of consciousness and they easily leave the page and enter one’s awareness—seamlessly, since the words are already in the mind. To read this syntactical space, the reader has to interrupt this normal cognitive procedure to see two and three and four and five dimensions and thereby to know the text as a complex object. Syntax is the architecture of prose, the necessary spatial structure and effect that makes the object there, not the object about which the writing is, but the writing itself as object. Much of the “Big Two-Hearted River” and the other stories of In Our Time are constructed with this diction and syntax. Everything has the material sense of surface of things, in the pacing and in the sequences, in the repetitions of words and phrases and syntactical structures, points and counterpoints. These are not the repetitions of a writer who has run out of words. This is cinematic, the repetition-insistence of Stein wherein closely repeated language insistent and insistently drives forth something dimensional in feel, as virtual and there as cinema (like a moving canvas) itself. The subtle achievement of In Our Time resists complete explication, for its movement seems so fundamentally existential and experiential that the reader finally appreciates Hemingway’s “it was a secret.” It is not a secret because the writer refused to let the reader in on a trick; it is a secret because it refuses to reveal itself fully even when it presents itself to full viewing, as does a Cézanne painting. George Orwell’s simply stated aesthetic—“Perception of beauty in the external world or … words and their right arrangement” 21—identifies the training of the writer’s aesthetic sensibility; Hemingway, returning again and again to the Musée to learn to see the way the painters were teaching their viewers to see,

21 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 3.

224

Lawrence Stanley

cultivated and disciplined his aesthetic sensibility. The aesthetic and the beautiful would thereby not be about sentimental prettiness but would be bold seeing, as bold as Cézanne seeing, and this seeing would not depend upon memory and nostalgia but upon a sensibility challenged by the way others had learned to see the mobility of reality and simultaneously the immobility of perception. One studied Cézanne. Then one went outside and experienced the fullness of the raw and the undifferentiated and the un-chosen, working out a proportional relation between perception and language. Then one could begin to “make it up.” One would no longer be trying to reconstitute what is already there. “I made it all up,” Hemingway wrote to Stein on the 15th of August, 1924, “so I could see it all.” And there you have it—the Cézanne paradigm, the Lawrence seeing all around. The writing will be, so it will not be about Hemingway and his life (despite the barely visible distinction between his nonfiction and his fiction). It will be simply because Hemingway the reporter, the fisherman, the hunter, had a deep sense of the ordinary-actual and knew that he must see and that he must trust his eyes. He wrote what he knew and knew from experience. But he knew too that mere reportage made a thing too timebound and hence potentially anachronistic—that it would, merely reported, have only the interest of the moment. Realities would have to arise out of the craft of writing, out of the choosing and arranging of words to create a there-ness, and it is “a very interesting thing to watch.” 22 “Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up on to the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake. A pencil lead might break off in the conical nose of the pencil-sharpener and you would use the small blade of the penknife to clear it or else sharpen the pencil carefully with the sharp blade and then slip your arm through sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the pack again, get the other arm though and feel the weight settle on your back and feel the pine needles under your moccasins as you started down the lake. “Then you would hear someone say, ‘Hi, Hem. What are you trying to do? Write in a café?’ ” (A Moveable Feast 81)

Works Consulted Bromwich, David. “Hemingway’s Valor.” Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry. Chicago and London: U Chicago P, 2001. Flora, Joseph M. Hemingway’s Nick Adams. Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State U P, 1982.

22

Stein, Narration, 9.

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing

225

Gaillard, Theodore L. Jr. “Hemingway’s Debt to Cézanne: New Perspectives.” Twentieth Century Literature 45. 1 (Spring 1999) 65–78. Gass, William. “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence.” The World within the Word. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Ed. William White. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967. ———. Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. ———. Green Hills of Africa. London: Jonathan Cape, 1936. ———. In Our Time. [1930] New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1958. ———. A Moveable Feast. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964. ———. The Nick Adams Stories. Ed. Philip Young. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Johnston, Kenneth G. “Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country.” American Literature 56.1 (March 1984) 28–37. Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Lawrence, D. H. Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. New York: The Viking Press, 1936. Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian U P, 1976. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters on Cézanne. Ed. Clara Rilke. Trans. Joel Agee. [1952] New York: Fromm International, 1985. Stein, Gertrude. Narration: Four Lectures. [1935] Chicago: U Chicago P, 1969. ———. Writings and Lectures 1911–1945. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. London: Peter Owen, 1967.

This page intentionally left blank

A NARRATIVE OF ETHICAL PROPORTIONS: HISTORY, MEMORY, AND WRITING IN DANGAREMBGA’S NERVOUS CONDITIONS LAURIE EDSON

In the opening paragraph of Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s female narrator, Tambu, reveals herself to be a writer-in-the-making. The story that Tambu goes on to narrate turns out to be a powerful representation of the complex social, political, cultural, and economic forces at work in colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s and the ways in which these institutionalized forces have affected women and men. By the final paragraph of the novel, the self-assured eight-year-old girl is no longer so self-assured, having experienced a series of difficult steps through a confusing adolescence, Shona patriarchy, and the colonial educational system. Nevertheless, narrating in retrospect, she reveals how her lived experience has brought her to writing. The focus of this essay, then, is the complexity of forces that create and shape Tambu’s resolve to write down her story, as well as the implications of that writing. Unlike her highly educated aunt Maiguru who returns home from England to resume her subservient position beside her rich husband Babamukuru as the good, silent, obedient African wife who never questions his authority, Tambu will tell the story of what she has learned and will expose the way the system works so that other women may be more equipped to negotiate the rough terrain in which cultural institutions of power and gender politics work against them. In this respect, both Tambu’s narrative and Dangarembga’s novel address a significant ethical issue and participate in the larger theoretical issue of the responsibility of the African intellectual in postcolonial society.

