The Secret Country: Decoding Jayne Anne Phillips' Cryptic Fiction (Costerus New Series 165)

The Secret Country Decoding Jayne Anne Phillips’ Cryptic Fiction

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 165 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper

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The Secret Country Decoding Jayne Anne Phillips’ Cryptic Fiction

Sarah Robertson

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2007

Cover Image: Nigel Oddy Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2140-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands

————————————————————————— CONTENTS —————————————————————————

Prologue

1

Chapter One Accessing the Secret Country

16

Chapter Two Nameless Implications: The Haunting Vestiges of the Paternal Past in Machine Dreams

41

Chapter Three A House Divided: Class Divergence in Machine Dreams

69

Chapter Four Preparing for Take-Off: Autochthony and Flight in Machine Dreams

90

Chapter Five Structures of Retrospect: The Inescapable Past in Fast Lanes

111

Chapter Six Dislocations: Retracing the Erased in Shelter

145

Chapter Seven Fantastical Remembrances: Sexual Desire in Shelter

164

Chapter Eight Leaving the Fatherland: Emasculation and Exodus in Shelter

181

Chapter Nine The Experience of Separation in MotherKind

207

Chapter Ten Textured Memories: The Remnants of a Paternal Past in MotherKind

227

Chapter Eleven Almost Magical: Once upon a time … in MotherKind

241

Conclusion

262

Bibliography

271

Index

280

PROLOGUE Remembered landscapes are left in me The way a bee leaves its sting, Hopelessly, passion-placed Untranslatable language. Non-mystical, insoluble in blood they act as an opposite To the absolute, whose words are a solitude, and set to music.1

Charles Wright’s poem aptly captures the impact of region on the individual consciousness. Injected into the bloodstream those “remembered landscapes” remain achingly present, their inconstruable nature continuing to haunt. Indeed, the lingering presence of region shapes much of Jayne Anne Phillips’ writing. Phillips, born in 1952 in Buckhannon, West Virginia, is the author of three novels, Machine Dreams (1984), Shelter (1994), MotherKind (2000) and two collections of short stories, Black Tickets (1979) and Fast Lanes (1987). Each of these texts involves a return to the West Virginia of Phillips’ childhood. The somewhat regressive nature of her work creates a tension between the apparent desire to leave the region and a simultaneous need to “redeem that past”, to try and “make it live again and save something of it”.2 In interviews, Phillips repeatedly employs the word “redeem” which carries attendant notions of both freeing oneself of burdens, and of reclaiming a place, effectively freezing it in time. Phillips’ backward glance takes the form of what Raymond Williams defines as a “structure of retrospect”, a feeling that involves “a deep and melancholy consciousness of change and loss”.3 For Phillips, the death of her parents, as well as the changing landscape of her hometown as commercial franchises including “malls and chain restaurants” replace the traditional main street stores, all contribute to her feeling that “West Virginia is lost to me”. The Appalachia of her childhood has now become “mythic territory, powerful beyond any 1

Charles Wright, “All Landscape is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself”, in Appalachia (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998), 19. 2 Thomas E. Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, XXI/1 (1994), 187. 3 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (2nd edn, St Albans: Paladin, 1975), 79.

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boundaries”.4 Her feelings of loss, and the subsequent mythologizing of the past, raise questions about how Phillips negotiates the past in her fiction. Naturally, her own departure from place, and her development as a writer, shadow any return that she makes to West Virginia. In effect, Phillips and her work are situated in-between places and times. In his discussion of Thomas Hardy’s writing, Williams describes the positional stance of the writer who lives in the “border country”, a borderland “between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and an experience of change”.5 Despite her break from region, Phillips still remains in a “border country”. She claims that “I still feel myself seeing things as a West Virginian and really using the language that I used a child”.6 Just as her past shapes how Phillips “perceives things”, so too, inevitably, does her education, as well as her experiences outside of West Virginia, inform her retrospective accounts of that place. Williams’ notion of “the return of the native” can be usefully applied to the complex nature of Phillips’ literary return to Appalachia. For Williams, such a return “has a special importance to a particular generation, who have gone to university from ordinary families and have to discover, through a life, what that experience means”.7 Phillips, a child of the baby-boomer generation during the 1950s and 1960s, was born into a culture in which “upward mobility … was an implicit but very real demand”.8 In her work, mothers are the key force behind the social advancement of the children whilst the fathers reflect a more stable attachment to place and to labour practices. The parental divide re-enforces the collision in Phillips texts between “education and social solidarity”: a collision that creates conflicting maternal and paternal legacies.9 Indeed, the economic imperatives behind both Phillips’ attachment to, and

4

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 185. Williams, The Country and the City, 239. 6 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 186. 7 Williams, The Country and the City, 241. 8 Fred Pfeil, “Makin’ Flippy-Floppy: Postmodernism and the Baby-Boom PMC”, in The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook, 1985, eds Mike Davis, Fred Pfeil and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1985), 265. 9 Williams, The Country and the City, 245. 5

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departure from, place shape much of her fiction, often acting as a burden for her central characters. Phillips addresses the burdensome weight of the past when she states that for herself, as well as for her fictional characters, the return home “has to do with settling issues. In many cases these are issues that have been inherited.”10 Her notion of inherited issues, issues that are “insoluble in blood”, is intertwined with her emphasis on regional haunting. As Donaldson and Jones suggest: Texts are marked by the same seismic tremors as is ideology itself … texts echo, like Quentin Compson’s haunted body, with conflicting names and stories. In the American South, texts, like their writers and like the excessively gendered culture that speaks through them, are deeply riven. And if texts haunt bodies, bodies can nevertheless produce new texts that remember, disremember, and lay old ghosts to rest.11

The “haunted” bodies in Phillips’ work are certainly separated along gender lines as her mothers struggle with the burden of remembrance, while her fathers carry the conflicting weight of having disremembered aspects of their past. Their children often assume the responsibility of laying their parents’ “old ghosts to rest”. Home and family, then, are troubled sites in Phillips’ writing. For Phillips, “Family politics is the screen through which we experience place”.12 As a result, place and family cannot be regarded separately in her work, as each informs the other. In her treatment of family, Phillips’ work brings into focus Faulkner’s Jason Compson for whom “blood is blood and you can’t get around it”.13 Interestingly, Phillips, who resists classification as a southern writer, repeatedly cites the influence of Faulkner on her writing.14 In addition, her name appears, however cursorily, in recent 10

Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver, “The Mystery of Language: An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, New Letters: A Magazine of Writing and Art, LXI/1 (1994), 117. 11 Susan V. Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones, Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 7. 12 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 184. 13 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (London: Vintage, 1995), 243. 14 See Sarah Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, European Journal of American Culture, XX/2 (2001), 68-77.

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commentaries on the state of southern writing.15 Indeed, whilst Phillips does not consider herself a regional writer, she does define West Virginia as southern.16 Her seemingly opposing claims allow for the possibility that whilst the author herself evades regional labels, the work itself, with its repeated returns to Appalachia, is undoubtedly southern. However, despite her Appalachian roots and her continued return to the South in her work, Phillips’ name remains conspicuously absent from numerous studies of contemporary southern women writers.17 Such exclusion may be a result of the ongoing debate concerning “southerness” and what it means to be southern. My approach to Phillips’ writing purposefully avoids the contentious and potentially reductive nature of questioning which qualities define a regionalist writer. Rather, whilst acknowledging that an Appalachian heritage may differ from a history rooted in the Mississippi Delta, I work within the remit of Richard Gray’s argument that writers from the “Southern highlands …. deserve the title of Southern as much or as little as any place or person has done”.18 Certainly, Phillips believes that her return to West Virginia throughout her work stems from the fact that “fiction is anchored in place – that’s where all sensory details of a world are counterpoints, mirrors and refractions of emotional realities”.19 Her emphasis on the interconnection between place and identity, and how the two shape each other, points to the deterministic nature of region in her work. Patricia Yaeger questions the impact of the South upon developing identities through Christopher Bollas’ psychoanalytic account of the “unthought known”:

15 See J. A. Bryant Jr., Twentieth Century Southern Literature (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997). 16 See A. M. Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, Bomb, XLIX (Fall 1994), 49. 17 Phillips does not appear in studies such as Southern Women Writers: The New Generation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990) ed. Tonette Bond Inge; Linda Tate’s A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994) or Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). 18 Richard Gray, Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), xii. 19 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 186.

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For Bollas, the “unthought known” is a residue of childhood imprinting us with expectations about the way the world will shape itself (or fail to shape itself) about us. These early experiences are lodged in the sensorium but not available to consciousness – hence known but unthought or unacknowledged. I want to wrest this idea from its psychological context and use it as a cognitive and political category for thinking about the South.20

Yaeger may dislodge Bollas’ account from its psychological mooring but she limits her use of the unthought known by largely confining her study to the exploration of race relations in the region. In the subsequent chapters I attempt to widen the scope for understanding how region infiltrates and shapes identity by considering the economic and class variants in Appalachia during the twentieth century. Phillips returns her reader to the turn of the twentieth century in Fast Lanes through the short story “Bess” whose setting forms the earliest dating of any of her work thus far.21 Phillips disrupts the time frames of her texts as she collapses past into present, so that even the narrative the farthest removed from Appalachia (MotherKind), contains traces of the regional past embodied in “Bess”.22 In relation to the conflation of different time frames in one picture, Gray argues that: The past is not the present, nor should it be, but, as every reader of Southern literature knows, the past is always there, helping to form our beliefs and judgements. And the best way to deal with its formative influence is to figure it: to know and respect the shaping minds of an earlier generation – and to know them, first and fundamentally (and despite the critical continuities), as different and historically specific people of their own time rather than ours.23

Whilst mine is a literary study, I invariably turn to the social and economic history of West Virginia during the past century in order to contextualize the region’s “formative influence” upon Phillips’

20

Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire, 101. Jayne Anne Phillips, Fast Lanes (2nd edn, New York: Vintage Books, 2000). 22 Jayne Anne Phillips, MotherKind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). 23 Gray, Southern Aberrations, xiii. 21

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writing. In effect, I consider how regional residues shape the “unthought known” in her narratives. Although I frame the study within an Appalachian context, my analysis works from the inside out, which is to say that I attend to the specifics of Phillips’ prose, tracing her intricate networks as they function at both intra-textual and intertextual levels. Through such close reading I attempt to socialize the everyday in Phillips’ writing. By “everyday” I refer not only to the interaction between characters, but also to the objects that permeate their lives. Raymond Williams provides a useful gloss on the need to socialize what he terms “structures of feeling” as they invest both practices and the things that those practices take up: We need, on the one hand, to acknowledge (and welcome) the specificity of these elements – specific feelings, specific rhythms – and yet to find ways of recognising their specific kinds of sociality, thus preventing that extraction from social experience which is conceivable only when social experience itself has been categorically (and at root historically) reduced.24

With Williams in mind, I consider how individual experiences and interactions reflect larger social and historical shifts in Appalachia during the twentieth century. At a textual level the “specific feelings” and “rhythms” that Phillips creates may be said to stem from her interest in “perception and in dislocations of thought and the simultaneity of time [rather] than in event, getting from A to B”.25 For the reader then, Phillips’ novels and short stories do not always provide a linear series of images that can be drawn together to make a coherent whole. Rather, the reader must trace various “dislocations of thought” across the texts, following Phillips’ sub-semantic whispers. My methodological approach often reflects the non-linear pattern of Phillips’ writing. Indeed, for Max Black critical paradigms need not be “literally constructed: the heart of the method consists in talking in a certain way”.26 Admittedly, my Phillipsian “talk” does not 24 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133. 25 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 48. 26 Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 229.

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follow a specific topic, such as “home” or “mothering”, yet, as Black argues: There will always be competent technicians [literary critics] who, in Lewin’s words, can be trusted to build the highways “over which the streamlined vehicles of a highly mechanized logic, facts and efficient, can reach every important point on fixed tracks.” But clearing intellectual jungles is also a respectable occupation. Perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra; and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra.27

My study is neither “streamlined” nor argued along “fixed tracks”, but I do endeavour to make “clearing[s]” among Phillips’ dense prose. As Black suggests, there is no shortage of “competent” critics to “build the highways” and to offer structured readings of texts, but such readings follow a linear path from A to B, a path that Phillips herself wishes to avoid. As I attempt to address the intricate networks within the primary material my reading mirrors Phillips’ non-linearity: like my subject, I trace words and images both intra-textually and intertextually. Whilst I ask the reader to suspend traditional reading habits, I hope that my somewhat dislocated argument serves as an insight into the dislocations of thought central to Phillips’ theory of writing. Black argues that “the key to understanding the entire transaction” between the study and its subject “is the identity of structure that in favourable cases permits assertions made about the secondary domain to yield insight into the original field of interest”.28 If the reader questions the non-linearity of my analysis then, perhaps, that reader will subsequently question the dynamics of Phillips’ texts. Of the many dynamics in her work, the “dislocations of thought” and “moments of perception” highlight the traces of an event not disclosed within the text itself. By way of Malcolm Bull’s theory of hiddenness, I discuss how moments of perception are inextricably bound to that which appears hidden, to something that exists on the periphery of one’s vision. Bull argues that:

27 28

Ibid., 242. Ibid., 230-31.

8

The Secret Country If something hidden must be both potentially knowable and at least partially experienced by someone, this suggests that hiddenness is not a quality independent of knowledge, but rather a function of it …. Hiddenness therefore presupposes not just incomplete knowledge but incompleted knowledge, knowledge that is less full than it might be, perhaps than it ought to be.29

Bull’s sense that the hidden, despite its apparent concealment, is nevertheless “potentially knowable” and “partially experienced”, provides a way of reading the hidden in Phillips’ work. Her texts often point, through a series of words or images, to events outside the narrative. Half-told stories and withheld information shape Phillips’ narrative stylistics. Indeed, Allan Lloyd Smith argues, in his essay on the uncanny, that “the secret that has not come to light … nevertheless makes its presence felt”.30 Despite attempts at concealment, the hidden always resurfaces in disguised form, often in the shape of metaphors or what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok term “cryptograms”.31 I unpack the term “cryptogram” in what follows, here I simply wish to introduce a term that will reappear throughout my analysis. In his translator’s introduction to Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic study, Nicholas Rand defines cryptograms or cryptonymy as “a verbal procedure leading to the creation of a text … whose sole purpose is to hide words that are hypothesized as having to remain beyond reach”.32 Cryptonymy provides a vocabulary for speaking about that which remains hidden, secret. Luise White, in her study of secrecy and lies, proposes that “Lies and secrets are explanations about the past that are negotiated for specific audiences, for specific ends. Secrecy and lies conceal, they

29 Malcolm Bull, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality (London: Verso, 1999), 18. 30 Allan Lloyd Smith, “The Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca: The Uncanny Reencountered through Abraham and Torok’s ‘Cryptonymy’”, Poetics Today, XIII/2 (Summer 1992), 285. 31 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Theory and History of Literature, XXXVII, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 32 Nicholas Rand, Introduction, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Theory and History of Literature, XXXVII, lviii.

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camouflage, but they certainly don’t hide everything.”33 For White, evasion and falsehood are social acts that “cannot be discussed separately from accusation and confession, from revelation and resolution. A world of social and narratological expectations is revealed in any cover story.”34 That social, and in the case of Phillips, regional, motives may lead to the creation of a lie or the withholding of a secret, underlines my concentration on the dense layers of Phillips’ prose, on how seemingly insignificant narrative slippages may reveal elements of an untold, regionally specific, story. Of particular importance in White’s argument is her assertion that one cannot “have a serious talk about lies, secrets, telling or not telling without locating it in some way in orality and in oral history: the history of telling is the history of talking”.35 Secrets then can be detected through the very language that denies their existence, effectively highlighting the significance of narration, or of how Phillips tells her stories. Esther Rashkin, in her study of Abraham and Torok’s account of mourning and melancholia, suggests that: Behaviour and speech are the means by which characters both real and fictive recreate themselves as other, symbolically telling the tale of what and why they could not be. This implies that characters in certain literary texts may be construed as cryptic poetic entities whose words and actions can be heard to tell the secret history generating their existence.36

I apply Rashkin’s theory of the multiplicity, or the layered nature, not just of fictive characters but also of “certain literary texts” in my understanding of the stories that Phillips does not tell, but to which she nevertheless directs the reader. Through a convergence of voices Phillips creates narrative slippages that make apparent the gaps in her texts. In Machine Dreams she uses both the first and third person to

33

Luise White, “Telling More: Lies, Secrets and History”, History and Theory, Theme Issue 39 (December 2000), 15. 34 Ibid., 19. 35 Ibid., 11. 36 Esther Rashkin, “Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Work of Abraham and Torok”, Diacritics (Winter 1988), 50.

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piece together a Hampson oral history.37 Phillips effectively deploys a range of narrative devices to ensure a disjunction of voices – one that occurs within a limited textual space. She argues: I use italics differently in various works, but they nearly always signify time shifts, or language unlimited by time. They may be phrases or lines spoken in another time, powerful enough to have remained intact in the mind of the character recalling them. They may be the voice of one character perfectly recalled in the mind of another.38

In her work, therefore, voices from the past interrupt the present, an interruption that results in a textual slippage. Malcolm McKenzie makes a case for the direct relationship between free-indirect discourse, or what he terms Free Indirect Speech (FIS), and narrative slippages. He argues that “the intermingling of voices in speech representation … leads directly to FIS …. FIS allows a greater degree of vocal blending or polyvocality than any other speech representation form.”39 Throughout the subsequent analysis I question the nature of “polyvocality” in Phillips’ work, particularly in relation to her layering not simply of characters’ voices but also of specific words as they carry the weight of intertextual meanings. For the reader who follows Phillips’ semantic traces such words act as dual signifiers that distend time frames as well as differentiated voices. In Machine Dreams Phillips employs the image of clothes sewn onto blankets, “spread out like one body on top of another and another” – such layering permeates her narratives, resulting in a genealogical, and regional, density.40 In considering Phillips’ narrative density I begin the study with a reading of “Bess” which leads onto discussions of her texts from Machine Dreams onwards. Therefore, I do not offer any sustained analysis of her first major publication, Black Tickets.41 My exclusion 37

Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams (New York: E.P. Dutton / Seymour Lawrence, 1984). 38 Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 74. 39 Malcolm McKenzie, “Free Indirect Speech in a Fettered Insecure Society”, Language and Communication, VII/2 (1987), 154. 40 Machine Dreams, 36. 41 Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets (2nd edn, New York: Vintage Books, 2001).

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stems from Phillips’ own assessment of her writing career to date. Phillips states that in Black Tickets she was, “working with voice[s], usually an individual or internal voice”, and that such voices are: not bound by an event or a past. [They are] more dreamlike. The unconscious is closer to the surface. You are cut loose from all conventions.42

Phillips builds on the unmoored voices of the first collection from Machine Dreams onwards, claiming: Probably the reason I’m attracted to the novel is the kind of patterning you can do or that almost emerges. I think that if you stay focused on the material, in the way that I hope to, there is a pattern that emerges in the writing …. It is something that is almost unconsciously worked out over the period of the time that you live in the material and work with the material.43

That a pattern “almost emerges” highlights the problematic nature of reading her fiction, of tracing elements that are there, but not yet there, at the same time. Her argument that the patterns may be a direct result of the unconscious may be read in terms of Bollas’ “unthought known”, indicating that in the case of Phillips, what she gradually reveals throughout her dense prose partially stems from her experiences of growing up in West Virginia. To introduce Phillips’ regionally determined narrative density I offer, here, an introduction within the introduction, by way of a consideration of the short story “Snow”, part of the Black Tickets collection. II Whilst certain stories in Black Tickets, most notably “Wedding Picture”, “Home”, and “1934” contain characters that may be said to act as preludes to the more developed characters of Phillips’ later fiction, “Snow” also offers an insight into her layering of words with semantic and temporal density. Narrated in the third person, the story focuses on the marriage between two blind characters, Randal and 42 43

Lyons and Oliver, “The Mystery of Language …”, 121. Ibid., 127.

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Laura, and their children, Molly and Callie. Randal teaches at the local “School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind”: in response to a question concerning “how a blind person dreams” Randal states: That the sounds and voices have their own shapes and varied thicknesses. Almost like colors, infinite shades of silver. Randal realized then that his sight in dreams was that of his childhood; blurred moving shapes with a light or emptiness behind them. In dreams he could still almost see the fingers on a hand, the beautiful separated films that moved differently and by themselves.44

Randal’s account of sleep reflects how many of Phillips’ characters, who are not physically blind, recall their pasts. His recollection of “blurred” images, of “separated films” that merge together yet also stand as individual memories, points to the partial nature of what he remembers. Such partiality mirrors the way in which the hidden comes to light in Phillips’ texts. Just as a character verges on accessing a hidden event through a dream or memory, the obscure images disperse “like film run too fast”.45 Whilst Phillips occasionally compares the sporadic return of memories to the disrupted viewing pattern of watching a film, the pictures “mov[ing] … forward and backward”, she commonly employs the image of snow to suggest how a character’s knowledge of their past may be veiled.46 In “Snow”, when Molly asks her father for the location of a particular fairy-tale garden, Randal “said he would try to remember, but when you try to find some things, there is a snow comes down”.47 Certainly, in “Snow” both parents imagine snow when they try to recall certain “things”. I concentrate here on the density of snow in order to establish the opaqueness of words in Phillips’ fiction. In particular, I will focus on the word “snow” which she continues to use throughout her work as a metaphor for concealment. The short story indicates that Laura’s blindness may result from mental, rather than physical, trauma. Prior to her marriage, Laura was 44

Black Tickets, 215. Jayne Anne Phillips, Shelter (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin / Seymour Lawrence, 1994), 128. 46 Ibid., 261. 47 Black Tickets, 227. 45

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one of Randal’s students, and on her admittance to the academy, the school’s psychiatrist told Randal: Laura is a special case Her blindness, he said, Is to some extent hysterical… thrown free, the car…her mother crawled out burning, he said. We think Laura was, he said, Conscious. Gloves at night for years, he said, To keep from hurting…herself in her sleep. I’m not qualified, he said, To deal with her.48

The inconsistent account of the psychiatrist’s assessment, an inconsistency marked in the text by a series of ellipses, reflects Laura’s own fragmented knowledge concerning the onset of her blindness. The intricacies of Laura’s past, and her subsequent relationship with Randal, require a detailed analysis beyond the limits of the present introduction. Here I simply wish to explore the layered nature of the word “snow”. When Laura recalls the night that she, her mother and her mother’s boyfriend were in a car crash, her account suffers from temporal irruptions. She remembers being in the car, all of them laughing, “her mother dangling the discarded ribbon from the rearview mirror, the wrinkled raveled satin, and the car lurched and they laughed”. As the next paragraph begins Phillips returns the reader to the present: Laura’s head was aching. She would not think of it. She would go and lay in the snow.

Whilst the snow appears to act as a calming image for Laura, snow simultaneously returns her to the past, “Behind her mother’s house” where “the snow was deep”. She recalls a voice saying: Laura move your arms up and down like this And your legs, there, like this…Laura would close her eyes under the pines in her warm clothes, feel snow falling on her face…all sounds went away. And her mother lifted her laughing Silly don’t fall asleep in the snow….

48

Ibid., 224-25 (the ellipses and the full stops in the passages from “Snow” are Phillips’ own).

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Ellipses disrupt Laura’s memories as the snow helps to take “all the sounds away”, sounds that reflect someone placing her body in a certain way “like this”. The uncompleted image of her bodily position allows for the possibility that snow, with its whitening, drifting and burying properties, displaces a potentially abusive relationship or moment. However, the snow that offers some solace from the memory that Laura wishes to negate is also intricately bound to that memory. Returning to the present, Laura undresses and gets into bed, “She got between the sheets, feeling the wide empty bed with her legs. It seemed to open, the sheets opening and covering.” Laura’s alternating position in the bed immediately takes her back to the snow outside her childhood home: In the snow they lay down to make women in gowns whose arms had exploded. No Laura, those are angels with wings like the angel in the tree…Snow fell from the trees in clumps, filled the angels up. Laura stamped the exploded arms.49

In various time frames snow functions on a number of levels. In the present tense Laura draws upon snow to help her escape the past, to displace the memories that she cannot entirely suppress. However, snow does not displace the past, rather, the word serves to return Laura to those childhood memories in which snow plays a central role. William Empson, addressing the structure of complex words, notes that “when a man is dutifully deceiving himself he will often admit the truth in his metaphors”.50 Snow acts as a metaphor for the concealment or denial of the past, yet the metaphoric word partially reveals what it hides. III Phillips’ capacity to generate semantic density within single words and images requires a study focused on the specifics of her narration, on how she deploys language in a way that allows her to tell two, or several, tales within one. I draw on Abraham and Torok in order to 49

Ibid., 223. William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (2nd edn, London: Penguin Books, 1995), 339. 50

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make the gaps in Phillips’ texts socially and historically readable, to trace the silences in her writing back to moments of decisive regional transition. For Rashkin, “Abraham and Torok’s theory of cryptonymy allows them to make the bar or sign of repression into an object of investigation.”51 Such investigation requires a certain habit of reading, a “methodological point of view” through which, Rashkin claims: The linguistic elements of the text are considered to be incomplete and need to be joined with their missing complements, whose traces are hidden in the text. The reading of these traces and the union of meshing complements enables the interpreter to perceive or conjecture a drama or dramas concealed within a character’s history. Frequently … such dramas will have occurred prior to the events of the narrative.52

Central to Rashkin’s summary is the idea of tracing disparate elements, and that only through the “meshing” of those elements can the reader “perceive or conjecture” what lies beneath the narrative gaps and silences. In what follows I attempt to untie Phillips’ entangled genealogical histories and to reconfigure the various threads into a conjecture about the complex attachments to region, and to the social traumas bound up in the characters’ ties to West Virginia. Ultimately, with Black’s theory of analytical models in mind, I hope that my non-linear approach goes some way to uncovering “what otherwise would be overlooked, to shift the relative emphasis attached to details – in short, to see new connections”.53

51

Rashkin, “Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism …”, 45. Ibid., 50-51. 53 Black, Models and Metaphors, 237. 52

CHAPTER ONE Accessing the Secret Country Against a wall sits a young woman, dressed in a blue, patterned dress, hugging a young boy dressed in a shirt and tie, both smile at the camera. The image is one of three that appear when visitors to Jayne Anne Phillips’ website access “The Secret Country”. The section contains three family photographs, each attributed to a particular area of Phillips’ life (MotherKind, Paternal and Maternal). Phillips aligns each image with an extract from her published work. Together, photograph and text tell multiple stories. Whilst each of the images falls under the general heading “The Secret Country”, Phillips directly aligns the image of the woman and boy with an extract from her first novel Machine Dreams: In the beginning there were twelve kids in that family, … Bess was the youngest, twenty when I was born, and she took care of me … Bess had been married once … she was young and it was kept secret in the family. Divorce was rare then. The first husband? He wasn’t from around here … I don’t think she knew him very well. Just within a month or so, she wired home from St. Louis – he’d taken off and left her there. It was my father, Warwick, went to get her … They booked passage back on the train, but it was near Christmas and a winter of bad blizzards; they were weeks getting home.1

Mitch recounts the vague details of his family past for his daughter Danner, in a section entitled “The Secret Country: Mitch”. His memories of Bess and his father, Warwick, form the basis of the paternal ur-narrative at the centre of Phillips’ work. The story of Bess, the woman whom Mitch knows to be his aunt, appears in two versions: one in Mitch’s memories of his childhood in Machine Dreams and the other in a short story entitled “Bess”, the final story in Fast Lanes. In what follows I explore the semantic density of that ur-narrative, as well as the socio-historic context of “Bess”, in order to trace the origins of an unspeakable event that haunts the text. 1

Jayne Anne Phillips: American Writers, ed. Jayne Anne Phillips, vers. 2002, 10 July 2005 .

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Phillips initially wrote “Bess” as part of Machine Dreams and later removed the story, claiming that: I realized the novel was meant to be about that little family, and Bess, though related was something of a peripheral character. Moreover, the “Bess” story makes a case for Bess being Mitch’s mother. To put that in the book would have completely skewed it.2

As Phillips acknowledges, the short story reveals Bess to be Mitch’s mother. In that text Bess claims that her brother Warwick signed the birth certificate in order to protect her name. As for the name Icie, Bess recounts: “We invented a name for [Mitch’s] mother, a name unknown in those parts, and told that she’d abandoned the baby to us.”3 Concealment and revelation act as key narrative devices for Phillips, both in the novel and across the charged gaps created by the removal of the story from the novel’s manuscript. Her cutting of “Bess” from Machine Dreams reinforces the lie that shapes Mitch’s life. Mitch continues to believe that Warwick is his father, Bess his aunt, and Icie his mother. As Foucault says in his essay on genealogy and history, knowledge, in Phillips’ case, genealogical knowledge, “is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting”.4 Whilst the image of cutting points to the severing of family memories, such cutting carries the attendant image of pasting together the various segments in a way that cannot hide the original slicing process. Genealogy may be best understood as a series of fractures and fissures rather than as a coherent, linear narrative. Certainly, Phillips propels her reader back and forth through her writing in order to piece together the fragmented lives of various characters, and, indeed, families. In what follows I will argue that “Bess”, the story in which relations to place are radically refigured, lies at the centre of Phillips’ writing.

2

Lyons and Oliver, “The Mystery of Language …”, 124. Fast Lanes, 184. 4 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rainbow (London: Penguin, 1991), 88. 3

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“Bess” contains a number of secondary scenes that point towards, yet deny access to, an excluded and original event. By the term “excluded” I refer to events or experiences that exist outside, or on the periphery of the narrative, constituting what might, in a Freudian reading, be referred to as the primal scene. Whilst excluded scenes may exist beyond the narrative framework, traces of their existence are discernible within the prose. In what follows I argue that the traces of an unspoken event haunt certain key sections in “Bess” and I offer analyses of these sections to show how the unspeakable defines the shape of the narrative. In examining the effects of the hidden on the story I propose that “Bess” deals with the tension between endogamy and exogamy, a reading that depends heavily on historical and regional contextualization as well as intertextual connections with Machine Dreams. Ned Lukacher’s work on primal scenes, in which he suggests that the primal scene is always the event that remains unspoken, may help in understanding the dual function of secondary scenes. For Lukacher, the primal scene is revealed yet simultaneously concealed within the narrative of a patient or a literary text. Lukacher argues that since the seeker after the content of the primal scene has only words to go by, he or she must be particularly attentive to speech “modulations” as they “mask” the force of the forgotten: The primal scene is always the primal scene of words …. The primal scene is always constructed from what the analyst-critic hears or reads in the discourse of the patient-text. Interpretation is always a kind of listening or reading that enables one to translate one set of words into another. The voice of the text, like the voice of the patient, is a verbal mask that conceals forgotten words and the forgotten scenes they compose. The analyst must learn to detect modulations and shifts within the patient’s speech, to hear the voices of the patient’s different selves and the traces of the voices of others.5

5 Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 68.

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Lukacher’s terms, “modulations”, “shifts”, and “traces”, may usefully be applied to the complex networks of Phillips’ fiction, particularly in so far as much of her complexity resides in the announced slippage between voices. Within individual texts italicized voices interrupt the narratives of particular characters, while between texts links across stories and novels establish traces that problematize the coherence of the self-contained plot.6 So, for example, “Bess” draws on characters who appear in Machine Dreams, but the histories of these characters change between the novel and the short story as new information is implied or revealed. The idea of partial revelation is intrinsic to Phillips’ writing and is central to the secondary scenes in “Bess”. As Lukacher argues, the primal scene cannot be fully recreated in words, rather the words referring to the scene appear in another form. The reader must interpret a series of signifiers that point to an undefined signified. In order to reach an understanding of that which exists outside the narrative, Phillips’ readers must engage with the gaps in the narrative. I intend to argue that the blockage in Phillips’ work revolves around prohibited desire that in the case of “Bess”, is an implied moment of incest. Karl Zender argues that Faulkner, even “As early as Flags in the Dust … had depicted the destruction of the forests of the Mississippi Delta by northern-financed timber merchants, and he had linked an inability to oppose this process to fantasies of sibling incest”.7 Following Zender’s economic contextualization of incest in Faulkner’s work, I suggest that prohibited desire does not simply characterize individual psychology in Phillips’ writing; desire and incestuous desire focus larger historical and regional shifts addressed in her work. Bess narrates the story that bears her name, and the implied speech situation of “Bess”, as well as the first-person narrative sections in Machine Dreams, indicate that Bess tells her story to Danner Hampson. The Bess of the short story begins her narrative by directly engaging her listener: “You have to imagine”.8 Bess’ “you” echoes a 6 Examples of italicized voices permeating the voices of other characters can be seen in Machine Dreams as Grace’s voice penetrates Jean’s thoughts; and in Shelter where Audrey’s words continuously enter Alma’s thoughts. 7 Karl Zender, Faulkner and the Politics of Reading (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 26. 8 Fast Lanes, 165 (my emphasis).

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similar usage in Machine Dreams where Jean, in “Reminiscence To A Daughter”, engages Danner by way of the second person pronoun: “You were first-born”, “Did I ever take you to see it?”.9 “Bess”, first written as part of Machine Dreams, and then turned into a selfcontained short story published one year after the novel, signals a retrospective continuation of the Hampson family history.10 Bess narrates events that occurred “sixty, seventy, eighty years ago, more than the lifetimes allotted most persons”.11 Narrated in the first person, “Bess”, like the other stories in the collection, signals the importance of memory as a narrative device. Michel de Certeau’s study of narrativity provides a useful account of how memory distorts the process of re-telling: Memory mediates spatial transformations. In the mode of the “right point in time” (kairos), it produces a founding rupture or break. Its foreignness makes possible a transgression of the law of the place. Coming out of its bottomless and mobile secrets, a “coup” modifies the local order. The goal of the series is thus an operation that transforms the visible organization. But this change requires the invisible resources of a time which obeys other laws and which, taking it by surprise, steals something from the distribution owning the space.

As de Certeau points out, memory effectively ruptures both spatial and temporal dimensions. Memory aligns both the real time (the moment a recollection occurs in the present) and the time remembered (some point in the past). Whilst memories are “indissociable from the time of their acquisition”, they also depend upon a present moment in order to become visible. Present time, whether a moment after the event occurs or fifty years later, signals the memory’s passage through “accumulated time”. Accumulated time effects changes in the process of recollection – knowledge gained after the initial event necessarily impacts upon how one remembers. Michel de Certeau claims that memory “(makes possible) a reversal, a change in order or place, a transition into something 9

Machine Dreams, 4-5 (my emphasis). “Bess” was first published in The Esquire Fiction Reader, I, eds Rust Hills and Tom Jenks (Green Harbor, Mass: Wampeter Press, 1985). 11 Fast Lanes, 165. 10

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different”. Memory creates a two-fold distortion: the past, as it returns through memory, is altered by “accumulated time”, whilst the present is subject to what de Certeau terms “a temporal irruption”.12 Memory’s distortive qualities may create a “foreignness” in the locality of the remembered event so that Bess’ version of any particular scene may contain elements of a foreign moment whose own disruptive nature denies its full expression. The secondary scenes in “Bess” are subject to memory’s distortive force: although Bess’ narrative omits a key event, her account of the secondary scenes contains elements of that which remains hidden. In effect, Bess’ present recollection transposes the temporality of the hidden event onto alternative memories of the past. Bess’ narrative, then, depends upon her own recollection of the past, a perspective that is not merely subjective but whose basis in memory renders her account structurally susceptible to the ruptures and transformations induced by time. Bess recounts growing up on a rural farm in West Virginia, but more specifically she tells of her relationship with one of her older brothers, Warwick. Hindsight allows Bess to narrate her childhood with the advantage of what she did not know at the time: “Winters frightened me, but it was summers I should have feared.”13 Bess’ account of a particular summer in 1900 focuses on several scenes that take place between herself and Warwick. That she aligns a summer to be “feared” with her relationship with Warwick signals an inherent danger within their sibling bond.14 12 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984), 82-87. 13 Fast Lanes, 167. 14 “Bess” contains parallels with Katherine Anne Porter’s story “The Grave”, a text that Phillips discusses in “Outlaw Heart” [Critical Quarterly, XXXVII/4 (1994), 4348]. In “The Grave” the cutting open of a dead, pregnant rabbit by Paul, witnessed by his younger sister Miranda, acts as an initiation process for the younger sibling. Miranda thinks that, “Her brother had spoken as if he had known about everything all along. He may have seen all this before. He had never said a word to her, but she knew now a part at least of what he knew. She understood a little of the secret, formless institutions in her own mind and body, which had been clearing up, taking form, so gradually and so steadily she had not realized that she was learning what she had to know.” The sense of inevitability, as Miranda finds out what she already knew, echoes throughout “Bess” and, indeed, much of Phillips’ fiction (Katherine Anne Porter, The Old Order: Stories of the South from The Leaning Tower, Pale

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Bess’ sense of Warwick depends on her creation of a distinction between herself and her brother and the rest of their siblings: Our parents joked about their two families, first the six sons, one after the other; then a few years later the four daughters, Warwick and me. Another daughter after the boy was a bad sign, Pa said; there were enough children. I was the last, youngest of twelve Hampsons, and just thirteen months younger than Warwick. Since we were born on each other’s heels, Mam said, we would have to raise each other.15

The nameless groups of boys and girls stand in opposition to Warwick and Bess, in a them/us relation. The last two children share a bedroom with their older sister Ava (a character who also appears in Machine Dreams).16 Warwick and Bess, already spatially differentiated from the others, seal their bond in a voyeuristic moment. Bess takes the reader back to a particular summer night in 1900 when she was twelve and Warwick was “nearly fourteen”. She tells us that “Warwick woke me, pinched my arms inside my cotton shift and held his hand across my mouth”. Walking “like a shadow”, Warwick motions that Bess “should follow him outside”. I quote at length because what follows constitutes the initial secondary scene of the story: We climbed into the top branches that grew next the third floor of the house and sat cradled where three branches sloped; Warwick whispered not to move, stay behind the leaves in case they look. We were outside Claude’s window, seeing into the dim room. … She held him just away with her hands and he touched over and over the big globed belly, stroking it long and deeply like you would stroke a scared animal …. She was all naked globes and curves, headless and wide-hipped with the swollen belly big and pale beneath her like a moon; standing that way she looked all dumb and animal like our white mare before she foaled …. We saw him, he ______________________________________________________________ Horse, Pale Rider and Flowering Judas [San Diego and London: A Harvest Book, 1972], 54-55). 15 Fast Lanes, 166-67. 16 In “Mitch: The Secret Country” (Machine Dreams), we learn that Mitch stays with Ava for a time as child.

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started to prod himself inside her very slow, tilting his head and listening …. I put my cool hands over my eyes then, hearing their sounds until Warwick pulled my arms down and made me look. Claude was tight behind her, pushing in and flinching like he couldn’t get put of her; she bawled once. He let her go, stumbling; they staggered onto the bed, she lying on her back away from him with the bunched chemise in her mouth… This was perhaps twenty minutes of a night in July, 1900. I looked at Warwick as though for the first time. When he talked he was so close I could feel the words on my skin distinct from the night breeze. “Are you glad you saw?” he whispered, his face frightened. He had been watching them from the tree for several weeks.17

Warwick’s sensual whispers take the reader to his later quarantine after he suffers a severe reaction to poison ivy. Although I will unpack the densities of his illness later, here I wish to highlight the effect of Warwick’s whispers on his younger sister. His whispers are initially directional, telling Bess “not to move” but as their voyeuristic moment draws to a close, he whispers so closely that Bess “could feel the words on [her] skin distinct from the night breeze”. Warwick’s whispers, with their prickling effect on Bess’ skin, echo his own skin prickles during his later infection. Throughout Warwick’s contagious period, only Bess can touch him, and she states that “When I touched him with the cloth he made such whispers, such inside sounds; they weren’t even words but had a cadence like sentences”. Through his whispers Warwick lays claim to his younger sister – her name is the first real word that he whispers as he comes out of his fever. In an inversion of Sleeping Beauty, Warwick tells Bess that: he slept a hundred years, swallowed in a vast belly like Jonah, no time anymore, no sense but strange dreams without pictures. He thought he was dead, he said, and the moment he came back he spoke [Bessie] the only word he’d remembered in the dark.18

To return to the passage in question, Warwick’s intimate whispering as brother and sister share a voyeuristic moment highlights the growing bond between the two, particularly given that 17 18

Fast Lanes, 168-71. Ibid., 182-83.

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Bess views her brother in a new, sexualized light: “I looked at Warwick as though for the first time.” Indeed, Bess employs similar terms to describe both Claude’s sexual activities and her own subsequent meeting with Warwick in the barn. The image of Claude touching his wife “over [her] big globed belly, stroking it long and deeply like you would stroke a scared animal” pre-empts Bess and Warwick’s grooming of the horses in the following secondary scene. Bess watches her brother, “both arms moving smooth and repetitive as in some purposeful dance except all his body is still, just standing, while his arms stay lifted, stroking”. Bess joins Warwick in the grooming, stating that: “Our fingers in their long manes are plaiting the rough hair, the hair coarse and cool and dead against the warmth of their broad necks. In the quiet the horses feel big and human, their hard heads pressed close to our shoulders.”19 Claude’s sexualized stroking of his wife, whom Bess compares to a “white mare”, contains echoes of Bess and Warwick’s encounter in the barn, raising the question as to which of the two scenes takes priority in Bess’ narrative. Bess’ decision to narrate the voyeuristic scene in the past tense is of particular importance. Although much of the story is told in the past tense, three sections are narrated in the present tense. The present tense scenes are the most intense form of secondary scenes in the story, the scenes closet to the unspoken event that haunts Bess’ account. Indeed, the change of tense between the Claude scene and the barn scene indicates that whilst the sexual act watched by Bess and Warwick may be a key event in the narrative it is not, in itself, the experience that haunts Bess’ story. Bess’ ability to narrate the event in the past tense suggests that she controls that particular memory: for all its forbidden content, the memory is safe, though it may be said to encrypt a hidden event. In contradistinction, the intrusion of the present tense signals a disruption in Bess’ narrative.20

19

Ibid., 171-72. For a psychoanalytic account of the intrusion of the past into the present, specifically within the context of trauma theory, see Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (2nd edn, New York: Basic Books, 1997), 37-42. 20

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III Two of the three parts of the story that unfold in the present tense begin with Bess searching for Warwick: “Warwick. Warwick, are you here?”21 and later in the text, “Warwick? Warwick?”.22 An abrupt shift in tenses, accompanied by the interrogative, implies a breakdown in Bess’ account: past time dislocates Bess’ story telling as key memories break into her thoughts demanding present expression. In the Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky’s characters, “remember from their own past only that which has not ceased to be present for them, that which is still experienced by them as the present: an unexpiated sin, a crime, an unforgiven insult”. For Bakhtin, the past does not interrupt the present, rather the past is part of the present. He argues that for Dostoevsky, “to get one’s bearing on the world meant to conceive all its contents as simultaneous, and to guess at their interrelationships in the cross-section of a single moment”.23 The collapse of past and present into one “single moment” offers an interesting parallel with de Certeau’s proposal that memory, as an act of narration, “permit[s] the juxtaposition of different spaces in a single picture”.24 Bess effectively draws the past into the present, rupturing the dimension of space as well as time. Bess, who we can assume narrates her tale in present day Bellington, the fictional setting of Machine Dreams, elides town with farm by making the past present. The interruptive force of the present tense, therefore, demands closer scrutiny. In the first of these two “Warwick” sections, immediately following the Claude scene, Bess and Warwick discuss what they saw the previous evening. Warwick admits leading Bess into watching, and she promises not to “tell anyone”, though she stresses she has no wish to “watch them again”. The first encounter after their shared voyeurism notably takes place in the barn as brother and sister prepare their horses for the Independence Day parade. The braiding of the horses’ manes resonates with sexual connotations. Indeed, Bess 21

Fast Lanes, 171. Ibid., 179. 23 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Theory and History of Literature, Volume, VIII, trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 28-29. 24 de Certeau, The Practice of Everday Life, 84. 22

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claims that “In the quiet the horses feel big and human”. Bess’ language establishes a connection to the Claude scene with its juxtaposition of people, sexuality and horses. Warwick and Bess discuss whether “a woman belongs” to her first sexual partner “whether she is with him later or not,” as they work on the horses. Warwick believes that a virginal woman belongs to that man who first possesses her. Bess disagrees, at which point she reaches into a basket balanced between them that holds ribbons and grosgrain: The satin ribbon is knotted in a coil beneath grosgrain, slick and silky by the nubby darker red – unrolling it I feel the basket shift and almost fall. Warwick catches it, kneeling down beside me to hold it with one hand.25

The passage centres on the “nubby darker red”, the texture and colour of which point to the sexual tension in the siblings’ relationship. “Nubby”, a word that derives from the noun “nub” or “knub” contains multiple meanings. At one level, knub refers to the waste or refuse of silk cocoons. Significantly, one of the present tense sections deals with Warwick’s infection, during which he slept like “a pupa, larva wrapped in a woven spit of gauze”.26 Each moment reflects another so that the barn scene actually prefigures later encounters between the siblings. Indeed, the word “nubby”, as used in the barn scene, reveals the intense connection between brother and sister. In addition to its links with insect life, “knub” or “knob”, is colloquial for penis. More subtly, nubby links phonetically with “nubile”, the state of a woman as she becomes sexually mature or of marriageable age. In terms of the barn, all three readings of the word “nubby” emphasize the latent sexuality of Bess and Warwick’s encounter. The image of Warwick on his knees in front of Bess highlights the idea of marriage as sexual union and recalls the previous secondary scene of Claude kneeling before his wife. That the scene unfolds in the barn places emphasis on that space as central to the siblings’ relationship. The barn effectively acts as the spatial nucleus of Bess and Warwick’s move towards endogamy. Bess, recent convert to voyeurism, secretly watches Warwick as he practices tightrope 25 26

Fast Lanes, 171-73. Ibid., 179.

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walking. I will consider the implications of Warwick’s secret pastime in what follows. Here, I wish to concentrate on the link between the sexual nature of the sibling relationship and the barn. Bess remembers that her brother “often walked naked since the heat was fierce”. Her description of his naked body again draws an analogy with the Claude scene: Warwick was “still coltish” and “long muscled” yet she remembers that it was not Warwick’s nakedness that moved her to “stay hidden”. Rather, “it was the way he touched the long yellow pole … he clasped it lightly and the pole turned horizontally with a half-rotation; six, seven, eight quick flashes, turning hard and quick”. The pole’s repeated arc, through vertical and horizontal, is potentially phallic. Bess recalls that after watching the sexualized act, she would run back to the barn “where it was shady and cool and I could sit in the mow to remember his face and the yellow pole come to life”: You had to look straight into the sun to see its airborne end and the sun was a blind white burn the pole could touch. Like Warwick was prodding the sun in secret, his whole body a prayer partly evil.27

Warwick’s “prodding the sun” recalls Claude’s “start[ing] to prod himself inside [his wife] very slow”, sexualizing Warwick’s actions. After witnessing her brother’s feats, Bess retreats to the barn, a site previously associated with sexual latencies in the sibling relationship. The barn is described in terms of a scopic and spatial contraction: she passes through the forest “to the clearing, the meadow, the fenced boundaries of the high-grown yard and the house, the barn, where it was shady”. The Bess/Warwick relationship is endogamous, an inward turning reflected in Bess’ retreat to the barn. The barn acts as an internalizing space within which Bess encloses the sexual attraction between herself and Warwick. Indeed, within the incestuous space of the barn Bess responds to Warwick’s insistence that a woman belongs to her first sexual partner with a question about the rape of a local girl by a tramp. Warwick explains that the girl belonged to a “family” and so was not herself a tramp. He adds that the tramp who attacked the girl was lynched by townsmen. Fatherless, the girl is protected by members of the community. The town takes responsibility for protecting its own from 27

Ibid., 175-76.

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an outsider. Bess presses Warwick to explore his logic, asking, “But the tramp can’t own her when he’s dead. Who owns her then?”. Warwick supposes that the girl is therefore “an orphan”.28 Warwick’s response implies that women either belong to a male family member or to a husband/lover, and further, that if a woman belongs to neither she loses any family by transgressing the limits of belonging. Richard Gray, in his discussion of incestuous relationships in southern literature, proposes that in the “Southern family romance” the “region was conceived of as a vast metaphorical family”. The collective myth caused “erotic tensions” and “generational conflicts”, turning “every potential relationship between men and women into a version of sibling intimacy”, meaning that “every young white woman became a ‘sister’, a member of the clan, whose purity and honor had to be protected”.29 In light of Gray’s argument, incest, as part of a collective southern myth, inevitably creates a tension between exogamy and endogamy. The tramp in “Bess”, as an outsider, is lynched not merely for his assault against the local girl but also for penetrating the family ties that hold the community together. Lynching, as a method of punishment, embodies a sense of hostility towards change. As southern historian John Ezell notes, lynchings tend to occur in greater numbers during times of turmoil. Ezell claims that fear was the root cause of lynchings against blacks in the South, a “Fear of being economically displaced by the Negro”.30 However, whilst white-on-black lynching constituted the largest number of lynchings in the South, white-on-white lynching was not uncommon. W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes that between 18801930, “more than half of the whites lynched in both Virginia and Georgia were charged with crimes against white women”. Brundage states that white-on-white lynching “drew heavily upon xenophobia, bigotry, and rural southerners’ strong … urge to distinguish between full members of the community and interlopers”.31 The tramp in “Bess”, then, poses a threat to the social structure. As a penetrant

28

Ibid., 170-76. Gray, Southern Aberrations, 29. 30 John Samuel Ezell, The South Since 1865 (2nd edn, New York: Macmillan, 1975), 362. 31 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 88-91. 29

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outsider he figures a contemporary intrusion of Northern investment into the Appalachia. IV The encroachment of industrialization into Appalachia during the early 1900s precipitated a loss of self-sufficiency. Paul Salstrom states that as timber and coal operators moved into the area, farmers became embroiled in a dual system of work, “combining subsistence agriculture with industrial wage labor”.32 Bess alludes to this economic change when she recalls that her brothers “worked mines or cut timber for money to start farms”.33 Salstrom suggests that Appalachian farmers, who placed greater emphasis on labour rather than capital, would have considered their industrial work as a means to supplement their farms. However, the increasing reliance on outside investment signalled a dependency upon the industrial wage. When Warwick dies in a mining accident, Bess recognizes that his “dying would make an end of the farm”. Indeed, shortly after his death Bess moves to Bellington and her parents leave the main family farm to live with Claude and his wife.34 Warwick’s work in the mines had kept the family farm together, and his industrial related death signals the end of the family’s farming heritage. Certain key moments in the story prefigure the family’s eventual departure from the land, moments that invariably revolve around the relationship between Bess and Warwick. After their discussion in the barn concerning he to whom a woman belongs, Bess and Warwick attend the Independence Day parade in the nearest town, Coalton. Bess’ description of the parade stands in stark opposition to the photographs taken of the town “that July 4th”. Bess notes how “those black-and-white studies” did not capture the intense colours of the “sky” or “the streamered buildings and the flags”. She remembers how the photographer asked the townspeople “to stay still”, effectively freezing the moment and removing the image from historical continuity. Bess’ account of the parade, however, places emphasis on movement and change. 32

Paul Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 1730-1940 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), xxi. 33 Fast Lanes, 168. 34 Ibid., 185.

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Bess’ memory of the day is bound up with the image of the circus that “the local merchants had hired” for the event.35 Helen Stoddart claims that “Of all arts and entertainments during this pre-cinema period, the circus was the most wholeheartedly wedded to what would emerge as the spirit of modernity”.36 The American circus, in opposition to its European counterparts, was the first to become mobile. The replacement of permanent buildings with tents allowed the circus to move from place to place with greater ease, particularly during the North American circus’ “Golden Age (1871-1915)”, when rail replaced road as the preferred method for transporting the circus around the country.37 The circus became synonymous with modernization as the growing rail network and the speed of rail travel allowed circuses access to remote areas. The railway, so often a means to industrialization, marked a significant change in relations between rural areas and larger cities. In the case of Appalachia, the rail system provided Northern investors with the means to transport coal or timber out of the region. The train not only allowed people to leave their locality with greater ease, but also effected changes in place. At a generic level, David Harvey argues that modernization aided the capitalist “investment in the conquest of space”: “the expansion of the railway network, accompanied by the advent of the telegraph, the growth of steam shipping … all changed the sense of time and space in radical ways.”38 The removal of coal and timber from Appalachia signals the physical transformation of place. Whilst “Bess” does not refer to the rail system, the circus in Coalton implicitly presages the encroachment of modernization into the region. More particularly, the circus in Phillips’ story is destructive in its passage through woodland and town. Bess, waiting for the circus to come into view, sees the “dust raised in the woods” and hears “the crackling of what was crushed”. The parade leaves the main street in a “sea of yellow dust, the flags snapping … and banners strung between the buildings broken, 35

Ibid., 173-74. Helen Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 36. 37 Ibid., 23. 38 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 264. 36

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flying”.39 The “five elephants” belonging to the travellers break the banners, and presumably crush the woodland, thereby figuring chaos and change. However, in a recent study of Britain’s sale of Jumbo to America in 1882, Tim Lustig argues that during the 1880s elephants “had … definite political significance as the emblem of the Republican party”. A tension between radical change and conservative values places the elephant in what Lustig calls a “‘third’ or ‘hybrid’ space”.40 For Lustig, such hybridity requires binary terms between which to form Britain and America: black and white. In “Bess” the elephant represents a discord between an agrarian past and a modernized future, or between endogamy and exogamy. As Bess watches the elephants approach she sees a trainer sitting on the “massive harnessed head of the first” animal. Warwick is sitting next to the trainer and Bess recalls how: “Far, far up, I saw Warwick’s face; I was yelling, yelling for them to stop, stop and take me up, but they kept on going.” The three-fold repetition structures the sentence. “Far” denotes distance since Warwick is out of reach and despite Bess’ “yelling” cannot hear her. The repeated “stop” does not indicate that Bess wishes to prevent change, rather she wishes to be part of the move away from an agrarian past – hence her “take me up”. Warwick’s place on the moving elephant links him with the potential for change and situates him between endogamy and exogamy. Excited by the circus, Warwick decides to learn how to “walk a wire”. Ignoring a paternal ban, he went “secretly to the creek every morning and practised on the sly”. Stoddart proposes that aerialists, like the circus itself, “are held to be representative of the suspensions of place, time and social relations”.41 Warwick’s desire to be elevated above the ground places him in a hybrid space undefined by social constructs: a space between the binaries of endogamy and exogamy that haunt his relationship with Bess. He balances between autochthony and flight, a binarism that echoes throughout Phillips’ writing. Stoddart notes that the aerialist’s “stunts” are bound up with the “present moment”, effectively removing “the figure involved from 39

Fast Lanes, 174. Tim Lustig, “Seeing the Elephant: Constructing Culture in Britain and the United States after Jumbo”, Symbiosis, IV/2 (October 2000), 113-16. 41 Fast Lanes, 174-76. 40

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any temporal continuum in which it leaps or at least detaches itself from a past”. The contravention of time is merely a temporary aberration: “the stunt points only ‘to inherent possibility rather than future progress’, a possibility which may be either lost or realised.”42 Stoddart’s assertion that the aerialist exists in suspended time works only in relation to the time the performer spends in the air, unsupported by ropes: the aerialist is otherwise dependent upon the ties that link him or her to the ground. Warwick walks “six feet off the ground” on a “thick rope” which he tied “between two trees”. He depends upon the trees for support, trees whose roots tie Warwick to the earth. In effect, Warwick’s attempts to transgress the limitations of endogamy, as figure in his rope-walking, are doubly frustrated by his attachment to both the earth and to Bess. The endogamous nature of the sibling relationship is sealed when Warwick sees Bess watching him. Bess’ sexualized gaze, a form of “watching” that she attributes to Warwick – “watching as he himself had taught me to watch” – successfully grounds her brother. When Warwick realizes Bess’ presence the two share a mutual gaze, a gaze that brings Warwick to the ground. Warwick jumps down after successfully walking across the whole length of rope for the first time: Bess remembers that “That day he did it; I believe he did it only that once, straight across”. Warwick is returned to the earth just as he manages to transcend his own limited abilities and to escape the restrictions of endogamy. Bess recalls that the “change I saw in [Warwick’s] face, that moment he realized my presence, foretold everything. Whatever we did from then on was an attempted escape from the fact of the future.”43 Interestingly, whilst the “fact of the future” may appear to be an incestuous coupling with Warwick, the fact actually relates to exogamy, exogamy marked by Bess’ departure from the home place after Warwick’s death in the mine. Although Warwick’s death officially marks the loss of the farm, Bess’ departure from the farm when she elopes indicates early rifts within the idea of place, here recast as a tension between exogamy and endogamy. V 42 43

Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 186. Fast Lanes, 178-79.

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Bess is the only daughter to attend finishing school in “Lynchburg”, a place whose very name recalls the punishment suffered by the tramp.44 Lynchburg, a town whose name echoes the violent repercussions of presumed sexual transgression in the South, is ultimately linked with departure from place. Historically, Lynchburg, named after the man who set up a ferry service across the James River to connect the town with the North, was a key trade centre in Virginia.45 Connected to the North first by ferry and then by rail, Lynchburg served as a central out of state shipping point for tobacco and cotton. Ultimately, Bess’ final education in a town noted for its route out of the South highlights her eventual departure away from Coalton. Part of Bess’ movement away from the farm occurs as she begins “court[ing]”. Warwick’s insistence, in the barn, that a woman belongs to her first sexual partner, structures his later jealousy of the men who court Bess. His covetousness pushes Bess to elope when she is eighteen. Yet she cannot remember the face of the man with whom she elopes, and she does not reveal his name. Interestingly, Phillips reveals the mysterious man’s name in Machine Dreams, where Mitch claims that “Seems to me his name was Thorn”.46 The remembered name carries painful allusions, particularly since any man who courted Bess was a “thorn” in Warwick’s side. Indeed, the name Thorn may reflect Warwick’s infection with poison ivy after he “was covered all over with small cuts from running through the briars”.47 In the story itself, the only information provided about Bess’ partner is that “He was blond but otherwise he did really resemble Warwick – in his movements, his walk, his way of speaking”. Bess renders her partner featureless, but his physical actions mirror those of Warwick. Bess’ description of her partner simultaneously contains and yet denies a resemblance to the brother. Bess says that “I do not really remember his face” yet she negates her own denial when she states that “he did really resemble Warwick”.48 The emphatic repetition of 44

Ibid., 184. LynchburgOnline, vers. 2004, Lynchburg Internet Associates, 10 July 2005 . 46 Machine Dreams, 27. 47 Fast Lanes, 178. 48 Ibid., 184 (my emphasis). 45

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the word really leads one to question which really is real. Bess’ husband serves to conceal Warwick as Bess’ potential partner. Malcolm Bull offers an account of concealment in his work on hiddenness. He claims that: just as the covers of a book conceal its contents yet recall its content to someone who has previously read it, so the silent earth [in a graveyard] somehow echoes with the voices of the dead. It is as though the dead are revealed not despite but because of their concealment.

Bull’s remarks concerning burial and death provide a useful gloss from which to read Bess’ account of her partner. For Bull, the very act of concealment results in partial revelation. Concealment necessarily implies knowledge: we have to be aware of something in order both to hide it, and to experience it as hidden. Once concealed, the truth no longer functions “within the realm of the sensible”, the truth stops functioning as “raw” or “visual” experience. However, what cannot literally be seen, can instead, be perceived. Concealment, like burying the dead, does not mean that the truth has been successfully removed. Bull proposes that the dead “are perceptible in that through memory, intuition, or some form of extra-sensory perception they remain objects of knowledge”.49 Bess conceals Warwick within the image of the man with whom she runs away and within that concealment lies the potential moment of incest. Such concealment, in the form of a mysterious man, prefigures the Hampson family’s later decision to conceal Mitch’s parentage through the invented name Icie. The need for concealment becomes clear when the reader charts the dates provided for Mitch’s conception in both the short story and in Machine Dreams. Bess elopes after returning home from finishing school. She leaves with the unnamed man and stays away for eight weeks. The marriage fails when Bess discovers that the man has a “sickness for the roulette wheel”. Constantly on the road during her eight weeks with the man, Bess remembers sitting in hotel rooms surrounded by the “blur of noise coming through the floor”. In these rooms, Bess: “imagined the vast space of the barn around [her]: dark 49

Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 11-12.