Named the African region’s nominee for the Commonwealth Prize for Literature in 1989, Nervous Conditions is the first English-language novel published by a black Zimbabwean woman and one of the most important African novels of the end of the twentieth century. Although it was finished in 1985, it was not published until 1988 by the Women’s Press in London after being rejected by publishers in Zimbabwe. In the opening paragraph of Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s female narrator reveals herself to be a writer-in-the-making, “recalling … the events that put me in a position to

228

Laurie Edson

write this account.” 1 Although Tambu announces that her story will be “about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion … ,” 2 the story she goes on to narrate turns out to be a powerful representation of the complex social, political, cultural, and economic forces at work in colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s and the ways in which these institutionalized forces affected women and men. By the final paragraph of the novel, the self-assured eight-year-old girl is no longer so self-assured, having experienced a series of difficult steps through a confusing adolescence, Shona patriarchy, and the colonial education system. Nevertheless, narrating in retrospect, she reveals how her lived experience has brought her to writing: “Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. …” 3 By establishing her heroine as a writer, Dangarembga is able to weave together a female coming-of-age story and the kind of subversive journalismvérité called for by African philosopher Paulin Hountondji. In “Daily Life in Africa: Elements for a Critique,” Hountondji explains that journalism-vérité is a purposely anecdotal reconstruction of facts combined with organization and interpretation that leads readers to an awareness of the real conditions of daily life and exposes the structures that make them possible. Similar to the project proposed by Henri Lefebvre in Critique de la Vie Quotidienne, although different in that Hountondji’s plan is Africa-specific, Hountondji calls for a demystification, a “return to what is real beyond the pretentious stream of discourses that obscure it.” 4 As he puts it: The critique of the everyday must bring to light this weighty system that clutches at our heels and which we ended up by accepting as normal through sheer habit. The critique must identify this familiar system and make it recognizable. …5

The focus of the present essay, then, is not so much the personal development of the central female character of Dangarembga’s novel, but rather the complexity of forces at work in colonial Rhodesia that create and shape the central character’s resolve to write down her story, as well as the implications of that writing. Unlike her highly educated aunt Maiguru who returns from England to 1

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (Seattle: Seal Press, 1988), 1. Dangarembga, 1. 3 Dangarembga, 204. 4 Paulin J. Hountondji, “Daily Life in Black Africa: Elements for a Critique,” in The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness 1947–1987, ed. V. Y. Mudimbe (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1992), 361. 5 Hountondji, 362. 2

History, Memory, and Writing

229

resume her subservient position beside her rich husband Babamukuru as the good, silent, obedient African wife who never questions his authority, Dangarembga’s narrator will tell the story of what she has learned, will expose the way the system works so that other women may be more equipped to negotiate the rough terrain in which cultural institutions of power and gender politics work against them. In this sense, both Tambu’s story and Dangarembga’s novel address a significant ethical issue and participate in the larger theoretical issue of the responsibility of the African intellectual in postcolonial society. Several critics have analyzed Dangarembga’s novel with respect to its title and its epigraph referring to Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, analyzing the novel in terms of Fanon’s theories concerning the split existence lived by colonial subjects.6 In particular, Nyasha’s bulimia/anorexia nervosa has received special attention.7 However, much less attention has been paid to the character of Maiguru, the various manifestations of Maiguru’s silence, and the way Maiguru’s decisions about her silence ultimately function as a catalyst for the narrator’s own decision to become a writer. Indeed, one of the central concerns to emerge in Tambu’s narrative is her aunt Maiguru’s continued silence in the face of Shona patriarchal authority that has been further molded and intensified by colonialism. Tambu narrates these episodes of silence with careful precision, but it is only in retrospect that readers gain an awareness of the extent to which Maiguru’s silence has necessarily shaped Tambu’s resolve to become a writer. At Tambu’s very first dinner at her aunt’s and uncle’s house, she witnesses a powerful and disturbing scene at the dinner table that disrupts her preconceived ideas about this family. Much to the reader’s (and Tambu’s) amazement, Maiguru protects her husband and remains resolutely silent as Babamukuru refuses to acknowledge that he has removed the D. H. Lawrence book that Tambu’s friend and cousin, Nyasha, is looking for in vain. Babamukuru, declaring that “[n]o daughter of mine is going to read such books,” has simply taken matters into his own hands.8 Maiguru’s silence, of course, is meant to preserve the power of the male authority in this scene, for if Maiguru were to reveal something that Babamukuru has already decided to hide (the fact that he has removed the book), then Maiguru would be seen to be undermining her husband’s absolute authority, which she is unwilling to do. As Dangarembga has Maiguru siding with her husband against her daughter, Tambu

6

See, for instance, Charles Sugnet, “Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga’s Feminist Reinvention of Fanon,” in The Politics of (M)Othering, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka (New York: Routledge, 1997), 33–49. See also M. Keith Booker, The African Novel in English (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998). 7 Sue Thomas, “Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized’s House: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27 (1992): 26–36. 8 Dangarembga, 81.