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air filling a gold oval, the tall beams, the bird sounds ghostly, like echoes. The hay, ragged heaps that spilled from the mow in pieces and fell apart.” Bess may have left home and married outside her family, but even during that brief exercise in exogamy she seeks the enclosed and family space of the barn. The barn, a site previously associated with sibling sexuality, retains that occluded sexuality in Bess’ sibling narrative. The “dark air” functions penetratively to fill a “gold oval”, whose very shape holds vulval associations. In effect, the external world is displaced as Bess thinks of the interior of the barn, which itself “echoes” and “ghost[s]” the internal space of her own desirous body.50 Left in St Louis by her husband, Bess waits for Warwick to take her home. The narrative moves directly from Warwick’s collecting of Bess in St Louis to their return to the farm. However, readers of Machine Dreams know that they were delayed, due to bad weather, resulting in the fact that “they were weeks getting home”.51 That fact, withheld in “Bess”, creates a gap in Bess’ account. That gap deepens when she recounts that “It was decided to keep my elopement and divorce, and the pregnancy itself, secret”.52 The phrase, “and the pregnancy itself”, is grammatically isolated within its sentence: bracketing commas ensure that the possessive pronoun seems to refer more strongly to elopement and divorce than to pregnancy, so that impregnation, cast as part of a separate process, takes on a veneer of secrecy. Family decision ratifies syntax as the Hampsons agree to keep her elopement and divorce secret, and consequently to suppress her pregnancy. I would argue that the story, allied to details afforded the reader in Machine Dreams, indicates that Bess’ child may be the result of an incestuous coupling between herself and Warwick. Bess states that Mitch was born in the September following her return to the farm. The dates of Bess’ pregnancy allow for the possibility that Warwick may be the father. Whilst the narrative remains unclear as to exactly when Bess’ husband leaves her, Mitch claims that “it was near Christmas” when Bess and Warwick planned to leave St Louis for the journey back to the farm, a journey delayed by blizzards.53 Mitch’s September birthday means that conception 50

Fast Lanes, 184. Machine Dreams, 28. 52 Fast Lanes, 184. 53 Machine Dreams, 28. 51

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took place no later than the end of December, a time frame that includes Warwick as well as the nameless man. Adversely, whilst the endogamous coupling is an “attempted escape” from the exogamy that will breach the Hampson’s attachment to place, Mitch’s birth actually highlights the limitations of their escape. As the product of their incestuous union, Mitch also embodies the gradual movement away from the farm. Warwick “could not abide” Mitch. Bess asserts that for Warwick, “the child was living reminder of my abasement, my betrayal in ever leaving the farm”.54 His contempt for the child appears contradictory: if Warwick sees an incestuous coupling as a means of protecting the family from external threats then Mitch should embody that desire. Indeed, Mitch is the product of Warwick’s retrieval of his sister from exogamy. In his study of nativism and modernity Walter Benn Michaels discusses Quentin Compson’s incestuous desire for his sister, Caddy, in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury in ways that provide a useful gloss on “Bess”. For Michaels, “What’s at stake in the desire to keep someone in the family is thus the sense that what is outside the family is also outside the race”.55 He perceives the incest in Faulkner’s novel as representative of the need to protect the family purity from the threat of miscegenation. Whilst race is not an endemic part of Phillips’ writing, Bess and Warwick’s relationship is nevertheless an attempt to maintain a regional identity in the face of modernization. However, because they cannot both be recognized as parents of the child, their secret family falls apart. In effect, the breakdown of their relationship mirrors the break up of the family and the severance of family links to the land after Warwick’s death. Warwick’s failure to keep Bess in the family is sealed at the very moment he chooses endogamy over exogamy. When he jumps to the earth from his tightrope, ratifying his and Bess’ “attempted escape” into endogamy, he simultaneously reveals the inevitability of Bess’ movement towards exogamy. Warwick, “wild with rage”, chases Bess through the forest and into a thicket where they roll on the ground, fighting. During their struggle Warwick becomes infected, poisoned by the briars. Warwick’s infection “was in his blood” and 54

Fast Lanes, 185. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 7-8. 55

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given its severity required his isolation: Bess is the only person allowed to touch him because she “doesn’t catch poison”. Her care for her brother constitutes only the second scene in the story narrated in the present tense. Warwick is quarantined and moved from the house into the sun porch. His father, mother and Claude carry him, “wearing gloves and their forearms wrapped in gauze”; Bess removes their protective wear and later burns it “in the woodstove”.56 Fear of contamination surrounds Warwick, yet Bess remains immune to his illness. Bess, as the only family member who “doesn’t catch poison”, is marked as other: her blood differs from the rest of the Hampson family, situating her in the role of outsider. Indeed, as established, Bess is the only daughter sent to finishing school – her “older sisters would tell a lot later how she’d been sent away to learn to ride a horse like something other than a savage”.57 The family encourages Bess to move beyond the confines of the locality, just as in Machine Dreams Jean Hampson encourages her children to become economically mobile. For both Danner Hampson, and indeed for Bess, such social mobility also results in a separation from the birthplace, a separation that appears inescapable in both texts. From farm to town to out-ofstate cities, Phillips’ women are involved in a lengthy departure from West Virginia. That departure reflects Phillips’ own regional experience, an experience that shapes much of her work. Williams, writing of Thomas Hardy’s relationship with region proposes that “the real history of his writing is that he knew, in himself, the experience of separation”.58 Phillips, too, knows “the experience of separation” and “Bess” pivots around the break from region, a separation caused by economic and social imperatives. Interestingly, the story oscillates between a predetermined break from place and a departure based on chance. Bess, in the third and final present tense section in her account, tells of a dream that she has “lately”. In the dream Bess returns to the old, now dilapidated family farm, and walks out to the thicket where she and Warwick fought: 56

Fast Lanes, 178-81. Machine Dreams, 27. 58 Williams, The Country and the City, 251. 57

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I kneel down to touch the leaves, and the dirt beneath is cool as cellar air, pliable as sand. I dig a hole, as though a grave is there, a grave I will discover. Cards I find, and a knife.59

Bess’ discovery of cards brings into focus the repeated allusions to cards and fortune telling throughout Fast Lanes. In that collection, in stories such as “Fast Lanes” cards represent that which is predetermined, a belief that events are “in the cards from the beginning”.60 However, in opposition to the inevitability of what lies in the cards, Bess’ nameless partner “gambled at cards and roulette”. The partner is associated with chance, something that Bess could not “bear”. She claims, “I hated … the clackings of the wheels like speeded-up clocks and everyone’s eyes following numbers”. Bess regards chance and gambling as a way of cheating time, of attempting to alter the course of what she perceives as already predetermined. The cards that she digs up in her dream belong to the fortune telling variety. The movement of the dream, from Bess’ return to the old farmhouse that is now “deserted but still standing” to the thicket where she and Warwick fought, traces the demise of the farm to the moment that Warwick became infected with poison ivy. In her dream: There is mist from the creek and the moist smell of day lilies, mustard bitters of their furred sepals broken in black ivy. Thick beds of the dark-veined leaves are a tangle in the undergrowth. There, in the thicket where I fought with Warwick, I find the yellow rope, bleached pale as rain in those leaves. I kneel down to touch the leaves, and the dirt beneath is cool as cellar air, pliable as sand.61

The ivy that poisoned Warwick, infecting his blood so that only Bess could touch him, covers the ground, hiding under its “dark-veined leaves”, the rope and the cards. The rope, lying on the surface of the earth, represents Warwick’s fall to the ground, a fall into endogamy. That the cards lie beneath the ivy and the rope indicates that the cards, buried in the earth, signal the inevitability of both the siblings’ endogamous union and the subsequent loss of the homestead. The 59

Fast Lanes, 185. Ibid., 54. 61 Ibid., 184-85. 60

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family’s move away from the land emanates from the land itself, in the process Harvey defines as the “buying and selling of space as a commodity”.62 Through the idea of tarot cards Phillips presents the notion of economic determinism, that the sale of the profitable land to northern businesses was a direct and an inevitable result of the region’s move into increased capitalization. In “Bess”, then, cards highlight two opposing methods of dealing with life in an increasingly capitalistic culture. One can accept that the deterministic nature of capital precipitates a break from regional ties, what Harvey states as an increasing ability to “throw away values, lifestyles, stable relationships, and attachments to things, buildings, places, people, and received ways of doing and being”.63 On the other hand, one can rely on chance, using cards as a way of cheating time. The latter reaction appeals to what Harvey defines as “widespread resistances on the part of individuals who seek to put themselves outside … [the] rigid disciplines of time schedules, of tightly organized property rights and other forms of spatial determination”. For Harvey, such resistance need not be political: Movements of all sorts – religious, mystical, social, communitarian, humanitarian, etc. – define themselves directly in terms of an antagonism to …. the materializations of money, space, and time under conditions of capitalist hegemony.64

The tension between chance and that which is predetermined pervades the story as Bess negotiates between her break from a regional past, following a predetermined move from away from place, and her inextricable ties to the land she leaves behind. Bess passes on her complex attachment to the family farm to Mitch, who himself returns to the old homestead in Machine Dreams. Upon his return to the place of his birth Mitch realizes the full weight of his inheritance as he thinks that “I was a secret myself”.65 That secretive past casts a shadow throughout Machine Dreams as Mitch tries to access the occluded knowledge that he inherits through his blood-line. 62

Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 254. Ibid., 286. 64 Ibid., 238. 65 Machine Dreams, 45. 63

CHAPTER TWO Nameless Implications: The Haunting Vestiges of the Paternal Past in Machine Dreams No one spoke this language; it was language you knew in your blood and learned to hear.1

Katherine Anne Porter, in her “portrait” of the “old South” writes: “I am the grandchild of a lost War, and I have blood-knowledge of what life can be in a defeated country on the bare bones of privation.” Porter’s understanding of the Reconstruction South stems not from her own experience but from the fact that “older people in my family used to tell such amusing little stories about” those times.2 Bloodknowledge, then, allows an individual to gain a sense of a period or event that he or she may not have actually experienced. Such knowledge shapes much of Porter’s fiction, particularly her stories of Miranda Rhea. Indeed, in the first part of the The Old Order Porter says that the young Miranda and her sister, Maria, “had lived not only their own years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of the grown-ups around them”.3 Such generational inheritance is central to Phillips’ writing. Indeed, Phillips, in a discussion of Porter’s work, argues that the Miranda stories evoke “memory’s function within consciousness itself”.4 Phillips reveals her own interest in both the nature of memory and of blood-knowledge in the opening section of Machine Dreams, with Jean Hampson’s opening lines: “It’s strange what you don’t forget.”5 Whilst the novel centres primarily around acts of recollection, those acts are often hindered by secrecy, forms of secrecy that deny full articulation. Even Jean, the harbourer of family

1

Machine Dreams, 115. Katherine Anne Porter, “Portrait: The Old South” (1940), in The Collected Essays and the Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: A Seymour Lawrence Book, 1970), 160. 3 Katherine Anne Porter, The Old Order: Stories of the South from The Leaning Tower, Pale Horse, Pale Rider and Flowering Judas (San Diego and London: A Harvest Book, 1972), 98. 4 Jayne Anne Phillips, “Outlaw Heart”, 44. 5 Machine Dreams, 3. 2

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memories, admits that certain periods in her past remain “a blur”.6 As Susanne Carter argues, Phillips, rather than offering “clear distinctions”, offers “blurred impressions”.7 The fractured nature of the blood-knowledge that passes from generation to generation in Machine Dreams reflects Phillips’ developing interests as she moves away from the short, poetic form of Black Tickets. Indeed, Phillips regards the novel form as subversive because people “read a paragraph, and they think they are involved in normal life”.8 Phillips creates that everyday life by placing emphasis on the words that shape and define the Hampsons’ existence. For Bakhtin, the novel form allows for the “fullest and deepest expression” of the “dialogical orientation of a word”. In the novel individual words gain meaning through a polyphony of voices, a polyphony that can create a “subversive” effect. Bakhtin continues, “the prose writer confronts a multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been laid down in the object by social consciousness”.9 In reading Phillips’ work the emphasis on the social nature of words cannot be overlooked, particularly in Machine Dreams where so many exchanges carry residues of class-bound tensions. Certainly, the novel allows Phillips to trace the paths of words as they pass through families – she argues that “writing in paragraphs makes things possible in a larger way …. a novel can have a subliminal effect that a poem almost cannot”.10 Whether one agrees with the statement that poems lack a “subliminal effect” is not a matter for discussion here. Rather, the importance lies in what Phillips regards as the power beneath the words in her novel writing. The subversive quality of Machine Dreams rests in the deceptive nature of the novel’s chronological structure. The novel’s progression, through the various voices of the Hampson family, from the Depression through to the Vietnam War, implies linearity, a linearity absent from Phillips’ earlier, poetical 6

Ibid., 12. Susanne Carter, “Variations on Vietnam: Women’s Innovative Interpretations of the Vietnam War Experience”, Extrapolation, XXXII/2 (1991), 173. 8 Dorothy Combs Hill, “A 1986 Conversation with Jayne Anne Phillips”, South Carolina Review, XXIV/1 (1991), 67. 9 M.M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holoquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holoquist (9th edn, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 275-78. 10 Hill, “A 1986 Conversation with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 67. 7

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pieces that focus on individual voices that are often “not bound by an event or a past”.11 Phillips, though, subverts the daily life of the Hampsons by filling the text with both family secrets and with the ghostly voices of dead ancestors. Both are sustained by language, a language passed down through the blood. As the past both informs and eludes Phillips’ characters the semantic density of the narrative subverts the chronological framework, so that “returnings, knottings, recrossings, crinklings to and fro, suspensions, [and] interruptions” work to “trouble its straightforward linearity”.12 Danner Hampson’s return to West Virginia and her compilation of an oral history are attempts at piecing together her fractured inheritance. Danner, who, by the end of the novel lives in California, returns home to Bellington, Phillips’ fictional West Virginian town, “two or three times a year” for both traditional holidays as well as to remember Billy, her younger brother shot down over Vietnam. Whilst Billy’s MIA status may be said to generate the oral history that forms the narrative, the novel is not simply composed of memories of his life. Rather, multiple voices, and therefore multiple histories form the basis of the novel. Phillips divides the novel’s sections between the first and the third person, imbuing each section with additional voices best understood in terms of free-indirect discourse. Free-indirect discourse, with its “intermingling of voices”,13 allows Phillips to address the complex nature of memories as they pass from one family member to the next.14 Whilst Freud terms such movement as “thought transference”, Sandor Ferenczi defines blood-knowledge as the “dialogue of the unconscious”.15 Psychoanalysis may posit such transference within the unconscious, but as Thurschwell usefully notes: “Freud pictures thought transference as a mechanism of transmission that can negotiate that fraught arena with which

11

Lyons and Oliver, “The Mystery of Language …”, 121. Hillis J. Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 17. 13 McKenzie, “Free Indirect Speech in a Fettered Insecure Society”, 154. 14 For a detailed discussion of Phillips’ use of free-indirect discourse, see Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 249-79. 15 Pamela Thurshwell, “Ferenczi’s Dangerous Proximities: Telepathy, Psychosis, and the Real Event”, Differences, XI/1 (1999), 150-78. 12

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psychoanalysis is so centrally concerned, in which the material, the psychic, and the historical are interwoven.”16 Phillips certainly grounds her interest in memory within the “material”, within history. Just as Katherine Anne Porter’s bloodknowledge gave her insight into the post-Civil War South, so the family memories in Phillips’ novel reflect the changes taking place in West Virginia during the course of the twentieth century. Indeed, Danner’s return to West Virginia, and her need for family stories of the past, reflect not simply her concern for her people but also her attachment to her region. Phillips interweaves family and place in the text so that when Danner returns to Bellington, she goes back to the parents that she describes as “my country, my divided country”.17 In light of the dense nature of Danner’s fractured family narratives I have organized my discussion of the novel into three separate, yet interconnected chapters. In this chapter I examine the haunting nature of Mitch Hampson’s past. To understand Mitch, is, in many ways, to understand other Phillipsian fathers, particularly Shelter’s Wes Swenson and MotherKind’s Waylon Tateman. Whilst the pasts of her fathers may differ, each shares similar blue-collar attachments. In Chapter 3 I shall explore the dynamics at play with the Hampson household, reading those dynamics through a specific regional lens. In the final chapter on Machine Dreams I consider Danner’s, and indeed Phillips’ complex relation to place. II In “The World, 1972” Danner draws together the disparate fragments of her family’s history, including the divorce of her parents, Mitch and Jean, and the loss of Billy in Vietnam. In the opening line of that section, Danner recalls, “My father owned a concrete plant”.18 Her opening words, with emphasis on “father” and “concrete”, problematize much of the criticism surrounding Phillips’ novel. Machine Dreams has generated the greatest critical response to Phillips’ work to date. Elizabeth Bronfen, in her analysis of the text, claims that “a pattern emerges in Machine Dreams that assigns to 16

Ibid., 159. Machine Dreams, 324. 18 Ibid., 297. 17

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women, to the matriarchal line, the qualities of a more or less stable rootedness in one’s native community, to the men lacking this inherent sense of bonds, a more mobile restlessness, a greater proclivity towards ‘rugged individualism’”.19 Bronfen’s claim is symptomatic of reactions to the novel, reactions that polarize the linearity of female inheritance and community against the fragmented or restless lives of the male characters. Reading the novel along such demarcated lines reduces the complex nature of inheritance in the text. Inheritance, and therefore memory, is multifaceted in Phillips’ work, drawing, as it does, on both male and female acts of remembrance. The distinction between male and female modes of remembering may be defined by regionally specific differences between the genders. In Machine Dreams, Jean is attached to her family past by declaredly verbal means. The titles of her narrative sections stress “Reminiscence” and “Anniversary” and thereby imply a willingness to look to the past. Female inheritance depends upon an articulated version of the past; after her mother’s death, Jean felt that her mother’s “sayings seemed present in the walls of the house – between the walls, as unseen as the supports and beams”.20 On the other hand, Phillips argues that her “male characters experience just as deeply as do female characters, and they understand what they experience just as deeply. They don’t necessarily process it verbally.” Phillips recalls that the Appalachian men that she “grew up around” did not “chatter, or talk to discover or investigate what they thought”. Phillips’ male characters often process their feelings silently, passing on to each generation an unarticulated sense of the past. Phillips, addressing the under-articulated, states: we repress our knowledge until we are able to look at it directly, act on it, articulate it. Art is a way of reaching into knowledge, beyond that repression, past any resistance. The tension in my work comes 19 Elisabeth Bronfen, “Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment: The Concept of ‘Home’ in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Novel Machine Dreams”, AAA – Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, XIII/1 (1988), 22. 20 Jean refers to her family home, once owned by her father and then shared by mother and daughter after his death. I highlight the proprietorship of the house in light of the various homes in the novel, each of which represents specific historical and class shifts.

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For Phillips, the excluded or repressed remains a presence that can be detected through the “pressure” it places “on language”. Avery Gordon argues that “To write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories”. Gordon, in her sociological study of haunting, suggests that the excluded in literature as well as in everyday life, leaves a residual presence. She suggests that reading “ghost stories” creates a “paradox”, that we respond to: [by] tracking through time and across all those forces that which makes its mark by being there and not there at the same time …. From force to hand … to ghostly presence in the register of history and back again, this is a particular kind of social alchemy that eludes us as often as it makes us look for it.22

The ghost story, according to Gordon, is grounded in “historical materialism”.23 The ghost is a “social figure”, a figure whose emergence from “modernity’s violence and wounds” serves as a “reminder of the complex social relations in which we live”.24 Central to Gordon’s argument, and to any examination of Phillips’ work, is the notion that historical and social enquiry may render the gaps created by the excluded, readable. Gordon proposes that: Paying attention to the disjuncture between identifying a social structure (or declaring its determinate existence) and its articulation in everyday life and thought, I have hoped that working at understanding these gaps, the kinds of visions they produce, and the afflictions they harbor would enable us not to eradicate the gap – it is inevitable – but to fill in the content differently.25

In her account of social structures and their “articulation in everyday life”, Gordon draws from Raymond Williams’ work, “Structures of 21

Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 71-72. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6. 23 Ibid., 198. 24 Ibid., 25. 25 Ibid., 19. 22

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Feeling”. Williams challenges the notion of “fixed explicit forms”, forms that separate “experience from belief; feeling from thought; the immediate from the general [and] the personal from the social”. In contradistinction, Williams argues that within the everyday there exist “structures of feeling” that reflect and often act as precursors to larger social change. These “structures of feeling” appear anterior to actual social transitions in as much as they “do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action”. In other words, historical and economic mutations ghost everyday interactions, imbuing the personal with traces of the social. For Williams, the presence or trace of any new structure of feeling is best related to the rise of a class … [or] at other times to contradiction, fracture, or mutation within a class … when a formation appears to break away from its class norms, though it retains its substantial affiliation, and the tension is at once lived and articulated in radically new semantic figures.26

Williams’ tracing of presence, or the structure of feelings to class shifts may, in conjunction with Gordon’s definition of the ghostly, be applied to the class tensions within Machine Dreams. Indeed, a close examination of the silent gaps and shadows that haunt Phillips’ writing provides an alternative framework for reading her fiction. Phillips states that “I believe that everyone is haunted … I work inside silence; every writer does”.27 Exclusions, shadows and shadings pervade Machine Dreams: from the “shadow” cast by Jean’s father,28 to the cancer that invades her mother’s body (a disease that “seemed to come and go like a shade”);29 from the “interior shade” of the “Elks’ barroom”, a distinctly male space with a “locked door”,30 to Billy and Danner who form “one shadow”, existing “between their parents”, and to the workmen whose “tall shadows with no faces” haunt the corners of Danner’s bedroom.31 Historical and regional 26

Williams, Marxism and Literature, 128-35. Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 72. 28 Machine Dreams, 8. 29 Ibid., 16. 30 Ibid., 75-76. 31 Ibid., 128. 27

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contextualization, as well as psychological accounts of haunting provide a useful basis from which to explore the shaded gaps in Machine Dreams. Indeed, the following section establishes a theoretical framework that provides insight into Machine Dreams as well as to Phillips’ writing as a whole. III Phillips’ distinction between that which is articulated and that which remains repressed, or unspoken may usefully be explored in light of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic account of mourning.32 Abraham and Torok employ the terms “introjection” and “incorporation” in their analysis of the mourning process. Introjection, at its most rudimentary level, refers to the successful articulation of a traumatic event. In contradistinction, incorporation relates to the suppression of words surrounding a traumatic experience. I will offer a brief account of introjection and incorporation in order to examine what Abraham and Torok refer to as cryptonymy. An understanding of cryptonymy may, in turn, explicate what Phillips refers to as “pressure on language”. Introjection first takes place in infancy when the child’s mouth, left empty by the absence of the mother’s breast, must find words to fill the void. The mother’s continued presence remains necessary, however, in order for the child to inherit language. Abraham and Torok claim that “the mother’s constancy is the guarantor of the meaning of words”. Original word acquisition (acquired from the mother) propagates through the continual process of turning words into other words, so that ultimately the “wants of the original vacancy are remedied by being turned into verbal relationships”. Introjection allows individuals to channel “a desire, a pain, a situation … through language into a communion of empty mouths”. Mourning through introjection allows the loss both to be accepted (words make it speakable), and to be shared. Incorporation, in contradistinction, casts the potentially speakable as the “unnameable”: “The crucial move away from introjection (clearly rendered impossible) to incorporation is made when words 32 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernal (2nd edn, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), I, 171.

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fail to fill the subject’s void and hence an imaginary thing is inserted into the mouth in their place.” Filling the mouth with an imaginary thing satisfies the void left in the mouth. Put another way, incorporation fills the gap (created by the loss of a love-object) not with words that express the loss (introjection) but with a fantasy that allows the individual continually to defer the loss. Abraham and Torok argue that “in order not to have to ‘swallow’ a loss, we fantasize swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been lost, as if it were some kind of thing”. The subject not only swallows the loss itself but also “The words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, [and] the tears that cannot be shed”; in effect, “everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss”. Once swallowed, the “inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject”. The tomb, or crypt may exist as a “secret” inside the subject, but “Sometimes in the dead of the night … the ghost of the crypt comes back to haunt the cemetery guard, giving him strange and incomprehensible signals, making him perform bizarre acts, or subjecting him to unexpected sensations”. Incorporation and the resultant crypt fail in fully internalizing the loss; through encryption, the secreted words and scenes return to haunt. Incorporation ultimately denies loss but simultaneously “reveals a gap within the psyche – it points to something that is missing just where introjection should have occurred”.33 Whilst refusing to acknowledge what has been lost, incorporation necessarily indicates that the something or someone is gone: by its act of denial, incorporation inadvertently and tautly emphasizes that it covers a gap. Derrida, in the Forward to Abraham and Torok’s study of the Wolf Man, recognizes an inherent contradiction within incorporation. He argues that “Although it is kept secret, the fantasy of incorporation can and even must ‘signify,’ in its own way, the introjection it is incapable of: its impossibility, its simulacrum, its displacement”.34 As Derrida suggests, secreted words “must signify” since the subject cannot entirely repress the existence of the incorporated event. Abraham and Torok define the process of reading the encoded and buried materials through a series of signifiers as cryptonymy. Nicholas Rand, in his introduction to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, 33 34

Ibid., 126-30. Jacques Derrida, Foreword, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, xviii.

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proposes that cryptonymy “permits us to pinpoint areas of silence in works of literature as well as in the oeuvre of a human life, and grant them the potential of expression, that is, the possibility of untying their tongue”.35 Cryptonymy allows both the psychologist and the literary critic to give words to the unspoken, offering a “theory of readability [that] begins by addressing the problem of establishing a signifying process”.36 In their study of the Wolf Man, Abraham and Torok traced a signifying process within the patient’s dream of wolves. Their discovery of the connection between the six wolves in the Wolf Man’s dream and the original trauma surrounding his sister is summed up in Derrida’s Foreword: Schematically: the six in the six wolves [sechs] … is translated into Russian (chiest: perch, mast, and perhaps sex, close to chiestero and chiesterka, “the six”, “the lot of six people”, close to siestra, sister, and its diminutive, siesterka, sissy, towards which the influence of the German Schwester had oriented the decipherment). Thus, within the mother tongue, through an essentially verbal relay this time, the sister is associated with the phobic image of the wolf. But the relay is nevertheless not semantic; it comes from a lexical contiguity or a formal consonance.37

The merits of Abraham and Torok’s analysis is not a matter for discussion here. What is pertinent is Derrida’s summation of how the sound of a present verbal usage may recall and retain prior usages and referents – what is recalled, or partially echoed is, of course, also displaced, invoking traceable shifts that warrant close scrutiny. The idea that in the unconscious, one signifier may only and eventually lead to a signified by way of “relay” through a series of signifiers (or parts of signifiers), is relevant to any discussion of Phillips’ writing. Abraham and Torok’s cryptonymic analysis of “a signifying process” places emphasis on “the barrier that serves to separate the chain of signifiers from a potential signified”.38 Esther Rashkin argues that Abraham and Torok consider barred or blocked meanings to be, of 35

Nicholas Rand, Introduction, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, lxvi. Ibid., lii. 37 Derrida, Foreword, xl. 38 Rand, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, lx (my emphasis). 36

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themselves, “an object of investigation”.39 Cryptonymy allows the unspoken in a text to be “converted into readable entities”.40 Phillips claims that her writing is infused with “nameless implications” and secrets that appear to defy meaning.41 Given the silent context of Phillips’ work, a cryptonymic analysis may serve to place the silences within a regional and historical context. IV Secrecy is no where more apparent in the novel than in Mitch’s first narrative section, “The Secret Country”, whose title indicates a blockage; a part of his past that remains inaccessible, secret. Mitch is undoubtedly haunted throughout Machine Dreams. As a child he states: I’d fall asleep and hear a voice I’d never heard. I was called Mitch, or nicknames like Cowboy. But this voice said, ‘Mitchell … Mitchell … Mitchell …’ with no question, till the sound didn’t seem like a name or a word.

The haunting voice takes on phonetic qualities as words are contorted into sounds, highlighting the presence of the unspoken or underspoken. The unspoken haunts Mitch throughout his life. Recollecting his childhood and teenage years, Mitch states that “I was a secret myself”.42 Returning to the dilapidated family farm, sold when he was a child to “Eastern businessmen”,43 Mitch looks: [at the] heaps of dirt, cut-away ledges where they’d [the Eastern business men] stripped. Looking at it made me think I’d been asleep a long time and had wakened up in the wrong place, a hundred miles from where I lay down. Like I’d lost my memory and might be anyone.44

39

Rashkin, “Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism …”, 45. Rand, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, lxvi. 41 Phillips, “Outlaw Heart”, 47. 42 Machine Dreams, 45. 43 Ibid., 26. 44 Ibid., 45. 40

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Mitch’s dream recalls the legendary sleep of Rip Van Winkle who shares a regional connection with Phillips’ character.45 Phillips’ allusion to Rip Van Winkle is most pronounced in her third novel MotherKind in which a character named Rip lives in a mountainous region of West Virginia. Phillips argues that the constant references to legends and fairy stories in her writing relate to the notion of identity. She claims: All of the world view/information/psycho symbology represented in fairy tales, myths, fables, children’s stories, religious stories does engage with the issue of evil, and also with identity. Identity itself – the fascinating issue of meaning – is the question. First symbols presented to children are a way into character which not only defines character … but represents the interface between individual and culture, historical era, family of origin.46

Significantly, Mitch’s feeling that he had “wakened up in the wrong place, a hundred miles from where [he] lay down” echoes Rip Van Winkle’s evasive sleep and subsequent lost identity.47 In re-visiting the farm, Mitch effectively returns to his “secret country”. His birthplace serves to remind him of the concealment surrounding his parentage. He states that he “never really knew” his father, Warwick, and of his mother he recounts: [she] lived at the farm during her confinement and left right after I was born. The birth certificate gives her name as Icie Younger, but no one ever told me anything about her. Her people were from down around Grafton and she went back to them. When I was selling road equipment for the State I used to travel through there. Asked after the family several times but no one had ever heard of them.48

45

In “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), Washington Irving writes that the Kaatskill mountains which form the geographical location of his story, “are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family” (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 29. 46 Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 76. 47 In Washington Irving’s account, Rip’s extended sleep in the Kaatskill mountains results in his evading the War of Independence, and allowing him to return to his village once the war is over. 48 Machine Dreams, 25-26.

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The Hampson family generates secrecy as they withhold information from Mitch: “no one ever told me anything.” Mitch grows up to embody that secrecy, and when Danner asks him “why [he] didn’t try harder to find” his mother, Mitch claims, “Why should I? She left me.”49 Mitch, by resisting his daughter’s demands that he explore his origins, transfers the inarticulate nature of a repressed element of the Hampson past onto her. Abraham and Torok address the transmission of secrets from parent to child in their study of the “transgenerational phantom”. The phantom occurs as unspeakable family secrets are passed down through the generations, each new generation keeping alive the hidden facts of a family’s history. The phantom, a product of that which remained unspoken by the parent, passes on to the child through the unconscious, where the unconscious may be understood as silent marks laid down by daily family exchanges. In relation to Phillips’ writing, the transference of family secrets is more concretely achieved within social practices such as half remarks, omissions and blocked communications. Rand argues that Abraham and Torok’s psychological accounts of mourning and transference may be read both historically and socially. He suggests that: The idea of the phantom has implications beyond the study of individual psychology or even familial psychology. Aspects of this concept have the potential to illuminate the genesis of social institutions and may provide a new perspective for inquiring into the psychological roots of cultural patterns and political ideology .… Abraham and Torok’s work enables us to understand how the falsification, ignorance, or disregard of the past – whether institutionalised by a totalitarian state … or practiced by parents and grandparents – is the breeding ground of the phantomatic return of shameful secrets on the level of individuals, families, the community, and possible even entire nations.50

Rand’s attempt to socialize the concept of the transgenerational phantom echoes Avery Gordon’s claim that the ghost story provides a “haunting reminder of the complex social relations in which we 49 50

Ibid., 45. Nicholas Rand, Editor’s Note, The Shell and the Kernal, 169.

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live”.51 In the light of Machine Dreams, and more specifically of Mitch’s past, the silences of one generation impact upon the social practices of the next. The secrets surrounding Mitch’s birth impact upon his later relations with his own family. Jean recalls that Mitch would “never belong to anyone the way some men belonged to women. Jean guessed she’d liked that in the beginning: his aloneness meant she could pay attention to other things.”52 His aloneness stems from his parentage, a sense of abandonment that Danner highlights when she asks, “whose baby was he, orphaned, raised by Bess?”.53 Indeed, Abraham and Torok state that “what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others”. The gaps act as a barrier against the vocalization of words that threaten to expose the gap; words that “refer to the unspeakable”. Consequently the phantom “is sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc from within the unconscious”. Of particular importance here is the contradictory nature of the secreted words. While on one level the words remain hidden, protecting the unspeakable from exposure, on the other hand, the words seek discovery. The secreted words remain untranslatable but nevertheless leave an indelible mark upon conscious actions or other words. The indelible mark appears in various forms, and in terms of speech, exists within metaphors or cryptograms. Abraham and Torok define these conscious yet veiled words as “staged words”. Staging words “constitutes an attempt at exorcism, an attempt, that is, to relieve the unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm”.54 Two modes of transference exist within Abraham and Torok’s notion of the transgenerational phantom. In many instances the phantom remains a presence felt but unacknowledged in its passage through the generations. Intermittently however, the unspeakable surfaces in the social realm in a masked form (under the guise of metaphor for example), and can be passed from one person to another, the word’s layered meaning remaining intact.

51

Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 25. Machine Dreams, 113. 53 Ibid., 185. 54 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernal, 171-76. 52

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Mitch’s unspeakable past is revealed in concealed form throughout both his narrative and the short story “Bess”. The story is narrated in the first person by Bess Hampson, who Mitch claims in Machine Dreams “was like a mother to me”.55 As previously established, Phillips invites the reader of “Bess” to detail the circumstances surrounding Bess’ pregnancy – to recover details that point to the possibility of her incestuous coupling with her brother Warwick.56 The omission of such details in Machine Dreams creates a tension in the novel, a tension only partially explicated through Mitch’s dreams and memories of the past. Together, the novel and the story reveal and simultaneously conceal opposing facts surrounding Mitch’s parentage, producing a tension that may be said to generate the name Icie. In his study of Phillips’ work, Richard Godden argues for a phonetic reading of “Icie”, claiming that “I/ci/e”, broken down, echoes the pronoun sequence “I/she/me”.57 Godden highlights Mitch’s visit to the Hampson family cemetery in his emphasis on the phonetics at play within the fabricated name. Mitch tells Danner: I walked up by the stones, between the rows of names. Warwick. Eban. Ava. Icie. What kind of name is that for a woman. You always asked why I didn’t try harder to find her. Why should I? She left me. The cemetery was still and clean, though the grass was ragged. You know I thought of the leper; hadn’t thought of him in years.58

Godden recognizes that “Had there been no break between ‘Ava’ and ‘Icie’, the name of the missing and supposed mother (Icie) would have materialized as the last marker in a line of Hampson graves”.59 I would like here to draw on Godden’s argument, offering an alternative reading of the phonetic importance of the invented name. The line break between Ava and Icie signals both the gap in Mitch’s past and an empty space yet to be filled. In the natural line of family 55

Machine Dreams, 28. See Chapter 1, 32-36. 57 Richard Godden, “No End to the Work? Jayne Anne Phillips and the Exquisite Corpse of Southern Labor”, Journal of American Studies, XXXVI/2 (2002), 262. 58 Machine Dreams, 45. 59 Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 262. 56

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succession Bess’ name would rightfully appear after that of Ava. Indeed, Mitch declares that Bess is “the only one left living after Ava died”.60 The line break effectively points to Bess. In my phonetic recasting of the missing mother’s name, “Icie” becomes “I/see”. Mitch does not need a question mark after “What kind of a name is that for a woman”, because Icie exactly hides yet reveals what Mitch sees but does not fully comprehend. Icie, a name chosen to encrypt or conceal the real mother, serves only, in Malcolm Bull’s terms, to “flirt” with Mitch. Central to Bull’s notion of hiddenness: is the idea that someone’s quest was not merely unsuccessful but frustrated in the sense that its defeat is inextricably linked to the proximity of achievement. If something is hidden from you, it is not because the truth has eluded you and is unattainable, but because truth is flirting with you, simultaneously offering and withholding, or keeping herself from you while giving herself to others in your presence.61

Icie taunts Mitch, withholding yet partially exposing the identity of his real mother. As well as the phonetic significance of Icie, the climatic resonance of the name may be read in light of Phillips’ repeated use of the word snow. As argued in the introduction, snow acts as a metaphor for concealment throughout Phillips’ writing so that the glacial properties of Icie point to a hidden element beneath the frosty glazing. Such coded meanings permeate Phillips’ fiction. Indeed, at the family cemetery, Mitch recalls the leper of whom he “hadn’t thought” in years. When Mitch first left the farm he stayed with his Aunt Ava and her husband Eban, in Raynell, that “was a big junction for Southern Rail”. During his time in Raynell, the “B&O Railroad discovered they had employed a leper and, for want of any other plan, deposited the man on forest land by the tracks near Raynell”.62 Mitch considers the leper “a secret”, drawing a link between the contagious man who had “no country, no family, no job” and his own situation, “I was a secret myself”.63 Mitch’s childhood encounter with the leper is central to “The Secret Country”; Phillips 60

Machine Dreams, 26. Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 19-20. 62 Machine Dreams, 30-31. 63 Ibid., 45. 61

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argues that “the leper reminds [Mitch] of things he can’t deny. There is so much about him that he doesn’t know. His entire past is a mystery. It is a secret they are keeping from him in a way.”64 In effect, the leper functions to remind Mitch of his father and of the secrecy surrounding his birth. Phillips places Icie and the leper in structural relation within Mitch’s family cemetery. The leper’s name itself may be said to contain encryptions. Under pressure from generative sonorities of “Icie”, the name Li Sung may be heard as Li[e] S[o]n – a whisper that highlights the lie that has shaped Mitch’s life. The leper’s disease and subsequent quarantine echo Warwick’s isolation in “Bess”. With Li Sung deposited on the land near Raynell, the B&O “employees burned the boxcar and left on the train”. Repetition of the incineration process occurs after his death when men from Raynell “dug a grave, filled a casket with quicklime, and raked the leper into it …. The shack was doused with kerosene and burned, and the ashes covered with lime.”65 Bess, in the story bearing her name, recalls that Warwick was placed under a form of quarantine after a severe reaction to poison-ivy. When family members moved Warwick into the “sun porch” they were “all wearing gloves and their forearms [were] wrapped in gauze”. Bess later removes the protective wear and burns “it in the woodstove”.66 The analogy between the leper and Warwick deepens by way of the image of layering. Ava gives the leper Eban’s old clothes “but Li Sung never wore them”. The leper, instead, saved the clothes and “sew[ed] them layered onto his blankets during the cold”. Significantly, Phillips aligns the freezing conditions with layering, a combination that necessarily brings into focus the frosty qualities of the name Icie. Both the recurrent references to snow and whiteness contain the unarticulated nature of Mitch’s past. Whiteness echoes Mitch’s explanation of why Bess and Warwick were delayed on their way back to the farm, prior to Mitch’s conception. Mitch claims that they had “booked a passage back on the train, but it was near Christmas and a winter of bad blizzards; they were weeks getting home”. Bess and Warwick effectively employ the 64

Lyons and Oliver, “The Mystery of Language …”, 127. Machine Dreams, 32-35. 66 Fast Lanes, 181. 65

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snow that blocks their passage home as a device for withholding Mitch’s parentage: the name of the fictional mother, “Icie” takes the reader to the blizzards that delayed the brother and sister’s journey back to the farm. Mitch recalls that after their delayed journey, and news of Bess’ pregnancy: “Warwick was very protective of her. All this was before I was born and no one ever talked about it. Why would they? What’s the difference, it don’t matter.”67 Mitch’s refusal to ask questions connects with the image of snow and of “bad blizzards” that reduce visibility. Information about his past lies beneath the whiteness that blinds Mitch. In “Amazing Grace: Danner, 1965”, Danner asks Mitch, “What’s the last dream you remember?”. He replies: “I was driving in a snowstorm along a road … and snow was flying at the windshield so fast you couldn’t see where you was going.”68 Mitch’s inability to see what lies in front of him relates to his struggle, throughout Machine Dreams, with the elements of his life that remain under-articulated, somewhere between the concealed nature of the transgenerational phantom and the full revelation of its existence. Mitch’s childhood encounter with the leper secures the relationship between snow, layering and under-articulation. Mitch recalls that it was during the winter that Li Sung sewed “Eban’s shirts and trousers … onto his blankets”. The clothes “spread out like one body on top of another and another” echo the layers of snow that lay “deep for five months”. Mitch recounts that the leper “got through the cold weather but wouldn’t talk anymore in the spring”.69 The snow cover reduces Li Sung to silence, a silence that Mitch attributes to his connection with the leper: “He could have stopped talking because I didn’t seem real either, only another sound he heard in the woods.”70 The snow renders the leper mute, a silence that Mitch mirrors by turning himself into an echo, “a sound … in the woods”. The leper’s silence takes the reader back to Phillips’ short story “Snow” and the central characters’ deafness, another form of silence aligned with niveous conditions. In Machine Dreams Danner goes some way to understanding the snow covered layers that cloud Mitch’s past. 67

Machine Dreams, 28. Ibid., 216. 69 Ibid., 33-36. 70 Ibid., 45. 68

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V Danner’s “Amazing Grace” section reveals the dense networks of Phillips’ prose in which snow acts as a metaphor for complex genealogical layering. Danner, after hearing about her father’s dream, goes to her summer job “as a banquet waitress at the local Methodist college”.71 Toward the end of serving the present group of visiting ministers, the head minister tells Danner that “we’re going to present a little performance …. It’s an entertainment, a sort of farewell.” As four of the ministers sing “Amazing Grace”, Danner compares the song’s words, “I once was lost. But now. I’m found”, to her father “sealed into his dream [of driving through snow] like a figure in a fluid-filled paperweight, the ones in which snow flew when the globe was shaken”. Danner’s image traps Mitch within a sealed container, endlessly surrounded by snow. Phillips’ punctuation of the sung line highlights the notion of obscured vision. The original version of the hymn reads “I once was lost, but now; I see”; unhindered by full stops the original moves through sight to being found. However, in Phillips’ narrative, sight occurs only after being found – “I was blind but now I see”; something or someone has to be uncovered before sight is restored.72 Phillips’ version appeals to the idea of hiddenness. As Bull suggests “Hiddenness arises in cases where we sense something but do not perceive it”.73 Phillips structurally juxtaposes the line “I was blind but now I see” with Danner’s realization that her father is “Lost”. Listening to a hymn whose title recalls Danner’s maternal heritage “Amazing Grace”, and that places emphasis on the line “I was blind but now I see” Danner, “had a sudden wintry vision of the house from above”.74 She imagines: “the yard and the fences and surrounding fields all white, deep, silent with snow. Her father had built that house. How could someone else ever live there?”75 Danner mourns the Hampson family’s move from Mitch’s house to Jean’s home in town as she listens to a song that echoes her maternal heritage, a 71

Ibid., 213. Ibid., 219-21. 73 Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 12. 74 Grace is the name of Danner’s maternal grandmother (my emphasis). 75 Machine Dreams, 221. 72

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heritage associated with the middle-class movement away from the blue-collar labour that Mitch represents. The image of Mitch’s snow covered home takes the reader to the Mitch Concrete plant, where Danner and her boyfriend Riley choose to go during “winter” when “the snowy plant had looked ghostly”. Danner: “thought of Mitch Concrete as a distant planet still revolving in the past. Hymns should sound in the background of the emptiness, very low, wisps of hymns.” For Danner, Mitch’s work ethic lives on, “still revolving in the past”,76 a continuance that counters the mournful words of “Amazing Grace” that were “a sort of farewell”.77 Yet Danner wants a hymn to play “in the background of the emptiness” at Mitch’s old plant; the only hymn in the section is “Amazing Grace”, indicating that Danner begins to understand her father’s complex past in the time she spends at the concrete plant. Rather than focusing on the hymn as a farewell, Danner’s belief that the hymn should play “in the background” of the plant focuses on the hymn’s discovery of what was previously lost. Through the snow that she imagines covering her family home, Danner becomes more aware of her father’s secretive past. Indeed, her image of Mitch stuck in a “fluid-filled paperweight”, places her father in a static position, floating amid endless snow. VI Danner’s snowy vision further emphasizes the dense nature of Phillips’ prose. Each image reflects another in a complex, multilayered process. In relation to Mitch, Phillips employs the leper to deepen the secretive covers that prevent Mitch from fully accessing his past. As established, when Eban and the local men dispose of Li Sung’s remains, he discovers “his long-worn clothes sewn on those blankets, the sleeves of the shirts and the trouser legs spread out like one body on top of another and another”.78 Godden notes that “By way of a systematic group of structural analogies Phillips at least intimates that where one body lies over another, a further body may

76

Ibid., 229-30. Ibid., 219. 78 Ibid., 33-36. 77

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be recovered from beneath the coupling”.79 Phillips’ language certainly points to a three-fold layering – “one body on top of another and another” – and I would argue that Mitch’s father lies beneath Eban and the leper. Mitch, through his identification with the “secret” leper, places himself in the contagious man’s space. Mitch’s own sense of secrecy derives from the hidden facts of his parentage indicating that in an overtly male layering process, Warwick, himself an agent of contamination, lies beneath the Mitch-Leper pairing. Mitch believes that he was left in the care of Bess and other relatives because his father “didn’t want” him, and he tells Danner that Warwick “never did a damn thing for me, never noticed me”.80 As I established in Chapter 1, Warwick denies Mitch’s existence because Mitch is bound up in a lie that Warwick does not wish to maintain. Warwick cannot reveal that Mitch is the product of his incestuous coupling with Bess, yet Mitch is the evidence of that coupling, a secret that rebukes the father and elicits Warwick’s contempt towards his son. However, through the layered bodies, the phonetics of Li Sung (Li[e] S[o]n), allow for a partial revelation of Mitch’s heritage. Such momentary revelations plague Mitch throughout the novel. In particular, Mitch’s wartime experiences and his later memories of that time spent in the Philippines and New Guinea, simultaneously contain yet displace his secret parentage. In “Machine Dreams: Mitch, 1946” Mitch remembers “A leave he’d taken alone soon after he and Warrenholtz had trapped that Nip pilot in the field west of the base camp”. Mitch does not expand on the incident with the Japanese soldier at this point in the narrative: “he wouldn’t think of that and remembered instead coming back from the cinema in Sydney where he’d seen Gone With The Wind for the second time during the war.”81 Patricia Yaeger argues that “Gone With The Wind creates multiple modes of forgetting”.82 Whilst Yaeger focuses on race in Margaret Mitchell’s novel, I would suggest that Gone With The Wind is central to Mitch’s connection with the past. After watching the nostalgic movie that 79

Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 266. Machine Dreams, 28. 81 Ibid., 70. 82 Yaeger, Dirt and Desire, 100. 80

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revolves around the O’Hara homestead, Mitch experiences a troubling re-connection with his home in Bellington. Returning to his hotel after watching the movie, Mitch enters his room. The room makes Mitch’s “skin prickle with an odd, interior fear”. As he looks around the room, he focuses on the wallpaper: “The paper was the same print as the pattern on his walls at home, at Bess’ house in Bellington. He sat, a stupid Yank son of a bitch.” Unable to stay in a room reminiscent of his bedroom in Bess’ house, Mitch leaves and “fifteen minutes later, he had a room in a hotel two blocks away”.83 Christopher Bollas defines an experience that is simultaneously strange yet familiar as an “aesthetic moment”. He traces human interaction with objects back to the role of the mother in infantile development, claiming that the mother acts as a “transformational object” for the young child.84 The mother is transformational in as much as she effects changes in the baby’s developing sense of self. Bollas proposes that just as “the mother is experienced as a process of transformation” so “this feature of early existence lives on in certain forms of object-seeking in adult life”.85 He goes on to suggest that if a maternal or parental situation should fail to develop the child’s sense of self through language (what Abraham and Torok would define as introjection), then “language is dissociated from feeling, and … the moods of the internal world are almost exclusively registered in the subject’s way of being”. For Bollas, an aesthetic moment for an individual who fails to process internal feelings through language “may occur when he faces a formidable and confusing external object that establishes an internal confusion in the subject, providing him with an uncanny feeling of the awful and the familiar, an experience where this aesthetic object seems to demand resolution into clarity but threatens the self with annihilation if the subject seeks to speak it”.86 Bollas’ terminology may usefully be applied to the sensation that Mitch experiences in the hotel room. The standardized room is familiar: “It was plain, clean and ordinary”, yet for Mitch, the room, and more specifically the 83

Machine Dreams, 71. Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London: Free Association Books, 1987), 39. 85 Ibid., 14. 86 Ibid., 37. 84

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wallpaper, create an “odd, interior fear”.87 Mitch’s sense of “internal confusion” results in his inability to speak or to address his fear of the familiar. The silences surrounding his birth and early childhood account for the strangeness of Mitch’s reconnection with home in another country. If, as Bollas suggests, object relations may residually refer back to the mother, then the wallpaper reminds Mitch of the secreted nature of his parentage. As discussed earlier, Mitch’s unwillingness to probe Icie’s history implies that he senses that Bess may be his mother. For Bollas, “The experience of the object precedes the knowing of the object”; that which is not yet known can still be felt.88 Bollas refers to that which can be sensed yet not fully understood as the “unthought known”, a term that he states “is not determined by abstract representations. Rather, the “unthought known” is “established through countless meetings between the infant subject and his object world, sometimes in tranquility, often in intense conflict”: Through these meetings the infant’s needs or wishes negotiate with the parental system and a compromise emerges. Ego structure records the basic laws which emerge from these meetings and its knowledge is part of the unthought known.89

Secrecy and lies shaped Mitch’s “unthought known” or way of being. His infantile meetings with Bess and Warwick fostered in him a sense of hiddenness to the extent that Mitch believes “I was a secret myself”.90 Hiddenness determines “the basic laws” that Mitch inherits from Bess and Warwick so that when the hotel room confronts Mitch with the “unthought known”, or the knowledge of his mother (Bess) that he possesses yet does not or cannot comprehend, he retreats. Mitch feels safer literally being in the dark. He claims that in the room he “was afraid of what he’d see when the lights came on. Not scared of the dark, scared of the light.”91 In the hotel room, Mitch considers himself a “Yank”, effectively assuming a foreign attitude towards his own nationality, and as a 87

Machine Dreams, 71. Bollas, The Shadow of the Object, 39. 89 Ibid., 52. 90 Machine Dreams, 45. 91 Ibid., 71. 88

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Yank, he takes on the role of the spoilers of the O’Hara homestead. In effect, Mitch temporarily denounces his birthplace and his home with Bess. His need to distance his thoughts from home derives from the sensation Mitch feels inside the hotel room – the “skin prickle with an odd, interior fear” returns him not only to Bess but also to the contagious and merged bodies of the leper and Warwick. Both men suffered from skin disorders, and significantly the leper attempted to hide his disease from his brother: “he wore gloves to cover the lesions on his hands, but somehow his brother discovered the secret”.92 The physical symptoms of leprosy result in Li Sung’s failure to hide his “secret”. Similarly, Mitch’s exterior “skin prickle” reveals an internalized “fear”. In an attempt to counter his fear Mitch thinks of himself as “a stupid Yank son of a bitch”, yet the latter half of his phrase undermines the displacing qualities of Yank. Mitch feels his skin prickle in the room as a result of his own contagion – his concealed past may lead Mitch to believe that he is literally a “son of a bitch”, a fact he senses in a room that reminds him of Bess. On a later visit to the cinema, in post-war Bellington, Mitch returns to a memory of the Japanese soldier. Brian Jarvis proposes that in Machine Dreams cinemas are “A warm, dark space of comfort and escape”, part of “a series of mechanical wombs in which characters are seen to seek refuge”.93 Jarvis highlights the relationship between key spaces and characters’ memories in the novel. However, his employment of the womb metaphor undermines the complex visions that return to Mitch in, or after attending, the cinema. The secrecy surrounding Mitch’s mother effectively problematizes any connection he may make in a womb-like space. In the familiar space of the local cinema (“How many times had he been in this theatre since he was a kid?”), Mitch compares the “wind” that “blew on the sound track” to the wind in “New Guinea”. Sitting in the cinema: [he] could hear [the wind] now, how it sounded by the sea: beach road wind. He knew that road and where it went; didn’t want to go there now, but he had to sit here in this dark and his mind kept falling into the wind: it’s all right, go ahead, think about it now. 92

Ibid., 31. Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 102. 93

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In the safety of the theatre, Mitch recalls how he and Warrenholtz, test driving a rebuilt engine, discovered a “Nip, saw the brush move where the Nip was crawling”. Mitch follows the Japanese soldier into the brush and “momentarily” he saw “the fields behind the farm at home, and he drew his own gun and fired – fired again and again into the grass until the chamber was empty and Warrenholtz stood beside him, staring not at the grass, which had long since stopped moving, but at Mitch”.94 Jarvis proposes that Mitch “begins to inhabit two locations simultaneously”: the cinema and his experience with the Japanese soldier.95 Yet Mitch also thinks of “the fields behind the farm at home”, creating a triad of memories “one on top of another and another”. Just as Warwick lay beneath the Eban, leper/Mitch mound, so the cinema takes Mitch through the war and back to a childhood encounter with his father. Earlier in the novel, in “The Secret Country”, Mitch remembers a summer at the farm, “I was real young … I had a baby coon”. He recalls his father standing over him with a rifle, “out at the edge of the fields, away from the house, where the grass was tall”. His father tells him to go into the grass and let the animal go – “you can’t keep a wild creature”. Mitch recounts that: “The grass was over my head, deep and high. He [Warwick] started shooting …. The grass was moving and he was shooting where the grass moved.”96 Mitch’s shooting of the Japanese soldier evokes and reverses his childhood memory. Juliet Mitchell, in her psychoanalytic study of hysteria and sibling relationships, argues that a traumatic wartime experience may refer back to an earlier sibling related moment of displacement. Mitchell challenges the psychoanalytic accounts of hysteria, from Freud to the present day, that focus primarily on the Oedipal complex. For Mitchell, Oedipal and pre-Oedipal relationships “stress vertical, generational relationships between children and parents at the expense of those which I think are at the heart of hysteria, the lateral relationships of siblings, peers and affines (those related by marriage)”.97 She proposes that when a “soldier, sailor or airman” kills during war, he or she “may also be suffering from … the 94

Machine Dreams, 83-85. Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies, 102. 96 Machine Dreams, 28-29. 97 Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 20. 95

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knowledge that he has broken a taboo and that in doing so he has released his wish to do so – his wish, his ‘wanting’ to murder, to kill his sibling substitutes”.98 I will return to Mitchell’s theories of sibling relations in Chapter Four: here I wish only to consider her argument in relation to the Oedipal connection from which she deviates. Her proposal that a primal sense of displacement lies beneath a wartime trauma provides a useful method for examining Mitch’s war memories in Machine Dreams. In killing the Japanese soldier Mitch succeeds, in a relocated space, in killing the father who displaced him as a child. Warwick’s refusal to recognize Mitch as his son, and his attempts to physically injure Mitch, result in his son’s lack of a secure family past. Mitch was literally displaced throughout his childhood as he was moved “around from one household to another”.99 Throughout the novel Mitch struggles against his primary sense of displacement through his construction of solid edifices. VII Mitch’s secret family history does not result in what Bronfen terms a “mobile restlessness”. The county bus shelters that Mitch designs encapsulate the concreteness that Danner attributes to her father. The words “MITCH CONCRETE” remain “emblazoned” on the shelters long after Mitch sells the company that he owned with his Uncle Clayton. Danner notes that the shelters “are still standing, well kept and newly lettered with the same two words”.100 The shelters represent the lasting nature of Mitch’s manual labour, in opposition to the succession of sales jobs that follow his move from the concrete company. Bronfen dismisses the significance of building in Mitch’s life, proposing that: because [Mitch’s] sense of family always was abstract, his interest is in building the outside support, the house, not in the emotional security and pragmatic needs of the family. This culminates in an empty obsession with building a bomb shelter.101

98

Ibid., 29. Machine Dreams, 89. 100 Ibid., 297-98. 101 Bronfen, “Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment …”, 24. 99

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However, I would argue that Mitch’s “obsession” with the bomb shelter, and his construction of the first family home, reflect his attempts to provide his family with the foundations that he himself lacked. Building necessarily requires foundations, and Mitch’s attachment to construction places him in a grounded position. Shelters, and the notion of shelter are central to Phillips’ work and she claims that “I look in my work at both maternal and paternal versions of shelter, at spoken and unspoken love”.102 For Mitch, creating a shelter is a physical and material declaration both of his desire and of his ability to protect his family: Mitch’s handmade structures are representative of his “unspoken love.” Brian Jarvis makes the linked point that Mitch’s need to build a shelter “is a surrogate for the manual labour denied him as a white collar professional”.103 Mitch expresses himself through actions, a mode of expression undermined by his reduced role in the family economy. His move into salesmanship precipitates a fall in his income potential, altering the family’s wage dynamics. Indeed, Mitch has to ask Jean for money to build a shelter: “I’ll need your help on this.”104 Mitch’s transition from a blue-collar to a white-collar occupation reflects a shift that occurred in the South after World War II. Numan V. Bartley argues that modernization led to a “vast increase in the labor force employed in retail and wholesale trade, insurance, finance … and similar predominantly white-collar occupations”.105 Mitch effectively moves from owning his own company and his own labour into a labour market that undermines individual control. C. Wright Mills, in his study of the American middle class, argues that “in new middle-class occupations men work for someone else on someone else’s property”.106 Mitch works from the basement within the family home, although at the end of his professional life, the home markedly belongs to Jean. Throughout the course of her marriage Jean works 102

Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 73. Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies, 95. 104 Machine Dreams, 163. 105 Numan V. Bartley, The New South 1945-1980: The Story of the South’s Modernization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press and The Littlefield Fund for Southern History of the University of Texas, 1995), 262. 106 C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 71. 103

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toward middle-class, town status through “extension classes and summer courses to get [a] master’s, almost a doctorate”. Jean, tired of “struggling on [Mitch’s] ground”, uses her wage earning capabilities as a means of coercion. To secure the family’s move from the house Mitch built to a house in town, Jean threatens her financially weakened husband: “You know, I told him I’d move out alone if he’d sign an agreement to pay for your college educations.”107 Fred Pfeil notes that during the Cold War era the movement of women, and more particularly mothers, into the workforce served to erode … the socially-constructed polarities around which gendered identities had formerly been constructed: e.g., male = authority/autonomy/freedom/power/public sphere, female = nurturance/identification/connectedness/love/private sphere.108

Billy and Danner witness the gradual erosion of their father’s authority throughout Machine Dreams. Preparing to go to Vietnam, Billy states, in reference to Mitch, that “That man went through some changes”.109 For Mitch, self-definition and expression rest in his attachment to manual labour. Just as Mitch’s behaviour may be said to stem from his childhood, so too can Jean’s proclivity for economic mobility be traced to her own parents’ failed marriage. Significantly, whilst Mitch’s unstable foundations result in his desire for that which is secure, Jean’s desires actually culminate in the destabilization of the family unit. On the surface, Jean, with her constant stories about the past, may, as Bronfen states, be associated with “a stable rootedness in [the] native community”.110 However, any close analysis of the novel reveals the tension that exists at the centre of the maternal inheritance. In the following chapter I consider in detail Jean’s striving for middle-class status and I reveal how her needs lead to the disintegration of the family unit.

107

Machine Dreams, 164. Pfeil, “Makin’ Flippy-Floppy …”, 268. 109 Machine Dreams, 302. 110 Bronfen, “Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment …”, 22. 108

CHAPTER THREE A House Divided: Class Divergence in Machine Dreams By the close of Machine Dreams Danner Hampson reflects back on her “World” from the distant viewpoint of her home in California. Unable to remain in a home that reminds her “of the last few years my family lived [together], and the year Billy went away” Danner leaves West Virginia.1 Whilst she claims “I’d never leave my country”, she has, nevertheless, left the region.2 Danner’s departure echoes Phillips’ own, a departure that Phillips partially attributes to her mother: “Very early on I felt this unconscious responsibility to escape for her sake or to escape for her, to do something different than what she had done.”3 Phillips imbues a number of her female characters, including Danner, with the same “unconscious responsibility”. Indeed, Jean Hampson, in addition to passing on her maternal inheritance to her daughter, is a good baby-boomer mother as she “groom[s] and encourage[s]” her children “to fly the coop outward and upward”. Significantly, though, such movement often comes “at the expense of old class traditions, networks and ties”.4 As a result Phillips’ homes are perpetually divided by the contrasting desires of social mobility and regional inheritance. Whilst Danner and Billy inherit from Mitch a history embedded in silence and labour, Jean’s legacy carries the weight of endlessly recited phrases and stories. Of particular interest is Phillips’ description of maternal inheritance: “Women pass down a real assignment, in a way. Particular to daughters. At least that was true in the South.”5 Her use of the word assignment evokes not simply the often burdensome nature of maternal memories, but also, and perhaps unwittingly, the teaching careers of the mothers who pervade her writing. The daughters in her fiction are weighed down with the dual expectations of sustaining the matriarchal line whilst also completing

1

Machine Dreams, 299. Ibid., 324. 3 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 46. 4 Pfeil, 265. 5 Lyons and Oliver, “The Mystery of Language …”, 125. 2

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the assignments that will provide them with a “head start” in terms of economic and social mobility.6 Danner’s very name is charged with her maternal heritage since Jean names Danner after her own mother’s surname, guaranteeing Danner’s place in the female line.7 Named after the “Danner women” who preceded her, Danner becomes the recipient of Jean’s constant reminiscences.8 Jean tells Danner that “I always assumed I’d have my own daughter. I picked out your name when I was twelve, and saved it.”9 When Jean gives birth to her daughter she simultaneously imagines re-birthing her mother in a cyclical process. On the morning Danner was born the weather was “already as hot as Hades”, a heat reminiscent of the crematorium “white heat” used to dispose of Grace’s body. Jean states that “when I knew I had a daughter, I was so thankful – like my own mother had come back to me”.10 Her emphasis on the maternal line displaces Mitch and dismisses the role of the father. On the night Jean realizes that she is pregnant, she and Mitch have sex, but in the second, and final textual example of their physical relationship Jean fantasizes about taking another into her body. Godden provides an insightful reading of the passage, arguing that during sexual intercourse with Mitch, Jean incorporates her dead mother.11 With Mitch “on top of her”, Jean looks up toward the ceiling where “she imagined on its surface the imprint of a dark, delicate body, a body that vanished by degrees”.12 The dark body may be read as that of Gracie, given the darkness attributed to the “Danner women”. In “Anniversary Song” Gladys tells Jean, “You look like all the Danner women, dark haired, dark-eyed – beauties, every one of 6

Machine Dreams, 136. The novel remains unclear as to whether “Danner” is Grace’s maiden or married name. Grace’s husband is only ever referred to as JT and her maiden name does not appear in the text. In “Anniversary Song”, Gladys highlights the ambiguous origin of “Danner”, telling Jean that “You’re a Hampson legally …. But you’ll be a Danner all your life …. You look like all the Danner women” (105). Gladys implies that Jean was a Danner and is now a Hampson, yet she singularly attributes the Danner name to women. 8 Machine Dreams, 105. 9 Ibid., 4. 10 Ibid., 18-22. 11 Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 250-51. 12 Machine Dreams, 116. 7

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them”.13 As Jean climaxes, “the body disappeared like a shadow or a wish and that was how [Jean] gave herself up, all her words gone like sparks burned up in a darkness”.14 Jean may attempt to claim Danner for the matriarchal line, but Danner’s complexity stems from her dual inheritance. In the divide that separates Mitch and Jean, Danner acts as a mediatory force. As Fiona Le Brun notes, Danner’s very name places her “at the axis of her matriarchal and patriarchal lineage”, in a position where “she must be aware that any impulse to isolate those interconnecting stories would lead to her own dissolution”.15 Living in California, Danner recognizes her place between her parents: “my parents are my divided country. By going to California, I’d made it to the far frontiers, but I’d never leave my country. I never will.”16 The description of Jean and Mitch as a divided country appeals to Phillips’ concern with the gradual erosion of the nuclear family. In “The House At Night: Danner, 1956” Phillips explores a child’s understanding of what she defines as complex “family politics”.17 The image of “the house at night” reappears in Phillips’ short story “Alma” that formed the prelude to her second novel Shelter. Both Danner and Alma fall asleep listening to their parents’ bedtime rituals, both lost in the silence that their parents represent: “Danner hears her mother, her father, lie silent in an emptiness so endless they could all hurtle through it like stones.”18 Similarly, Alma states that as a child, “I imagined my parents in their double bed, lying prone and silent, their heads in the exact centers of their pillows”.19 Failed marriages haunt Phillips’ texts and marital beds are divided not merely by sexual continence but by class division. In “The House At Night” Jean fears contamination from the working class – she drove past road crews with “the car windows rolled up in the stifling closeness just another minute, and locked all the doors”. Fearing the intake of working-class dirt necessarily 13

Ibid., 105. Ibid., 116. 15 Fiona LeBrun, “Women’s Time? A Historical Examination of the Reproduction of Mothering in Machine Dreams”, Overhere, XIII/1 (Summer 1993), 95. 16 Machine Dreams, 324. 17 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 184. 18 Machine Dreams, 132. 19 Ibid., 110. 14

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involves a contempt for Mitch who makes the same journey with “the windows rolled down” allowing the “yellow dust” to fill the car.20 Jean’s concern with maintaining middle-class propriety may be said to stem from memories of her father, whom she refers to as JT. She recalls that before she was born her father “had money”, and “had the biggest lumber business in the state”. Prior to losing his wealth during the Depression, Jean’s father “had a succession of ‘secretaries’ out at the mill, one of whom he brought to live in the family home for a “few weeks”.21 Jean comes to perceive blue-collar secretaries as a transgressive force that violated her childhood home, transgressive both economically and sexually. Although Jean was a small child during the period of her father’s infidelities, she defines secretarial work as demeaning: “Did anyone ever admire a secretary? Well, she wouldn’t be a secretary all her life, that was certain.” 22 When Jean incorporates her mother she simultaneously incorporates her parent’s failed marriage. Jean undoubtedly inherits her mother’s words and phrases, and these phrases often relate to Grace’s relationship with JT. In “Reminiscence To A Daughter: Jean, 1962”, she recounts an argument between herself and Mitch, claiming that after locking herself in the bathroom she shouted: I don’t have to stay anywhere. There are laws to protect me from men like you. The words came out of my mouth as though I’d had them in my mind all along. Later I wondered if I’d heard my mother say them to my father. 23

Warren and Wolff, in their study of southern mothers, state that “Sooner or later, every unsuspecting woman who has known her mother confronts a startling moment of truth: she hears her mother’s voice speaking through her”.24 Jean may hear Gracie’s words but those words reverberate with the breakdown of her parent’s marriage. 20

Ibid., 128-29. Ibid., 4-5. 22 Ibid., 106. 23 Ibid., 164. 24 Southern Mothers: Facts and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing, eds Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), xv. 21

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When Jean cares for her cancer stricken mother she “thought she dreamed her mother’s dreams, not hers”. She would: Lie down and plummet into a sleep she never owned. She saw her father standing outside a baroque locked door, begging to be let in. He hadn’t had a thing to drink tonight, he promised, oh Gracie, this time he’d be gentle. Jean woke with her heart pounding in a rush of heat and panic. She’d check on her mother, whose thin body seemed pressed to the bed, oblivious.

The image of Grace “pressed to the bed” indicates an element of force that reflects the threat posed by the violent husband who would be “gentle this time”. In the following paragraph Jean describes how she and Mitch would often “make love quickly in a downstairs bedroom”, a bedroom immediately beneath the room in which Gracie lies. Jean recalls how she would: press herself tight against Mitch as though fighting his weight, and the weight of the sickness above them. The fighting took her in until kissing him was deep and hard and unfamiliar, like kissing a stranger with whom she was trapped, with whom she was drowning. Behind her eyelids she saw the face in the bed upstairs, and she was able to cry.25

The juxtaposition of the two paragraphs suggests that as Jean “fight[s]” Mitch’s weight, and the weight of her sick mother, she simultaneously fights the weight of her violent father. The presence of the father problematizes the simplicity of Jean’s matriarchal inheritance, passing a “weight” or a burden down through the maternal line. Jean herself questions the value of her maternal heritage when she thinks that she “compared everyone to her mother: maybe that was what scared her. God, did she hate it – her mother’s strength? It was what she loved most and what she hated.” In order to analyse the complexity of Jean’s inheritance, I recall Abraham and Torok’s work on both incorporation and the transgenerational phantom. In as much as the incorporation of a lost love object may result in the transmission of a gap from parent to child (a gap that creates a transgenerational phantom), the phantom 25

Machine Dreams, 102.

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may appear before the act of incorporation. When Jean readily submits to the incorporation of Gracie, she circumvents her mother’s death as she figuratively internalizes Grace “and that was how she gave herself up, all her words gone like sparks burned up in a darkness”. With “all her words gone” Jean’s speech, postincorporation, becomes a shared dialogue between mother and daughter about the father. However, JT haunts Jean before she incorporates her mother; half remarks define Gracie’s marriage to JT (“The things I tell my pillow, no woman should”),26 effectively passing on to Jean a transgenerational phantom about the acts her father may have committed. As Rand argues in his editor’s notes to The Shell and the Kernal, the transgenerational phantom occurs when “people unwittingly inherit the secret psychic substance of their ancestor’s lives … the symptoms do not spring from the individual’s own life experiences but from someone else’s psychic conflicts, traumas, or secrets”.27 Doubly haunted, Jean’s burden determines her attitudes both to class and racial distinctions, and inevitably to her social practices as a wife and mother. Jean’s inherited burden is cast in distinctly economic terms as she makes love in a bedroom containing the financial dynamics of Grace and JT’s marriage. Jean remembers that her “Mother had always kept household accounts” in the “tall wooden file cabinet”. The cabinet held “business papers from JT’s lumber mill, and sales receipts from the Depression years, after the mill had failed and they’d scraped along selling milk and butter and eggs to townspeople and renting the upstairs to roomers”. The accounts trace the financial demise of Jean’s family, and as she and Mitch “made love”, Jean turns away from the “dark knobbed drawers” of the cabinet, effectively turning away from her father’s economic ruin.28 Throughout Machine Dreams, Jean seeks to return to an edited version of the middle-class status of her youth, excluding the husband who fills the car and their marriage with an attachment to the working class.

26

Ibid., 112-16. Rand, Editor’s Note, The Shell and the Kernal, 166. 28 Machine Dreams, 102. 27

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II In “The House At Night: Danner, 1956”, Danner undermines Jean’s repudiation of blue-collar workers as she fantasies about the darkness that her mother wishes to expel. “The House At Night” is relayed through the third person perspective: a perspective that Phillips draws upon in eleven of the novel’s seventeen character sections. Within the house that Mitch built, Danner experiences a pre-sleep stream of consciousness in which she visualizes the tension in her parents’ marriage. The six pages of “The House At Night” form one uninterrupted paragraph that begins with Danner lying in the bed “of her child’s bedroom” in which “she turned and sweated until the sheet wrapped her small body like a sour cocoon”.29 Danner’s body, layered by the “old … worn sheet”, recalls the bodies of both Warwick and the leper,30 an echo strengthened by her cocoon-like state, a state that takes the reader to “Bess”, where Warwick sleeps “like a pupa, larva wrapped in a woven spit of gauze”.31 Given the contamination surrounding the two male figures (a contamination embedded in Mitch’s family past), Danner’s “sour cocoon” represents her father’s adulterated history. In the subsequent pages of “The House At Night” Danner “lay listening, waiting, fighting her own heavy consciousness to hear and see [Mitch and Jean] as they really were”. She recalls “hearing her mother up at night”, and the sounds of “doors shut[ting] in the dark”. Danner imagines her mother in the bathroom, “rummaging in cabinets too high for the kids to reach”, finding “the hidden equipment” – douche equipment that Jean uses to eradicate the traces of sexual relations with Mitch.32 Jean enforces her obsession with middle-class cleanliness upon the children, administering “enemas” with the same “hidden equipment”.33 Jean’s attempt to rid herself and her children of any working-class dirt involves a fear not only of class transgression but also of racial infiltration.

29

Ibid., 127. See Chapter 2, 55-56. 31 Fast Lanes, 179. 32 Machine Dreams, 129-30. 33 For a detailed discussion of the enema process in Machine Dreams and its relation to both class and sexuality, see Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 270-71. 30

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Racialized rhetoric determines Jean’s middle-class contempt for the road crew. The economic others are branded as “black” and “dark” throughout “The House At Night”. However, as previously stated, all the Danner women are “dark beauties”, and Jean’s own mother referred to her daughter as “my pickaninny”.34 When Danner reflects on some of Jean’s sayings in “The House At Night”, she “hears Jean’s voice ….. Pretty as pretty does, seen and not heard, my only darling, don’t ever talk back to your mother, come and read Black Beauty, a little girl with a crooked part looks like no one loves her.” Her phrase “a little girl with a crooked part looks like no one loves her” suggests that Jean works to correct any variation from the white, middle-class status that she upholds. In the light of the chapter’s emphasis on blackness Jean’s choice of Black Beauty appears significant, particularly given that Jean and Danner are, themselves, “dark beauties”. However, Danner’s attraction to the black, “dirty birds” and the workmen whom she imagines in the “dark corners of her room” subverts Jean’s obsession with middle-class propriety. Within the narrative framework of the section Danner is trapped between her parents’ opposing views of the workmen. Whilst Jean strives to imprint the children with the fact that their “father and Clayton own the concrete company”, Danner compares the labourers’ clothes with the “khaki work clothes her father wore to work” (my emphasis). Indeed, Mitch defends the road crew, telling Jean that “they were trying to get along like everyone else”. Here Phillips underlines the antipathy between husband and wife already established in the discussion of how they each drive past the road crew with the children. When Jean closes the car windows to prevent the infiltration of the “yellow dust”, she remonstrates with Danner and Billy, “just another minute”. Phillips follows Jean’s restraint with a description of how Danner and Billy act out their parents’ relationship: Danner and Billy closed themselves secretly into adjacent closets and stayed there until the dark scared them, tapping messages with their fists on the plyboard between them. Pressed back against clothes and stacked shoe boxes, Billy wore a billed khaki cap like his 34

Machine Dreams, 4.

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father’s and Danner kept a navy blue clutch purse her mother no longer used; it smelled of a pressed powder pure as corn, and the satin lining was discolored. Danner unzipped it and put her face in the fold; she held her breath just another minute and that made everything lighten.

Hidden within the “adjacent closets”, brother and sister communicate silently using their own form of Morse code. However, they tap messages “with their fists”, implying a level of aggression in their coded interaction. Danner and Billy appear to assume the roles of Jean and Mitch respectively, and the children’s silent game reflects what Danner hears as she falls asleep – her parents lying “silent in an emptiness so endless they could all hurtle through it like stones”.35 The closeted communication simultaneously strengthens and undermines the fixity of the parents’ roles. Phillips’ language holds Billy in place: “Pressed back against clothes”, he assumes Mitch’s role, wearing “a billed khaki cap like his father’s”. Similarly, Danner seems to imitate Jean, holding the “blue clutch purse her mother no longer used”. I would argue, however, that Danner does not simply mirror Jean, rather the daughter re-sexualizes the mother who “no longer use[s]” her “clutch purse”, a purse that read psychoanalytically, represents female genitalia.36 Danner, with “her face in the folds” of the purse, inhales the smell of “pressed powder pure as corn” and “she held her breath just another minute”. The repetition of “just another minute” counters Jean’s suppression of the road crew’s “Yellow dust”. Whilst Jean asks the children to indulge her restrictions “just another minute”, Danner wants to breathe in her mother’s discarded sexuality for as long as possible, “just another minute”. In the closet, Billy’s billed cap and the purse that Danner holds reflect and invert the social practices of their parents. Danner reinvigorates the sexuality that Jean spurns in the face of potential contamination from Mitch’s attachment to the working class. In effect, the siblings’ child-play re-sexualizes 35

Ibid., 128-32. The discoloured lining of Jean’s purse echoes the “soiled” linings of the fur coats that Lenny and Cap wear “inside out” in Shelter. The girls wear the coats, which belonged to Cap’s absent mother, when they play the rabbit game; a sexualized game in which fantasy and reality merge. The Shelter chapter offers a detailed exploration of the game within the context of desire. 36

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their parent’s relationship. Significantly, their play depends upon the material objects in their possession. Throughout the novel Phillips reveals the interconnectedness between human desires and consumable objects. III Indeed, having discussed the dynamics of the Hampson’s family relations, I turn to artifacts, to the objects that acts as vessels for memories in Phillips’ novel. Henri Lefebvre, in the Critique of Everyday Life, argues for the significance of the commonplace, suggesting that “in each thing we see more than itself – something else which is there in everyday objects, not an abstract lining but something enfolded within which hitherto we have been unable to see”. He goes on to state that “it is in the most familiar things that the unknown – not the mysterious – is at its richest”.37 Lefebvre’s understanding of the everyday provides a model for reading the objects that pervade Machine Dreams. The meanings attached to everyday objects in Phillips’ novel carry the weight of the characters’ unspoken desires or memories, often providing partial access to what Lefebvre terms the “unknown”. Phillips argues that because the characters in Machine Dreams “didn’t express themselves to each other, or define themselves to each other in words, or even consciously think of themselves as being defined in any way” they “projected a lot of their ideas about their own identities onto objects. Particularly machines.”38 In “Radio Parade: Danner, 1963”, Danner’s desire centres around her radio, a gift from her parents. Danner liked the radio “as a box, as an object, so neat in its leather case with snaps. Brown leather like a woman’s purse”. The feminine radio case personalizes the object: “Without the case the radio was a simple plastic block, red and white, with the white grill in the front.” Given the previous association between a purse and the mother’s sexuality, Danner’s radio is contained within a distinctly female and sexualized space. For Danner, the simple action of the “(Off-On)” wheel, transforms the otherwise “meaningless 37 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 Introduction, trans. John Moore (2nd edn, London and New York: Verso, 1992), 132-34. 38 Hill, “A 1986 Conversation with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 54.

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thing”, making “it more than itself”. In the songs that Danner hears over the radio, “Every sigh, every inflection, echoed a haunting, a push that was sexual and desirous, a promise to get a little lonely in the middle of the night”. The haunting echoes of the “slow songs, the ones that whimpered and questioned, came across like secrets and confession, the whisper of conscience,” offer Danner a vocabulary for reading her own family relations. In a section that echoes “The House At Night”, Danner falls asleep listening both to the “slow songs” and to the sounds of the house and its inhabitants. Indeed, she believes that at night “sounds replaced the [song] words, sounds rose and fell”. Behind the sound of the music Danner hears the tenor of “her father’s snoring … sounds [that] didn’t seem like her father at all but became instead the rhythmic workings of the house, the blind labor that got them all through the night”.39 The radio acts as a filter for the inner workings of the Hampson home, revealing to Danner her father’s unseen labour within the structure of the family house. David Harvey argues that “particular objects (like a piano, a clock, a chair), and events (the playing of a record of a piece of music, the singing of a song) become the focus of a contemplative memory, and hence a generator of a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of consumerist culture and fashion”.40 The characters’ attachment to various objects throughout Phillips’ novel may be read in terms of what Harvey defines as “contemplative memory”. When Danner listens to the radio the object, and the music it produces, result in Danner’s contemplation of her father’s role within the family. Interestingly, Danner thinks of her father’s “blind labor” after comparing Jean’s bedroom, with “the big antique bed”, to Billy’s room where “there were twin beds on opposite walls. Usually Mitch slept in one of them.” Although Mitch is banished from Jean’s bedroom, Danner reasserts her father’s foundational role within the home environment by placing emphasis on the structural support he provides within the “workings of the house”. Through the song, “Turn On Your Love Light”, Danner also probes her father’s complex past; an inheritance that she herself begins to feel as she falls asleep, listening to the line, “Oh let it shine 39 40

Machine Dreams, 184. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 292.

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shine shine”. Danner, wishing to “shine” the light on her father’s identity, imagines “the whisper of the radio no longer really heard but felt, beating near her hand, I feel all right I feel all right I feel all right”.41 Danner feels, or experiences Mitch’s hidden, incestuous past, a past that even Mitch does not fully comprehend. Transgenerational haunting from father to daughter results in Danner’s recognition of something that she senses yet cannot fully access. For Malcolm Bull, the “phenomenon of hiddenness is created by an imbalance between the experiential and the cognitive somewhere on the continuum between the barely experienced and the fully cognised”.42 Machine Dreams pivots around certain moments of “imbalance” as characters sense an occluded knowledge. Obscured memories, or what Bollas defines as the “unthought known”, often return to characters in their relations with objects. Brian Jarvis argues that the novel “achieves an archaeology of the subliminal depths of (post)industrial America, excavating memories from its machinescapes and recovering the genealogy of technological artefacts as felt experience”.43 Listening to the radio prompts Danner to excavate her paternal inheritance. Danner remembers that “In the old photographs at Bess’ house [Mitch] was a blond heavy-lidded baby in a girl’s white dress: whose baby was he, orphaned, raised by Bess?”. Her question “whose baby was he?” appears structurally between two song lyrics from “Turn On Your Love Light”: “Come on baby, baby please” and “I’m begging you baby”. Following the first line “Come on baby, baby please” Danner thinks of Mitch’s displacement from the marital bed, and before the line “I’m begging you, baby” she considers Mitch’s lack of a domestic past. In between these two desire laden lines lies the question mark over Mitch’s legitimacy, yet his daughter at least maintains Mitch’s position as the head of the house. The song lines contain sexualized requests (“Come on”; “I’m begging”) that turn Mitch, and his past, into an object of desire for his daughter. Danner’s movement through the words of the song to Mitch occurs by way of an associative chain that works regressively through Billy to their father. That Danner can only begin to access her paternal past through

41

Machine Dreams, 185-86. Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 16. 43 Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies, 105. 42

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her brother highlights the prominence of the sibling relationship in the novel. Lying in bed, Danner thinks of how she “still sometimes pressed her ear to the back of the empty shelf near the floor and heard Billy walking in his room”. Significantly, Mitch “designed” the shelves that separate the children’s rooms, and he had “ordered them made at the local lumber store: they were walnut, stained dark to match the closet”. In preparation for the installation of the shelves, brother and sister “had watched their father tear a hole in the wall between their rooms; the hole was the size of a door and extended from floor to ceiling”. The shelves “perfectly” fill the doorway between the two rooms.44 Fitted, the storage shelves block the door between the siblings yet, as in their closet game, Danner and Billy can communicate through the shelf unit. When Danner listens to Billy through the shelves, she interprets individual sounds to create a picture of her brother. Linked with the closet, the shelves are another object that connects the siblings, a link made possible by the father’s labour. Mitch’s design places emphasis on not simply his attachment to construction, but also on his choice of a “local lumber store” to turn the design into a finished form. Judy Attfield argues that “To conceptualise design as a practice of making meaning material suggests an enabling process in reconstituting and situating those aspects of life such as identity and authenticity, that have become destabilised as a result of rapid social, economic and political changes”.45 Indeed, the shelves represent both Mitch’s role in engineering the family home as well as the regional quality of the work. Region and class, then, lie within the house that Mitch built. Phillips highlights the intense level of communication between the siblings as witnessed in the description of the shelves, in a scene before Billy leaves for Vietnam. Brother and sister talk about a “phantom phone” that allows them to communicate between one another. Danner asks Billy, “You get in trouble, is that the phone you’ll call me on? Is the Big Guy going to get you through to me?”.46 The notion of a “phantom phone” implies that Danner and her brother 44

Machine Dreams, 185-86. Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), 42. 46 Machine Dreams, 303. 45

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may be able to converse without words, effectively sharing a telepathic link to one another. Their transgenerational inheritance of an unspoken past from their father highlights Danner and Billy’s education in methods of silence. Through the shelves Danner hears “Billy walking in his room: creak of a chair as he sat at his desk building model airplanes, humming to himself”. Billy’s creative pastime, with his attention to detail (“moving the smallest wheels and wing fittings to their proper places with a spot of glue on the end of a toothpick”), echoes Mitch’s building of the family home. Whilst Danner’s image of her brother takes her back to Mitch, Billy’s fascination with model aeroplanes precedes his own flight and eventual disappearance over Vietnam. Danner’s picture of the planes that had “plastic men at the controls – tiny, frozen men with billed caps, looking out through cockpit windows”,47 acts as a precursor to her future vision of Billy “in the air [over Vietnam] with Luke, both of them poised to land, arms extended”.48 Billy, frozen in time like the plastic aircrew in his model planes, remains suspended, caught between flight and autochthony. Flight and departure from the home-place are central to the novel and both are often encapsulated by cars in the text. In a novel whose title merges the inanimate with the animate, machines take on different guises in relation to individual characters. Interestingly, whilst criticism of the novel tends to focus on the male characters’ relationship to machines, Phillips actually erodes the gender divide that aligns men with machines when Jean drives to her mother’s grave in Mitch’s Nash.49 At the cemetery, Jean: “felt a silly fondness for the car; it was so new and big and blue, and signified such expectation. Somehow that fact made her sadder; she wept harder, and felt ridiculous.” Jean, becoming emotional in the car’s interior, subverts the external meaning attributed to the machine. She felt “Safe and tired as she hadn’t felt for many nights”.50 Her emotional outpourings inside the car stand in opposition to Mitch’s

47

Ibid., 185-86. Ibid., 317. 49 See Karen Wilkes Gainey, “Jayne Anne Phillips’ Machine Dreams: Leo Marx, Technology, and Landscape”, Journal of American Studies Association of Texas, XXI (October 1990), 75-84. 50 Machine Dreams, 99. 48

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connection with the machine that develops in relation to the exterior of the Nash. Mitch, sitting in Bess’ kitchen on his return from the war, thinks of “leaving the Philippines on the ship, seeing with a last glance the dirty women sitting on the docks”. However, the memory “receded, and he saw instead the rich, dark blue of the car, felt again the shock of its newness as he’d leaned inside at the salesman’s invitation”. The car’s surface allows Mitch to displace his wartime experiences. His displacing of feelings onto the Nash is most pronounced when he polishes the car: Automatic, this work, rubbing onto the long car a substance like cold butter, filming the hard shine of the metal. Methodically, he did the car in sections, beginning with the long front hood, the broad snout of the machine …. His own reflection distorted on the cloudy surface and he thought of unconnected things, no stories, remembered jumbled associations from last night.51

The car’s surface may distort Mitch’s face but in a reversal of his displacement activity the Nash takes Mitch back to a wartime experience. Although Mitch appears to think of “unconnected things”, his memory of the previous night spent with Mary Chidester takes him back to the Japanese soldier and so to Gone With The Wind.52 The distortion that Mitch sees in the car’s surface reminds him of his own distorted past. Mitch and Jean alter the commercial meaning of the Nash – “signif[ying] such expectation” – as they personalize both the interior and exterior of the car. Reb’s attachment to his Pierce Arrow coupe further collapses the distinction between human and machine. Mitch recalls, of his childhood friend, that: “Reb tended that car like it was living, and thought of it every minute. His father said he was love-struck.” More importantly, the Pierce signifies flight: “A Pierce Arrow coupe was high off the ground, with windows all around like you were in a cockpit.”53 When Reb suicidally drives, with his girlfriend Marthella, into a nearby river Mitch looks on, noting that “The Pierce was 51

Ibid., 67-70. For an analysis of Mitch’s connection to Gone With The Wind, see Chapter 2, 59-62. 53 Machine Dreams, 36-37. 52

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shining in the moonlight and they hit the drop-off and sailed out. Seemed like they stayed in the air a long time.”54 The car that leaves the ground promises a flight from place, creating a tension between that which remains on West Virginian soil and that which departs. IV In order to examine the complex nature of flight in Phillips’ novel, it is necessary to consider Danner’s childhood dream that closes “The House At Night” section. Danner’s dream works on multiple levels, integrating sexual and racial desire with flight and departure from place. In addressing the complexities of Danner’s dream I will initially chart the sexual and racial dimensions afforded to the dream from its focal linkage to other sections in the novel. Listening to her parents go to bed: “Danner sinks deep, completely, finally, into a dream she will know all her life; the loneliness of her mother’s voice, Oh, it’s hot, rises in the dream like vapor.”55 Jean’s “Oh” is a shifty signifier, moving from a childhood recollection of her father, pleading to be allowed into Grace’s bedroom, “oh Gracie, this time he’d be gentle” to Jean’s adult “loneliness” to the “Oh deep like the turning of a broad dark knife, like a man in the dark surprised by his own sharp pleasure”.56 The Oh, compared by Jean to male sexuality, derives from both her violent father and from the Al Jolson song that she hears at the New Year’s party in “Anniversary Song: Jean, 1948”. As a blackface or minstrel performer Al Jolson belonged to a tradition that Michael Rogin argues “claimed to speak for both races [Jewish and African American] through the blacking up of one”.57 Al Jolson, then, represents the merging of racial identities, effectively collapsing white (Jew) into black. Jean fears the infiltration of black into white as she watches Mitch dance with Marthella Barnett. Mitch, recounting Reb and Marthella’s relationship in “The Secret Country”, remembers that “Marthella was a dark little thing – the family had 54

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 132. 56 Ibid., 115. 57 Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996), 5. 55

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guinea blood, or Indian”.58 Reb calls Marthella “Tarbaby”, a label that confirms her place as a racial other. Jean sees her husband dancing with Marthella, “his hands cupped low on [her] red skirt, caressing her hips and moving up to touch the small of her back”; a closeness that Jean perceives as sexually and racially deviant.59 Jean’s reaction to Mitch’s friendship with Marthella Barnett again intensifies her covert racialization of the working-class. Marthella’s family owned the local “pool hall”, a business associated with the working-class in Phillips’ novel. Bess refers to the Barnett family as “trash”, merging the issue of race and class that resurfaces later in the novel in Billy’s relationship with Kato Black, whose father Shinner Black owns the pool hall previously owned by the Barnetts.60 Phillips, attributing to Shinner and his family the name Black, effectively racializes the otherwise white, working-class family. In Machine Dreams the transgressive nature of the workingclass characters equates to a fear of miscegenation. In particular, Kato permeates social boundaries, disrupting the class divisions that Jean tries to instil in both her children. Billy compares his relationship with Kato to the “girls he went out with” at college, stating that the college girls were on a steady path: “They all had plans as though the future were cast in stone.” Unlike Kato, who “hadn’t needed promises”, the other girls were sexually “willing to different degrees but [they] wanted something in exchange for their loyalty, their favors”. Kato stands in opposition to the college students who impose boundaries on their relationships with Billy. Kato’s sexual relationship with Billy takes the reader back to Danner’s dream, compounding the layered nature of Danner’s desire. Billy’s sexual liaison with Kato begins and ends in his car. He remembers that “Somehow his getting a car had started them off”.61 Interestingly, both Billy and Danner experience sexual encounters with their respective partners in cars parked in the old Mitch Concrete plant, just “off a side road called Graveyard Road”, a road that “led only to the cemetery”. Given that Hampson family history is so imbedded in machines and the spaces they create, then the cars in 58

Machine Dreams, 39. Ibid., 112. 60 Ibid., 39 (my emphasis). 61 Ibid., 255. 59

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which Danner and Billy have sex represent a space capable of reproduction in the otherwise deserted site of their father’s labour history.62 Significantly, Mitch’s concrete legacy is officially denied the potential for continuation. When Mitch designed the county’s bus shelters he had wanted to place “sliding aluminum doors across the fronts to cut down the wind and rain”. However, Danner recalls that the school board rejected Mitch’s plan, claiming that “the kids waiting in the shelters would be junior high or high school students, and it wasn’t wise to equip the shelters with privacy”. Mitch followed the school’s advice “and there was no recorded case of sexual activity in the bus shelters”.63 Danner and Billy’s sexual activity at the concrete plant re-animates their father’s ghostly heritage.64 In particular, Billy’s sexual relationship with Kato contains semantic residues of Danner’s somnial fantasies. Before Billy begins Basic Training at Fort Knox, he and Kato have sex in his Camaro. The intercourse in the car contains echoes of Danner’s dream, during which horses are figured as masturbatory devices. When Billy “touched [Kato] there, through her clothes, he felt a small hardness throbbing like a pulse point”,65 a pulse reminiscent of “the smell that comes in waves and pounds inside [Danner] like a pulse”.66 Equine imagery prevails as both Kato and Danner move toward climax. The black horses of Danner’s dream reappear when Kato achieves orgasm: “when she came her whole body rippled lengthwise with a delicate vibration that reminded Billy of horses shivering their flanks.” Billy attaches the notion of floating to his sexual experience with Kato, stating that their foreplay was “a drug between them; there was the weightless high of dope”. When they finally take off their clothes “the heated interior of the car was like a capsule with steamed windows, drifting space”.67 Billy’s sense of floating recalls Danner’s wish to fly with the horses of her dream: “the animals swim hard in the air to get higher and Danner aches to stay with them.”

62

Ibid., 229. Ibid., 297. 64 Ibid., 229. 65 Ibid., 275. 66 Ibid., 132. 67 Ibid., 275. 63

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In the masturbatory dream Danner’s fantasy centres around “winged animals” with “equine eyes”. The winged horses are “dark like blood” and they “gleam with a black sheen”.68 In a section filled with blackness, the horses represent Danner’s desire for transgression beyond the confines of Jean’s sterilized world. Jean’s fear of racially and economically transgressive others represents a wider fear of the breakdown of the boundaries that she seeks to apply within the confines of her home. In the opening section of the novel Jean tells Danner that “I stayed married all those years until you and Billy were grown – I only kept going to make you safe”. Jean equates safety with staying geographically in place, within the set limits of middleclass propriety. Of course, Jean’s insistence that her children be educated and therefore economically mobile provides a major flaw in her emphasis on stasis. Danner’s dream, and the novel itself revolve around departure from place, an inevitable departure that undermines Jean’s attempted controls: “It turned out I couldn’t keep anyone safe. Not you. Not Billy.” The adult Danner, who is “always moving around”, has made the departure from place that her childhood self dreams.69 In the dream Danner actively fantasies about moving beyond the limits of home, seeking in her dream to translate the trapped “loneliness of her mother’s voice”. The image of the powerful animals “cut[ting] the air, slicing the mist to pieces” prefigures the ruptures caused by Danner’s eventual move away from Bellington.70 The slicing motion of the hooves recalls Jean’s comparison of Al Jolson’s “Oh” with the “deep turning of a broad sharp knife, like a man in the dark surprised by his own sharp pleasure”.71 Phillips’ conflation of sexually transgressive cutting and slicing highlights the fractured nature of the Hampson’s family history. Indeed, the winged horses of the dream return the reader to one of the novel’s epigraphs: “Now he (Pegasus) flew away and left the earth, the mother of flocks, and came to the deathless gods: and he dwells in the house of Zeus and brings to wise Zeus the thunder and lightning” (my emphasis). Just as Pegasus “flew away”, the horses of 68

Ibid., 132. Ibid., 22. 70 Ibid., 132. 71 Ibid., 115. 69

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Danner’s dream “swim hard in the air to get higher and Danner aches to stay with them”.72 Horses appear in various guises in the novel, from an epigraph based on Greek legend, that states that “The Greeks believed that their heroic dead appeared before the living in the form of a horse”, to the Mobilgas’ brand image of a winged horse. The epigraphs themselves chart the commodification of flight as the Greek myth becomes a consumer reality in the lines taken from Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”. Importantly, in a narrative divided between stasis and departure from place, cars become integrated into the notion of horses and flight. Tracing the transitive pattern of horses within the text reveals a network of loss – a loss that links death with flight. Jean tells Danner about her mother’s dairy business and of the workhorse used to deliver the milk. She claims that “that horse knew every stop by heart .… There was one customer who’d died a couple of years before I’d started helping, but Gus stopped at that house anyway.”73 The workhorse, a direct link to an agricultural past, never forgets: a trait that shares similarities with Jean’s own sense of remembering. In her opening lines to Danner, Jean insists that “It’s strange what you don’t forget”.74 The work of the horse, in effect, keeps the memory of the dead alive, just as Jean keeps her mother alive through her words and actions. Jean’s horse denies death, effectively refusing flight from the place of remembrance. In opposition, Mobilgas promises flight: “NEW MOBILGAS GIVES 75 FLYING HORSEPOWER.” The Mobilgas icon reflects the changes wrought by modernization as it turns a Greek legend into a commodity. In effect, mechanized horsepower replaces the traditional workhorse. Katie, Bess’ daughter and quite possibly Mitch’s halfsister, idolizes the Mobil horse, and on their ritual visits to the cinema, Mitch always stops at the gas station so that she could “sit and stare at [the] big sign”.76 From above their heads “The red horse seemed to fly over the cracked concrete of the station lot and the 72

Ibid., 132. Ibid., 7. 74 Ibid., 3. 75 Ibid., 81. 76 With Mitch’s parentage established by my appeal to “Bess”, I refer to Katie as Mitch’s half-sister. However, in the novel itself, Mitch and Katie believe, on a surface level at least, that they are cousins. 73

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street beyond”, promising distant travel powered by strong “flanks” and “feathered wings spread to glide”. The red horse has a “white streak up the center of [its] … head”, a mark that aligns the horse with Mitch’s “Silver Streak” car. The car takes its name from the “silvered midline of the hood” that “Runs right down to the grill”.77 The semblance between horse and car underlines Jarvis’s argument that in Machine Dreams “animate and inanimate partake of qualities traditionally associated with the other within an environment in which technology is pervasive”.78 One of the tensions in the novel, then, rests in the conflation of those things and people that remain grounded and those that offer the possibility for flight, and therefore, departure from place.

77 78

Machine Dreams, 81-82. Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies, 99.

CHAPTER FOUR Preparing for Take-Off: Autochthony and Flight in Machine Dreams Phillips’ fiction gravitates around West Virginia; her first two novels are set in and around the fictional towns of Bellington and Gaither, in what she calls a “mythic West Virginia or the myth in my mind”.1 Whilst Bellington and Gaither may be fictional towns, locations for the “myth” in Phillips’ mind, both areas share similarities with her West Virginian hometown, Buckhannon.2 Phillips recalls the West Virginia of her childhood, proposing that “if you are dealing with the elements of a past, your past, someone else’s past, the past of a country, county, town, you are basically trying to redeem that past, trying to make it live again and save something of it”.3 Bronfen defines Phillips’ “nostalgia for home” as an “attempt to develop a consoling world view … ultimately embracing conservative values like stability, tradition and an ahistorical timelessness of myth, a narrative strategy … [that] diffuses any intentions of political and social critique”.4 Rather than offering a “timelessness of myth”, Phillips’ sense of redemption may be figured in terms of her attempt to re-inscribe a region with its forgotten history, a history rooted within everyday lives. Phillips states that “writing about so-called ordinary people is a political statement because it’s talking about everyday life and why it’s precious and why it’s worth defending against whatever costs”.5 Phillips’ writing politicizes the effects of increased modernization in West Virginia by tracing the impact of social and economic change on ordinary lives. She claims:

1

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 188. For a semi-biographical history of Phillips’ writing, see Avery F. Gaskins, “Middle-Class Townie: Jayne Anne Phillips and the Appalachian Experience”, Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, XIX/3 (Spring 1992), 308-316. 3 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 187. 4 Bronfen, “Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment …”, 17. 5 Celia Gilbert, “Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, Publisher’s Weekly, XXII/5 (8 June 1984), 66. 2

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I see politics as very subversive in most people’s lives, like ripples in a body of water. I’m often talking about people who don’t pay much attention to politics, people who are so involved in their daily lives … that they are basically acted upon by political realities.6

Phillips may be said to write what Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt term “counterhistories”. Gallagher and Greenblatt argue that counterhistories “make apparent the slippages, cracks, fault lines, and surprising absences in the monumental structures that dominated a more traditional historicism”.7 Quoting the historian E.P. Thompson, they suggest that the power of counterhistories rests in the ability to “rescue” forgotten or marginalized individuals “from the enormous condescension of posterity”.8 Gallagher and Greenblatt’s new historicist reading argues for the power of the anecdote. They argue that through anecdotes, counterhistories of “possibilities cut short, imaginings left unrealized, projects half formulated, ambitions squelched, doubts, dissatisfactions, and longings half felt, might all be detected”.9 Their reading provides an essential vocabulary for interpreting Phillips’ work. Phillips often focuses on “possibilities cut short” and “longings half felt”, feelings that often arise from her concern with the notion of home. For Phillips, the return home, whether literally or in her fiction, has to do with settling issues. In many cases these are issues that have been inherited, not made by the characters. I think that is everyone’s situation, vis-à-vis parental stories and myths. Family is partly burden … the heart of it is kind of mystery. Going home is a little like self-motivated analysis. It is a long process and unconsciously motivated in many ways.10

These “unresolved issues and emotional dilemmas”, become “the tenor of family life”.11 In response to Phillips’ emphasis on “family”, “unresolved issues” and inherited “burden[s]”, I recall Abraham and 6

Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 50. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2000), 17. 8 Ibid., 55. 9 Ibid., 74. 10 Lyons and Oliver, “The Mystery of Language …”, 117-18. 11 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 46. 7

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Torok’s notion of the transgenerational phantom. Their account of the way in which incorporated words become staged, or revealed in the social realm in concealed form, shares elements of the writing of counterhistories. Both are attempts at exorcism, articulating that which has been denied or forgotten. Counterhistories provide a means for revealing a family’s or a nation’s “shameful secrets”, so that when Phillips refers back to West Virginia in her writing, her anecdotes may be thought to reveal the unspoken effects of economic transitions in the region through the unresolved issues of everyday family relations. In relation to Mitch and Jean, those issues relate as much to their individually inherited burdens as they do to their marriage and its economic division. In Machine Dreams, Danner and Billy live out their parents’ unresolved issues through their inextricable connection to a homeplace that they simultaneously wish to leave. The desire to leave West Virginia manifests itself throughout Phillips’ writing, particularly through Danner’s narrative. In “The World: Danner, 1972”, Danner thinks that the Trees in Bellington are oaks, elms, chestnuts, maples …. These trees are the green world of Bellington, of the county surrounding the town, of the mountainous state. In California, I live way up north, near the sea. The trees are different there. The land – the beautiful cliffs, the ocean, and the waves of the surf – seems foreign. When I think of home, I think of a two-lane road densely overhung with the deciduous trees of a more familiar world. The real world.12

Despite Danner’s attachment to the “familiar world” of home, she nevertheless feels the need to leave the “green world of Bellington”. Her departure from the “two-lane” roads of the town reflects a movement away from place typified by the “Baby-Boom PMC”. Jean educates her children with the intention that they might move “outward and upward”, escaping Mitch’s working-class ethic.13 The tension between Danner’s notion of home as the “real world” and her desire to escape that world, stems from her parents’ divided class ethics. Mitch’s attachment to labour and to place instils in Danner a 12 13

Machine Dreams, 304. Pfeil, “Makin’ Flippy-Floppy …”, 265.

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similar connection to her home. Likewise, Jean’s constant references to inheritance link Danner to family traditions, yet Jean’s subscription to middle-class ethics determines her daughter’s departure from Bellington. Danner and Billy’s sibling interaction reflects the complex nature of Danner’s link to her divided country. As a child, Danner wants to ground Billy, to keep him in place. Progressing through the narrative, three grounding scenes occur, each one associatively working back in time. In “The Air Show: Billy, 1963”, Danner and Billy hide in the long grass of an airfield as a plane prepares for take-off: Billy pressed himself flatter against the ground, staring intently to see through the grass …. He’d never seen a plane in flight so close … the plane was perhaps thirty feet above them as it passed over, lifting off, roaring. He stood into the roar, Danner grabbing his arm hard. Then she was on top of him, yelling into his neck as the sound of the plane was everywhere …. Billy looked elated as he sank to his knees in the spongy dirt …. Billy craned his neck to keep the plane in sight as it gained altitude, then grabbed Danner’s wrist. “Come on. We’ll run. He won’t see us now.” Billy tightened his grip on her arm and stood; then he let go and ran …. He ran flat out and saw her beside him, a peripheral moving image .... The plane had gone up just above him, so loud and close. The pilot had seen him: it was like a pact.14

Billy seems attached to the plane, involuntarily rising with the roaring sound. Although Danner physically holds Billy to the ground – “lying on top of him” – Billy does not stick to the “spongy dirt”. In a reversal of control, Billy grabs Danner, forcing her to run with him instead of holding him back. The pact Billy imagines between himself and the pilot is a precursor to his later decision to join the air crew in Vietnam. When Danner offers him a chance to go to Canada and avoid the draft Billy tells her

14

Machine Dreams, 208-209.

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The fuckers won’t do me in. I’ll stay off the ground if they send me, get into an air crew. I'll keep my ass in the air.15

Danner’s need to hold Billy on the ground at the airfield recalls a game they played together as children. In the childhood game, Danner and Billy take turns to bury each other under leaves. They “walked up into the woods to a clearing where the leaves were layers deep”, and after one of them “got inside, buried to the shoulders” the other would run and jump on top of the pile. Occasionally, playing the game “in earnest”, Billy tells Danner to “Bury [him] way down deep”. Danner recalls: I covered him, piling on more leaves …. The more leaves I gave him, the better chance he had. I wanted him to win, to stay hidden, stay silent. I kept piling leaves, alone in the clearing, hiding him deeper and deeper, the mound of leaves higher than my chest. I kept working until he was secret, buried, warm. Until he was nowhere.

Before analysing the symmetry between the two grounding passages, I should offer a brief account of the third, and final grounding scene. Within two paragraphs of the above passage, Danner discusses her role as her brother’s “protector”. She remembers that when she was “about three” and Billy was a baby, Jean would tell her to “watch [her] little brother”. Danner takes her role seriously: she “wouldn’t even let him stand up”, keeping him occupied with a “ball or the block or whatever he was fooling with”, and “if all else failed, [she] held him down by main force”.16 The repeated imagery of sister securing brother to the ground may be read as a particular version of Phillips’ more general preoccupation with place and the retention of place. In contradistinction to Bronfen’s assertion that the women in Machine Dreams possess a “stable rootedness” within their home community, Danner’s interaction with Billy revolves around her desire to leave the locale. Phillips, describing her own childhood, states, “I had to leave West Virginia”. She remembers that:

15 16

Ibid., 267. Ibid., 326-27.

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Even when I was very young, I remember sitting on the back porch of my parents’ house, looking out at the fields and wondering how far I would travel from this exact point. I wanted to leave. Family politics is the screen through which we experience place …. Like so many who evolve into writers, I had no real boundaries. Parent and sibling memories became my own fractured history, even crossgender.17

Phillips does not distinguish between family and region as she infuses “family politics” with the “experience [of] place”. In Machine Dreams, Danner and Billy play a central role within the Hampsons’ “fractured” family politics, existing between their parents and in a class divided country. Juliet Mitchell usefully explores the connection between sibling tensions and a sense of place. She suggests that sibling relations are foundational because they form “our first social relationship”. Displacement becomes the central factor of the sibling bond. Mitchell argues that “On the advent of a younger sibling or the awareness of the difference of an older sibling (or sibling substitute), the subject is displaced, deposed and without the place that was hers or his: she/he must change utterly in relation to both the rest of the family and the outside world”. Although the child may feel displaced on the “advent of a younger sibling”, he or she will simultaneously identify with that sibling, since “the child is also excited by the discovery of someone like itself”. Whilst Mitchell expands her argument to incorporate hysteria, I will focus here on the specifics of sibling displacement. Mitchell defines the two-way feelings of identification and displacement as “the love/hate ambivalence” between siblings.18 In terms of the Danner/Billy relationship, Danner identifies with her brother – (love) – she wants to keep him fixed in a southern place. If Billy stays in the home place Danner can escape leaving a part of herself, the part she sees in Billy, behind. Interestingly, Danner recalls that when “Billy was in the air … I was in the ground-floor classroom”: Danner, based on the ground, teaches phonics to underprivileged children in the Project Headstart program.19 Her actions mirror those of Jean who taught phonics when 17

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 184. Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas, 20. 19 Machine Dreams, 307. 18

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Danner and Billy were children. Forcing them to join the class to make up the numbers, Jean tells Billy that the phonics class will give him a “head start”. Jean regards education as a means to securing middle-class life since her phonics teaching places emphasis on the tacit association between language and the maintenance of a whitecollar tradition. For Jean, language keeps things in place, holds people together. However, she cannot maintain Billy’s attention on the sounds of the words, and he begins to think of numbers: “Rhymes were words and words were letters: letters made the sounds in the rhymes. There were numbers in rhymes but no numbers in words: he didn’t know why.”20 Numbers eventually decide Billy’s fate as he succumbs to the Vietnam lottery – in effect, numbers determine his departure from place. I will return to the issue of numbers, yet here I wish to focus on Danner’s involvement in an occupation designed to provide children with a solid ground[ing] in language. Danner relates her wish to ground Billy with his eventual death, and her place within a “ground-floor classroom” reinforces her grounding ability. Grounding effectively takes the reader to the basements that figure predominantly in a novel divided between that which is grounded (or in/on the ground) and the need to leave place through both literal and figurative flight. II Within the first few pages of the novel, Jean discusses how her mother ran a dairy business from the cellar of the family home that was “still as a tomb”, surrounded by shelves: “lined with mason jars sealed full of tomatoes and beans and beets. The jars were just jars but you were always aware of them in the dimness, dense and weighted.”21 The cellar, a tomb filled with conserved foods, reflects the weight of preservation. In other words, the basements in Machine Dreams reflect the incorporation process, acting as vessels for the storage of memories as well as food. Jean collapses basements, preservation and death in her dream of the Quiet Glade murders. Having driven in Mitch’s Nash to visit her mother’s grave, Jean falls asleep and imagines that in her “brief, deep 20 21

Ibid., 136. Ibid., 6-7.

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sleep” she “had been on a journey to some lost place still existing alongside this one. This one began a new year, but the other played in the mind, repeatedly, selectively.” In the dream, Jean recalls an image from her past that she does not immediately understand, questioning “What had she remembered?”. Jean effectively returns to her childhood in the dream, and recalls her “Mother and one of the other women … lifting her out of the car and onto the road”. She remembers walking along a “dusty road” and in the distance “pickaxes pounded rhythmically on the stone cellar walls of an isolated house”. Alongside “people from nearby towns”, Jean and her mother stand by the house, observing the “wide pit” that “had been dug along the stone house so that one side of the foundation was exposed”. Jean hears various phrases – “Imagine,” a woman’s voice intoned, “his own wife, his own children” – but she fails to connect the image and the phrases with the factual details of the event.22 Only at the subsequent New Year’s party does Jean realize that “she’d dreamed of the murders at Quiet Glade … A man had killed his family, buried them in the cellar, and confessed weeks later”. Jean’s delayed recognition of the events at Quiet Glade notably takes place after she sees Mitch and Marthella “holding hands”. On seeing her husband with Marthella, Jean thinks: You had to be mature about these things, and about dreams and apprehensions as well. Dreams didn’t mean so much. Anyway, what sort of dream could she expect, falling asleep in a graveyard? And she’d been thinking about her father; it was true they’d been afraid of him sometimes.23

Jean only starts to remember the details of the Quiet Glade murders after she moves through an associative chain that begins with Mitch and Marthella’s blue-collar, racialized union,24 to the memories of her violent father and then to the man who “had killed his family”.25 The murderous father who buries his family in the cellar forms a grave within Jean’s dream – a grave accessed through her own recollections

22

Ibid., 99-101. Ibid., 110-11. 24 See Chapter 3, 83-84. 25 Machine Dreams, 100. 23

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of a father of whom she and Gracie had “been afraid … sometimes”.26 The incorporative nature of basements reappears in “Danner: The World, 1972”. On a return visit to West Virginia, Danner contemplates the role of the basement in her mother’s house. The basement, that had been Mitch’s workspace before the divorce, was also the room “in which [Jean] slept”. Like the school basement, pipes surround the walls of the underground room: pipes that “at night … assume a dominance over the rest of the room.” Danner compares the “subterranean dominance of the pipes” with the “spirit of the last few years [her] family lived in one house, and the year Billy went away”.27 The pipes in Jean’s basement act as vessels for family memories, effectively containing her last recollections of Billy. In opposition to the pipe filled basement of Jean’s house in town, the old family home built by Mitch “didn’t have a basement”. As children, Danner and Billy had begun an excavation project under Danner’s bed. Danner claims that they were “looking for a secret passage, a trapdoor”. Billy believes that if he is first to find whatever secrets lie beneath the floor then he will be “the King … King of the World … king of everything that’s down there”. When Jean discovers their destructive labours, the children fear Mitch’s reprisals. Instead of the expected anger, Mitch responds with respect for their efforts. Danner thinks that “Mitch probably did actually tell us there were no secret passages, that a trapdoor couldn’t lead anywhere because the house didn’t have a basement – but I don’t remember any remarks, only that his lack of anger seemed miraculous”. Mitch’s obscured understanding of his parentage results in his building of a house with no secret “trapdoor” or basement. He does not design his house for the passing on of burdensome secrets. With hindsight, Danner realizes that Mitch was not angry with her and Billy because he wanted Billy to understand the house that he had built. She believes that “Billy’s investigation of the house was exploration that my father understood: the house was my father’s, what he’d made, what he owned. Information he wanted Billy to have.”28 Mitch provides his 26

Ibid., 110. Ibid., 298-99. 28 Ibid., 324-25. 27

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son with concrete knowledge, effectively trying to bypass the transference of his own secrets to another generation. Despite Mitch’s unconscious efforts to prevent Billy’s inheritance of his unspoken knowledge, Billy’s submission to the lottery numbers, like his choice to join an aircrew in Vietnam, echoes his paternal heritage. At a surface level his military service reflects his father’s World War II experiences, but as I argue in Chapter 5, Billy’s choice of air combat may be traced back to Warwick’s desire to be above the ground. Billy’s actions reflect those of his grandfather (a man he both never knew, and whom he does not believe to be his grandfather). He places faith in the metal structure of the helicopter: “The fuckers won’t do me in. I’ll stay off the ground if they send me, get into an air crew. I’ll keep my ass in the air.”29 Owen Gilman, argues that in Machine Dreams, the Vietnam War: connects naturally with an enduring impulse by men to rise over the earth, a quest with dramatic linkage to the South …. Although man’s machines have become increasingly complex and wondrous, they are still destined one day to fall back to earth. The long reach of time encompasses all, and with this message, Phillips chastens the side of ambition that would have man break free from earthly limits.30

Gilman’s claim that the “enduring impulse by men to rise over the earth” relates to the specificity of a region goes some way to explicating Phillips’ preoccupation with flight in the novel. However, Gilman’s argument rests on the factual details of flight, that machines “are still destined one day to fall back to earth”. In Machine Dreams, Billy’s body, missing in action, transcends the inevitability of falling back to the earth, floating in a no place between the limitations of region and the successful escape from the home place. III The novel’s concern for a tension between autochthony and flight ensures that medial images of floating recur throughout Machine Dreams. When Billy’s helicopter is shot down over Vietnam, Danner 29

Ibid., 267. Owen W. Gilman Jr, Vietnam and the Southern Imagination (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 42. 30

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thinks of “A hostile force”, those “dark-haired women crawling into the trees with their heavy guns”.31 Billy, in a war letter addressed to Danner, writes that the Viet-Cong “crawl up into the trees with their AK-47’s & their rpg rockets and fire at us from about 50 ft away. You never see them, you see muzzle flashes. Women’s Lib is real big with NVA and the Cong – sometimes it’s women trying to waste us.”32 Having spent her childhood trying to keep Billy on the ground, Danner feels complicit in his death, aligning herself with the “darkhaired women” in Vietnam. The dark-haired, grounding women incountry are a foreign version of the dark-haired Danner women who subscribe to a grounded position, if not for themselves, then for their family members. Danner attempts to circumvent the loss of Billy when she begins sleeping with Vietnam veterans. For Danner, these veterans had “stood on the same ground” as Billy, or had “flown in the same kinds of machines”. Danner remembers that “In the first year Billy was missing, that was all I needed”. She effectively tries to incorporate Billy’s missing body by taking into herself those men who had shared her brother’s “ground”. During that year Danner went to “Lynchburg State” with three vets – she recollects that she’d “slept with two of the three and it wasn’t clear who [she] was with”. I would argue that Danner’s sexually transgressive behaviour with the vets, constitutes an attempt to re-situate Billy. If the vets remind her of Billy, then sleeping with them allows her figuratively to sleep with her brother. Sleeping with Billy involves an obviously endogamous relation, a relation designed to keep the family together and in place. Danner’s retentive transgression ends when Riley, her old high school boyfriend, sees her in a Lynchburg bar with the vets. Thinking that Riley “sounded so familiar, when the world was full of strangers”, she allows him to drive her back to her college. After talking to Riley, Danner “stopped sleeping with anyone”. She retreats into herself, and unable to re-situate Billy on the ground she works to keep him floating. Danner keeps Billy suspended in the air, floating, circumventing his probable death. She imagines “Billy in the air with Luke, both of

31 32

Machine Dreams, 311. Ibid., 290.

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them poised to land, arms extended”.33 Such levitation reflects what Joanna Price calls “incomplete” mourning. Price argues that “The fantasy of the continued existence of American troops missing in action in Vietnam …. has to do with a mourning which, lacking a body, as it does a determinate interpretation of the war, must remain incomplete, playing itself out through a continuous deferral of loss”.34 Price’s notion of a continual “deferral of loss” recalls Abraham and Torok’s distinction between incorporation and introjection. The “shrink” whom Danner goes to see at “Student Health Services” proposes that in order to circumvent her “blocks against talking” to him or to herself, she should “talk to Billy”. Danner recalls that the letter she wrote to Billy contained no greeting and was unsigned. The words came into my mind as though carved in stone, and I don’t think they will alter. This is the letter in its entirety: They’ll never convince me I won’t see you again – I just don’t feel alone.

Danner denies Billy’s death whilst simultaneously burying him in her head. The words “carved in stone” effectively form a gravestone in her mind. Whilst Danner’s letter may point to her incorporation of her sibling, the psychiatrist forces her to respond that Billy may be “Dead over there … you fucker, you made me say it”.35 Godden notes that “The proximity of ‘dead’ and ‘fucker’ ties loss to desire (‘dead fucker’)”.36 I would argue that the desire and loss to which Godden points reflects a desire to leave place and the subsequent feelings of loss attached to such a separation. After leaving Bellington, Danner has a recurring dream of herself and Billy “walking in the deep dark forest”. Danner’s “Machine Dream” ends Phillips’ narrative, leaving a lasting image of Billy floating above the ground. Walking through the woods

33

Ibid., 317-21. Joanna Price, “Remembering Vietnam: Subjectivity and Mourning in American New Realist Writing”, Journal of American Studies, XXVII/2 (August 1993), 17379. 35 Machine Dreams, 321-32. 36 Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 260. 34

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In the dream, Billy and the plane become interchangeable, his “private energy” recreating “engine sounds”.38 The fact that the plane gets closer to the earth as each year passes brings into focus the tension between Danner’s wish to keep Billy floating and hence alive, and her desire to ground her brother. Here I recall Mitchell’s study of sibling relations, in which she suggests that although a sibling encounters a sense of displacement on the advent of another sibling, he or she “is also excited by the discovery of someone like itself”.39 Billy and Danner’s shared genealogy indicates that if Billy stays in place then Danner can safely leave, having left “someone like” herself behind. Significantly, the problematic nature of Billy’s floating can usefully be explored through the notion of paternal inheritance in the novel. IV The closing image of Billy, floating on a downward trajectory, draws together elements of his complex paternal inheritance. In as much as Jean attempts to claim Danner for the maternal line in her New Year re-conception of her daughter, Mitch’s secretive past casts a shadow over the news of Billy’s conception. The notion of Billy suspended in time and out of place may be said to reflect the dream that Mitch has on the night Jean tells him that she is pregnant with their son. “The Coral Sea: Mitch, 1950” opens with Mitch dreaming of “the Gulf of Papua, the Coral Sea”. Transported to a pre-wartime New Guinea, he stands with Katie “in his arms”. My reading of “Bess” in Chapter 1 casts Katie as Mitch’s half-sister since they potentially 37

Machine Dreams, 331. See Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, who offers an interesting discussion of the movie sounds and their connection to George Roy Hill’s film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 257-58. 39 Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas, 20. 38

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share the same mother. Mitch wants to “teach [Katie] to dance” because “Clayton was too old to teach a girl to dance right, though he stood watching them at a short distance”. The image of Mitch dancing takes the reader back to his dance with Marthella at the New Year’s party on the night that Jean re-conceives Danner through her incorporation of Grace. The echo of Mitch and Marthella’s sexual transgression, with its racial and class markings, casts Mitch’s fantastical dance with his half-sister in a forbidden context. Dancing with Katie, Mitch “had to hold her down as he led and circled, careful not to tread on her shoes”. Katie is a floater, “her body so light” that Mitch can barely retain her.40 Here, I wish briefly to offer an account of Katie’s links to floating and to numbers, in order to explore the complexity of the Coral Sea dream. In “Machine Dreams: Mitch, 1946”, Mitch dreams about his halfsister. In the dream, Katie is dead, her coffin surrounded with flowers so that “she looked as though she were floating”. Mitch believes that he caused Katie’s death: if he’d got his in the war, she might still be lying in her bed …. It was like the numbers had got mixed up and Bess had been right to be afraid: somehow after he’d gotten back from the war, all the numbers changed around and Katie had come out wearing his.

Mitch’s sense of floating and numbers relate back to his own childhood and to “all the floating around since he was a kid younger than [Katie] and moving from one household to another; floating around is what it was and there she was now, wearing his number and floating”. The transfer of floating and numbers as motifs from Mitch to Katie indicates that Mitch senses that he and Katie share a more direct, blood relation. Thinking about leaving Bellington after Katie’s funeral, Mitch concludes that “He couldn’t go unless he felt they wanted him to, leave them alone with it, then they could put it [their loss] somewhere: she’s your darling, I’m afraid, but she never had been”. The potential for desire between Mitch and Katie is immediately displaced by his denial, that “she never had been [his]”. The undercurrent of sibling desire takes Mitch back to Bess and, so too, to Warwick. 40

Machine Dreams, 119-20.

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As the dream progresses, he imagines that “far off he heard rifle shots”. Rifle shots remind Mitch of his childhood at the farm and memories of Warwick. Mitch thinks that “the shots kept on as though in celebration or ceremony, and as he turned toward the open window he felt Bess near him”. However, in the dream, Bess’ “face was surprisingly young, the face of a young woman, and as [Mitch] awakened the face aged in seconds”. In the course of the dream, floating and numbers ultimately link back to Mitch’s parentage, returning him to a young Bess whom he thinks “he must have seen in a photograph”.41 Mitch and Katie’s relationship reverberates with the hidden knowledge of their shared mother’s past. The sexualized connection between brother and half-sister resurfaces in Mitch’s Coral Sea dream, in which he works to displace his attraction to his sibling. As the Coral Sea dream unfolds Katie’s father Clayton, who had “stood watching [Mitch and Katie] at a short distance”, becomes an active participant, effectively replacing Mitch: turning to shield his eyes from the wind, Mitch looks “seaward” and sees “Clayton wading in, holding Katie like they were honeymooners”. Clayton interrupts the physical proximity of half-brother and sister. However, the displacement of sibling incest in turn offers the potential for father/daughter incest, as Clayton wades into the water “holding Katie like they were honeymooners”. Mitch’s dream works to combat such immediate family proximity by translating the object of desire, so that when Clayton turns to face Mitch, “Katie was Jean”.42 The threefold transition from brother/sister incest, to father/daughter incest ends with the image of the surrogate father with his daughterin-law. Jean’s displacement of Katie may be read in one of two ways, both of which highlight Mitch’s complex relationship with Bess. If Clayton holds Jean then he cannot hold Bess, leaving the unacknowledged mother free – free for Mitch to connect her with Warwick. Alternatively, rather than Jean displacing Katie, she may figuratively become the half-sister. Such transformation allows Mitch a legitimate route to his half-sister, a union that ultimately links back to Bess, who withholds the knowledge of Mitch and Katie’s relationship to one another. 41 42

Ibid., 88-90. Ibid., 120.

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At the close of the Coral Sea dream Mitch wakens to discover that Jean had “left a window open in the cold March night”. Mitch “got up and closed the window, his skin prickling at the cold”. As previously established, Mitch’s skin prickle in a hotel room in Australia returns him to his contaminated heritage, allowing him partial access to the secret of his incestuous conception.43 The “Coral Sea” section ends with Mitch looking out toward the fields behind his house, “trying to see past the rain”. He realizes that: If he squinted, changed how he was looking, he could make out the periphery of the first field and the fence posts. The bulk of the big hill was there but invisible; still, at its foot, he saw a whiteness that glimmered gently in the dense gray shadows of the rain. Puzzled, he walked farther and felt rainy vapor as he leaned almost into darkness.

Mitch’s altered perspective allows him to perceive the “first field and the fence posts” yet the big hill remains “invisible”, obscured by the “whiteness that glimmered gently in … the rain”.44 The whiteness puzzles Mitch, drawing him closer to interpret what he sees. As previously established, whiteness connects Mitch with his obscured history, so that the news of Billy’s conception is contained within the dynamics of secreted knowledge.45 The snow that haunts Mitch returns in the form of the “white plastic ball[s] … [that] bounced around” in the lottery machine that decides Billy’s fate.46 Just as snow reflects Mitch’s incestuous past (his conception a failed attempt to “escape the fact of the future”, the fact of the Hampsons’ move away from the farmhouse), so the white balls of the lottery machine determine his son’s fate.47 Indeed, Billy Sometimes … dreamed about the lottery, a close-up interior view: hundreds of days of white balls tumbling in a black sphere, silent and very slow, moving as though in accordance with physical laws. A galaxy of identical white planets. No sun. Cold, charged planets,

43

See Chapter 2, 60-64. Machine Dreams, 120-23. 45 See Chapter 2, 56-57. 46 Machine Dreams, 248. 47 Fast Lanes, 179. 44

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simple, symmetrical, named with months and numbers. Nov. 1, no. 303 of 365.

Billy attempts to confine the fall of the lottery numbers to fate, believing that “He didn’t know histories or politicshe didn’t need to know. Knowing wouldn’t change what was going to happen.”48 His belief that the fall of the numbers is inevitable, and that “Things are in the cards”, takes the reader back to “Machine Dreams: Billy, 1957”, when Billy experiences a prophetic dream of Clayton’s death.49 In his childhood dream, Billy and Mitch are at the Mitch Concrete plant: watching one of the mixers load .… Billy’s father picked him up and lifted him way high to see inside. Billy had never looked in there before; as his father lifted him higher and higher, he realized he’d always wanted to see. Mitch’s hands were very big, but as Billy got higher the hands seemed to go away. The end of the drum was open and Billy peered in. The sides were glowing and going round, grinding out a familiar rumble. Uncle Clayton was in the drum. He was sitting in the metal desk chair from the plant office and the chair floated.50

The link between the concrete mixer and the lottery machine suggests that whilst both machines mix things up, they do so in a concrete way. As Billy floats over the concrete mixer he sees not only Clayton’s imminent death, he also imagines the experience of his own eventual floating, an experience given by his father’s “hands”. When Billy realizes that “he’d always wanted to see” inside the machine, he submits to a belief that “things are in the cards”. As I will establish in Chapter 5, the cards that Billy believes in, are, arguably dealt by his paternal past. Billy’s machine dreams provide him with a clear structure for the future. The overlapping of Billy’s lottery dream with his Clayton dream evidences the density of Phillips’ writing. The dreams are representations of family densities; the language of his dreams, and the linkages effected by those dreams, results in semantic 48

Machine Dreams, 248. Ibid., 266. 50 Ibid., 147. 49

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density, setting Billy in-between: effectively floating in the middle ground between an inherent connection with family and region and his attempt to fly beyond them. To that extent, by the end of the novel Billy floats just as his father does in Danner’s image of Mitch frozen in a snow globe. V The novel itself might be thought of as Danner’s attempt at mediation as she balances between incorporating her brother and her introjection of his death. Price draws a connection between the loss of male bodies in Vietnam and a consumer culture that “reflect[s] an image without a body, a network of desires which can find no material resting place”.51 An “image without a body” becomes a simulacrum, a superficial likeness that cannot fully restore the lost body. Price highlights the profusion of consumer objects in Machine Dreams, claiming that in Phillips’ novel, “the sexes are destined to revolve around the lack of body, of weight, of burden, held endlessly apart in the deferred temporality of mourning”.52 Here I wish briefly to assert that following my previous allusions to objects in the novel, the objects in Machine Dreams do not act as merely empty vessels. Rather, Phillips imbues objects with meaning, so that when readers consider commodity goods in her work they see, to employ Lefebvre, not an “abstract lining but something enfolded within which hitherto we have been unable to see”.53 The density that Phillips attributes to such consumables serves to re-body objects, a re-bodying that problematizes the notion of continuously deferred mourning. Indeed, whilst Price considers “the deferred temporality of mourning” as an endless state, I would argue that the novel works towards an acceptance of Billy’s death. The lasting image of “the plane” as it “falls, year after year, to earth” implies that although Danner keeps Billy in the air, she will, at some point, bring him back “to earth”.54 Her growing acceptance of his loss may be understood in terms of what Freud defines as the gradual “withdrawal of libido”. 51

Price, “Remembering Vietnam …”, 179. Ibid., 182. 53 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 134. 54 Machine Dreams, 331. 52

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In his essay on “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud argues that the “characteristic of detaching the libido bit by bit is therefore ascribed alike to mourning and melancholia; it is probably supported by the same economic situation and serves the same purposes in both”. In other words, the seemingly opposite processes of mourning and melancholia, or introjection and incorporation, share, though with differing degrees of urgency, attempts to erase the libido’s dependent attachment to a love object. Although the “path is blocked for the work of the melancholic”, he or she will eventually “loosen the fixation of the libido to the object”.55 The recurrent floating in Phillips’ novel represents a negotiation involving a loss, a loss of both individuals and of an attachment to region. Machine Dreams centres not just on the mourning process in relation to dead (Grace) or missing characters (Billy), but the narrative itself reflects Danner’s mourning for the home she has left behind. Compiled as an oral history, the novel forms part of Danner’s mourning not just for her missing, presumably dead, brother but also for West Virginia. As Freud argues, in both mourning and melancholia, “The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love”.56 Mourning and melancholia may occur not simply at the death of a love object but also through the fear of losing that object, indicating that one can mourn for the erosion of regional values as much as the death of a family member. Danner’s oral history is an attempt at a dual introjection: she mourns not only for Billy, but for the effects of his absence on her own attachment to place. Without her brother grounded in place Danner’s departure is partial, requiring that she always return to offer overt grief for the person and place that she moved beyond. Indeed, she reflects “I come back two or three times a year, always at Christmas, always late in June, most of July. Both are bad times for my family because Billy’s absence is so immediate and felt.”57 Machine Dreams not only moves chronologically towards Billy’s disappearance in Vietnam, but also works towards Danner’s inevitable departure from Bellington. 55 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981), XIV, 256-57. 56 Ibid., 245. 57 Machine Dreams, 304.