230

Laurie Edson

watches the scene. Although it would seem that Tambu is still quite innocent and unable to interpret correctly what is going on in this scene, it is important to remember at points like this that the novel is narrated in retrospect by a narrator who writes this scene precisely because she has understood only too well the effects of these kinds of seemingly trivial dramas that take place daily in families, but that are by no means trivial. The daughter’s emotional abandonment by her mother in the face of unjust paternal power will contribute not only to Nyasha’s growing mental illness, but also to Tambu’s resolve to expose that paternal power, as well as that maternal complicity, by writing. Tambu will also historicize that maternal complicity, exposing the factors that contribute to it so that it may change. In the above scene, Babamukuru skillfully manipulates the topic of conversation from his own unjust act and subsequent behavior (taking the book, refusing to acknowledge that he took it, and allowing Maiguru to take the blame) to what he labels his daughter’s “talking back.” He then accuses his daughter of being a bad child because she will not do as he commands (“I expect you to do as I say. Now sit down and eat your food”).9 When Nyasha leaves the table against her father’s expressed wishes and he begins to go after her, Maiguru restrains him, smiling sweetly in an attempt to pacify him: “She was asking about her book. … After all, you did take it. …” 10 Tambu is still watching all this. It is significant that as narrator, Tambu chooses to comment on Maiguru’s response rather than on Nyasha’s behavior or on Babamukuru’s behavior: “Perhaps Maiguru thought Babamukuru had calmed down enough to be able to be objective about the matter. Perhaps she was fed up with taking the blame for my uncle’s actions. I don’t know, nor did I want to find out.” 11 Tambu’s narrative voice in this scene establishes that she has a keen intuitive understanding of what has just occurred, but that she is fearful of probing deeper and unwilling to acknowledge that either Babamukuru (because of his unjust act and subsequent aggression) or Maiguru (because she chooses to be Babamukuru’s silent accomplice) might be less ideal than she had imagined. In one of the more violent scenes of the novel, Dangarembga again has her narrator writing about Maiguru’s silence. Agitated because Nyasha hasn’t returned home one night after a dance at exactly the same time as her brother and Tambu, and irritated to learn that she has been talking with a white boy, Babamukuru becomes verbally aggressive, twisting Nyasha’s words for his own ends. When Nyasha protests that she hasn’t done anything wrong, Babamukuru takes that to mean that his daughter is standing up to him and challenging his authority, so he attempts to reassert his power: “Do not talk to 9

Dangarembga, 83. Dangarembga, 84. 11 Dangarembga, 84. 10

History, Memory, and Writing

231

me like that, child. … You must respect me. I am your father.” 12 Tambu, rightly sensing that things will only intensify, has already run to wake up Maiguru who she hopes will be able to intervene, and they both arrive back on the scene just in time to hear Babamukuru call his daughter a whore. When Maiguru tries to speak, the narrator notes that she is silenced immediately. Both females, then, are forced to remain silent and witness Babamukuru strike Nyasha twice, knocking her down to her bed. When Babamukuru threatens to “teach her a lesson” because “I am respected at this mission. I cannot have a daughter who behaves like a whore,” Maiguru tries meekly to intervene again, but she is ignored.13 She remains silent while her husband wrestles her daughter to the ground, punching her head and banging it into the floor. Finally Maiguru and her son Chido do succeed in holding Babamukuru back, and Nyasha makes her escape. The narrator notes, however, that when Maiguru later stretches her arms out to her daughter, “the daughter walked by in a stony denial. Maiguru’s arms sagged.” 14 The narrator also adds a significant detail about Maiguru watching while Nyasha received fourteen lashes from Babamukuru, another indication of Maiguru’s helplessness and silent complicity in her husband’s actions. To sustain the image of herself as a good and proper African wife, Maiguru does not dare challenge Babamukuru’s authority. While one of the subjects Tambu the narrator develops in this section is Nyasha’s growing detachment from her surroundings (she has already stopped eating), a second subject at issue is Tambu’s own response. As Babamukuru condemns Nyasha to whoredom simply because she is female, Tambu the narrator reflects: “[W]hat I didn’t like was the way all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness,” 15 but she is unwilling to probe more deeply at this point because she believes that such thinking would be too dangerous for her: If I had been more independent in my thinking then, I would have thought the matter through to a conclusion. But in those days it was easy for me to leave tangled thoughts knotted, their loose ends hanging. I didn’t want to explore the treacherous mazes that such thoughts led into. … I became embarrassed with my acquired insipidity, but I did not allow myself to agonise over it, nor did I insist on any immediate conclusions. … I thought there was time to see what would happen, to decide what needed to be done. I thought I was wise to be preserving my energy, unlike my cousin, who was burning herself out.16

12

Dangarembga, 113. Dangarembga, 114. 14 Dangarembga, 117. 15 Dangarembga, 116. 16 Dangarembga, 116. 13