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Before she leaves for California, Mitch offers Danner Billy’s Camaro, the car he kept “in Bess’s wooden garage”. Danner declines the offer, despite the Camaro’s “look[ing] bright and cherished, hidden in a place almost too small for it”. Leaving Billy’s car in place, “hidden” within the confines of their unacknowledged grandmother’s garage, Danner feels that she may depart safely. Intertextually, Bess figuratively grounds her brother in “Bess”, highlighting a genealogical heritage of sisters grounding brothers in order to precipitate their own departure from place. However, whilst Danner ensures that Billy’s car remains in Bellington, she continues to keep him floating. Phillips’ narrative allows for the possibility that Billy never will truly leave his home-place, given the subterranean indication that he will live on in future generations. Danner recalls that Kato, back in town to visit her father, “heard I was leaving and phoned me”. Danner sees Kato’s baby for the first time, stating that: “The baby was five months old and she looked like Kato …. I think Kato must have been honest with Buck and they’d both accepted whatever possibilities existed.”58 The possibilities to which Danner refers lie in the knowledge that the baby could be either Buck’s or Billy’s. Prior to being shipped to Vietnam, Billy “was home on leave in May”, when Jean threw him a “going-away party”. Kato attended the party, taking a picture of “Billy in uniform”. To trace dates running from the party in May 1970 to Kato’s baby, aged five months old in July 1971, indicates that the baby was conceived whilst Billy was home on leave. If Billy is the father then Phillips, through a coded formula that reappears in “Bess”, works to keep him alive. Kato tells Danner that “Even if it’s twenty years, I’ll think of him as gone. I can’t think of him as not alive.”59 The tension between incorporation and introjection, that manifests itself through floating in the novel, links to Phillips’ statement that “A book should pose an unanswered question that doubles back on itself, leading the reader more deeply into the book”. For Phillips, “Billy may be dead, or he may not be; Danner’s strong intuitive sense of him could speak to either truth”.60 Phillips’ writing moves between the two fates, as she carries forward the “unanswered question” 58

Ibid., 323. Ibid., 318-19. 60 Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 72-73. 59

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surrounding Billy into Fast Lanes, in the story “Blue Moon”. Fast Lanes deals with a generation of floaters – those who have left their homes and exist in “a realm of placeless streets”.61 Danner’s departure from Bellington in Machine Dreams effectively opens into the epigraph to Fast Lanes, “I have begun my freedom and it hurts”.

61

Fast Lanes, 38.

CHAPTER FIVE Structures of Retrospect: The Inescapable Past in Fast Lanes Either way, it’s a narrow stretch of road. The ground, without light to give it form, rises against my feet and rocks and trees brush past before words can mean anything. Outside themselves, the dead too, nameless and without bound, come closer, staking a claim.1

Phillips’ second collection of short stories pivots around the replacement of roots for routes. As in all of Phillips’ work, that replacement is fraught with difficulties. Whilst certain characters in Fast Lanes may leave West Virginia, following the routes laid out by the newly built interstates, their regional roots continue to stake “a claim” on their present lives. Phillips prioritizes that regional past as she organizes the stories chronologically but in a reversed sequence so that the first, “How Mickey Made It” is set in the 1970s while the last, “Bess”, though narrated in a quasi-present, concerns events taking place in the early 1900s.2 Inversely then, Fast Lanes, with its titular emphasis on speed and the movement away from West Virginia, actually provides the most obvious example of Phillips’ return to place. In effect, the inverse chronology produces a regressive sequence and places emphasis on “Bess” as the earliest or generative story. Just as the chronology regresses, so too does the stylistic nature of the stories. The fractured nature of “How Mickey Made It” reflects Phillips’ new realist style as much as it does the traumatic life of the central character, Mickey. The story opens with Mickey’s first person account: 1 Judy Jordan, “Hitchhiking into West Virginia”, in Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems (4th edn, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 24. 2 For a detailed analysis of “Bess”, see Chapter 1, 16-39.

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As the story continues Phillips disrupts the narrative with further midsentence capitalization, as well as with the bracketed comments offered by a quasi-third person voice. The story appeals to some of Phillips’ early, pre-Machine Dreams work, writing in which the characters are “not bound by an event or a past”.4 As Maya Koreneva argues, Phillips “constructs her characters by revealing the interaction of … words, actions, a general orientation to life, subconscious impulses, involuntary emotional outbursts – with large gaps between them, which become an essential part of the modern fragmented consciousness”.5 That consciousness often appears in fiction that has collected a number of labels during the last few decades including “dirty realism”, “k-mart realism” and more commonly “new realism”.6 “How Mickey Made It” contains the traditional markers of such new realism including “the increasing emphasis on violence, sexual experimentation, drug use and urban despair”.7 James Annesley attributes the contemporary interest in such issues to “the dynamics of contemporary capitalism”.8 Throughout the fictional worlds that explore the contemporary state roam: “Dazed and distracted characters … [who lack] a clear sense of location, wondering, ‘Which world am I in and which of my personalities do I employ?’”9 The acceleration of life under late capitalism leads to the heightened sense of dislocation for characters like Phillips’ Mickey. As the opening story of the collection, “How Mickey Made It” falls amongst those 3

Fast Lanes, 3. Lyons and Oliver, “The Mystery of Language …”, 121. 5 Maya Koreneva, “Hopes and Nightmares of the Young” in Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges between (ex) Soviet and American Women, ed. Susan Hardy Aiken (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 269. 6 For a detailed discussion of Phillips’ use of new realist techniques, see Brian Jarvis, “How Dirty Is Jayne Anne Phillips”, Yearbook of English Studies, XXXI (2001), 192-204. 7 James Annesley, Blank Fictions (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 2. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 301. 4

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stories of Phillips’ that deals with characters, and indeed with styles of writing, that “are cut loose from all the conventions”.10 However, in Fast Lanes, Phillips makes a hasty retreat from the dark world explored in the first story back to “Bess”. The regressive movement of the collection echoes what Raymond Williams defines as a “structure of retrospect”.11 For Williams, the transition from a rural to an industrial society is seen as a kind of fall, the true cause and origin of our social suffering and disorder. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this myth, in modern social thought. It is a main source for the structure of feeling which we began by examining: the perpetual retrospect to an “organic” or “natural” society.12

The fact that country and town, agriculture and industry have often worked in collusion as well as discord prompts Raymond to term retrospective glances back to an earlier, more organic time as mythical, or as tainted with nostalgia. Of particular importance here is Williams’ account of a retrospective structure of feeling. As Phillips moves Fast Lanes back to the farming life of “Bess” the reader must question “not only the reality of the rural community” but rather, “the observer’s position in and towards it; a position which is part of the community being known”.13 Readers of Phillips’ work need to question why she repeatedly returns to the past in her work, as well as the extent to which her experiences outside of Appalachia shape her retrospective concerns. As established earlier, Phillips’ departure from West Virginia involved her movement away from a “customary life” as she experienced a “literary education”.14 Much of her writing attempts to “save” that customary life “from being forgotten”, a project evident throughout Fast Lanes.15 Indeed, the final story, set in 1900, contains distinctly agrarian concerns as Bess recounts the effects of increased modernization in the region. However, whilst the chronological recoil implies a nostalgia for a lost way of life, as with any Phillips’ story, “Bess” 10

Lyons and Oliver, “The Mystery of Language …”, 121. Williams, The Country and the City, 79. 12 Ibid., 121. 13 Ibid., 203. 14 Ibid., 240. 15 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 187. 11

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itself contains “unresolved issues and emotional dilemmas”.16 In that respect, Phillips does not depict an uncomplicated country life. According to Williams, in nineteenth-century city writing, “experience and community would be essentially opaque” whereas in the “country kind” the style would be “essentially transparent”.17 Phillips, writing a contemporary form of country tale in “Bess”, complicates the binary between city and country writing as she imbues her 1900 Appalachia with all the density apparent in the most contemporaneous story in the collection. Those characters in Fast Lanes who have moved beyond the confines of region, and who live in Phillips’ hedonistic 1970s, often look toward the past, or a secure version of the past, to give a sense of stability to their fragmented, present day lives. Phillips claims that: if you are dealing with the elements of a past, your past, someone else’s past, the past of a country, county, town, you are basically trying to redeem that past, trying to make it live again and save something of it. Save something. Keep something from fading away. Keep something real. Keep something from being forgotten. You are also trying to penetrate it, to really move into the center of it and understand it in a way you couldn’t when you were inside it. Redemption implies sin. There’s sin and there’s death, and death is a kind of sin. Things die, and things vanish, things change. Fiction holds things in place, lights things up long enough that we can see and feel and sense what might already be lost.18

Phillips’ language highlights the tension between moving away from, yet moving closer to, the past. She simultaneously states that distance is central to understanding the past in ways “you couldn’t when you were inside it”, whilst emphasizing the need to “penetrate” the past, to return to its “center”. The contradiction evident in Phillips’ sentence is also apparent in the narratives of Fast Lanes: stories that reflect dislocation, a distance from the rootedness of place, nevertheless work backwards into the past, returning in the final story to “Bess”.

16

Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 46. Williams, The Country and the City, 202. 18 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 187. 17

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“Bess”, as the generative story, “holds things in place”, acting as a stable yet troubled nucleus for both “Blue Moon” and “Fast Lanes”, stories joined together by either a direct or implied family history. The two later stories are pivotal to my reading of the collection – a reading that divides Fast Lanes into three time frames.19 “Bess” and “Callie” return the reader to the early decades of the twentieth century and portray the gradual breakdown of traditional forms of community. “Blue Moon”, set in the late 1960s, highlights the problematic nature of family relations and the emergence of a break from the West Virginian locale, issues also addressed in “Alma” and “Something That Happened”. “Fast Lanes” appears at the centre of the final group of stories, stories set in the 1970s and concerned with characters who have made the physical break with place that the previous stories work towards. My categorization of the collection is not intended to reduce Fast Lanes to a series of separate studies; rather, I would argue that the stories work together as a historical response to the unspoken primary scene that haunts “Bess”. As established, “Bess”, that begins at the turn of the century, reflects the effects of modernization on rural life and as the chronology progresses the stories move through Fordism and finally into what may be defined as a post-Fordist economy. Moving from “How Mickey Made It” back through the collection, I trace the effects of developing capitalism as reflected in the lives of the central characters. II Phillips states that “I’ve always been interested in the people who are outside the myth, because they are the ones for whom the myth exists”.20 Of all her characters, Mickey is one of the furthest removed from the myth of the nuclear family, with its attendant notions of stability. Mickey falls into the category of “characters … lost in the fractured narratives of current literature”.21 Alienated from his adopted parents, Mickey’s identity crisis, “how come I got such dark 19

I refer here to the second edition of Fast Lanes, published in 2000, that contains two additional stories, “Alma” and “Callie”. 20 Lyons and Oliver, “The Mystery of Language …”, 121. 21 Catherine Houser, “Missing in Action: Alienation in the Fiction of AwardWinning Women Writers”, Mid-American Review, XIV/2 (1994), 33-39.

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skin”, manifests itself in a number of ways, including time spent in a “Correction School”.22 Mickey comes to embody a generation: with his “Galahad punk” Mickey represents a period in time that Phillips regards as one of “mobility and aimlessness.” For Phillips, the drug culture of the seventies, unlike the sixties, was marked by a “business of obliterating yourself”. Interestingly in terms of Fast Lanes, Phillips regards the sixties at a time when “there was a feeling of real community”.23 Certainly, unlike the other stories in the collection isolation haunts “How Mickey Made It” as Mickey moves from relationship to relationship. For Phillips, then, Mickey’s sense of dislocation reflects life under late-capitalism. For Harvey, since the 1960s onward, “the first major consequence” of flexible accumulation “has been to accentuate volatility and ephemerality of fashions, products, production techniques, labor processes, ideas and ideologies, values and established practices. The sense that ‘all that is solid melts into air’ has rarely been more pervasive.”24 The opening story of Fast Lanes certainly captures such “volatility and ephemerality”. Indeed, the pacing of the story actually mirrors the speed and dislocation of Mickey’s existence: “Doncha like to walk down the street with, hmmm, doncha? Whoops, something tells me you’re not amused, not amused Hey well excuse me (dodging passerby with elaborate swoops and fast two-step skips) I’m part preppie, can’t help sliding through crowds, stay close now.” Following Mickey through the story takes the reader rapidly from one scene to the next. The story’s tempo is certainly far removed from the slow, detailed prose of “Bess”. Phillips presents such change as inevitable, as economically predetermined. However, she works to re-inscribe the temporary nature of life under flexible accumulation with an historical and regional bedrock. Phillips states: I have patterned my adult life on escape and redemption, escape being flight, movement, self-reliance, redemption being the circle back, the writing, the saving of a version of events that is

22

Fast Lanes, 6-7. Hill, “A 1986 Conversation with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 57. 24 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 285. 23

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emotionally real, that can’t ever recede or be lost. Escape is no longer possible; I no longer believe in escape.25

Phillips “begins the circle back” at the close of “How Mickey Made It”. The story never specifies what “it” is that Mickey makes, but his disavowal of his adoptive parents and his claim, “I’m a SINGER I don’t go for that commercial shit I’LL DO IT MYSELF THANK YOU”, indicates that he hopes to break from all restraints, including family ties.26 Indeed, he states, “I don’t have any memory before about age six. No, I DON’T remember any real parents.”27 The capitalization of his denial, “I DON’T” places too great an emphasis on his denial, effectively negating his assertion that he cannot recall the past. Mickey may hope to mentally disengage himself from his heritage, but he cannot physically escape his origins, his appearance containing traces of his Native American ancestry.28 Mickey undermines his attempts to break free of the past in his response to his lover’s claim that she can read his fortune. He tells her, “I believe in that shit, don’t scare me … turn out the light, I got something for you, do it in the dark if you’re going to do it”.29 Mickey’s fear reveals a belief that events are predetermined and his request that she does “it” in the dark, echoes the burial of cards in “Bess”. Even Mickey, who appears to be the most detached of Phillips’ characters in the collection, believes that his past may have already shaped his future. Kate, the narrator of “Rayme”, continues Mickey’s conviction over the power of cards as she recounts, in the opening line of her narrative, that in “our student days we were all in need of fortune tellers”.30 Whilst Kate suggests that she and her friends needed a sense of where they were going, the story implies that they look not to the future but to the past in order to find out the facts of their future.

25 Jayne Anne Phillips, “Premature Burial”, in Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers, ed. Joyce Dyer (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 217. 26 Fast Lanes, 4 (my emphasis). 27 Ibid., 11. 28 Ibid., 6. 29 Ibid., 17. 30 Ibid., 21.

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III In the closing lines of “Rayme” the narrator Kate wonders “Where were we all really going, and when would we ever arrive? Our destinations appeared to be interchangeable pauses in some long, lyric transit.”31 That “lyric transit” runs both forwards and back so that characters often find themselves turning to the past as they try to negotiate their way through the fractured worlds that Phillips creates. The nameless female narrator of “Fast Lanes” has seemingly achieved the distance from home that Danner desires in “Blue Moon”. Although unnamed, she shares enough similarities with Danner to be unknown yet knowable, disconnected yet connected to the West Virginia of “Bess” and “Blue Moon”. Significantly, a number of the narrators in these stories remain nameless highlighting the problematic nature of identity for those with confused attachments to place. The narrator of “Fast Lanes”, having moved beyond the region, nevertheless finds herself being drawn back to the homeplace. Indeed, the title story revolves around the narrator’s travels back to West Virginia to visit her sick father. She drives across country with Thurman, a carpenter, claiming that “When I met Thurman he was floating and I was floating home”.32 The term floater effectively situates the narrator alongside the characters that permeate the most contemporaneous stories in the collection. In “Rayme”, Kate recalls that she and her student housemates, “were adrift …. A group of us floated among several large ramshackle houses.”33 The narrator of “Fast Lanes” defines the “floater’s only fix”: I was free, it didn’t matter if I never saw these streets again; even as we passed them they receded and entered a realm of placeless streets. Even the people were gone, the good ones and the bad ones; I owned whatever real had occurred, I took it all. I was vanished, invisible, another apartment left empty behind me, my possessions given away, thrown away, packed in taped boxes fit into an available vehicle.34 31

Ibid., 30. Ibid., 36. 33 Ibid., 21. 34 Ibid., 38-39. 32

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Floating unmoors the characters, placing them outside reality in a “realm of placeless streets”. Hovering allows momentary resistance to the movement either away from or closer to their home place. Their mobile lives are possible, in part, because of the nature of their contemporary society. The floater’s reliance upon disposable goods echoes the move into flexible accumulation. Harvey, in his study of the transition from Fordism to “flexible accumulation” between 1965 and 1973 states that “individuals were forced to cope with disposability, novelty, and the prospects for instant obsolescence”. Harvey, employing Alvin Toffler’s theory of a “throwaway society”, argues that the sense of transience associated with flexible accumulation results in what Toffler defines as “‘a temporariness in the structure of both public and personal value systems’ which in turn provides a context for the ‘crack-up of consensus’ and the diversification of values in a fragmenting society”.35 Whilst the characters’ sense of floating may reflect their attempts to escape an increasingly fragmented society, their very floating depends upon the temporary nature of flexible accumulation. The narrator of “Fast Lanes” can move easily from one town to the next, leaving “another apartment … empty behind [her]” with her “possessions given away, thrown away”. The title of the story highlights the ephemeral nature of the character’s lives, as they drive across the country, past “placeless streets” and towns. Indeed, the road and the car act as key spaces within the story offering alternate notions of freedom and structure, of the escape from the home-place and the inevitable return to that place. The narrator contrasts the freedom of being on the road with the stasis of those people “who lived where they stood”. For the narrator, these stationary people lived behind road signs, “place names, streets, houses”, forming “points on a giant connect the dots”. Yet her own sense of freedom on the road depends on road signs. She claims: If I remember right, what we did was this: Rte. 25 from Denver to Albuquerque, 10 to El Paso, 20 to Dallas, 35 to San Antonio, back on 10 to Houston, Beaumont, New Orleans, 65 to Montgomery, 85 to Atlanta and Charlotte, 21 to Wytheville, Virginia, 77 to Charleston and West Virginia; passing through, escaping gravity in a tinny Japanese truck, an imported living quarters. 35

Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 286.

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Whilst the “imported” truck allows her to escape gravity, her retentive listing of the route sets limits on her floating.36 Her commentary also focuses on Thurman’s truck, that as an import, marks a significant break from the cars driven by their parents. At Thurman’s parents house: “An old Chevy station wagon sat on blocks in front of the garage. Thurman and I sat in the driveway, in the cab of the Datsun, looking.”37 Their view through the imported glass magnifies shifts in tradition and marketplace. As established, although nameless, the narrator shares many of the characteristics of Phillips’ other major female characters including, Danner Hampson. In “Blue Moon”, Danner remembers that her father’s cars were “never luxurious; they were unadorned, American, massive”. Danner recalls that in the car, “The outside world … seemed like a movie we were voyaging through, and the room of the car was a kind of inviolate space”.38 “Fast Lanes” repeats the image of driving through a movie as the narrator recalls that “it was good driving into the movie”, since the “windshield” protected her as she watched “the continual movie past the glass”.39 The car, whether American or Japanese, offers feelings of safety within an enclosed space, yet the influx of foreign goods into the U.S automobile market marks a significant historical change. Harvey proposes that the change was partly caused by economic revival within other countries. By the mid-1960s, “the West European and Japanese recoveries were complete, their internal market saturated, and the drive to create export markets for their surplus output had to begin”.40 The narrator and Thurman, driving in an imported car in the fast lane of the highways that bypass local communities, epitomize the acceleration of life within a system of flexible accumulation. The narrator highlights the transition from the stability of earlier generations to the transient nature of her generation of floaters when she and Thurman discuss her origins. In reference to the workingclass population in West Virginia she claims that 36

Fast Lanes, 39-44. Ibid., 48. 38 Ibid., 129. 39 Ibid., 44. 40 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity,141. 37

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they stayed in one place and sank with whatever they had. But us – look at us. Roads. Sensation, floating, maps into more of the same. It’s a blur, a pattern, a view from an airplane.

However, despite her break from the confines of a locality, the narrator is, nevertheless, on her way home, back to the place where people “sank with whatever they had”. In Phillips’ collection of stories the past works to complicate the seemingly ephemeral life of the characters. The narrator’s family history alludes to Bess’ account of land loss: granted substantial lands in the 1700s, her ancestors “parceled it out for two hundred years of ten-children families, and only sold the last of it as [her] father was growing up”. Thurman challenges the narrator to provide a clear reason for her complex feelings concerning her return home, “What do you want? You want to sink, righteous and returned to your roots? Is that it?”. However, she believes that she cannot sink, telling him, “I don’t know how”.41 Her lack of density may reflect her life as a floater, moving from one town to another in an attempt to detach herself from the past. However, her inability to sink derives as much from her refusal to be weighed down as from any biological or psychological feeling of weightlessness. Staying over night in an apartment, the narrator claims that she cannot sleep in the bed with Thurman because “This mattress is too soft.” I moved away from him. “The sheets feel heavy. I’m going to sleep in the other room on the floor.” “The floor,” [Thurman] said. He lit a cigarette. “It’s a shame you can’t levitate, so that even the floor couldn’t touch you.”

She fears sinking into the soft mattress, weighed down by the “heavy” sheets. Such fear indicates that she not only feels unable to sink, but she actively avoids any constrictive objects. Thurman asks her to explain what she is “scared of”: “I don’t know. Going back.” “Explain. Tell Thurman.” “I can’t. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe, like living under blankets.” 41

Fast Lanes, 45-47.

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The Secret Country “Hot?” “Hot, but cold too. Shaking.” “Then don’t go back.” “I have to,” I said. “It doesn’t help anymore to stay away.” He stood up and went to the bedroom. I heard him pull the sheet off the bed in one motion, the sheet coming clear with a soft snap. He brought a pillow too, stood at my feet, and furled the white sheet out so it settled over me like the rectangular flag of some pure and empty country”. 42

Her adverse reaction to “going back” to West Virginia points to a complex relation with place. The narrator can only sleep under the sheet once Thurman pulls it loose from the bed, turning the material into a “flag of some pure and empty country”. For her, the sheet, tucked into the bed, represents regional constrictions, of being tied to place. Sleep comes only when she denies her connections to West Virginia, believing that she dreams the empty dreams of a pure country, untouched by social and economic realities. Despite her conviction that she has substituted routes for roots, the narrator continues to suffer physical effects related to her return home. Interestingly, for Phillips herself, “the pull home was so strong that if I didn’t leave I’d sort of freeze in place”.43 The notion of freezing in place recalls the fabricated Icie of “Bess” as well as the snow that recurs throughout Phillips’ work. Freezing repeatedly alludes to hiddenness, a hiddenness with distinctly regional markings. In the context of “Fast Lanes” the closer the characters get to West Virginia the more her flashes of coldness and heat intensify, implying that returning home is not a safe option. On reaching West Virginia, she links the cold with infancy. She remembered “a song that used to play on AM radio when I was gawky and twelve, the tallest girl in the class”: Be my little baby, Won’t you be my darling, be my baby now … I laughed. That’s what I was, a baby, a frozen six-year-old baby going back to the start of the cold.44

42

Ibid., 39-40. Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 185. 44 Fast Lanes, 58. 43

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Her memory works regressively, taking her back to “the start of the cold”. At twelve, the words in the song, “baby” and “darling” recall a “frozen” moment some six years earlier. The memory triggers a further recognition, involving someone calling her “baby” and “darling” – terms of endearment that operate as dual signifiers, in that both can be applied equally to child or lover. Whilst the source of “the cold” remains undefined, its onset is declaredly associated with the home place. Read in the context of “Bess” and Machine Dreams, the cold associated with West Virginia takes the reader to Icie and the snow that not only provides Bess and Warwick with an opportunity to commit incest, but that also obscures Mitch’s family knowledge. The intertextual densities of coldness imply that the narrator’s fear of going home relates to an endogamous moment. I use the term “endogamous” rather than “incestuous” in order to situate my argument within the historical and social context both of the story and of the collection as a whole. Certainly, I do not wish to imply that the narrator was physically abused, rather, that through an intense connection with one, or even both parents, the narrator felt suffocated, trapped by a family bond, and, therefore, inextricably connected with place. She alludes to the idea of suffocation when she tells Thurman that “Sometimes it’s hard to breathe, like living under blankets”.45 The smothering sensation connects with her fear of being tied to the region, tied by the endogamous desires of a parent or of a community that wishes to keep the child safe, frozen in time. Phillips, in relation to the bonds between adults and children in her second novel Shelter, argues: Children are very sexual, and they have something sexual to do with adults. It’s not necessarily abusive …. The connection between mothers and daughters particularly is very sexual in that it’s a merged identity, physically and emotionally.46

In “Fast Lanes” the narrator worries that she shares a “merged identity” with her mother, indicating that her negative response to the song lyrics, “Be my little baby, Won’t you be my darling, be my baby 45 46

Ibid., 40. Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 50.

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now” stems from her repudiation of a suffocating mother-daughter relationship. During the journey Thurman asks the narrator about her father but her mother is unmentioned, and as they arrive in West Virginia, she remarks, “I don’t want to see you meet my mother, none of that. All right? Please.”47 Her reasons for the ban may be associated with her own response to Thurman’s mother in Dallas: she saw in “Her profile … a broken, feminine version of his”.48 The narrator turns away from the noted resemblance, and refuses to allow Thurman the chance to discover a similar likeness between herself and her mother. For the narrator, who has spent time trying to escape her ties to any specific place, the return home, and more specifically the return to her mother, reminds her of what she cannot escape. Thurman, after convincing her to drive the truck, constantly reminds her to, “Check your mirrors. Always know what’s coming up on you.”49 The images in the rearview mirror act as reminders of the past – she can only drive forwards if she knows where she has come from. Irwin states that “there is a very real sense in which we can say that we live our lives by moving forward, but that we understand our lives, that we introduce causality into our lives, by moving backward”.50 Indeed, Phillips further emphasizes the need to acknowledge the past in “Rayme”. Kate recalls: All of us were consulting a series of maps bearing no relation to any physical geography, and Rayme was like a telephone to another world. Her messages were syllables from an investigative dream, and her every movement was precise, like those of a driver unerringly steering an automobile by watching the road through the rearview mirror.51

The collection itself reflects Rayme’s driving: the reverse chronology of the stories results in the reader’s awareness that the past (that which is behind us), distends the present (the moment of any 47

Fast Lanes, 59. Ibid., 53. 49 Ibid., 43. 50 John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 72. 51 Fast Lanes, 27. 48

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particular story). The collection radically changes when read again, particularly given that in a second reading one knows the end in the beginning, creating a rear-view reading. IV As Fast Lanes pivots around the replacement of routes for roots, “Counting”, one of three new stories published in the second edition becomes the medial point for the clash between the old and the new. The story effectively acts as an interruptive force within the collection.52 Although the contents page offers a page reference for the beginning of “Counting”, the story itself contains no page numbers. Pagination ceases to exist after the close of “Fast Lanes” on page 59 and does not reappear until “Bluegill” begins on page 87. Unlike the additional two new stories, “Callie” and “Alma”, stories that fit into the pre-existing narrative framework, “Counting” acts as a gap in the text. Numerically absent, yet otherwise present, “Counting” is separated into twenty-one, single page, individually titled, sections. In contrast to other elements in the collection, “Counting” is narrated in the third person, following the relationship between a nameless couple. In effect, “Counting” floats between the inherent connection to place highlighted by the stories that follow (stories that lead back to “Bess”), and the move away from region in the preceding stories. Whilst attempting to address the complex nuances of the story, my reading of “Counting” will focus, more specifically, on the characters’ opposing relations to their individual home-places. The nameless she often appears to deny her past, in “10. Awake”, “She was awake, she wanted no knowledge”. Her disavowal of the past is pronounced in “13. Hired Help”, where “She tells her lovers she was never a child”. Like the narrator of “Fast Lanes”, having broken off the relationship in “11. Possessions”, “She packed her possessions in four large boxes. She would leave them with him and he would stack them in a closet.” The closeting of her material goods links to her repression of her family heritage. In “14. Heirs”, the reader discovers 52 I would like to thank Richard Godden, Tim Lustig and Claire Stocks for sharing their insights into the complexity of “Counting” and its relation to the other stories in Fast Lanes.

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that she “owns” the family farm, an ownership presumably, given the section title, gained through inheritance. However, despite her legal bond to the land, “she never goes back to claim it. The house falls in, drops its boards. At night she smells it settle.” Allowing the house to settle, she effectively leaves the past undisturbed, any secrets buried under the “boards”. The title of one of the sections dedicated to her, “3. Samsara”, highlights her attempts to forget the haunting reminders of her past. In Hinduism samsara refers to the never-ending cycle of birth, death and rebirth, or, in Buddhism, to the passage of a person’s soul into another body or state.53 Here, rebirth permits, at a surface level, the rejection of the darker elements in a character’s past, allowing him or her to continue without family or regionally grounded burdens. In “3. Samsara”, she discusses the inevitability of life in tones similar to those used by Bess, suggesting that to fight against a predetermined path is futile: “To cry is to resign yourself, she said”, telling him “that’s why you are bitter. You have accepted so little.” Accepting change, or the transition into another state (rebirth), allows one to make a break with the past in order to effect a successful displacement. The continual cycles of birth, death and rebirth create a sense of timelessness because time never truly ends. In “4. Ambergris”, “She wore a toy watch around her wrist on a narrow ribbon”, as she strives towards forgetting she does not require real time, a time that would place her in history, the very history she wishes to escape. In the same section, he tells her, “I supposed we were born with desires …. She laughed. We are born with nothing, she said.” However, despite her efforts to situate herself outside history, when, in “13. Hired Help”, she recalls telling her lovers that she was never a child, she thinks “But 1946”. The narrative encounters an interruption – at the moment she denies her childhood, Phillips introduces a specific date. The year 1946 marks her move into womanhood, a transition speeded up by a metaphorical attack against her developing femininity. That year her father “hired help to pick the fruit”. The men employed were drifters, veterans from World War II. Phillips provides a description of one man in particular who had a dead leg 53

I will address the notion of completed passages or rebirth more closely in Chapter 9, 220-23.

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that meant when “climbing, he moved its dumb weight each rung”. The following paragraph begins: “At night the workers were ravenous. Over supper he watched her, thirteen in her mother’s housedress” (my emphasis). The “he” is a shifty signifier that may refer to the worker with a “dead leg” or her father.54 However, in the paragraph she collapses the hired hands into one, anonymous unit, “the workers”, implying that the unspecified “he” may be her father. At thirteen, an age associated with puberty and, in addition, the number of the “Hired Help” section, she wears her mother’s “housedress”, showing signs of her emerging sexuality. Noticing her, dressed in adult clothes, “he” grabbed her and said: Look here girl, this is what you are. And the bitterness was red, with a rim …. He held out a bowl of the fresh picked cherries. Squeezed one with his thumb. The dark pit sliced the skin. It seemed to surge.

Given the common link between cherries and virginity (or the hymen), and the specificity with which “the dark pit sliced the skin”, “he” may be thought, in the colloquial phrase, to “pop her cherry”. Whether the “he” refers to the migrant worker or to her father, the popping of the cherry merges the girl’s sexuality with the farm’s economic production. If the “he” refers to the hired help then his slicing of the cherry serves as a direct attack against her father’s produce, both literally in the shape of the cherry and metaphorically in the form of his offspring. Such an attack highlights the instability of the farm: the daughter’s sexuality indicates that she will move beyond an endogamous attachment to the land through an exogamous sexual union. Again, with reference to her sexuality, if her father is the unspecified “he”, then the attack on his daughter may be read as an attempt to save the farm’s production through an endogamous union. Phillips addresses his fear of losing the farm in the following section, “14. Heirs”.

54

Here I quote the passage in its entirety in order to exemplify the shiftiness of the pronoun. After the references to both her father and the worker in the opening paragraph, the second paragraph reads: “At night the workers were ravenous. Over supper he watched her, thirteen in her mother’s housedress. Later he picked his teeth, blunt nails pearled by the light of the lamp. Caught her arm and pressed it.”

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The father believes his farm is doomed to fail because he has no sons to carry on the family business. She recalls that her father “wanted boy children”: Ageing, her mother birthed stillborn twins. The old man kept them in formaldehyde for a week. Kept a light burning on wooden steps to the basement where he kept his traps and fish hooks. He didn’t show it to anyone, only the family and the neighbors. He held up the jar and big tears rolled down his face. My sons, he said. Their penises were like tiny fingers bruised the color of bowels.

The dead twins end the possibility of male heirs, effectively setting into motion the eventual collapse of the farm and the farmhouse itself. Showing the preserved babies to “the family and the neighbors”, those with an vested interest in what happens to the farm, the father highlights his conviction that his land will go to ruin. The “penises”, the colour of “bowels”, indicate that the farm will turn to shit rather than passing to male heirs possessed of the ability to procreate. After the twins’ death, “her mother locked the door against [her husband]. This country, she always said, will fall from within.” In the story, sons represent the maintenance of the status quo in so far as male heirs would guarantee the survival of the farm and thereby counter change. However, as in “Bess”, the daughter represents the potential for change, associated with movement via exogamy, where marriage in Phillips’ collection involves a break away from place precipitated by modernity and the industrialization of regional ways of life. In “Counting”, with the brothers dead and unable to keep their sister within the family, only the father remains as a potential instigator of an endogamous union that would save the farm. When the mother locks herself prophetically away, she simultaneously points to the potential father/daughter incest that in its very attempt to save the farm, will inevitably result in “The house fall[ing] in, drop[ping] its boards”. Despite the narrator’s attempts to situate herself outside of history, and therefore beyond the burdens of her family inheritance, her narrative negates the possibility of such an escape. For her, “But 1946” will always return to haunt. Her sections ultimately serve to question the possibility of breaking free, and indicate that even if one travels in the fast lane, one cannot escape the pictures seen in the rear-view mirror.

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In opposition to her endeavours to blank out the past, he constantly returns to his childhood memories in sectional titles such as “16. Knots” and “18. Circle”, titles that suggest a sense of continuity, of things bound or linked together. Around her, he begins to recollect a series of images from his youth. In “4. Ambergris”, the reader discovers that “she was a dancer” who “trained her own company”, an occupation further explored in “8. Dancers”. In section eight he watches her practice: Smooth slap, her foot on the lacquered floor. He watched her move. In his mind he stroked her thigh. Muscled flank hard in his hand. His fear of large sexual animals, mute, expecting.

Such “fear” necessarily takes the reader to “Bess” and the animalistic imagery of the Claude scene. As previously argued, Phillips’ repeated allusions to horses offers a route back to the past, a route often negotiated through the juxtaposition of horses and sexuality. Indeed, in “8. Dancers”, he continues to watch her: She moved at the bar, rippled her thighs. Horses. Pounding track at a country show. Blue flies bit women in hats. Children then were savage, hurt each other in the grass. Women tongued their teeth in the heat, touched his private throat.

References to “Horses”, the “country show” and to how things were “then” all serve to place his thoughts in a historical and regional context. Significantly, his memory of “women” who “tongued their teeth” reappears in altered form in “11. Possessions”, that notes that when she prepares to leave him: She bit her lips. Nervous. Or her fingers. Angry he grabbed her hands. He remembered his mother’s red mouth, looking up at her as a child. Flecks of lipstick on the edges of her teeth.

His lover reminds him of his mother, of those women at the country show, sexualizing his connection to his mother, a sexuality that he renders violent. In “5. Mosquitoes”, Phillips refers to the “hard edge to their fucking”. In the same section he realizes that she is ready to leave

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him, “But he held her, knew how to use his hands. Knew weapons and how to use them.” His hands control both her sexuality and weapons, merging the two together. Later in the same section he cuts the branches of a tree with a “loud saw”: He worked slow, gained an angle for the teeth. Sliced the tree in lengths and split each piece. Exposed to the heart, the damp white wood had the look of flesh. (My emphasis.)

His use of the mechanical “teeth” to expose the wood’s flesh-like centre, highlights the connection between teeth and violence, teeth that touch the interior of the wood in a manner that recalls the women who “tongued their teeth in the heat, touch[ing] his private throat”. His imagined sensation of a tongue “touching” his throat necessarily silences him, making him temporarily “mute” like the “large sexual animals” that were “mute, expecting”. I would argue that his violent sexuality, in conjunction with his childhood memories, connects to his family’s aggressive appropriation of land. He returns home in “16. Knots”, a title that effectively offers a solution to his feeling “at loose ends”. His family “are old. Even the cousins are sixty, all of it old. They are small town aristocrats of dwindling means.” His mother tells him that “He would be glad you came …. He would be glad you have come, his son”, implying that his father is dead. As the son and heir, his mother, in “19. Guns”, gives him: “a ring inlaid with pearl and a derringer which fits his hand like a musical instrument. She tells him his ancestor carried the gun when the land was only territory.” He potentially carries the vestiges of his ancestor’s original acquisition of the land, an acquisition achieved through violence or stealth rather than wealth. He recalls that “Back then they all died of typhus”. Typhus, transmitted to humans through a bite from an infected lice or tick, brings into focus section “5. Mosquitoes”. The “Blood suckers”, transmitters of disease, pervade the section in which the reader learns that he “Knew weapons and how to use them”. His knowledge of weapons, and the grace of his grip on the derringer, that “fits his hand like a musical instrument”, reflects his ancestor’s use of the gun to control the land. His own violent sexuality may be seen as a contagious transference, originating in the disease ridden ancestor. In “21.

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Bridge”, he drives over the town’s suspension bridge, on which “the steel is” still “buckled where one of his father’s drivers pitched into the water”. He remembers his father waking him up to tell him, “we have the river to drag”. As he thinks back to that night he recalls the “truck hauled up”, breaking “water … stream[ing] like something live. Its blunt snout. He shivered on the bridge, aware of his contracted sex, and something gave way.” At the time of the incident he was “perhaps fourteen”: his position on a suspension bridge situating him between childhood and emergent adulthood. That he defines his adulthood, or his “sex”, as “contracted” may relate to his contraction of family burdens passed down from a typhoid-infected ancestor. The disease, related to the unlawful procurement of land, sent down through the family in the shape of an aggressive sexuality, contains echoes of Warwick’s contamination in “Bess”. The male character’s family life in “Counting” reflects a complex attachment to place that Phillips sets up in “Bess”. In “18. Circle”, he has completed a circle back home, attending, instead of a country show, a circus that “camps in town”. In the “afternoons he walks the grounds”: [He] watches the animals. A demented lion rolls its head at the bars for hours. Rancid, stinking of meat. He sees its manged head circle, one round eye that keeps going.

The lion’s dementia may stem from the continual circular movement of its head, a movement that reflects his own return home, and the constant return of childhood memories. The circular motion ultimately reflects the shape of Fast Lanes as Phillips takes her readers back to the early 1900s through a series of inter-related moments that highlight the very changes that resulted in the move away from West Virginia. Indeed, although “Counting” acts as a hinge in the collection between the inescapable return to the homeplace and the attempts to deny that place, both his and her stories ultimately suggest that the past is inescapable. V The narrators’ moves towards home in “Fast Lanes” and “Counting” form one stage in a regressive drive to the womb, dealt with in

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“Bluegill”. Unlike “Fast Lanes” that presents a negative response to regional connections, “Bluegill”, whilst set outside of West Virginia, nevertheless strives to integrate elements of the past into a relocated setting. As such, “Bluegill” marks the collection’s movement back towards “Bess”. The unnamed narrator of “Bluegill” directs her story towards her unborn child. As Susan Squier notes, the narrator defines her relationship with the foetus in economic terms, drawing herself and the unborn child together in “a number of more or less economic relationships: employment, marriage, a bargain”.55 Squier proposes that “Bluegill” supports “the notion that a complicated relationship exists between the gestating woman and the foetus, a relationship that has social and political dimensions”.56 Whilst Squier’s observations provide a useful starting point, she discusses the story outside the historical context of Fast Lanes, a context that ultimately shapes the political and social elements within the story itself. The mothers in “Bluegill” and “Bess” stand in contrasted economic relation to their illegitimate offspring. Bess, bound by the ties of family and community, relinquishes the right to motherhood. She recalls that her “boy grew up believing I was his aunt and Warwick his father”.57 The decision to name Warwick as Mitch’s father underlines the importance placed on paternity. In contradistinction, the narrator of “Bluegill”, separated from home place and family, challenges the need to name the father of her child. She tells the foetus, “there were many fathers”, and her description of the various men includes the spaces in which they work: “Men cursed in heavy accents, living in motor hum of the big dishwashers”, “men across hallways, stair rails, men with offices”, “men in elevators, white shirts ironed by a special Chinaman on Bleecker.” Despite her specificity, the narrator ultimately reduces the men to a generic figure and that one man fathers the foetus, “all of it men and faces, progression, hands come to this and you, grown inside me like one reminder”. Her purposes appear mythic as she seeks a paternity suited to legendary form. She tells the foetus: 55

Susan M. Squier, “Fetal Voices: Speaking for the Margins Within”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, I/10 (Spring 1991), 30. 56 Ibid., 19. 57 Fast Lanes, 185.

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I’ll say your father was a horse, a Percheron whose rippled mane fell across my shoulders, whose tight hide glimmered, who shivered and made small winged insects rise into the air. A creature large-eyed, velvet. Long bone of the face broad as a forearm, back broad as sleep. Massive. Looking from the side of the face, a peripheral vision innocent, instinctual.

The legendary father stands in contrast to the men she will detail. She sets her anthology of possible fathers on the road, detailing her journey through men as starting in “a truck”, ending “in a long car with mechanical windows”, with, in between, “faces in many cars, road maps”.58 The narrator of “Bluegill” desires, as do other females in the collection, to escape the confines of home, hence the vast array of places and people she recounts. In contradistinction, the mythic space she creates returns her to a sense of history located in an agricultural past. The narrator’s choice of the “Percheron” indicates a desire for a lost past. Percherons were popular in the United States during the late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth and they were mainly used as farm horses. A 1930 census showed over 70% of the purebred draft horses in America to be Percherons, and indicated that every major land grant school in America maintained a stable of the breed. Percheron were viewed as “the most economical source of farm power”. With mechanization the strain faced extinction. However, nostalgia for an earlier form of production effectively re-established the Percheron during the 1960s, so that such animals are now used “on small farms” and for “working in the fields and thousands are used for recreation such as hayrides, sleigh rides and parades”. 59 The horse exists as part of a sustained simulation of “earlier times”. Harvey argues that “The revival of interest in basic institutions (such as the family and community), and the search for historical roots are all signs of a search for more secure moorings and longer lasting values in a shifting world”.60 However, he goes on to state that 58

Ibid., 91-92. Official Site for the Percheron Horse Association of America, vers. May 17, 2005, Percheron Horse Association of America, 13 July 2005 . 60 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 292. 59

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such a search often results in notions of “tradition”, “at worst … produced and marketed as an image, as a simulacrum or pastiche”. Such simulation indicates that the narrator’s classification of Bluegill’s father appeals to the idea of insemination by simulacrum. In addition, the choice recalls “Bess”, where although the breed is unnamed, the specified horses carry out what might be thought Percheron functions. Bess recalls sleigh rides in the winter and she and Warwick prepare horses for the Independence Day Parade. Harvey notes: It is difficult … to maintain any sense of historical continuity in the face of all the flux and ephemerality of flexible accumulation. The irony is that tradition is now often preserved by being commodified and marketed as such. The search for roots ends up at worst … [recovering] imitation communities constructed to evoke images of some folksy past [in which] the fabric of traditional working-class communities [is] taken over by an urban gentry.61

Phillips’ Percherons exemplify her bid for continuity through simulacrum. Harvey argues, however, that the attempt to reconnect with a lost past inevitably relies upon a series of images. Nostalgia for a traditional working-class way of life may result in an idealization of that past in which images effectively displace the realities of that existence. I would argue that the recurrent transposition of horses and sexuality throughout the collection reveals individual characters’ disconnection from the past and their attempt to retrieve what they have lost. As the collection continues readers begin to enter that lost world as they move into the Hampson family story in both “Blue Moon” and, finally, “Bess”.

VI For Phillips, writing is an attempt to make the past “live again and [to] save something of it” and the continuity of much of her work denies “death” or completion. For example, Billy Hampson, who 61

Ibid., 303.

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goes MIA in Vietnam at the end of Machine Dreams, reappears in Fast Lanes, in the story “Blue Moon”. The story goes back to Billy’s high school days, effectively returning to the past in order to circumvent the possibility of his death. The continuation of the Hampson family story again works retrospectively in the light of Machine Dreams, allowing Phillips to expand and alter the family’s history. Phillips argues that she sees her work “all of it, as a continuum …. Billy may be dead, or he may not be”.62 “Blue Moon” appeals to the contradiction that even if he is dead Phillips’ writing keeps him alive. As a self-contained short story within the collection, “Blue Moon” draws distinct parallels with “Bess”. The stories are separated by fifty or sixty years yet the brother/sister relationship shares similarities with the sibling bond established in “Bess”. I do not wish to suggest that “Blue Moon” contains an encrypted moment of incest but I intend to explore why Danner and Billy’s relationship reflects that of their grandparents. Danner’s narrative returns readers of Machine Dreams to 1968, where, with her opening words, “My brother”, Danner declares Billy as the subject of her story. Danner recounts that Billy “was a gymnast, the best in the Tri-County area; he refused to perform on any equipment but the trampoline”.63 Billy’s trampoline contains Warwick’s tightrope – both pieces of equipment raise the issue of space. As one of Billy’s “texts on trampolines” states, “Trampolining Develops a Sense of Relocation”.64 A sport that offers “a sense of relocation” takes on a social context in a collection centred on the move away from place. Danner thinks that in the air Billy grew away from himself: only when he lands does he “suddenly become himself again”. Danner claims that she could not watch Billy practice because, “If I looked at Billy, I wouldn’t be able to look away”.65 She thinks that the gymnastic meets “seemed to be held in secret”, and at strange hours. The clandestine nature that Danner attributes to the sport contains echoes of Warwick’s secret pastime in “Bess”.66 Recalling one of the 62

Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 72. Fast Lanes, 127. 64 Ibid., 145. 65 Ibid., 128-35. 66 See Chapter 1, 31-32. 63

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meets that she attended, Danner remembers watching Billy, as a beginner, on the horse: he swung his legs like lethal weights, as though the lower portion of his body could be manipulated at will. There was the hard, firm slap of his hands grasping the pommels, switching off, one leg after the other scissors-kicked high and straight. He moved with clean, violent force, splicing air.67

Billy’s gymnastics re-enact Warwick’s attempts to walk the tightrope, indicating a desire to be above the ground. Bess remembers looking “through dense summer leaves” seeing her “brother totter magically just above the groundline”:68 Danner similarly recalls how Billy “looked like a beautiful object, hurtling end-to-end along a fall of air”.69 Whilst Warwick is restricted in his attempt to be above the ground (he must follow the direct line of the rope or else fall), the trampoline allows Billy temporarily to defy gravity: the preposition “along”, in the phrase “along a fall of air”, briefly halts the downward trajectory. In the air, Billy temporarily breaks ties with the ground. In the male Hampson line, Billy repeats and supersedes his grandfather’s actions. Warwick is active in his own autochthonic endogamy – he jumps down from the tightrope to the earth, down from potential exogamy into an inevitably endogamous relationship with Bess. Indeed, the earth to which he returns effectively kills him, or to use Bess’s phrase, the cave-in in the mine “probably suffocated” Warwick.70 Billy reaffirms the genealogical cycle, willingly submitting, in Machine Dreams, to the lottery that will decide whether he would go to Vietnam: “He would take his cue from the numbers …. Numbers were his plan while the holding pattern held.”71 Shot down over Vietnam, Billy remains suspended in the air, as “the plane falls, year after year, to earth”.72 He, unlike his grandfather, will not necessarily return to the ground. 67

Fast Lanes, 140-41. Ibid., 175. 69 Ibid., 135. 70 Ibid., 183. 71 Machine Dreams, 249. 72 Ibid., 331. 68

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In contrast to the autochthonous position of both Warwick and Billy, Bess and Danner move away from their home places. Indeed, both sisters actively work to keep their brothers on the ground, indicating that the brothers’ stasis guarantees the sisters’ mobility. In Machine Dreams Danner recalls a game that she and Billy played as children, “Our game was to pile the leaves up very high: one of us got inside, buried to the shoulders, while the other ran and jumped on top”. Danner remembers how she always wanted to cover Billy with as many leaves as possible, “hiding him deeper and deeper” until “he was secret, buried, warm. Until he was nowhere.”73 In as much as Phillips’ writing works to “Save something. Keep something from fading away …. Keep something from being forgotten”, so Bess and Danner work to keep their brothers fixed in time, immune to historical change. John Irwin notes in his study of incest in Faulkner’s writing that there is a “temporal aspect of incest – the way in which incidents of incest or of incestuous attachment recur at intervals within the same family”. 74 For Irwin: the temporal aspects of … incest evoke the way in which the circle of the self-enclosed repeats itself through time as a cycle, the way that the inability to break out of the ring of the self and the family becomes the inability of successive generations to break out of the cyclic repetition of self-enclosure.75

In Fast Lanes, the prohibited desire between brother and sister points to a “ring of the self and the family” that traps the men rather the women. Just as Bess’ first husband, “Thorn”, acts as a temporary blockage between Bess and Warwick, in “Blue Moon” Kato, Billy’s girlfriend, impedes the potential desire in Danner and Billy’s relationship. Kato Black, motherless and living in “the lawless den of her dad’s pool hall” poses a social, if not a racial, sense of otherness (my emphasis). Danner feels an inexplicable attachment to Kato, believing that when Kato thought of Billy “by extension, she thought of me”: so that in effect, Kato is a vessel for a union of siblings. 73

Ibid., 326. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge, 81-82. 75 Ibid., 59. 74

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In her homeroom Kato tears out advertisements from magazines and offers them to Danner as cryptic messages. Kato’s perception of her role in the sibling relationship is encoded in the labels she attributes to the models in the advertisements. She not only couples the brother and sister, but she also designates herself as their driver. Danner remembers one advertisement in for a Lincoln that showed: a couple lounging against the car, the woman in furs, the man in formal dress. A uniformed chauffeur waited, smiling, his arm draped over the hood of the impossibly long silver car. “Me,” Kato had written across his chest, and on the couple, “you and Billy.” Underneath: “off for a night on the town”.

Kato, perceiving herself as the chauffeur, recognizes her class status in the community, “she wasn’t like the rest of us”. Her messages force Danner to interpret a series of codes wrapped up in the “glossy pages”. In one particular advertisement for champagne: A woman sat alone at a table in a diaphanous robe, touching her fluted glass; behind and below her, a couple walked along the beach, their backs to the camera, holding identical glasses. Kato had written, in block letters across the bottom, “your house!” No one was labeled and for a minute, pausing at the big trash can by the door of my soc.class, I wondered who was who. Then I folded the paper in half and threw it away quickly, as if it constituted some evidence against Kato, or maybe against me.

By leaving the figures in the advertisement unlabelled, Kato subverts Danner’s assumptions about herself and her family. In Kato’s understanding of the Hampson “house” only three characters constitute the “family”.76 Her triangulated view of the Hampson household contains two possible readings. Given her position within the sibling relationship, Kato, Danner and Billy may constitute the three figures in the advertisement, Kato’s presence safely filtering an otherwise endogamous house. Alternatively, “your house” can be read as the Hampson household, with the term operating as a synonym for family. Mitch is the absent second male in the picture. Mitch is absent from the surface world of commodity 76

Fast Lanes, 131-33.

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aesthetics because his attachment to manual labour places him in the realm of the unseen. He, in effect, represents the labour hidden within the commodity. Pfeil, in his critique of the Baby Boom generation and the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC), provides a useful account of commodities and production – one that may help in understanding Mitch’s absence from Kato’s scene. Barbara and John Ehrenreich define the PMC “as consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations”.77 The growth of the PMC during the 1950s and the 1960s expanded the market for capitalist production. As members of the working class increasingly transgressed social and economic boundaries to enter the PMC they became the target for what Pfeil defines as the “commodification of daily life”. For Pfeil, increased commodification and the “withering of the entire public sphere” caused by “suburbanization and the spread of tv” transformed the “Father into an increasingly diminished and abstract principle”.78 When Jean sarcastically asks Danner where Mitch is “at this time” every day, Danner replies: “I don’t know. I don’t know where he is even when he’s here …. Sometimes he and I are home at the same time, and I don’t even know it.” Mitch is absent from the family home, notably the home in town for which Jean pays. In the move from the house he built to the house paid for by his wife, Mitch is relegated to the basement. Jean sleeps in the basement but Mitch uses the “dark and depressing” room as his living space.79 Mitch, unlike Warwick and Billy, passively accepts the historical and economic changes that affect him. Mitch’s passivity effectively excludes him from the cycle in which his father and his son participate. He represents a break in the male line, a break that reflects the distinct social changes that shape the stories after “Bess” and “Callie”. As was previously indicated, Mitch’s birth precipitates the failure of endogamy as a figure for the preserved unity of family and farm. He is the first generation of 77

Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional Managerial Class” in Between Labor and Capital: The Professional Managerial Class, ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 12. 78 Pfeil, “Makin’ Flippy-Floppy …”, 267-68. 79 Fast Lanes, 137.

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Hampson men to leave the family property. In contradistinction, Warwick’s death places him outside change; he is buried in the earth that his family subsequently leave and sell to “Eastern businessmen”, the same land that Mitch returns to as a salesman, selling goods to the strip mining companies.80 On his return he notes how the “land was all changed, moved around”.81 In contrast to Warwick’s escape from change, Mitch’s sales job places him in the economic process behind the destruction of his family’s land. The link between Billy and Warwick occurs as the grandson tries to revert to a masculine ideal from which his own father is detached. Irwin argues that in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! “The question of whether Quentin can assume an active, masculine role is essentially the historical question of whether any male descendant of the Compson family after General Compson can avoid repeating the General’s failure and defeatism and avoid passing it on to the next generation”.82 Billy’s relocation in the air places him outside of the social forces that emasculated Mitch, effectively bypassing Mitch as he echoes the actions of his grandfather. As Warwick becomes present through Billy, the reader sees what de Certeau calls “a pirouette”, a genealogical ring caused by: “the return of a time that the spatial distribution of the characters did not know about. There is a whodunit form in which the past, by coming back, overturns an established hierarchical order.”83 The need to return to a past unaffected by change appeals to the contradiction within Fast Lanes: Phillips’ characters inadvertently return to the past, even as they physically detach themselves from West Virginia. In “Blue Moon”, Shinner Black tells Danner, “You kids are not like us. You won’t always live here. Already, you’re practically gone.”84 “Blue Moon” ends before Danner leaves for college but other stories in the collection, notably “Bluegill” and “Fast Lanes”, are narrated by nameless females whose histories are distinctly similar to Danner’s. These female protagonists are all, to greater and lesser degrees, disconnected from their home places. I propose that the sense of departure central to Phillips’ collection is structurally 80

Machine Dreams, 26. Ibid., 45. 82 Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge, 69. 83 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 85. 84 Fast Lanes, 155. 81

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determined by the loss of the family farm in “Bess” and by Bess’s subsequent move into town. VII Phillips, in the epigraph to Fast Lanes, signals the importance of escape, or departure, to the grouped stories. She cites the opening line of Alan Dugan’s poem, “Stability Before Departure”: I have begun my freedom and it hurts. Time opens out, so I can see its end As the black rock of Mecca up ahead. I have cut loose from my bases of support and my beasts and burdens are ready, but I pace back and forth across my right Of way, shouting, “Take Off! Move out In force!”, but nothing moves. I wait For a following storm to blast me out of here Because to go there freely is suicide! Let the wind bear my responsibility.85

Dugan’s poem highlights a contradiction inherent in the need to escape, a contradiction that Phillips addresses in her work. Despite a readiness to leave home and family – “I have cut loose from my bases of support” – the characters in the most contemporary of the stories, remain attached to, or seek a new sense of, family or community. As Dugan’s poem suggests, to depart “freely is suicide”; Phillips’ characters want neither to assume responsibility for a past they leave, nor for their experiences outside the boundaries of home. In “Blue Moon” Danner recalls how she “wanted to physically escape the fields of feed corn fanning out from the boundaries of the two-lane road, escape the valley and the worn hills”.86 Her need to narrate the story contradicts her impulse to escape, since narration itself returns her to the two-lane roads in West Virginia. The repeated imagery of country roads in the collection signals retreat to a lost place. Alma, in the story bearing her name, remembers her mother driving along two-lane roads, past large, successful farms and “many 85 86

Alan Dugan, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), my emphasis. Fast Lanes, 129.

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more” that “were scroungy and poor, the houses sagging”. She recalls that “when the interstate was built, none of them showed anymore, not the houses or the way people really lived”. The interstate allowed “outsiders” to pass through the region seeing only “the seemingly empty hills, rolling land dotted with strands of maples and oaks”.87 Bypassing local ways of life at high speed relegates small communities to the periphery and results in the decline of local business. Phillips describes how the “big highways that bypass[ed] town”, took a “constant stream of traffic out to the malls …. Meanwhile, the grocery stores downtown suffered, shut down, and closed.”88 The sense of change represented by the loss of the farm in “Bess”, and by Bess’s move into town is further enhanced by the decline of the town centre as a site of social and economic exchange. The views that Alma remembers seeing from the two-lane roads connect with her ability to imagine an older way of life. “Alma”, although not one of the stories in the original collection, nevertheless strengthens Phillips’ chronological purpose in Fast Lanes. As with the other stories, Alma narrates her tale in a quasi-present but recounts events that occurred in the early 1960s. She recalls her regular visits to Souders Department store while she waited for her mother, Audrey, who was involved in an extra-marital affair. Looking up, Alma notes: [how] the ornamental tin ceilings of the building hinted at an opulence of fifty years before, but now no one looked up; fluorescent lights hung down at a more reasonable height, and the wide marble stairs were never crowded. Everyone squeezed into the elevator in a profusion of boxes and perfumes.

The store reflects the effects of technology on individual behaviour – shoppers prefer the cramped space of the elevator to the “wide marble stairs” of the past. For Alma, the elevator is a “cage”, and as the cage moves “along its vertical route”, she remembers that “Through its lattice of steel triangles I watched our passage through the shaft itself and thought of tunnels, mining, a dark netherworld”. Alma’s “dark netherworld” reverses the elevator’s upward trajectory: she imagines “mining” down into the earth as the elevator climbs further from 87 88

Ibid., 120. Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 185.

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ground level. The elevator’s movement marks Alma’s own departure from her roots. The only conversation in the elevator belongs to “the youngest children … their voices whole and pure in the enclosure”, and Alma heard “their words and phrases as the lost, receding language of a home now far from me, and I understood that I was no longer a child”. The electrified ascent of the elevator detaches Alma from the past, a movement reflected in a recurrent childhood dream. Alma recalls that in the dream, “I’m walking through the house of my childhood, a Fifties style ranch house”. As the dream continues she recalls moving away from her parents’ bedroom, past the bathroom and her sister, Lenny’s, room, “desperately trying to keep my footing because the floor is moving and the walls are not stationary”.89 The moving floor, and the walls that “are not stationary”, recall Alma’s elevator ride in an associative chain that highlights the distinction between country roads and the interstates. Certainly, Alma’s description of the house moving beneath her contains Bess’s feeling, (after she spies on Warwick and their mother), that the “house moved beneath my feet, slipped and slid with a creaking like a ship, like we were all afloat”.90 Bess and Alma, both voyeurs, witness the instability of the foundations upon which they stand. Just as “Bess” signals the move from the farm and large families, so “Alma”, alongside “Blue Moon” and “Something That Happened”, marks the gradual shrinkage of the family, split by parental separation. The disintegration of family life reflected in these stories preface a pervasive sense of dislocation in the final part of the collection, comprising of “Bluegill”, “Counting”, “Fast Lanes”, “Rayme” and “How Mickey Made It”. In effect, Phillips’ glance back towards “Bess” may appeal to an earlier time but that time does not provide a stable foundation. As Phillips notes, “In the past families stayed together because there was a lack of options to do anything else. I don’t think that people were necessarily any happier.”91 A great deal of Phillips’ work centres around changing family dynamics as greater options become available to her characters, meaning that even a turn back to the earliest family in the collection does not guarantee safety or stability. 89

Fast Lanes, 123. Ibid., 177. 91 Hill, “A 1986 Conversation with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 58. 90

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Phillips states that “The stories in Fast Lanes, and in a lot of other work I’ve done, have been about the struggle to accept the fact that there is no safety”. In her second novel, Shelter, Phillips returns to West Virginia to examine the impact of the new “options” available to those living in 1960s America, and on the lack of safety in family relationships. She explores those ideas through the consciousness of children because “all children are violated”: That’s part of childhood. I don’t mean violated physically. Children, because they’re powerless and extremely impressionable, and part of their identity is interfacing with the world, are bound to feel violated.92

That sense of violation, either in relation to actual sexual abuse or to the damage caused by wider socio-economic factors is central to Shelter and forms the basis of my exploration of the novel.

92

Sarah Anne Johnson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, The Writer’s Chronicle, XXXIV/6 (Summer 2002), 6-9.

CHAPTER SIX Dislocations: Retracing the Erased in Shelter He filled some dirt between the logs and planted in some fern and kudzu, and he watered them with the bucket, every morning all through the heat, four trips from the water, holding the bucket to his chest with both arms. He thought in a while you wouldn’t be able to see the hole even if you were looking straight at it.1

Whilst “there are seemingly no limits to what [kudzu] covers or hides” not even the greatest amount of the vine can conceal the holes, cracks and fissures that haunt Phillips’ second novel Shelter.2 In the dark, Faulknerian3 world of Camp Shelter secrets come out to play in the “heat of noon”4 as well as in the “bruised … moonlight”.5 The trees, with their “darkened leaves and layered pewter depths” aptly reflect the density of Phillips’ prose.6 Such opaqueness derives as much from the setting and timeframe of the novel as it does from Phillips’ intention to write a “kind of interior book in which memory exists alongside reality”. With her concentration on interiority, both in terms of the enclosed limits of the camp as well in relation to the characters’ thoughts and dreams, Shelter is the most southern of Phillips’ texts to date.7 Not only could the setting of camp “be any isolated, mountainous Southern region”, but the actual writing style itself most resembles 1

Shelter, 273. Derek H. Alderman and Donna G’Segner Alderman, “Kudzu: A Tale of Two Vines”, Southern Cultures, VII/3 (Fall 2001), 54. 3 For an examination of the Faulknerian influences at play in Shelter, see Richard Gray, Southern Aberrations, 424-28. 4 Shelter, epigraph. 5 Ibid., 51. 6 Ibid., 18. 7 For a discussion of Shelter in relation to Eudora Welty’s writing, see Françoise Palleau-Papin, “L’Obscure Clarté De Jayne Anne Phillips”, Cahiers Charles V, trans. Benedict O’Donohoe, XXIX (December 2000), 95-107. 2

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that of earlier southern writers particularly Faulkner.8 For Richard Gray, Phillips, by “listening to the ‘voices’ of her characters in the full sense – that is, the voices inside as well as around them … seems to be following, and playing on, Faulkner’s example”.9 The Faulknerian influences are certainly most detectable in Phillips’ use of free-indirect discourse that merges the histories of the various characters. Phillips notes that “Plot moves out of voice for me; story is suggested in part by the rhythm of the language in which a narrative unfolds”.10 Shelter’s rhythm depends upon the movement in and out of different voices, so that each section contains an “intermingling of voices”.11 Those voices bring together the interior world of Camp Shelter and the external world of Gaither, and the past into the present. Past and present certainly intersect in the novel as the characters’ memories interrupt the daily events of camp life during a few July days in 1963. For Phillips, Shelter rests on “impressed memory and the past of all [the] characters”.12 Of importance here is the idea that all the individual memories join to create one “past”, a conflation that Phillips notes when she claims, “I don’t see [Shelter] as belonging to any one of the characters, it’s almost as though they share the same collision course, or they’re all drawn to a center, which is what happens at the water”.13 The water of Turtle Hole, as the nucleus of the novel, provides a pastoral “stage-set” for the characters as their narratives merge.14 Indeed, many of the characters’ pre-camp memories actually prefigure the eventual climax of the novel at Turtle Hole when the children meet their inner fears as reflected in Carmody, the camp’s very own “Captain Hook”.15 The characters’ shared “collision course” foregrounds the interpenetration of the four narrative strands appropriated to the central characters: the sisters Lenny and Alma Swenson, the country 8

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 188. Gray, Southern Aberrations, 424. 10 Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 74. 11 McKenzie, “Free Indirect Speech in a Fettered Insecure Society”, 154. 12 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 188. 13 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 49. 14 Shelter, 237. 15 For an interesting discussion of Shelter in relation to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, see Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 256. 9

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boy, Buddy, and the fundamentalist Parson. Each section is narrated in a free indirect voice as a species of the third person, offering a “God’s eye” view of the interior and exterior movements of the characters.16 Whilst all four narratives work to create the climatic scene at Turtle Hole, the narratives of the two sisters, Lenny and Alma, offer both a historical and regional insight into the final event. II I begin with the sisters because they each carry with them the weight of their parents’ failing marriage. Despite the fact that in the hardback edition of the novel Phillips divides Shelter by setting out who the characters are “In Gaither” and “In the Country”, in the text itself her recurrent interest in class and marital conflict infiltrates the leafy expanse of camp. Just as Danner Hampson is torn between the maternal and paternal in Machine Dreams, so Lenny and Alma are claimed by their father and mother respectively. However, whilst I allude here to Machine Dreams, it is important to note the differences between the family dynamics at play in each novel. Whilst Phillips gave voice to Mitch and Jean in her first novel, in Shelter the reader’s only understanding of the Swenson marriage between Wes and Audrey comes through their daughters’ narrative sections. Filtering the parents through the dreams and memories of the children allows Phillips to reveal how the daily practices of family life unwittingly shape the thoughts and actions of the children, leading to Lenny and Alma assuming “their parent’s unresolved issues and emotional dilemmas”.17 In effect, what the reader encounters through the temporal irruptions in the girls’ sections are distinct structures of feeling, feelings that exist “at the very edge of semantic availability”.18 Through her densely wrought prose Phillips portrays characters at the “very edge” of understanding, and for the Swenson sisters that understanding relates to the class struggle at the centre of their family experiences. That economic conflict echoes the parental split in 16

In “Buddy Carmody: His Kingdom”, Mam places a God’s eye over Buddy’s bed “because God’s eye never closes”. According to Mam, the eye “doesn’t think, it only sees and knows” (277). 17 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 46. 18 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 134.

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Machine Dreams that occurs as the blue-collar father fails to meet the expectations of a socially mobile wife. The Swenson marriage is additionally weakened as Audrey transgresses sexual limits in her desire for class mobility. Audrey, after feeling that she had “wakened up … and found [herself] in the wrong life” becomes involved with the father of Alma’s best friend, Nickel Campbell, a middle-class man who “comes from a good family”.19 In different ways, both sisters become privy to their mother’s infidelity and throughout the novel Phillips reveals the extent to which issues of class and sexual desire are the “tenor” of Swenson family life. Interestingly, Phillips’ use of the word “tenor”, however inadvertently, places emphasis not simply on the state of things, but also on the male voice. Both sisters, with varying degrees of subtlety, attempt to access the paternal legacy often denied to them by Audrey. In what follows I explore the “tenor” of the Swenson home, a rhythm that Alma, as her mother’s confidante, is most attune. Indeed, in this opening chapter on Shelter I focus specifically on Alma’s pursuit of knowledge, a search that foregrounds the other characters’ struggles to reconcile themselves to the darker elements of their family experiences. Alma moves between the external and the internal in the novel, between the external world of Gaither and the internal space of camp. Movement exemplifies Alma’s centrifugal position in the narrative. Her memory drifts from life at camp to numerous instances of and encounters from her life in Gaither, and then returns to the world the girls inhabit at camp: “In the quiet cabin, Alma could think about the Winfield bus station, how it smelled like peanuts and dirt.” During her imaginative transition to the bus station Alma recounts her mother’s secret meeting with Nickel Campbell, and remembers her hunger then, only to find that she “was hungry now, too”.20 The movement and the positioning of Alma between the worlds of Gaither and camp implies that she is one of the key sites within which the external and the internal meet. Consequently, Alma is a receptacle for knowledge. In relation to the other characters and the wider implications of the novel, it is necessary to ascertain not only what Alma knows, but also how she knows. 19 20

Shelter, 120-21. Ibid., 26-27.

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As previously mentioned, Phillips’ short story “Alma” was one of three stories added to the second edition of Fast Lanes.21 Phillips writes of “Alma”: That story, first published in Esquire, was written as I began work on a novel called Shelter. Two of the characters, Lenny and Alma, are sisters, and “Alma” was my first inkling of who they were before they arrived … at the isolated rural setting of the novel.22

Significantly, unlike the free-indirect discourse of the sections in Shelter, Alma narrates the short story bearing her name, recounting her childhood from an adult perspective. In the story, Alma remembers being eleven and thinking, “my name was a code for what happened when I said the word that was me”.23 In the novel, Alma acts as a code, as a container of various fragments of knowledge, fragments gained from an extra sensory perception of the people and things around her. Certainly, Alma constantly seeks the role of observer: Now Alma smiled, imagining how B wing must look from above, glimpsed from one of the lookouts along Highest trail. She thought of the Seniors as rugged angels, able to view the whereabouts of the younger girls at any moment. Alma knew she would spy on everyone if she were a Senior, on the girls and the counselors, on Frank, on Mrs. Thompson-Warner.24

Alma desires the role of spy and she frequently appears as a covert figure. She “watched her sister as a stranger might, a stranger in possession of stories and facts”,25 and while waiting for her mother in Souders Department Store in Winfield, she would watch the “salesgirls”: “It became her practice to observe them unnoticed, and try to overhear their conversations …. She learned to keep moving, be nearly invisible.”26 Alma’s watching results in her acquisition of

21

See Chapter 5, 141-42. Phillips, “Author’s Note”, Fast Lanes. 23 Fast Lanes, 109. 24 Shelter, 118. 25 Ibid., 108. 26 Ibid., 30. 22

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secrets that permeate her sections of Shelter. Indeed, “Alma was the only kid who knew more than most of the grownups knew”.27 In her first section, “Alma: The Black Field”, Alma’s connection with secrets is pronounced. She hears Lenny and Cap “speak in monosyllables, as though cartoons were some big secret”,28 and later at heritage class she learns about “Democracy and Communism”. Alma thinks that heritage class “was really about secrets”.29 From a child’s perspective Alma connects the secrets she knows with the secrecy surrounding Communism. She draws a parallel between “the cold war Mrs. T. talked about, all done with spies,” and “her mother’s mouth, closer than a kiss, saying silently secret, secret, and spy”.30 The link between “secret” and “spy” recapitulates Alma’s dual position as a watcher and a vessel for secrets. The reference to her “mother’s mouth” alludes to Alma’s anxiety over her mother’s affair with Delia’s father, Nickel Campbell. The affair, and its connection with death, in the form of Nickel’s suicide, establishes a reason for Alma’s secrecy. Alma feels “surrounded” by “Audrey’s voice and talk”.31 Audrey’s words break into Alma’s thoughts sporadically and remain unspoken due to her fear of the consequences of telling secrets. In the heritage class she is told that “Certain Americans have vanished without a trace” and that it is a “fact” that “the furnace of the Russian embassy burns at temperatures hot enough to cremate human bones”. The fate of “certain” Americans (presumably spies, given the Cold War context of the novel), relates both to Alma’s child-like acceptance that punishment necessarily attends covert activities, and to Nickel’s dead body. Alma makes a connection between the vanished Americans and the vanishing of Nickel in death. Nickel “had not looked real anymore”, his body was like “an empty doll with no man inside”.32 “Certain” Americans, Nickel among them, lack “bones”, resulting in a complex mourning process. Alma’s description of Nickel’s death

27 28 29 30 31 32

Ibid., 74. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 138-39.

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suggests disembodiment: he “disappeared”,33 and she imagines that he “had floated, floated away, out of his car into river water.”34 Nickel’s floating body recalls Billy, left suspended at the close of Machine Dreams. Just as Danner needs to keep her brother floating in order to circumvent his death, so Audrey refuses to acknowledge Nickel’s death. In the context of Shelter, Alma unwittingly partakes in Audrey’s incomplete mourning for Nickel. Audrey refuses fully to acknowledge her loss: she “plowed up the whole lower yard and planted, it was as though she still had Nickel Campbell, his absence, out there in the ground, and she kept it close beside her”.35 At the funeral home Audrey remains in the car claiming that “she couldn’t look at him [Nickel]”.36 At the moment of denying loss by her refusal to witness the body, Audrey sends Alma in her place. “Alma would have to sign” the condolence book on behalf of Audrey, literally marking her acceptance of her mother’s mourning. Audrey, displaced, is contained in her daughter’s [sign]ature. Alma consequently ratifies Audrey’s impacted mourning. Alma’s [sign]ature is the locus for the blocked mourning, and the sign incorporates two signifiers, “Alma” and “Audrey”. Mother and daughter signify not loss but blockage, a significance compounded by Phillips’ play on the word “sign” (“Alma would have to sign”) where sign indicates the silent communication of signing for the deaf. Failing to turn the loss into words, Audrey and Alma internalize the loss – because we do not know whether Alma signs her own or her mother’s name, both options and names remain possible, constituting an improper excess. The name “Alma” both displaces and contains the name Audrey, along with its incorporated corpse. Even Alma’s name, that means soul or essence, draws an analogy with her mother – her name constitutes one part of “alma mater” – the benign mother applied to universities. Alma is subsequently haunted not by a dead mother but by the death that her mother mourns. Audrey’s refusal fully to acknowledge Nickel’s death situates her in a process of incomplete mourning. Abraham and Torok’s distinction between introjection and incorporation addresses the complex nature of mourning that often 33 34 35 36

Ibid., 120. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 138.

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results in incompleteness.37 Audrey’s constant talk about, and recovery of, Nickel shows her need to fill the gap he left in her by denying that he has gone. Audrey’s words, however, do not imply introjection because her words maintain, rather, than address the gap. Audrey talks about Nickel in ways that circumvent her own guilt surrounding his death. She never acknowledges the possibility that her affair with Nickel caused him to commit suicide. Her words deny rather than accept. Audrey’s talk of Nickel and his death infiltrates Alma’s inner consciousness: the mother’s “voice” constantly “floating into Alma’s thoughts.”38 Alma imagines that Audrey’s voice is a “Phantom Radio” playing in her head, a voice “droning on” that “no one could turn off”.39 The haunting vestiges of Audrey’s words take the reader back to Machine Dreams and the “phantom phone” that Danner and Billy imagine will allow them to communicate without words.40 In both novels Phillips’ use of the term “phantom” holds certain parallels with Abraham and Torok’s notion of the transgenerational phantom. Phillips employs the word to describe Audrey’s voice, a voice that talks about Nickel’s death but simultaneously hides a refusal to mourn. Audrey paradoxically talks about not talking and so communicates with Alma in words characterized by repression and encryption. In interviews, Phillips has addressed the generational inheritance of parent’s unspoken issues in a manner that underlines my own analogy between the “phantom” voiced in her work and Abraham and Torok’s phantom. Phillips states that “There is an expansion that happens in all families. Children take on their parents’ unresolved issues and emotional dilemmas, and this comes out in all kinds of subtle ways.” In the same interview, she adds that the “taking on” of parental “issues” does not resolve those issues, but carries them like: “a burden – to keep their parents alive, in a sense. Parents may act in a particular way because of what they haven’t resolved in themselves.” For Phillips, the inheritance of parental “issues”, or secrets in the case of Alma and Audrey, is the “tenor of … family 37

Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernal, 125. Shelter, 70. 39 Ibid., 120. 40 Machine Dreams, 303. 38

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life”.41 Alma’s “heritage” then, involves not simply her receipt of a guilty secret, but an education in language formed by secretion. The idea of the “transgenerational phantom” elucidates the analogy between Audrey’s voice and its manifestation as a “phantom” in Alma’s head. Alma imagines that at the moment Nickel’s body floated away in the river, Audrey’s soul also left, and was buried with Nickel. The burial metaphor continues as Alma thinks that “Audrey’s soul really would be hard and dense, buried or hidden like a nugget or a seed, like a jewel with her voice held tight inside. Or the voice had found a way into Alma’s head, with all its words intact.”42 A gap forms inside Audrey as her “soul” leaves with Nickel, a gap that passes to Alma in the form of incomplete mourning – figured as Nickel’s empty body that continues to float in Alma’s thoughts. Alma offers a choice over exactly how and where Audrey’s voice is placed (buried or hidden), in Nickel’s body or in her [Alma’s] head. In effect, the “or” is rendered obsolete because in both options Audrey’s voice enters Alma. Nickel is the cause of Audrey’s gap, and Alma’s inheritance of the gap suggests that Nickel is inside Alma. If Nickel is inside Alma, then that part of Audrey inside him, will also be in Alma. In either scenario Audrey’s voice, with “all its words intact”, exists as a gap inside Alma. Alma knows that Nickel “would always be dead”, but Audrey’s voice replays inside Alma, keeping Nickel alive.43 Alma and Audrey’s internalized communication is furthered by Alma’s apprehension about receiving a letter from her mother at camp. Whilst at Camp Shelter the girls receive mail or “missives” from family members. Audrey’s letters “weren’t normal letters like Delia got from Aunt Bird”: Audrey sends “blank pages with pieces of grass or pressed flowers … or a poem she copied from somewhere”. Audrey posts Alma blank sheets or pictures sans captions because she knows that Alma has the knowledge to fill in the missing spaces. Her letters are indeed missives: “No message at all, no scrawled comment in the margins. Alma had stared at the images, intrigued, until she remembered one of Audrey’s comments.” The gaps belong to Audrey

41

Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 46. Shelter, 224 (my emphasis). 43 Ibid., 73. 42

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but because she repeatedly tells Alma stories about Nickel, her daughter inherits the materials with which to fill the blanks. Alma recalls that Audrey’s last missive consisted of “some pages torn out of National Geographic, an article about Italy with pictures of mountains and a walled town”: No message at all …. Alma had stared at the images, intrigued, until she remembered one of Audrey’s comments from last winter. He speaks Italian beautifully, Alma. He says it’s a language for shouting or whispering …. Can you imagine? How we’d love it, you and I. Siena. It was the town where Nickel Campbell had lived in a villa before he was married.44

As Alma stares at the images, Audrey’s voice suddenly starts playing in her daughter’s mind, a “phantom radio” that “no one could turn off”. Alma finds the words to put in the margins, but those words point to the gap in her unconscious caused by the mother’s incomplete mourning, and by Audrey’s continued attempts to keep her affair with Nickel secret. The secret itself makes Alma sense an extra layer of complexity that she cannot identify. She knows that Nickel’s death somehow made the secret “bigger, deeper”.45 Audrey’s voice continually resurfaces in Alma’s thoughts, pointing to, yet simultaneously denying, the gap opened up by Nickel’s death. For Abraham and Torok “The phantom’s periodic and compulsive return [is] like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental 46 topography”. Abraham argues that the phantom produced by the gap “comes back from the unconscious to haunt and leads to phobias, madness, 47 and obsessions”. Alma’s obsession with spying can be traced back to the gap that haunts her. She spies in order to collect information that may enable her to read her partially inscribed inheritance of secrets. The desire to reveal links directly to her wish to expose Audrey’s affair, and in a wider context relates to Alma’s constant attempts to connect discrete fragments of knowledge.

44

Ibid., 146. Ibid., 120-21. 46 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernal, 173. 47 Nicolas Abraham cited in Esther Rashkin, “Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism …”, 39. 45

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III In heritage class Alma tries to link together various accumulated details that she knows but does not understand. I quote at length to underline an association between knowledge and secrets in her sections, and in the novel more generally: What public place? Alma couldn’t ask. And what did it mean, sick? He [Mrs T.’s husband] wanted someone else to find him? A bridge was a public place, though no one ever went to Mud River Bridge, or walked along it, or did anything but drive over it. The bridge was not beautiful. It rattled. Some people in Gaither said Nickel Campbell had driven off the bridge on purpose, but he’d never seemed sick at all. The man Alma had seen at the drive-in was probably sick. And Mrs. T.’s husband must have been. Sick. In a public place. He’d wanted to be discovered, like a secret. He must have known secrets, his own secrets or secrets about Communists. Alma sat down now beside Mrs. T., her forearm nearly touching the ample, satisfied wrists of Mrs. T. She watched Mrs. T.’s every gesture and expression and linked each one to an entry on a list of details she kept in her head concerning Mrs. T.: the dead husband, pamphlets about Communism passed around in heritage class, the sick husband, the wedding ring with the big diamond and the other rings Mrs. T. kept in her room, the gun, the public place, the books about Lenin and Stalin on display in Great Hall, the silver hairpins Mrs. T. wore. Somehow the details linked up, the lists corresponded, like those pages of lists in grade school workbooks, those texts where kids drew lines running corner to corner between ‘wood’ and ‘mahogany,’ ‘fruit’ and ‘cherry,’ ‘morality’ and ‘rules.’ The pencilled lines would get mixed up and erased and drawn again in web-like combinations.48

I emphasize a single sentence to draw attention to the existence of an indeterminable male figure. The “he” refers shiftily to Nickel, Mr. T., or to the onanist at the drive-in, but, in addition, and simultaneously, also refers to an elusive fourth male. The existence of an undisclosed male implies there is a further link that Alma does not reveal, or is unable to access: “He’d wanted to be discovered, like a secret”. Alma

48

Shelter, 105 (my emphasis).

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shifts her notions of the other named men through the image of a man with “secrets” wanting to be “discovered”. Phillips’ implied chain of signifiers can be read as an implicit narrative device in light of Erich Auerbach’s notion of prefiguration, or what he most specifically refers to as “Figural interpretation”. I will explore prefiguration as it appears in the novel in greater length in what follows, but for the present discussion a brief introduction is required. Auerbach defines “figural interpretation” as a method that “establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfils the first”.49 Auerbach’s theory of prefiguration is limited to two disparate events or people but could be expanded to encompass a number of signifiers. So, for example, Nickel signifies Mr. T., who signifies the onanist, who in the sentence, “He’d wanted to be discovered, like a secret”, at least potentially implies a further figure, that of the nameless man. Alma needs to link things together in response to the interminable “he”. In effect, she attempts to join fragmented images in a bid to build a series of images that will take her to the missing link. Alma certainly desires connections and her thoughts turn on the word “sick”. Overheard in relation to the death of Mrs T.’s husband, the word informs the thoughts that follow. She questions her perception of past events – was Nickel sick when he drove off the bridge? The man at the drive-in was “probably sick” and he, along with Mrs T.’s husband, embodies that word. Alma links sickness with discovery, and discovery, in turn, with secrets: Mrs T’s husband who was “sick” had “wanted to be discovered, like a secret”; the onanist in the drive-in exposed himself while engaged in a private act. In effect, Alma conjoins intimacy, exposure and secretion in a way that at least implies that what tries to be hidden is never far from discovery. Sickness works for Alma in a way reminiscent of the way that snow acts as a partial concealer for many of Phillips’ characters. In the passage then, secrets are connected with a sickness that relates to both the act committed, and to its discovery. The acts in question are each associated with male death, male sexuality, or both. Alma tries to understand Nickel’s death in the 49

Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 53.

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context of the rumoured suicide of Mrs T.’s husband. She also addresses sexuality through her memory of the man at the drive-in. Earlier in Alma’s narrative, Alma remembers secretly watching the man in question as he masturbated. Alma feels “dirty” after witnessing the scene, “dirty because he was dirty … dirtied by her own curiosity”. Alma thinks the man was “hurting himself”, that he “bled milk like a broken plant”; the words associated with masturbation emphasize a child’s perspective on the event.50 Alma, lacking knowledge of the sexual act, presumes a connection between sexuality and damage. Alma does not fear sex, however, but the sense that sex causes death. Her elision of Mr T. and Nickel with the onanist expresses Alma’s need to see whether male emission in and of itself causes death. The “fourth” man, as a representative of all the men, is thereby associated with similar acts. The link made between sex and damage is intrinsic to the novel as whole and will be discussed later and at greater length. The ways that shelter relates to damage, however, pertains to the current discussion of the novel. Phillips argues that in her writing “There is an intertextual notion of shelter, and I think of those bus shelters in Machine Dreams as opening out into the older, primal world of Camp Shelter”.51 However, despite her emphasis on the lasting nature of shelter (Mitch’s bus shelters are built to last), and the general assumption that shelters provide a place of refuge and protection, shelters also represent a site for secrets in the novel. Shelters are hidden, closed off from the external. The nuclear shelters that appeared during the Cold War offer an example of how “shelter” denotes “secrecy”. The shelters, a means of protection from Communist attack, were expressive of high levels of fear and anxiety at the time. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Alma takes part in air raid drills at school: “The sixth grade had been herded into the girls’ bathroom and told to crouch along the cement-block walls with their arms over their heads.”52 Mrs T. discusses the reasons for these drills in heritage class, warning the girls that such protective measures were necessary because of the likelihood of Communist aggression. Alma’s confused understanding of heritage class as a discourse about 50

Shelter, 104 (my emphasis). Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 73. 52 Shelter, 138. 51

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“secrets” suggests that for Alma, “shelters” are inextricable from “secrets”. As I have established, Alma connects secrecy with sickness or damage. That she also links “secrets” to “shelters”, subverts the assumption that shelters protect. Indeed, Alma experiences the metamorphosis of shelter into damage as she considers the bodies of Mrs T. and Hilda Carmody, so that even the matronly forms of the large women fail to fully protect. In “Alma: Stars and Bread”, Alma sits close to Mrs T. and ponders the fleshiness of Hilda Carmody’s body even as she senses that “shelters” may contain “damage”. With “her forearm nearly touching the ample, satisfied wrists” of her camp’s leader, she risks an association between the wrist action of the onanist and the “satisfaction” of Mrs T.’s wrists. Earlier in the same section she links maternal shelter and the “hurt” of male emission as she watches with curiosity Hilda Carmody’s large, maternal, body. Hilda creates the dough for the bread rolls that Alma wanted “to have been grown by the body of a woman, laid like eggs from her private parts, or dropped from her fingertips like immediately edible fruit”. Alma, whilst desiring the closeness of a maternal body capable of producing such “warm” bread simultaneously distrusts the image. The girls watch Hilda through the kitchen window as she kneads the dough, “lost to the elbows in the big vat. She gazed down at what she lifted with an expression of placid concentration.”53 As Alma watches Hilda, Hilda metamorphoses into the man masturbating at the drive-in: She could never be sure she was remembering exactly what she’d seen, but her memory of the sound never altered. That strangled, satisfied Oh, like something maimed and alive. Alma heard it in her sleep. When she saw Mrs. Carmody through the kitchen window, glimmered by the dust on the old screen, Alma thought the big woman knew the sound too, and felt it in her hands.

Alma sees two figures in one image: her view of the warm female body is permeated with the “dirt” associated with male bodies as the image of the maternal body is partially displaced by the image of male arousal and ejaculation. That link may be a result of her knowledge of her own mother’s illicit behaviour: for Alma, the 53

Ibid., 103-105.

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maternal body is always a troubled site. Significantly, the “strangled, satisfied Oh” that Alma hears “in her sleep” recalls Jean Hampson’s linkage of the sound with “the turning of a broad dark knife, like a man in the dark surprised by his own sharp pleasure”.54 The intertextual crossings point to a fascination with, and repulsion of, sexual desire. Having aligned male satisfaction with Hilda’s matronly form Alma seeks to keep separate what she has fused by introducing a notion of necessary categories. Troubled by the density of her own tacit associative networks she tries to make “details link” in “web-like combinations”. Needing to keep things ordered, she recalls school categorization exercises, with their stress on usefulness of lists and titles. Reassured by her own recollection of “grade school workbooks” she seeks to lodge the term “sick” in an overt and stable set of relations – she tries to grasp information by placing facts into categories such as who or what is “sick”.55 Categorization opens up the wider political and social issues addressed through Alma, issues that emphasize the Cold War climate of the novel. Categorization during the Cold War placed facts into binary opposites – Mrs T. teaches the girls about the antithesis between Democracy (good) and Communism (evil). Michael Rogin’s study of political demonology details the prevalent “anxiety” surrounding the Communist threat in the decades after World War II. He notes that Americans were convinced of the pervasive presence of an alien other embodied in “the invisible agents of a foreign power” against whom American freedoms – personal and national – were defined.56 Alma sees her own secrets in awkward relation to what she learns of Communism as a hidden threat to US democracy. In the heritage class Mrs Thompson-Warner tells the girls about freedom and establishes a Manichaen and categorical opposition between the US and Russia. The girls are taught facts in a way that encourages a polarized conception of knowledge: Communism is wrong and Americanism is right. Rogin’s definition of demonology clarifies the reasoning behind such an education. Demonology, he argues, is a result of “the creation of monsters as a 54

Machine Dreams, 115. Shelter, 104-105. 56 Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 67-68. 55

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continuing feature of American politics by the inflation, stigmatization, and dehumanization of political foes”.57 The classification of an alien other, in this instance Communists, produced the required result – cultural fear and anxiety. Alma views heritage class as “storytelling” but “the stories were meant to be scary”.58 Her fears may contribute to her sense that any category, list or line of demarcation, comes ghosted with its own negation. Certainly, Alma’s attempts to categorize are blurred, just as “The penciled lines” between the words in school textbooks “would get mixed up and erased and drawn again”.59 The erased connections leave an indelible trace on the page, indicating the presence of underlying and alternate connections. Useful here is Bakhtin’s claim that any word moves from context to context, but that in “its path of transfer … [it] cannot completely free itself from the power of those concrete contexts into which it has entered”.60 Because a word retains layers of prior usage any attempt to define that word within an antithetical construct is problematic in its simplicity. Phillips states that she included “the sixties anti-Communist propaganda rhetoric” in Shelter “as a kind of shadow”. She regards both the “political red scare tactics” and the “religious Fundamentalism” in the novel as “an ordering of good and evil, or black and white, or right and wrong – an ordering of things that reduces complexity to the point that we can feel we’re on the right side”.61 However, beneath Alma’s categorizations lie the remnants of previous lists and lines that despite their erasure, nevertheless leave a mark. Such traces bring into focus the nature of hiddenness, of what lies beneath the surface in Phillips’ novel. Malcolm Bull states that “Hiddenness arises in cases where we sense something but do not perceive it, or when we perceive something but cannot sense it”. Bull’s definition is crucial and merits closer analysis. He defines “sense” or “sensation” as “raw experience without or prior to any epistemic or cognitive component” (my emphasis). Sensation, as understood here, occurs without the knowledge fully to determine what has taken place. Alternatively, Bull defines “perception” as “a 57

Ibid., xii. Shelter, 131. 59 Ibid., 105. 60 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 202. 61 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 48. 58

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discriminatory cognitive experience with an epistemic content, an experience that is at least logically distinct from that of sensation”. Perception of the hidden may exist without sensation, in which case something can be known without having been physically experienced. Bull argues that such perception belongs in the categories of “memory, intuition, or some form of extra-sensory perception”, telepathy perhaps.62 Bull’s categories highlight Phillips’ claim that in her writing she has “always been much more interested in perception and in dislocations of thought”. In her work knowledge is often accessed through memories or through “some form of extra-sensory perception”. Indeed, Phillips argues that in Shelter she wanted the children to “see how complicated everything is”, but that she “wanted [them] to step into that knowledge nonverbally”.63 Whilst the nonverbal transmission of knowledge, or secrets, highlights Phillips use of perception in her work, Bull highlights the attendant problems of perception. For Bull, “it is … possible to perceive something without recognising what it is that you are perceiving”. Something perceived but not recognized signals “disguise”, but once recognition reinforces perception, the thing becomes “known”.64 In Shelter, Delia, Alma’s best friend, “did know: somehow, she knew everything, but she didn’t know she knew. Her eyes were open but she didn’t see.”65 Delia knows but does not know about her father’s infidelity, her cognition fails to connect with her experience to make the hidden accessible. Delia’s open-eyed blindness exemplifies Bull’s notion of “perceiving” without “sensing”. The tension between perception and sensation, and between perception and recognition, that arises when something hidden is partly known is a tension central to Shelter. Alma continually feels that she knows “something” but the facts remain elusive. She watches Lenny as a “stranger might, a stranger in possession of stories and facts” but the stories are untranslatable, they “were images, pictures with no words, or words that didn’t match”. Alma possesses knowledge that she is unable to access, she “didn’t know what the stories meant”.66 62

Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 12. Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 48-49. 64 Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 13. 65 Shelter, 29. 66 Ibid., 108. 63

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Alma’s desperate attempt to make it all link through the categorization process she learns in her Cold War schooling highlights the existence of a network of erasures that return as traces. The erasures represent an attempt at hiddenness, but as Bull suggests, an attempt to hide something must logically involve what is hidden in “ceasing to be unexperienced or unknown”. The very act of hiding makes the under-sensed or unexperienced “more knowable”. Bull defines the ability to perceive or sense that which is unknown at the moment of its hiddenness not as a “going into hiding, but [a] coming into hiding”. The residues or traces of the hidden appear most commonly in words. Bull employs the example of puns where a “word with at least two meanings” creates an alternation between the different meanings.67 He argues that a pun only works if both or all meanings can be simultaneously perceived. So, for example, in Shelter – the indeterminable, fourth “he” who surfaces in Alma’s categorization process points to a series of male figures. The unknowable “he” is simultaneously sensed: “he” becomes knowable, exemplifying the coming into hiding of a figure within a word. I would suggest that Bull’s sense of a partial knowledge, that quality of the undifferentiated’s “coming into hiding” exactly captures the hidden nature of specific words in Shelter. Certain words are secreted, making them secret or hidden in a way that leaves a trace, a trail of secretion. The notion of secretion appeals to Abraham and Torok’s work on cryptograms, and the coded words’ ability to point to a truth whilst simultaneously trying to hide that truth. Rashkin glosses Abraham and Torok’s “cryptonymy” as a mechanism “of concealment and dissembling that thwart[s] understanding”. Rashkin argues that the identification of cryptonymy in the language or behaviour of an individual, begins a “signifying process”, that is, one of unravellments.68 What occurs in Shelter is the return of the undifferentiated in the form of cryptonymy. Once the existence of cryptonymy is established a process of signification begins. Rashkin argues that a cryptonym is “literally a word that hides”. Such hidden words constitute Shelter and are represented on one level in the way that the characters sense levels of hiddenness. Bull argues 67 68

Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 25-26. Rashkin, “Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism …”, 43.

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that the inability to connect perception and sensation, that results in hiddenness, may be understood as “frustrated knowledge”.69 Shelter is constructed around frustrated knowledge, and a key to reading the narrative is to question not just what characters know or try to know, but to look at what may be hidden within their merged narratives. Alma’s narrative is particularly crucial to the development of the hidden as her partial knowledge pertains both to Lenny and the wider issues addressed by Phillips. Both Alma’s accounts of her sister and Lenny’s own sections allow for an understanding of the historical and socio-economic causes of their occluded knowledge, a knowledge that manifests itself through sexuality and desire in the novel.

69

Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 19.

CHAPTER SEVEN Fantastical Remembrances: Sexual Desire in Shelter Phillips claims that in her second novel she is “exploring sexuality itself”. That sexuality is not merely anatomical: Phillips infuses the bodies in Shelter with distinct socio-economic markers. She argues that “children are very sexual, and they do have something sexual to do with adults”, yet that child/adult connection need not take the form of actual abuse but may instead be a result of the way in children “are very aware of their parent’s sexuality … whether it’s an aversion to each other that the kids pick up, or a domination or entrappedness, or the safety of trust and attraction”.1 Whilst Shelter contains tangible moments of abuse in the relationship between Buddy and Carmody, Phillips also explores child/parent desire in ways that circumvent simple categorization. Particularly through her depiction of Lenny, Phillips places desire in definite economic terms so that the opaque levels of concupiscence between Lenny and her father can be read as indicative of the social changes taking place in the early nineteensixties. Throughout Shelter characters begin to access sexually encoded images as they merge with one another. In Alma’s opening section, “Alma: The Black Field”, Alma “fit[s] herself to Delia’s shape” and falling asleep dreams of Lenny. Merged with Delia, she moves through images of Lenny that imply a level of telepathic communication from one sister to another. The dream begins in camp’s open space, crosses into the confinement of the “hallway at home”, and passes into the bathroom, where Alma dreams of drinking from the “faucet” in a “forbidden fashion” fitting her mouth around its circular lip. She doesn’t have to swallow, the water snakes down her throat like contraband, and she is just climbing to get closer, fit her whole body into the oval sink, when she turns to find herself in Lenny’s room. Lenny looks cold, but comfortably so, as though she is meant to be cold, like marble or crystal. She sleeps like a nun, fearless and still, on her back, her hands at her sides, her head gently inclined. Her face, expressionless, 1

Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 50.

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perfect and smooth, seems a face unconcerned with possibilities, a face waiting to be alive. Her long, loose hair is the color of bleached hay, hay that has weathered in fields. All day her hair is bound in a long blond swatch, a silky blunt-cut ponytail that swings when she moves. Wes, who learned to barber in the army, trims it once a month – and now Lenny is in the kitchen, stalwart in her straight chair, Wes with his sharp scissors and rat-tail comb.2

The vulval description of the “circular lip” of the faucet and the “oval” shape of the sink indicate a desire centred around female sexuality: significantly, the same language is used throughout the novel with reference to Turtle Hole. The swimming hole, “whose mysterious depths were forbidden”, is the spatial nucleus of Shelter, where Lenny’s sexual encounters with Frank and Cap, and with Parson, take place and where the characters converge at the climax of their shared narrative.3 The hole is generally described in feminine terms. Turtle Hole “was a perfect oval, deep in the center”,4 “oval as an egg”:5 “egg” implies womb, but at the same time Turtle Hole appears vulval resembling the sink in Alma’s dream. The loaded image of the sink is displaced as Alma finds herself in “Lenny’s room”. By juxtaposing a sexual moment with the image of Lenny sleeping, Alma effectively transfers her eroticization of the faucet to Lenny. Yet Alma imagines that the sleeping Lenny looks like a “nun, fearless and still”. Lenny lies on the bed like a piece of funerary art: “on her back” with “her hands at her sides” she “looks cold … like marble or crystal.” Lenny’s face is “unconcerned with possibilities, a face waiting to be alive”.6 In Lenny’s “expressionless” face her features are obscured. The marble quality of her face indicates a loss of the senses – featureless, Lenny is unable to express feelings. Mortification is implicit in the description and effects a parallel between Lenny and a noted Lenore of earlier southern fiction.

2

Shelter, 30-31. Ibid., 7. 4 Ibid., 36. 5 Ibid., 127. 6 Ibid., 31. 3

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The immediate connection between Poe’s “Lenore” and Phillips’ “Lenny” lies in their names. Cap indicates that Lenny is an abbreviation of Lenore, playfully referring to “Queen Lenore’s minions”, minions who include bats and crows. Crows that “were black … glossy, bigger than chickens”.7 Lenny’s connection with crows evokes images of the dead mistress in Poe’s “The Raven”. Mourning for the lost Lenore, Poe’s narrator reports his clandestine conversation with the Raven. The narrator demands to know what the Raven can tell him about Lenore “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us – by that God we both adore – Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore – Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”8

Lenore, named by “angels”, is “nevermore”. The link between the Raven and the crows that haunt Lenny’s dreams may appear tentative, but when asked about the influence of Poe in her writing Phillips claims that “the connection makes sense”: I do feel that the work that is most influential moves so deeply inside us that those connections may not be entirely conscious. Poe was an influence, probably when I was about the age of Lenny, and both characters [Lenny and Lenore] fit a particular female archetype.9

Certainly, Poe’s description of Lenore in death confirms the possibility of connections between his Lenore and Phillips’ Lenny. The death of Lenore is the subject of a second Poe poem, this time entitled “Lenore”. The set of Lenore’s corpse recalls Alma’s vision of the sleeping Lenny: For her, the fair and debonnaire, that now so lowly lies, 7

Ibid., 88. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 1. Poems, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbot (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 364-69. 9 Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 75. 8

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The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes – The life still there, upon her hair – the death upon her eyes.10

Lenore is youthful and maidenly, qualities that recall the virginal Lenny, who for the dreaming Alma, resembles a nun. Poe notes that Lenore was the “queenliest [of the] dead”, a queen whose fate is spoken by the Raven. Though her eyes are lifeless, full of death, life remains “upon her yellow hair”. The lifeless Lenore is echoed in the featureless Lenny. Lenny’s hair, reminiscent of Lenore’s, becomes the focus of Alma’s dream. Alma dreams of Wes cutting Lenny’s hair in the kitchen at home: her language resonates with hidden sexual overtures. Lenny’s hair “is bound in a long blond swatch, a silky blunt-cut ponytail”.11 Phonetics is crucial in my reading of the passage, a reading that will ultimately link to Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic claims. Jonathan Culler, introducing On Puns: The Foundations of Letters, provides interesting parallels between the workings of puns and of the unconscious as dealt with by Freud, Lacan, and Abraham and Torok. Culler argues that puns operate “to reveal the structures of language, motivating linguistic signs, allowing signifiers to affect meaning by generating new connections – in short, responding to the call of the phoneme, whose echoes tell of wild realms beyond the code and suggest new configurations of meaning”.12 Puns work to challenge existing codifications of meaning, and as Culler argues, a phoneme may work within the pun to solicit new meaning. The new meanings however, need not always be “new”. Culler goes on to suggest that phonemes or letters combine “in various ways to evoke prior meaning and to produce effects of meaning … that cannot but disrupt the model of language as nomenclature”.13 Culler establishes a link between a pun’s evocation of “prior meaning” and repetition within the psychoanalytic tradition.

10

Edgar Allan Poe, “Lenore” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 1. Poems, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 334-37. 11 Shelter, 31. 12 On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 3. 13 Ibid., 14.

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In puns, as in analysis, old meanings reappear in a new guise – a denied meaning circumvents its own repression by resurfacing in another word. Culler borrows from Lacan to draw the pun and the unconscious together, noting that if the unconscious is “structured like a language, it is not a transparent language where signifiers and signifieds are determinedly paired but a punning language, where the call of the phoneme and the foundation of letters serve as psychic relays”.14 The idea that in the unconscious one signifier may only and eventually lead to a signified by way of “relay” through a series of signifiers (or parts of signifiers) is relevant to any discussion of Shelter. In my reading of Alma’s dream I will show, via phonetic shifts, how Phillips’ processes of signification take place at several levels. To return to Alma’s dream, and more particularly to the conjoined phrases “long blond swatch” and “blunt-cut ponytail”: a shifting “n”, liberated by a certain euphony between “blond swatch” and “bluntcut”, turns “blond swatch” into “blod swnatch”; removal of the “w” resulting in “snatch”. The movement to “snatch”, a slang term for vulva, gains weight and is justified by proximity to a second shifty “n”. The “blunt-cut” of Lenny’s hair becomes “blut cunt”.15 Vulvic allusions in Alma’s description of the hair-cutting relates to her earlier reference to the bathroom sink. Wes’ role as barber demands closer scrutiny. Lenny’s hair, bound up, is under Wes’ control – he “trims it once a month”. The connection between Lenny’s hair and sexuality implies that Wes shapes not only Lenny’s hair but her sexuality. Alma’s dream effectively establishes two key, yet opaque ideas: the relationship between Lenny and Wes, and the encoded sexuality of that relationship. Alma offers the novel’s most comprehensive account of Swenson family life, a life that she structures around two pairings – Alma and Audrey, and Lenny and Wes. In her dream, Alma “sees Lenny and their father tilting and spinning through space, Lenny seated, their father’s hands in her hair”.16 Alma, as an onlooker, regards the Lenny/Wes bond from a distance, noting an intimacy that no one else 14

Ibid., 10. I would like to thank Richard Godden for sharing his insights into the phonetic shifts in this passage. 16 Shelter, 31. 15

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can enter: “Herself and Lenny she saw as logical extensions of their parents: Lenny for Wes, claimed and left to herself, as though he’d drawn a magic circle around her and then stepped away.”17 Elsewhere, Alma imagines that her sister and father are “both like stars Alma saw in the sky from the earth of home”.18 Alma distinguishes Lenny and Wes as a separate unit, detached, yet within the family. Alma’s exclusion from the Lenny/Wes relationship appears to stem from events before her birth. In a flashback to childhood, Lenny remembers looking out of her parents’ bedroom window, watching Audrey at the clothesline. In memory Lenny calls to her mother, who cannot hear her. When Audrey finally turns “Lenny sees her form in the loose dress, how she leans back to balance her bulk and carries the empty clothes in the basket to the side, her round and swollen front so big there is no room”.19 Lenny’s attempts to communicate with her mother are blocked by the unborn Alma – what the child wants to say remains silenced or unacknowledged. The significance of blocked, or what I would term frustrated, communication, is twofold, both in terms of what Lenny wishes Audrey to hear, and in relation to the possibility that Alma becomes a vessel for the unheard. Lenny senses that she went to the parental window to hide from a male presence inside the room. Other images break into her memory impeding a clear understanding of what occurs in that room. Wes’ reappearance throughout the flashbacks at least implies that his is the unannounced presence in the room. The passage in question will be analysed in greater detail in a later section. However, it remains sufficient to state that Lenny needs to talk with Audrey regarding the probable presence of her father. Audrey is unable or unwilling to hear Lenny: What did I ever do to you? Why don’t you talk to me? The phrases are Audrey’s, plaintive and insistent, as though she’s repeated them for years. Lenny feels herself respond with an old silence, but she

17

Ibid., 209. Ibid., 109. 19 Ibid., 171. 18

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Lenny’s unspoken accusations imply that Audrey refuses to hear what her daughter tries to say. Lenny’s attempt to be heard, whilst her mother was pregnant with Alma, leads to the possibility that what Audrey could not, or would not hear, passed into the unborn Alma, perhaps accounting for the elusive “fourth male” who completes Alma’s linked network of male figures.21 Rashkin states that for Abraham and Torok, the child’s development as an individual, separate from its mother, does not mean that the child “is rid of the maternal unconscious”: rather, “The maternal unconscious becomes part of the child’s language” and is “Communicated without ever having been spoken”.22 Glossed by Abraham and Torok, Alma’s exclusion from the Lenny/Wes relationship may be said to result from the frustrated knowledge about Lenny and Wes, passed in utero from mother to unborn child. Lenny’s memory of calling to Audrey suggests that Audrey was so heavy in her pregnancy that there “was no room” for what Lenny wished to express.23 Lenny’s room is cancelled by Alma’s roominess in her mother’s womb. The room of potential abuse is cancelled out, erased, but like the lines drawn in Alma’s schoolbooks, the erased lines can always be detected. II For Alma, the erased details start to reappear as she merges with Delia. Lenny experiences a similar state of mergence with Cap throughout the novel. Both examples of merging centre around the Gaither fathers, Nickel and Wes. At camp, Alma begins to think that Delia knows her secret about their parents’ affair: From the first night, Delia had come and stood over her in the dark. Alma had looked up at her and realized Delia did know: somehow, 20

Ibid., 169. See Chapter 6, 153-55. 22 Rashkin, “Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism …”, 34. 23 Shelter, 171. 21

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she knew everything, but she didn’t know she knew …. Suddenly it was as though Alma hadn’t spend all those Saturday mornings wandering alone through Souders Department Store.24

When Alma sleeps with Delia to protect her friend from sleepwalking, she “fit[s] herself to Delia’s shape” and their conjoined bodies provides Delia the safety of sleep, and for Alma, the sense that she too has her own confidante. In effect, as the bodies of the two girls converge, Alma believes that they share the weight of Nickel’s adultery. Similarly, Lenny recalls images of her father during her erotic encounters with Cap. These encounters sometimes take the form of a game called “rabbit”. The girls wrap their naked bodies in old rabbit skin coats belonging to Cap’s mother and play a truth-telling game. If either of the girls lies she must pay a forfeit – if Lenny loses the game, Cap crawls naked onto Lenny inside Lenny’s fur coat. The game centres on its sexual content, with a falsified secret resulting in sexual exchange between the two girls. During one instance of the game Lenny speaks of a man standing in her room, watching her sleep, then slowly pulling her twisted nightgown down to cover her belly, her thighs. You’re lying, Cap had said with authority, you lose! Maybe Cap knew the dream was real, that it was Wes who’d touched Lenny in that gentle, deliberate way, and then turned and left the room. But the rabbit game was a way to make things that really happened seem as though they never had, make things that were magical, dangerous, waiting, fade into shadows. Lenny and Cap could hold the shadows, tangle up in shades of lies, Cap grabbing Lenny, lying on her, sucking at her shoulder to make a warm, soft bruise, both of them laughing until it became an experiment just to play with the dreamy, tingly feeling, stay sleepy, silent, a little drunk.25

Playing sexual games with Cap allows Lenny to desensitize herself from those images she associates with Wes. The game renders Wes’ touch “gentle and deliberate”, safe as “dangerous things fade into shadows”. Phillips argues that sexuality in Shelter is “not necessarily 24 25

Ibid., 29. Ibid., 114.

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abusive”, although in the case of Carmody and Buddy the abuse is self-evident.26 I mean neither to confirm nor deny Wes’ abuse of his daughter, I aim only to explore the image of the father and to detail why Lenny imagines him in ways that appeal to the category of abuse. The game is based on dares that invite dangerous truths and the most inventive lies. The daring implies that the game is an excuse for sexual experimentation, but more importantly, it also involves the structural confusion of truth and falsehood. The articulation of secrets effectively erases them – what happened suddenly did not. Yet, as the remembered event is revealed and called into question, so it produces a literal moment of eroticism. The girls suck on each other and their physical connection turns a potential lie into a sensory truth, marking the body with a real fantasy. I will address the blurred distinction between fantasy and reality in what follows. Presently, however, I would like to consider the recurrence of the sucking that appears in the above extract. Sucking, and suckling, appear in moments of implied desire between father and daughter. Alma witnesses Wes smoking and reading sales magazines. She compares Wes’ smoking with JohnJohn’s suckling as a baby. John-John would “grab on to Mina and suckle, moving his mouth in a long kiss”. Alma imagines that Wes “wanted to touch someone that way” when he touches the “glossy pictures of the big mining machinery”.27 On one level desire is transposed onto machines implying its commodification. Alma’s link between Wes and suckling however, also connects to Lenny. When Frank and Lenny meet in Turtle Hole, Lenny thinks that “He didn’t seem like Frank … he was almost a man”. Lenny effectively blanks out Frank’s face, turning him into a man. From this point to the end of the section “Lenny: Turtle Hole”, Frank is not mentioned by name, rather “he” is pronominally present. The “he” “nuzzled inside, between her breasts, like a vicious baby, pushing, using his mouth. He moved his hands, lifting her against him, sucked at her skin, her throat, tasting until he found her lips.”28 The “he” sucks on Lenny’s 26

Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 50. Shelter, 22. 28 Ibid., 39. 27

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skin and breasts in a fashion similar to Alma’s idea of Wes’ wish to suckle. Suckling reappears in a later Lenny section, “Bright Air”, as Lenny sees Wes in a series of flashbacks. She remembers falling asleep in her crib “After something”. I leave the capital “A” in “After” to highlight the emphasis Phillips places on the phrase – she punctuates two words as a sentence pointing and isolating an unspecified event. Lenny sleeps with “his finger in her mouth, the smallest finger of his right hand. The pulsing of her tongue against him, sucking.” Wes is the man in Lenny’s image. She sees, even though the pictures in her head are confusing, that “her father was there”. In the latter reference to “sucking” sexuality is interchangeable with notions of family. Phillips eroticizes normal family moments – a child sucking on a parent’s finger (or a child breast feeding as in Alma’s image). Explicit sexual language – the “pulsing of her tongue … sucking” – leads one to question the nature of the intimate moment between father and daughter.29 Again, I do not claim that abuse has occurred, but, rather, that Phillips’ language introduces levels of desire within the Lenny/Wes relationship. Lenny’s memory of Wes standing in her room operates in an awkward space situated between the real and the fantastical. Jacqueline Rose discusses the reality/fantasy tension within psychoanalysis, particularly as it has been used by feminism. She focuses on how Freudianism and feminism explore ties between fantasy and political institutions, noting that it is rarely demonstrated “how far the effects of the unconscious are tied into the key fantasies operating at the heart of institutions, and how these in turn are linked into the most fundamental images of sexual difference (adoration of the male, chaos or exclusion to the female) on which the wider culture so centrally turns”. She argues that political fantasies result from the modes of sexual behaviour deemed proper or improper by societal institutions. Rose points out that for women, “the supremest of autocrats is a father whose status goes without question and beyond which there is no appeal”.30 The daughter’s voice is second to 29

Ibid., 129 (my emphasis). Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (2nd edn, London: Verso, 1996), 4-5. 30

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that of the father. Consequently, the paternal order structures female desire. So framed, a female account of abuse is always liable to be assigned to the realms of fantasy, particularly if the account lacks coherency. Rose argues that “The debate about political causality and the real event resolves itself into the issue of language. Political truth relies, therefore, on the concept of full speech.” For Rose, psychoanalysis refutes the definite distinction between reality and fantasy, by refusing to “discredit the utterance of the patient”. Psychoanalysis, along with feminism, tends to refute any typical political and societal polarization of fantasy and reality. Rose proposes that the linked traditions, through their “foregrounding of sexuality”, question “the dualities (inside/outside, victim/aggressor, real event/fantasy, and even good/evil) upon which so much … political analysis has so often relied”. Rose argues that in Freudian psychoanalysis, the line between fantasy and reality is not definable in categories of lie or truth. Freud did not try to discredit his female patients’ fantasies as “wilful untruth[s]”, rather he worked towards “a dimension of reality all the more important for the subject because it goes way beyond anything that can, or needs to be, attested as a fact”. Put tersely, psychoanalysis does not define fantasy as the “unreal”. The psychoanalytic prefers to consider those external societal factors that result in the creation of any given fantasy. For Rose, “Freud’s unconscious” allows for the “vexed relationship between actuality, memory, and fantasy”.31 The desire between Lenny and Wes, therefore, might be seen to arise from a blurring of reality and fantasy, where the very fact that a fantasy of abuse exists, presupposes an excluded but fantastical reality. Fantasy, as a product of repressed human desire, merely figures the acts denied by social norms. Incestuous desire between father and daughter is representative of a desire that crosses the permeable boundary between reality and fantasy. Again, it is important to stress that I am not making a direct appeal to any actual moment of abuse in the Lenny/Wes relationship. Indeed, as I hope to suggest, the problem with any real moment of penetration lies in the fact that Wes is incapable of such force. Rather, Lenny’s memories, that appear to 31

Ibid., 13-15.

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hinge on some occluded moment of abuse, stem instead, from frustrated penetration. To understand frustrated penetration in the novel, the reader must to turn to Cap, the girl whose very name potentially means diaphragm. Phillips suggests that Lenny’s relationship with Cap offers Lenny a sense of safety as she “connects to an unconscious memory or feeling about her father which has to do with being acted upon and not being able to respond”.32 In effect, Cap offers Lenny sexual protection. However, the encounter between Lenny, Cap and Frank in the water of Turtle Hole pivots on a penetrative hand: [Lenny] nearly moved to touch herself but felt a hand hard against her. She felt it probe inside and let her weight rest there, then she clasped him tighter …. She felt a hot rush and knew she was urinating, emptying into the hand that held her. 33

The identity of the hand remains ungendered, neither “his” nor “her” hand. However, in the following Lenny section “Lenny: By The River”, Lenny dreams about Cap and Frank, “dreaming Cap had done something to her, she couldn’t find her way out of Cap’s hands”, implying that the hand inside Lenny belongs to Cap.34 Whether the penetrating hand was Cap’s remains unresolved but Lenny’s desire for the hand to be Cap’s is enforced later in the novel. Remembering the night at Turtle Hole, Lenny imagines that Cap had perhaps “put her hand on [her] to keep Frank out. She [Cap] wanted Frank to show them what people did, and she wanted to keep him out.”35 Cap acts as a barrier blocking the male penetration of Lenny, raising the issue of why attempts to penetrate Lenny throughout the novel are frustrated. III To move to a consideration of the Lenny and Cap friendship, is to witness how frustrated knowledge links to frustrated penetration. Furthermore, frustrated penetration becomes inextricable from 32

Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 50. Shelter, 39. 34 Ibid., 51. 35 Ibid., 91. 33

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concealment and so from the more generic issue of the secret. Frustrated penetration opens up a chain of signifiers in Shelter that extend to Phillips’ other works. After Lenny’s encounter with Frank, she dreams of a male figure who “put his hands over her ears” reading “her face with his mouth, kissing her”.36 A similar image appears later in “Lenny: The Voice That Doesn’t Talk”, after Lenny experiences a sexualized connection with Parson. Parson’s body “moved them to and fro …. She [Lenny] kept her eyes closed, and behind her lids his white undershirt came loose”.37 As with Frank, so with Parson, male penetration is inferred even as the language itself frustrates our ability to know with any specificity. The scene with Parson merely implies a sexual content. Each attempt at penetration is seemingly blocked, yet blockage establishes linkage, effectively creating a series, that in turn recalls the serial “he[s]” in Alma’s linkage of Nickel, Mr T., the onanist and a fourth implied man that I discussed earlier.38 Auerbach’s theories on “figural perception” again offer an insight into why one signifier (Frank) leads to another (Parson), who then relates to a third. Auerbach, in his discussion of the changing meaning of the word figura proposes that Cicero’s contribution to the word’s meaning was to pile “up several related words with a view to expressing a whole”.39 Phillips’ multiple variants merging towards a distinctly male presence or figure, are, I would argue, similar in process to the prefiguration described by Auerbach. The relevance of one signifier can only be discovered by following a chain of signifiers that eventually point to, or propose, a signified. Frustrated penetration, read in the context of Phillips’ other writing, may relate to frustrated incestuous unions that fail to ensure regional continuity, a failure that stems back to “Bess”. If Bess and Warwick did commit incest their endogamous union still failed to save the farm. Likewise, in Shelter, the frustrated attempts to penetrate Lenny, attempts that may be traced back to Wes, reflect the failure to keep both her and Alma within the region. By the close of the novel Audrey has left the South, taking her two daughters to “the 36

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 166. 38 See Chapter 6, 153-55. 39 Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 19. 37

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state of New York” where she has a “job in admissions”.40 I would suggest that Wes’ economic failure, a failure attributed to Phillipsian fathers in general, precipitates his wife and children’s move away from West Virginia. Phillips’ chain of prefiguration often centres on male figures, particularly fathers with working-class attachments, and is stylistically central to much of her writing. A deconstruction of the linkage between specific male characters will widen the understanding both of Shelter and of Phillips’ other writing. Following her meeting with Parson, Lenny stands up and “puts her hands over her ears to stop the sound she hears”. Her actions connect with the dream she experiences after having been with Frank – that dream, in effect, serially prefigures the scene where she covers her own ears to stop the sounds. Lenny moves in her dream through the image of Frank to an unspecified male figure. The unspecified man, however, takes form by connecting the whiteness behind Lenny’s dreaming eyelids with the whiteness of the parental bedroom, and more specifically with Wes’ white cotton shirt. Parson’s “white undershirt” takes Lenny back to Wes in the room of potential abuse. The whiteness of the room is reflected in the white sheets that Audrey hangs on the clothesline and in the white envelope into which Lenny fits herself: In the big bed she [Lenny] keeps her eyes closed but afterward she can reach the string on the window blind by its little ring and pull it all the way down. The blind reaches to the floor and Lenny sits hidden between the blind and the wall, a narrow white space like the inside of an envelope.41

The link between Wes’ white shirt, laundry and envelopes suggests the cleaning away and sealing up of something, that takes the reader back to Lenny’s inability to communicate with Audrey in the moment of whiteness. The prefiguration that stems from Lenny’s encounter with Frank moves Lenny simultaneously forward to a meeting with Parson while taking her back to the past. 40 41

Shelter, 273. Ibid., 167-68.

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The conflation of male characters produces a chain of signification: Frank becomes Parson and Parson becomes Wes. Whenever Lenny is in close proximity to Parson images of her father enter her mind. At one moment she watches Parson standing close to her and then “She remembered suddenly … feeling her father come home”.42 Parson wears khaki pants, similar to those Wes wore when he was a labourer: the garment arouses pictures in Lenny’s mind, pictures of her childhood. The seriality of a certain kind of male sequence has class facets and extends beyond single texts. When Lenny was a child Wes was a blue-collar labourer. His current job as salesman for Henry Briarley means that “he doesn’t wear khakis anymore, he doesn’t drive a truck or work a night shift, he doesn’t come home any longer in the middle of the day”. Despite his rise to white-collar status, Lenny believes that the part of Wes she knows remains working class. In effect, her negatives imply that her father currently works in “disguise”.43 Her reiterated denials concerning what Wes “doesn’t” do succeed only in evoking what they negate. The blue-collar image sets Wes in an intertextual series linking him to Mitch (Machine Dreams) and Waylon (MotherKind). All three daughters remember their respective fathers in light of their bluecollar jobs.44 In Machine Dreams Danner recalls: My father owned a concrete plant. He wore khaki shirts and work pants, the same kind of clothes he wore in wartime photographs when he was building airstrips in New Guinea …. In grade school my brother Billy and I rode the Brush Fork school bus from our house in the country past bus shelters emblazoned with our father’s name, and the name of the plant: MITCH CONCRETE.45

Kate’s images of Waylon in MotherKind contain residues of the previous recollections of both Wes and Mitch:

42

Ibid., 127. Ibid., 169-70. 44 Both Mitch and Waylon are self-employed indicating that their blue-collar occupations are not simply predetermined, but are their chosen careers. 45 Machine Dreams, 297. 43

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[Waylon] ran machines, paved streets, built roads. When he ran a construction crew and actually poured concrete, his khaki clothes had stayed clean, his work pants never creased. Never just a workman, always the boss.46

“Concrete” men proliferate throughout Phillips’ writing – their solid reliability is, however, set against their failure to meet the social expectations of their wives. In the short story “Alma” Audrey and Wes’ youngest daughter addresses the class failure of her parents’ marriage: My mother had wanted so desperately to do well and she had ended up with Wes, an outsider to whom nothing was relative. He compared himself to no one and he worked alone …. My mother knew he was friendly with powerful men, men who passed for rich in our sphere. She envisioned being entertained in their homes, living as they lived …. Oh, my mother wanted so much. Even before she conspired to be loved by someone else, Wes was lost to her. She might have been happy with a salesman, a man whose nature it was to cajole and charm. Wes was the antithesis of his own profession. He wasn’t ingratiating, he didn’t try to please, he wasn’t cheerful or optimistic. He had a solid masculine presence and an outlaw dignity. “What does he have to feel so proud about?” my mother would muse. Men trusted him.47

I quote Alma’s own musing about her father, and her mother, at length to highlight the seriality of Phillips’ writing. Shorn of the specific names of husband and wife, Alma’s description of a marriage doomed to fail because of different class ambitions might equally describe the marriages at the heart of Machine Dreams and MotherKind. Divorce or separation eventually divides the parents as the social aspirations of the mothers overtakes the static nature of the men. My intention here is not to suggest that Phillips merely reworks a formulaic male “type”, but instead that her situating of these men’s lives in the decades after World War II implies that Phillips’ fathers are shaped by regional and historical concerns. 46 47

MotherKind, 179. Fast Lanes, 111-12.

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Phillips draws the fathers against the backdrop of the decades immediately preceding World War II (even in the contemporary Nineties setting of MotherKind, Kate’s strongest memories of Waylon derive from her childhood in the post-war South). Donaldson and Goodwyn Jones consider the impact of region on the individual, proposing that in the South “gender construction – even at the relatively simple level of overt prescription – cannot historically be disentangled from constructions of race, class, and sexuality”. 48 For them the southern body, whether male or female, is haunted in its regional markings. Lenny’s body is certainly haunted, but that haunting stems from her witnessing the gradual erosion of her father’s authority. In the following chapter I examine the extent to which Phillips’ portrayal of fathers is tied to regionalism and more specifically to demasculinization, and how that sense of demasculinization haunts Shelter.

48

Donaldson and Goodwyn Jones, Haunted Bodies, 2.

CHAPTER EIGHT Leaving the Fatherland: Emasculation and Exodus in Shelter Just as Machine Dreams ends with Danner Hampson living in California, Shelter also concludes with Lenny and Alma living in New York State with Audrey who now has “a job in admissions”. Lenny’s postcard to Buddy makes clear that “My mother and sister live here now”.1 Wes, figured here only through his absence, presumably still lives in Gaither. Wes’ disappearance at the end of the novel signals the shifting position of male authority in the years after World War II. Wes, like Mitch, moves into a sales job: both men’s career trajectories reflect the increasing move from labour intensive, bluecollar jobs to white-collar service related occupations. As Susan Faludi suggests, “the economic transition from industry to service, or from production to consumption, is symbolically a move from the traditional masculine to the traditional feminine”.2 Wes’ move into sales certainly appears to weaken his control within the family unit. Indeed, his hands, no longer used for manual labour, now have “squared, clean nails”. Rather than emphasizing the actual “square” shape of the nails, Phillips feminizes his hands, since “squared” carries attendant notions of grooming. In a novel where manicures take place in the overtly feminine space of Bird’s Beauty Parlor, Wes’ well-tended hands only serve to emasculate him. An emasculation heightened by his wife’s departure at the end of the novel. Audrey has successfully made the break not just from her husband, a break that Jean also makes in Machine Dreams, but also from the South. In addition, her secretarial job goes some way to elevating her to the middle class status she covets. Her constant need improve her economic status, encapsulated by her affair with Nickel who was “from a good family”, reflects a wider change in the class system of the South in the years after World War II.3 1

Shelter, 273. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999), 38. 3 Shelter, 121. 2

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From 1945 onwards the South moved increasingly towards economic advancement. As Cobb contends in his work on industrialization in the region, the route to achieving and maintaining economic prosperity lay in the emergence of a middle class. Cobb quotes William H. Nicholls, an observer of the South’s growth in the Sixties, who claimed that certain “regional deficiencies” held back progress in the South. Cobb lists the “deficiencies”: “the persistence of agrarian values, a rigid social hierarchy, an undemocratic political structure, a generally weak concept of social responsibility, and extreme conformity of thought and behavior.” Nicholls proposed that “an independent middle class … would have challenged the traditionalism that held the South back”.4 The expansion of the middle class came into effect as southern society underwent increased modernization. For Bartley, the new middle class posed a threat to the paternal infrastructure of the South – a challenge he acknowledges in his summation of their effects on the foundations of social life: By 1960 an impersonal and bureaucratic world based on formal contracts, legal procedures, and money transactions was approaching maturity. Even though wide diversity existed within white-collar ranks, the “new middle class” relentlessly undermined the paternal foundations of the old social order. The sense of roots, place, and stability that had for so long been central to the Southern value system retreated before new ideological currents emanating from the metropolitan areas …. By the 1960s middle-class houses were no longer homeplaces; they were capital investments. Men struggled to “get ahead” in an increasingly competitive society where time was money.5

In effect, Bartley insists on the loss of paternal order, a paternal order not merely in the wider sense of an embedded plantation patriarchy but an order that encompasses the average southern man whom Bartley describes as, by the Sixties, struggling “to get ahead”. The rapid shift from blue to white-collar status, as labourers moved into sales, insurance and other such occupations, marked a 4

James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society 1877-1984 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 99. 5 Bartley, The New South 1945-1980, 266.