232

Laurie Edson

So Tambu resolves to take on the persona of the “grateful poor female relative” for the time being, knowing that she is playing a role until that time when she can “decide what needed to be done,” as she says in the above passage. What needed to be done, of course, was to write a novel that would expose the gender politics at work so that other females would not suffer as Nyasha did. At a very early age, then, Tambu has already learned that she must temporarily play a role in order to survive in this household, but she is already certain that her role-playing will only be temporary. She already knows that she will not follow in the footsteps of Maiguru. Near the end of Nervous Conditions, Maiguru’s silence becomes the focal point of yet a third important scene in which Tambu as narrator witnesses diverse female reactions to unjust patriarchal authority. Various women have gathered together in the kitchen of the homestead to discuss their anger at not being included in the decision-making dare that is taking place in the living room, where Lucia’s fate will be decided by those in power. Lucia, it seems, has become pregnant by either Takesure or Tambu’s father, but she is not allowed to be present when she is accused and when her case is being discussed. When she and the other women ask Maiguru, highly educated, to side with them in “sisterly solidarity,” Maiguru adamantly refuses to become involved because, as she says, she is not a member of her husband’s family: “This matter is not my concern. … Am I of their totem? I am not. I was taken. Let them sort out their own problems, and as for those who want to get involved, well, that’s up to them. I don’t want to intrude into the affairs of my husband’s family. I shall just keep quiet and go to bed.” 17 The other women are shocked at what is perceived to be a betrayal, and Tambu’s mother even denounces Maiguru as being too proud, too rich, and too full of white ways. Tambu, the narrator, however, inserts a detail into this section to show that she has understood, although only at a later date, that Maiguru’s silence stems from her own long-term suffering under patriarchal authority. Tambu has understood that as a result of “generations of threat and assault and neglect,” women have formed self-images that they cling to in times of conflict, but that these self-images are myth, not reality: “Each retreated more resolutely into their roles, pretending while they did that actually they were advancing. …” 18 Maiguru plays yet again the role of the good African wife who does not meddle in the affairs of her husband. As Maiguru tries to pass the living room in order to go to sleep, the narrator notes that she is “curtseying and bringing her hands together in a respectful, silent clap,” and then moving forward “with a deferential stoop of her back.” 19 17

Dangarembga, 138. Dangarembga, 138. 19 Dangarembga, 142. 18

History, Memory, and Writing

233

Dangarembga creates a narrator who often declares her unwillingness to analyze too deeply her experiences with her aunt’s and uncle’s family because she fears that such analytical activity is not safe. Although Tambu as a very young girl had exhibited strength and determination, even asserting herself physically against her older brother on the school playground because he stole the maize she had planted to earn money for her own school fees, when she comes to the mission with this westernized African family she is acutely aware that she has changed and become unnerved: “I do not know how I came to be like that. … [M]y going to the mission was such a drastic change that it unnerved me. Whatever the case, I had grown very tentative.” 20 Even after the initial event of Babamukuru’s homecoming from England, the narrator, sensing that this family is now very different, declares to the reader her hesitations about thinking too much about how she dislikes what is happening: These were complex, dangerous thoughts that I was stirring up, not the kind that you can ponder safely but the kind that become autonomous and malignant if you let them.… Sensing how unwise it was to think too deeply about these things in case I manoeuvred myself into a blind alley at the end of which I would have to confront unconfrontable issues, I busied myself with housework.21

While a younger child, Tambu had been proud of what she called her “thinking strategy” that served as solid support in times of need; however, after moving to the mission, the narrator comments often on her hesitancy to think too deeply about a multitude of subjects ranging from her cousin Nyasha’s growing depression, her aunt Maiguru’s incessant need to efface herself and talk baby-talk to Babamukuru, Babamukuru’s increasing anger at the way his growing children are now behaving, and Babamukuru’s growing need to assert his authority in the face of what he perceives to be challenges to that authority. More and more, Dangarembga focuses on the narrator’s growing detachment and eventually brings this issue to a head toward the end of the novel, when Tambu finally acknowledges to herself that she hates the idea of Babamukuru forcing her parents to get married “properly” in a church. Although Tambu has already commented to the reader several times that she finds the idea of a church wedding humiliating and does not want to attend, she is nevertheless powerless to take action: “I couldn’t simply go up to Babamukuru and tell him what I thought. So I pretended to myself that the wedding was a wonderful idea.” 22 Ironically, she becomes like Maiguru, suppressing her thoughts and assuming the role that has been prescribed to her by

20

Dangarembga, 110. Dangarembga, 39. 22 Dangarembga, 163. 21

234

Laurie Edson

Babamukuru. Tambu narrates that she cannot sleep for nights on end, and yet she continues to remain silent about her thoughts, growing increasingly frustrated with herself for remaining mute and not being able to take a stand: “There was definitely something wrong with me, otherwise I would have had something to say for myself. I knew I had not taken a stand on many issues since coming to the mission, but all along I had been thinking that it was because there had been no reason to, that when the time came I would be able to do it.” 23

Unable to confront Babamukuru, yet unwilling to attend the wedding, Tambu becomes increasingly distressed at her own weakness: “My vagueness and my reverence for my uncle, what he was, what he had achieved, what he represented and therefore what he wanted, had stunted the growth of my faculty of criticism, sapped the energy that in childhood I had used to define my own position. It had happened insidiously. …” 24 Tambu then narrates a horrific scene in which she is unable to get out of bed the morning of the wedding: one part of her watches with interest and fascination as the other part of her slips out of her body and stands near the foot of the bed. She has clearly gone somewhere where Babamukuru can’t reach her although this experience of disembodiment is extremely frightening for her. As she gives up caring about Babamukuru’s threats and anger, she narrates the trauma she experiences with precision: Babamukuru did not know how I had suffered over the question of that wedding. He did not know how my mind had raced and spun and ended up splitting into two disconnected entities that had long, frightening arguments with each other, very vocally, there in my head, about what ought to be done, the one half maniacally insisting on going, the other half equally maniacally refusing to consider it.25