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loss of values associated with direct production, values that might be summarized under the generic term “control”. Labour intensive work implies a control over material and a direct relation, intellectual and manual, to those things that the worker handles. Such labour is inextricable from the way in which southern men learned to evaluate themselves and their masculinity. Indeed, Phillips argues that “The male attachment to labor in that part of the country is partly emotional/psychological – men should be physically strong, able to tend their own domiciles, build, make – and partly economic: jobs involving physical labor were the norm”.6 Given that manual labour carried such “emotional/psychological” ties in West Virginia, the gradual erosion of that labour inevitably had a profound effect upon working men’s sense of self. In Shelter “Wes used to drive big machines before he began to sell them to the mines”. Wes’ control over machines is subsumed by his move into retail – a change that Wes himself regards as failure to meet the expectations of “manhood”. He remembers how his father and brothers participated in WPA commissioned work in the South during the Depression, helping to construct new buildings. Camp Shelter is a product of WPA work and Wes tells Alma that “Those halls will last into the next century, if they don’t burn down. Those stone chimneys, all by hand.”7 Wes places emphasis on the lasting nature of such work – Camp will continue to “shelter” future generations in that it represents a legacy of male labour resting on paternal foundations. The sturdiness of the brick walls resonates with the same levels of safety and security as Mitch’s bus shelters in Machine Dreams. For Mitch and Wes, these solid structures stand as testimonies to male strength, a strength that diminishes throughout both novels. Certainly, Wes’ move into a white-collar occupation undermines his sense of fulfilling a predetermined masculine role. Phillips claims that “West Virginia is a place in which men are men and women are women – all old ideas about what makes a man a man still held in the ’50s, the ’60s, and even the ’70s”. She argues that in West Virginia or Appalachia “Men are defined by the outside world, and women are emotionally responsible for holding things together, while the man 6 7

Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 71. Shelter, 119.

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remains outside”. Phillips proposes that because men’s lives centre around their jobs, when economic depression threatens those jobs, men themselves feel under threat: “if your whole identity depends on what you do, and you can’t earn a living, everything falls apart.”8 As a labourer Wes spent more time at home but now that he “no longer works with his hands” he does not return “home till nearly dark”.9 His sales job takes him away on business trips “because the mines were laying off and he roamed farther and farther to sell machines”.10 As Wes travels further to earn a living he distances himself from his home, and Audrey’s affair with Nickel ultimately marks Wes’ diminished authority. Wes’ relationship with Lenny, however, allows him to retain dominance, at least in her life. For Audrey, Wes is a distant figure, he “existed apart from them, always – that was Audrey’s constant reproach”. Yet, in the same passage, Lenny thinks of Audrey as a “canceled zero somewhere in the workings of the house. Lenny couldn’t imagine her mother except in the context of Alma and herself; her father she saw clearly.” Wes appears as the stronger presence in Lenny’s eyes, but the extent to which desire is the focal point of the father/daughter relationship remains in question. At camp, Lenny thinks about sitting on the porch at home, drinking beer with her father. The act carries distinctly erotic connotations: “protected by Cap … she imagined the beer pouring into her and over her, thick and golden like cold, syrupy lava, poured from her father’s glass in a Technicolor dream.” Lenny needs Cap’s protection in order to imagine the beer pouring into her because the liquid resonates with insemination. The more literal use of “cap” suggests protection against ejaculative fluids, the “syrupy lava poured from her father’s glass”.11 Penetration and ejaculation necessarily imply erection, suggesting that Lenny’s desire for her father reaffirms his masculinity. Desire, then, acts as a form of re-gendering – a regendering required as a result of the historically specific changes that occurred in the decades after World War II.

8

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 184. Shelter, 169. 10 Ibid., 22. 11 Ibid., 7-8. 9

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II Just as Machine Dreams chronologically progresses towards America’s conflict in Vietnam, so the events in Shelter, that take place over a few days of July 1963, unfold in the months prior to the escalation of conflict in South East Asia. Phillips argues that it was after 1963 when “the whole thing began to erupt … because everyone’s ass was at stake in Vietnam. Because of the draft people became politically aware and acted.” The impending war certainly casts a shadow over the novel, particularly in relation to the fact that both Wes and Carmody are veterans of the Korean War. Indeed, whilst Phillips regards the politics of Shelter as a product of the transition between what she defines as the “pre-conscious” America of 1963 and the consciousness that occurred thereafter, the two Korean War veterans undermine that easy distinction. For Phillips, Shelter descends to “a level that’s pre-political, that has more to do with questions of good and evil, identity, consciousness and gender”. Whilst questions of identity and gender exist in the pre-political world at camp, they inevitably stem from the outer, political world. Phillips concedes that the characters relate to each other in “intrinsically political” ways because “they are living in the real world, and they’re girls”. Ultimately Phillips goes on to state that Shelter “deals with the political realities between women and men”, a point that emphasizes the importance she places on gender and family interaction in her work.12 Those “political realities” addressed by Phillips are closely related to the climate in which the novel is set, a climate shaped by impending war and by the diminishment of the father figure. Indeed, Schwartz draws an analogy between the girls’ treatment at Camp Shelter and that of soldiers at boot camp, claiming that “camp forces them (the girls) to focus on schedules, clipboards, flag formations and the dangers of Communism”. Vietnam is an undeclared presence in the novel but the weight of the impending war is, as Schwartz notes, evident in the “hot sleepyness” of the narrative that is “foreboding, evocative of … the jungles of Vietnam”.13 Military constrictions surround the girls from the opening pages of 12 13

Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 50. Deb Schwartz, “Look Homeward, Angels”, Nation, CCLIX/16 (1994), 587.

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Shelter: Lenny and Cap sleep in tents “donated by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The tents were war surplus, army olive, weathered, alight on squat frames that were new and rough. Each frame seemed the unfinished skeleton of some more ambitious structure.” The older girls sleep in these “unfinished skeletons” – unfinished because they were not put to military use (presumably during World War II or Korea). The camp depends upon donations from the VFW because “The county was low income, the mines, statewide, laid off”, a dependence that sets the children within economic and social concerns.14 The girls do not exist apart from political realities but rather they live within them. In an interview prior to the completion of Shelter, Phillips stated that she intended to explore the “daily lives” of the children, set within “the lives of their families”. Her children, however, are not merely representative of an “interior”, domestic world. Phillips alludes, in the same interview, to the idea of Americans as “all new souls; we are all children”.15 By implication, what haunts the children in the novel is indicative of what haunts America as a whole. Phillips employs what she sees as the nation’s loss of innocence post-1963, at the climax of the novel as the children, and Parson, unite together in defending Lenny from Carmody’s attack. When they realize that they have killed him, Lenny thinks that “The world would not be as it was”.16 Haunted throughout the novel by what they do not quite know, by the time the characters congregate around Turtle Hole, the children “step into that knowledge nonverablly”.17 Indeed, Lenny is effectively reborn after Carmody attacks her by Turtle Hole, “her body stung in the moist air, limb by limb, as though it were painful to come alive again”. Lenny’s new perception of the world charts the move between a preconscious America in 1963 and the growing awareness that developed from that point onwards. Lenny thinks that “there was no world but this one now, full blown and dense with shifting air; they were born into it, mourning”.18 Part of that mourning process relates to the loss of the idealized father. The father figure who reappears in different guises throughout Phillips’ work is 14

Shelter, 5. Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 188. 16 Shelter, 243. 17 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 49. 18 Shelter, 243. 15

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historically pivotal, his loss being closely related with wars and attendant economic shifts occurring after 1945. For Price, Phillips concern with the male body reflects her new realist style. Price, drawing on Susan Jeffords’ work on remasculinization post-Vietnam, situates new realist writing as “a response to the anxiety caused by the loss of fathers, brothers, sons, in the War; by the perceived emasculation of the American government and its bureaucracy through the loss of War; and by the challenge to patriarchy made, since the fifties, by oppositional movements as the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements”. Price argues that images of Vietnam “provide a lens through which some of the meanings attached to sexual differences in contemporary American culture come into focus”. In effect, Price points to a historically grounded attack on male power in America, represented both by defeat in Vietnam and by protest movement attacks against dominant male ideology. Price suggests that the collapse of such concrete meanings in the face of the US withdrawal from Vietnam weakened the male power structure of the nation. The male body lost in Vietnam effectively represents a national decline in male power. Indeed, Price argues that the loss of male bodies during the war created a desire for “figuration” – the need to fill the void created by loss. She suggests, with the aid of Jeffords, that an “idealized” image of “masculinity” fills the gap created by the missing male body. I turn, here, to Price’s notion of an historically particular re-masculinization through figuration, to re-focus my own psychoanalytical approach. For Abraham and Torok one aspect of the fantasy of incorporation involves the replacement of words with imaginary things. She who incorporates mourns badly by taking the lost object (in this case the missing/lost male body) into herself, and by outwardly retaining that object in an idealized form (a perfected image of masculinity). Price regards figuration as a fantasy that stems from mourning, a mourning “which precisely demands the presence of symbols through which to regenerate the self and society, to repair the ‘hole in the real’ which has been created by loss”.19 I would argue, by way of Abraham and Torok’s work, that the mourning addressed by Price represents an unsuccessful attempt to mourn. The image of the idealized father figure will repeatedly return in disguised or encrypted forms because 19

Price, “Remembering Vietnam …”, 173-78.

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the loss has not been accepted. Figuration denotes images rather than words, so therefore, an idealized image replaces words in the gap. For Price, Vietnam operates as the focal point of demasculinization. However, the reduction of masculinity should not be directly attributed to one particular historical moment. Shelter, set just before America’s increased efforts in Vietnam, charts the weakening position of men – a weakening that stems both from the economic situation in the region and also from male combat in Korea. Demasculinization results from a gradual shift in gender roles, brought into focus by the debilitating effects of Vietnam. The Korean War, like the war that followed, was undeclared. Without declaration, combat lacks definition, and the enemy inclines to an anonymity defined as “Communism”. According to Donald Brandon, unlike World War II, the war in Korea “was unpopular in the United States from almost beginning to end” and whereas the USA ended the Second World War victoriously, the unconcluded nature of the Korean War left the country in a position of a negotiated peace. Brandon goes on to suggest that many Americans “could not understand the decisions to limit the war and to accept a truce ‘without victory’”.20 The truce between America and North Korea did not provide resolution for American troops. In both Korea and Vietnam, victory was unattainable for the men who served: in broadly generic terms, an American military campaign failed to produce the levels of success attained by the US in the two world wars. The decline in masculine control, explored by Price in relation to Vietnam, is also evident in the post-Korean experiences of both Wes and Carmody in Shelter. Wes keeps a photo album of his time in Korea and his memorabilia suggest an attempt to circumvent the unresolved nature of the war. Korea, commonly referred to as America’s forgotten war, was lost within an amnesic national narrative. Wes’ visual images help keep the war real and demonstrate an attempt to retain his experiences. Alma’s response to her father’s war photographs provides an additional perspective on the demasculinization that resulted from the conflict. Alma, sensing the loss of Wes’ masculinity, arrives at camp with the intention of living out a version of her father’s military 20

Donald Brandon, American Foreign Policy: Beyond Utopianism and Realism (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966), 125.

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experience. “She [Alma] had wanted camp to be like the army, like her father’s photo album of the war in Korea” but Alma’s image of war is undercut by the sight of her counselor, Pearlie. Pearlie, who “was a pink blonde with frosted, tousled hair” reminds Alma of Bird’s Beauty Salon, a space where everything is pink from “the baseboards” to the “window frames”. For Alma, the Salon’s customers are the embodiment of femininity: “This is how women were.”21 Pearlie’s presence at camp means that Alma cannot access the male combat experience, a point underlined by the way in which pseudo military life is contained within an overtly female space where “Everyone was safe”.22 Carmody’s experience in Korea compounds the notion that men lost their masculinity in the war, becoming themselves sites for penetration rather than penetrative forces. Carmody was neglected as a child and abused in a children’s home after his attempt to kill his mother. His life is revealed in parts through Parson’s narrative. Just as Audrey’s italicized voice haunts Alma’s sections, so Carmody is an italicized presence in Parson’s narrative. Incarcerated together, Carmody and Parson appear to merge. So, for example, Parson recollects a homoerotic fight on the prison floor, during which Carmody “groaned and arched himself and laced his fingers into Parson’s thick, dark hair, trying to push Parson’s wet mouth lower, harder, and Parson heard the Devil’s suckling cries, the Devil’s whimpering want, and he raised up to lie full length upon the Devil’s form”.23 The two men appear, at times, to share the same identity, an identity based around sexual danger. As children, Carmody and Parson are both abused by men. Carmody is raped at the children’s home, whilst Parson is molested by his foster parent, Harkness. Parson is also taught, under Preacher’s care, that he should deny his sexual urges: “the old man [Preacher] said he must spill his seed on barren ground, never in the house or in his bed … throw it in the river, Preacher said, that is the seed of evil.”24 Parson responds to the damaged Carmody but is protected by a religious education that insists on abstinence. 21

Shelter, 71. Ibid., 67. 23 Ibid., 46. 24 Ibid., 42. 22

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When Parson thinks of Lenny he likens her to a statue: remembering a view of fallen statues from his prison window, he imagines that Lenny is one of those statues: the whole white length of her lying not in the depths of Turtle Hole but in the stream, which was shallow and looked so clear, her face washed by water until the regular features and cast of eye are obscured. Until she is smooth as scooped stone, long and tapered in her body, a rock fish, a fish with breasts. Her breasts are like white apples, full and compact, young, not the large breasts men slept in, but breasts men mouthed and tasted, nearly tore with their teeth. The nipples are faint bruises at the centers.

Even as a smooth statue Lenny also becomes a sexualized figure for Parson. In addition, his detailed description of her young breasts is undercut with a sense of violence. Men nearly “tore” breasts like these “with their teeth”.25 Parson’s thoughts couple with the reality of Carmody, a man capable of enacting such violence. Parson believes that “Carmody was surely his brother; Parson was near him, always, breathing his look and his smell”.26 Parson feels as though he “had floated a long time in the shadow where Carmody lived”, and in describing that “shadow” Parson summarizes Carmody’s life to date. In the shadow Parson hurtles “through a dark space in which Carmody hit his mother till she was nearly dead”: and Carmody, sent to Proudytown, got fucked, fist-fucked, fucked with brooms, still his mother’s child. Carmody, a sixteen-year-old private, lied to get to Korea, posed with a gun he didn’t have to steal. Then Carmody in a cage, his first real cell, the cold mountains east of Manchuria, where certain phrases got him rice and bread crusts. These were pictures, memory transplant; they were Carmody’s.27

Carmody was obviously damaged before he went to war, but his return from Korea involves an intensification of his bouts of paranoia. The “certain phrases” Carmody learnt during his captivity in Korea infiltrate his dreams, resulting in a night world that frightens Hilda. She confronts his wild ravings during daylight as long as she is 25

Ibid., 48-49. Ibid., 65. 27 Ibid., 141. 26

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“careful” and does not “turn her back”. At night, however, Korean words punctuate his nightmares, and, waking he “throw[s] things at the light bulb”, as though trying to retreat back into the darkness. Buddy remembers that during such episodes his father yelled out “words that weren’t American”: Mam said he learned those in the army in Korea, and he didn’t talk foreign unless he was drunk. Then he got afraid. Afraid of what? He’d been in prison in Korea, Mam said, long time ago, but not for doing anything wrong. Just for being a soldier. So you got in jail for being a soldier. No, no, he was captured by his enemy, in a war back then.28

Carmody’s masculinity is not only questioned by fears relating to captivity, but also by his loss of American words. The demasculinization evident in Phillips’ portrayal of Carmody and of Wes (though in a less overt sense), is played out in the novel through their relationships with their children. III Carmody, the victim of abuse, becomes the abuser of Buddy. The abusive nature of their relationship is openly presented in Buddy’s section “Two Girls”, the title of the section reflecting Carmody’s feminization of his stepson. Carmody calls Buddy “Miss” and encloses him in a female space: “You and your Mam,” Dad said. “You a couple of girls, ain’t you”. Buddy knew not to answer yet. Not to move. “Well, ain’t you? Couple of girls? Or not. Yes or no?” Buddy nodded. He held out his glass. Dad put an ice cube in it. “Two girls”, he said. “Then do what a girl does.”29

Carmody justifies his abuse by projecting a female identity onto his son and by instigating a fear that allows him to reassert a sense of 28 29

Ibid., 154-55. Ibid., 59.

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authority. As Buddy rubs the ice cube down Carmody’s body, Carmody masturbates – the scene is a vague prelude to Alma’s later reference to the onanist at the drive-in.30 A textual link, through Carmody to the image of the onanist, takes the reader eventually to Lenny. As previously established, Alma thinks that the sexual act of the onanist who “bled milk”, is damaging.31 In a later section, “Parson: Meant To Do”, Parson draws a similar analogy between milk and damage. Walking with Lenny in his arms, Parson thinks that “She smells of milk, sweet and strong, but she is not so pure. She carries some damage around.”32 Lenny’s damage stems, in part, from her dreamlike memories of her childhood encounters with Wes. Wes told stories of World War II to Lenny when she was a young child – tales about France and the D-day landings. Playing with Lenny in the bathtub, he likens the water to an ocean that “swallowed ships” and speaks of “submarines, hard cigar shapes that sunk and spied before the troops could land”. Wes’ account accentuates the covert and stealthy nature of men in war: “They hid in the dark and landed in waves on the beach.”33 The stories allow Wes to reassert his masculinity. He tells tales of victory in Europe in order to erase his own participation in an Asian conflict that lacked resolution. Phillips’ allusion to the notion of war talk prompts male reaffirmation: in “Parson: Dump Run”, Parson hears the workmen at the camp refer to themselves as “the dirt platoon, as though they were soldier remnants of some small castoff army delegated to dig and haul; it was Private, hump it, for Chrissakes! Or Sarge, gimme a smoke!” For Parson the workmen exist in a space that “seemed like a forgotten shelf, a location in which they were placed and held”.34 The workmen, “forgotten” by society, reaffirm their identity through war talk. War talk gives purpose to their task and confirms a chain of command – the foreman as the “Sarge” and the workers as the “Privates”. I would argue that Wes’ bath-time war talk fits into the wider issue of father/daughter desire. The ocean in the bathtub exists in displaced form as the field at the back of the Swenson home, where Lenny and Wes would lie “down 30

Ibid., 104. See Chapter 6, 155-57. 32 Ibid., 143. 33 Ibid., 235. 34 Ibid., 61. 31

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so the weeds closed over them”. Grass and water elide in the notion of submergence. Wes’ hand moves around in the bathtub, a hand that “was the troopship, long and broad, bigger and bigger, steaming toward her with an engine sound” only to reappear in Lenny’s memory of the field and of being with her father in the weeds. She recalls his bare forearms: the watchband on his wrist turning and darkening. She caught her breath and felt the rolling shift of the ground beneath the picture. That was in the field, when they were hiding in the grass.

I would suggest that Wes’ hand, hidden as it submerges, is penetrative, moving towards Lenny to be swallowed, as the ocean swallows submarines, and the grasses swallow bodies. Lenny’s flashback to the scene in the bathtub occurs prior to her violent encounter with Carmody at Turtle Hole. In “Lenny: Beautiful Sea”, Lenny likens the water in Turtle Hole to “bath water”. Ultimately, the environment at camp, and more particularly Turtle Hole, functions as a site of re-enactment. In the water Lenny confronts her paternal, working-class legacy. Turtle Hole is defined by class boundaries. The water exists at the “border of camp property” and the “Girl Guides didn’t swim there”. Lenny thinks that it “was odd” that the girls were not allowed to swim in Turtle Hole, perhaps “there were snapping turtles, or ghosts”. The girls are banned from swimming there because the “county people” swam at Turtle Hole “when camp was not in session”.35 The “county people” of the area are most lucidly described in Machine Dreams as Danner recalls the people who shopped in Bellington: Saturdays, miners cashed checks in their hard hats and rumpled clothes; country families stood in line at the welfare office before shopping at Woolworth’s. They choked the three blocks that were Bellington’s downtown. Their children were numerous and pale, dressed in ill-fitting clothes …. They were dirty and smelled of dirt, despite the cakes of harsh yellow soap dispensed by the County.

Danner watched these people, “afraid but fascinated”, and her fear is reflected in the camp’s decision to ban the girls from swimming in a 35

Ibid., 235-36.

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site known to be used by the working-class.36 Indeed, Mrs T asks the workmen laying pipe on camp property “not to set foot across the river without special permission”. The workmen “were discouraged from walking through the camp except when they were on their way to or from the work site, as though Girl Guides were somehow threatened by the vision on five men in khakis”.37 The proximity of working men, or “county people”, is treated as a possible contaminate, but for Lenny, contact with Turtle Hole allows her access to her family history. Her erotic memories of Wes, bound up in a class trajectory, find an outlet both in the water and in her confrontation with Carmody. IV In the novel Parson dreams that Carmody was water, an elongated sheen not unlike Turtle Hole in color and brilliance, an oval water that moved along the edges of things like a shade or a ghost, a water that moved up walls, through bars, edged past the warrens of cells along the main corridor of the prison, water that glistened, featureless and flat, probing, searching to take on any shape, any color, anything to get out.38

Here, Carmody is symbolically linked to Turtle Hole, that often appears holographic, or as emphasizing the characters’ ability to see multiple images in the same reflection. Lenny, after meeting Parson by the water, imagines that “the oval of Turtle Hole was the black pool she knew could tilt and move through trees”.39 Buddy perceives that the “circle of clearing around Turtle Hole and the water that went so deep were one world, far from any other”. They see two worlds within Turtle Hole and the surface layer cracks open to reveal a hidden depth. Carmody makes the “dark crack” in the water, a “crack that reached across to find [Lenny] and hold her”.40 The cracking open of Turtle Hole is reminiscent of the “room” that Parson opens 36

Machine Dreams, 225-26. Shelter, 45-46. 38 Ibid., 10. 39 Ibid., 166. 40 Ibid., 238. 37

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up in Lenny’s mind – a room that “cracked open” to reveal pictures in her head, pictures that “are older and rush through her”.41 In a figurative sense, the cracking open, with its attendant sexual connotations, represents the opening up of Lenny to reveal the damage that exists inside. After Carmody drags Lenny from the water, he is depicted as having “one arm under her, pulling her hips off the ground like he was going to rip her open”. However, as Buddy and the other girls stop Carmody’s attack, Lenny “tried to crawl toward them to tell them, stop, stop, you’re too late”.42 Her attempted interjection implies an earlier crime: they are too late, presumably, because Lenny is already damaged in ways that Carmody’s attack merely brings to the surface. Whilst Lenny’s assertion that they are “too late” implies earlier penetration, presumably by Wes, given her somnial encounters, these notions of abuse always exist at the margins of perception. The fantastical nature of Lenny’s abuse indicates that rather than there being an actual act of molestation by the father, Lenny’s damage is more generally a direct result of the Swenson family politics as she is torn between an increasingly independent mother and a weakened father. As Audrey diminishes Wes’ position within the family unit, Lenny is torn between the erasure of her father and the need to maintain his position. Audrey’s affair signals a shift in the family dynamic marked by the mother’s break from the home sphere and violation of the marital bond. On two separate occasions Lenny recalls Nickel kissing Audrey in the Swenson kitchen – images that in many ways constitute the primal scene at the heart of the changing politics within the Swenson family. Lenny describes the scene for Cap during the “rabbit game”: She might tell how she’d seen a man biting and kissing her mother, a man who’d come to the house selling dictionaries. In fact the man had been Mr. Campbell, Delia’s father, the same one who’d driven off the bridge last spring. He’d brought Delia over to stay the night with Alma. Wes wasn’t home and the girls had been watching TV. Lenny had looked into the kitchen from the sofa and noticed the clock, the second hand moving around, and realized there was no 41 42

Ibid., 166. Ibid., 242.

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talking. She’d moved into the hallway and seen her mother with Delia’s father, pressed against the kitchen counter, their eyes closed, oblivious. Lenny didn’t even consider telling her father. It seemed like women’s business, mundane and mildly horrifying, like menstruation.43

Lenny’s lie, re-framing the scene for Cap, reflects the class status of Audrey’s infidelity. Nickel is a salesman, but unlike her father who sells machinery, Lenny’s revision of the adulterer has him selling words: effectively, she makes him the vendor of educational aides. Lenny also notes that the peddler of language stands in place of the father who is missing from the family home. Lenny’s decision to keep her knowledge from Wes involves her in a double bind. Her complicity with “women’s business” undermines her allegiances to Wes. The analogy with menstruation indicates the inevitability of Lenny’s own developing sexuality, a sexuality she may connect with the betrayal of the father after witnessing Audrey and Nickel. Her desire for Wes is, in effect, an attempt to reverse Audrey’s betrayal. The image of her mother with another man returns to Lenny as she helps to dispose of Carmody’s body: A picture slams into Lenny clear as a snapshot: Nickel Campbell with Audrey, Audrey backed against the kitchen sink, holding him, his mouth in her neck. Then the picture moves, they move inside it, forward and backward in their tiny history like film on a reel. Slow it down and look. They were moving, weren’t they, like dancing in place, no, more like floating on what eddied and slowed and moved them both, and Lenny thinks about Mud River, Nickel Campbell’s car blunt as a metal beetle, spraying water when it hit and disappearing when the river closed over. Audrey backed against the kitchen sink. Lenny hears the roaring, far away from her, like some dim apprehension.44

The idea of the image slamming “into” Lenny carries accompanying notions of penetration, so whilst Wes may be said to lie inside Lenny, so too may the mother’s infidelity function as a blockage. As the image violently interrupts Lenny’s thoughts and as she turns her memory into a film reel, Lenny effectively seals the moment, 43 44

Ibid., 113. Ibid., 261-62.

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“forward and backward in their tiny history like film on a reel”, thereby allowing her some form of control over the otherwise uncontrollable nature of the memory. Lenny’s “snapshot” situates Audrey within the complex historical and social changes that occurred in the South during the 1960s. Bartley suggests that “Motherhood and homemaking in a nice house in a suburb with good schools, convenient shopping centers, and low crime rates was the socially proper goal for middle-class and upwardly mobile women”.45 Audrey desires all these things, and indeed by the end of the novel she has turned her desire into a reality. However, Audrey’s needs become real only as she moves out of the South, and away from Wes. Audrey’s separation from Wes fits into a wider regional and national changes in the traditional structure of the family. During the 1960s, as women gradually moved in increasing numbers into the work place: Divorce became more common … and a declining number of households sheltered nuclear families. Divorce and even desertion lost much of their stigma as marriage forfeited its moral and religious sanctity.

Audrey separates from Wes as she searches for the “self-fulfillment, self-achievement, and self-advancement” that Bartley attributes to the rise of modern cultural assumptions in the South.46 In effect, Lenny struggles to find a place within the changing dynamics of her home life, as traditional gender oppositions break down. Jessica Benjamin considers the collapse of gender polarity in her work on gender and domination. She suggests that “The social separation of private and public spheres – long noted by feminists as the crucial form of the sexual division of labor and thus the social vehicle of gender domination – is patently linked to the split between the father of autonomy and the mother of dependency”.47 As Audrey deviates towards middle-class values, she both violates and transcends the private sphere. She brings Nickel into the home she 45

Bartley, The New South 1945-1980, 266. Ibid., 450. 47 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (London: Virago, 1988), 185. 46

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shares with Wes, and then later renounces that home as she moves north into a clerical occupation. Lenny anticipates Audrey’s separation from Wes as she constantly returns to the image of her mother kissing Nickel. Lenny hears a roaring sound when the image returns for the second time at Turtle Hole: later in the section she will imagine sending the roaring (that originates from within Carmody), to Audrey. The passage in question begins as Lenny contemplates the effect of Carmody’s killing on the lives of the children: They’ve done a terrible thing. The line floats into her head like a story about someone else. She knows what is means but she can’t feel it. She knows something terrible happened, came to get them. She feels it in front of her, breathing on her. Like the air of another world, this world, the world that shifts and moves beneath what she knew. What had they seen, each of them, what did they know? A world inside them all, dark and velvet and ripped. Suddenly come upon and taken in. Like he took them in and showed them: what was in him roared like a cyclone, a hurricane; it was the sound that ate Carmody and turned him loose and Buddy had turned it all: Buddy with the rock in his hand, no plan, no thought, what he knew broken through in him at the only possible moment. Strangely, he’d saved them, and they had saved him, made sure Carmody never got up, never, to come and get him, find them, find Buddy. They did something terrible. And when he’d fallen and lay there, still, with his feet turned in and his long arms loose, the roaring dropped him like he’d dropped Buddy. What it raged inside was only a thing, a possession. Where had it gone? Lenny imagines a black wind tearing through the night sky over Turtle Hole, ripping at trees and bridges, ripping along the two-lane to Gaither, imagines Audrey alone in the house, opening the door. And the roaring is Lenny’s own voice, poured through like a message, a long, rattling, unmistakable sound, perfectly rendered.48

Carmody exposes an intrinsically spoiled interior world. The roaring that leaves Carmody transfers to Lenny, not because it is a permeating evil but because it is her only available articulation of an interior damage.

48

Shelter, 264.

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Lenny imagines the roaring moving towards Audrey because she needs Audrey to hear her. The roaring takes the form of an “unmistakable sound”, “perfectly rendered” – one that Audrey could not fail to hear: as such, it gives Lenny a “voice” that transcends the earlier “trapped quiet” of her attempts to communicate with her mother.49 Lenny finds in the sound a way back into what I established earlier as the potential “room of abuse” that Audrey cancels out.50 Abuse should be understood as occurring in two rooms: the words that Lenny hears – “They’ve done a terrible thing” and “They did something terrible” float “into her head like a story about someone else”.51 The lines suggest that Lenny, at that moment, is recovering both the “terrible” thing she saw her mother do and at a level more opaque, the room where her interior was formed by paternal desire. Lenny gains partial access to both rooms even as she considers her part in the death of Carmody. If so, it may be said that Carmody allows Lenny to re-enter the paternal legacy that Audrey is gradually erasing. Lenny is effectively transformed in the water into the white cloth that haunts her childhood memories. Swimming out to the centre of Turtle Hole, Lenny looks back towards the shore “showing only her white shoulders and her opalescent face, her wet hair flat to her head and floating out around her, swirled like fabric when she turns”.52 Lenny’s “fabric” hair resonates with the earlier description of the “white cloth twisting in black space” that “is sucked inward, swallowed and gone”. As was established earlier, the whiteness that plagues Lenny’s flashbacks indicated the erasure of the potential room of abuse.53 Here, I should add, that the whiteness also cancels out Wes: “In a dream Lenny has, he holds out his hands for inspection, to show he hasn’t taken anything; the hands show open palms against a white field that gets so bright the hands are blotted out.” Wes’ hands, once associated with manual labour, are erased by a whiteness that, at one level, epitomizes Audrey’s desire for middleclass status. 49

Ibid., 169. See Chapter 7, 167-68. 51 Shelter, 264. 52 Ibid., 237. 53 See Chapter 7, 175-76. 50

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Audrey, for both Lenny and Alma, is she who does the washing: the sisters tie whiteness to their mother who is recurrently imaged as pinning up “white sheets that are vast and square”, ensuring that in the parental bedroom the “sheets are white and the bed is white and the walls and the ceiling are white”.54 For Audrey, whiteness covers over all the things she wishes to forget. She defines her affair by telling Alma that Being with him was the worst wrong I ever did but it felt the most like belief; I still believe things he said. I don’t have any shame in my mind about that time, just a still white calm, like there’s snow over all the pictures and the words.55

Audrey displaces her guilt and the whiteness blanks out the images that remind her of her part in Nickel’s suicide. Similarly, the whiteness of her home implies her attempt to erase Wes from her life. Even as a salesman Wes holds on to blue-collar values, shown by his emphasis on the man made structures at Camp Shelter. Wes’ values impede Audrey’s desire for middle-class status, hence her refusal to recognize them. However, the whiteness, representative of forgetting, never completely covers the picture, just as the lines erased in Alma’s schoolbooks always show through the page. Indeed, the whiteness in Shelter takes the reader to Machine Dreams where snow acts as a concealer. The repeated allusions to whiteness throughout Phillips’ work negate, perhaps intentionally, the effect of hiddenness as readers expect to encounter some form of hidden knowledge beneath the blanketed colour. As Bull suggests, “Hiding is only possible to a potential observer”.56 The conscious concealment of events is central to Phillips’ style, but in that very consciousness rests the potential for discovery. Certainly, whiteness figures Buddy’s release from the abusive Carmody. In “Buddy: His Kingdom”, “There is a white space Buddy can make when he is on top of the rock, and he can put any good thing in that space”. When Turtle Hole turns into a “snow oval” as it freezes over in the winter, Buddy imagines running “right across the 54

Shelter, 167-69. Ibid., 230. 56 Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 16. 55

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middle, whooping and screaming,” seeing “it all laid out hard and shining around him, gleaming”.57 However, Carmody is buried within the cave that feeds Turtle Hole, so the white surface, across which Buddy wishes to skim, retains a darker element beneath it. The tension between burial and the continued presence of that which is buried persists as a dominant feature of Buddy’s last section, and indeed of the final section of the novel, “Buddy Carmody: His Kingdom”. V The network of trenches in which the workmen prepare to lay pipes throughout the text is finally filled during the closing section. The earth becomes a “river colony of ditches” as the workers (unemployed miners),58 “dig out the earth for ten foot of pipe, set the pipe, and spend the afternoon cutting brush for the trail road for the truck”.59 Bulldozers move in to cover over the trenches and Buddy recalls how the “hills of dirt the workmen had dug up … began to disappear”. As the bulldozer fills in the holes “little trees and green brushes [are] pulled in and crushed, the limbs cracking and the dozer jerking back and forth, roaring”.60 The surrounding area is pulled into the trenches, wiping away traces of the workmen’s existence. The burial of the pipes, and therefore the workmen’s labour, is striking in comparison with the earlier male construction work at the camp during the Depression. As established earlier, Wes recalls how the male members of his family carried out WPA commissioned work during the Depression: their work resulted in a lasting testament to organized labour. The workmen at camp during 1963 lay pipes only because they lost their jobs in the mines. The first section of the novel, “Lenny: Higher and Highest” notes that “the county was low income, the mines, statewide, laid off”.61 The foreman of the work crew “cursed the loudest how he’d only taken the job because the mines had laid him 57

Shelter, 275-77. Ibid., 7. 59 Ibid., 45. 60 Ibid., 272. 61 Ibid., 5. 58

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off, goddam mickey mouse operation”.62 For the workmen in 1963 the job itself is of little worth beyond earning them an income because their labour will be buried. “A long mound” still exists “where the trenches once lay open; Buddy has run up and down it, stomping and tramping, talking to the hard dumb pipe that is buried”. Buddy mourns at the mound, talking to that which is buried. His mourning, though, may be considered in light of his, and the girls’ loss of innocence, rather than in terms of his feelings of loss for an abusive stepfather. The mound becomes an alternate site at where Buddy may remember Carmody, and by the end of the summer he thinks that “He’s said all his words and he doesn’t have to look”. Buddy uses the mound as a coping strategy because “he can’t go to or look at” the place beside Turtle Hole where he and the girls killed Carmody. The site where Parson built the seven markers of stone is the “only one not part of his [Buddy’s] kingdom”. Buddy covers up Carmody’s actual grave inside the cave, turning the cave’s entrance into a garden “for things to grow up over … to look old, like it had all grown without help”, but he knows that that which he has hidden remains “hidden [only] for a while”.63 Bull’s discussion of the different forms of hiding associated with sensation and perception offers a useful way of glossing the concluding distinction in Shelter between burial and the return of the dead. Bull argues that “The dead are perceptible in that through memory, intuition, or some form of extra-sensory perception they remain objects of knowledge despite their removal from the realm of the sensible”.64 Buddy and the girls remove Carmody’s body from the “sensible” world (that is from the world of sensation), by concealing him in the cave, but their shared memory of the event suggests that what they concealed may still return to haunt them. The children choose to try to forget about Carmody’s death, and in so doing ensure his incorporation, and the incorporation of the damage he encapsulated. Phillips’ description of Turtle Hole alludes to their need to forget. Lenny imagines the water in the pond “watching them, certainly a presence, heavy with time and

62

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 272-74. 64 Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, 12. 63

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forgetting”.65 Furthermore, Buddy pictures Parson taking all the damage that surrounds them away into the water, water “so big and deep nothing ever comes out again”.66 The children are caught in a complex process of mourning. They want to forget what happened, and by not talking about Carmody’s death to anyone outside of their circle they seek to guarantee that the death will be lost, or incorporated into themselves. Lenny tells the others that It’s over now …. But if we tell someone, it’ll never be over. We’ll have to tell it and tell it. We’ll never be able to stop telling it. Nothing else will matter anymore, ever.

Yet, despite their attempts to bury the event, Lenny knows “that she would never leave this place”. Indeed, as the others strike Carmody about the head, Lenny’s body is effectively imprinted on the earth: she “felt the impact of each blow as she was hammered into the earth beneath his dark, dense weight”.67 Just as her form sinks into the earth, Carmody’s death seeps into the minds of all the children. Indeed, both Lenny and Buddy carry the event within themselves. Lenny, after helping to dispose of the body imagines that Carmody “skates fast and vicious inside her, a shadow to sidestep, a remnant”.68 As a “sidestep” in her mind, Carmody is an obstacle requiring evasions, or the making of interior gaps, that even as they deny what happened, draw attention to the omission. Buddy is plagued with nightmares, “he can wake up in a sweat, gasping, thinking Dad’s hand is jammed between his teeth”.69 Phillips identifies the God’s eye that Hilda hangs above Buddy’s bed as part of a “pagan ritual of purification” that her church “would not condone”.70 Hilda tells Buddy that the eye “doesn’t think, it only sees and knows”: the eye purifies because it does not judge.71

65

Shelter, 237. Ibid., 249. 67 Ibid., 242-43. 68 Ibid., 260. 69 Ibid., 277. 70 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 48. 71 Shelter, 277. 66

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Phillips, in an essay entitled “Report of the Spies”, describes her childhood memory of a Minister kissing her, and of how, then: A shudder of wakefulness moves in my chest, secretive and dense. I tilt my head back to look up, up above all our heads at the oculus in the center of the ceiling. There in its round window of chartreuse glass is painted one clear eye, like a mirror, I know, like a spy.72

The God’s eye in Shelter is one of a series of eyes that appear in the text. When Carmody holds Buddy inside the cave, Buddy imagines his Mam looking for him with “her searching eye”. Buddy sees her eye, “big and wise as the world, peer in at the opening of the cave, the colors darting and moving, and the iris of her beautiful eye was hard with facets like a jewel, and her gaze lit a path through the dark”. At one level, the all seeing eye attributed to both God and Mam, offers momentary protection. After his nightmares about Carmody Buddy takes solace from the hanging eye that watches everything, but judges nothing. His fear in the cave is also alleviated as he imagines Mam’s eye searching for him to make things better, because “Mam would know what to do”.73 However, Phillips’ account of a similar eye in the church window of her own past refers to the eye both as a mirror and a spy. Like Alma, Buddy appears as a spy. He would watch the workmen from the bridge “and think he was a spy”.74 He peers “through green cover to watch the girls at the stream”,75 and he moves “in the bushes and cover like a frog in a hop” so that “the tall girls never saw until he wanted them to see”.76 If the God’s eye, according to one associative skein, represents the qualities of concealment then secrecy must resonate within its protective power. The novel closes as Buddy finds a “one-eyed” rabbit, and its one good eye is as “rounded and reflective as a little mirror”. Rabbits, in the text have previously been associated with secrecy and lies – Buddy’s pet shares the pedigree, as Buddy recalls that out of all the 72 “Report of the Spies”, vers. 2000, Jayne Anne Phillips, 20 April 2006 73 Shelter, 214. 74 Ibid., 100. 75 Ibid., 95. 76 Ibid., 78.

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animals, the “rabbits got nothing but knowing”.77 Knowledge is central to the novel’s development as Phillips charts the move from pre-consciousness to consciousness. At the water the children reach that level of consciousness together, and their individual narratives are drawn into one. Phillips states: Remember that old idea that ignorance is bliss, that knowledge, any kind of knowledge, comes at a price, that it’s work, that you give up something to understand the connections between things and you get larger because it takes a certain strength to see how complicated everything is. I wanted these kids to step into that knowledge nonverbally.78

Phillips’ allusion to knowledge as connections is imperative if we are to understand how the novel works. In her review of Shelter, Schwartz argues that “it’s hard to know what to take from Shelter”: While the book is full of characters with histories long and complex enough to make them seem solid, by its end such specificity is subsumed in the larger fable quality, by the big, plot-y issues of the war between good and evil and the girls’… fall from innocence. Somehow the mythic quality of the story and the accumulation of heavily weighted symbols, of snakes, caves, angels and devils, seem a pesky shorthand and a detraction from Phillips’ otherwise supple storytelling.79

I quote Schwartz at length in order to highlight how easy it is to miss the importance of “knowledge” as emerging from “connections” not only in Shelter, but in all of Phillips’ writing. Schwartz’s reading is potentially both myopic and redundant because whilst Phillips certainly draws from fairy tales, and explores the Cold War rationale of good versus evil, these elements work within a historically and regionally specific frame of reference, a frame that must not be reduced to “fable” or “myth”. The network of “connections” within the text suggests that to dismiss a feature like the cave as no more 77

Ibid., 278. Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 49. 79 Schwartz, “Look Homeward, Angels”, 587. 78

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than symbolic jargon, is to sacrifice the webbed connections through which the cave materializes: what results is “shorthand”. The essential connections in Shelter unfold both outwardly, as events shape the progress of the characters at camp, and inwardly as memories and hidden scenes resurface. The resurfacing of forgotten memories disrupts the temporal framing of the novel, a breaking down that is highlighted in the splitting of the Swenson family. The family structure itself undermines Schwartz’s claim that the girls “fall from innocence”, because the phantoms of family life would suggest that “innocence” is always and already encrypted with the shadowy secrets of other lives. For Phillips even the “preconscious” is not innocent or, white, since whiteness regularly seeps with the stain that it seeks to whitewash. The characters in Shelter are inextricably bound not only to their personal, family history, but to the regional and national context that shapes that history. Phillips explores the connection between the political and the domestic throughout her fiction, and the intertextual nature of her writing highlights the tensile and often opaque connections that hold her characters together in the grip of a rapidly changing environment. At the close of Shelter, Lenny and Alma’s immediate bond to the South seems severed as they move north with their mother. However, they cannot escape their internalized memories of the region, and Lenny’s imprint remains embedded in the earth by Turtle Hole. As Phillips moves from Shelter to MotherKind she moves into the 1980s, introducing her character, Kate Tateman, who has relocated outside of the region. Even in that novel the soil of West Virginia continues to lay claim on its expatriate.

CHAPTER NINE The Experience of Separation in MotherKind I wanted to look at dark material, like death, but inside a very accessible surface. I wanted the language of MotherKind, unlike the language in Shelter, to be superficially simple, clear, and familiar. I wanted to look at the ancient, mythic dimension of both birth and death as spiritual transitions and departures inside a very ordinary world.1

Phillips’ departure from the dense prose of Shelter, to what she defines as the “simple, clear, and familiar” language of her third novel, MotherKind, may reflect the transition from the West Virginian locale of her earlier novels and stories to a north-eastern setting. The expatriation of MotherKind’s central character, Kate, to Boston, signals a relocation away from a southern place: a relocation whose roots lie in the story “Bess” and gradually work through Phillips’ numerous female characters, most notably through Danner Hampson and the Swenson sisters. Indeed, whilst the women in Phillips’ work pay homage to their ancestral pasts, they nevertheless harbour the strongest desires to leave the home-place. In MotherKind, Kate’s move away from the “coal mines” and the “desolation” of West Virginia, to the “respectable house” in a suburb of Boston, means that on the surface at least, she appears to be a “true WASP”. Her marriage to Matt, a Jewish doctor, that also involves her becoming stepmother to his two young sons, Sam and Jonah, means that Kate has fulfilled her mother’s desire: she has married outside her class and will not, therefore, have to struggle against a blue collar man as her mother had done.2

1 2

Johnson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 10. MotherKind, 87.

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Kate’s having flown “the coop outward and upward”, a migration that applies to Phillips’ as well as to Kate, means that the novel pivots around the question of whether such a move results in the loss “of old class traditions, networks and ties”.3 Godden claims that in MotherKind “Phillips has come close to the end of her haunted commitment to the long dying of southern things”.4 Certainly, the death of Kate’s mother, Katherine, may be read as a final break with southern tradition. Kate wonders “if she would see anything of that first world, the world she’d come from, when her mother was gone”.5 Yet the novel works to circumvent such finality as it moves through a series of transitional spaces (often marked by italicized sections) that effectively negotiate between an acceptance of death via introjection and a refusal to acknowledge loss, involving incorporation. These italicized sections form a travel journal, recording memories of Kate’s journeys through India and Nepal, as well as her journey back to West Virginia to visit her sick mother. In those italicized spaces, Kate finds herself within a “border country”, a place “between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and an experience of change”.6 So whilst she appears to have moved beyond a regional past the italicized sections continually draw Kate back to West Virginia. Indeed, Phillips’ decision to open and close the novel with two of those italicized passages frames the text within a regional past. Subsequently, whilst the surface layer of MotherKind may appear “simple” and “clear”, as with all of Phillips’ work to date, her most recent novel works around a complex series of interrelated moments that carry both intra- and inter-textual concerns. II Despite the intricate networks of meaning that connect the novel with Phillips’ earlier work, and the central character’s West Virginian roots, in MotherKind Kate attempts to break with the incorporation of family secrets and the inheritance of transgenerational phantoms. 3

Pfeil, “Makin’ Flippy-Floppy …”, 265. Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 272. 5 MotherKind, 42. 6 Williams, The Country and the City, 239. 4

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Such a break often produces a tension between the desire both to erase and conserve certain elements of the past. Kate believes that giving birth to a son, Alexander, marks the end of the incorporative nature of mother/daughter relationships. Kate thinks about the “many maxims [she] would have passed on to her daughter, were she carrying one. But she wasn’t. Her baby was a boy.”7 His gender protects him from the weight of inheritance, a point that Jean Hampson makes in Machine Dreams when she tells Danner that I always assumed I’d have my own daughter …. In a funny way, you were already real. I never felt that way about your brother. You were first-born; then he arrived and made a place for himself; I’d had no ideas about him. Maybe it’s that way with boy children; maybe their luckier.8

Kate not only believes that Alexander’s gender will automatically exclude him from inheriting the weight of a maternal past, but she also actively seeks to prevent his incorporation of her own family burdens. Kate, aware that “she’d carried the burden of her mother’s confidence for years, and [that] even before words were spoken, her childhood had unfolded at the strained boundary of her mother’s entrapment”, actively works to stop her son from ingesting the traces of Katherine’s illness and eventual death.9 Kate marks her mother’s medicine spoon with “a thin red strip of adhesive tape, and again with a long black line of permanent marker, marker that would never wash off, so that [she] would never, never, now or in the future, use this spoon for her baby, her little boy”.10 She strives to provide Alexander with a space free of contamination from both her mother’s cancer and the words used to define the disease. When Matt and Kate discuss Katherine’s diminishing condition in Alexander’s bedroom, Kate

7

MotherKind, 16. Machine Dreams, 4. 9 MotherKind, 80. 10 Ibid., 90. 8

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For Kate, the speaking aloud of words necessarily results in the layering of each word or phrase with a coating of “dark iron filings of contagion or despair”. As Bakhtin states: the life of the word is contained in its transfer from one mouth to another, from one context to another context, from one social collective to another, from one generation to another generation. In this process the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of these concrete contexts into which it has entered.12

Kate tries to prevent the passing on of burdensome words “from one generation to another generation”, protecting her son from the internalization of family secrets that she experienced as a child. Certainly, Alexander’s birth in Boston already distances him from the weight of a West Virginian past. Yet, while Alexander may live free of regional ties, Kate remains unmoored in the text as she struggles to negotiate between a new life in a middle class, northern enclave and the pull southwards. Just as words do not “forget” their “own path” and cannot entirely free themselves “from the power of [those] concrete contexts into which” they have entered, Kate cannot completely sever her ties to region. Those ties mean that she exists in an in-between state, floating between the past and the present. Kate, who continually feels adrift, becomes another in a long line of Phillipsian floaters. Floating in MotherKind is often aligned with the recurrent images of water that in a novel concerned with mothering, necessarily evokes amniotic fluid. The “liquid movement[s]”13 in the novel take the reader back to Phillips’ short story “Bluegill”, where a mother talks to her unborn 11

Ibid., 239. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 202 (my emphasis). 13 MotherKind, 23. 12

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floating foetus against the backdrop of a West coast fishing village.14 Geographically surrounded by water and filled with amniotic fluid the narrator refers to her unborn child as the “Boat in my blood”, a boat negotiating the inevitable departure from the womb.15 The narrator ends the story with her acceptance of the child’s eventual separation from her body, telling it: “The air is yours; it is water circling in like departure.”16 Water, in the context of “Bluegill” and throughout sections of MotherKind, acts as a separating force – the amniotic fluid that keeps the foetus afloat also marks the baby’s departure from the womb. When Kate’s waters break she “felt something deep within her let go …. [and] The water actually splattered out of her as though poured from a vessel, filling her boots and pooling on the concrete between her knees.”17 Maternity and separation, are, therefore, intertwined throughout the novel. For Phillips, the succession of female carers in MotherKind “all know they’re dealing with life and death, and the way in which they labor together is essentially female: birth, the experience of having given birth and raised children, is a common experience which has nurtured and prepared them to act, essentially, as mothers and priestesses supporting a transition from one world to the next”.18 Phillips attributes the notions of separation, continuance and death to the female reproductive system, to the “mothers and priestesses” who watch over the processes of both life and death. When Kate considers Katherine’s illness outside the Kennedy Library in Boston, she thinks of her mother “floating in her sleep as they floated”: all of them and the world itself, through various postures and traveling states, the boys tossed in the van against a soft drone of adult comment, this arching, inhabited monument on its spit of land, the coastline beyond, irregular and rocky, running on for hundreds, thousands of miles, into other weathers and zones of time. The turning of events might register across such distance as a ripple of liquid movement, a setting of limbs.19 14

The story appears in Fast Lanes. Fast Lanes, 87. 16 Ibid., 95. 17 MotherKind, 25. 18 Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 77. 19 MotherKind, 22-23. 15

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Phillips juxtaposes the movement “into other weathers and other zones of time” with the gestation period during which a child floats in amniotic fluid “setting [its] limbs”. The image of a child suspended in the womb highlights the notion of transition as the foetus evolves into a fully developed form that must inevitably leave the mother’s body: a transition echoed in Kate’s move away from region. Whilst the novel pivots on maternity, the allusions to the gestation period and the subsequent separation of child from mother appeal only to the most transparent of Phillips’ concerns. Read within the context of her previous work, the aqueous allusions take on regional dimensions. The “irregular and rocky” nature of the geographical coastline in Kate’s ponderings outside the Library shares distinct similarities with the “phantom coast of inlets and jagged depths” that haunt Kate’s post-coital, dreamy imaginings in Chapter 7 of MotherKind. In the chapter Waylon has journeyed north to visit his daughter. After she and Matt have sex Kate falls asleep seeing “her father’s face”.20 In effect, during Waylon’s stay West Virginian “zones of time” interrupt the present tense of Kate’s coital imaginings. Floating, then, appears to be a dangerous and potentially limited state as it requires careful negotiation around the “jagged depths” of a regional history that may, at any point, return the floater back to the past. III The transitory nature of floating in the novel recalls Phillips’ earlier writing. Just as the floating in Machine Dreams reflects a stage between the processes of introjection and incorporation, the floating in MotherKind signals Kate’s metaphorical stepping out of time to consider the changes in her life. Floating occurs between incorporation, that may be read as a haunted attachment to place, and introjection, that equates with the move beyond a regional past. In light of the tension between Kate’s attempts to resituate herself in Boston and her ties to West Virginia where Waylon remains, floating represents a brief pause in the inevitable articulation of a move away from a regional past.

20

Ibid., 200.

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Kate follows a Phillipsian tradition of women who float, or feel the ground move beneath them at times of change. In Fast Lanes, Bess, in the story bearing her name, temporarily feels that “the house moved beneath my feet, slipped and slid with a creaking like a ship, like we were all afloat”.21 Bess’ sensation of motion may stem from her projected sense of the instability of the family’s ties to the land. In the same collection, Alma tells of a recurring nightmare that first “evolved in [her] mind” as a child. In the “scary dream”, Alma walks through her old childhood home, “from my parents’ bedroom in the back, past the bathroom and Lenny’s closed door, turning the corner near my own small room, desperately trying to keep my footing because the floor is moving and the walls are not stationary”. As the dream progresses, Alma walks into the kitchen where, in the reality outside her dream, she would “nearly always find [her] mother”. However, in her dream the kitchen “is empty, the counters wiped clean, the doors of the cabinets shut, the dishrag wrung out and dried stiff,” prompting Alma to think that her mother has “been released, she’s gone, I’ve lost her”. Alma’s belief that the room moves beneath her feet stems from her childhood intimation that her mother will eventually migrate northwards. Indeed, Alma claims that growing up, “I was always afraid she’d leave, though I never acknowledged my fears, even to myself”.22 Imminent change may be said to result in a sense of movement or of floating. In MotherKind, Kate experiences a floating sensation after giving birth: At first, when she stood or walked, she’d felt as though she moved on the deck of a ship, as though some rhythm pulsed in the ground, the floor. Rooms subtly shifted. The effects of the anesthetic, Matt said, but Kate could see the movement even from her bed, from her window. The way the angles of the ceiling met the walls, how the floor slid to its four corners. How the earth turned. This is the way it’s always been, Kate thought; she hadn’t known. Now she did.23

21

Fast Lanes, 176-77. Ibid., 119-20. 23 MotherKind, 37. 22

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Her recognition that change cannot be forestalled is indicative not only of her having given birth but of her increasing awareness of her distance from West Virginia, a distance underpinned by Katherine’s eventual death. Kate’s feeling that “she moved on the deck of a ship” brings into focus the novel’s many ships or boats that float somewhere in between the inevitability of change (introjection) and the wish to deny that change (incorporation). The ill-fated boat that Kate wins in Chapter 8 of the novel at Big Boy Sports, as she shops for Sam’s birthday presents, physically embodies MotherKind’s nautical allusions. At the fourth of July celebrations spent at Matt’s uncle’s house by the shore, Jonah unwittingly puts the boat too close to the sea, eventually drifting out, weighted down by his roller skates. Kate, the first to see Jonah alone in the boat, leaves Alexander wedged into the sand inside his baby carrier and swims out to pull the boat back to the shore. Swimming, she thinks that the “water seemed turgid, intent on separation, but she was moving closer”. She believes that the water would not separate herself and Jonah “as long as he stayed in [the boat], as long as he didn’t fall out”.24 Unlike the water that features in Kate’s dreams and in memories of her time in Sri Lanka, a water that symbolizes eternal life, Kate fears that the salty sea water off the Boston coastline might swallow Jonah, a fear warranted by the religious connotations of his name. Jonah’s skates would inevitably pull him down, resulting in complete separation rather than returning him to the surface like his biblical namesake. For Kate the boat acts as a life preserver, its floating denies death. In the chapter following her rescue of Jonah, Kate reads to him from “a hardcover version of Noah’s Ark”. The sleepy Jonah tells Kate that “We could get on …. Two of us, two of you, two dogs. But what about the mothers? …. And what about Alexander? He’s by himself.” Kate and Jonah rework the dynamics of the biblical story, updating the rules so that as Jonah tells his step-mother, “You could carry [Alexander], like mothers do babies on airplanes”. Kate assures Jonah that his plan would work, Alexander “wouldn’t need his own

24

Ibid., 229.

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seat. And the mothers. They get on as well.”25 The altered entrance rules would allow even the dying Katherine a safe journey on the ark. Kate earlier compounds the image of boats as guarantors of safety when she compares the European pram that she buys from the second-hand shop to a boat, considering, “What a boat of a thing, with its big round wheels and silver fenders”. Feeling weak at the thought of pushing the pram, Kate thinks that “The bed seemed large enough for a smallish, cramped adult in fetal position, and [she] was tempted to crawl inside”.26 Both the boat and the boat-like pram provide a safe space within the otherwise tumultuous sea changes of the novel. Whilst the womb-like space inside the pram may highlight the notion of maternity and life cycle, like Jonah’s roller skates, the ark of the pram comes equipped with those marks of motion over land, wheels and fenders, that signal progress and departure. IV Certainly, it is a wheelchair that marks Katherine’s funereal move from West Virginia to Boston. When Katherine first arrives in Boston, Kate “had watched her wheeled up an airport walkway in a US Air wheelchair”. The wheelchair indicates Katherine’s diminishing condition, “It might be too late, Kate had thought. Her mother sat erect in the approaching chair, abysmally thin, her face a set mask with anguished eyes.” The wheelchair not only highlights Katherine’s illness, but also marks her movement away from her home-place. Katherine had “consented to leaving home, consented to never going home again, where she’d lived all her life. She crossed all those lines in her wheelchair, without a whimper, moving down an airport walkway.”27 The wheelchair represents a state of transition from one place to another, from one state to another. In opposition to Katherine sitting in a chair that signals approaching death, Hannah, the sister of Kate’s babysitter, Amy, was confined to a chair from birth, “She was born with cerebral palsy”. Yet despite her medical condition, Hannah embodies the willingness 25

Ibid., 244-45. Ibid., 76. 27 Ibid., 83. 26

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to embrace life: “Hannah was the smart one, Amy had said of her sister; as soon as they’d got her into special school, where computers did so much of what she couldn’t manage, she’d done very well.”28 The two women provide differing uses for the chair: Katherine’s diminishing mobility highlights her approaching death, yet Hannah’s chair allows her to become mobile. The alternative options of the chair combine in the wheelchair of Kate’s dream in Chapter 3 of Phillips’ text. The dream explores the state of namaste, a state that Kate begins to understand through her friendship with Sumi whilst in Kathmandu. Kate recalls a conversation with Sumi, thinking that “It wasn’t clear what Sumi did, something in Ram’s hotel, evidently; there was no family compound for him, no matriarch or shielded wife; probably he had come from the mountains”. Sumi effectively acts as an Eastern counterpart to Rip, Katherine’s friend who lives in the Appalachian mountains. I will return to Rip’s significance later. Here I wish to focus on the distinction between Eastern and Western attitudes toward death. Sumi tries to explain the word “namaste” by drawing “images on a scrap of paper”: “namaste” was greeting and benediction, exclusion and inclusion, wholly Buddhist; “namaste” was thousands of years folded into syllables. Sumi sketched mandalas with a waiter’s pencil: “namaste” was a sound. A pulse in the mouth, acceptance and surrender.

Sumi, employing the image of a mandala to give form to “namaste”, highlights the cyclical nature of the word that “was thousands of years folded into syllables”. In Buddhism and Hinduism mandalas are pictorial symbols of the world, circles that enclose images of deities or geometric designs. Their circular design reflects Kate’s belief about the power of words: approaching the airport in West Virginia Kate thinks about the word “Terminal. Terminus. Like a spiritual roundhouse, a circular station where all tracks meet, a center of travel, transfers, routes and sojourns.” Sumi’s sketches allow Kate to understand that namaste, like the double meaning attached to 28

Ibid., 152-55.

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“Terminal”, draws life and death together, collapsing the binary distinction between the two. Sumi states that “The Nepali people were born in namaste, and there was no death”.29 His account of death offers an alternative to the Western distinction between mourning and melancholia or introjection and incorporation. For Sumi, there is life in death, people live on in the continuous circle of namaste. A word that collapses inclusion into exclusion similarly combines incorporation and introjection, blurring what appear to be the clearly defined boundaries between the two. Sumi’s description of the word as a “pulse in the mouth”, a pulse that draws “acceptance and surrender” together, takes the reader to Kate’s own preoccupation with words in the novel, a preoccupation often tied to the mothering process. A “pulse in the mouth” relates not merely to word pronunciation, but also to breast-feeding. When Kate first begins nursing Alexander “she’d moaned as he sucked, then, to move through the initial latching on, she did the same breathing she’d used throughout labor. She breathed evenly, silenced vocalizations cutting through her like a thread of lightening.”30 Even as the baby experiences a “pulse in the mouth” during breast-feeding, so Kate’s silent “vocalizations” form a pulse in her own mouth as she feeds her son. Kate, a poet, effectively compares writing to the process of birthing and nurturing a child, and the inevitable separation of a child from its mother. She thinks that writing “happened in sustained, hopeful anguish, like the pain of separation, as though one’s counterpart existed in some denied spiritual realm, urgently signaling over a vast distortion of distance while the writer tried to hear, tried to speak”.31 The emphasis on another’s voice, a voice from a “spiritual realm” foregrounds the notion that writing, for Kate (and one might conjecture for Phillips), works to keep the voices of the dead alive, effectively undoing the “pain of separation” through the translation of signals sent “over a vast distortion of distance”. Phillips refers to her use of italics in her writing as a method of signifying “language

29

Ibid., 4-5. Ibid., 28. 31 Ibid., 195. 30

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unlimited by time” and in relation to the italicized sections in MotherKind she claims: [that they] form one narrative which threads throughout the book – the journey home to and with the mother exists in perpetuity, outside the boundaries of death. The books ends with the mother’s voice, with her wish – she stays alive for the reader, just as she stays alive in Kate’s mind or being.32

Given the need to keep Katherine alive, the repeated references to the state of namaste in the novel become clear. Namaste charts the cyclical process from childhood to old age to rebirth. The process is central to a dream in which Kate, walking with her friend, Amrit, sees a chair that begins as a stroller. At first Kate sees a “pilgrim walking near them, a woman swathed in cloth”. Although the pilgrim “was dirty and her face was streaked” Kate “saw that she was Amy”. When the dreaming Kate realizes that Amy is pushing a stroller she wonders “Whose child was trapped there?”; imagining that Amrit will be able to answer the question, she feels “his arms beneath her hips as though he were lifting her to embrace her, but he turned to look at Amy: Amy saw them and moved toward the water”. Guided by Amrit’s glance, Kate witnesses the transformation of stroller into wheelchair. She notes that after Amy pushes the wheelchair into the water, the babysitter turned pilgrim, “stood still, watching, her hands in the silvery lake. Namaste.” Entering the “silvery lake” equates with entering namaste, the state of life and death represented by the transformation of the stroller into a wheelchair. In effect, then, Amy negotiates between life and death in the dream as the cart she pushes turns from “a stroller” into a “wheelchair”. Notably, the colour of the “namaste” lake ties not only to the wheels of the chair, but also to many of the vehicles of transit in the novel, from Jonah’s roller skates that “were scratched silver in the centers with use”33 to the “silver fenders” on the pram. The motion of both the skates and the pram reflect onward movement that may be recast as “Progress”. When Kate buys the pram she also buys a 32 33

Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 74. MotherKind, 70-73.

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Millennium Falcon “one of the original Star Wars spaceships. Though she disliked plastic toys, Kate was attracted to the thing, to its shape and what it represented.”34 Thinking about her attraction, Kate surmises that “Millennium Falcons didn’t recognize lines or points of location. Space was a continuum and they floated through it, ignoring boundaries, attached by tubes to what they breathed.” She imagines the Falcon’s crew with a considered specificity, “their silver suits … alien to all they encountered, each in an enclosed system, away and apart, and that was death”.35 Wrapped in protective silver, that blazon of modernity as motion, the spacemen live a suspended “death”: their entry into space equates with their entry into an altered sphere in which the dead breathe through “tubes” like babies attached to the umbilical cord. In effect, the frequent allusions to silver point to the continual transition between life and death, what Kate acknowledges as the fact “that time diminished and was cancelled, that lives moved through her and beyond her”.36 Whilst the promise of life after death helps Kate to cope with the imminent loss of her mother, read in regional terms the colour silver, and the attendant concerns of movement and progress contain melancholic traces. Silver may represent motion and continuance in MotherKind, yet Phillips equates the colour with death in “Bess”. On the day that Warwick dies in the mine Bess remembers that “I had the color silver in my mind .… I had no words in my mind, just the color silver, everywhere. The fields looked silver too just then, the way the sun slanted.”37 Whilst silver was often used in Appalachian death rituals, “to keep the eyes shut”, a custom that “paid homage to the belief that when a person enters heaven, they should do so with their eyes closed”, the silver that Bess imagines relates to the manner of Warwick’s death.38 Dying in a mine places him within the process of industrialization in the region (exogamy), yet, as the victim of a cavein, Warwick is effectively drawn back into the earth (endogamy). Whilst the colour may be said to represent continuation and, in a 34

Ibid., 76. Ibid., 84. 36 Ibid., 94. 37 Fast Lanes, 183. 38 Eliot Wigginton, “Death in Appalachia: Examining the Rituals”, 21 April 2006 35

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larger sense modernization, Phillips imbues the process with attendant feelings of melancholy. V Throughout the novel Phillips conjoins the idea of separation with an overriding sense of loss. Notably, Kate knows that she cannot, and should not attempt to escape the past. On “the plane from Madras to Kathmandu” she talks to a fellow American who had “been gone from Illinois for ten years, but she didn’t communicate with her family. Her mother? No, it wasn’t necessary.” Kate, unable to comprehend how one can lose contact with one’s family, considers that “Stepping out of history seemed as cold” as the mountain range beneath the plane. She realizes that even though she herself has been out of contact with her family since leaving on her travels, she cannot step “out of [her family] history”. As the plane approaches Kathmandu, Kate “found in her mind a clear image of her own mother, sitting in a chair” back in her West Virginian home. For Kate, “The picture was startling in its clarity and intense aura, when [she] hadn’t thought of home for weeks”. Later, back within her mother’s home, Kate now “knows [that] Katherine’s odyssey into illness began about the time she herself was flying into Nepal, unreachable, out of touch. Why hadn’t she called home even once during those weeks?”.39 Phillips effectively couples Kate’s departure for the East with the discovery of Katherine’s illness, implying that separation results in contagion. On her final night in Kathmandu Kate once again sees the American girl from the plane, “at a shrine to Shiva”. Shiva, a Hindu God, represents the dual qualities of namaste: death for devout Hindus is nearly synonymous with rebirth, so when one dies another one is created. Thus, Shiva is not only a destroyer but also a creator. The rhythm he dances to is that of a world perpetually forming, dissolving and re-forming.40

39

MotherKind, 105-106. Hinduism Infocenter, vers. 2006, ICBS Inc, 21 April 2006 40

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When Kate thinks back to her last visit to the shrine to Shiva, she “feels an alert watchfulness, a patience she cannot entirely enter, as though she grasps the enormity of what she might apprehend, yet has not understood”.41 After seeing the dead pilgrim at the shrine Kate thinks of “completed” “passage[s]”, thoughts that lead her to the knowledge that she apprehends yet has not understood, the knowledge of Katherine’s illness. Witnessing the dead body, “Kate thought of Katherine” and returns to her hotel to “try to phone her mother, but the international operator informed her that the lines were jammed”.42 Kate’s “gut” sense leads her to connect the dead pilgrim with Katherine in a telepathic awareness of the inception of her mother’s illness. The fact that she senses the significance of the pilgrim’s death “in her gut” links Kate with Rip who suffers from a “Congential gut problem”. Her mother’s friend, who has “No nerve endings, intestinally speaking”, is a returned traveller “someone who has returned home after successful escape”. Kate compares Rip to pilgrims when he tells her that those suffering from his disease “typically drifted off into the cosmos as skinny tykes”. Rip provides Kate with a regionally based variant of the spiritual understanding achieved in Kathmandu. He tells her that she should continue to write whilst at home, suggesting, “I’ll give you titles: ‘Duress, Revisited.’ ‘Desist, Traveller’ ”, titles that hint that Kate’s return to West Virginia is inevitable, since “duress” must be “revisited”. His caption “Desist, Traveller” highlights the end of Kate’s journeys in the East: like the pilgrim, Kate’s travels ultimately lead back to her birthplace. Kate tells Rip that the word “traveller” is “a good word. You probably know it was the name of Robert E. Lee’s horse.” With “Raised brows” Rip responds, “A distant relative of yours, I understand. The general, that is, not the horse.”43 As a “distant relative” of the Tateman family, Lee raises specifically regional concerns. When Lee was halted at the Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, where he subsequently surrendered, he was on his way to Lynchburg, to escape by way of the town’s rail connections to the 41

MotherKind, 106-107. Ibid., 175. 43 Ibid., 144-46. 42

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West.44 I have previously analysed the significance of Lynchburg as route to escape the South for Bess.45 In a historical context, Lee failed in his attempt to leave the region, yet Kate, his “distant relative”, gradually “distanc[es]” herself from the South – indeed her return visit to West Virginia in the novel is her last before Katherine dies in Boston. Interestingly, Rip’s reference to Lee’s horse, Traveller, brings into focus Phillips’ intertextual series of equine images. As argued in relation to Machine Dreams, Danner’s orgasmic dream of horses ties to her need to transgress family and regional boundaries.46 For Kate, horses also come to mark the separation caused by death. In the italicized section after her discussion with Rip, Kate moves from a consideration of the dead pilgrim to the present and to her stay in West Virginia. Looking out of her old bedroom window, she reflects that the town looks worn and twilit, layered in new American time …. She thinks of rough Nepali wool, with its interwoven bits of wood and husk. Bargains and debts, promises kept. Traveller. Surely the horse soldiering on despite its deluded rider and the pilgrim lying down to sleep share some unerring, indisputable instinct.47

Kate’s earlier image of her mother, “counting back through her knitting to see where the pattern was off”, inextricably links Katherine to the Nepali wool, “with its interwoven bits”. Kate recalls how her mother would count back the stitches “to find the mistake; clear back here, [Katherine] lamented, undoing rows of tight, clean stitches”, a habit that Kate begins to understand, realizing that “it wouldn’t work to throw the pattern away itself. What was the meaning, then, of anything?.”48 The idea of patterns, of being linked to one another through a historical network of interwoven moments, highlights Kate’s linked focus on the pilgrim and the horse. Both man

44

The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, eds Paul Boyer et al, (2nd edn, Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath, 1995), 332-33. 45 See Chapter 1, 32. 46 See Chapter 3, 85-87. 47 MotherKind, 175. 48 Ibid., 106-107.

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and animal partake in the inevitable movement towards, and acceptance of, death. For Kate, her travels in India and Nepal provide her with alternate ways of dealing with impending loss. Memories of Kate’s last visit to see her mother in West Virginia are interspersed with the foreign images of Kate’s travel journal. As I have established, Phillips employs that travel journal to keep Katherine “alive for the reader, just as she stays alive in Kate’s mind or being”.49 In MotherKind Phillips negotiates a middle ground between denial of death and a full acknowledgement of loss. Her argument that the italicized sections provide a textual space in which Katherine “exists in perpetuity, outside the boundaries of death” may be read in terms of Abraham and Torok’s concept of incorporation. They suggest that “The magical ‘cure’ by incorporation exempts the subject from the painful process of reorganisation”.50 If Katherine lives on then Kate need not assimilate the full impact of the loss of her mother. However, only through introjection (the author’s italicized words that provide a quasi third person voice for Kate) can Katherine be kept alive. The narrative (introjection) effectively keeps the memory of the dead mother alive (incorporation). In effect, Kate’s travels to India and Nepal complicate what she defines as her particularly American understanding of death, an understanding grounded in the Western binaries of life or death, introjection or incorporation. Kate certainly returns in her mind to her Eastern sojourn throughout the novel. In one daydream, Kate moves beyond her recollections of India, thinking that “There was always the same picture in her mind”, a picture of “Sri Lanka”. In the picture Kate “saw herself at the lake in Sri Lanka, the lake in Kandy, by the Temple of the Tooth”. The dream follows a serial pattern in which Kate always “walked around the lake and it was dusk … and the lake turned colors. Tatie was there with her; somehow, he was the water itself, and Kate simply walked, waiting to know what was next.” Kate’s thought that “Tatie … was the water itself”51 propels the reader forward to her dream in which “A child wailed, 49

Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 74. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernal, 171. 51 MotherKind, 64-65. 50

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inconsolable”.52 Kate invests in the idea that Alexander signals continuance – in the namaste lake, the wheelchair transforms into a baby’s cry, signalling rebirth. Kate returns to the lake in the dream she has on the night her mother dies. In the dream “she recognized the oval lake that lay like a reflecting mirror beside the Temple of the Tooth. How surprising her mother had brought her here, to the Sri Lankan hills above Kandy, but she realized that this was the birth road.” Katherine and Kate walk toward the temple but “the doors were closed; the pilgrims had withdrawn”. Unable to enter the temple, “Arm in arm, they turned their backs and proceeded high still, into the mountains of a strange country”.53 Their failure to enter the temple, a building connected with the pilgrim’s death in Kathmandu, effectively allows Katherine to bypass death and to start off again on the “birth road”. Their immediate entry onto the “birth road” is an extinction of an extinction: turning their backs on the temple effectively renders Katherine’s death obsolete. The cyclical nature of birth, death and rebirth is contained within the language surrounding maternity in the novel. By the latter section of MotherKind, when Katherine and Kate rely on nurses from a health care agency, Kate thinks that “Nursing was a double verb, a figure eight they turned inside, traversing decades”.54 The notion of a figure that effectively doubles back on itself may usefully be explored through Hillis Miller’s theory of narrative linearity. Miller argues that “The intelligibility of writing depends on [the] twisting and breaking of the line that interrupts or confounds its linearity and opens up the possibility of repeating that segment, while at the same time preventing any closure of its meaning”.55 In effect, a line that folds back on itself points both to repetition and to the layering of words or images in one. Yet, as Miller goes on to suggest, such repetition acts as a disruptive force within a narrative:

52

Ibid., 73. Ibid., 289. 54 Ibid., 271. 55 Hillis J. Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 8. 53

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If the line suggests always the gathering of the word, at the same time, in all places of its use, the line contains the possibility of turning back on itself. In this turning it subverts its own linearity and becomes repetition. Without the line there is no repetition, but repetition is what disturbs, suspends, or destroys the line’s linearity, like a soft wintry aurora playing behind its straightforward logic.56

Following Miller’s logic, the double meaning that Kate attaches to the figure eight appeals to Phillips’ larger concern with how the past interrupts the present, effectively “traversing decades”. An eight “turned” on its side figures infinity in mammary form so that nursing, as a form of infusion, reflects the interconnectedness of generations. To turn within such a figure, then, is to “traverse” time via ingestion. The incorporative nature of ingestion collapses past into present, so that the nursing of a child or a dying parent involves an inevitable merging of generations. Such a merger indicates that despite Kate’s attempts to prevent Alexander from hearing certain words related to Katherine’s illness and from inheriting regional burdens, he nevertheless ingests the past through the maternal milk. Significantly, the temporal shiftiness within the “double verb”, results in a collapse that given the intertextual nature of Phillips’ writing, takes the reader back to “Bess”. Bess recalls how her older sister Ava taught her and Warwick their letters: I remember her teaching us, with chalks on a slate, gravely, the letter S. I was not even talking yet; she taught me to hiss, then drew one line and changed the S to an 8. S, 8. Something was flickering all around us. Doubtless it was the fire, lit on a winter evening when the dark came so early. I remember no one’s face, but I see her hand on the slate beside the magic form.57

The figure eight, as it is produced from a doubled “8”, comes to represent inherent connections: “S”, reversed and repeated in overlay, indicates that all things turn back on themselves, to complete a full and interconnected figure. Put simply, the S becomes an 8, effectively 56 57

Ibid., 19. Fast Lanes, 127.

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doubling back on itself in Phillips’ generative story. That Bess and Warwick learn how the two symbols intertwine connects to their potentially endogamous union, itself a doubling of the same. Their endogamy haunts Phillips’ texts, so that when they conceive Mitch, they subsequently conceive the shadowy words that pass on to each new generation, to be conceived anew, “washed, infused shadowed or illumined”.58 The sense of continued life, impacted within a figure and turned on its side to “traverse decades”, ties not only to Kate’s awareness of Eastern forms of mourning but to her obsession with words, and with the meanings they carry across time and through lactation. So read, the figure 8 may be thought of as dense with “so many lives that knew each other not”.59 The repeated allusions to that originating story serve, in a novel primarily concerned with mothering, to keep Kate’s father, and indeed all of Phillips’ fathers, in view. If the surface material of the novel deals with maternity, then the “dark material” that lies beneath points to the paternal past, a past explored in Chapter 10.

58 59

MotherKind, 4. Ibid., 127.

CHAPTER TEN Textured Memories: The Remnants of a Paternal Past in MotherKind From Machine Dreams to MotherKind the fathers in Phillips’ work gradually drift into the background, so that in the latest novel Kate’s father, Waylon, is “excluded” from her wedding day in order that “her parent’s discomfort with one another would cast no shadows”.1 However, despite Waylon’s absence throughout large sections of the novel, when he visits Boston Kate realizes that he is a “colossus”, that “His masculinity was like an elemental gravity”.2 His gravitas permeates the entire novel to the extent that even the moments most associated with maternity, nevertheless prompt Kate to think of her father. Indeed, Kate’s fear of polluting her son with adult knowledge relates not only to the maternal line and Katherine’s illness but also to the paternal line, and Waylon. Kate often calls her son Tatie or Mr. Tate because “His middle name is Tateman” Kate’s “family name”. As a new-born baby Kate states that Alexander “was so little … his names seemed too big”, hence her reduction of Tateman to Tatie. Although Kate claims that Tateman is her “family name”, Phillips offers contradictory evidence concerning whether the name belongs to the maternal or paternal side of Kate’s family. Katherine tells Kate, “Your name may be Tateman, but you’re like Mother, like me”, effectively attributing the name Tateman to Waylon.3 However, when Kate asks her father about the relationship between Katherine and Kate’s grandmother, Waylon recalls that “Grace Tateman was a good woman, and she’d always managed on her own”.4 Echoing the ambiguous attribution of the name Danner in Machine Dreams, the unclear origin of Tateman in MotherKind blurs the distinct lines between male and female inheritance.

1

MotherKind, 163-64. Ibid., 188. 3 Ibid., 55-58. 4 Ibid., 183. 2

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Indeed, Kate names her son Tatie “after her family, her divided parents”.5 Alexander’s inheritance of the Tateman name does not necessarily, of itself, indicate that he will carry the burden of a failed regional marriage. Kate’s readiness to acknowledge the division between her parents may, in its articulacy, be said to reduce the haunting attributed to such a failure. Alexander will know a vocalized and nominal version of his grandparent’s lives rather than inheriting internalized, unspoken remnants of his family’s past. Kate’s nomination of her son as the carrier of a name that may belong either to the male or female line may be read as an attempt to protect Alexander from her own parentally generated burdens, burdens that relate to Waylon as well as Katherine. The weight of the past often surfaces when Kate thinks about, or nurses, Alexander. During her difficult period of breast feeding Alexander, Kate feels “adrift in a haze of genetic memory and hormones”: she floats through words, words that take her back to a time in her past “when she was small enough to be held by someone as petite as her mother”, and when she heard the same words that Katherine now sings to Alexander. Yet Kate thinks how “her childhood past had washed away from her”: and the more recent past, between home and Matthew, was gone too. Nothing but now: her mother and Tatie in the blue armchair. The process by which the chair had come to rest in a house she’d bought with Matthew in Boston seemed a mystery not worth bothering about. The mystery seemed in motion still, as though they all bobbed and circled on some watery surface.6

The mystery that Kate attributes to the chair and its appearance in her own family home, far removed from West Virginia, represents her complex relationship to the place she has left behind and to the objects that nevertheless keep her moored to the past. Ultimately there is no mystery to the chair’s appearance in Boston – Kate discusses her removal of the chair with Katherine, telling her mother that she “was right to drag it here [to Boston]”. Kate transports the blue armchair that “had once graced [Katherine’s] own living room”, covering it “in a vibrant 1920s print, navy blue with 5 6

Ibid., 35. Ibid., 60.

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blowsy, oversized ivory flowers”. Despite her attempts to refashion the chair, Kate still recalls it “in one of its guises. In the old house.” Talking to Katherine about recovering the chair, Kate states that it “seemed ageless”, although her choice of material effectively dates the chair, locating it in a notional 1920s. Indeed, her mother tells Kate that: “This was your father’s chair, and the fabric darkened just in the shape of him.” “Really?” Kate asked. “You mean, as though his shadow sank into it?” Her mother frowned, exasperated. “No, I mean it was worn. Worn from use. Am I speaking English?”7

Through Katherine’s angry insistence that her words mean one thing and not two, she simultaneously denies the continued presence of her labouring ex-husband. If Waylon can be read in light of Mitch, then Katherine certainly recalls Jean, and the Hampson mother’s aversion to both racial and working-class dirt.8 Kate’s abstract belief that Waylon’s shadow might have sunk into the chair troubles the mother who strove to prevent any working-class contamination of her home. In one of her many phrases concerning her marriage, Katherine tells Kate that Waylon, “was fastidious. He never left things lying around. There was no one cleaner than your father.”9 The thought that despite his surface cleanliness Waylon may have carried within him the dirt of building projects, a dirt that may have caused his “shadow” to sink into the chair, inevitably troubles Katherine, resulting in her exasperation with Kate’s claim. The changing nature of the chair’s fabric highlights the object’s movement through a changing family dynamic. Kate realizes that “the print she’d chosen for the chair, dark blue with white, was nearly the reverse of her mother’s choice”.10 The alternating prints may be read in the light of Judy Attfield’s recent study of material culture. 7

Ibid., 29-30. Phillips draws on material from Machine Dreams (164) in MotherKind (191) when she attributes to both Jean and Katherine the haunting phrase “There are laws to protect me from men like you”. 9 MotherKind, 179. 10 Ibid., 30. 8

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Phillips’ description of the changing fabrics on the chair offers a localized version of what Attfield abstractly defines as “the materialisation and unfolding of different human life-stages of identity formation within specific historical and cultural contexts”. In a chapter dedicated to the relationship between the materiality of cloth and the process of human interaction, Attfield argues that: The ephemeral characteristics of cloth lend a sense of scale to formative social contexts in terms of space and time through the dynamic act of consumption in which it is used for processes of dressing up, wearing out, using up, transforming, possessing, absorbing, ordering, containing and embodying, that all go towards the constructing of identities.11

Kate’s positioning of her father’s chair in her own bedroom focuses her contradictory attempts to keep her regional past alive within the very house that signals her move away from the home-place – that place of “coal mines, [and] desolation”.12 For Attfield, viewing the arrangement of objects “through the case study of the private abode as a personal space it is possible to consider the material contextualisation of the individual within the home as the repository or objectification of social relations”.13 Kate and Matt’s jointly owned Boston home epitomizes the middle-class acceptability rejected by Waylon and desired by Katherine. However, the presence of the chair, with its dark shadow beneath the new covers, indicates that Kate’s covering of the chair serves only to hide, rather than extinguish, the working-class element of her regional past. Kate’s recovering of an already covered chair creates a layering pattern that recalls the layers in Machine Dreams, “one body on top of another and another”.14 The chair’s multiple layers reflect the incorporation process as bodies sink into the fabric. Although each new layer effectively hides the previous cover, the shape of the body remains immersed in the chair itself, indicating that the covered body may resurface. Waylon’s shadow takes the reader to the shadows that haunt Phillips’ first novel, shadows that return to haunt. 11

Attfield, Wild Things, 124. MotherKind, 87. 13 Attfield, Wild Things, 154. 14 Machine Dreams, 36. 12

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Jean’s incorporation of her mother’s “dark” shadow necessarily results in Grace’s return in both the form of her granddaughter, Danner, and through Jean’s repeated sayings.15 Phillips further attributes shadows with economic and social contexts in her descriptions of the labouring class. Danner imagines the road crew workers “in the dark corners of her room, tall shadows with no faces”.16 Despite the fact that Mitch and Waylon own their construction companies, they are nevertheless aligned more with their shadowy employees than with their wives’ middle-class ambitions. The chair, then, retains regional and economic shadows within the confines of Kate’s northern, middle-class home, a home in which she often feels like “an interloper, someone in disguise”.17 Kate describes her new house on Pill Hill as “the ‘respectable house’”, respectable compared to her previous house “on a hill in Jamaica Plain” in a neighbourhood that “was not yet gentrified and [where] domestic squabbles took place on the sidewalks”. Even in the constructed safety of a middle class locale, Kate still thinks of the street she left behind: “Now Kate lay in bed at night in an enclave called Pill Hill, because doctors had built these expansive houses a hundred years ago, and heard her former neighbors’ voices tearing through the soft dark.” In particular Kate remembers her neighbours’ son, Mark, who she saw “in dreams now, scuffing along down the hill in the narrow street, frowning and woebegone, and then she’d wake with her breasts like rocks, aching and full”.18 Memories of the working-class neighbourhood stimulate both a maternal and sexual response, making Kate feel like an “interloper” in Pill Hill. When she and Matt discuss their home he reminds her of her “gay tenants” in Jamaica Plain, and specifically of a collector of pornography who “liked [her] to look at those pictures”. Kate defends her ex-tenant, arguing that “there has to be room for people like him, there has to be, and there sure isn’t any room on Pill Hill”.19 The exclusionary nature of Pill Hill troubles Kate, not simply because she still remains attached to the more diverse world of Jamaica Plain, but because she feels increasingly attached to her middle-class life. Kate 15

Ibid., 116. Ibid., 128. 17 MotherKind, 86. 18 Ibid., 62. 19 Ibid., 86. 16

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constantly fights against her desire for the consumer goods considered part of the average white collar home: She’d always regarded the various droning generator [air conditioning] boxes of her neighborhood as ugly and morally questionable, emblematic of the resource-hogging, financial-mightis-right West …. She thought of rivers altered in their courses, mighty falls harnessed and tamed, not to irrigate crops but to run inground sprinkler systems and keep linen dresses from sticking to the shaved limbs of American women who could afford organic produce. Today she herself wished for a white linen sheath …. Fair weather friend to her own moral concerns, she envisioned victimized waterfalls and only wanted to stand in one.20

As a successful member of the PMC Kate has fulfilled her mother’s desire for middle-class status, yet she still dreams of the diverse, less commodified lives she left behind in Jamaica Plain. Kate’s contempt for “the American women who could afford to buy organic produce” may be read in terms of Fred Pfeil’s study of the PMC. He argues that “One attitude … towards the commodification and fragmentation of the self is horror and disgust towards those trapped in and defined by the endlessly proliferating codes, clichés and slogans of everyday life: a horror whose underlying anxiety [is] that even the subject him/herself feeling it is not ‘free’”.21 As much as Kate fights against commodification, she realizes that she cannot completely escape the “consumer megastores … whose products were saturation-advertized on network television she never watched and pictured on Day-Glo boxes of sugar cereals she wouldn’t let anyone eat”.22 Despite her attempts to ban such heavily branded items from her home, Kate finds herself in Big Boy Sports buying Sam’s birthday present, pushing “her perfectly dressed blue-eyed baby [in the] Perego stroller”.23 In contradistinction to all the above items, her father’s chair offers Kate a link to the past. Her increasing distance from West Virginia certainly explicates her attempts to reconnect to the past she has left 20

Ibid., 241. Pfeil, “Makin’ Flippy-Floppy ...”, 279. 22 MotherKind, 206. 23 Ibid, 87. 21

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behind, a past partially bound up in memories of her father, the man who remains in the place where he can still see the “houses [he] built” and the “streets [he] laid down”.24 Even in the present, as Kate watches her father eating, she realizes that he does so “like a workingman” but that he “sat and moved like a king, broadshouldered, solid”.25 That apparent solidity plays in Kate’s mind throughout the novel. II Kate has a recurrent dream in which Waylon figures, a dream she begins to remember when she thinks about watching Rawhide as a child. She recalls that “Rowdy got most of the heroics and ended up a movie star, but Gil Favor, the boss man with tight, mournful eyes, was Kate’s idea of a man”.26 Kate’s “idea of a man” links back to her father, who was “Never just a workman, always the boss”.27 Kate thinks of Rawhide as she contemplates crossing “the big intersection” that “meant walking across five lanes and a concrete island”. She thinks that the island “was … frightening. Kate was afraid of being marooned there, with cars whizzing by before her and behind her.” Afraid of being stranded in an in-between state, Kate imagines that with Gil Favor, “she could stand on that concrete island, right now, today”. She begins to question what Gil represents to her: What was it about him? It was as though he’d already been where Kate was going, when so many others around her were innocents. Steadfastly they looked away from what she sensed was ahead for them all; they refused to acknowledge what approached, or to feel its chill breath hovering near them in sleep. At night it passed its thin dry lips along the narrow planes of Kate’s collarbone and down, to the cleft of her breasts, and then she woke, lunging sharply away to keep it from where the baby put his mouth, from poisoning her milk and turning it black as blood. What’s wrong? Matt would ask. You wake up like something’s after you, he’d say then, making light. Do you have a guilty conscience I should know about?28 24

Ibid., 203. Ibid., 187. 26 Ibid., 80. 27 Ibid., 179. 28 Ibid., 80-81. 25

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Gil, Waylon’s mirror image, leads Kate into an understanding that others “refused to acknowledge”, an understanding that carries through into her dream. The “it” of Kate’s dream may be read as death, or the awareness of death, yet “its chill breath” contains traces of the cold that haunts Mitch in Machine Dreams. Whilst Waylon is a peripheral figure in MotherKind, Godden argues that if we read him serially “as one of a sequence of Phillipian fathers” he becomes more than “an engineer who happens to live in an aunt’s house, somewhere in West Virginia”.29 Although I wish to avoid collapsing Phillips’ characters or novels into one another, Kate’s complex relationship with her father gains significance if read through the father/daughter relationship established in Machine Dreams. In Kate’s dream, the unspecified “it” contains a level of desire as “it” passes “its thin dry lips along the narrow planes of Kate’s collarbone and down, to the cleft of her breasts”.30 Kate’s fear that the dry lips may poison her milk, and subsequently her son, returns the reader to Mitch’s haunted past in Phillips’ first novel, and, more particularly, to the short story “Bess”, in which a haunting is traced back to a father, Warwick, badly infected by poison ivy. The poisonous desire of Kate’s dream highlights the repressed element of a paternal past in a novel dedicated to mothers and mothering. The paternal presence in MotherKind permeates every section, including the italicized travel that reveals Kate’s efforts to move outside the limits of her southern upbringing. Whilst Kate considers returning to the East, to stay “out of touch with any world but this”, she thinks that the world of “Tibet, Bhutan” would “change her view of what she’d come from, mix it up, stoic Protestant ethic and Christ as bridegroom crossed with the dharma whirl of prayer wheels”. Through her contemplation of a world and a religion beyond Western traditions, Kate cannot but simultaneously appeal to the past she wants to leave behind. Inside a shrine in Kathmandu, Kate thinks: No mansion here, no Father’s house. Behind her thoughts Kate imagined she heard the Himalayan wind, wild as tsunami, tear

29 30

Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 272. MotherKind, 81.

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across the remote Tibetan plateau to the northwest; Tibet, she dreamed, moonscape, snowcast ceiling of heaven, hear my prayer.

If the reader were to merely accept the “accessible surface” of the novel,31 then “no Father’s house” would simply refer to the Western churches that Kate had “come from … stoic Protestant ethic and Christ as bridegroom”.32 Yet, if read as part of an intertextual series, the passage gains subterranean depths. Certainly, the complex network of images, (“Father’s house”, “snowcast ceiling”, “hear my prayer”) take the reader back to Phillips’ previous two novels and to “Bess”. The wind that Kate imagines tearing “across the remote Tibetan plateau to the northwest” recalls the “black wind” that Lenny imagines “tearing through the night sky” in Shelter. In as much as Lenny visualizes the wind “ripping along the two-lane road to Gaither”33 towards her mother, Kate’s wind moves along a northwesterly trajectory towards “American time”, a time marred by Katherine’s emerging illness.34 Both Lenny and Kate send prayers through the wind, prayers that acknowledge the changing circumstances of their regional connections. In “Lenny: Miraculous Creatures”, Lenny questions the meaning of prayers. She thinks that “crying … and groaning” were prayers: “Standing in Cap’s mother’s closet, looking at the clothes she’d left behind: that was praying. Delia was wrong; a prayer didn’t have to ask. A prayer could be brave enough not to ask at all.”35 For Lenny, a prayer is a wordless acknowledgement of absence or loss rather than a request to circumvent loss. Indeed, when Audrey opens the door to the wind, the “roaring is Lenny’s own voice poured through like a message, a long, rattling, unmistakable sound, perfectly rendered”.36 The roaring prayer that Lenny sends to Audrey recognizes her mother’s affair with Nickel, an affair grounded in Audrey’s desire for a life beyond the regional and economic limitations of her life with Wes. Lenny’s prayer acknowledges the inevitability of the mother’s 31

Johnson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 10. MotherKind, 173-74. 33 Shelter, 264. 34 MotherKind, 175. 35 Shelter, 261. 36 Ibid., 264. 32

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eventual separation from the father, effectively addressing the failure of their regional marriage. Similarly, Kate’s prayer relates to both Katherine and Waylon: whilst her prayer may highlight her telepathic awareness of her mother’s newly diagnosed illness, it also appeals to her father’s mysterious past. Read intertextually, the narrative proximity of “Father’s house” and “snowcast” takes readers to the snow that covers Mitch’s heritage in Machine Dreams. In “Amazing Grace: Danner, 1965” Mitch tells his daughter of the last dream he remembers: “I was driving in a snowstorm along a road … and snow was flying at the windshield so fast you couldn’t see where you was going.”37 As we saw earlier,38 when Danner later hears the Ministers singing Amazing Grace, she “imagined her father sealed into his dream like a figure in a fluid-filled paperweight, the ones in which snow flew when the globe was shaken”.39 The snow that blocked Bess and Warwick’s return to the farm and created time for them to conceive Mitch, continues to haunt their son, effectively blurring a clear view of his parentage. Reading Phillips’ fathers serially implies that Kate struggles to escape her father’s secret history, a history that can be traced back to “Bess”. Indeed, an undercurrent of father/daughter desire surfaces later in the novel when Kate and Matt have sex. In bed together on the final night of Waylon’s visit to Boston, Kate asks Matt, “Tell me what you thought about all those evenings with my father, out there in the moat of the castle”. In an echo of Kate’s earlier dream, Matt “moved his mouth along her collarbone, smooth, quiet touch to slow them down”. Moving toward orgasm Kate “felt herself reach him inside it”: holding him tighter each time he ground to the center of her, each time they pulled back to push deeper. Nothing but that old house … Kate pushed the phrase away from her; she wouldn’t hear it or see it; still she refused; she pushed away into her own sensation and heard Matt cry out as though he were her voice.40

Kate’s pushing away of the phrase, “Nothing but that old house”, is a complex repudiation of Phillips’ old West Virginian homes. 37

Machine Dreams, 216. See Chapter 2, 57-59. 39 Ibid., 221. 40 MotherKind,199-200. 38

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Within the text, the house that haunts Kate may refer either to the family home built by Waylon with money accrued from the sale of Katherine’s “family home”, or to the maternal house sold to ensure the family’s move into the suburbs.41 However, intertextually the phrase recalls the oldest of Phillips’ houses, the Hampson farmhouse in Machine Dreams and “Bess”. Whilst such an intertextual bid may appear tenuous, the irruptive nature of the phrase and its links to Kate’s post-coital images points to the old farmhouse. After orgasm, Kate falls asleep seeing “her father’s face in the specific photographs, pictures she’d taken years ago, visiting home alone – Waylon looking dead into her camera, a softened battler, beautiful colors aged into his face”. Kate, thinking of a photograph of herself and Waylon, and realising that “guardedness was in her eyes” asks: Who had bequeathed her that watchfulness? She slept; she thought she slept. She drifted at the borders of sleep, blunt and eyeless, nudging a phantom coast of inlets and jagged depths.42

Her father, whose “background was mystery”, provides Kate with a degree of “guardedness”.43 Such guardedness reaches back to the old farmhouse, the site of Mitch’s, and I would argue, Waylon’s hidden past. On her walk home after thinking of Gil Favor, Kate indirectly appeals to the farmhouse and to the lost, regional way of life it represents. She notices that “the sky had darkened and was gray and bruised, like snow might dust the slush again with new powder”. The thought of impending snow makes Kate think of the words Dashing through the snow. No wonder Amy sang Christmas songs; spring would never come. O’er the fields – that phrase made the song sound so old.44

Amy, Kate’s babysitter, sings various Christmas songs to Alexander, singing “so slowly that the words took on a sorrowful image, like the coloring of someone’s lost memory”: 41

Ibid., 187. Ibid., 200. 43 Ibid., 186. 44 Ibid., 81. 42

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Kate supposed that babies all over America were being sung to in a language of artifacts and extinctions. Now there were no horsedrawn sleighs; perhaps someday there would be no horses, but the song would still be sung.

Phillips’ phrase, “in a language of artifacts and extinctions”45 appeals to the novel’s main concern of how one negotiates a break from a region whilst attempting to keep alive a place that “doesn’t really exist anymore”.46 Phillips offers one possible method of reviving a regional heritage through her notion of “coloring someone’s lost memory”. That a memory has been lost implies that any colouring must be a recolouring, effectively taking the reader back to the chair and its numerous, distinctly coloured layers. Whilst the surface layer of the chair appeals to the idea that what came before is now extinct, the shadow that sinks into the chair remains present despite its apparent absence. Kate’s allusion to “Jingle Bells” as a route to a forgotten past brings into focus her own attempt to reclaim her own “lost memory”, a memory tied to her father and his secret parentage. “Jingle Bells”, an incantation of a lost past, echoes Phillips’ generative story. Kate’s recollection of “Jingle Bells” takes the reader back to “Bess”, when Bess was a child and the “snow [was] too deep …. [and] drifts on the road were waist high”. Bess recounts that when the snow froze over: Pa marked a track with sticks and bundled us in furs. We rode round, runners of the sledge tracing a circle past the house and the naked oaks. The belled harness jingled and beyond the oaks were fields on all sides.47

The now dilapidated farm may no longer contain traces of sledge marks but, as Kate recognizes, even though today “there were no horse-drawn sleighs … the song would still be sung”. That the past continues in songs, stories and myths becomes a central feature of Phillips’ preoccupation with spatial movement in MotherKind. As 45

Ibid., 75. Ibid., 56. 47 Fast Lanes, 165. 46

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Phillips seemingly moves beyond the haunting of a regional past, she invests in a mythologized version of that past. Phillips claims that “there’s nothing left in the home I remember. I feel that West Virginia is lost to me in the same way that my primal family is lost, has passed away. It’s become mythic territory, powerful beyond any boundaries.”48 I will explore the mythic dimension of Phillips writing in Chapter 11. However, I need first to return to Kate’s awareness of her paternal burdens. Alexander’s birth goes some way to alleviating Kate’s uncertainties over her paternal inheritance. Prior to giving birth, Kate remembers her father calling the family house from the “store”, telling the then adolescent Kate that “They shot Bobby Kennedy”. Kate thinks that The phrase floated still. [She] saw the words bobbing on water like a cast-off paper label, remnant of some drifting flotsam. She heard it in her father’s voice as the baby moved, hard. Kate stood to give him room.49

The shifty “him” refers both to Waylon and to the unborn Alexander (although in the physical context one of the signifiers [Waylon], is subordinate), suggesting that when Kate gives birth to her son she figuratively rebirths her father. The rebirth of a southern father in a northern state does not work to displace the father from his Appalachian roots: rather, Waylon’s rebirth serves to alter the haunted nature of his past as his story passes from father to daughter to grandson. Through Waylon’s rebirth, Phillips negotiates the transition between the haunting of an unknown, regionally determined past (Waylon’s mysterious parentage) and the movement beyond such haunting (Kate’s move to Boston). Alexander marks a further break from what Kate thinks of as “quiet traumas … slow ones, sadnesses, years of long confusions”. Her cautionary concern over “how much Alexander should see, what might he remember, what she’d want him to remember” addresses her hope that Alexander will not inherit family, and regionally grounded burdens.50 Kate thinks that “her baby 48

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 185. MotherKind, 23. 50 Ibid., 274. 49

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was Alexander, conqueror of the world, the world as it was”.51 Kate’s wish to prevent Alexander from inheriting regional secrets highlights her own, and Phillips’, attempt to move beyond a preoccupation with place. However, given the split meanings attached to Kate’s use of “him”, Alexander could be both Alexander and Waylon in Kate’s under-articulated linguistic slippage, while remaining just Alexander (conqueror of spaces) in her articulated preference. The child’s double existence troubles any simple break from the past. Indeed, Kate’s very insistence that her son would view “the world as it was” acts as a split signifier. She intends “was” to mean “is”; that Alexander will see the world as it “is”, in a present tense unmoored from a constrictive past. However, her very claim for his break from such family and regional restrictions also connects him to the past, since her phrase can be taken to mean that Alexander will see the “world as it was”, in all its past contexts. Kate may attempt to protect Alexander from the past, but her merger of the child with his grandfather goes some way to expressing the continuing presence of a paternal, and regional past in her writing. Throughout MotherKind, though, Phillips seemingly employs myths to contain the past. In the final chapter I question Phillips’ potentially nostalgic backward glances, considering both the limitations and possibilities contained within her turn to mythical accounts of the past.

51

Ibid., 16.

CHAPTER ELEVEN Almost Magical: Once upon a time … in MotherKind Once upon a time there lived a man, named Rip, who had an “almost magical” home on a mountain top. In his garden “silver foil and jingle bells” played in the wind, creating a “dreamy twinkling sound”. One day, a woman named Kate visited the man who presented her with a bassinette that looked “as thought it might hold highly charged, protected air, or some invisible gift”. The gift was continuance – a gift that would keep both Kate’s mother, and Kate’s home-place, alive forever.1 In MotherKind Rip, and his mountain abode, appear to counter the finality of death. Indeed, when Kate visits Rip’s home and she encounters his “magical” garden, she also encounters a site that circumvents death or extinction. The novel ends in Rip’s garden as Kate and her mother view the bassinette that Rip has restored for Kate’s unborn baby. The final, main section of the novel ends with Katherine’s imminent death, yet the final italicized section resurrects the dead mother. Rip’s “invisible gift” constitutes the continuance of tradition despite Katherine’s death and Kate’s separation from the home-place. Prior to their visit to Rip’s home, Kate thinks of how: Tomorrow she will drive into the country with Katherine. They will look for a baby’s bed, an object made here from hard woods carved and scrolled as Appalachian myth. Kate sleeps. In her dream the cradle is an oracle whose turned, pegged wood and scalloped edge are spiritual braille, read by the soul itself, but there are no words in that language. She hears the hard, ragged breath of her mother’s last weeks and watches a horse the color of rain, immensely strong, pick its way riderless across a field of corpses. Then she forgets the sounds and the pictures; sleep puts them deeply away.2

1 2

MotherKind, 291. Ibid., 175.

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The cradle highlights Kate’s, and potentially Phillips’, concern with providing a mythical version of the past. Although Kate emphasizes the cradle’s Appalachian origin, “an object made here”, the “baby’s bed” does not appear to contain the remnants of the social practices that contributed to its making. Instead, Kate reduces the workmanship behind the object by comparing the “carved and scrolled” hard wood to “Appalachian myth[s]”. In the dream, Kate adds an extra layer of density to the cradle, imagining that it “is an oracle whose turned, pegged wood and scalloped edge are spiritual braille”. However, unlike normal Braille that becomes readable through touch, the cradle’s pattern of dots are felt internally, “read by the soul itself”. Kate’s belief in an internal Braille indicates that as much as she strives to mythologize her regional roots, she nevertheless carries within her an “oracle”, a version of the past that cannot be read and dismissed because “there are no words in that language”. Unable to interpret the Braille, Kate cannot successfully introject those vestiges of her haunted past that remain inside her “soul” or her dreams. The lasting presence of region becomes clear when Kate looks at the reworked basket, seeing “into it with the certainty that she will look through it one day to see her baby’s face”. Her image is realized in that Alexander does sleep in the bassinette, a bassinette that, according to Katherine, is “old wicker, very strong. All my babies slept in it the first weeks, and Mother’s too.”3 Alexander, contained within a basket that resonates with a regional past, is sung to “in a language of artifacts and extinctions”.4 Kate discovers such artefacts in Rip’s garden. Indeed, whilst Rip’s home acts as a mythical space, his means of subsistence equates him with traditional working practices, thereby placing him in time. Although one might argue that Rip’s occupation belongs to an earlier time (his preference for exchange rather than selling his goods), Rip is actively involved in the process of restoration and continuance, so that the bassinette that he returns to Kate, carries traces of its labour history. Her wish to protect Alexander from the haunting vestiges of a West Virginian heritage leads her to reduce the labour process to an undecipherable Braille. However, Phillips’ language, with its emphasis on the cradle’s 3 4

Ibid., 265. Ibid., 75.

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“pegged wood and scalloped edge” recalls the workmanship ingrained into the natural material.5 Whilst pegging is integral to the object’s durability, the sides being “pegged” together, so scalloping marks the object, the ingrained lines a reflection of the hand that made them. Phillips’ language imbues Kate’s myth with remnants of a past that she would rather forget. Of course, Rip’s mountain top is only “almost” magical, and the man’s name, RIP, is a reminder of the death that hovers beyond “the boundary of the big garden”. Throughout MotherKind, Rip represents a contradiction – a contradiction that provides insight into Phillips’, as well as Kate’s, troubled connection to West Virginia. Kate realizes that: One day, her mother will be too ill to live alone. When the call comes … it will come from Rip. Understated, matter-of-fact. Rip will tell her.

Rip will be the bearer of bad tidings: not of death, perhaps, but of its nearing approach.6 Simultaneously, though, Rip’s presence in the text evokes Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”. The novel’s repeated allusions to sleep, in conjunction with Rip, make “Rip Van Winkle” the most prevalent Appalachian myth in MotherKind. Significantly, the tale of a man who sleeps through the War of Independence, effectively bypassing change, encompasses Kate’s dream of her mother’s eventual death. Within the dream, she thinks forward to the “hard, ragged breath of her mother’s last weeks” and subsequently “watches a horse the color of rain, immensely strong, pick its way riderless across a field of corpses”. At the moment of facing the reality of her mother’s death, Kate “forgets the sounds and pictures; sleep puts them deeply away”.7 Kate, like her mythical counterpart, falls asleep rather than addressing the realities of change. The fending off of change connects with aspects of Phillips’ notion of writing itself, particularly in relation to MotherKind, in which her turn to mythical accounts of the past stands in opposition to her previous engagement with historical and economic realities. She 5

Ibid., 175. Ibid., 264. 7 Ibid., 175. 6

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argues that fiction “is not only history, it is myth, it is storytelling, the sending off of death and practicing for death at the same time”.8 Just as fiction itself carries out this dual function, MotherKind pivots between acceptance and denial. II MotherKind focuses on the tension between Kate’s preparations for her mother’s death and her appeals to a mythic version of the past that will keep Katherine alive. In part, that tension relates to the difference between Eastern and Western forms of mourning. Kate’s belief in namaste, or in reincarnation, becomes most pronounced at Camille’s Easter lunch.9 During the meal Kate felt “nearly drunk … a contact high of sorts, composed of forgetfulness and company, the dizzy, welcome intersection of so many lives that knew each other not”. High on the conjunction of past lives and present company Kate realizes that the line “so many lives that knew each other not” was a line from “an old poem, a beautiful poem Kate had known well but could no longer remember”. However, more lines return to Kate, lines whose words reflect her belief in namaste, in the existence of life and death as one perpetual cycle: In fact there was nothing ancient about history, any history; countless, simultaneous images seemed to Kate to coexist, dimensioned sound, smell, textures; all we breathe and live within, ran the lines of poem she couldn’t place, all that is vanished from us. Not vanished, Kate thought, moved from sight. Any of them might inhabit again the forms and structures they had once composed, certainly they might, but the shapes would seem changed or wholly new in the intense, sensual present: new snow, new flesh, new place, new child.10

Kate’s contemplation of reincarnation follows a line of thought that reflects her own move away from West Virginia – “new snow, new flesh, new place, new child”. Such thoughts allow Kate, like Sumi, to accept death through the belief that things never really die. 8

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 189. For a detailed discussion of namaste, see Chapter 9, 216-20. 10 MotherKind, 127-29. 9

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Whilst the Nepali people embrace death, Kate thinks that “Americans simply denied it until they stepped off the cliff and fell”.11 She notes that Americans recognize only presence not absence. She thinks of American schoolchildren, “‘Here’… they said when the roll was called, as it was every morning, a ritual in the grade school Kate attended”. The “ritual” requires presence over absence, “as though teachers couldn’t make out who was absent without the recitation of names, the voices answering, ‘Here’”.12 Phillips explores the American refusal to directly recognize absence through Kate’s visit to the Kennedy Library in Boston. Kate visits the Kennedy Library that “glared white, lit in the winter sun, massive and lonely”, with Matt and his two sons Sam and Jonah. The library stands as a memorial to the dead President – Kate tells Jonah that the “museum tries to tell people all about the life of a man, John Kennedy”.13 However, whilst walking around the Library, Kate realizes that the museum shows only certain elements of Kennedy’s life. Immediately after thinking that Alexander would see “the world as it was” (here I take Kate to mean that Alexander will see the world as it is, as a matter of presence) Kate walks on “perusing photographs of the world as it was not”. Unlike Alexander, whose life Kate hopes will not be determined by the past, the memorial library focuses solely on the past, on “the world as it was not”. Marita Sturken argues that “Memorials embody grief, loss, and tribute or obligation; in doing so, they serve to frame particular historical narratives”.14 In MotherKind, the Kennedy Library’s “historical narrative” works to circumvent Kennedy’s death. The interior space of the Library shapes Kate’s experience, leading her to question the memorialization of the dead President. Kate and Matt take the boys to watch the film that the Library runs “continuously … every half hour”. When Kate asks the attendant how much of the assassination the film shows, he tells her that “there’s no footage of the assassination. It ends as his plane is taking off for Dallas.” Indeed the film begins with the President’s funeral: 11

Ibid, 242. Ibid., 5. 13 Ibid., 11. 14 Marita Sturken, “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial”, Representations, XXXV (Summer 1991), 120. 12

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Just as the film implies the question of how the future might unfold after Kennedy’s death, “with a flicker” Kennedy effectively comes back to life as “a boy in a suit”. Even the photographic exhibits deny the reality of the death. Kate, walking toward the theatre finds “herself in a square white room whose walls were hung with enlarged photographs”. The images detail the spectacle of the Kennedy wedding day, showing “the world as it was not”.15 Although the film and the Library’s exhibition’s fail to acknowledge the assassination, the curator’s exclusions prompt Kate to consider the unseen material. The absence of key images creates the presence of that absence, a point that relates to much of Phillips’ writing. The shadows and gaps that haunt her texts may be read as absences that by way of their exclusion, prompt Phillips’ characters and readers to interpret those gaps, effectively giving presence to absence. Within the Kennedy Library, Kate adds her own narrative to that provided by the museum itself. In her study, Making Histories in Museums, Gaynor Kavanagh proposes that museums “can lift the lid on our memories”. Kavanagh employs Sheldon Annis’ definition of three key spaces within museums, highlighting in particular the notion of “dream spaces”. By way of Annis, Kavanagh suggests that dream spaces are “where we as visitors respond to images, colours and textures in rather random yet highly personal ways. Odd memories, bits of conversations, scraps of songs, images of things we once owned or used, or fragments of information long forgotten may slip into our minds.”16 Indeed, within the museum’s theatre, Kate thinks both of Sam and Jonah and of her own childhood. Kate worries about Matt’s children and their constant pushing of boundaries. In the confines of the theatre she imagines the

15

MotherKind, 14-18. Gaynor Kavanagh, “Making Histories, Making Memories”, in Making Histories in Museums, ed. Gaynor Kavanagh (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1996), 3-4. 16

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wild boys. No stalwart commandments engraved on the conscience …. They moved happily this way and that, for miles of verdant plains and hills. They made it seem she and her brothers had grown up in a series of careful boxes. But had they?

The spatial dynamics of the theatre allow Kate to access, and to question, her memories of past events. Within the space of the Library, Kate draws on her own memories of the assassination, effectively adding depth to the museum’s narrative. Kate, thinking about her dying mother’s arrival in Boston, considers that “Sometimes it did seem they were all involved in a graphic melodrama whose banal details were nearly as heartrending as pillbox hats and blood-smeared pink mohair”. Interestingly, Kate does not see the image of “hats” and “mohair” in the museum itself. Rather, the image returns as memory – a memory of all the photographs “not shown”. In effect, the museum’s omission of the shooting only serves to remind Kate of death – not only in relation to President Kennedy, but in relation to her own mother’s terminal illness. Her recollection of Jacqueline Kennedy’s bloodied suit leads Kate to think that The suit stayed its torturous color, even in black and white. Those photographs, Kate thought, all the ones not displayed here, were another reason American girls should never wear pink. ‘No pink’ was one of many maxims Kate would have passed on to her daughter, were she carrying one.17

Kate’s aversion to the suit may be read as a displacement of the assassination. However, her initial repudiation of death in the museum alters throughout the narrative as she associates the colour pink with her mother. Kate’s change in attitude toward the once “torturous” colour stems from her acceptance of largely Eastern notions of mourning. When Kate talks to her mother about “Karmic advancement”, suggesting that “This life, after all, is but a moment, a ripple on the waters”, Katherine asks her why she finds that “such a delightful thought”. Kate answers that “it put us all in sync … sort of like spawning salmon, working our way upstream against the current. 17

MotherKind, 16-18.

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Flashes of color, a rush of rapids.”18 Kate’s salmon metaphor provides a pink backdrop for the passing moments of life, a backdrop that she projects onto her mother’s final months. Preparing to attend Camille’s Easter meal, Kate tells Matt, “I want my mother to wear the pink silk suit she brought up here in hopes she’d wear it another spring”. Significantly, only Kate considers her mother’s suit pink – Katherine tells her daughter that “It’s not pink, it’s apricot”.19 For Kate, a colour which she had previously connected with death becomes a statement of continued life, in that her mother lived long enough to wear the suit “another spring”. Katherine wears the same outfit at Kate and Matt’s wedding, her daughter seeing “Katherine’s suit” as “a glimmer of promissory pink” that “floated in [her] peripheral vision”.20 The colour’s promissory note echoes Phillips’ claim that in MotherKind, death “is a continuation, not an ending”.21 That Kate sees the colour in her “peripheral vision” serves to place the wearer of the suit in a region outside of the normal boundaries of daily life, effectively floating somewhere beyond the finality of death. The emphasis on continuation provides a framework for reading Kate’s repeated connection to the colour pink. On her wedding day, Kate looks out of her bedroom window, prior to the ceremony, and sees Amy standing with her sister, Hannah, in front of Kate’s dogwood tree. On seeing the baby-sitter, Kate’s “memory tugged at her, as though she’d seen Amy before against that shade of pink, in some other place or time”.22 Kate’s visualization places Amy in or against the pink with Katherine. Kate remembers that her mother had always tried to grow pink dogwood trees, and recalls the “Little white wire fences around them, ankle high”. Kate’s merging of the two women completes a cyclical chain in which life and death exist simultaneously. Watching Amy, Kate tells her mother that she “think[s] Amy is pregnant”.23 Kate appeals to the notion of namaste through her inadvertent and colour driven drawing together of her dying mother and the baby-sitter who carries a new 18

Ibid., 162. Ibid., 115-19. 20 Ibid., 164. 21 Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 77. 22 MotherKind, 152. 23 Ibid., 158-59. 19

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life. In a dream of her time in Kandy she alludes to the “glowing pink” walls of the Temple of the Tooth. In her recollections of her time in the East, Kate aligns temples with death and rebirth. When she remembers seeing a dead pilgrim in a Hindu shrine in Kathmandu, she recalls that she “saw a movement of light across the body, a lifting of shadow”.24 She imagines the soul leaving the man’s body, beginning its journey into another life. The link between the colour of the temple walls and the ailing mother enables a fuller realisation of namaste. The links to rebirth, or regeneration, are enhanced by Phillips’ employment of a dogwood tree to connect the dying Katherine and the pregnant Amy. The dogwood tree acts as a focal point throughout Chapter 6 in the novel, a chapter dedicated to Kate and Matt’s wedding. The tree, at the time of the wedding, “in full bloom, a riot of frothy pink”, recalls Katherine’s failed attempts to cultivate a pink dogwood tree in her garden: Katherine tells her daughter “they never took. I used to blame your father, for running into them with the mower, but I think now that the earth was just wrong.”25 That which was unable to grow in West Virginia grows “glorious[ly]” in Kate’s Boston home, allowing Kate to foster an element of her southern past in a relocated setting. Katherine and Hannah deck the dogwood in regionally specific religiosity. For Katherine “all dogwoods are dwarf trees …. That’s the legend of dogwood. My grandmother, even my great-great-aunt, another generation back, told the story.” Hannah specifies reasons for the dogwood’s abbreviation via a Sunday School version of the “legend”, claiming that the dogwood was “once a full sized tree” but “the cross was cut from it …. And ever after, the tree grew small and gnarled. So it could never be used again for … such a sorrow.” Listening to the religiously framed version of the story, Kate states that “It’s an animist take on adaptation, isn’t it? I mean, as grief or penance, it worked. No one builds anything from dogwood …. Dogwood only stands and flowers. Instead of ceasing altogether, the tree rendered itself ornamental and survived.”26

24

Ibid., 175. Ibid., 158. 26 Ibid., 169-70. 25

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The tree’s ornamental status places emphasis on its surface value, indicating that Kate plants the dogwood for the West Virginian memories it evokes. Kate’s comment concerning the tree’s adaptive nature merges with her own need to adapt to a life outside of West Virginia. Her planting of the tree in her Boston garden highlights her need to resituate her southern past in an alternative setting. As Katherine’s condition rapidly diminishes towards the end of the novel, so she begins to reminisce about her former life in West Virginia. She talks to Camille about plants, prompting Camille to ask Kate: “Did you have very tall, President Grevy lilacs? I thought at first she was talking about a person, then I realized it was the name of the lilac.” “They were taller than the house, the ranch house my father built. They grew all along her bedroom windows so thickly you couldn’t see through them, but she would never let him cut them back. I never knew the name.” “Well, darling, that’s what they’re called, and I’m going to plant some for you.”27

Kate’s recollection of the lilacs also brings into focus the dynamics of her parents’ relationship, effectively imbuing the flowers with socially constructed memories. That Camille offers to plant “President Grevy lilacs” in Kate’s garden underlines the attempts to recreate a sense of regional tradition in a displaced environment. Harvey terms the need for “secure moorings in a shifting world” as the search for “Place-identity”.28 He argues that “Place-identity, in this collage of superimposed spatial images that implode in upon us, becomes an important issue, because everyone occupies a space of individuation (a body, a room, a house, a shaping community, a nation), and how we individuate ourselves shapes identity”. In MotherKind, Kate attempts to retain a part of her West Virginia identity against the backdrop of her northern, suburban home. However, unlike the chair that Kate transports from her mother’s house, a chair that although displaced, still carries vestiges of its past

27 28

Ibid., 256-57. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 302.

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use, the design of Kate’s garden works to recreate the South in another setting.29 For Harvey: The assertion of any place-bound identity has to rest at some point on the motivational power of tradition. It is difficult, however, to maintain any sense of historical continuity in the face of all the flux and ephemerality of flexible accumulation.

Harvey suggests that attempts to maintain “historical continuity” often result in the creation of pastiche, or of simulacrum, such as the image of the Percheron horse in Fast Lanes.30 Following Harvey’s line of argument, Kate’s garden can be read as simulacrum of the gardens of her childhood, within which plants provide little more than physical reminders of her past. Until Katherine dies she can recount the stories attached to various plants, but once she dies the specifically regional practices attributed to such objects die with her, leaving Kate with only the memories of those practices. Harvey argues that “At best, historical tradition is reorganized as [a] museum culture … of local history, of local production, of how things once upon a time were made, sold, consumed, and integrated into a longlost and often romanticized daily life (one from which all trace of oppressive social relations may be expunged)”.31 Ultimately, Kate’s garden is carefully constructed to merge elements of a West Virginian heritage with an eclectic mixture of other plants. When Camille announces her gift of a wedding garden, she tells Kate and Matt “There’ll be a blue corner, for Katherine. And pinks and rose and peach, and green, green, green, all summer long.”32 For each year that the blue corner blooms Kate will retain a part of her mother. In contrast to the pink flowers that will bloom “all summer long”, representing continuance, Camille indicates that the blue corner will bloom for a short period, perhaps the colour, traditionally associated with sorrow, will act as yearly reminder of Katherine’s absence.

29

For a detailed discussion of the chair, see Chapter 10, 228-33. See Chapter 5, 133-35. 31 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 302-303. 32 MotherKind, 131. 30

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Significantly, in order to bury Katherine’s toy poodle Katrina, Matt “dig[s] near the dogwood tree”.33 Katherine considers her dog, who travelled with her from West Virginia, as a family member: Matt even jokes with Kate prior to Camille’s Easter meal that they should take the dog along, “as a guest, a relation. We can say, ‘This is Katrina. She barks’.” Katherine mixes up her daughter’s name with the dog’s, leading Kate to joke “I shouldn’t talk like this about Katrina. After all, she’s my sister more or less – an adoptee with a pedigree.” The dog’s official name, “Katherine’s Katrina Kay” confirms the dog’s place among the female members of the family, given that Katherine often refers to Kate as Kay.34 Burying the dog by the dogwood tree effectively plants part of the family in northern soil, providing fertilizer for the tree that reminds Kate of West Virginia. As Harvey suggests, “Through the presentation of a partially illusory past it becomes possible to signify something of local identity”.35 Kate’s garden, in effect, allows her to signify her southern heritage, a heritage from she is continually distanced. III Phillips argues that “People who feel that their past is lost have to compensate in some way. They have to find some way of placing themselves in a context, some way in dealing with a past that is not supported by people around them.” Harvey’s discussion of the search for a place-bound identity casts light on Phillips’ assertion that those people who “feel that their past is lost” have to place “themselves in a context”. For Kate, the attempt to recontextualize herself takes a number of forms. Her planting of southern things in her Boston garden highlights Kate’s desire physically to surround herself with reminders of her “lost” past. Whilst she may be thought to draw on what Harvey defines as “material simulacra” to recreate elements of her heritage, she also appeals to regionally grounded myths. Phillips employs regional myths in order to recontextualize her relocated characters. In as much as Kate appeals to the notion of namaste in MotherKind, Phillips considers her writing as an attempt 33

Ibid., 262. Ibid., 112-13. 35 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 303. 34

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to keep the past alive, to “Keep something from being forgotten”. I return here to Phillips’ argument that “Fiction is not only history, it is myth, it is storytelling, the sending off of death and practicing for death at the same time”.36 In MotherKind, a novel centred on Katherine’s imminent death, Phillips continually employs the notion of sleep. To sleep is both to “practice for” and yet to “send off” death, a suggestion supported by Phillips’ continual references to Sleeping Beauty in both Shelter and MotherKind. When Cap and Lenny meet for the first time in Shelter, Cap sees Lenny waiting for her mother on the steps outside the Methodist Church. Recalling that meeting, Cap tells Lenny, “I couldn’t believe how you were just lying across the steps, like some bewitched Sleeping Beauty”. Lenny casts Cap as her Prince Charming, telling her: My mother had dragged me to the church and I wouldn’t go inside, and it was hot and the stone was cool, and I knew she’d be pissed off when she came out and saw me lying there …. But I heard this voice in my face, ‘Wake up,’ and there you were, like you appeared out of nowhere.

Confirmed in their fairy tale roles, Cap proceeds, in Princely fashion, to rescue Lenny. When the two girls are baptized Lenny, expecting to float in the baptismal water, suddenly realizes that she is sinking to the bottom. Drifting downwards, Lenny finds: Cap within that liquid crescent – she never remembered seeing anyone jump in …. They grabbed the folds of each other’s gowns and struggled to the surface. There they stood gasping, doubly confirmed: it was the first time they’d tried to save anything but themselves.37

Faced with drowning, the girls rescue each other, initiating a mutual need for dependency. The sense of rebirth associated with their emergence from the baptismal water, connects to the notion of renewal at the heart of Sleeping Beauty. Max Lüthi argues that: 36 37

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 185-89. Shelter, 93-94.

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The Secret Country Sleeping Beauty, wondrously endowed and mysteriously threatened, suffers death or a sleep similar to death. But she is awakened again and begins to flourish – and with her, the world about her. Our fairy tale tells of death and resurrection.38

That Sleeping Beauty represents “death and resurrection” explicates Phillips’ employment of the tale throughout her last two novels. After her violent encounter with Carmody at Turtle Hole, Lenny looks at her dead abuser, “and her body stung in the moist air, limb by limb, as though it were painful to come alive again”. Resurrected, Lenny realizes that “The world would not be as it was. She saw that there was no world but this one now, full blown and dense with shifting air; they were born into it, mourning.”39 As previously established, Lenny mourns as she realizes that Audrey has begun a gradual break away from place, a break that will remove Lenny and her sister from their home and their southern father.40 Lenny awakens from a child’s perspective of events to a more adult understanding of, in Phillips’ words, “how complicated everything is”.41 Phillips goes on to develop Sleeping Beauty references throughout MotherKind, having Kate sleep and dream often so that she may “skim … the reflective surface of something deep”.42 Kate, in her sleeping state, bypasses the actual changes in her daily life. On the night that Katherine dies, Kate dreams that she and her mother walk along the “birth road” after “turn[ing] their backs” on the temple that at least one pilgrim has entered in order to die.43 As in Sleeping Beauty, sleep negates all that is bad so that sleep, like floating, eases the novel’s movement through birth and death. The magical power of sleep necessarily recalls Rip’s presence in the narrative. For Godden, “MotherKind closes at Rip’s place, magically relocated somewhere between the Hudson and West Virginia, because there, Phillips, on Kate’s behalf, may recast death as sleep,

38

Max Lüthi, Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 23-24. 39 Shelter, 243. 40 See Chapter 8, 192-97. 41 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 49. 42 MotherKind, 34. 43 Ibid., 289.