Tambu is ultimately punished for having defied Babamukuru’s authority, but this scene sets in motion a series of quickly-unfolding events. With support from Lucia, Maiguru will finally break her silence and stand up to her husband, Nyasha will find a new respect for her mother when she walks out on her husband, Babamukuru will learn to consult his wife and take her opinions seriously, and as a result, Tambu will be allowed to pursue her studies at an exclusive multi-racial school, Sacred Heart. The novel, however, does not end here. With Tambu’s imminent departure for Sacred Heart, Dangarembga now shifts focus from the problems within Babamukuru’s family to some of the larger societal problems that have served as the unexplored context for those family dynamics, particularly the colonial 23

Dangarembga, 164. Dangarembga, 164. 25 Dangarembga, 167. 24

History, Memory, and Writing

235

educational system and its effects on Africans. Although Tambu narrates her own enthusiasm and anticipation about going to a European school from the perspective of a naïve school-girl eager to escape and broaden her horizons, her cousin Nyasha warns her about the dangers of assimilation: “So they made a little space into which you were assimilated, an honorary space in which you could join them and they could make sure that you behaved yourself. … [O]ne ought not to occupy that space.” 26 Unlike Tambu, Nyasha has experienced first-hand a radical dislocation from her African identity while living in England, and she has had a difficult time readjusting to African ways, much to the dismay of her parents who, as she puts it, do not like the hybrids that their children have become. Nyasha already understands the dangers of the postcolonial educational system, a system that Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o also exposed in Decolonizing the Mind, and she tries to warn Tambu that she risks forgetting about her own culture and values by being seduced so readily.27 Babamukuru, too, supremely aware of the racism inherent in multiracial schools, prefers his own children to remain in all-black schools and counsels Tambu not to go to Sacred Heart, not to “associate too much with these white people, to have too much freedom. I have seen that girls who do that do not develop into decent women.” 28 Here, as elsewhere throughout the novel, Babamukuru reveals his obsession with Christianity and sin, products of colonialism, and his conviction that the proper place for Tambu is in the traditional family structure, married. (Ironically, Babamukuru himself is a product [“a bloody good kaffir,” as Nyasha sarcastically calls him] of colonial efforts to establish an upper-class elite among the black population to further serve the interests of colonizing countries.) Even Tambu’s mother, who had already experienced the loss of a son when he returned home from his English-speaking school refusing to speak Shona, laments that her daughter will return as a stranger, “full of white ways and ideas.” 29 Tambu, determined to continue her education despite the warnings, arrives at Sacred Heart and at once experiences racism, but she eagerly pursues her studies, devours books, and participates in sports, hardly thinking about her past except when she receives letters from Nyasha and feels only temporarily guilty about not writing back: “But the pang of guilt was no more than a pang which dissolved quickly in the stream of novelty and discovery I had plunged into.” 30 The narrative is momentarily set up to suggest that Tambu is, indeed, in danger of being assimilated and forgetting about her past. 26

Dangarembga, 179. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986). 28 Dangarembga, 180. 29 Dangarembga, 184. 30 Dangarembga, 197. 27

236

Laurie Edson

But Dangarembga’s novel does not end here either. Instead, when Tambu returns to the mission during a vacation, Nyasha has already fallen into mental illness, vomiting her food and succumbing to fits of anger that she cannot control. As she rocks her body, she rages with increasing intensity against the combined economic, political, and social forces of colonialism that have made Africans, including her father, grovel. She jabs fragments of broken mirrors into her flesh, and her parents quickly take her to a psychiatrist in Salisbury, who misunderstands her condition. She ultimately gets admitted to a clinic, but the experience of watching her cousin disintegrate into mental illness has completely unnerved Tambu, who now fears for her own sanity. Precisely at this point in the narrative, Tambu returns home to visit her mother, who diagnoses the problem as “too much Englishness” and advises her daughter to be careful. It is significant that the narrator returns home at this moment, for Tambu will ultimately heed her mother’s advice. Tambu’s narrative now focuses with increasing urgency on the necessity of remaining supremely vigilant so that she does not simply assimilate into the culture of the colonizer and forget her past. As Dangarembga has said in an interview, “I think this problem of forgetting— remembering and forgetting—is really important. What is interesting is that Nyasha as an individual does not have anything to forget: she simply doesn’t know. She is the one who is worried about it. …” 31 Tambu, on the other hand, has a very solid background at the homestead and knows exactly where she has come from, even though she is leaving it. “The problem is the Englishness,” explains Tambu’s mother, so you just be careful!” 32 Already aware that her mother is right, the narrator admits thinking about her own “creeping feelings of doom” and wonders if she can resist assimilation: Was I being careful enough? I wondered. For I was beginning to have a suspicion, no more than the seed of a suspicion, that I had been too eager to leave the homestead and embrace the “Englishness” of the mission; and after that the more concentrated “Englishness” of Sacred Heart. The suspicion remained for a few days, during which time it transformed itself into guilt, and then I had nightmares about Nhamo and Chido and Nyasha two nights in a row.33

The narrator resolves to be on her guard, no longer impressed with English affluence or what Sacred Heart represents. She returns to Sacred Heart, certain of her ability to resist the seduction and not be so “contaminated” that she will 31 Jane Wilkinson, “Tsitsi Dangarembga,” in Talking with African Writers; Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights, and Novelists, ed. Jane Wilkinson (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992), 191. 32 Dangarembga, 203. 33 Dangarembga, 203.