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and ‘home’ as a dream space where (for a time) time stops”.44 Certainly, given Rip Van Winkle’s propensity to fall asleep at a moment of profound change, Phillips’ Rip may be read as Kate’s guarantor of regional stability and continuance, effectively allowing her to make a nominal break from West Virginia. Phillips claims of her fictional use of fairy-tales and myths: All of the world view/information/psycho symbology represented in fairy tales, myths, fables, children’s stories, religious stories, does engage with the issue of evil, and also with identity. Identity itself – the fascinating issue of meaning – is the question. First symbols presented to children are a way into character which not only defines character (the still-forming identity of child characters) but represents the interface between individual and culture, historical era, family of origin.45

Kate ultimately works to provide her son with a mythologized knowledge of his West Virginian heritage by placing him in the bassinette given to her by Rip, although, as established, that very object contains traces of a regional heritage. When Kate and Katherine visit Rip’s home to view the basinette Rip leads mother and daughter through his barn, “past piles of horse harnesses …. Armoires and chiffoniers stand open, rockers are turned up, an old sledge stands empty, still fitted with sleigh bells.”46 The sledge, “still fitted with sleigh bells” recalls the sledges of both “Bess” and those in the song “Jingle Bells”, indicating that Rip’s barn preserves those objects whose attendant social practices are now extinct. Whilst the subsequent generations of the Hampsons no longer live at the farm, or use horse-drawn sledges, the sledge contains echoes of that lost way of life. In the barn filled with vestiges of a lost past, Kate and Katherine “gaze past the bassinette into Rip’s garden”: Beans climb on taut strings. Silver foil and jingle bells strung over the corn on transparent fishing line hover in midair, and bits of bright paper turn and flash. Occasionally there comes a dreamy twinkling of sound, but the air is nearly still.47 44

Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 255. Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 76. 46 MotherKind, 265. 47 Ibid., 291. 45

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Rip’s magical garden, with its “dreamy twinkling of sound” contains fairy tale possibilities: possibilities of boys who might climb the “beans” that grow “on taut strings”. The “jingle bells strung over the corn” obviously evoke the song filled with “artifacts and extinctions”. Rip’s awareness of Kate’s need for continuation underlines the significance of his presence in her travel narrative, a narrative that, as I have argued, effectively works to keep Katherine alive. Phillips situates the main narrative within the italicized journal, a journal that opens and closes the novel. The initial section opens with Kate’s return to West Virginia and the final entry ends with Kate and Katherine on Rip’s mountain. Rip provides Kate with a continuing link to a past that she has geographically left behind, so that when she thinks of Rip she simultaneously thinks of her mother. As the italicized journal unfolds, Kate imagines standing with her mother “on a silvery plateau whose level plain extends, endless, into the line of the horizon; the outcast holy one stands with them, barefoot, garbed in orange silk, his skin rubbed white with ash”.48 Rip, whose mythical qualities allow him to bypass change, replaces “the holy one” in the final image of mother and daughter standing together.49 Rip, cast as the pilgrim or the “holy one”, helps Kate to negotiate her mother’s transition into death, and her own departure from West Virginia. Phillips closes her narrative with a final image of Katherine, Kate and Rip at his mountain home, so that the mother, on the verge of death in the final chapter, may return alive by way of the final journal entry. Rip’s magical mountain home provides Kate with a space in which she can keep her mother alive, suspended in a simulated locale where time stops, and “The air is beautifully still”.50 Kate ultimately partakes in a regional myth that bypasses change. In effect she holds the “common wish of all” those in Irving’s Kaatskill “neighborhood,

48

Ibid., 107-108. Although Irving’s Rip Van Winkle does integrate into the American Republic that he enters after sleeping through the War of Independence, I would argue that his sleep nevertheless acts as a way of bypassing the actual transition period between America as a British colony and America as an independent country. 50 MotherKind, 263. 49

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[that] when life hangs heavy on their hands … they might have a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle’s flagon”.51 Whilst MotherKind as a whole marks a notable break from the specificity of place, Phillips employs the most obvious of mythical references to “hold things in place, light things up long enough that we can see and feel and sense what might already be lost”.52 Phillips’ observation, though, points to the fleeting nature of such backward glances. Indeed, as discussed at the beginning of the chapter, Rip’s home is only “almost magical”, thereby imposing limits on the circumvention of loss. Despite the temporary nature of such deferment, Phillips employs plateaux, or mountain tops, to represent a space in which the past can be momentarily brought back to life, or where progress, that in Phillips’ writing often leads to departure from place, can be forestalled. The image of plateaux best exemplifies Kate’s contradictory willingness to accept change, or death, and her simultaneous denial of such transitions. In the travel journal plateaux appear to represent Katherine’s continued survival and the temporary denial of imminent death. In the journal entry that opens the novel Katherine tells Kate that the doctors, “say I’ve plateaued …. Fine with me. I’m trying to sit tight.” Throughout the following journal sections Kate keeps her mother in place on top of a plateau, a plateau that she marks as elusively southern, “Kate envisions her mother on a high, empty mesa, watching the sky for incoming weather while her tiny, failing poodle stands rigidly at attention”.53 On a mesa, a flat-topped hill commonly found in the southwestern United States, Katherine’s condition remains stable. In a later travel excerpt Kate turns to Eastern mourning rituals as she imagines herself and Katherine standing on that “silvery plateau whose level plain extends, endless, into the line of the horizon”.54 Although the allusion to an “endless” expanse indicates that plateaux appeal to the timeless qualities of myth, mountain tops in the novel acts as transitory spaces, where characters pause before making the 51 Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 41. 52 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 187. 53 MotherKind, 3. 54 Ibid., 107-108.

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descent into death and, in a wider context, the move away from region. Certainly, whilst Rip’s mountain may be “magical”, when Kate and Katherine descend they are immediately surrounded by the socioeconomic realities of life in West Virginia. On Kate’s initial return home at the start of the novel, she considers the surrounding countryside. Her description of the area relates as much to an internalized sense of the past as it does to the physical scenery around her. Whilst she claims to have “fled” the region, the densities of that place pervade her topographical account of the: Landscape: no plateaus. Appalachian scrub hills wild with flower, the dense foothills and humped mountains, valleys, small skies, hay smell, cicada and locust, generations of farms and mining towns, the winding dirt roads and fields in dense shade or brilliant sun, silos and barn board, choke of sumac and bramble: all she sees in her mind’s eye when she remembers what she fled.55

Kate cannot escape the “winding dirt roads” that lead back to farmhouses and towns: what she has “fled” returns with intertextual specificity, a manifestation of the old Hampson farmhouse as it appeared in “Bess” and Machine Dreams. Kate’s recollections effectively challenge her attempts to mythologize the past, and although she argues that the West Virginia of her childhood “doesn’t really exist anymore”, the sensory particularity of her denial negates that denial of home.56 Kate can still smell the “hay” and hear the “cicada and locust”; the dirt roads she imagines take her back not to the mythical past of Rip’s mountain, but to the farmhouses and towns whose economic histories reflect the regional, labour oriented heritage beyond which Kate cannot fully move. Kate realizes the impossibility of her departure from her past on the flight to Nepal, when she fails to comprehend her fellow traveller’s disavowal of her family. The “American girl” tells Kate that she “didn’t communicate with her family”; when Kate questions if that lack of correspondence includes her mother, the girl responds that speaking to her mother, “wasn’t necessary”. Shocked, Kate considers the landscape beneath the plane: 55 56

Ibid., 5. Ibid., 56.

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Miles of snow. The plane seemed to fly into jagged white, then banked and dropped lower. The peaks grew ever more massive, into vertical fields and gleaming, tipped sheets, dwarfing all creatures, timeless, implacable. There was silence …. Furled air rose in swaths from the peaks themselves, and the plane leveled off so that it seemed to fly a nether region veiled above and below. The bases of the mountains were obscured in cloud, their heights in shifting vapor. Stepping out of a history seemed as cold.57

The shifting landscape reflects the tension in Phillips’ work between a haunted commitment to the past and the desire to break free from regional constrictions. The plane, flying blindly through a series of “jagged” edges represents characters’ snow covered images of their individual histories. For example, the snow covered peaks take the reader to Mitch Hampson’s frustrated attempts to recall his heritage and to the whiteness that hides yet simultaneously reveals the hidden beneath Shelter’s multiple surfaces. However, the plane drops beneath the whitening blindness, moving closer to the tops of the mountains whose “timeless[ness]” may be thought to recall Rip’s magical mountain home. Yet flying through the “nether region” troubles Kate: to step from history is to be “cold”, a coldness reminiscent of the intense extremities of temperature experienced by the narrator of “Fast Lanes” who, on her return home imagines that she is a “frozen six-year-old baby going back to the start of the cold”. Her coldness relates to her difficult relationship with her mother, a link emphasized in her request that Thurman should drop her “off tomorrow. Me and the suitcases and the box of books. I don’t want to see you meet my mother, none of that.”58 In MotherKind, the coldness that Kate aligns with distancing oneself from one’s family prompts her to consider her own mother, and how during her time in the East she had effectively “step[ped] out of time”  “Now she knows Katherine’s odyssey into illness began about the time she herself was flying into Nepal, unreachable, out of touch. Why hadn’t she called home even once during those weeks?”59 Whilst Kate, and perhaps Phillips, turns to a mythical “nether world” to bypass change, Phillips aligns such removal from time with illness. 57

Ibid., 105-106. Fast Lanes, 58-59. 59 MotherKind, 106. 58

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In effect, “stepping out of time” does not halt change. Rather, Phillips’ authorial intervention (through free indirect discourse), in the italicized narrative effectively juxtaposes the removal from time with the inception of cancer. In the novel any authorial drift into Kate’s experimentation with atemporality, or what Bronfen terms “atimelessness”, is held firmly in the temporal by the instructive juxtaposition of cancer and myth. That Phillips taints myth with reality implies that to simply mythologize the past is to lose the past, and her unwillingness fully to accept those terms suggests that, as yet, Phillips has neither given “up confrontation” nor turned to a “reassuring idea of a stable tradition”.60 When Katherine drives Kate back to her West Virginian home, Kate tells her mother that “When I think of a place, I think of here. I’m from this place, no matter where I am. But it doesn’t really exist anymore. The highway bypasses what’s left.”61

Here the highway, a pronounced signal of movement away from place in Fast Lanes, “bypasses” the last remnants of traditional, rural ways of life. However, Kate pleads, “Let’s go home. Let’s take the old road.” Driving along the “two-lane” road, a type of road often built by Phillipsian fathers, mother and daughter pass: clustered houses and abandoned coal tipples. Closed roadside gas stations still wear the weathered, upright jewelry of their empty pumps …. The air, the sky, the leaning buildings, all seem less dusty, the land more green, the storefronts preserved and oddly alone, as though they will vanish beyond this deserted grace into a future that already exists, shimmering where the heat meets the road.62

Although the highway bypasses the “abandoned coal tipples” and weathered “gas stations” Kate does not believe that these ignored remnants of a specifically regional past will fall into extinction. Rather, they will “vanish beyond this deserted grace into a future that already exists”, saved from extinction through Phillips’ writing. 60

Bronfen, “Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment …”, 27. MotherKind, 56. 62 Ibid., 50-51. 61

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Through Kate’s need to preserve her past, Phillips’ addresses her own concern with saving “something. Keep[ing] something from fading away. Keep[ing] something real.”63 Her desire to keep her West Virginian heritage “real” may explain why all of her texts, with the exception of Black Tickets, end in West Virginia. Although MotherKind ends in Appalachia, Phillips’ consideration of home and region in her latest novel, and her decision to close MotherKind on Rip’s “magical” mountain, troubles her earlier interest in historical and economic determinants. Phillips herself acknowledges that the novel has an “accessible surface”, a surface that marks a distinct shift from the density of her earlier prose. To access the potentially “dark material” that lies beneath the clear prose, the reader must draw on readings of her earlier work.64 Yet Phillips’ turn to myth problematizes such a backward glance, since her accounts of the past, particularly in relation to Rip, offer a sense of a place removed from time, and therefore from the social practices that haunt much of her writing prior to MotherKind. Even whilst Phillips’ language places emphasis on Rip’s bartering skills and his labour, that expertise lies beneath the veneer of his magical garden. That she closes her novel on a plateau begs the question of where, in writing terms, she goes from there.

63 64

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 187. Johnson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 10.

CONCLUSION “[It] is a continuation, not an ending.”

Concerning Phillips’ writing, what follows neither is, nor should be, conclusive. Phillips will publish further works, works that may provide alternative perspectives on previous texts. Indeed, whilst MotherKind appears to mark a significant shift in Phillips’ writing, published extracts of her forthcoming novel, Termite, indicate a return to a pre-MotherKind style. Phillips claims that “Place/identity informs everything I do. The next book is partially located in the South.”1 With its backward glance to a post-Korean war context, and its partially southern setting, Termite, appears, from these early outtakes, to echo the density of Phillips’ first two novels.2 In Machine Dreams and Shelter, and in her collections of short stories, Phillips’ engagement with the historical and economic transitions in West Virginia during the twentieth century allows for an historical materialist approach to her writing. In MotherKind, however, Phillips appears to counter such historical determinism through her appeals to regional myths that tend to undermine socially grounded readings. Elizabeth Bronfen traces Phillips’ attempts to mythologize the past to Machine Dreams. Bronfen hopes “to illustrate”: the dubious ideological stance that underlines Phillips’ giving in to a nostalgic urge to believe in a consoling and reassuring world view. Her retrogressive act of ultimately falling back on conservative values like stability and tradition, and the idea of an ahistorical timelessness of myth is all the more perfidious because it coexists with and yet supersedes her critical discussion of American political and social reality.3

1

Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, 76-77. See Jayne Anne Phillips, “Termite’s Birthday, 1959”, Granta 82: Life’s Like That (Summer 2003), 109-24 and Jayne Anne Phillips, “Termite, 1959”, The Southern Review, XLI/1 (Winter 2005), 60-77. 3 Bronfen, “Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment …”, 20. 2

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I trust that my analysis of Phillips’ work prior to MotherKind has dispelled Bronfen’s charges by establishing that Phillips’ characters confront, through haunting dreams and fragmented recollections, a past that is anything but reassuring or stable. Plainly, Phillips draws upon the beginnings of modernization in the South, the Depression, the post-World War II boom years and the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts, in order to destabilize any simple or mythological version of a regional past. However, the historicity of her work may be overlooked by those who do not attend to the semantic density both in and across her texts. Phillips’ reader can only understand the socio-economic elements that propel her writing by examining the minute details of her texts, by exploring the coded interactions between characters or by considering the material objects that resonate with family and regional specificity. Indeed, for Phillips, history and politics are best explored through their impact upon everyday interactions: “The literature of an era is a record that takes in what really happened – how political decisions affected people’s actual lives.”4 As a result, Jean’s refusal to allow Mitch to build a bomb shelter in Machine Dreams, Audrey’s move out of the South in Shelter, and Kate’s removal of her father’s chair from West Virginia to Boston in MotherKind, are all actions that reflect wider regional and national movements. Given Phillips’ concern with social realities prior to MotherKind, aspects of her latest novel compel readers to consider whether or not Phillips is moving towards what Bronfen terms “enchantment”. That Phillips, “Tiring of the uncomfortable” in MotherKind, “succumbs to the temptation to give up confrontation and believe in the reassuring idea of a stable tradition ... as home, and invites her readers to do likewise”.5 As I bring the study to a close, I wish to play devil’s advocate to my own historical materialist approach by exploring the mythical tendencies throughout in Phillips’ writing. Yet, in my consideration of her appeal to myth, and in conclusion, I hope finally to counter Bronfen’s dismissal of the historical and social densities in Phillips’ work.

4 5

Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 50. Bronfen, “Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment …”, 28.

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Whilst I have considered the fact that each of Phillips’ novels end in the South, I have not fully explored the mythic dimension of her conclusions in those three texts. Just as MotherKind closes with a final image of mother and daughter standing on Rip’s magical mountain, so Shelter may be said to end in a mythical Never Land. In his work on Phillips, Godden notes that “Buddy, the semi-flier who likes white, will not write, sees fairies and angels, talks to trees, and covets a young girl, is a trainee Peter Pan”. Godden, in his appeal to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, goes on to argue that through Buddy, Lenny “retains access to a Never Land, ‘magical’ in that she can and will revisit it forever”.6 Peter Pan was clearly in Phillips mind as she finished her second novel. Close to the completion of Shelter, Phillips stayed at the MacDowell writer’s colony but left after four days to watch her “son in ‘Peter Pan’”.7 Consciously or sub-consciously, Phillips’ depiction of Buddy’s “Kingdom” at the end of the novel shares similarities with Peter’s Never Land. Phillips dedicates the second of Shelter’s two sections solely to Buddy, so that “Buddy Carmody: His Kingdom” stands as the only narrative of “Early November, 1963”.8 Buddy’s “Kingdom” does act as a Never Land in which he “could fall into [a] white space … and in that white space him and Mam are at Turtle Hole like they were in August after camp closed”.9 If, then, Buddy exists in a mythical space, the reader must question Phillips’ motives for specifying its temporal location (November, 1963). As Jacqueline Rose asks of Barrie’s text, what if: Peter Pan is a little boy who does not grow up, not because he doesn’t want to, but because someone else prefers that he shouldn’t. Suppose, therefore, that what is at stake in Peter Pan is the adult’s desire for the child …. I am using desire here to refer to a form of investment by the adult in the child, and to the demand made by the adult on the child … a demand which fixes the child and then holds it in place. A turning to the child, or a circulating around the child – 6

Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 256. Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 51. 8 Shelter, 271. 9 Ibid., 275. 7

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what is at stake here is not so much something which could not be enacted as something which cannot be spoken.10

Rose’s enquiry prompts Phillips’ reader to consider the nature of her, and indeed Lenny’s, investment in Buddy. Buddy provides Lenny with an apparently safe version of her regional past, in which the evil Carmody has been killed and buried in the cave by Turtle Hole. For Rose, “The child is, if you like, something of a pioneer who restores these worlds to us, and gives them back to us with a facility or directness which ensures that our own relationship to them is, finally, safe”.11 Read in the wider context of Phillips’ relation to region, Buddy exists in what Phillips considers a “magical” place, that in 1963 was “pre-conscious .… It was pre-Vietnam, it was preassassinations: the whole thing began to erupt after that point.”12 The image of Buddy as Peter Pan, existing in a “pre-conscious” space ripe with the mythical qualities of Rip’s mountain, is in line with Bronfen’s assertion that Phillips demonstrates “a nostalgic urge to believe in a consoling and reassuring world view”.13 However, as I seek to contextualize Phillips’ mythologization within my historical materialist reading, I want, here, to consider her use of fairy tales and myths in relation to the unspoken, or what Christopher Bollas terms the “unthought known”. Lutz Röhrich argues that “fairy tales are essential and substantial stories which offer paradigmatic examples of conflicts in decisive life situations”.14 Indeed, Rose’s psychoanalytic approach to Peter Pan serves to address the notion of conflict at the heart of children’s fiction. Through her re-working of Freud, she states that: The most crucial aspect of psychoanalysis for discussing children’s fiction is its insistence that childhood is something in which we continue to be implicated and which is never simply left behind. Childhood persists …. It persists as something which we endlessly 10 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: The MacMillan Press, 1984), 3-4. 11 Ibid., 9. 12 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 50. 13 Bronfen, “Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment …”, 20. 14 Lutz Röhrich, Introduction to Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 1.

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The Secret Country rework in our attempt to build an image of our own history.

So, whilst Shelter is not a book for children, Phillips’ characterization of children, and more specifically of Buddy, perhaps highlights her own attempts to negotiate a haunted attachment to place. However, as Rose suggests, childhood cannot be put to rest, cannot be resolved in a fairy tale. Rose argues that “there are aspects of our childhood which one part of our mind, a part over which we precisely do not have control, would rather forget”.15 For her, these elements return in fairy tale narratives, and, in relation to Peter Pan, she argues that the story “seems to be nothing more than a constant return to these points of difficulty around which it gravitates and stalls”.16 The elements of childhood that cannot be left in the past relate to Bollas concept of the “unthought known”, which, in Patricia Yaeger’s terms, refers to “a residue of childhood imprinting us with expectations about the way the world will shape itself (or fail to shape itself) about us. These early experiences are lodged in the sensorium but not available to consciousness – hence known but unthought or unacknowledged.”17 Yaeger’s use of the word “sensorium” places weight on that which is sensed, on the elements of daily life that may be considered “structures of feeling”.18 Phillips’ return to the West Virginia of her childhood, whether through myth or through accounts of everyday interactions, returns her reader to parts of her or her characters’ regional heritage that cannot be left behind: a heritage whose traces continue to haunt. Even when she turns to myth she fixes her characters in time (most notably Buddy and Rip), since her descriptions of their environments and everyday lives contain residues of that haunting past which she attempts to bypass. For Phillips, myth cannot simply erase the past: like the lines drawn in Alma’s schoolbooks in Shelter, once erased, the lines leave an indelible trace on the page.19 In Shelter, as well as Phillips’ other writing, even that which appears buried, can resurface at any moment. Indeed, Buddy’s white 15

Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 12-13. Ibid., 24. 17 Yaeger, Dirt and Desire, 101. 18 I borrow the phrase “structures of feeling” from Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature, 128-35. 19 Shelter, 105. 16

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safety net, into which he and Mam can fall, carries with it attendant allusions to his dead stepfather who lies buried in the cave, floating in the water that feeds Turtle Hole. In effect, Carmody’s dead body pollutes the water over which Buddy imagines “slid[ing] … on his sled …. Or maybe this year in a hard freeze he’ll run right across the middle, whooping and screaming, see it all laid out hard and shining around him, gleaming.”20 In effect, Carmody lies just beneath the surface, just as Wes’ working-class dirt lies beneath the cleanliness of Audrey’s white sheets. As previously established, throughout Phillips’ fiction the colour white, often in the form of snow, reveals yet simultaneously conceals elements of characters’ pasts. In my introductory discussion of the short story “Snow”, I highlighted Phillips’ use of the titular term as a cover or veil, hiding that which remains unspoken. In that story, Randal recounts modified fairy tales to his children. One tale that he tells Molly reads: Molly Molly Pumpkin Polly How does your garden growl With seahorse bells and turtle shells And midget men all in the aisle.21

The midget men of Randal’s rhyme take the reader to Shelter, to Mam’s rhyme of “little men” murmured by Buddy during his violent encounters with Carmody, both in the cave and in Turtle Hole. Godden offers an insightful account of the rhyme, William Allingham’s “The Fairies”, suggesting that although the “little man who emerges from ‘Mam’s rhyme’ is a multiple saviour”, readers of Allingham’s poem will “know that the ‘little men’ in question are to be feared”. In Godden’s account, “Buddy’s saviour is an abuser ‘hidden deep within the lake’”.22 Rendering Godden’s line of thought more generic, I would suggest that even the apparently innocent rhymes that appear in Phillips’ work contain darker elements. The darker aspects of Phillips’ mythical or fairytale realms are apparent in the final, one paragraph section, of Machine Dreams, “Machine Dream: Danner”. In that section Danner tracks “the magic horse”, in a fairytale “forest”, yet that place cannot alter the fact that 20

Ibid., 277. Black Tickets, 227. 22 Godden, “No End to the Work? …”, 276. 21

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Billy’s “plane falls, year after year, to earth”.23 The mythical realm can only ever provide a temporary respite from Billy’s death, or more generally from a break with region. Phillips turns to myths and fairy tales, then, only for superficial reassurance: as in all her writing, such moments are imbued with the everyday, and with elements of the unspoken or underspoken. In her constant return to the “unthought known” or in her explorations of “transgenerational phantoms”, she inadvertently fits into Avery Gordon’s synopsis of the ghostly matters at play in the work of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela: These women possess a vision that can not only regard the seemingly not there, but can also see that the not there is a seething presence. Seething, it makes a striking impression; seething, it makes everything we do seem just as it is, charged with the occluded and forgotten past. These women comprehend the living effects, seething and lingering, if what seems over and done with, the endings that are not over.24

Certainly, just as Carmody remains a “seething presence” in Buddy’s seemingly perfect Never Land, so too does Waylon’s chair carry with it, as it moves from West Virginia to Boston, a “forgotten past”. If Phillips’ earlier use of fairy tales and myths contains regionally grounded social practices and repressed knowledge, her turn to myth in MotherKind may be read as equally charged in its density. III The inability to fully escape a regional past is something that Phillips has herself experienced throughout her time in Boston. In effect she writes about the South in the North, yet despite her geographical distance from her subject she claims: I still feel myself seeing things as West Virginian and really using the language that I learned as a child. People up here [in Boston] never know what I’m talking about when I say something like ‘He thought it was the end of P time’ or all kinds of little phrases that are 23 24

Machine Dreams, 331. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 195.

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part of my vocabulary.25

Her double voice, or polytonality, recalls Faulkner’s description of Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!: he would seem to listen to two Quentins now – the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times; and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South … the two separate Quentins now talking to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage.26

Phillips’ writing often reflects the sense of the internal conflict of characters who have geographically left the South, but who cannot rid themselves of the “garrulous outraged baffled ghosts” of their pasts. Phillips belongs to a line of southern writers who cannot be “absolved of [their] responsibility to encounter again and yet again, in language, those earlier tragedies, inequities and losses”.27 The past is clearly a focal point of Phillips’ writing prior to MotherKind. Yet while the surface layer of that latest novel suggests that Phillips has lessened her hold on West Virginia, the novel still upholds the idea that home, in Phillips’ work, is tied to the South. In the text Waylon and Kate discuss the possibility of his moving to Boston to be closer to Kate: “everything’s there [West Virginia],” he said, “houses I built, streets I laid down, Raine’s grave. You’ll be bringing your mother back. I’ve been in that town sixty years. It’s home, no matter who’s left. Your home too.” “My home is here, Dad,” she said gently. He turned to look at her. “This is where you live. Home is where 25

Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 186. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (London: Vintage, 1995), 9. 27 James Applewhite, “Southern Writing and the Problem of the Father”, in The Future of Southern Letters, eds Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29. 26

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270 you come from.”28

That divide between current location and originating home-place lies at the centre of Phillips’ writing. She has experienced, in her own move away from West Virginia, the “double movement of loss and liberation”, and through her fiction she seeks to interrogate the nature of that loss.29 The fact that Phillips ends MotherKind in a mythical place, a site in-between loss and liberation, points to the difficulty of reconciling the two. In exploring Phillips’ work I hope that I have revealed that “much is at stake in our recognition of and engagement with ghostly matters, in our ability to stop fleeing from the recognition of the something more”.30 To read Phillips is to read both the apparently insignificant and the seemingly not-there. Her awareness of the impact of social and economic changes in West Virginia on daily lives provides a glimpse into times and places that she regards as “being lost, as being gone” because that have “changed so much”.31 Following Phillips’ main routes back to the past leads to a dense network of interconnected side roads. To access those byways the reader must attempt to piece together the intra- and inter-textual signs that permeate her work. Such a reading does not always follow “fixed tracks”, and in this study I have taken many detours as I attempted to clear the “intellectual jungle” of Phillips’ prose.32 Indeed, Phillips’ interest “in perception and in dislocations of thought and the simultaneity of time” often complicate any straightforward reading.33 Yet without such close and densely wrought analysis, Phillips may remain absent from generic studies of southern writing.

28

MotherKind, 203. Williams, The Country and the City, 251. 30 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 206. 31 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 185. 32 Black, Models and Metaphors, 242. 33 Homes, “Jayne Anne Phillips”, 48. 29

BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary: Jayne Anne Phillips Phillips, Jayne Anne, Sweethearts (Carrboro, N.C: Wingbow/ Truck Press, 1976). —— Black Tickets (2nd edn, New York: Vintage Books, 2001). —— Machine Dreams (New York: E.P. Dutton / Seymour Lawrence, 1984). —— Shelter (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin / Seymour Lawrence, 1994). —— “Outlaw Heart”, Critical Quarterly, XXXVII/4 (1994), 43-48. —— “Obsession: A Simple Story”, Critical Quarterly, XXXVII/4 (1994), 49-51. —— “Premature Burial”, in Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers, ed Joyce Dyer (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 209-17. —— “Jayne Anne Phillips Gets Her Hair Done”, Women’s Review of Books, XVI/10-11 (1999), 10-13. —— MotherKind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). —— Fast Lanes (2nd edn, New York: Vintage Books, 2000). —— “Report of the Spies”: http://www.jayneannephillips.com/esdaughter.htm —— “On Not Having a Daughter”: http://www.jayneannephillips.com/esdaughter.htm. —— “Dreaming of Beauty”: http://www.jayneannephillips.com/esdaughter.htm. —— “Home After Dark”: http://www.jayneannephillips.com/esdaughter.htm. —— “Termite’s Birthday, 1959”, Granta 82: Life’s Like That (Summer 2003), 109-24. —— “Termite, 1959”, The Southern Review, XLI/1 (Winter 2005), 60-77.

272

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Primary: Other Authors Allingham, William, “The Fairies”, in The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, ed. Christopher Ricks (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 317-18. Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom! (London: Vintage, 1995). —— The Sound and the Fury (London: Vintage, 1995). Irving, Washington, “Rip Van Winkle”, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 29-42. Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, 1831-1842, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 392-421. ——“The Raven”, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, 1831-1842, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 36469. ——“Lenore”, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, 1831-1842, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 33437. Porter, Katherine Anne, The Old Order (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1955). —— “Portrait: The Old South”, in The Collected Essays and the Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: A Seymour Lawrence Book, 1970), 160. Secondary Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Theory and History of Literature, XXXVII, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). —— The Shell and the Kernal, trans. Nicholas Rand (2nd edn, London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) I. Alderman, Derek H. and Donna G’Segner Alderman, “Kudzu: A Tale of Two Vines”, Southern Cultures, VII/3 (Fall 2001), 49-64.

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Brandon, Donald, American Foreign Policy: Beyond Utopianism and Realism (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966). Bronfen, Elisabeth, “Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment: The Concept of ‘Home’ in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Novel Machine Dreams”, AAA – Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, XIII/1 (1988), 17-28. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Bryant Jr, J.A., Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997). Bull, Malcolm, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality (London: Verso, 1999). Carter, Susanne, “Variations on Vietnam: Women’s Innovative Interpretations of the Vietnam War Experience”, Extrapolation, XXXII/2 (1991), 170-83. Cobb, James C, Industrialization and Southern Society 1877-1984 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984). Culler, Jonathan, ed., On Puns: The Foundation of Letters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984). —— The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Donaldson, Susan V and Anne Goodwyn Jones, eds, Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997). Douglass, Thomas E., “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, XXI/1 (1994), 182-89. Dugan, Allan, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1970). Ehrenreich, Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional Managerial Class”, in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 5-45. Empson, William, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Penguin Books, 1995). Ezell, John Samuel, The South since 1865 (2nd edn, New York: Macmillan, 1975).

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Faludi, Susan, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999). Fludernik, Monika, “The Linguistic Illusion of Alterity: The Free Indirect as Paradigm of Discourse Representation”, Diacritics, XXV/4 (1995), 89-115. Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rainbow (London: Penguin, 1991). Freud, Sigmund, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV, trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981), 243-58. —— “The Uncanny”, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978), 219-52. —— “A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad”, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX, trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981), 227-32. —— “The History of an Infantile Neurosis (‘Wolf Man’)”, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1989), 400-26. Gainey, Karen Wilkes, “Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams: Leo Marx, Technology, and Landscape”, Journal of American Studies Association of Texas, XXI (October 1990), 75-84. Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Gaskins, Avery F., “Middle-Class Townie: Jayne Anne Phillips and the Appalachian Experience”, Appalachian Journal, XIX/3 (Spring 1992), 308-16. Gilbert, Celia, “Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, Publisher’s Weekly, 225 (June 8 1984), 65-66. Gilman Jr, Owen W., Vietnam and the Southern Imagination (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992). Godden, Richard, “No End to the Work? Jayne Anne Phillips and the Exquisite Corpse of Southern Labor”, Journal of American Studies, XXXVI/2 (2002), 249-79.

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Gordon, Avery F., Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Gray, Richard, Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass and Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Haug, W.F., Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology and Culture (New York: Cambridge Polity Press, 1987). Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Hill, Dorothy Combs, “A 1986 Conversation with Jayne Anne Phillips”, South Carolina Review, XXIV/1 (1991), 53-73. ——“Jayne Anne Phillips (1952- )”, in Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, eds Joseph M Flora and Robert Bain (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993). Homes, A. M., “Jayne Anne Phillips”, Bomb, XLIX (Fall 1994), 4651. Houser, Catherine, “Missing in Action: Alienation in the Fiction of Award-Winning Women Writers”, Mid-American Review, XIV/2 (1994), 33-39. Inge, Tonette Bond, ed., Southern Women Writers: The New Generation (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1990). Irwin, John T., Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). Jarvis, Brian, Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1998). —— “How Dirty Is Jayne Anne Phillips?”, Yearbook of English Studies, XXXI (2001), 192-204. Johnson, Sarah Anne, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, The Writer’s Chronicle, XXXIV/6 (May/Summer, 2002), 4-10.

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Mitchell, Juliet, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (London: Penguin Books, 2000). Pfeil, Fred, “Makin’ Flippy-Floppy: Postmodernism and the BabyBoom PMC”, in The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook, 1985, eds Mike Davis, Fred Pfeil and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1985), 263-95. Price, Joanna, “Remembering Vietnam: Subjectivity and Mourning in American New Realist Writing”, Journal of American Studies, XXVII/2 (August 1993), 173-86. Rashkin, Esther, “Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Work of Abraham and Torok”, Diacritics (Winter 1988), 3152. Rhodes, Kate, “Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, Women’s Studies, XXXI/4 (Jul/Aug 2002), 517-20. Robertson, Sarah, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, European Journal of American Culture, XX/2 (2001), 68-77. Rogin, Michael, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). —— Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996). Röhrich, Lutz, Introduction to Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 1-9. Rose, Jacqueline, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: MacMillan, 1984). —— Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1996). —— On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003). Salstrom, Paul, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 1730-1940 (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1994). Schwartz, Deb, “Look Homeward, Angels”, Nation, CCLIX/16 (1994), 585-88. Squier, Susan M., “Fetal Voices: Speaking for the Margins Within”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, X/1 (Spring 1991), 17-30.

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INDEX Abraham, Nicolas, 8-9, 14-15, 62, 73-74, 91-92, 101, 15152, 162, 167, 170, 187-88; The Shell and the Kernal, 48-51, 53-54, 151-54, 223; The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, 8, 50 abuse, 122-24, 144, 164, 16775, 177, 189-95, 199-201, 254, 267 agrarianism, 31, 113-14, 182 agriculture, 29, 113 Alderman, Donna G’Segner, 145 Alderman, Derek H., 145 ancestors, 43, 74, 121, 130-31 Annesley, James, 112 Appalachia, 1-2, 4-6, 29-30, 45, 113-14, 183-84, 216, 219, 239-43, 258-61 Attfield, Judy, 81, 229, 230 Auerbach, Erich, 156, 176 autochthony, 31-32, 82-84, 99 baby-boomer generation, 2, 69, 92, 139 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 25, 42, 160, 210 Bartley, Numan V., 67, 182-83, 197-98 basements, 67-68, 95-98, 139 Benjamin, Jessica, 198 Benn Michaels, Walter, 36

birth, 36, 54, 57, 63, 126, 140, 207, 224, 254; child, 70, 209, 211, 213-14, 217, 239; certificate, 17, 52; place, 37, 39, 52, 64, 210, 221: see also conception Black, Max, 6-7, 15, 270 blindness, 11-13, 58-59, 79, 161, 259 blood, 1, 3, 37-44, 84- 87, 103, 130-31, 211, 234, 247: see also contagion and contamination blood-knowledge, 41-44 bodies, 14, 186-87, 254; dead 70-71, 100, 107, 150, 202203, 221, 249, 267; diseased, 47, 73; floating, 103, 107, 151, 153; haunted, 3, 180; layered, 10, 58, 60-61, 75, 230-31; maternal, 158-59, 211-12; merged, 64, 123-24, 164, 170-71, 189, 240; missing, 99, 101; sexualized, 24, 27, 35, 164, 172, 176, 190, 192-93 Bollas, Christopher, 4-5, 11, 62-63, 80, 265-66 Boyer, Paul, 222 Brandon, Donald, 188 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 44-45, 66, 68, 90, 94, 260, 262-63, 265 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, 28

Index Buddhism, 126, 216-17 Bull, Malcolm, 7-8, 34, 56, 59, 80, 160-63, 201-203 burdens, 1, 3, 69-74, 91-92, 9899, 107, 126-31, 152, 209210, 225-28, 239-40 burial, 34, 94, 101, 117, 153, 201-203, 252 cancer, 47, 73, 209, 260 capitalism, 29-30, 39, 112, 115-16, 134, 139-40 cars, 13, 71-72, 76-77, 82-89, 96-97, 109, 119-20, 124-25, 133, 138, 151, 233: see also machines cemetery, 49, 55-57, 82, 85 de Certeau, Michel, 20-21, 25, 140 chance, 37-39 childhood, 1-5, 14, 16, 21-24, 51, 56-58, 62-66, 68, 71-72, 84, 87, 90, 93-95, 97, 100, 103-104, 106, 126-31, 14244, 147-54, 169-70, 178-80, 190-92, 199-200, 203-206, 209-210, 213, 217-18, 228, 246-47, 251, 258-59, 264-66 chronology, 42-43, 108, 111, 113, 115, 125, 142, 185 cinema, 61, 64-65, 88; film, 12, 38, 120, 197, 245-46 circus, 29-33, 131 class, 2, 5, 42, 44-47, 59-60, 67-77, 81, 84-87, 92-97, 103, 121, 134, 138-39,14748, 177-84, 193-200,

281 207-208, 210, 229-32, 267 coal, 29-30, 260; mining, 29, 140, 143, 172, 207, 230, 258 Cobb, James C., 182 codes, 49-50, 54-58, 77, 109, 138-39, 149-64, 167-68, 232, 263 Cold War, 68, 150, 155-62, 206; communism, 150, 155, 159, 185, 188 commodities, 39, 88, 107, 139: see also objects community, 27-29, 45, 53, 68, 94, 113-16, 123, 13234, 138, 141-42, 250 concealment, 7-9, 12-15, 1719, 33-36, 40, 42-43, 4558, 60-64, 79-80, 92, 104105, 122-23, 145, 155-57, 159-63, 175-76, 200-206, 267 conception, 34-36, 57-58, 102-105, 109, 226, 236: see also birth concrete, 44, 60, 66, 76, 8586, 99, 106, 178-79 contagion, 23, 26, 33, 37, 56-57, 61, 64, 131, 210, 220; and leprosy, 56-58, 60-61, 64; and poison-ivy, 23, 33, 38, 57, 234 consciousness, 1-2, 4-6, 4142, 75, 112, 144, 152, 185, 201, 205, 266 construction, 66-67, 81-82, 98, 178-79, 183, 202, 229,

282

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231, 263 contamination, 37, 61, 71-72, 75-77, 105, 130-31, 194, 209, 229 counterhistories, 91-92 cryptonymy, 8-9, 14-15, 48-51, 54, 162-63: see also encryption Culler, Jonathan, 167-68 customs, 2, 113, 208, 219 cycles, genealogical, 136-37, 140; life, 126, 215, 244 death, 1, 29, 32, 34, 45, 57, 74, 88, 96, 100-101, 103, 106108, 114, 126, 128, 135, 140, 150-57, 166-67, 19899, 202-23, 207-209, 21124, 234, 241-49, 253-58, 268 demasculinization, 67-68, 13940, 180, 188-89, 191: see also emasculation departure, 2-3, 29, 31-39, 69, 81-82, 84, 87-89, 92-96, 108-13, 140-143, 181, 206208, 211-13, 215, 220, 25660 Depression, Great, 42, 72, 74, 183-84, 202, 263 Derrida, Jacques, 49-50 desire, 67-68, 78-80, 133, 14849, 154, 156, 187, 209, 252, 261, 264; economic, 6869,148, 164, 197, 200, 230, 232, 236; endogamous, 19, 36, 103-104, 123, 137-38, 172-74, 18485, 193, 196, 199, 236; to escape, 1, 31, 84, 87, 92, 94,

99, 101, 118, 133, 136, 207, 259 divorce, 16, 35, 44, 98, 179, 197 Donaldson, Susan V., 3, 180 Douglass, Thomas E., 1-4, 71, 90, 95, 113-14, 122, 142, 146, 184, 186, 239, 244, 253, 257, 261, 269, 270 dreams, 12, 23, 38-39, 50, 52, 55, 58-59, 73, 84-88, 96-97, 101-106, 122, 143, 145, 147, 164-168, 171, 175-77, 184, 191, 194-95, 200, 212-18, 222-24, 23136, 241-43, 246, 249, 25456, 263 driving, 58-59, 64-65, 11921, 124-25, 129, 142, 236, 260 Dugan, Alan, 141 economics, 2, 5, 19, 29, 37, 39, 47, 67-68, 70-76, 81, 87, 90-92, 108, 116, 120, 122, 127-28, 132-34, 13944, 148, 163-64, 177, 18188, 230-32, 236, 244-43, 258, 261-63, 270 education, 2, 12, 33, 37, 6870, 82, 95-96, 113, 153, 155, 157-60, 162, 190, 196, 225-26, 245 Ehrenreich, Barbera, 139 Ehrenreich, John, 139 emasculation, 139-40, 18185, 187: see also demasculinization

Index Empson,William, 14 encryption, 24, 49, 56-57, 135, 152, 188, 206 endogamy, 18-19, 26-36, 39, 55, 61, 80, 104-105, 123-24, 128, 135-38, 140, 174, 176, 219, 226 ephemerality, 116, 119, 121, 134, 230, 251 escape, 14, 31-33, 36, 64, 6970, 92-95, 99, 105, 116-17, 119-20, 124, 126, 128-29, 133, 140-42, 206, 220-22, 232, 236, 258-59, 268 everyday, the, 6, 42, 46-47, 7879, 90-92, 232, 263, 266-268 exogamy, 18, 28, 31-37, 128, 136, 219-20 Ezell, John Samuel, 28 fairy tales, 12, 52, 206, 253-56, 265-68; “Sleeping Beauty”, 23, 253-54 Faludi, Susan, 182 family, 1-3, 16-45, 51-89, 91110, 115, 117, 121-24, 126128, 130-41, 143-44, 14748, 150-54, 164-65,167-82, 184-87, 191-93, 195-200, 202, 206, 208-10, 213, 216, 220-22, 227-30, 236-40, 252, 254-55, 258-59, 263 fantasy, 49, 87-88, 100-101, 172-75, 187-88 farm, 21, 25, 29, 32-33, 35-39, 51-52, 56-58, 65, 104-105, 126-28, 133, 140-43, 176,

283 236-39, 255, 258 fate, 96, 105-106, 109, 150, 167, 214 fathers, 2-3, 16-17, 44, 7074, 79, 82, 86, 128, 13233, 139-40, 147-48, 164, 170-80, 185-89, 195-98, 226-27, 233-36, 239-40, 254, 260, 263 Faulkner, William, 3, 19, 36, 137, 140, 145-46, 269; Absalom Absalom!, 140, 269; The Sound and the Fury, 3, 36 film, see cinema flexible accumulation, 116, 119-20, 134, 251 flight, 32, 82-84, 88-89, 93, 96, 99, 116, 258 floating, 60, 86, 99-109, 118-21, 151-52, 197, 200, 210-14, 248, 254, 267 Fordism, 115, 119: see also post-Fordism Foucault, Michel, 17 free-indirect discourse, 10, 43, 146, 149 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 43, 65, 107-108, 167, 173-74, 265 Gainey, Karen Wilkes, 82 Gallagher, Catherine, 91 Gaskins, Avery F., 90 gender, 3, 45, 68, 82, 95, 175, 180, 185, 188, 198, 209

284

The Secret Country

genealogy, 17, 42-44, 80, 102 ghosts, 3, 35, 46-47, 49, 19394, 269; ghosting, 43, 47, 60, 86, 268, 270; ghost stories, 46, 53 Gilbert, Celia, 90 Gilman Jr, Owen W., 99 Godden, Richard, 43, 55, 6061, 70, 75, 101-102, 125, 146, 168, 208, 234, 254-55, 264, 267 Gone with the Wind, 61, 83 Gordon, Avery, 46, 53, 268 Gray, Richard, 4-5, 28, 145-46 Greenblatt, Stephen, 91 Greek Legend, 87-88 hands, and contamination, 64; and sexuality, 130, 168, 175; and working class, 85, 106, 127, 181, 184, 200 Hardy, Thomas, 2, 37 Harvey, David, 30, 39, 79, 112, 116, 119-20, 134, 250-52 haunting, 16, 18, 24, 46-49, 5154, 71, 115-16, 154, 166, 186, 202-203, 230-31, 246, 261, 263, 266-67; regional, 1, 3, 239-42; family 31, 4344, 51, 73-74, 79-80, 105, 126-28, 151-52, 180, 189, 212, 226-28, 234-37: see also transgenerational phantoms heritage, 4, 29, 59-61, 69-70, 73, 86, 98-99, 105, 109, 117, 126, 153, 236-39, 242-43,

250-52, 255-56, 258-61, 266 hiddenness, 7-9, 34, 55-63, 80, 122-23, 160-63, 200201 Hill, Dorothy Combs, 42 Hinduism, 126, 216, 220, 249 history, 5-6, 15, 17-19, 2931, 33, 44, 46-48, 51-53, 115-16, 120-21, 123, 12629, 131-34, 137, 139-40, 147, 163, 178-89, 197-98, 206, 221-22, 230, 242-47, 250-53, 255, 261-63, 265; family, 16-17, 19-40, 4345, 52-66, 69-75, 79-80, 84-88, 91-99, 102-107, 115, 121, 126-28, 135-37, 194, 197, 206, 220, 236; regional, 4-5, 37, 90, 206, 212, 251, 259; secret, 9, 15, 66: see also oral history home, 1-3, 7, 62-69, 72, 7982, 87, 90-92, 98, 109, 123-25, 132, 138-39, 148, 164, 167, 169, 182-84, 195-98, 200, 213, 220, 228-32, 237, 241, 249-50, 255-63, 269-70; departure from, 32-35, 81-82, 87, 92-96, 99, 109-11, 113, 118-22, 133, 137, 140-43, 196-98, 206-208, 215, 220-22, 230, 237, 241, 254; loss of, 39, 59-60,

Index 108, 239; return to, 3, 34-36, 39, 43-44, 57-58, 90-92, 113-15, 118-19, 121-24, 130-32, 141, 258-59 Homes, A.M., 4, 25, 69, 91, 114, 123, 146-47, 153, 16061, 164, 172, 175, 185-86, 204-205, 254, 263-65, 270 horses, 24-26, 86-88, 129, 13334, 222, 238; Percheron breed, 133-34, 251 identity, 51-52, 80-81, 124, 175, 185, 230, 255; crisis, 115, 118; gendered, 192-93; hidden, 56, 80; loss of, 52, 184; sexual, 123, 144, 189 incest, see endogamy incorporation, 48-49, 70-74, 92, 96, 98, 100-103, 108109, 151-53, 187-88, 203, 208-10, 212, 214, 217, 223, 230-31 industrialization, 29-30, 113, 128, 182, 219: see also modernization infidelity, 142, 148, 150-54, 161, 170-71, 181-82, 184, 195-98, 200, 236 Inge, Tonette Bond, 17 inheritance, 3, 39-45, 48, 5358, 61-74, 79-82, 91-93, 98-99, 102, 126-28, 15254, 208-10, 225-28, 23940: see also legacies intertextuality, 6-7, 10, 1820, 35, 55, 75, 109, 117, 123, 135-37, 147, 149,

285 151-52, 157, 159, 176, 178-79, 181, 185, 187, 194, 201, 206, 222, 22527, 231, 234-39, 251, 25355, 258-61 intra-textuality, 6-7, 19, 208, 270 introjection, 48-49, 62, 101, 107-109, 151-52, 208, 212, 214, 217, 223, 242 Irving, Washington, “Rip Van Winkle” 52, 243, 256-57 Irwin, John T., 124, 137, 140 italics, 10, 19, 189, 208, 21718, 222-23, 234, 241, 256, 260 Jarvis, Brian, “How Dirty is Jayne Anne Phillips” 112; Postmodern Cartographies, 64-65, 67, 80, 89 Johnson, Sarah Anne, 92, 207, 235, 261 Jones, Anne Goodywn, 3, 180 Jordan, Judy, 111 Kavanagh, Gaynor, 246 Kennedy, John F., 211, 24547, 265 Korean war, 185-86, 188-91, 262-63 kudzu, 145 labour, 2, 29, 60, 66-69, 7677, 79, 81, 85-86, 92, 98,

286

The Secret Country

139, 178-79, 181-84, 200202, 229-31, 242-43, 258, 261 land, 29, 36, 39, 92, 121, 12628, 130-31, 140, 213, 215, 260 landscapes, 1, 258-59 language, 1-2, 8-11, 14-15, 26, 41-43, 45-46, 48-49, 61-62, 76-77, 95-96, 106, 114, 143, 146-47, 153-54, 160, 162, 165, 167-70, 173-76, 196, 207, 216-18, 224-25, 23743, 261, 268-69; phonemes, 167-68 layering, 9-13, 54, 57-61, 75, 85, 94, 145, 160, 210, 222, 224, 229-30, 238 LeBrun, Fiona, 15 Lefebvre, Henri, 78, 107 legacies, 2-3, 69-70, 85-86, 147-48, 183, 193, 199 lies, 8-9, 17, 56-57, 61, 63, 171-72, 174, 196, 205 Lloyd Smith, Allan, 8 loss, 1-2, 29-32, 39, 43-44, 4849, 88, 100-103, 107-108, 121, 141-42, 150-52, 165, 182-91, 202, 208, 219-20, 223, 235, 245-46, 256-57, 269-70 Lukacher, Ned, 18-19 Lustig, Tim, 31, 125 /ĦWKL0D[, 253-54 Lynchburg, 33, 100, 221-22 lynching, 27-28 Lyons, Bonnie, 3, 11, 17, 43, 57, 69, 91, 112-13, 115

machines, 78-80, 82-86, 99100, 105-106, 172, 179, 183-84, 196: see also cars marriage, 11-12, 26, 34, 65, 68, 71-72, 74-75, 92, 128, 132, 147-48, 179, 197, 207, 228-29, 236 masculinity, 182-85, 187-92, 227 masturbation, 86-87, 15558, 170, 192 McKenzie, Malcolm, 10, 43, 146 melancholy, 1, 108, 219-20 memory, 12-14, 16-17, 2021, 24-25, 30, 34, 41-45, 51, 55, 61, 64-66, 69, 72, 78-80, 83, 88, 95-98, 104, 117, 122-23, 126-31, 14548, 157, 161, 169-70, 17375, 180, 191-94, 196-99, 203-204, 206, 208, 214, 223, 228-29, 231, 233, 238-39, 246-48, 250-51 metaphors, 7-8, 12-14, 54, 56, 59, 64, 127, 153, 212, 248 miscegenation, fear of, 36, 85 Mitchell, Juliet, 65-66, 95, 102 modernization, 30, 36, 46, 67, 88, 90, 113, 115, 128, 182, 219-20, 263 motion, 213-15, 218-19, 228 mothers, 2-3, 17, 45, 48, 52-

Index 56, 58, 62-64, 68-78, 82, 84, 87-88, 96-98, 103-104, 12324, 127-30, 132-33, 142, 147-54, 158, 169-71, 179, 181, 184, 195-200, 206-226, 228-36, 241-44, 247-60, 264 mourning, 9, 48-49, 53, 59-60, 101, 107-108, 151-54, 166, 187-88, 202-203, 217, 226, 244, 247, 254, 257 myth, 2, 28, 52, 88, 90-91, 113, 115, 133, 205-207, 239-44, 252-70 names, 17, 33-34, 51, 55-58, 70-71, 85, 89, 132, 149, 151, 156, 166, 172, 175, 178-79, 214, 221, 227-28, 243, 245, 252; nameless, 22, 36, 38, 51, 111, 118, 120, 125, 141, 156 narrative, 5-8, 10-11, 15-21, 24, 35, 44-45, 51, 55, 61, 76, 88, 90-93, 101, 108-109, 125, 128, 146-48, 163, 186, 189, 205, 223, 236, 245-47, 254, 256, 260, 264, 266; density, 10-12, 14, 16, 43, 106-107, 114, 145, 159, 26163, 268; dislocations, 6-7, 19, 24, 112-16, 126, 143, 161, 224, 270; gaps, 9, 15, 19, 35, 46-49, 54-55, 73, 112, 125, 152-54, 187-88, 204, 246; linearity, 6-7, 15, 42, 43, 45, 224-25; perception, 6-7, 59, 149, 161, 163, 176, 202-203, 270; punctuation, 35, 59, 173;

287 rhythms, 6, 146, 148; slippages, 9-10, 19, 91, 240 narration, 9, 11, 14, 19-25, 37, 55, 111, 125, 141-42, 147, 149 networks, literary 6-7, 19, 59, 88, 159, 162, 170, 206, 208, 222, 235, 270; rail, 30 new realism, 112, 187 nostalgia, 61, 90, 113-14, 133-34, 240, 262, 265 objects, 6, 62-63, 187; love, 49, 73, 108; material, 7881, 107, 214-15, 218-19, 228-231, 233, 238, 24143, 248-52, 255, 263, 268; words as, 15, 51 obscurity, 12, 59, 80, 98, 105, 165 Oliver, Bill, 3, 11, 17, 43, 57, 69, 91, 112-13, 115 opacity, 12, 114, 145, 164, 168, 199, 206 oral history, 9-10, 43, 108 orgasm, 86, 222, 236-37 pastiche, 134, 251 penetration, 174-76, 184, 189, 195, 197 Peter Pan, 146, 264 Pfeil, Fred, 2, 68-69, 92, 139, 208, 232 Phillips, Jayne Anne, Machine Dreams, 1, 9-11, 16-20, 22, 25, 33-37, 39-

288

The Secret Country

40, 41-110, 112, 123, 13537, 140, 147-48, 151-52, 157, 159, 178-179, 181, 183, 185, 194, 201, 209, 212, 222, 227, 229, 230, 234, 236-37, 258, 262-63, 26768; Shelter, 1, 12, 19, 44, 71, 77, 123, 144, 145-206, 207, 235, 253-54, 259, 262-64, 266-67; MotherKind, 1, 5, 16, 44, 52, 178-80, 206, 207261, 262-64, 268-70; Black Tickets, 1, 10-14, 42, 261; and “Home”, 11; and “Snow”, 11-14, 267; and “Wedding Picture”, 11; and “1934” 11; Fast Lanes, 1, 5, 16-40, 110, 111-44, 149, 213, 251, 259-60; and “Alma”, 71, 115, 125, 14243, 149, 179; and “Bess”, 5, 10, 16-40, 55, 57, 66, 47, 7576, 102, 109, 112-118, 12223, 125, 128-36, 140-44, 176, 207, 213, 219, 225, 234-238, 255, 258; and “Bluegill”, 125, 132-34, 141, 143, 210-11; and “Blue Moon”, 110, 115, 118, 120, 134-41; and “Callie”, 115, 125, 140; and “Counting”, 125-32, 143; and “Fast Lanes”, 38, 110, 115, 11825, 132, 141,143, 259; and “How Mickey Made It”, 111-17, 143; and “Rayme”, 117-18, 124-25, 143; and “Something that Happened”,

115, 143; Termite, 262; and family, 1, 3, 16, 69, 71, 91, 95, 144, 152; on Fast Lanes, 144; and the influence of Faulkner, 3; on inheritance, 69; on Katherine Anne Porter, 21, 41; on Machine Dreams, 17, 57, 78, 109, 157; on memory, 41; on MotherKind, 207, 211, 248, 261; and the past, 23, 5, 116, 185, 252, 263; and the influence of Poe, 166; and region, 1-2, 4-6, 9-11, 15, 17, 19, 36-67, 44, 69, 90, 94-95, 111, 113-14, 122, 128, 142, 176-77, 179-80, 183-84, 207, 212, 239-40, 257, 261-69; on Shelter, 123, 144-49, 157, 160-61, 164, 171-72, 175, 185-86, 205, 254, 265; on writing, 6-7, 10-11, 17, 42-43, 45-48, 51-52, 67, 90-91, 109, 112-13, 115-17, 135, 137, 146, 157, 161, 217-18, 229, 243-44, 253, 255, 257, 261-62 phonetics, 26, 51, 55-56, 61, 95-96, 167-68 politics, 3, 5, 31, 39, 53, 71, 81, 90-91, 95, 106, 132, 159-60, 173-74, 182, 18586, 195-96, 206, 262-63 polyvocality, 10, 42, 269 post-Fordism, 115

Index predetermination, 37-39, 11617, 126, 178, 183 prefiguration, 24, 29, 34, 87, 146, 156, 176-77 pregnancy, 21, 35, 55, 58, 70, 102, 170, 248-49 primal scene, 18-19, 66, 196 psychoanalysis, 4, 8-9, 24, 4344, 48, 65, 77, 167, 173-74, 187, 265 puns, 162, 167-68 race, 5, 36, 61, 74-76, 84-85, 87, 97, 103, 117, 138, 180, 229 Rashkin, Esther, 9, 15, 50-51, 154, 162, 170 rebirth, 126, 218, 220, 224, 239-40, 249, 253 redemption, 1, 90, 114, 116 region, 1, 3-6, 9-11, 15, 18-19, 28-30, 36-39, 44-47, 51-52, 69, 81, 90-95, 99, 107-108, 111-16, 118, 122-26, 12832, 142, 146-47, 176, 17982, 188, 197, 206-208, 210212, 219-22, 225, 228-31, 235-40, 242, 248-52, 25556, 258-63, 265-66, 268 remembrance, 3, 45, 88 revelation, 9, 17, 58, 61; partial 19, 34, 61 roads, 30, 34, 52, 58, 64, 71, 76-77, 85, 111, 119-21, 124, 133, 179, 224, 236, 254, 258; highways, 111, 120, 142, 260; two-lane roads, 92, 142-43, 235, 260

289 Robertson, Sarah, 3, 10, 4647, 52, 67, 109, 135, 146, 157, 166, 183, 211, 218, 223, 248, 255, 262 Rogin, Michael, Blackface, White Noise, 84; Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, 159 Röhrich, Lutz, 265 roots, 4, 111, 121-25, 134, 143, 182, 207-208, 239, 242 Rose, Jacqueline, The Case of Peter Pan 264-66; Sexuality in the Field of Vision 173-74 routes, 33, 104, 111, 120, 122, 125, 129, 143, 216, 222, 238, 270 sales, 31, 39, 66-67, 74, 140, 172, 178-79, 181, 183-84, 196, 200, 237 Salstrom, Paul, 29 Schwartz, Deb, 185-86, 205206 secondary scenes, 18-22, 24, 26 secrets, 8-9, 16, 20-21, 2627, 31, 35-36, 40-43, 49, 51-57, 60-66, 74-76, 79, 92-94, 98-99, 102, 105, 126, 136-37, 145, 148, 150, 152-62, 170-72, 176, 204-206, 208, 210, 236, 238, 240

290

The Secret Country

semantics, 6, 10-11, 14, 16, 43, 47, 50, 86, 106, 147, 263 sex, 25-27, 33, 70-72, 75-80, 84-87, 100, 103-104, 112, 123, 129-131, 144, 148, 157, 159, 164, 167, 171-76, 187, 189-90, 192, 195, 198, 212, 231, 236: see also abuse sexuality, 24-26, 32, 35, 78, 127, 129-31, 134, 156-57, 163-65, 168, 171, 173-74, 180, 196 shadows, 2, 22, 40, 47, 71, 102, 160, 171, 185, 190, 203, 206, 226-27, 229-31, 238, 246, 249 shelters, 66-67, 86, 157-58, 178, 183 siblings, 17-40, 65-66, 77, 81, 93-95, 101-104, 135, 138-39 signification, 10, 19, 49-50, 84, 123, 127, 151, 156, 167-68, 176, 239-40 silence, 15, 47, 50-51, 54, 58, 63, 69, 71, 82, 130, 169, 217 simulacrum, 49, 107, 134, 25152 sleep, 12-13, 23, 51-52, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 96-97, 121-22, 139, 158-59, 164-66, 171, 173, 186, 211-14, 237, 24143, 253-56 Sleeping Beauty, see fairy tales snow, 12-14, 56-60, 105, 107, 122-23, 156, 200201, 235-38, 244, 259, 267 song lyrics, 59, 79-80, 84, 88, 122-24, 238-39, 246, 255-56

South, 3-5, 28, 33, 41, 44, 67, 69, 99, 176, 180-83, 197-98,206, 222, 251, 262-64, 268-69 Southern, bodies, 1, 80, families, 28, 72, 239, 254; men, 183; past, 208, 234, 249-52; writing, 3-5, 28, 129, 145-46, 165-67, 26970 spying, 143, 149-50, 154, 204: see also voyeurism Squier, Susan M., 132 Stoddart, Helen, 30-32 structures of feeling, 6, 4647, 113, 147, 266 Sturken, Marita, 245 suburbs, 139, 197, 207, 237, 250 Tate, Linda, 17 temporality, 11, 13, 20-21, 32, 107, 137, 147, 206, 225, 260, 264 tense, past, 24; present, 14, 24-26, 37-38, 212, 240 Thurshwell, Pamela, 43 Torok, Maria, 8-9, 14-15, 62, 73-74, 91-92, 101, 151-52, 162, 167, 170, 187-88; The Shell and the Kernal, 48-51, 53-54, 151-54, 223; The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, 8, 50 tradition, 43, 69, 84, 88, 9093, 96, 115, 120, 134, 181-82, 197-98, 208, 213, 235, 241-42, 250-51, 260-

Index 63 transgenerational phantoms, 53-54, 58, 73-74, 80, 92, 152-54, 208, 268: see also haunting trauma, 12, 15, 24, 48-50, 6566, 74, 111, 240 unconscious, 11, 43, 50, 53-54, 69, 91, 99, 154, 167-70, 17375 unspoken, the, 16-18, 24, 45, 48, 50-55, 58, 67, 78, 82, 92, 99, 115, 150-52, 170, 228, 265, 267-68 unthought known, the, 4-6, 11, 63, 80, 265-66, 268 Vietnam war, 42-44, 68, 81-82, 93, 96, 99-101, 107-109, 135-36, 185-88, 263, 265 violence, 33, 46, 73, 84, 97, 112, 130-31, 190, 193, 197, 254, 267 voice, 9-10, 11, 18-19, 34, 4243, 51, 72, 75, 112, 125, 147-48, 150-54, 173, 176, 189, 199, 217-18, 223, 269 voyeurism, 22-26, 143: see also spying

291 Warren, Nagueyalti, 72 West Virginia, 1-5, 11, 15, 21, 37, 43-44, 52, 69, 84, 90-92, 94, 98, 108, 111115, 118, 120-24, 131-32, 140-44, 177, 183-84, 20616, 220-23, 228, 233-34, 237-39, 242-44, 249, 25052, 254-63, 266-70 whispers, 6, 23, 57, 79-80 White, Luise, 8-9 Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City, 1-2, 37, 113-14, 208, 270; Marxism and Literature, 6, 46-47, 147, 266 Wolff, Sally, 72 World War II, 61, 64-67, 83, 99, 127, 159, 179-82, 18586, 188, 192, 263 Work Progress Administration, 183, 202 Wright, Charles, 1 Yaeger, Patricia, 4-5, 61, 266 Zender, Karl, 19