History, Memory, and Writing

237

forget her purpose. The ending of the novel, then, stands in sharp contrast to the much earlier episode describing Tambu’s journey to her uncle’s house for the first time, when her narrative revealed her goal to forget her past and her old self. Indeed, not forgetting emerges as a key concern in the novel: “If I forgot them, my cousin, my mother, my friends, I might as well forget myself. And that, of course, could not happen. So why was everybody so particular to urge me to remember?” 34 The way to not forget was precisely to keep her story and the story of her people alive by its retelling, not in the oral tradition of her ancestors, but with the tools learned in her colonial education—writing. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi writes that “the most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history,” and Tambu becomes a writer to correct the record—to write herself and other women, and men, into history.35 In this respect, Dangarembga’s novel participates in the long tradition of African novels such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that serve to preserve the history of a group of people at a particular time and to chronicle, from the perspective of the colonized, the extent to which colonial economic, religious, political, and educational institutions changed the lives of African people. Already at the beginning of the novel, Tambu had called her grandmother’s oral stories “history lessons,” “[h]istory that could not be found in the textbooks,” and it is significant that Tambu preserves her people’s history by embedding her grandmother’s richly-textured oral story into her own written account.36 For Tambu’s story is ultimately a continuation of her grandmother’s story and cannot truly be understood without the larger context made available by her grandmother: the story about the ancestors being driven from their land by wizards from the south, about Tambu’s great-grandfather who was enticed into slavery and escaped to the gold mines in the south, about Tambu’s greatgrandmother, abandoned with six children to support, who walked with nine-year-old Babamukuru to the mission and who, “being sagacious and having foresight, had begged them to prepare him for life in their world.” 37 Babamukuru’s actions throughout the novel are to be understood, as Nyasha constantly reminds the reader, in the context of his upbringing by the missionaries and the colonial educational system that groomed him as one of the colonial black elites. Although the combination of Shona patriarchy and colonial education would seem to make Babamukuru an unsympathetic figure until the end, this is 34

Dangarembga, 188. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1965), 91. 36 Dangarembga, 17. 37 Dangarembga, 19. 35

238

Laurie Edson

not at all the case. Like Mr. Matimba earlier in the novel, who ends up supporting eight-year-old Tambu’s determination and drive to succeed and who possesses enough patience to ask her why she had attacked her brother and then can “listen hard” as she tells her story, Babamukuru too learns to listen when women talk. After Maiguru declares that she is unhappy and leaves him for five days, he turns over a new leaf and reveals his willingness to listen to, and even ask for, his wife’s opinion. What is even more significant, however, is that Tambu’s narrative calls attention to the way Babamukuru also asks her, a mere child, for her opinion: “Babamukuru cleared his throat. ‘Er, Tambudzai,’ he asked tentatively, ‘do you have anything to say?’ ” 38 By the end of Tambu’s narrative, Babamukuru is not at all remembered by Tambu as an unsympathetic character. If someone as authoritative as Babamukuru is interested in what she has to say, then perhaps others will be, too. In fact, Babamukuru joins a growing list of male characters in feminist African fiction who are genuinely interested in women’s opinions, like the sympathetic male character Daouda Dieng in Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, who believes that women “should no longer be decorative accessories, objects to be moved about, companions to be flattered or calmed with promises. … Women must be encouraged to take a keener interest in the destiny of the country.” 39 Just as Ousmane Sembène had proclaimed, writing God’s Bits of Wood in Senegal almost three decades earlier than Dangarembga’s novel, when one gender undergoes profound change, so too does the other gender: “[T]he men began to understand that if the times were bringing forth a new breed of men, they were also bringing forth a new breed of women.” 40 As Dangarembga’s novel makes clear, social change can, indeed, be brought about by women like Maiguru who emerge from their silence and, by extension, by women like Tambu who become writers. As a writer-in-the-making, Tambu the narrator observes her cousin Nyasha suffering a nervous breakdown, tearing her history books and screaming in rage at the lies promulgated in the colonizer’s history books. While Tambu is powerless to help her cousin in this scene, she ultimately assumes power by writing the history of the women of her generation, daughters who are already

38 Dangarembga, 181. As Anthony Chennells has put it, “Babamukuru has authorized her to speak and in authorizing her he has freed her as author.” See Chennells, “Authorizing Women, Women’s Authoring: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” in New Writing from Southern Africa; Authors Who Have Become Prominent Since 1980, ed. Emmanuel Ngara (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996), 73. 39 Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter, trans. Modupé Bodé-Thomas (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1981), 61–62. 40 Sembène Ousmane, God’s Bits of Wood, tr. Francis Price (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1970), 34.

History, Memory, and Writing

239

aware of the disconnection between their lived realities and the history books written from the perspective of the colonizer, daughters who have seen and experienced events unfolding differently from the way their parents experienced them. Born into different contexts at a different moment in history from their parents, these daughters interpret their worlds differently. Finding her life excluded from the history books, Tambu sets out to write herself and others of her own generation a history. In an interview, Dangarembga has said: “One of the problems that most Zimbabwean people of my generation have is that we really don’t have a tangible history that we can relate to.” 41 Perhaps Tambu’s narrative comes closest to representing that lived history. By the end of the novel, even though Tambu meets head-on with the institutionalized racism of the convent school where she will pursue her education after leaving her rich uncle’s mission school, she is quite certain that she can navigate through the difficulties without being defeated by the racism and without being assimilated into the culture of the colonizer. As Supriya Nair remarks in an article entitled “Melancholic Women: The Intellectual Hysteric(s) in Nervous Conditions, “[T]he response Tambu’s ‘own story’ makes to Ngugi’s text is that the colonial student need not necessarily be a passive receptacle, reified by the experience of colonial education.” 42 Her very decision to become a writer and represent the treacherous journey through the combined minefields of colonialism and patriarchy is in itself a testament to her resistance to assimilation. Nevertheless, by the end of the novel, readers still do not know if Tambu will be successful or not. What happens during and after the convent school, she tells us, “would fill another volume,” a volume that Tambu has not yet written. When questioned about Tambu’s fate in an interview published in 1992, Dangarembga talked about writing another novel in which she would explore this issue: “I think I would pursue this idea of ‘how does Tambudzai come through?’ I think that’s a very intriguing idea. Because on the face of it, as the story ends, really one could not see how she could come through. I think there we really have a very serious social dilemma.” 43 Tambu’s dilemma, of course, is the dilemma of the African intellectual, schooled in an educational system established by the colonizer, who nevertheless cannot morally and ethically buy into a system that perpetuates economic, political, and social inequality. Charles Sugnet has suggested that Tambu follows her grandmother’s strategy of surviving by accommodation: “The line

41

Wilkinson, 191. Supriya Nair, “Melancholic Women: The Intellectual Hysteric(s) in Nervous Conditions,” Research in African Literatures 26(2) (1995): 138. 43 Wilkinson, 193. 42

240

Laurie Edson

between resistance and accommodation is sometimes a difficult one to draw; indeed the grandmother’s story suggests that surviving by accommodation may sometimes be the only mode of resistance available.” 44 An alternative possibility, however, is that Tambu follows Maiguru’s example in speaking out as an ethical imperative. Donald Wehrs has remarked that Maiguru challenges Babamukuru and leaves him only when he brutally punishes Tambu for not attending her own parents’ wedding: “Maiguru acquires a degree of selfempowerment not because her own oppression becomes too much but because she cannot be ethically indifferent to the injustice done another.” 45 Similarly, the text suggests that it may be her best friend’s fall into mental illness and her subsequent fear and nightmares that ultimately trigger Tambu’s resolve to write down her story. Seeing another person she loves suffer intensely, Tambu feels an ethical responsibility, and a political imperative, to write in an effort to effect social change and ease the suffering of those around her.

Works Consulted Bâ, Mariama. So Long a Letter, trans. Modupé Bodé-Thomas. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1981. Booker, M. Keith. The African Novel in English. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998. Chennells, Anthony. “Authorizing Women, Women’s Authoring: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.” in New Writing from Southern Africa; Authors Who Have Become Prominent Since 1980, ed. Emmanuel Ngara. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. Seattle: Seal Press, 1988. Hountondji, Paulin J. “Daily Life in Black Africa: Elements for a Critique.” in The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness 1947–1987, ed. V. Y. Mudimbe. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1992. 344–64. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: Orion Press, 1965. Nair, Supriya. “Melancholic Women: The Intellectual Hysteric(s) in Nervous Conditions.” Research in African Literatures 26.2: (1995): 130–39. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986. Sembène, Ousmane. God’s Bits of Wood, tr. Francis Price. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1970. Sugnet, Charles. “Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga’s Feminist Reinvention of Fanon.” in The Politics of (M)Othering, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka. New York: Routledge, 1997. 33–49.

44

Sugnet, 40. Donald R. Wehrs, African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 127. 45

History, Memory, and Writing

241

Thomas, Sue. “Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized’s House: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27 (1992): 26–36. Wehrs, Donald R. African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values. Gainesville: U P Florida, 2001. Wilkinson, Jane. “Tsitsi Dangarembga.” In Talking with African Writers; Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights, and Novelists, ed. Jane Wilkinson. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992. 188–98.

This page intentionally left blank

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Michael J. Meyer, editor, is completing his sixth and seventh book in this series. An adjunct professor of English at DePaul University and Northeastern Illinois, Meyer holds a Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago and is the author of Scarecrow’s Hayashi Steinbeck Bibliography, 1982–1996. His essays on Steinbeck have appeared in several collections and his study of Steinbeck’s use of the Cain and Abel myth was published by Mellen in 2000. Presently he is completing work on The Steinbeck Encyclopaedia for Greenwood where he serves as co-editor of the project. Reine Dugas Bouton, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Transitional English at Southeastern Louisiana University. In addition to contributing to Perspectives on Modern Literature: Literature and Music, she has also published articles on Eudora Welty in the Arkansas Review and Literatur en Wissenschaft und Unterricht. Mark Byron completed his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Cambridge in 2001, entitled: “Exilic Modernism and Textual Ontogeny: Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and Samuel Beckett’s Watt.” Since then, he has taught in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia, and as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. Recent publications include essays on sculpture in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, on the writing of estrangement and exile in Pound’s Cantos, and on ecstatic processes in Beckett’s Watt. Mary F. Catanzaro (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1986) is an Independent Scholar living in Milwaukee. She has published articles on Beckett in series collections such as The World of Samuel Beckett, ed. Joseph H. Smith (Johns Hopkins, 1991), Literature and the Grotesque, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Amsterdam, 1992), Beckett in the 1990’s, ed. Marius Buning and Lois Oppenheim (Amsterdam, 1993) and Literature and Music, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Amsterdam, 2002). In addition, she has contributed essays on Beckett in scholarly journals, such as Modern Drama, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Notes on Modern Irish Literature. In addition to her interest

244

About the Authors

in Beckett’s complex development of the couple and the musical texture of the speaking voice in all his works, she is currently exploring his notions of what constitutes personal identity. This essay pursues that idea and examines how Beckett exposes his deepest autobiographical secrets through the characters in his Trilogy. David Clippinger is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Penn State University. At present he is working on Authors and Other Marketing Monstrosities: Representations of Writers in Postmodern American Culture as well as a book-length study of Benjamin Britten’s appropriation of stories by Henry James, Herman Melville, and Thomas Mann as a means to advance an implicit but partially obscured socio-political critique of dominant sexual mores. His other publications include The Body of This Life: Reading William Bronk, and Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems of William Bronk. His The Mind’s Landscape, on twentieth-century American poetry, as well as Accumulating Position: The Selected Letters of William Bronk, are forthcoming. Laurie Edson is Professor of Comparative Literature and French and Adjunct Professor in Women’s Studies at San Diego State University. She is the author of Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Visual Art (2000) and Henri Michaux and the Poetics of Movement (1985). She edited Conjunctions: Verbal-Visual Relations (1996), Contemporary Feminist Writing in French: A Multicultural Perspective (1993), a special issue of Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, and Henri Michaux (1986), a special issue of L’Esprit Createur. She is also the translator (with critical afterword) of Jeanne Hyvrard’s novel, Mother Death (1988). Gene C. Fant, Jr. (Ph.D. University of Southern Mississippi) is associate professor and chair of the English Department at Union University in Jackson, TN. In addition to publishing articles in several journals, he received the DaubMaher Award for scholarship from the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 1994. His essays have most recently appeared in Mississippi Magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Connie Griffin teaches twentieth century American multicultural literature and cultural studies, as well as creative writing and literary journalism, at Boston College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has published numerous essays, articles, and reviews, including “Going Naked into the World: Recovery and Representation,” in Pedagogy and Representations of Violence edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Judith Roof for Concerns (1999) a publication of the Women’s Caucus for the MLA; “I Will

About the Authors

245

Not Wear that Coat: Feminism and Postmodernism in Dialogue,” in He Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text, edited by Sarah Appleton Aguiar and Mica K. Howe, 2001; and “Ex-Centricities: Multicultural Self-Representation in Contemporary American Women’s Autobiography,” in Style, Summer 2001. Her book reviews have included Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity by Jan Clausen, (Winter 1999), and Lesbian Configurations by Renee C. Hoogland (Fall 1997) for The Lesbian Review of Books. Marketta Laurila received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Spanish with a minor in Comparative Literature. She is an associate professor at the Tennessee Technological University, were she teaches Spanish language and literature, Business Spanish and Latin American culture. She has served as director of the minor program in Women and Gender Studies and now is the Interim chair of the Department of Foreign Languages. Her publications include “Utopia and Distopia in Elena Garro’s ‘Semana de colores’ ” (JAISA 6, 1–3, 2001), “Isabel Allende and the Discourse of Exile” (in Placing Identity in International Women’s Writing, Greenwood Press, 2003), “Elena Garro’s Reencuentro de personajes: The Female Writer and Androcentric Texts” (Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 27, 1993) She has also presented conference papers and published articles on Laura Esquivel and Carlos Fuentes. Magdalena Maczyn´ ska is a Ph.D. student at the Catholic University of America. She is currently working on her dissertation dealing with representations of London in contemporary British fiction. Her publications include essays on such twentieth century authors as Martin Amis, Philip Kan Gotanda, David Lodge, Ian McEwan, Wisl´awa Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. Laura K. Reeck received her Ph.D. from New York University in 2002. She currently teaches French and Francophone literature at Allegheny College. Her area of research is post-colonial French literature, and in particular, Beur literature and film. Her most recent publication, “Self/Representation in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Les raisins de la galère,” appears in the CEELAN Review. Lawrence K. Stanley, Director of Expository Writing, has been teaching at Brown since 1993. Along with critical reading and writing courses, he teaches travel writing and literature-oriented writing courses that concentrate on twentiethcentury American fiction and the English Romantics. His current research is in rhetorical and narrative theory particularly in relation to reading and writing creative nonfiction. His most recent publication is “Paranarrative and the Performance of Creative Nonfiction” in Professing Rhetoric (Lawrence

246

About the Authors

Erlbaum, 2002). He holds a doctorate in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. Marjorie Worthington earned her doctorate in English from Indiana University and is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Bradley University. Her research focuses on meta-narrative, technology and authorship in TwentiethCentury fiction. She has had articles published in journals such as Studies in the Novel, Critique, and Twentieth-Century Literature.